How the age in which our lot is cast will appear before posterity is a question very easily asked, and never answered. In the article of poetry, for instance, what have these two middle decenniums of the nineteenth century to offer? Some there are, doubtless, who look upon Longfellow as in no degree inferior to Horace; and perhaps George Warrington is not the only one who holds that "Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge may take rank with the greatest poets of all." Others less sanguine hold this to be a time of flat mediocrity, -a time when the old school of poetry has died away and no new one has arisen. For ourselves, we are inclined to believe the truth lies between these two estimates. It is true there is no living Milton or Dryden or Byron; but we are inclined to think that Longfellow and Tennyson will compare not unfavorably with Goldsmith and Coleridge, and that through them our age will leave behind it something at least worthy of preservation. They are undoubtedly the two poetical leaders of the present day. After them we have, in England, the Brownings, Macaulay,-hardly more historian

*The Panorama. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1856. VOL. II. NO. IV. 19

than poet, Aytoun, Alexander Smith, and others little heard of this side of the water, yet whose poems are as valuable as half that immense load of rubbish that goes round the world under the name of "the British Poets." Nor in this country are we by any means obliged to stop at Longfel low as the first and last on our list. Bryant, Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Holmes, and Whittier, all readily suggest themselves for their shares of fame.

As a poet, judged solely by the merit of his productions, Whittier would probably rank as superior to Holmes, and not equal to Bryant, with more natural force, though less education, than Lowell. Many of his small productions are full of sweetness, and would deserve to be classed high in the better half of English poetry; and probably, if carefully selected and arranged, would form a volume of so much sweetness and beauty that posterity would not willingly let it die. His difficulty at present is one common to all living authors, he writes too much. Since every newspaper has had its poet's corner, and every magazine its original verses, our best poets have written far too much to write well. But the evil would be small if it stopped here, if the fugitive poems, after fulfilling their mission, producing so much money for their author, and the due amount of criticism from the world, were allowed quietly to die with the paper on which they were printed. This, however, they are not allowed to do. They must not rest quietly in the grave of musty newspaper files, but at stated periods, when enough of them have thus gone to their apparently long rest, the author drags them forth again, and thrusts them once more upon the world, this time in the form of a volume. Thus there is, and has been for fifty years, hardly a poet — with the exception of Macaulay, and one or two other men of genius, who have rather amused than occupied themselves with verse who would not appear better could half of his writings be destroyed. Byron is the most remarkable specimen of this, probably by nature more of a poet than the world