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The smile of your heroic cheer may float Above all floods of earthly agonies, Purification being the joy of pain!

THE VISION OF POETS is the second elaborate poem in the collection. Its design is to show the mystery of the poetical character, by which genius is at war with society, and with itself; by which it pines in sorrow and neglect and suffering, both self-imposed and from without, while the rest of the world apparently lives on in joy and carelessness. Its object is the noblest that can employ the pens of poets, to "vindicate the ways of God to man," to teach reconciliation and submission, to calm rebellion, to create smiles of happiness out of very unhappiness itself in the wounded breast of man. Miss Barrett may take for her shield the poet's motto, " We learn in suffering what we teach in song." In truth, this verse of divinest bards is no child's play of the faculties, no elegant amuse ment of the boudoir penned on satin paper with crowquill for the admiration of taste and fashion, no accidental thing to be picked up by a man as he goes along the world, played with for a while and laid aside. It is the soul's experience, wrung from the very depths of a noble nature, and of the noble nature only; and the whole life-childhood, youth with its shadows, manhood with calm day-light-the son, the lover, the father -must form its completeness.

A poet in whom the inward light prevented sleep, goes forth into a wood, like early Chaucer when he saw the wonders of the Flower and Leaf, and there meets with a lady on a snow-white palfrey, who leads him over the moor, where he is bade to drink of three separate pools, which represent the poet's dower, and tastes successively of the world's use, a bitter draught; the world's love bitter too, and of the world's cruelty; upon which he swoons, and being purified by this earthly purgation, is admitted to the vision of poets, held in some vast hall of the imagination in dream-land, where a Hebrew angel, clad in Miltonic strength and splendor, ministers at an altar, surrounded by the great bards of time.

Then first, the poet was aware Of a chief angel standing there Before that altar, in the glare.

His eyes were dreadful, for you saw That they saw God-his lips and jaw, Grand-made and strong, as Sinai's law.

On the vast background of his wings
Arose his image! and he flings,
From each plumed arc, pale glitterings
And fiery flakes (as beateth more
And round him, upon roof and floor,
Or less, the angel-heart!) before,

Edging with fire the shining fumes,
While at his side, 'twixt light and glooms,
The phantasm of an organ booms.

eddies at the foot of Niagara, and shroudIn a deep pool, nurtured by one of the ed forever by the clouds of mist, hid in a basin of rock aside from the steps of the careless traveller, a rainbow is literally burnt in with deep metallic dyes, an arc of gold and purple, fixed and immoveable as steel, and surrounded by half-illumined spray, fragile as air. Miss Barrett's Wall of the Poets, with its massiveness and "air-drawn" grandeur, has recalled to us this image, showing that even in the poet's cloud-land Nature has her highest invention cannot get beyond the omniscient prototypes, and that the actual.

"chambers of imagery" we see ShakAmong the portraits hung up in these speare and Dante, Goethe and Schiller, Electric Pindar, quick as fear, With race-dust on his cheeks

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And Virgil! shade of Mantuan beech
Did help the shade of bay to reach
And curl around his forehead high !--
For his gods wore less majesty
Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly.

And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine-
That mark upon his lip is wine.
Here Milton's eyes strike piercing-dim!
The shapes of suns and stars did swim
Like clouds from them, and granted him
God for sole vision! Cowley, there,
Drew straws to amber-foul to fair.
Whose active fancy debonnaire

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben-
Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows, when
The world was worthy of such men.

Before these good and great spirits a worldly crowd of those who take upon themselves unworthily the name of poets enter, and plead their cunning, their frivolity, their earthly-mindedness in their disguises

But all the foreheads of those born
And dead true poets flashed with scorn
Betwixt the bay-leaves round them worn-

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Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they,
The new-come, shrank and paled away,
Like leaden ashes when the day

Strikes on the hearth.

The last expression is altogether Dan

tean.

To give the reader an idea of the variety of the poetical powers displayed in these volumes, we should have to follow in this way every separate poem, for each, with a fine under-current of the original mind of the authoress, is a new These poems deserve to be creation. studied as we study the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller. With the flexibility of language of the one, they have much of the moral significance of the other. The "Cry of the Children" is in the high lyrical German strain, beyond A Rhapsody of Life's song-writing. Progress recalls to us the philosopher of Weimar. In The Dead Pan, Miss Barrett has written a reply, call it rather a supplement, to Schiller's Gods of Greece. In felicity of language, in historical enthusiasm, in picturesque beauty, it is as certainly equal to Schiller's poem, as in its Christian morality it is superior. In a certain massiveness of thought and expression no woman may equal his manli

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From the gloaming of the oak wood,
O ye Dryads, could ye flee?
At the rushing thunderstroke would
No sob tremble through the tree?—
Not a word the Dryads say,
Though the forests wave for aye.
For Pan is dead.

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Neptune lies beside his trident,
Dull and senseless as a stone :
And old Pluto deaf and silent
Is cast out into the sun.
Ceres smileth stern thereat,-
"We all now are desolate-"
Now Pan is dead.

Aphrodite dead and driven
As thy native foam, thou art,
With the cestus long done heaving
thy heart!
On the white calm of

Ai Adonis! At that shriek,

Not a tear runs down her cheek

Pan, Pan is dead.

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O brave poets, keep back nothing;
Nor mix falsehood with the whole!
Look up Godward! speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty,

Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!
Pan, Pan is dead.

In the poem on Victoria "Crowned and Wedded," there is a passage worthy of a chant in old Westminster Abbey:

And so the DEAD-who lie in rows beneath

the minster floor,

There, verily an awful state maintaining

evermore

The statesman, whose clean palm will kiss no bribe whate'er it be

The courtier, who for no fair queen will rise up to his knee

The court-dame, who for no court-tire will leave her shroud behind

The laureate, who no courtlier rhyme than "dust to dust" can find

The kings and queens who having made that vow and worn that crown, Descended unto lower thrones and darker deep adown!

The Lost Bower is a happy piece of ruralizing, founded upon the recollections from days of childhood of a woodland bower, which is very beautifully and delClaude, vanishing away on the burden of icately painted with the softness of a sweet lines into airy distance. She had seen the bower once, but could not find it again. Time passed on, and many joys of the outer world and from humankind were lost to the poetess, who, reclining on her couch of illness, sees through the fingers which press upon her eyelids this vision of the trees, and grass, and the birds of old. Is it not found again in the verse beyond any concealment or disaster-in verse simple, natural, fluent and affluent?

The Rhyme of the Duchess May is a most musical ballad of the olden song, related by a bell-ringer in a church tower ringing for the dead, with the burden in every verse, "Toll slowly!"

But we must pause somewhere. Miss Barrett's book is now before the American reader, and we confidently appeal to the mind of the country, recommending its cordial reception as a book that is pure, genuine, honest, a book of sustained power, well suited no less by its high Christian sentiment, than as an example of genius without artifice, to be profitable to the intellect of the country.

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Published by Anthony, Edwards & Co. from their Daguerreotype likeness in the

National Miniature Gallery 247 Broadway. New York

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