Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 104.djvu/53

Rh future efforts, he will approve himself capable of a "self-supporting system," that shall defy allusion to "Sordello," or to "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," or to "A Dream of Fair Women." The singular poem entitled "The Earl's Return" is a medley of all his manners and moods—alternately wild, dreamy, tender, rugged, stormy, subtle, and grimly humorous. "A Soul's Loss" is a forcible but melodious record of stifled passion—some of the stanzas breathe deepest thoughts in words that burn into the soul, and compel sympathy with that other soul's "Loss." "The Artist," again, is rich in meditative passages, and evidences an artist-author in the smoothness and sweetness of its metrical flow, while it implies a pledge of his inspiration to eschew all second-hand trading in authorship, and to speak out for himself the poetry that may be in him, and beat out music of his own, nor be

The enthusiasm with which the sights and sounds of Mother Earth are observed in these poems, and the fulness with which their charms, or imposing pomps, or lurking mysteries, are chronicled, form one of the most note-worthy characteristics of this new poet. He delights to depict the stagnant levels, burning in the distant marsh—the garden-bowers dim with dew—the white-rose thorns twinkling with sparkling drops—to bid us list the bittern's parting call, and the harsh murmurs of the frogs among the low reeds,—or watch the coming and going overhead of winnowing bats, and the snails' dull march adown shining trails.

We meet by the score with descriptive fragments such as this:

Or this sea-side sketch:

Every sea-shore roamer will own the graphic effect of the next extract:

But when the swallow, that sweet new-comer,

Floated over the sea in the front of the summer,

The salt dry sands burn'd white, and sicken'd

Men's sight in the glaring horn of the bay;

And all things that fasten, or float at ease

In the silvery light of the leprous seas

With the pulse of a hideous life were quicken'd,

Fell loose from the rocks, and crawl'd crosswise away.

Slippery sidelong crabs, half-strangled

By the white sea-grasses in which they were tangled,

And those half-living creatures, orb'd, ray'd, and sharp-angled,

Fan-fish, and star-fish, and polypous lumps,