Another palpable fault of Bulwer's, is his proneness to soften down the disgusting features of vice, and robe its deformity in the splendid drapery of an unequaled diction. "He has cast O'er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue The eyes, which o'er them shed tears fearfully and fast.” Not so with Byron. If he sings of rapturous love, or describes harrowing crime, he leaves the reader to approve or condemn; he seeks not to justify murder on the very spot of its occurrence; he indulges in no cold abstractions respecting the nature of vice and virtue. Bulwer, seemingly, loves to exert his almost supernatural power over the feelings of his readers; he draws around them the magic circle of his genius, from which they cannot escape, and then sways their emotions, according to his caprice, with the weird power of an evil magician; and while they listen to his syren-words, he destroys the principles of virtue, and mocks the conventional usages of social life. But we blame him especially, because he indulges in those dreamy speculations with regard to morality, which have made Germany a land of infidels: ay! such writers as Bulwer would have rendered the literature of that intellectual people pestilent, had it not been purified by the heavenly light of brighter stars. We also blame him for those nice-drawn distinctions between right and wrong, which are discernible to no other eye than his own; for those false, dazzling, and deceptive theories of ethics, which are scattered through his fictions, and give to them the air of sober philosophy; and because he presents to the plastic mind of youth, bad exemplars to admire and imitate. Who, for instance, does not venerate the commanding intellect, the curious and recondite learning, and the varied accomplishments of Eugene Aram? a man of blood, a being whose heart has been blackened by its fiery passions; and yet he makes that heart the altar of pure and ethereal love. All his fictitious works are of nearly the same cast. He enriches, it is true, the story with the hoarded treasure of thought and memory, but fails to crown the task with an instructive moral. He prefers to write sentimental tales for modern Juliets, rather than strew, like Scott, the paths to knowledge and virtue with the flowers of fiction. Indeed, he seems not to be aware that a sublime morality may be inculcated through the delightful medium of a novel, as effectually as by the ponderous tomes of the school-men. But there is much pleasure in the thought that our children, wiser than their fathers, will visit upon his pernicious VOL. VII. 18 works the fate of Don Quixote's library, while Byron will remain, as he is, one of the brightest ornaments of English literature. Although there is much in the character of Byron that deserves our censure, many faults that mar its beauty, yet like the specks on the burnished disk of the meridian sun, they are lost amid surrounding splendor. It would be absurd to say this, if we believed the vituperation of his slanderers; who love to identify the poet, courted by the virtuous and gifted, whose name for a season created a spell in the courtly circle of the British metropolis, with those dark and gloomy characters that seem to frown upon the reader from his pages. He is such a Proteus, in their eyes, that they imagine, while breathing his impassioned verse at the feet of the lovely Haidee, he suddenly passes into the frowning form of the dark-browed Lambro, who breaks their voluptuous day-dream, and dashes from their lips the enchanted cup of bliss. There is not a character that the reader loathes, which his enemies do not pronounce a faithful self-embodiment; thus Cain, the offspring of an exhuberant imagination, they regard as no other than the noble author. As well might the German critic say that Faust was Göthe's beau ideal of himself; for his religious sentiments were hardly more orthodox than those of his English friend: he represents Faust leaguing, soul and body, with Mephistophiles, as Byron does Cain with Lucifer. They are both actuated by the selfsame motive; each longs to extend, by unholy arts, the narrow limits of human knowledge, until it shall embrace in its circle the secrets of Jehovah himself. Although we would not compare this fragment of Byron's with the finished and symmetrical structure of Göthe's Faust; yet what different fates have befallen these works: one is considered the sublime achievement of a godlike intellect, the other the effusion of a morbid mind. Byron was a deep reader of the human heart; he loved to contemplate and exhibit it in its varied phases; he portrayed alike the gentle emotions of love, the fearful storms of passion, the dark brow of despair, and the calm serenity of happiness; but as the cherished hopes of his youth had been disappointed, and the prospects of his manhood clouded, he was more wont to paint the gloomy aspect of life, than the gay and bright, of which he had had but little experience. His descriptions of natural scenery reflect the same sombre taste: he loves to describe the warring elements, the fearful earthquake, or the tempestuous ocean, rather than the placid landscape, the gentle flower, or slumbering lake. Under the influence of this feeling, he has drawn, in dark colors, Lambro, Conrad, Manfred, and Cain, which reflect nothing of his own mind, save its genius and mel ancholy. Let those who think that Byron's heart was cold and congealed, read his farewell to his wife, in which the emotions of his soul burst forth in a gush of pathos and melody as pure and sweet as the waters of Horeb when smitten by the prophet's wand; let them tread, with him, the soil consecrated by the deeds of warriors and the songs of poets; and stand with him at the base of Parnassus, when he strikes his lyre and reminds the entranced hearer of the minstrelsy and glory of Greece's olden time. But while he yet lingered in that "land of lost gods and godlike men," the war-cry of embattled Greece came to his sequestered retreat, and in a moment he forgot his idle art and grasped the sword. But, alas! Death too soon palsied the nervous arm, and stilled the throbbing heart of the poet-warrior, or else he would have emulated the prowess of her ancient heroes, as he had the genius of her bards. The latter part of his career was (what Milton says the life of a poet should be) a heroic poem, and reminds us forcibly of the brave and gifted Körner. There are few poets whom we so much admire as Byron. We love the gentle Lamb and the amiable Goldsmith, but are awed by the genius and misfortunes of Byron. To our imagination he resembles a grand and gloomy mountain, stretching far away to heaven, on whose frowning brow rests a diadem of eternal light. HERMER, OH! WE'LL ALWAYS LOVE THE FLOWERS. "Tis said that ere sin into Eden had crept, Mid flowerets they passed their innocent hours, And at night, of the flowerets they dreamed as they slept- Wherever they spring, wherever they grow, In the wild wood shades, or the garden bowers, They start from decay amid ruins grand, With the ivy that clings to the crumbling towers, And they smile on us there, though trained by no hand-- We hail the mild spring, and we gladly greet Its soft, warm air, and its gentle showers; But what were the spring, without blossoms sweet? Though sin and its fruits have cast a sad blight O'er this else dark world of ours, Yet of purity and truth these are emblems bright Oh! we'll always love the flowers. F. J. G. C. BRAINARD. CRITICS have frequently complained of the difficulties which set at defiance all their attempts to form a just estimate of the talents of American Poets: for their productions are of so desultory a nature, that the weights and measures usually employed in ascertaining the value of poetical composition, cannot be applied to them. They have contented themselves with spinning elegant threads, but have never woven them into the rich and variegated web of imagery. They have culled here a bud and there a flower, forgetting that such blossoms exhale richer sweets, when blended into the bouquet. In fine, there is too little character in their writings. The probable cause of this is that mania, with which the entire corps seemed to be infected, for originating something before unheard of or conceived-some novelty-combined with a feverish dread of encroaching on the track of those who have preceded them in the walks of poesy. They seem to have been seeking for the gems which have escaped the observation of those whose search has been less careful. The wilder the vagary, the more fanciful and grotesque the device which emanates from their brain, the more heartily they congratulate themselves upon its invention. Thus rendering themselves, as it were, a crew of rhymster-adventurers, ever roving after some poetic El Dorado, or watching, with the patience of an astronomer, for the "telescopic ray" of genius, to reveal some new luminary in the intellectual firmament. Writings of so little tone would naturally embrace many defective productions, however great be the excellence of the author; and the critical reader finds himself not seldom called upon to exercise that charity which the Venusian bard craves with so graceful an earnestness: On one page of our author's works, a sentence appears which seems scarcely suitable for the precariously filled" poet's cor ner" of a newspaper: we turn, and have scarce read a line, ere the conviction irresistibly forces itself upon us, that the father of such a conception possessed a soul steeped in the pure dew of Castalie. "Breathing thoughts and burning words" begin to ravish our nicer senses: "the might of the poet" is upon us, and we stand spell-bound, as he twines one rosy chain after another around us. Although we cannot attribute extreme negligence in composition to Brainard, quite a number of his pieces bear the impress of haste. Some inaccurately-formed sentences, some local weakness of style, or some grating abruptness, deforms, slightly mayhap, nearly every page. The utter absence of all incitement to improvement, and the remarkably humble opinion which he entertained of his own talents, seem to have conspired to occasion these imperfections. What he might have been, under different circumstances, though a question which the mind is ever prone to ask itself, savors too much of croaking imbecility, and is too idle to be discussed. Be it enough for us that he was a poet, in the full sense of the word. The grandeur of thought, the richness of imagination, the exuberance of fancy, those principal and essential ingredients of the art divine, were his. His strains will long resound amid the concert of American song, and are destined to embalm his memory during all after time. Let us now glance at some of the peculiar characteristics of his style, which we will endeavor to illustrate by occasional ex tracts. Brainard was an accurate delineator of nature. The warmth of his genius kindles into life the beauties of her handiwork. With the eye of an artist, he paints in rich dyes the minutest graces which she presents to human contemplation. Moreover, he effects that which is the poet's peculiar province,-he amends and improves her beauties. The scenes in the grand picture of the universe, which appear lifeless and unattractive, when sunned by his fancy, spring into a bright existence. The wild desert is suddenly transformed into a fairy-green, and sweet floods, at his behest, water the dry and thirsty ground. Let us take, as an example of this, an extract from the piece entitled, "Salmon River," which, though the poet tells us "Tis hard to rhyme About a little and unnoticed stream, That few have heard of," is immortalized by his verses. ""Tis a sweet stream-and so, 'tis true, are all |