but a degrading account of the writings of Montaigne, reducing them from the highest aspirations of morality to a level with the fashionable conversations of Swift, and representing every ordinary reader as a forerunner in his noblest career of meditation.

We have alluded to the extensive influence of Montaigne on the subsequent literature of Europe, and might have adduced some curious illustrations, which we shall reserve for another occasion. In England, as in France, he has been read, admired, and followed. Our own writers, however, have been most ready, in general, to relish and to imitate what was best in the writings of Montaigne. They have taken example for the relaxation of their own style, from the freedom and artlessness of his; they have profited by his conversational manner, gracefully dealing with the topics of philosophy; they have learned something from his ingenuity, his humanity, and even from his idiosyncrasies. But in France Montaigne appears to have operated in a manner altogether injurious; nothing in his writings has been so influential in that country as his scepticism, the seeds of which were scattered so abundantly in his apology for Sebonde; not a hint was there dropped that was not afterwards taken up and fully developed by the more patient and penurious thinkers that formed the sceptical philosophy of France. In the one country his ascendancy has been altogether malignant; in the other it has, on the whole, favourably affected literature, if not morality; and it is remarkable that, in accordance with that diversity of influence, the essays of Montaigne have at this day a greater estimation in this than in their native country.

ONE WORD.

TRANSLATED FROM VICTOR HUGO.

ALL feel in joy and grief alike

One word most cloudless and refin'd,
That gives a brightness to our brow,
One word deep cherish'd in the mind.

This hidden word can never change,
In every heart the same, the same,
It softly sings, or trembles still-
A glorious, universal name.

This is the word whose breath can take
From every pining brow the care,

The lovely and mysterious sigh

Heard at all times and everywhere.

The word from whence all other words
As from a source immortal spring,
And whose undying sound is heard
Where'er a human voice may ring.

LITERATURE.

NOTICES OF NEW WORK S.

Morning, and other Poems. By a Member of the Scotch Bar. POETRY hath "a a crown of intermingling rays." The expression itself is poetry; it is not, however, ours, but our author's, and it conveys a beautiful and apt idea of his own powers.

There is this essential difference between poetry and prose, that we cannot open a volume of the former, even at random, and glance over a page without almost instantaneously arriving at the conviction of whether or not we are in the company of a true poet, while with the latter we must take a more patient survey to attain a just appreciation of its merits. The language of the land of song is syllabled in music, and we must feel at once whether we are traversing a barren desert or whether flowers surround our path. These may be the wild children of the soil bearing exuberance of blossom, or they may be the more splendid array of cultivated loveliness, but in either case the odour-loaded air, whether breathed from the wild breath of nature's graceful but careless weaving, or from the magnificent coronal of art's devising, bespeaks at once the true poetic clime. Panoramas of the mind, visions of the imagination, open on every hand. It is true the ground may be unequal, and we may even stumble over the defris of the way, and sometimes even we may have to grope through the thick fog of Egyptian darkness, yet even in this case we may often stumble over a gem, the brightness of which shall brighten and illuminate our path, and prove that we are following the wild and wavering way of a true poet. We catch a ray from the jewels which compose the poetic crown, and we are satisfied that we are in the wake of genius.

But if this sort of uncertain irradiation prove the legitimacy of the poet, and at once exempt him from critical severity (and we would have it always kept in remembrance that the real bard, of whatever class he may be, however fitful and capricious, is not a subject for anatomical dissection, and that poetry ought to be judged by a sort of sliding scale of justice), if, we say, an occasional flash of the fire of genius, being the masonic sign of the brotherhood of bards, entitle him to a charter of immunities, his freedom should be as the winds of Heaven, whose steady brightness is as the morning light growing into the splendour of the perfect day.

Our prepossessions are generally nothing more than our prejudices under a softened name, yet it must be owned that we opened this work with a prepossession in its favour. "Morning. Morning." The name conjured up visions of the chaste loveliness of the virgin day in all its beauty and its purity ere yet its unscorched garment had received the taint of the on-coming sin-stained hours. Morning, dawning on man with his passions calmed, his mind regenerated, his strength renewed, and, as he should humbly hope, his sins forgiven, is just the theme for the poet. Morning, that might well be called the childhood of the day, in which the hopes are brightest, and the spirit lightest. Morning, when the great God of Nature, deigning to unveil the fair world of his creation, and bid it cast away the dark mantle of night, breaks upon us, beaming smiles of gladness and gratitude. Morning, with its heaven-descended dew baptising all the earth. Morning, refreshing the poet's eye with its living freshness, making his very heart hope in its hopefulness, his spirits dance with sympathetic joy, his bosom throb with righteous impulses, and so acting upon him until he break forth in poetry-such poetry as this of which our volume is composed.

The intellectual as well as the natural world is crowded with innumerable forms of loveliness, yet these, ideal as well as visible, are restrained in their allotted places of harmonious order. Poets have each their preferences, and thus one breathes passion, another is reflective, a third delights in pastorals, a fourth adores the trumpet-tongued Bellona, a fifth hymns the high praises of the Deity. The author of "Morning" justifies his taste by his selection of subject. The pure and holy love of nature, and the still purer and holier love of the God of Nature, are fit concomitants, and the one must ever be imperfect without the other. Our poet, for in the strictest sense of the word he is a poet, breathes this sanctified spirit. He is not a being of fitful words and evanescent fancies, now plunged in the depths of unfathomable darkness, and now emerging like a meteoric blaze, but just as because his faith in the good, and his perception of the beautiful are constant as their cause, so is the effect sustained and equal. The mind of man, though it be in truth a mirror, is often too much stained and sullied to reflect the unblemished and the lovely, though they surround him on every hand; yet is the current of this poetry clear as the crystal stream, in the depths of whose waters no slimy pools are sleeping, which if the breath of passion agitate the surface, can no longer glass its own heaven above, or its own flower-crowned embankments. From one end of this volume to the other we find not one impure idea which might have to plead the much-abused license of poetry for pardon. We find not one line which, dying, its author might wish to blot, and not one that distrusts our own self-pleasure in this praise. All

Even classic lore is made to
In "Tithon and Aurora"

has a moral, much a holy tendency. yield its harvest of salutary lesson. the vanity of human wishes is forcibly illustrated; not in that dictatorial tone of teaching which makes the convinced reason all but join the rebellion of the irritated feelings in rejecting the truth for the sake of its offensive application, but by unveiling the graces of the beautiful, exciting the love which should be a willing tribute. Our poet is a lover of nature, and his eye catches the ever-varying form, and ever-changeful hue of her perfect loveliness. His ear drinks in her myriad harmonies, and he has the power of conveying these impressions to other minds. This is the great secret of poetry. But he is a scholar also, and without the cumbrous parade of learning his taste is refined and classical; above all, the seal of religion is set upon this volume.

Rhymes by a Poetaster.

Of all the various forms of poetry there is none more forcible in expression, more complete in capability, more perfect in formation, or more powerful in effect than the class of short, sonnet-like compositions of which this volume is composed. They are generally written on an impulse, the flash of some bright and bold conception, in which the words, so far from being laboured and studied, seem a part of the thought; not the poetic robe, however, tastefully fitted and arranged, but an integral part of the heaven-born idea. In other species of poetical composition, although the first feeling may be an impulse, the prominent feature throughout be marked with all the force of a powerful inspiration, yet as it must be surrounded and supported by auxiliaries, and these must be gathered and expressed by processes of labour and pains; and just because effort can never have the success of impulse; thus often results grievous disparities even in the most able performances. One great merit may be followed by a host of discrepancies. Not so, however, with those felicitous conceptions which are one in thought and expression, one in idea and execution, and which, therefore, belong to the most perfect, though perhaps not to the highest class of poetry.

The volume now before us so modestly designated " Rhymes," is composed of pieces of the nature of which we have been speaking. In an age when authors are apt to assume high and often untenable positions the humility of a title with the pretty application of a simple and deprecatory quotation from our Bard of Avon for a preface, may well propitiate gentle usage even from a critic's ungentle hand. Yet because we know that true merit seldom exists without true modesty, that men are generally least humble when they have most need to be so, so the signs of that graceful May, 1846.-VOL. XLVI.-NO. CLXXXI.

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