Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain—

Torrents methinks that heard a mighty voice
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo God!

God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder God!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and wonders of the element !
Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!

Once more, hoar mount with thy sky-painting peaks,
Oft from whose feet the avalanche unheard,
Shoots downward glittering through the pure serene,
Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast―
Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou,
In adoration, upward from thy base

Slow travelling with dim eyes, suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud

To rise before me-Rise, O ever rise;

Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!

Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,

Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God!

One cannot look too often upon Mr. Wordsworth's charming female portrait :

She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight:

A lovely apparition sent

To be a moment's ornament;

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;

Like twilight too her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn ;
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view
A spirit, yet a woman too!

Her household motions light and free
And steps of virgin liberty;

A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death;

The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill,
A perfect woman nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light.

I would add " Laodamia," if it were not too long, and the "Yew-trees," if I had not a misgiving that I have somewhere planted those deathless trunks before. In how many ways is a great poet glorious! I met with a few lines taken from that noble poem the other day in the "Modern Painters," cited for the landscape:

'Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth

of intertwisted fibres serpentine,

Upcoiling and inveterately convolved!

Beneath whose shade

With sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged

Perenially"

and so forth. Mr. Ruskin cited this fine passage for the picture, I for the personifications:

"Ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope

Silence and Foresight, Death the skeleton,

And Time the shadow !

Both quoted the lines for different excellencies, and both were right.

II.

AMERICAN POETS.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

AMONGST the strange events of these strange days of ours, when revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutions changed one week and rechanged the next, seem to crowd into a fortnight the work of a century, annihilating time, just as railways and electric telegraphs annihilate space-in these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood relations (I had well nigh called them our fellowcountrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his foot

steps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and to my mind it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey— provided always, it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought, and clear of word, we could fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of "Absalom and Achitophel,” or of the "Moral Epistles," if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name.

The work of which I am about to offer a sample, all too brief, is a little book much too brief itself; a little book of less than forty pages, described in the title-page as "Astræa-a Poem, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, August, 1850, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and printed at the request of the Society."

The introduction tells most gracefully, in verse that rather, perhaps, implies than relates, the cause of the author's visit to the college, dear to him as the place of his father's education :

What secret charm long whispering in mine ear,
Allures, attracts, compels, and chains me here,
Where murmuring echoes call me to resign
Their sacred haunts to sweeter lips than mine;