t each man's private grief suffices
him, and that he should not seek increase of it in the griefs of
other men. But he answers him, (this passage we have before quoted,)
that the king's lot and the poor man's is the same, for that neither
has his will; and he takes order that the dead man be buried in his
own royal tomb.

We know few poems the style of which is more unaffectedly without
labor, and to the purpose, than this. The metre, however, of the
earlier part is not always quite so uniform and intelligible as might
be desired; and we must protest against the use, for the sake of
rhyme, of _broke_ in lieu of _broken_, as also of _stole_ for
_stolen_ in "the New Sirens." While on the subject of style, we may
instance, from the "Fragment of an Antigone," the following uncouth
stanza, which, at the first reading, hardly appears to be correctly
put together:

"But hush! Hoemon, whom Antigone,
Robbing herself of life in burying,
Against Creon's laws, Polynices,
Robs of a loved bride, pale, imploring,
Waiting her passage,
Forth from the palace hitherward comes."--p. 30.

Perhaps the most perfect and elevated in tone of all these poems is
"The New Sirens." The author addresses, in imagination, a company of
fair women, one of whose train he had been at morning; but in the
evening he has dreamed under the cedar shade, and seen the same forms
"on shores and sea-washed places," "With blown tresses, and with
beckoning hands."

He thinks how at sunrise he had beheld those ladies playing between
the vines; but now their warm locks have fallen down over their arms.
He prays them to speak and shame away his sadness; but there comes
only a broken gleaming from their windows, which "Reels and shivers
on the ruffled gloom." He asks them whether they have seen the end of
all this, the load of passion and the emptiness of reaction, whether
they dare look at life's latter days,

"When a dreary light is wading
Thro' this waste of sunless greens,
When the flashing lights are fading
On the peerless cheek of queens,
When the mean shall no more sorrow,
And the proudest no more smile;
While the dawning of the morrow
Widens slowly westward all that while?"

And he implores them to "let fall one tear, and set him free." The
past was no mere pretence; it was true while it lasted; but it is
gone now, and the East is white with day. Shall they meet again, only
that he may ask whose blan