social
laws of humanity, by neglecting to restrain his appetites, pay his
bills, and keep his engagements; but also on every conceited word and
look, every gaucherie and rudeness, every self-indulgent moroseness
and fastidiousness, as sins against the sacred charge which has been
committed to him; and determine with that Jew of old, who, to judge
from his letter to Philemon, was one of the most perfect gentlemen of
God's making who ever walked this earth, to become "all things to all
men, if by any means he may save some."

ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE

On reading this little book, {61} and considering all the exaggerated
praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could
not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English
poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great
poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us.
There are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which,
as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying.
But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to
succeed him? And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the
dawn--of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of
the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope,
freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or
dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers
are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a
few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild
winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without
their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay
of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world. Such is
poetry in England; while in America the case is not much better.
What more enormous scope for new poetic thought than that which the
New World gives? Yet the American poets, even the best of them, look
lingeringly and longingly back to Europe and her legends; to her
models, and not to the best of them--to her criticism, and not to the
best of that--and bestow but a very small portion of such genius as
they have on America and her new forms of life. If they be nearer to
the spring than we, they are still deep enough in the winter. A few
early flowers may be budding among them, but the autumn crop is still
in somewhat shabby and rain-bedrabbled bloom. An