Notes and Queries, Oct. 26, 1867, seems to have furnished the first hint of this poem. P. 333, No. cclxii.-Henry More (Philosophical Works, p. 100) records and gives credit to the legend on which this poem is founded: 'The story of the pied Piper, that first by his pipe gathered together all the rats and mice, and drowned them in the river; and afterwards, being defrauded of his reward, which the town promised him if he could deliver them from the plague of those vermin, took his opportunity, and by the same pipe made the children of the town follow him, and leading them into a hill that opened, buried them there all alive; has so evident proof of it in the town of Hammel where it was done, that it ought not at all to be discredited. For the fact is very religiously kept among their ancient records, painted out also in their church-windows, and is an epoch joined with the year of our Lord in their bills and indentures and other law instruments.' P. 354, No. cclxxv.-This poem is drawn from a small volume with the title, David and Samuel, with other Poems, published in the year 1859. Much in the volume can claim no exemption from the doom which before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half ironical, of Goethe's lighter pieces; while more than one of the more uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit. It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the Eastern world. I believe that I break no confidence in mentioning that Robertson is here the nom de plume of one who has since in prose awakened an interest and achieved a reputation which it was not given to his verse to do. P. 356, No. cclxxvi.-During the last Chinese war the following passage occurred in a letter of the Correspondent of The Times: Some Seiks, and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.' P. 358, No. cclxxvii.-Turner's fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the French), towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very high order, which has here been finely rendered into verse. P. 379, No. ccc.-Tithonus is a noble variation on Juvenal's noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and temper, 'Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in Dryden's translation, 'And count it nature's privilege to die.' P. 387, No. cccvi.-Few readers of this and other choice specimens of American poetry—some of which have now for the first time found their way into any English anthology-but will share the admiration which I cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson, and by others, do, so far as they reach, leave nothing to be desired. |