warm interest of a village tale, no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet. The Universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the purpose.

I visited the House of Lords, the other day, to hear Canning, who, you know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order of intellect. Then I stept into the Lower House, and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or, rather, as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men, whom I meet nowa-days, often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive, and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of my life, somebody comes and stares me in the face, whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted never more to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For instance, going to Drury-Lane Theatre, a few evenings since, up rose be. fore me, in the ghost of IIamlet's father, the bodily presence of the elder Koan, who did die or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or other, so long ago that his fume is scarcely tradi

tionary now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king.

In the stage box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a profile for I did not see her front face-that stamped itself into my brain, as a scal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind, a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, nature enables him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable one-sid dness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form than he could re-arrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as if, for the joke's sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive; and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so hideous, an avenging providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it is out of his own power, I would gladly assist lia to change countenance; for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and night-time. Some other players of the past genera tion were present, but none that greatly interested me. It be hoves actors, more than all other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being, at best, but painted shadows flickering on the wall, and empty sounds that echo another's thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to fade, and the voice to croak with age.

What is there new, in the literary way, on your side of the water? Nothing of the kind has come under my inspection, except a volume of poems, published above a year ago, by Dr. Channing. I did not before know that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics

of the author's mind, as displayed in his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not merely of the sur face, but glows still the brighter, the deeper and more faithfully you look into them. They seem carelessly wrought, however, like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude, native manufacture, which are found among the gold dust from Africa. I doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last sleep, with the Thanatopsis gleaming over him like a sculptured marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses in the newspapers, and published a Don Juanic poem called Fanny, is defunct as a poet, though averred to be exempli fying the metempsychosis as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of Got tingen. Willis-what a pity !-was lost, if I recollect rightly, in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going, to give us sketches of the world's sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous men.

And yet there is no telling-it may be as well that they have died. I was myself a young man of promise. Oh, shattered brain!-oh! broken spirit!-where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefullest mortals in their youth;

when it would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live. Let me die upon this apophthegm, for I shall never make a truer one!

What a strange substance is the human brain! Or ratherfor there is no need of generalizing the remark—what an odd brain is mine! Would you believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my intellectual ear-some as airy as bird-notes, and some as delicately neat as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals-that seem just such verses as those departed poets would have written, had not an inexorable destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to attend to; and, besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such a job.

Good bye! are you alive or dead? And what are you about? Still scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever? It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I! Expect me home soon, and to whisper you a secret-in company with the poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming, and enjoy the shadow of the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale, and so shadow-like, that one might almost poke a finger through his densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.

P.S. Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable

and revered friend, Mr. Brockden Brown. It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a double columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press, at Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic reputa tion on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive? Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century! And does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas, with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists in burthening him self with such a ponderosity of leaden vorses?