equally clear and vivid. His fancy
cannot suggest a poetical view of life, without his wit at the same
time suggesting its prosaic counterpart in society. A mind thus
exquisitely sensitive both to the beautiful and laughable sides of a
subject--looking at life at once with the eye of the poet and the man
of the world--naturally finds delight in a fine mockery of its own
idealisms, and loves to sport with its own high-raised feelings. His
poetry is not, therefore, so much an exhibition of the real nature and
capacity of the man, as of the play and inter-penetration of his
various mental powers, in periods of pleasant relaxation from the
business of life. In a few instances, we think, his humorous insight
has been deceived from the unconscious influence upon his mind of the
sentiment of Byron and Moore. Thus he occasionally falls into the
exaggerations of misanthropy and sentimentality. In his poem entitled
Woman, we are informed that man has no constancy of affection,--

His vows are broke,
Even while his parting kiss is warm;
But woman's love all change will mock,
And, like the ivy round the oak,
Cling closest in the storm.

Here, for the purpose of a vivid contrast, there is a sacrifice of
poetic truth. The same piece closes with asserting that the smiles and
tears of woman,

Alone keep bright, through Time's long hour,
That frailer thing than leaf or flower,
A poet's immortality.

Here the thought, redeemed as it is by beautiful expression, is worthy
only of a sentimental poetaster of the Della Cruscan school; and we
can easily imagine what a mocking twinkle would light the eye of its
author, if some one should tell him that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and
Milton were "kept bright" by the smiles and tears of woman. These, and
one or two other passages in Halleck, are unworthy of his manly and
cant-hating mind; and it is wonderful how they could have escaped his
brilliant good sense.

Fanny, and the Croaker Epistles are the most brilliant things of their
kind in American literature, full of wit, fancy, and feeling, and in
all their rapid transitions, characterized by an ethereal lightness of
movement, a glancing felicity of expression, which betray a poet's
plastic touch equally in the sentiment and the merriment. No American
poems have been more eagerly sought after, and more provokingly
concealed, than these. Three editions of Fanny have been published,
but the