land's Crisis," about the year 1676. Besides this "great epic," "he wrote," says the editor of the collection before us, "three shorter poems, neither of which have much merit."

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It is attempted to be proved in this volume, that very little poetry worthy of preservation was produced in America before the period of the revolution; in fact, till the spirit of freedom began to influence the national character. "The POETRY OF THE COLONIES," says the editor, was without originality, energy, feeling, or correctness of diction.' Nothing is more easy to make than such an assertionnothing more easy to prove. A little judicious selection in both periods will make it all plain; but, even giving him credit for making a fair selection from the colonial bards, will the specimens he produces support the implied assumption that the "spirit of liberty" has begotten "originality, energy, and freedom" in the later bards of his country? We hesitate in replying to the question. At least we are unable to observe the strong demarcation between the two periods which he would have us recognise.

Philip Freneau was the most distinguished poet of the revolutionary time. Out of his voluminous compositions, the editor has been able to extract a few detached scraps, fit to be ranked in a "select" collection. The equivocal merit of his verse makes us the more regret not being indulged with a little of his prose, which, as Mr. Thomas modestly remarks, "combined the beauty and smoothness of Addison with the simplicity of Cobbett!" Here are some stanzas :

At Eutaw Springs the valiant died;

Their limbs with dust are covered o'er

Weep on, ye springs, your tearful tide;

How many heroes are no more!

If, in this wreck of ruin, they

Can yet be thought to claim the tear, O smite your gentle breast, and say,

The friends of freedom slumber here!

Stranger, their humble graves adorn; You too may fall, and ask a tear, &c.

But we would willingly, out of the selected specimens, ourselves select the best, although it would be perhaps

only fair, since the country has itself passed favourable judgment on what is here given us, to scan them strictly, or at least take them indiscriminately. Dana is one of the few names which has reached this country, and it deservedly holds a high place on the roll of American genius. Dana is, we are informed, of a fair English descent; William Dana, Esq., having been sheriff of Middlesex, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the republican editor adds, "Thus it will be seen our author has good blood in his veins an honour which no one pretends to despise, who is confident that his grandfather was not a felon or a boor." He, like all the other literary men of America, was a magazine writer and editor, though he has escaped, more completely than most of them, the faults of style, diction, and sentiment, which such an occupation must have a tendency to create. There is a sustained feeling through his compositions, which do not seem to be thrown at the public in fragments, in order that they may stick the more readily and immediately. But there is wanting, too, the bold and fierce energy, the hardihood of thought and language, which constitute at once the faults and the interest of a vigo rous mind. Take, for instance, the following good lines from "Factitious Life," which are only a weakened reflection of the more burning thoughts of another poet :

Thy cry is weak and scared, As if thy mates had shared The doom of us; Thy wailWhat doth it bring to me?

Thou call'st along the sand, and haunt'st the surge,

Restless and sad: as if in strange accord

With the motion and the roar

Of waves that drive to shore, One spirit did ye urge

The Mystery-the Word.

Then turn thee, little bird, and take thy flight

Where the complaining sea shall sadness bring

Thy spirit never more.

Come, quit with me the shore,

For gladness and the light
Where birds of summer sing.

William Cullen Bryant, the most popular of American poets, somewhere about the year 1821 presented his principal poem, Thanatopsis," " for inser. tion in "The North American Review," while Dana was one of its managers. It was agreed by the whole directory that the unknown author "could not be an American," the poem was so good. He was, however; and to show that now at least the nation appreciates the powers of its author, we need only extract from the notice prefixed to the extracts the following passage—

"This (The Ages, a poem) is the only poem he has written in the stanza of Spenser. In its versification it is not inferior to the best passages of the

Fairie Queene' or Childe Harold,' and its splendid imagery and pure philosophy are as remarkable as the power it displays over language:"that is, in versification it is equal to the best parts of the best poems of this class that have ever been written, and in every thing else vastly superior. But it really is good, in spite of this fulsome stuff; and indeed "Thanatopsis" may vie with poems of a very high class in English literature. The tone is solemn, sustained, and dignifiednot so much thought as Young, but less of epigrammatic quaintness. The following is a fine admonition:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, that moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave, at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained

and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one that draws the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant

dreams.

Yet even in this fine poem, and in the other compositions of Bryant, are to be detected constant imitations of what has gone before-a want of We originality and independence. only admit such resemblances where the ancient classics are drawn upon. In America we can plainly see that English poetry of every age is admittedly set up for modelling from, and that it pleases instead of offends a trans-Atlantic ear to perceive that the (in another sense) fontes remotos mix with the julep of their verse.

Take as an instance part of a description of the prairies—

Here we are perpetually getting sight of Lord Byron. There is ever and anon an approximation, and then off again at a tangent; and then close again, like the buzzing of a bee about our ears and we have no doubt that all this is a merit in America, though she cannot of course expect that we should feel any very lively emotions of interest when we find that what its shores are ringing with is only the echo of what shook our ears at home long ago. Observe in the passage we have extracted the expressions

Go, rock the little wood-bird in his nest, Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse

The wide, old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning, from the innumerable

boughs,

The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast.

It will not be expected by the reader that we should pretend even to enumerate the names of the first-class American poets. If we adduce a few, it is without prejudice to those we omit to mention, and almost without assigning any superiority in those we notice over the rest. The volume before us embraces extracts from at least one hundred writers, and some of the poems given run to a considerable length. Certain names, however, are better known here than others, and have attained higher celebrity; and such is the case, too, with our own writers in America. For instance, Kirke White, instead of being classed with those geniuses who are more eminent for their promise than their performance, is perhaps more quoted and imitated in America than any modern English poet. We could easily multiply examples; and hence we may not, perhaps, fall in with American feeling or public judgment in the remarks we make, or the authors we quote. Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, accordingly, we dismiss without notice. They were written into popularity by a popular author, and never would have attracted interest by their writings, or, indeed, by their history, which, as we have remarked in a former number of this Magazine, is, in its manufacture, but an affected imitation of a literary history published in the parent country years ago.

The most remarkable poem that has ever appeared from an American pen, is undoubtedly "Zophiel," by Mrs. Brooks, a lady who, in publishing, assumed the name of Maria Del' Occidente. This poem was published in London in 1833, at a time when Mrs. Brooks was the guest of Southey, and that eminent man honoured it by correcting the proof sheets as they passed through the press. He has himself borne testimony to the genius of the author in that strange book of his, "The Doctor," in which he styles her "the most impassioned and the most imaginative of all poetesses;" and the Quarterly

Review, in denying her the full benefit of the laureate's praise, admits the poem to be "altogether an extraordinary performance." The germ of the story is to be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of the apocryphal book of Tobit, and the mysterious obscurity of the text admits of the full play of her imagination, or fancy, as the reviewer would have it called, which involves and evolves itself in the most extraordinary, and at times magnificent flights. The observations of the editor of the collection upon the merits and defects of this performance are impartial and sound, and unbiassed by the leaning which in some instances misleads him into undue panegyric. He says, "in some of her descriptions she is perhaps too minute; and, at times, by her efforts to condense, (or rather, we should say, by the over-rapidity of her thoughts,) she becomes obscure. The stanza of 'Zophiel' will probably never be very popular, and though the poem may, to use the language of Mr. Southey, have a permanent place in the literature of our language, it will never be generally admired."

It is impossible for us to give more than a single passage out of the third canto of the poem, the whole of which is quoted in the collection :

The dark-green myrrh her tears of fragrance weeps,

And every odorous spike in limpid dew is steeping.

Proud, prickly cerea, now thy blossom 'scapes

Its cell; brief cup of light: and seems to say,

"I am not for gross mortals; blood of grapes

And sleep for them. Come, spirits, while ye may!"

A silent stream winds darkly through the shade,

And slowly gains the Tigris, where 'tis lost;

By a forgotten prince, of old, 'twas made,

And in its course full many a frag

ment cross'd

Of marble, fairly carved; and by its side

Her golden dust the flaunting lotos threw

O'er her white sisters, throned upon the tide,

And queen of every flower that loves perpetual dew. Gold-sprinkling lotos, theme of many a

song,

By slender Indian warbled to his fair! Still tastes the stream thy rosy kiss, though long

Has been but dust the hand that placed thee there. The little temple where its relics rest Long since has fallen; its broken columns lie

Beneath the lucid wave, and give its breast

A whiten'd glimmer as 'tis stealing by. Here, cerea, too, thy clasping mazes twine

The only pillar time has left erect; Thy serpent arms embrace it, as 'twere thine,

And roughly mock the beam it should reflect.

We add a few lines, quoted by "The Doctor," from a smaller poem, which to us appear eminently beautiful

And as the dove to far Palmyra flying, From where her native founts of An. tioch beam,

Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,

Lights sadly at the desert's bitter

stream;

So many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring, Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaff'd,