own ideas; but his persistence lacked geniality. A notion appears to have risen in his mind of a natural antithesis between popularity and excellence, - a sure sign, perhaps, that popularity was necessary to the healthy action of his nature; that he required echoes of his mind from without to assure him that there was really power within. Cheerfulness, and the joyous exercise of creative energy, are so characteristic of assured genius, that we doubt if such an antithesis ever arose in a thoroughly live and sunny nature. If Mr. Dana had been as popular as he deserved, if the richness and depth of his mind had been gladly recognized, the present volumes would hardly have been a tithe of his contributions to literature, and we should have had now a different class of personal qualities to emphasize as characteristics. There are, in authorship, professors of the impudent and supercilious, who require a sharp resistance on the part of the public to tame their wilful and aggressive egotism; but Mr. Dana belongs to a class who arrive at the fact of their excellence rather by an induction from the results they produce on the public mind than by self-esteem; and to such, a lack of recognition is hurtful. The compositions of Mr. Dana, produced under the circumstances we have indicated, evince sufficient intensity both of sensibility and intellect; but it is that kind of intensity which declares rather than disputes with which is strong on positive grounds, but unapower, vailable in attack. Accordingly, in many of the articles published in the second volume, we discern, in the side references to opposite opinions, no hearty invective, no bold strokes of satire; but the fine superciliousness of the mechanical school of critics is met, on his own part, with a scorn as fine. Mr. Dana is not a good hater, because his mind needs sympathy more than it dislikes antagonism, and because austere principles are connected in his mind with gentle feelings, not with aggressive passions; and his impatience at error, therefore, rather frets than foams into expression. Though there is hardly a page in Mr. Dana's writings which does not declare him a poet, his poems are comparatively few. These are now generally well known, though their rare merit has not yet been heartily recognized. Mr. Dana is properly of no particular "school" of poetry, but in the direction given to his poetic faculty we perceive the influence and inspiration of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In his preface to The Idle Man, he speaks of his friend Bryant as having lived, when quite young, where few works of poetry were to be had, "at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol in the Temple of Art;" and that, upon his opening Wordsworth's Ballads, "a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden, to change into a strange freshness and life." Something of this effect Wordsworth appears to have exerted upon Mr. Dana; an effect, however, which never was manifested in a conscious or unconscious imitation of his author, and which tended to develop rather than submerge his individuality. Though he looks at nature somewhat in Wordsworth's spirit, he never looks with Wordsworth's eyes, but always with his own. The leading characteristics of his poems are the calm, clear intensity of his vision of objects, and his power of penetrating them, through and through, with life and spiritual significance. His imagination has a Chaucerian certainty in representing a natural object in its exact form, color and dimensions, the image before his intellect being as real as if it were before his eyes; and if he fail at all as an objective poet, he fails in interpreting its true life and meaning. Nature to him is ever symbolical of spirit; but, instead of evolving hers, he will often superadd his own. In both processes there is life as well as form, but in one case we have the life of nature, in the other the life of the poet. There are grand examples of pure objective imagination in Mr. Dana's poems, in which what is peculiar in the author's spirit does not penetrate the description, and the whole scene has the delicious remoteness of artistical creation; but commonly a subtile tinge of individual sentiment is diffused over the picture he so distinctly presents, and the impression which it leaves tells us that the life communicated to our hearts is not the life of nature, but of one individual's experience. Were Mr. Dana a purely subjective poet, his imagination playing whatever freaks with objects the caprices of his individuality might dictate, the difficulty of describing the action of his mind would be greatly lessened; but the elusive quality in his genius, which analysis is continually toiling after in vain, comes from the conflict in his nature between the objective tendency of his intellect and the subjective tendency of his disposition. We will give a few extracts illustrative of the varying operation of his imagination, according as it works impersonally or with his peculiar moods. The following, for instance, is pure picture: "And inland rests the green, warm dell; Here we have complete self-forgetfulness, the mind gazing at the scene it has conjured up, and representing it as a distinct reality. In the following there is a faint intrusion of the individual in the picture: -- ''T was twilight then; and Dian hung her bow Looked out, and blessed us through the passing glow." In the following exquisite poem, the imagery is so clear, that we are at first hardly aware that the whole takes from the sadness of the mood in which it is contemplated a dreamy melancholy, delicious but slightly morbid. "THE LITTLE BEACH-BIRD. "Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea, O, rather, Bird, with me "Thy flitting form comes ghostly dim and pale, As if thy mates had shared The doom of us: Thy wail, — "Thou call'st along the sand, and haunt'st the surge, With the motion and the roar Of waves that drive to shore, One spirit did ye urge, The Mystery, - the Word. "Of thousands, thou, both sepulchre and pall, Tells of man's woe and fall, His sinless glory fled. "Then turn thee, little bird, and take thy flight Where the complaining sea shall sadness bring Come, quit with me the shore, And on the meadows light, Where birds for gladness sing!" Vol. 1., pp. 129, 130. We might extract from Factitious Life, Thoughts on the Soul, The Dying Raven, and Daybreak, numerous passages where this melancholy deepens into gloom, if not despair, and while the poet's hold upon the form of natural objects is as sure as ever, the spirit is thoroughly individual. These poems could only have come from a deep experience of life, and there is a breadth of solemnity to them which is not without its charm; but the fatal objection to them is, that they do not communicate life. Their tendency is rather to awaken a conviction of wickedness than to inspire the energy of virtue. As lessons in psychology, however, they have great value. One of the best of Mr. Dana's minor poems is that on Chantrey's Washington. We extract it, as one of the very few tributes to Washington worthy the grandeur of the subject. "Father and Chief, how calm thou stand'st once more "For thought in that fine brow is living still, - |