e gave
us the present volume, we did not know how strong a case could be made
against it. The effect is perhaps not altogether intended, but it shows
how bad his material was, and how little inspiration of any sort
attended him in his work, when a literary gentleman of habits of
research and of generally supposed critical taste makes a book so
careless and slovenly as this.

We can well afford the space which the editor devotes to Mr. Lowell's
noble poem, but we must admit that we can regard "The Present Crisis" as
part of the poetry of the war only in the large sense in which we should
also accept the Prophecies of Ezekiel and the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
Many pious men beheld the war (after it came) foreshadowed in the poetry
of the awful and exalted prophecies, and we wonder that Mr. White did
not give us a few passages from those books. It is scarcely possible
that he did not know "The Present Crisis" to have been written nearly a
score of years ago; though he seems to have been altogether ignorant of
"The Washers of the Shroud," a poem by the same author actually written
after the war began, and uttering all that dread, suspense, and deep
determination which the threatened Republic felt after the defeats in
the autumn of 1861. As Mr. White advances with his poetical chronology
of the war, he is likewise unconscious of "The Commemoration Ode," which
indeed is so far above all other elegiac poems of the war, as perhaps to
be out of his somewhat earth-bound range. Yet we cannot help blaming him
a little for not looking higher: his book must for some time represent
the feeling of the nation in war time, and we would fain have had his
readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it
could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may
challenge any literature to surpass. Of "The Biglow Papers," in which
there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and
earnestness, we have but one, and that not the best.

As some compensation, however, Mr. White presents us with two humorous
lyrics of his own, and makes us feel like men who, in the first moments
of our financial disorder, parted with a good dollar, and received
change in car-tickets and envelopes covering an ideal value in
postage-stamps. It seems hard to complain of an editor who puts only two
of his poems in a collection when he was master to put in twenty if he
chose, and when in both cases he does his best