lack hairs--no
white hairs. Good young man."

And Washington led the way back toward the lieutenant's tent, saying,
"Let us go--eat up--yelly."

J. T.

REFORM IN VERSE.

A want of the day is some good fugitive poetry: bad is superabundant.
The demand is for short and telling effusions in plain, direct and
intelligible English, speaking to feelings possessed by everybody, and
placing incidents, scenes and creatures, familiar or exceptional, in
a poetic light, bright and warm rather than fierce or dazzling. The
millions are waiting to be stirred and charmed, and will be very
thankful to the singer who shall do it for them. Studied obscurity
of thought and language, verbal finicalities and conceits, and mere
ingenuities of any kind, rhythmic, mental or sentimental, will not
meet the occasion: that sort of thing is overdone already. It is the
"swollen imposthume" of refinement, an excrescence on culture, a
penalty of which we have suffered enough. The Heliconian streams which
are not deep, but only dark, must run dry if they cannot run clear.
Sparkling and pellucid rills, wherein we can all see our own-selves
and trace our own dreams, irradiated with light like the flickering
of gems, and set off with rich foil, are those to attract the popular
eye. Genuine humor, pathos, elevation and delicacy of fancy seek no
disguise, but aim at the utmost simplicity of expression. Inversions,
like affectation in every shape, are foreign to them. True songsters,
like the birds, warble to be heard, understood and loved, and not to
astonish or puzzle.

We read the other day, duly headed "For the ---- ----," and signed
with the contributor's name and place of residence, Wolfe's well-known
lines to his wife, the one good thing preserved of him, and better, in
our humble judgment, than those on the burial of Moore. The wearer of
borrowed plumes was obviously confident that his theft would not be
detected, readers of to-day having been so long unfamiliar with poetry
of that character as to be sure to set it down as original and hail
the reviver of it as a new light. Perhaps he may turn out to have been
right in that impression, and figure as the herald, if not an active
inaugurator, of a new era of taste in verse. He cannot remain the
only practical asserter of the theory that it is better to steal good
poetry than to write bad. Should his followers, however, shrink from
downright theft, they might consent to shine as adapters. So