d by the forms of
beauty and grandeur which past ages have bequeathed to the present. He
has not found inspiration in the palace, the cathedral, the ruined
castle, the ivy-covered church, the rose-embowered cottage. Indeed, it
is only by incidental and occasional touches that one would learn from
his poetry that he had ever been out of his own country at all: his
inspiration and his themes are alike drawn from the scenery, the
institutions, the history of his native land. His imagination, as was
the case with Milton, rests upon a basis of gravity deepening into
sternness; and we have little doubt that not a few of the things in
Europe, which move to pleasure the lightly stirred fancy of many
American travellers, aroused in him a different feeling, as either
memorials of an age or expressions of a system in which the many were
sacrificed to the few. In his mental frame there is a pulse of
indignation which is easily stirred against any form of injustice or
oppression. His later poems, as might naturally be expected, are those
in which the sentiments and aspirations of a patriotic and hopeful
American are most distinctly expressed; among them are "The
Battle-Field," "The Winds," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and that which
is called, from its first line, "O Mother of a Mighty Race." It would be
well to read these poems in connection with the seventeenth chapter of
the second volume of De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," which
treats of the sources of poetry among democratic nations; and the
comparison will furnish fresh cause for admiring the prophetic sagacity
of that great philosophical thinker, who, at the time he wrote,
predicted all our future, because he comprehended all our past.

And here we pray the indulgence of our readers to a rather liberal
citation from one of these later poems, because it enables us to
illustrate from his own lips what we have just been saying. It is also
one of those passages, not uncommon in modern poetry, in which the poet
admits us to his confidence, and lets us see the working of the
machinery as well as its product. It is from "The Painted Cup," a poem
so called from a scarlet flower of that name found upon the Western
prairies,

"Now, if thou art a poet, tell me not
That these bright chalices were tinted thus
To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet
On moonlight evenings in the hazel-bowers,
And dance till they are thirsty. Call not up,
Amid this fresh and virgi