wherever, as in the following, he gathers himself together, he

is successful :

THE NAUTILUS.

"Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl,

And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

"Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil ;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!"

Half the literary men, and all the literary women of this century in America, seem to have written verses. Most of them are respectable, and so many are more so that, after dwelling on a few of the authors who most saliently represent the tendencies of their age and country, we can only name a few of their followers. Belonging to the earlier period are the Pilgrim Fathers of J. Pierpont; Woodworth's Old Oaken Bucket; Home, Sweet Home, by J. H. Payne; the verses of Washington Allston, with the refrain, "We are one;" and Epes Sargent's A Life on the Ocean Wave. Eminently worthy of note1 are the miscellaneous and patriotic verses of James Gates. Percival; the sparkling fancies of the Culprit Fay, and the patriotic American Flag, by J. Rodman Drake; the fashion

1 Besides those mentioned in connection with Whittier's birthday festival.

able satire in the Don Juan measure, entitled Fanny, by Fitz-Greene Halleck, author of the famous historical lyric, Marco Bozzaris; the Curiosity, and tuneful miscellanies of Charles Sprague; the poems of Cranch, of N. P. Willis, especially that by the latter, beginning "The Shadows lay along Broadway," and of J. G. Holland; Brownell's Lyrics of the War; the Pike Court Ballads of John Hay; Sheridan's Ride, and other pieces, by T. Buchanan Read; H. Timrod's addresses to the Confederate dead; the wellbalanced stanzas of James A. Hillhouse; the plays of Conrad and Bird; Woodman, Spare that Tree, and the Whip-PoorWill, by George P. Morris; Alfred B. Street's Settler, Gray Forest-Eagle, and Forest Walk; the remarkable Sonnets of Jones Very; The King's Bell, and other pieces, of R. H. Stoddard; numerous thoughtful verses of Edgar Faucit, F. Ticknor, and G. Parsons Lathrop; the ballads, grave and gay, of T. Bailey Aldrich, whose Babie Bell is a popular favourite, and whose Lynn Terrace is a fine diorama of foreign scenes; Piatt's Western Windows: with the group1 of female singing birds, fairly represented by the religious and moral verses of the youthful prodigies Lucretia and Maria Davidson; with

1 The gallantry of criticism has never been so stretched as in regard to some of these ladies, e.g. of Mrs. Osgood, we are told that "her poems sing of themselves," with "lovely grace and bewitching melodiousness;" of Mrs. Preston, "that her intellect is more robust and shows greater intensity;" of Mrs. Hunt, that "her imagination is subtle and her sentiment profound;" of Mrs. Whitman, that "her volume is a book of rare passionate beauty, marked by fine mental characteristics," and that "she is undoubtedly the finest female poet New England has produced." I have seen nothing in any of these writers that comes within sight of Mrs. Browning, or of Mrs. Hemans, Miss Proctor, Miss Ingelow, or Miss Rossetti. Mrs. Whitman has an interest for us, as the lady to whom, on the death of his first wife, Edgar Poe paid his addresses; but her versification is favourably represented by this stanza :

"I paused on Grecian plains to trace
Some remnant of a mightier race,
Serene in sorrow and in strife,—
Calm conquerors of death and life,
Types of the godlike forms that shone
Upon the sculptured Parthenon."

those of Hannah F. Gould, Alice and Phoebe Carey, E. A. Lewis, Harriet Spofford, and Celia Thaxter, Mrs. F. S. Osgood, Mrs. M. J. Preston, Mrs. Helen Hunt, and Mrs. Whitman. A more ambitious effort is the strange and richlycoloured Eastern romance of Zophiel-on a theme similar to that of Moore's Loves of the Angels and Byron's Heaven and Earth-by "Maria del Occidente" (Mrs. Brooks), whom, with some exaggeration of friendship, Southey, one of her English hosts and admirers, declared to be "the most impassioned and imaginative of all poetesses." We may add one other name, that of Mrs. Sigourney, whose blank verse descriptions of nature approach those of Bryant, and conclude with the following specimen of one of her lighter pieces, to illustrate the use that the poets of the West have made of the musical nomenclature of their country :

INDIAN NAMES.

"Ye say they all have passed away,
That noble race and brave;

That their light canoes have vanished,
From off the crested wave.

That 'mid the forests where they roamed,
There rings no hunter's shout;
But their name is on your waters,
Ye may not wash it out.

""Tis where Ontario's billow,

Like ocean's surge is curled;
Where strong Niagara's thunders wake
The echo of the world;

Where red Missouri bringeth

Rich tribute from the West,

And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps
On green Virginia's breast.

"Ye say their cone-like cabins,

That clustered o'er the vale,

Have fled away like withered leaves,
Before the autumn gale.

But their memory liveth on your hills,

Their baptism on your shore;

Your everlasting rivers speak

Their dialect of yore.

FEMALE POETS.

"Old Massachusetts wears it Within her lordly crown; And broad Ohio bears it

Amid his young renown.
Connecticut hath wreathed it

Where her quiet foliage waves;
And bold Kentucky breathed it hoarse
Through all her ancient caves.

"Wachuset hides its lingering voice
Within his rocky heart;
And Alleghany graves its tone
Throughout his lofty chart.
Monadnock on his forest hoar,

Doth seal the sacred trust;
Your mountains build their monument,
Though ye destroy their dust."

253

CHAPTER VIII.

AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM.

LEAVING Cambridge, and taking the train on the other side of Boston, twenty minutes bring us to Concord, in Massachusetts. On one side of this "haunt of ancient peace" there lies, half buried in an orchard, a house whose attraction has been likened to that of the Arabian Mecca-the home of the most incisive writer, the most original thinker of the West. Unlike Longfellow, Emerson is an American of the Americans, nor does the contrast end here. The works of the one are finished wholes; of the other, fragments, rude though rich: the one soothes, the other excites us: the one loves to adorn the incidents of daily life, the other sees only general laws: the one runs history and biography into his verse, the other is an abstract moralist and metaphysician: the one maintains the connection between his country and the Past, the other is the moving spirit of a still recent revolution in the world of letters. An American writer finds his country well represented in the Paris Exhibition by the portrait of Emerson in its picture gallery; a sentiment which, giving a but slightly exaggerated expression to the feeling of a large section of educated Americans, calls for an examination of the sources and claims of an influence so widely extended. In comparing Mr. Emerson's English with his home reputation, we must deduct from the former his prestige as a brilliant conversa