'Here, say old men, the Indian Magi made
Their spells by moonlight; or beneath the shade
That shrouds sequestered rock, or dark'ning glade,
Or tangled dell.

Here Philip came and Miantonimo,

And asked about their fortunes long ago,

As Saul to Endor, that her witch might show
Old Samuel.

And here the black fox roved, that howled and shook
His thick tail to the hunters, by the brook

Where they pursued their game, and him mistook
For earthly fox;

Thinking to shoot him like a shaggy bear,

And his soft peltry, stripped and dressed, to wear,
Or lay a trap, and from his quiet lair
Transfer him to a box.'

To return, however, to Bryant, who, after all, we believe, is likely to be the more general favourite. The editor presents us with no fewer than twenty specimens from his poems. Several of which, such as his beautiful Lines to a Waterfowl,' After a Tempest,' and To the Evening Wind,' have already made their appearance in more than one of our British journals. All of them are pleasing-many of them exquisitely so; but certainly the epithet bold,' which the editor applies to his manner, appears to us singularly inapplicable to the mind of Bryant, which seems far more remarkable for tenderness and delicacy than power-and deals infinitely more with the beautiful than the terrible-even in his pictures of inanimate nature, and still more in his delightful studies of human feeling. His pleasure seems to be in conjuring up pictures of domestic tenderness of simplest mirth 6 and tears-calm household scenes, where the current of life glides by, neither overshadowed by gloom nor fretted into agitation. Such is the following beautiful song of Pitcairn's Island, sung by some island Neuha to her English Torquil-to our minds the finest with, perhaps, the exception of the noble lines, 'The • Indian at the Burying-Place of his Fathers'-of all the specimens from Bryant contained in the volume.

'Come take our boy, and we will go

Before our cabin door;

The winds shall bring us, as they blow,
The murmurs of the shore;

And we will kiss his young blue eyes ;.
And I will sing him, as he lies,

Songs that were made of yore:
I'll sing in his delighted ear,
The island lays thou lov'st to hear..

And thou, whilst stammering, I repeat,
Thy country's tongue shall teach;
'Tis not so soft, but far more sweet

Than my own native speech;
For thou no other tongue didst know,
When, scarcely twenty moons ago,
Upon Tahités beach,

Thou cam'st to woo me to be thine,
With many a speaking look and sign.

I knew thy meaning-thou didst praise
My eyes, my locks of jet;
Ah! well for me, they won thy gaze !-
But thine were fairer yet!
I'm glad to see my infant wear
Thy soft blue eyes and sunny hair,
And when my sight is met

By his white brow and blooming cheek,
I feel a joy I cannot speak.

Come, talk of Europe's maids with me,
Whose necks and cheeks, they tell,
Outshine the beauty of the sea,

White foam and crimson shell.
I'll shape like theirs my simple dress,
And bind like them each jetty tress,
A sight to please thee well;
And for my dusky brow will braid
A bonnet like an English maid.

Come, for the soft low sunlight calls—
We lose the pleasant hours;
"Tis lovelier than these cottage walls,
That seat among the flowers.
And I will learn of thee a prayer,
To Him who gave a home so fair,
A lot so blest as ours-

The God who made for thee and me
This sweet lone isle amid the sea.'

Full of sweet sympathy with Nature's minutest beauties, as well as her more magnificent, are the lines, To the Fringed 'Gentian,' where the pure mind of the author draws a moral even from the flower.

Thou blossom, bright with autumn dew,
And coloured with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night,

Thou comest not when violets lean,
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
O'er columbines in purple drest,

Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

'Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near its end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hours of death draw nigh to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to Heaven as I depart.'

We miss among the selections from Bryant an old favourite of ours, The New Moon.' Surely the grave and moral beauty of these lines must find an echo in every heart.

When, as the garish day is done,
Heaven burns with the descended sun,

'Tis passing sweet to mark
Amid that flush of crimson light,

The new moon's modest brow grow bright,
As earth and sky grow dark.

Few are the hearts too cold to feel,
A thrill of gladness on them steal,
When first the wandering eye

Sees faintly in the evening blaze
That glimmering curve of tender rays
Just planted in the sky.

The sight of that young crescent brings
Thoughts of all fair and youthful things,
The hopes of early years;

And childhood's purity and grace,
And joys that like a rainbow chase
The passing shower of tears.

The captive yields him to the dream
Of freedom when that virgin beam
Comes out upon the air;

And painfully the sick man tries
To fix his dim and burning eyes
On the soft promise there.

More welcome to the lover's sight
Glitters that pure emerging light;
For prattling lovers say,

That sweetest is the lover's walk,
And tenderest is their murmured talk,
Beneath its gentle ray.

And there do grave men behold
A type of errors, loved of old,

Forsaken and forgiven;

And thoughts and wishes not of earth,

Just opening in their early birth,

Like that new light in Heaven.'

We leave Bryant with reluctance even for Dana. More of strength and grasp there is in the latter, but also more of irregularity and inequality. He aims higher, but does not always reach his mark. Yet though the qualities of his mind have not yet been so completely harmonized as might be desirable, we should say that there was a greater chance of his producing, in time to come, a great work, than in the case of any of the Forty,' whose productions are here placed before us. For most of the elements of a great poet are here ;-quick sensibility, strong conception, great force and apparent facility of expression, though alloyed a little by a tendency to exaggeration, and not united with all that compactness which would be desirable. The editor gives at length his 'Tale of the Buccaneer'—a ghastly story of the sea, of murder and superstitious terror. To quote enough to give any fair idea of this very striking poem would be inconsistent with our limits; and mere insulated stanzas, though rich in picturesque beauty, or solemn description, could convey no impression of a poem of which the effect mainly depends on the wild and mysterious interest of its supernatural agency, and its effects on the mind of the guilty adventurer who is its hero. We must be content with a shorter specimen.

Thy flitting form comes ghostly dim, and pale,
As driven by a beating storm at sea;

Thy cry is weak and scared,
As if thy mates had shared
The doom of us. Thy wail-

What does it bring to me?

Thou call'st along the sand, and haunt'st the surge,
Restless and sad; as if, in strange accord

With motion and with roar

Of waves that drive to shore,

One spirit did ye urge—

The Mystery-the Word.

Then turn thee, little bird, and take thy flight
Where the complaining sea shall sadness bring

Thy spirit never more:

Come, quit with me the shore,
For gladness and the light,

Where birds of summer sing.'

Of the specimens from Percival, which are numerous, we like best the simple stanzas, entitled The Grave of the Indian Chief.' The lines to An Eagle,' which, we believe, have already made their appearance in some English publications, are more ambitious, but less successful-and, indeed, less calculated to give a true idea of the manner of the author-whose cast of mind, like Bryant's, inclines him more to a mournful simplicity, than to pomp or energy of thought or style. We are not sure, however, but that his little poem of The Deserted Wife,' unaccountably omitted by the editor, to make room, as we cannot help thinking, for pieces of inferior merit, is better than the poem we are about to quote from these Selections.' Is there not profound pathos in this picture of a deserted wife, still loving, though she has ceased to be loved, and watching beside her slumbering infant for her husband's return?

6

'He comes not. I have watched the moon go down,
But yet he comes not. Once it was not so.

He thinks not how these bitter tears do flow,

The while he holds his riot in that town.