side of the shield. He was notoriously so deficient in the faculty of
humor, that even Sydney Smith was unintelligible to him. Few specimens
of what can be called wit can be found in his writings. He could not see
that there is a poetry of wit as well as of sentiment,--of the intellect
as well as of the emotions. No wonder he could not enjoy Pope, and had
little relish for Horace. And yet how grand is Wordsworth in his own
peculiar sphere!

Those narrow views of the province of poetry, which roused the
indignation of Byron, and which would exclude such writers as
Goldsmith, Pope, Campbell, Scott, Praed, Moore, and Saxe from the rank
of poets, are not unfrequently reproduced in our own day. We do not
perceive that they spring from a liberal or philosophical consideration
of the subject. Poetry, [Greek: poiesis], or "making," creation, or
re-creation, does not address itself to any single group of those
faculties of our complex nature, the gratification of which brings a
sense of the agreeable, the exhilarating, or the elevating. As well
might we deny to didactic verse the name of poetry, as to those _vers de
societe_ in which a profound truth may be found in a comic mask, or the
foibles which scolding could not reach may be reflected in the mirror
held up in gayety of heart. As well might we deny that a waltz is music,
and claim the name of music only for a funeral march or a nocturne, as
deny that Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab is as much poetry as
the stately words in which Prospero compares the vanishing of his
insubstantial pageant to that of

"The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself."

The new volume of poems by Mr. Saxe is, in many respects, an improvement
on all that he has given us hitherto. There is more versatility in the
style, a freer and firmer touch in the handling. Like our best
humorists, he shows that the founts of tears and of laughter lie close
together; for his power of pathos is almost as marked as that of fun. As
good specimens of what he has accomplished in the minor key, we may
instance "The Expected Ship," "The Story of Life," and "Pan Immortal."
But it is in his faculty of turning upon us the whimsical and humorous
side of a fact or a character that Saxe especially excels. The lines
entitled "The Superfluous Man" are an illustration of what we mean. In
some learned treatise the author stumbles on the following somewhat
startli