DANA'S POEMS AND PROSE WRITINGS.*

THIS collection of the writings of one of our deepest and most suggestive thinkers ought to have been made before, although, from the preface, we should judge that the author had undertaken a somewhat unwilling duty in making it even now. It contains all of Mr. Dana's poems and prose writings formerly published, together with a large addition, in the shape of reviews and essays originally contributed to various periodicals, and now for the first time collected. The matter in the second volume will be new to most readers who are familiar with The Buccaneer and The Idle Man, it being wholly composed of articles reprinted from the North American Review, the Spirit of the Pilgrims, and a few other sources. The volumes will undoubtedly take a prominent place in American literature, among the best mental productions of the country; and our object in the present article is, to give a hasty view of the qualities of mind and disposition they display, and the peculiar individuality pervading the whole. We would not do Mr. Dana the injustice to judge his writings by any less exacting principles than those which apply to the higher class of minds.

In Mr. Dana's nature there is evidently no divorce between literature and life, and he belongs to a class of authors widely different from those who follow letters as a profession, as a trade, as a means of amusing others or displaying themselves. His writings carry with them the evidence of being the genuine products of his own thinking and living, and are full of those magical signs which indicate patient meditation and a nature rooted in the realities of things. From his prevailing seriousness, everything, too, has a meaning and purpose, and bears directly on the conduct of life; and there are passages of a certain still and deep intensity which seem forced from a mind eloquent from restrained agony, and expressive at the expense of impairing its vitality. The objects of thought seem to press so closely upon his heart and brain, that he cannot remove them to that safe distance which admits of their being cheerily contemplated; and he therefore has little of that free swing and felicitous audacity of manner, natural to thinkers in whom subject and object are in genial companionship. The general impression which his works leave on the mind is the combination of earnestness and conscientiousness in the spirit of the author, - an earnestness which, in spite of his clear-seeing and quick-shaping imagination, is apt to become didactic when it might be representative, and a conscientiousness which has a nervous and morbid, as well as a muscular and healthy

movement.

There is, indeed, in Mr. Dana's nature a singular disagreement between faculty and disposition. His intellect has an instinctive tendency to objects; is clear, sure, and bright, in its vision; endowed with the discerning power of the observer and the divining power of the poet, and, in its natural action, equally capable in the region of facts and in the region of principles. His sensibility, also, is strong and direct, quick to feel the flush and stir of great passions, and impatient of obstacles which obstruct the expression of its wealth of emotion. As far as regards intellect and passion, he appears the most objective and sympathetic of our poets; but the moment we pass into the more subtile sources of character, curious to scan the qualities which lie nearer the heart of his being, we discover widely different elements at work in the region of his sentiments. As shy and sensitive as they are deep and delicate, these sentiments exact more of society and mankind than either can give; and the result is a peculiar development of mental disgust, compounded of self-distrust and dissatisfaction with the world, which reäcts both upon his intellect and his sensibility, introduces a subjective element into his clearest representations, and sometimes hurries his mind from objects into ideal reveries suggested by objects. His finer affections, the saint-like purity of his moral feelings, the sentiments of awe, wonder, reverence, and beauty, incorporated with his religious faith, though fine and rare elements of his soul, are hardly elements of power, for they have not been harmoniously blended with the other qualities of his character. Had these, which are most assuredly the deepest things in his nature, flowed in a healthy current through his intellect, the creative power of his mind would have been increased, a more joyous and elastic spirit would bound through his productions, and his large nature would have had a grander impetus in its lyric expression, and a sunnier energy in its representations of external life. As it is, we have in these volumes the records of a great mind, but of one which appears to have been placed in circumstances not conducive to its genial development, - a mind in whom noble virtues and refined sentiments have acted as restraints rather than inspirations; - humility being separated from force; modesty producing a slightly morbid self-consciousness, generating self-distrust, and impairing the will's vital energies; exquisite sensibility to the beautiful expended more in contemplating than in creating beauty; moral sentiment divorced from moral audacity; -and all these subtile inward workings and cross movements of elusive emotions going on in a really broad and high mind, resolute in its grasp of the realities of things, with instincts for the great in thought and the daring in action, and, at times, tearing its way into expression with a fierce rending apart of the fine web of feelings in which its activity is entangled. In many of his writings he seems a kind of Puritan-Cavalier, with the Puritan's depth of religious experience without his self-will, with the Cavalier's tastes and accomplishments without his self-abandonment; and he accordingly has neither the strength of fanaticism nor the impetus of sensibility.

This inward shrinking from the exercise of undoubted power, this moral fastidiousness of a strong moral nature, this mental disgust "sickling o'er" the energies of a great mind, though doubtless to be referred, in some degree, to inward constitution, must be accounted for principally by the fact that Mr. Dana's life has been one of antagonism to the tastes and opinions of the community in which he was placed. As a poet, as a critic, as a speculator on government and social phenomena, he has shown the force, grasp, and comprehensiveness, of his intellect; but he has always been in opposition to current schools and systems. If this had been owing to a natural combativeness of disposition, it would have brought with it its own "exceeding great reward;" for, on the ground of mere self-satisfaction, few persons are more to be envied than pugnacious disputants: but Mr. Dana's nature is as averse to controversy as it is solicitous for the truth, and he found himself in opposition because he had positive principles in art and philosophy as distinguished from conventional rules and empirical generalizations. At present his views would, generally, excite nothing more than respect and admiration for the thinker; but at the time they were first announced they fell upon a politely unsympathizing audience, disposed to consider them as the freaks of spiritual caprice, and perfectly masters of that subtile superciliousness which eats into the very heart of a man who is at once modest and earnest. His critical principles were radically those of Lessing and Schlegel, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, principles which are an accurate philosophical statement of the processes of all creative minds; but he did not possess the peculiar egotism which enabled Wordsworth, and the peculiar dogmatism which enabled Coleridge, to bear with dogged contempt, or voluble and passionate replication, the common smiling indifference and the occasional sharp attacks of his opponents. This lack of recognition when there is really nothing in the mode of presentation to excite silent or stormy opposition, - this struggle of one man against ten thousand, to substitute positive principles for empirical rules, - is especially saddening to a nature as sympathetic as it is strong, and as shy as it is earnest. Mr. Dana persisted, in spite of unpopularity, it is true, and wrote in verse and prose according to his