Each booming like a world faint heard in space. The rising moon, and the young stars of God, Are things to love? With these my soul is brimmed; With a diviner and serener joy Than all thy heaven of money-bags can bring Thy dry heart, Worldling!'-Poems by Alexander Smith, p. 207. To these lines we must append, in passing, one word of dry criticism, pointing out how fatal to the effect of their lofty tone of contempt is the triteness of the example chosen by the poet to prove his superior appreciation of nature. From which it happens that the reader, instead of reflecting, as he is intended to do, how much finer it is to admire a primrose than to make a fortune, to be Mr. Alexander Smith than Lord Mayor of London,-is haunted by the echo of old familiar verses, which also use that little flower as a test, in words almost proverbial for their naked simplicity of diction. But to return. Such general remarks as we have made can only apply partially to individual instances; and the volumes before us are so various in merit and in subject, that the common train of thought they have suggested belongs more exactly to the poetry of the day as a whole, than to the example of it these specimens furnish. When we come to examine them separately, the family likeness, such as it is, fades away. We feel the injustice of ranking them in any sort together, or of drawing any common deductions from them. Some have talent, almost genius; some are the effusions of mere ignorance and weakness. Nor do they vary less in moral purpose. Some place their hope in the past, others denounce and forswear it, and think all good lies before us in the unseen future. Some have high aims; some low, sensual ones; others no definite purpose at all. Only, with all these differences, each bears the impress of the present day, and could hardly have been written in any other. Amidst the fluctuations of fashion and inevitable change there is one theme of which the world never wearies, to which poets and readers are equally attracted, that is of universal interest, and which will always be the most popular subject for the minstrel's art. Ages may vary in their appreciation of nature; one may take action, another manners; philosophy, metaphysics, politics, history, may all have their turn as vehicles of poetic thought, but while men write verses and women read them, love and courtship will be ever constant subjects. The heart's tenderest sensibilities, its trials, its histories, and manifold experiences, will furnish an easy, flowing, inexhaustible store of thought and incident. But while this is so, there is still no subject in which fashion, or some deeper, subtler influence, has a wider control. The love of one age, as expressed in its poetry, is altogether of a different class from that of another. We have the ages of chivalric love, of romantic, gallant, metaphysical, complimentary, pastoral, poetical love, all treated with more or less delicacy and refinement, and each characteristic of the moral features of its day. But these styles have passed away, even to the last, which was that of the purer poets of our youth. The love-making and love-painting of the poets of the present day, cannot be described by any of these terms. It aims at a certain reality, which no other style even affects,-a portraying of the minuter traits of incident and feeling, which is incompatible with the historical character of the heart's muse in past times. If any of our readers are acquainted with the language of philosophical analysis which the critics of the ballet have formed, they will have observed that dancers are divided into two distinct schools, distinguished by the terms 'idealists' and 'realists.' Now the poets of the present time are realists, and by this term we would express something which we hold to be a matter of regret, and sometimes even of shame and confusion. It implies an abandonment of the higher uses of poetry,-that of raising the mind beyond vulgar common joys, which can be comprehended without florid and elaborate description (and which so dwelt upon have an undoubted tendency to lower our nature), and teaching it to feel the sacredness of human affection; and its use, when duly exalted and refined from selfishness and inconstancy, as a type and foretaste of heaven itself. Certainly we feel that a coarser pencil is at work now than was guided by those who represent the poetry of our youth: the poets universally trusted and received, we mean to say-for Byron, and even Moore, were under a ban for failure in this very point. Suggestions and allusions are permitted now in books of universal acceptation, which the taste both of authors and readers then would have alike condemned as altogether out of place in poetic description; while in some instances where genius is wanting to awake pleasure and sympathy by legitimate means, it is sought to excite a vulgar interest in ways the degradation of which we cannot characterise. The two authors in our list, who have especially chosen this theme, may be placed at the two extremes of the 'realistic' development. Mr. Coventry Patmore, a very agreeable and happy example of the style, modified and tinctured as it is by many touches of the romance and gallantry of past times-and Mr. Alexander Smith, we must say, a very revolting one. The first has a pure, if not a very high estimate, of female influence and character; the other is altogether without any sense of modesty or propriety in his conception of woman's nature. Mr. Coventry Patmore's style is peculiar and often forcible, and shows such mastery of his art, as gives him just precedence on the present occasion; a mastery which proves that certain roughnesses, far from pleasing to us, are deliberate and wilfully indulged in by him as preferring a claim to originality of expression, and contrasting well with his habitual facility, and a graceful flow which his verse, when he chooses, can possess. But occasional affectations of style may well be tolerated in consideration of the superior nature and simplicity of the tone of thought. He knows his powers, and is content not to heave and strain them in gigantic efforts beyond what they can bear-a process by which many, who could write pleasant verses, (might this only satisfy them,) spoil both talent and temper in impatient attempts to do great deeds-to guide the age, to subvert the present system of things, to be and to do something for which they are all the time conscious their powers are inadequate; a state of mind engendering such surly imaginations as can only find vent in the growling thunders of moody, discontented, and very uninviting blank verse. Mr. Patmore avoids these errors; his is a very readable book-we are led on page after page-there is interest in the narrative, there is nature in the description; now and then, there is pathos in the situations. It is a book rather to read than to judge of by extracts-but we will venture on one or two. Tamerton Church Tower,' which gives its name to the volume, is one out of many poems, chiefly lyrical in form, and in most instances devoted to the delineation of the heart's pains and pleasures, and the effect of outward nature upon its various moods of feeling. It is the history of a poet's courtship and marriage, the sudden blight which fell on his happiness, his slow recovery from depression; his restoration, and the invigoration and strengthening of mind which sorrow works in him. The following passage expresses the apathetic, irreligious content with which the present fills him, after the fulfilment of all his hopes on his marriage with Blanche.' It is ominous of the doom hanging over him, for the storm comes on before they return to land, in which his bride is drowned. The noon was hot, and close, and still, When steadying Blanche's hand, I trod with her the southern hill, wasp 'Ere summer's prime that year, the Quietly dipp'd the dripping scull, 'The sun was rayless, pale the sky, The sailors on the silent seas With storm-tuned voices toil' 1. 'I could not toil, I seldom prayed: All perfect my contentment was, And heaven seemed only heaven because 'No wafted breeze the ships, did strike- The peace within my soul was like At times when action sleeps, unstirred A mystic wind, with warning heard, 'The fancy, then, a fear divines, It smote my thought, how, yesternight, And how her maimed and shapeless light 'From deeps of sleep my spirit woke, The terror passed, as, lightning-lit, 'Again I turned me, all devote, To my sweet Idol's shrine; Again I gazed, where in the boat Her shadow mixed with mine.' Coventry Patmore, p. 24. In connexion with this double shadow which here helps to lull into security, we will add one stanza of powerful effect to mark desolation. When he is described as rousing himself to exertion after the first agony of grief, there is yet one token of solitude and bereavement he could not bear : : 'But never when the waves drew back, Trod I the weltering strand; For horribly my single track Pursued me in the sand.'—Ibid. p. 39. The light, cheerful cadence of the following lines from the poem called Woman's Praises,' is well adapted to the gallant turn of thought. The term elegant, justly applies to them, nor does self-appreciation come amiss where it is only put forward as if to enhance the subject of his present song, and to express a certain joyousness of spirit: When I behold the reckless brook That casts itself from yonder crag, Passing the pageantry of dreams; Nor want for justly matching words: All interests of hill and plain, I so can sing in seasons fair I think with utterance free to raise My thoughts lie cramped in narrow scope, No skill'd complexity of speech, No heart-felt phrase of tenderest fall, No liken'd excellence can reach Her, the sheer paragon of all.'-Ibid. p. 79. There is a sort of narrative verse come in of late, against |