with a scorn as fine. Mr. Dana is not a good hater, because his mind needs sympathy more than it dislikes antagonism, and because austere principles are connected in his mind with gentle feelings, not with aggressive passions; and his impatience at error, therefore, rather frets than foams into expression.

Though there is hardly a page in Mr. Dana's writings which does not declare him a poet, his poems are comparatively few. These are now generally well known, though their rare merit has not yet been heartily recognized. Mr. Dana is properly of no particular "school" of poetry, but in the direction given to his poetic faculty we perceive the influence and inspiration of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In his preface to The Idle Man, he speaks of his friend Bryant as having lived, when quite young, where few works of poetry were to be had, "at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol in the Temple of Art;" and that, upon his opening Wordsworth's Ballads, "a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden, to change into a strange freshness and life." Something of this effect Wordsworth appears to have exerted upon Mr. Dana; an effect, however, which never was manifested in a conscious or unconscious imitation of his author, and which tended to develop rather than submerge his individuality. Though he looks at nature somewhat in Wordsworth's spirit, he never looks with Wordsworth's eyes, but always with his own. The leading characteristics of his poems are the calm, clear intensity of his vision of objects, and his power of penetrating them, through and through, with life and spiritual significance. His imagination has a Chaucerian certainty in representing a natural object in its exact form, color and

dimensions, the image before his intellect being as real as if it were before his eyes; and if he fail at all as an objective poet, he fails in interpreting its true life and meaning. Nature to him is ever symbolical of spirit; but, instead of evolving hers, he will often superadd his own. In both processes there is life as well as form, but in one case we have the life of nature, in the other the life of the poet. There are grand examples of pure objective imagination in Mr. Dana's poems, in which what is peculiar in the author's spirit does not penetrate the description, and the whole scene has the delicious remoteness of artistical creation; but commonly a subtile tinge of individual sentiment is diffused over the picture he so distinctly presents, and the impression which it leaves tells us that the life communicated to our hearts is not the life of nature, but of one individual's experience. Were Mr. Dana a purely subjective poet, his imagination playing whatever freaks with objects the caprices of his individuality might dictate, the difficulty of describing the action of his mind would be greatly lessened; but the elusive quality in his genius, which analysis is continually toiling after in vain, comes from the conflict in his nature between the objective tendency of his intellect and the subjective tendency of his disposition. We will give a few extracts illustrative of the varying operation of his imagination, according as it works impersonally or with his peculiar moods. The following, for instance, is pure picture :

"And inland rests the green, warm dell;

The brook comes tinkling down its side;
From out the trees the Sabbath bell

Rings cheerful, far and wide,

Mingling its sound with bleatings of the flocks,

That feed about the vale among the rocks."

Here we have complete self-forgetfulness, the mind gazing at the scene it has conjured up, and representing it as a distinct reality. In the following there is a faint intrusion of the individual in the picture: —

"'T was twilight then; and Dian hung her bow
Low down the west; and there a star

Kindly on thee and me, from far,

Looked out, and blessed us through the passing glow."

In the following exquisite poem, the imagery is so clear, that we are at first hardly aware that the whole takes from the sadness of the mood in which it is contemplated a dreamy melancholy, delicious but slightly morbid.

"THE LITTLE BEACH-BIRD.

"Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea,
Why takest thou its melancholy voice,
And with that boding cry

Along the breakers fly?

O, rather, Bird, with me

Through the fair land rejoice!

"Thy flitting form comes ghostly dim and pale,

As driven by a beating storm at sea;

Thy cry is weak and scared,

As if thy mates had shared
The doom of us: Thy wail,-

What doth it bring to me?

"Thou call'st along the sand, and haunt'st the surge,

Restless and sad: as if, in strange accord

With the motion and the roar

Of waves that drive to shore,

One spirit did ye urge,

The Mystery,

the Word.

"Of thousands, thou, both sepulchre and pa.l,

Old Ocean! A requiem o'er the dead,

From out thy gloomy cells,

A tale of mourning tells,—

Tells of man's woe and fall,

His sinless glory fled.

"Then turn thee, little bird, and take thy flight
Where the complaining sea shall sadness bring
Thy spirit never more;

Come, quit with me the shore,

And on the meadows light,

Where birds for gladness sing!"

Vol. 1., pp. 129, 130.

We might extract from Factitious Life, Thoughts on the Soul, The Dying Raven, and Daybreak, numerous passages where this melancholy deepens into gloom, if not despair, and while the poet's hold upon the form of natural objects is as sure as ever, the spirit is thoroughly individual. These poems could only have come from a deep experience of life, and there is a breadth of solemnity to them which is not without its charm; but the fatal objection to them is, that they do not communicate life. Their tendency is rather to awaken a conviction of wickedness than to inspire the energy of virtue. As lessons in psychology, however, they have great value.

One of the best of Mr. Dana's minor poems is that on Chantrey's Washington. We extract it, as one of the rery few tributes to Washington worthy the grandeur of the subject.

"Father and Chief, how calm thou stand'st once more
Upon thine own free land, thou wonn'st with toil!

Seest thou upon thy country's robe a soil,

As she comes down to greet thee on the shore?

"For thought in that fine brow is living still, -
Such thought as, looking far off into time,
Casting by fear, stood up in strength sublime,
When odds in war shook vale and shore and hill ;-

"Such thought as then possessed thee, when was laid

Our deep foundation, when the fabric shook

-

With the wrathful surge which high against it broke,--
When at thy voice the blind, wild sea was stayed.

"Hast heard our strivings, that thou look'st away
Into the future, pondering still our fate

With thoughtful mind? Thou readest, sure, the date
To strifes, thou seest a glorious coming day.

"For round those lips dwells sweetness, breathing good
To sad men's souls, and bidding them take heart,
Nor live the shame of those who bore their part
When round their towering chief they banded stood.

"No swelling pride in that firm, ample chest!
The full, rich robe falls round thee, fold on fold,
With easy grace, in thy scarce conscious hold:
How simple in thy grandeur,— strong in rest!

"Tis like thee: such repose thy living form

Wrapped round. Though some chained passion, breaking forth,
At times swept o'er thee like the fierce, dread north,
Yet calmer, nobler, cam'st thou from the storm.

"O mystery past thought!—that the cold stone
Should live to us, take shape, and to us speak,—
That he, in mind, in grandeur, like the Greek,
And he, our pride, stand here, the two in one!

"There's awe in thy still form. Come hither, then,
Ye that o'erthrong the land, and ye shall know
What greatness is, nor please ye in its show, -
Come, look on him, would ye indeed be men!"

Vol. 1., pp. 127, 128.

The Buccaneer is the most celebrated of Mr. Dana's poems, and though the plan of the story is open to objections, and it fails to reach that mystical element of the mind which it addresses, the characterization and scenery evince great closeness and force of imagination. With some obvious faults, it appears to us to exhibit