bald and commonplace sentiments, do we rank in point of dishonesty and extravagance the effusions of that school of versifiers who have complacently taken the phrases of contemporary poets as their own, and used them as capital on which to build a wide and profitable reputation. It is fortunate for the true poet that the imitative versifier always overreaches himself. The peculiar turns of phraseology, the rhythmical dress and posturing, and the artistic connections of sentiment, which, with ❘ as little modification as possible, the imitator would make his own, are rarely to be transferred so as to preserve their original beauty, even by the most skilful hands; and, degenerating into mannerism by being forced upon us too often, at last entirely lose their harmony and effect. It too frequently happens that an author who has charmed us by original felicities of manner is so far carried away by success and self-praise as to give us too many of them in his subsequent works. But, however well we may endure the repetition of the cloying sweetness, we have no patience for the distasteful and disproportionate dose of mannerism which the forthcoming imitator would compel us to swallow. And we resent the attempted infliction with as much heartiness as we would repel the impertinences of a bystander, who had taken upon himself to insult us from beholding our forbearance under the momentary caprices of a friend. Some time ago we had marked out certain phrases on the pages of two of our special favoites, Tennyson and Poe, and had ventured to predict in a quiet way, that the imitators of these admirable poets would betray themselves by fastening on these peculiarities, and repeating them to us ad nauseam. Two words particularly had attracted our attention as being very open to abuse, and very difficult to be used at all, except by minds of exquisite perceptions; and indeed they had been so bandied about by shallow mystics, that men who were equal to an appreciation of their meaning would be very cautious how they employed them. These words are the Real and the Ideal; and surely no one will say that they are to be played with by children, or harped on in vacant hours, like the strings of an idle instrument. Tennyson and Poe had been sufficiently familiar with them for our taste, and had used them quite enough for producing effect; but the easy complacency with which they are led off by the imitators of these poets, and preeminently Mr. Mulchinock, is an attack upon our forbearance and an affront to our notions of good sense and good poetry. What, for instance, can we think of such rhymings as the following? "Blending with the bright Ideal the sad Actual and Real, Till its chords shall seem to be all touched and struck by viewless fingers Of weird spirits in the air." "Overlong the false Ideal "In dreams she comes to me, to cherish and woo me The slumber is pleasure, the waking is woe, Where fades the Ideal, when triumphs the Real; I pine for young Alice of Ballinasloe." "Oh! thou bright and blest Ideal, Are they not simply an affectation of high sentiment where there is no sentiment at all, and an irreverent handling of words which were never meant to be trifled with? It requires no very great amount of skill to frame stanzas that shall contain these words; they are remarkably docile in couples; and there is not a clever lad of fifteen who could not string them together with as much of the "bright" and "blest" and "darksome" as they are garnished with by Mr. Mulchinock. And we do not know why we should be called upon to admire so cheap and easy a performance-what any of us could do equally well at any time. We are sorry to see Mr. Mulchinock depending so much for effect on the words "Past," "Present," and "Future," with their attendant adjectives, which every reader's memory will readily suggest to him. What has just been said about the Ideal and the Real will apply to these much-abused words. It requires a delicacy of taste amounting almost to genius to avoid using them in just such connections as those in which they are employed by the mob of ordinary writers and speakers when they would be thought learned, sublime, and prophetic. To talk about these three conditions of Time is to run the risk of talking commonplace ambitiously. Mr. Mulchinock has taken the risk, may judge from verses like these spoken by Paul Flemming, the "pale" student: and we think he has been unlucky-if we | with trifling with poetic terms, when we "Then like music spake he-Mary, by my love that ne'er can vary, By mine eyes so wan and weary, weary watch ing for thy presence, Oh, thou beautifully fair; "By the Past whose gloom is o'er me; by the Future dark before me; By the loved dead who implore me in sweet whispers from the grave-yard, To lie down and slumber there." Or these : In the kingdom of the Worker he shall have the highest place ko hath dipt into the Future living far beyond his race: "Who hath shown his mission God-like by the reaches of his eye, Glinting over Past and Present, lighting dim Futurity." often find him appropriating with equal recklessness the more peculiar property of other poets. Coleridge tells us of "A noise as of a hidden brook This therefore is Coleridge's, and no one else has any right to it. But Mr. Mulchinock does not agree with us. By virtue of his poetic calling he has a right to it, and proceeds to exercise his prerogative as follows: "Sweeter than the streamlet rushing amid spring flowers in their flushing Came the song of love outgushing from the lips of the pale student In the leafy month of June." Very awkwardly done. But it requires talent to plagiarize well. Tennyson's Locksley Hall contains this beautiful couplet : Part of this reminds us very forcibly of a "Love took up the harp of Life and smote on all couplet in Tennyson's Locksley Hall: "For I dipt into the Future far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be." Such coincidences, however, are common with Mr. Mulchinock. We may notice one or two others before we part company. Here is a stanza quite in the prophetic style of Mævius and Bavius. It is addressed to "Men of Genius": "Though to all your toil incessant We consider this disparagement of the times in which one lives an affectation, and unworthy a liberal mind. And in all candor we must say we find far too much of it in Mr. Mulchinock. But of this hereafter. We have noticed many other instances of this commonplace and unmeaning trifling with suggestive phrases which it is hardly necessary to quote for the purpose of showing that Mr. Mulchinock has brought nothing more out of them than certain rhymes and cadences for which he has mainly employed them. We shall not be accused of treating him unfairly in thus charging him its chords with might, Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of sight." ance with the best of living and late poets | speak in unvarying tones of despondency will detect in greater or less abundance in and complaint, when we have every reason nearly every piece in this volume; and of to suppose him capable of enjoying the coninstances of a recklessness in the use of meta- tent which he affects to find only in others. physical and poetic terms which most readers will not fail to discover and condemn. We have no disposition to enter upon an exhibition of Mr. Mulchinock's rhythmical errors, which swarm throughout these poems in unstinted profusion. For these, circumstances may offer a partial apology. It is after all more of the spirit of Mr. Mulchinock's rhymes than of their mechanical execution that we would complain. We should be somewhat disposed to excuse the slovenly measure and the bungling rhyme, if they were the dress of really original, poetic and healthy thoughts; but if we condemn the barren or the perverted sentiment, how can we approve the verse in which it is borne haltingly and wearily along? Mr. Mulchinock's verses are gloomy, and we think their gloom studied and unnecessary. There are very few men of education whose circumstances compel them to poverty and neglect; and when we hear such men complaining of one or both of these conditions of misery, we are apt to believe that they are practising on our sympathies, and are either clinging to sorrow for the melancholy pleasure it is sometimes said to afford, or are prating of its stings without actually undergoing them. To the really deserving and unfortunate, the public ear is seldom closed; but it is ever the case, as it should be, that public sympathy neither goes out spontaneously nor strongly for the man who clings to a vocation for which he is indifferently fitted, and which, in return, yields him but an indifferent support, when other callings, equally honorable and more productive, lie open to his exertions. We look in vain, then, through this volume for any traces of that genial and generous sentiment which should spring spontaneously from the heart of every man, and, most of all, from the heart of the man who thinks himself specially commissioned to address his fellow-men through the medium of the feelings and the imagination. A writer of verses, in addition to the necessary qualifications of imagination, taste, and rhythmical first glance-without lingering long over power, should have a liberal and compre- | certain obtrusive facts, the large number of hensive mind, capable of overlooking cir- writers, professional and unprofessional, who Need we say we have reference to professional verse-making-to that description of verse-making which Mr. Mulchinock cultivates, and which he professes to find so unprofitable? It must strike every one at the clamor for admission to the columns of every magazine, the immense disadvantages under which our authors labor from reproductions of foreign and unpaid-for literature, the excessive cheapness at which the home market for reading must be supplied that nothing can be more unwise than for a man of any other than first-rate abilities to pursue a career in which not more than one in a hundred can hope to earn more than a bare subsistence, when easier and more lucrative paths lie before him. It is unwise for this reason, setting aside all others that will occur at a moment's contemplation-namely, that a writer on broad and comprehensive topics, like those of poetry, ought to be thoroughly acquainted with all classes of society, and to have such a position as to be on easy and intimate terms with the great man as well as the laborer or the common citizen. He should possess an independence sufficient cumstances and of appreciating the good qualities to be found in every man and every thing. It is no more necessary that he should be an optimist than that he should plunge into the midnight of a Byronic misanthropy. If his disposition is like that of nine out of ten, it is hardly needful to caution him against one or the other of these extremes. But as Nature produces a few optimists and misanthropes, and circumstances many more, so we find certain poets whose verses are naturally optimistic or melancholy, and a greater number-of a lesser grade, be it said-whose verses, purporting to be results of their own experience, are evidently studied pictures of the utmost of cheerfulness or Timonism that can be evolved from the material around them. We are always suspicious of the sincerity of any writer who claims to have a larger share of happiness or misery than his fellow-men, and we especially condemn the processes by to raise him above all imputation of sycowhich a writer of poetry brings himself to phancy or meanness; such an independence as makes a man feel always light of heart, and above those fretting circumstances which assail him whose next dinner is for ever a subject of uneasy contemplation. His means should give him access to libraries and gal-petual presence of the arts; men whose fame is not leries; they should allow him the necessary stimulants of travel and public amusement; in fine, having the world for his peculiar study, the world should be in every way open to him. To substantiate this, we must leave great authors out of view: their genius has at all times evoked fortune and worshippers, laboring at first no matter under how great disadvantages. But for how many men of second-rate abilities and unpromising beginnings has competence prepared the way for literary distinction! and how many men of aspirations beyond their natural abilities, of a thirst for fame beyond their power to achieve greatness, has poverty happily kept back from a career in which only the most favored can run without faltering and failure! Now it is evident that the man who, without possessing sufficient ability to raise himself to the first rank in literature, sits down to gain his subsistence by writing verses, condemns himself to seclusion from the great world, and therefore to barrenness of sentiment and information. That many-sided knowledge which, in the present intensity of civilization, the writer who would reach the popular ear must possess, he will inevitably want. His writings will be capricious, onesided, and unfair. It will be strange if they do not fall into one unvarying strain, and that strain oftener melancholy and bitter than genial and warm. Living, it may be, in back streets; surrounded by a society whose manners are at best unattractive, and whose language breathes a harsh and disaffected spirit; he cannot hope to become acquainted with the ways of those who partake bountifully of the higher privileges of life, and from a secure position look comprehensively and unrepiningly on the world around them. No man of this day can approach to any thing like perfection in writing whose field of observation is as limited as Mr. Mulchinock's would appear to be, from what he says in the preface to his poemsan unsatisfactory apology for a very mani mon books, and the great works of God, besides the lessons of daily life, have been my sole teachers, With these aids, if I cannot hope to match men to whom many languages are as familiar as their own, whose mornings, nights, and libraries are in the peronlyence on the merits of my dear mistress turn American but universal; I at least may claim an whose beauty, like that of the gospel, though 'ever ancient,' is also 'ever new." Shelley, with infinitely more genius, but it must be owned, with less common sense, for he was in no want of money, talked somewhat like this, when he boasted of his acquaintance with the Alps and the glaciers, and his unsuitableness for the companion ship of his fellow-Englishmen. And consequently Shelley is read by nobody but poets, i He loved the people well enough, but he never learned how to write for them. He let his great soul go out over mountains and midnights, and his poems are one prolonged rhapsody. He is a good study, but a bad model. But Mr. Mulchinock has copied his error. Speaking of himself, he says: " All his harpings caught from nature, lakes and Not in city smoke begotten among rod-directed mountains for his schools, fools." So much the worse for Mr. Mulchinock. If poets only draw their inspirations from mountains and lakes, they may be as grand and mystic as they please, but they may rest content with lakes and mountains for listeners. If they will ride Pegasus occasionally on cross-roads and in cities, and lend their genius to "adorn common things," they will meet with the encouragement they deserve. We are not surprised, therefore, at the tone of Mr. Mulchinock's verses, after learning the circumstances under which they were composed, and the sources of inspiration whence they were drawn; especially when we see that greater men have written vaguely, and unfairly, and bitterly, while refusing to look at all sides of life before making it the subject of poetical philosophizing. To be shut out from the higher and refined amenities of life; to be constantly vexed by the thought that men of inferior minds, possessing no sympathy for the beautiful in art or nature, are spending "From the stimulus of elegant society, from de- money without stint on useless and unelelightful leisure, or many-path'd cultivation, I have vated pleasures, which a better owner would not obtained subjects or a style. A few good com-employ in the gratification of the noblest fest want: tastes of which our nature is capable; to be obliged, in the teeth of the intensest competition, to send hurried and incomplete verses to magazines for a nominal remuneration; and to live day by day without prospect of ever gaining more than a mere living, and with a dreary looking forward to sickness or failing powers; this condition of things surely cannot make the poet genial and comprehensive, and cannot give that mellow glow of hope and good-nature to his verses which, after all, is a large ingredient in the works of every successful poet whom the world has seen. What influence such cir cumstances have, we may infer from the following verses-the like of which are profusely strewn through this volume of Mr. Mulchinock's. We are willing to believe them true, for we would not accuse their author of making untrue appeals to our sympathies in lines which he tells us are drops of his own heart's blood, and beats of his own quick pulse": 66 "Now for me the silent sorrow and the loneliness and gloom, Entertaining this sense of unrequited merit, it is not strange that Mr. Mulchinock should extend his sympathy to the laboring classes, and endeavor to rouse them to an appreciation of their own rights, in a man Phantom shapes of long-lost pleasures flit around ner which savors much more of the disaf my lonely room: fected anarchist than of the reasonable, pathink, however, that the poor will never be tient, and philanthropic reformer. We helped by such bitter outpourings as these: "Woe to those in lordly places, sunk in lethargy supine, With their feastings and their revels, with their music and their wine! "Woe is me! befooled by fancies, and a sorrow at my door; Morn and even moaning ever-that 'twill leave me nevermore. Wealthy homes are all around me, homes of luxury and ease, Wine and music, mirth and laughter; but, alas! we've none of these. "On their Rights, not Duties, standing, earthly rulers one and all Grind and scourge their poorer brother, as an outcast and a thrall "Human eagles, from their eyries swooping down with hungry beak, Wayside sheep without a shepherd still the only prey they seek. |