d for us, where are
our spring flowers? What sign of a new poetic school? Still more,
what sign of the healthy resuscitation of any old one?

"What matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing
Mr. Carlyle. "Man was not sent into the world to write poetry. What
we want is truth. Of the former we have enough in all conscience
just now. Let the latter need be provided for by honest and
righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead."
And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle:
nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it.
Man is a poetry-writing animal. Perhaps he was meant to be one. At
all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating. It is
better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of
poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the
beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers'
bills; and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed,
to see that it be committed as well, or at least as little ill, as
possible. In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against
himself, reminding him of a saying of Goethe once bepraised by him in
print: "We must take care of the beautiful, for the useful will take
care of itself."

And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, did the beautiful
require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care
of itself; and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care
of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this
present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poems is to be
taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the
object of our reproaches: but Mr. Alexander Smith's models and
flatterers. Against him we have nothing whatsoever to say; for him,
very much indeed.

Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread
in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen
the sky, the sun and moon--and, moreover, the sea, report says, for
one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his
experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too painfully for
his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of
others--his means of culture and that of others--and, still more
painfully, the contrast between his environment and culture, and that