tethers his beast down and
makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the
embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains
stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock
and flag-leaved isis flowers."

No one will deny that this is fine imaginative painting,
and as such poetical,--but it is the poetry of well
written, elegant prose. Instead of the recurring sounds,
whether of rhyme or similarly weighted syllables, which
constitute the outward form of what we call verse, we
have the careless grace of uneven, undulating sentences,
flowing on with a rhythmic cadence indeed, but free
from all constraint of metre or exactitude of form. It
may be difficult, perhaps it is impossible, to fix the
measure of license which a poet may allow himself
in such matters, but it is at least certain that the
greatest poets are those who have allowed themselves
the fewest of such liberties: in art as in morals,
and as in everything which man undertakes, true
greatness is the most ready to recognize and most
willing to obey those simple outward laws which have
been sanctioned by the experience of mankind, and
we suspect the originality which cannot move except
on novel paths.

This is but one of several reasons which explain the
apathy of the public on A.'s first appearance. There
was large promise, but the public require performance;
and in poetry a single failure overweighs a hundred
successes. It was possible that his mistakes were the
mistakes of a man whose face was in the right direction
--who was feeling his way, and who would ultimately
find it; but only time could decide if this were so; and
in the interval, the coldness of his reception would serve
to test the nature of his faculty.

So far we have spoken with reserve, for we have
simply stated the feelings with which we regarded this
little volume on first reading it; but the reserve is no
longer necessary, and the misgivings which we experienced
have not been justified. At the close of
last year another volume was published, again of
miscellaneous poems, which went beyond the most sanguine
hopes of A.'s warmest admirers. As before with "The
Strayed Revellers," so again with "Empedocles on
AEtna," (Empedocles on AEtna, and other Poems. By A. London:
1852) the piece de resistance was not the happiest selection.
But of the remaining pieces, and of all those
which he has more recently added, it is difficult to
speak in too warm praise. In the unkno