nts; and become the Magnus
Apollo of our present age.

Perhaps we have fixed the standard too high, and forced a renewal of the
exclamation in Rasselas, "Thou hast convinced me that no man can ever be
a poet"--or, at least, the poet thus described. But nothing, we are
persuaded, is in the imagination which may not be in the fact. Had we
defined a Shakspeare ere he arose, "impossible" had been the cry. It
must, too, be conceded that hitherto we have no rising, or nearly-risen
poet, who answers fully to our ideal. Macaulay and Aytoun are content
with being brilliant ballad-singers--they never seek to touch the deeper
spiritual chords of our being. Tennyson's exquisite genius is
neutralized, whether by fastidiousness of taste or by morbidity of
temperament--neutralized, we mean, so far as great future achievements
are concerned. Emerson's undisguised Pantheism casts a cold shade over
his genius and his poetry. There is something odd, mystical, and shall
we say affected, about both the Brownings, which mars their general
effect--the wine is good, but the shape of the cyathus is deliberately
_queer_. Samuel Brown is devoted to other pursuits. Marston's very
elegant, refined, and accomplished mind, lacks, perhaps, enough of the
manly, the forceful, and the profound. Bailey of "Festus," and Yendys of
the poem before us, are the most likely candidates for the vacant
laurel.

That Bailey's _genius_ is all that need be desired in the "coming poet,"
will be contested by few who have read and wondered at "Festus"--at its
fire of speech, its force of sentiment, its music of sound, its
Californian wealth of golden imagery; the infinite variety of its
scenes, speeches, and songs; the spirit of reverence which underlies all
its liberties, errors, and extravagances; and the originality which,
like the air of a mountain summit, renders its perusal at first
difficult, and almost deadly, but at last excites and elevates to
absolute intoxication. It has, however, been objected to it, that it
seems an exhaustion of the author's mind--that its purposeless, planless
shape betrays a lack of constructive power--that it becomes almost
polemical in its religious aspect, and gives up to party what was meant
for mankind--that it betrays a tendency toward obscure, mystical
raptures and allegorizings, scarcely consistent with healthy manhood of
mind, and which seems _growing_, as is testified by the "Angel
World"--that there is a great gulf between