JOHN.

If a poet is fond of the sea, it always prepossesses me in his favor. The third verse of what you have read has great delicacy and beauty of express

ion :

"Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion":

there is a waviness in in its flow, and, at the same time, a gliding melody, which suggests both the stars and the ocean. The ending is exquisite; the whole sentence seems to swell on and on, like a wave upon the beach, till it breaks into the quiet foam of the last verse, and slides gently to its rippling close.

PHILIP.

Chapman does not often linger to describe outward nature; he has more important matters at heart. His natural scenery is of the soul, and that mostly of an Alpine character. There is none of that breezy, summer-like feeling in him, which pervaded the verses of the lyric poets a short time after, and has come near to perfection in many descriptive pieces of our own day,

Annihilating all that's made,

To a green thought in a green shade,"

and seeming to be translations from the grasshopper, butterfly, locust, bird, and bee languages into the vernacular. Yet he has some passages of great merit in this kind, and which show a very genial eye and ear.

JOHN.

A long sentence, but safely delivered at last. Those radicals you speak of are the deep-seeing philosophers who believe that an innate democracy resides in cowhide boots, and that a thorough knowledge of government and a general intelligence upon all subjects soak into the brain from the liberal virtue of a roofless hat; who suspect good-breeding for a monarchist in disguise; believe that all white men are their brothers on the day before election; and proudly stand sponsors, while Mr. Dorr (a man who, mistakenly, it is true, but no less surely, would have stabbed true de mocracy to the heart, by appealing to brute force) is christened over again with the abused name of Algernon Sydney. And yet such men as these play off the puppet-show of our government; such men as these persuade the workingmen of our dear New England to rivet the chains upon three millions of their fellow-workers, and so drug their senses with idle flatteries, as to make them forget. that, while the laborer is bought and sold in one part of a country, he can never be truly respected in the other. I can hardly keep my tears down when I think of it.

PHILIP.

Who goes mad now? But I do not wonder. said that Chapman has little dramatic power.

H

Who seem like Israelites to be,

Walking on foot through a green sea :
To them the grassy deeps divide

And crowd, a lane on either side;

With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
These massacre the grass along."

We cannot pardon extravagance in the imagination; but Fancy would be tame without it, and can never assume her proper nature of joyousness, except she break into it. I know you will thank me if I read a little more.

"Thus I, easy philosopher,

Among the birds and trees confer;
And little now to make me wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants;
Give me but wings as they, and I
Straight floating on the air shall fly;
Or turn me but, and you shall see
I was but an inverted tree.

Already I begin to call

In their most learned original;

And, where I language want, my signs
The bird upon the bough divines,
And more attentive there doth sit,

Than if she were with lime-twigs knit.
No leaf doth tremble in the wind,
Which I, returning, cannot find:
Out of these scattered Sybil's-leaves,
Strange prophecies my fancy weaves ;

What Rome, Greece, Palestine, e'er said,
I in this light mosaic read.

The oak-leaves me embroider all,
Between which caterpillars crawl,

And ivy, with familiar trails,

Me licks and clasps, and curls and hales.
Under this Attic cope, I move

Like some great prelate of the grove;

Then, languishing with ease,

I toss

On pallets swollen of velvet moss,

While the wind, cooling through the boughs,
Flatters with air my panting brows.

How safe, methinks, and strong, behind
These trees, I have encamped my mind;
Where beauty, aiming at the heart,
Bends in some tree its useless dart;
And where the world no certain shot

Can make, or me it toucheth not!"

Old Walton would have clapped his hands at this next :

"No serpent new, nor crocodile,
Remains behind our little Nile,
Unless itself you will mistake,
Among these meads the only snake.
See in what wanton, harmless folds
It everywhere the meadow holds ;
And its yet muddy back doth lick,
Till as a crystal mirror slick,

Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt

If they be in it or without;

And, for his shade which therein shines,

Narcissus-like, the sun, too, pines.

O, what a pleasure 't is to hedge
My temples here with heavy sedge,
Abandoning my lazy side,

Stretched as a bank unto the tide;
Or to suspend my sliding foot
On the osier's undetermined root,

JOHN.

If a poet is fond of the sea, it always prepossesses me in his favor. The third verse of what you have read has great delicacy and beauty of expression :

"Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion":

there is a waviness in in its flow, and, at the same time, a gliding melody, which suggests both the stars and the ocean. The ending is exquisite; the whole sentence seems to swell on and on, like a wave upon the beach, till it breaks into the quiet foam of the last verse, and slides gently to its rippling close.

PHILIP.

Chapman does not often linger to describe outward nature; he has more important matters at heart. His natural scenery is of the soul, and that mostly of an Alpine character. There is none of that breezy, summer-like feeling in him, which pervaded the verses of the lyric poets a short time after, and has come near to perfection in many descriptive pieces of our own day,

"Annihilating all that's made,

To a green thought in a green shade,"

and seeming to be translations from the grasshopper, butterfly, locust, bird, and bee languages into the vernacular. Yet he has some passages of great merit in this kind, and which show a very genial eye and ear.