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us what Coleridge does not hesitate to call, the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language'-words, it is true, which he slightly modifies by adding, 'at least it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth that I remember any rival.'

P. 352, No. cclxxii. This poem is drawn from a small volume with the title, David and Samuel, with other Poems, published in the year 1859. Much in the volume has no right to claim exemption from the doom which before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half ironical, of Goethe's lighter pieces; while more than one of the more uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit. It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the Eastern world.

P. 354, No. cclxxiii. -During the last Chinese war the following passage occurred in a letter of the Correspondent of The Times : Some Seiks, and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.'

P. 356, No. cclxxiv.-Turner's fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the French) towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very high order, which has here been finely transferred

into verse.

P. 359, No. cclxxviii.-A selection of Walt Whitman's poetry has very lately been published in England, the editor of this declaring that in him American poetry properly so-called begins. I must entirely dissent from this statement. What he has got to say is a very old story indeed, and no one would have attended to his version of it, if he had not put it more uncouthly than others before him. That there is no contradiction between higher and lower, that there is no holy and no profane, that the flesh has just as good rights as the spirit—this has never wanted prophets to preach it, nor people to act upon it; and this is the sum-total of his message to America and to the world. I was glad to find in his Drum-taps one little poem which I could quote with real pleasure.

P. 379, No. ccxcviii.—Tithonus is a noble variation on Juvenal's noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and temper,

Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat
Naturæ:

words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in Dryden's translation,

And count it nature's privilege to die.'

P. 386, No. ccciv.-Few readers of this and other choice specimens of American poetry-some of which have now for the first time found their way into any English anthology-but will share the admiration which I cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson and by others, do, so far as they reach, leave nothing to be desired.

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BEAUMONT (1586-1616) and FLETCHER (1576–1625) XXIV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII,

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