was, Captain Ogle was so indolent a man, that without a flapper, the matter might have slept in his hands till the Greek kalends. Such was Mr. Coleridge's kind recognition of my father's exertions, that he had the infinite goodness and condescension to look over the proof-sheets of two girlish efforts, "Christina" and Blanch," and to encourage the young writer by gentle strictures and stimulating praise. Ah! I wish she had better deserved this honoring notice !

I add one of his sublimest poems.

HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

Hast thou a charm to stay the Morning Star

In his steep course? So long he seems to pause

On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc !

The Arve and Arveiron at thy base

Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form!
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines
How silently! Around thee and above
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it
As with a wedge! But when I look again
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,

Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee

Till thou, still present to the bodily sense

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer

I worshiped the Invisible alone.

Yet like some sweet beguiling melody,

So sweet we know not we are listening to it,

Thou the meanwhile wast blending with my thought,

Yea with my life, and life's most secret joy;
Till the dilating soul, enwrapped, transfused,
Into the mighty vision passing-there

As in her natural form swelled vast to Heaven!

Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute tears and thrilling ecstasy. Awake!
Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale!
Or struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,
Or when they climb the sky or when they sink

Companion of the Morning Star at dawn,
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald wake, O wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents, fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,
Forever shattered and the same forever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

And who commanded (and the silence came),
Here let the billows stiffen and have rest?

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Ye living flowers, that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats, sporting round the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and wonders of the element!
Utter forth, God! and fill the hills with praise!

Once more, hoar mount, with thy sky-painting peaks,
Oft from whose feet the avalanche unheard
Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene
Into the depth of clouds that vail thy breast-
Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou,

In adoration, upward from thy base

Slow traveling with dim eyes, suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest like a vapory cloud

To rise before me-Rise, ever rise;

Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread embassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God!

One can not look too often upon Mr. Wordsworth's charming female portrait:

་་

She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight:

A lovely apparition sent

To be a moment's ornament;

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;

Like twilight, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view

A spirit, yet a woman too!

Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;

A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveler betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill,
A perfect woman nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light.

I would add "Laodamia," if it were not too long, and the Yew-trees," if I had not a misgiving that I have somewhere planted those deathless trunks before. In how many ways is a great poet glorious! I met with a few lines taken from that

noble poem the other day in the "Modern Painters," cited for

the landscape:

"Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibers serpentine,

Upcoiling and inveterately convolved! .

Beneath whose shade

With sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
Perennially-"

and so forth. Mr. Ruskin cited this fine passage for the picture, I for the personifications:

"Ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight, Death the skeleton,

And Time the shadow!"

Both quoted the lines for different excellences, and both were

right.

XXXI.

AMERICAN POETS.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

AMONG the strange events of these strange days of ours, when revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutions changed one week and rechanged the next, seem to crowd into a fortnight the work of a century, annihilating time, just as railways and electric telegraphs annihilate space,-in these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood relations (I had well nigh called them our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and to my mind it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey -provided always, it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought, and clear of word, we could. fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of "Absalom and Achitophel," or of the "Moral Epistles," if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name.

The work of which I am about to offer a sample, all too brief, is a little book much too brief itself; a little book of less than forty pages, described in the title-page as "Astræa—a Poem, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, August, 1850, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and printed at the request of the Society."