Or be so high above me glorified, Hear only such reply as angels give to all." We give the lines as they are: their grammatical construction is faulty; and the punctuation of the ninth line renders the sense equivocal. Of that species of composition which comes most appropriately under the head Drivel, we should have no trouble in selecting as many specimens as our readers could desire. We will afflict them with one only : SONG. "O soft is the ringdove's eye of love When her mate returns from a weary flight; And brightest of all the stars above Is the one bright star that leads the night. But softer thine eye than the dove's by far, When of friendship and pity thou speakest to me ; When of love, sweet maid, I speak to thee." Mr. Lord is never elevated above the dead level of his habitual platitude, by even the happiest thesis in the world. That any man could, at one and the same time, fancy himself a poet and string together as many pitiable inanities as we see here, on so truly suggestive a thesis as that of "A Lady taking the Veil," is to our apprehension a miracle of miracles. The idea would seem to be of itself sufficient to elicit fire from ice-to breathe animation into the most stolid of stone. Mr. Lord winds up a dissertation on the subject by the patronising advice "Ere thou, irrevocable, to that dark creed Art yielded, think, O Lady, think again.” the whole of which would read better if it were "Ere thou, irrevocable, to this d-d doggrel Art yielded, Lord, think! think!—ah think again.” Even with the great theme, Niagara, our poet fails in his obvious effort to work himself into a fit of inspiration. One of his poems has for title "A Hymn to Niagara -but from beginning to end it is nothing more than a very silly "Hymn to Mr. Lord." Instead of describing the fall (as well as any Mr. Lord could be supposed to describe it) he rants about what I feel here, and about what I did not feel there-till at last the figure of little Mr. Lord, in the shape of a great capital I gets so thoroughly in between the reader and the waterfall that not a particle of the latter is to be discovered. At one point the poet directs his soul to issue a proclamation as follows: "Proclaim, my soul, proclaim it to the sky! And tell the stars, and tell the hills whose feet Beheld by day and night, in calm and storm, Its thought of beauty, and so awed with might!" The "Its" has reference to the soul of Mr. Lord, who thinks it necessary to issue a proclamation to the stars and the hills and the ocean's old familiar face-lest the stars and the hills and the ocean's old familiar face should chance to be unaware of the fact that it (the soul of Mr. Lord) admitted the waterfall to be a fine thing-but whether the cataract for the compliment, or the stars for the information, are to be considered the party chiefly obliged—that, for the life of us, we cannot tell. From the "first impression" of the cataract, he says: "At length my soul awaked-waked not again And then Retired within, and self-withdrawn, I stood Of one vast harmony of sights and sounds, And from that deep abyss, that rock-built shrine, Though mute my own frail voice, I poured a hymn Of 'praise and gratulation' like the noise Of banded angels when they shout to wake That so vast a personage as Mr. Lord should not be o'ermastered by the cataract, but feel "conscious mastery over all without "—and over all within, too—is certainly nothing more than reasonable and proper-but then he should have left the detail of these little facts to the cataract or to some other uninterested individual-even Cicero has been held to blame for a want of modesty—and although, to be sure, Cicero was not Mr. Lord, still Mr. Lord may be in danger of blame. He may have enemies (very little men!) who will pretend to deny that the "hymn of praise and gratulation" (if this is the hymn) bears at all points more than a partial resemblance to the "noise of banded angels when they shout to wake empyreal echoes." Not that we intend to deny it--but they will :-they are very little people and they will. We have said that the "remarkable" feature, or at least one of the "remarkable" features of this volume is its platitude-its flatness. Whenever the reader meets anything not decidedly flat he may take it for granted at once that it is stolen. When the poet speaks, for example, at page 148, of "Flowers, of young poets the first words "— who can fail to remember the line in the Merry Wives of Windsor : : "Fairies use flowers for their charactery?" At page 10 he says:— "Great oaks their heavenward-lifted arms stretch forth In suppliance!" The same thought will be found in "Pelham," where the author is describing the dead tree beneath which is committed the murder. The grossest plagiarisms, indeed, abound. We would have no trouble, even, in pointing out a score from our most unimportant self. At page 27, Mr. Lord says: "They, albeit with inward pain Who thought to sing thy dirge, must sing thy Paan!" In a poem called "Lenore," we have it "Avaunt! to-night my heart is light—no dirge will I upraise, But waft the angel on her flight with a Pean of old days." At page 57, Mr. Lord says: "On the old and haunted mountain, Long-forgotten time.” There are no doubt many of our friends who will remember the commencement of our Haunted Palace": In "The Raven,” we have it : "While I pondered nearly napping, Tapping at my chamber door." But it is folly to pursue these thefts. As to any property of our own, Mr. Lord is very cordially welcome to whatever use he can make of it. But others may not be so pacifically disposed, and the book before us might be very materially thinned and reduced in cost by discarding from it all that belongs to Miss Barrett, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Proctor, Longfellow, and Lowell-the very class of poets, by the way, whom Mr. William W. Lord, in his "New Castalia," the most especially affects to satirise and to contemn. It has been rumoured, we say, or rather it has been announced that Mr. Lord is a graduate or perhaps a Professor of Princeton College-but we have had much difficulty in believing anything of the kind. The pages before us are not only utterly devoid of that classicism of tone and manner that better species of classicism which a liberal education never fails to impart-but they abound in the most outrageously vulgar violations of grammarof prosody in its most extended sense. Of versification, and all that appertains to it, Mr. Lord is ignorant in the extreme. We doubt if he can tell the difference between a dactyl and an anapæst. In the Iambic Pentameter, Alexandrines are encountered at every step-but it is very clear from the points at which they are met, and at which the cæsura is placed, that Mr. Lord has no idea of employing them as Alexandrines - they are merely excessive, that is to say, defective Pentameters. In a word, judging by his rhythm, we might suppose that the poet could neither see, hear, nor make use of his fingers. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible. His most extraordinary sins, however, are in point of English. Here is his dedication, embodied in the very first page of the book : |