Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/327

Rh by the way, would appear favourable to the "consecration and the poet's dream," without excluding the "common things that round us lie" in active practical life. But he leaves now to others the "accomplishment of verse," and reposes on such laurels as he has long-ago won, be they ever-greens or not.

His prose writings are numerous, but chiefly scattered among reviews, magazines, and newspapers. The "Letters of a Traveller," collected for English publication two or three years ago, form an agreeable miscellany, but without pretension to novelty in matter or any distinctive excellence in style. The subjects are trite, the treatment so-soish. The repast is a sort of soup-maigre, presented in no very lordly dish. Enthusiasm of description is as much awanting as singularity of incident. But to those who love quiet communications on quiet topics, these letters have an interest and value not to be gainsaid. The subjects range over a pretty wide surface of time and space; from 1834 to 1849, and from New England to Old, plus France and Holland, Austria and Italy. If there is a deficiency of colouring and warmth in the traveller's sketches of Italian scenery and arts—of what is picturesque in Shetland life—of England's home beauties—and of the swamps of Florida, and the rugged wilds of Canada, and the tropic vegetation of Cuba,—at least they are free from the showy verbiage and fustian neologisms in which some New Englanders so profusely indulge. Nevertheless, they are distinctively American; for Mr. Griswold is right in affirming, as respects the poet's prose writings, especially the political part of them, that, whatever is in them of intrinsic truth, his views on every subject disputed internationally, are essentially American, born of and nurtured by his country's institutions, experience, and condition, "and held," it is added, "only by ourselves and by those who look to us for instruction and example." The Evening Post has been the main channel of the ex-poet's political effusions. Prose belles lettres he seems to have abjured, together with verse—though once so welcome and prominent a contributor to the North American Review, the New York Review, and other home journals. As in the case of James Montgomery, Thomas Aird, and others, in the old country, this devotement to newspaper partisanship is held a thousand pities by most who pay homage to his muse.