been rented as pasture-ground for twenty crowns | with its crowd of Ionian islanders who came a year!

there with their spirits steadfastly gazing forward Poetry sees and shows and sings Delos rising into the then very imperfectly explored realms of from the depths of the ocean, drifting in the human art and intellectual beauty, its bands of Ægean sea, and at length fixed in its place, at a Ionian maidens at length collected on the day critical period, as a receptacle for that unpopu- and at the place for which their highest odes and lar courtezan of the gods, the unwedded mother the sweetest melodies of their voices had been of Apollo. But the sterner pages of Herodotus reserved, on the occasion of their purest worship and Thucydides exhibit scenes in Delos, in more offered to those of their divinities for whom, sober colors, and more sober times, which we alone of all the pantheon, the purest cheeks would rather have toiled to some high place to among them need not blush. Suddenly there is to witness, than even the emergence of the a pause in their measured tread. They incline seeming leviathan, and the smack of the per- their ears to catch a new voice breathing through turbed waves against the sands of Rhenea and the song, as wild souls stricken with the music of Myconos, and the drifting about of the unsteady the spheres are fabled to incline their ears to the float, and the air-borne Latona alighting upon it, stars at night, and listen to catch more surely the trembling lest so frail a floor should yet careen strange melody—and in their own partial silence with her weight, and again go down; the stroke it is now distinctly audible "new as if brought of Lothario Jupiter's sceptre which made it fast; from other spheres," sweet as if from the lips of the relinquished pursuit of foiled Juno, and the Apollo himself, easily confessed to be the voice scene beneath the sacred olive-tree which gave of a prince of singers. Rather than any secrets Apollo and Diana to Greek adoration. Let us of the Hyperborean mysteries on which Herodorather look upon the Delos of historic times. tus so expatiates, we would have heard the voice There was an annual day, in later times, when of that question-it was doubtless one of the the trailing-tuniced Ionians with their children most queenly of the island maidens who uttered and their modest spouses, from many an Egean it-"who can this prince of singers be, who was island, assembled at Delos in great, joyous, bust-announced here as a poor stranger?" Rather ling festal crowds, for contests of pugilism and than the blazing wheat-straw of the Hyperboorchestry and song ;* when, among others things rean mysteries themselves, we would see that which awoke the spirits and gave light to the" опокρíva☛de ciŸńμws," that courteous, artful, smieyes of the assembly, choirs of the brightest ling evasion of the others of the choir, as if they maidens of the islands, arrayed in the most im- would make sign that the strange voice itself posing forms of Greek dress, walked in graceful must answer; and more than all, the pausing order through the crowd, and uttered the purest step and voice and the reverting head of the blind sentiments of Greek imagination in tones of the man of Chios himself, his sightless eye-balls upwildest and richest music of the Greek islands. turned, and their lost cunning transferred to the It was on one of such days-we have a hint portals of the keen ear, while, with half sad, of it from the chief actor himselft-while these half smiling face, and in the same gentle kind bands of the fairest maidens were moving through voice which had called forth the question, he the great crowd with measured step and voice, answers: "A blind old man, and he dwells in that suddenly a voice was heard which was none rugged Chios." That scene did linger in the of theirs, blending with their notes, and a half spirit of him who was the jewel of it—HOMER— joy and half surprise arose among them, and although it reached him only through the portals looks of enquiry and wreathed smiles were ex-of the ear. changed, and one said to another among them: Delos on another day within the light of as"O girls, what prince of singers is this man who sured history would be worth seeing. It is a has come among us here?" And when they scene reminding us of the visions of the beings have seen from whence the voice comes: "This of the world above, which came to the Hebrew man was announced as a poor stranger and we patriarchs of old, and the significant names and are all so delighted with his singing!" And monumental places connected with those viswhen no answer is returned to the enquiry, and ions-their Nissi, their Bethel, their Mahanaim. the stranger himself has heard the gossip of the merry maidens, he answers for himself: "A blind man and he dwells in rugged Chios."Rather than any of the scenes of a cloudy mythology, we would see the assembly of that day,

* Thucydides, lib. iii, 104.

HOMER's Hymn to Apol., 165–176.

It seems a visible motion, among the mysteries of this life, of a spirit greater than human, greater than Apollo, or Jupiter, or Fate.

It was not lawful either to be born or to die in Delos. Both were held impure. The couch of Latona might be the couch of no one else; in the birth-place of Apollo and Diana, no one else might be born. Those who were approaching

THE MESSAGE TO THE DEAD.

BY GRETTA.

either of the two forbidden events were to em- the minds of the Attic statesmen, that all is not bark immediately for the neighboring island of right between themselves and the Immortal ImRhenia, which had been devoted to these purpo-personations of truth and purity. They are puses by a solemn bond. Death and burial in De- rifying this soil, that they may thus purify the los had been sometimes winked at when fortune spirit of the Attie confederacy, and prepare it to smiled on the Athenians and adverse fate seemed enter with firm heart into the struggle for existafar off. Pisistratus had undertaken to purify ence with proud Sparta. They stand in the the island before the Peloponessian war, but Ana-sight of all future ages testifying by the singular nias-like, he had deceived the Latoides, and done and significant action in which they are employthe work but partially. He had disinterred and ed that there is an inuate moral sense in man, removed only the dead bodies which were buried bearing reference to his weal or his woe, distribwithin reach of the eye from the Temple. The uted by Invisible Powers above. So let every conscience of Attic Greece was only partially nation purify its Delos. purified. Thucydides tells us, that when the Peloponessian war broke out, there was a headlong rush to arms on both sides, each seizing their sharpest weapons, because there were many youths both at Athens and at Sparta who had never seen war, and thought of it only in the hues of its romantic glory, not in those of its crimsoned battle-fields. But at that time a prodigy occurred which checked even the martial fury of the Athenian warriors. Delos was shaken by an earthquake !—as it had not been, in the memory of man, and as it had been supposed that the stroke of Jupiter's trident secured it from ever being. This shook the hearts of the Athenians. Delos then was not acceptable to the gods. The conduct of Pisistratus came into remembrance. Delos was not perfectly purified! And rashly as they were rushing to battle, this earthquake, together with a certain oracle" to the same effect, arrested their steps, and they sent a solemn deputation to purify the soil of Delos of all the dead who had been permitted there to sleep in the dust of the earth. Perhaps classic antiquity hardly presents another scene in which the mysteries of the moral life of the Greeks stand out so palpably, as on that strange day of resurrection at Delos. It is not summer; the forests are bare except the gloomy cypresses; the fields are not waving with ripe grain, that these groups of men which appear in them, should be thought to be Delian harvesters. Nor are they sportsmen; the precincts are too sacred to permit the rude revelry of field sports. Nor are they funeral processions employed in those solemn ceremonies of respect for the dead, which will release their manes from an hundred years of vagrancy on the hither shore of the Styx. They are not indeed Delians at all; but Attic men, reversing funeral obsequies, disinterring the dead, taking away from this island the odor of death which may offend those Immortal Powers who preside over the destinies of men; obeying the dictate of last summer's earthquake, complying with that deep and strange conviction which has seized on

• 11-8:

I heard a lovely legend. It had birth
Amid that race, that swarthy warlike race
Once proud Columbia's kings; but over whom
A tempest's wrath has swept, and given to earth
The crested warrior and his gentle wife,
Children and parent, friend and foe alike,
Save a few stricken hearts that still beat on;
Aud which like seeds before that tempest swept,
Are scattered far in distant covert spots
To bloom in stealthy loneliness and die!
That race upon whose sepulchre we rear
Our temples and our hearth-stones, and whose names
Written in water, still as Time rolls on,
Are deep ingulphed within the rushing stream
Whose sweep is onward to Eternity.
But this I heard was in the olden time
When still the azure lake reflected back
To Indian maids, their dark-eyed loveliness.
Then, in the sweet spring-tide's bright breezy hours
They wandered forth, and sought an unfledg'd dove
And caged his callow limbs with gentlest care.
With dewy flowers, and fruits, and daintiest things,
They stored his ozier prison, till the down
Lengthened upon his pinions, and his heart
Throbb'd with quick pulse for native liberty.
But not yet must he go, nor till there came
At nightfall or at morn, some unseen thing
And gave the gift of song. Then when it gush'd
From his full throbbing throat, they bore him forth
Warbling the while his untaught melodies-
And on that spot in wild and shaded dell
Or flow'ry field begirt with murmuring stream,
Their place of graves, they oped the painted bars
And gave the panting captive to the skies.
But ere they said "be free," with soft caress
They pressed him to their lips, and whisper'd low
Fond messages of love and tales of grief
And yearning wishes, hopes and joys and fears,
And all that made life lovely, all that gave
To their dark sky its gloom; while fond tears fell
Spangling his pinions as they fain essayed
To try their new-born strength. Then when each heart
Had voiced its deep revealings, the restraint

much. What, in him, seems the diffuseness of seen the noblest poem which, possibly, can be one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many : composed. and this species of concision it is, which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question. It would have served no purpose; for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue. Avaunt! to night my heart is light. No dirge will I upThus he was profoundly original. His quaint-But waft the angel on her flight with a Pean of old days. ness arose from intuitive perception of that truth

In my ballad called "Lenore" I have these lines:

raise

-They, albeit with inward pain,

Who thought to sing thy dirge, must sing thy Pæan. The commencement of my "Haunted Palace" is as follows:

In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace
(Radiant palace !) reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion-
It stood there.

Never seraph spread a pinion

Over fabric half so fair.
Banners, yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow-
This-all this-was in the olden
Time long ago.

Mr. Lord writes

On the old and haunted mountain

(There in dreams I dared to climb,)
Where the clear Castalian fountain
(Silver fountain!) ever tinkling,
All the green around it sprinkling,

Makes perpetual rhyme-
To my dream, enchanted, golden,
Came a vision of the olden
Long-forgotten time.

to which Bacon alone has given distinct utter- Mr. William W. Lord, author of "Niagara," ance:-"There is no exquisite Beauty which &c., has it thus: has not some strangeness in its proportions." But whether obscure, original, or quaint, Shelley had no affectations. He was at all times sincere. From his ruins, there sprang into existence, affronting the Heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angles, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the original-faults which cannot be considered such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A "school" arose-if that absurd term must still be employed-a school-a system of rules-upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered by the bizarrerie of the lightning that flickered through the clouds of "Alastor," had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were forced to be content with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were mature minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus, gradually, into this school of all Lawlessness,— of obscurity, quaintness and exaggeration-were interwoven the out-of-place didacticism of Wordsworth, and the more anomalous metaphysiciansm of Coleridge. Matters were now fast verThis is a thin pamphlet of thirty-two pages; ging to their worst; and at length, in Tennyson each containing about a hundred and forty words. poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But The hero, Alla-Ad-Deen, is the son of Alladdin it was precisely this extreme (for the greatest of wonderful lamp memory; and the story is in ruth and the greatest error are scarcely two the "Vision of Mirza" or "Rasselas" way. The points in a circle) which, following the law of all design is to reconcile us with evil on the ground extremes, wrought in him (Tennyson) a natural that, comparatively, we are of little importance and inevitable revulsion; leading him first to con- in the scale of creation. This scale, however, emn, and secondly to investigate, his early man- the author himself assumes as infinite; and thus er, and finally to winnow, from its magnificent his argument proves too much : for if evil is to be elements, the truest and purest of all poetical regarded by man as unimportant because, comtyles. But not even yet is the process complete; paratively, he is so, it must be regarded as unand for this reason in part, but chiefly on account important by the angels for a similar reason— f the mere fortuitousness of that mental and and so on in a never-ending ascent. In other moral combination which shall unite in one per- words, nothing is proved beyond the bullish propon (if ever it shall) the Shellyan abandon and the osition that evil is no evil at all. Tennysonian poetic sense, with the most proFound Art (based both in Instinct and Analysis) "The Dream of Alia-Ad-Deen, from the Romance of and the sternest Will properly to blend and rigo-Anastasia. By Charles Erskine White, D. D. ously to control all-chiefly, I say, because such Erskine White" is Laughton Osborn, author of "The Viscombination of seeming antagonisms will be only Jeremy Levis," and several other works-among which I = "happy chance”—the world has never yet must not forget "Arthur Carryl.”

ion of Rubeta," "Confessions of a Poet,'

"Charles

Adventures of

I hardly know how to account for the repeat- the ratio of our unprosaicalness at these points. ed failures of John Neal as regards the construc- Even while employing the phrase "poetic lition of his works. His art is great and of a high cense,"-a phrase which has to answer for an character-but it is massive and undetailed. He infinity of sins-people who think in this way seems to be either deficient in a sense of com- seem to have an indistinct conviction that the lipleteness, or unstable in temperament; so that cense in question involves a necessity of being he becomes wearied with his work before get-adopted. The true artist will avail himself of ting it done. He always begins well-vigorous-no "license" whatever. The very word will ly startlingly-proceeds by fits-much at ran- disgust him; for it says " Since you seem unadom-now prosing, now gossiping, now running ble to manage without these peccadillo advantaaway with his subject, now exciting vivid inter-ges, you must have them, I suppose; and the est; but his conclusions are sure to be hurried world, half-shutting its eyes, will do its best not and indistinct; so that the reader, perceiving a to see the awkwardness which they stamp upon falling-off where he expects a climax, is pained, your poem." and, closing the book with dissatisfaction, is in no mood to give the author credit for the vivid sensations which have been aroused during the progress of perusal. Of all literary foibles the most fatal, perhaps, is that of defective climax. Nevertheless, I should be inclined to rank John Neal first, or at all events second, among our men of indisputable genius. Is it, or is it not a fact, that the air of a Democracy agrees better with mere Talent than with Genius?

Few things have greater tendency than inversion, to render verse feeble and ineffective. In most cases where a line is spoken of as “forcible," the force may be referred to directness of expression. A vast majority of the passages which have become household through frequent quotation, owe their popularity either to this directness, or, in general, to the scorn of "poetic license." In short as regards verbal construe tion, the more prosaic a poetical style is, the bet ter. Through this species of prosaicism, Cowper, with scarcely one of the higher poetical eleIt is not proper, (to use a gentle word,) nor ments, came very near making his age fancy him does it seem courageous, to attack our foe by name the equal of Pope; and to the same cause are in spirit and in effect, so that all the world shall attributable three-fourths of that unusual point know whom we mean, while we say to ourselves, and force for which Thomas Moore is distinguish“I have not attacked this man by name in the ed. It is the prosaicism of these two writers to eye, and according to the letter, of the law"-which is owing their especial quotability. yet how often are men who call themselves gentlemen, guilty of this meanness! We need reform at this point of our Literary Morality The Reverend Arthur Coxe's 'Saul, a Mystery,' hav :- ing been condemned in no measured terms by Poe, of The very sorely, too, at another—the system of ano-Broadway Journal,' and Green of 'The Emporium,' a wrinymous reviewing. Not one respectable word ter in the can be said in defence of this most unfair-this most despicable and cowardly practice.

There lies a deep and sealed well
Within yon leafy forest hid,
Whose pent and lonely waters swell

Its confines chill and drear amid.

This putting the adjective after the noun is,

Hartford Columbian' retorts as follows:

An entertaining history,
Entitled 'Saul, A Mystery,'

Has recently been published by the Reverend Arthur Core,
The poem is dramatic,
And the wit of it is attic,

And its teachings are emphatic of the doctrines orthodox.

But Mr. Poe, the poet,
Declares he cannot go it-

merely, an inexcusable Gallicism; but the put-That the book is very stupid, or something of that sort:

ting the preposition after the noun is alien to all language and in opposition to all its principles.

And Green, of the Empori-
Um, tells a kindred story,

Such things, in general, serve only to betray the And swears like any tory that it is'nt worth a groat.

versifier's poverty of resource; and, when an inversion of this kind occurs, we say to ourselves,

But maugre all the croaking
Of the Raven and the joking

"Here the poet lacked the skill to make out his Of the verdant little fellow of the used to be review,

The People, in derision
Of their impudent decision,

Have declared, without division, that the Mystery will da

line without distorting the natural or colloquial order of the words." Now and then, however, we must refer the error not to deficiency of skill, but to something far less defensible-to an idea The truth, of course, rather injures an epithat such things belong to the essence of poetry-gram than otherwise; and nobody will think the that it needs them to distinguish it from prose-worse of the one above, when I say that, at the that we are poetical, in a word, very much in date of its first appearance, I had expressed no