ripe
wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives
evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS

The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man
and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard
Barton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the
sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way
of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse,
that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the
emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each
shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to
think of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed
"B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so
many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an
experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It
behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from
these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes
carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve
them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we
mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas
of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained
from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would
unanimously have denied him.

George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
the men the