SONG. HARK, hark, hark! The lark sings high in the dark. H. The raven croaked from the raven stone; The lark sings high in the dark. The lark sings high in the dark. Long have I wandered by land and by sea, While hark, hark, bark! The lark sings high in the dark. -Fraser's Magazine. C. K. NOVEMBER LEAVES. THESE gray November days Suit well my temper; so these fallen leaves lying In all the miry ways, Part rotten, part just dead, part only dying, Preach homilies for me most edifying. My hopeful spring is past, My rustling summer and my harvest season My fall-of-leaf hath come; and there is treason Within my heart, although I know 'tis reason. November leaves must fall, And hopes outworn, the timely frost must sever, Leaving their branches tall All gaunt and bare and black; but not forever. Thrice-strong to whom befall These kindly frosts! Let such forget them From The Saturday Review. Chaucer and Spenser, and those of the NarTHE POETICAL WORKS OF LEIGH HUNT.*rative Poems which are really metrical tales, LEIGH HUNT was one of a class of authors and turn, like fables, on the description of who fail to achieve eminence chiefly because simple incidents. It is natural that an authey are overshadowed by the vicinity of thor should regard with partial fondness his greater reputations. Ambitious men, of more elaborate efforts; and Mr. Hunt, like powers below the highest, should choose & Southey, does "not pretend to think that line of their own. A thirdrate physician there is no merit in the larger pieces," and, may become immortal by cultivating one of like him, appeals to the fact that " they have the waste places of natural science, and a not ceased to be called for by the public." barrister who has scarcely held a brief in We attach very little value to this test. It Westminster Hall may dash into the attor- varies with the attractiveness of the subject, ney-generalship of an obscure colony. It is the notoriety of the writer, and the greater the same in literature. The public prefers or less urgency of the puffing. Undismayed relative to absolute excellence. With a just by their alleged popularity, and by the aseconomy of time it will read a book, or go sertion that the first is the " finest narrative to see a sight, which is reputed to be the poem which has appeared in the English first of its class. It does not care to dis- language since the time of Dryden," we procriminate between the comparative elevation nounce "Rimini," "Corso and Emilia," of two different careers, or to balance the "The Palfrey," and even "Hero and Leandifficulty of success in that which is open der," to be second-rate productions, deficient and that which is crowded. Mr. Leigh in originality, and but for their pictures of Hunt wrote, and wrote well, in a variety of scenery very little above the level of the styles, but in each one he was fairly beaten prize-poem. It is perhaps worth while to by some contemporary poet. The "Story remark, by the way, that the line, "That of Rimini" contains some fine passages, but ever among ladies ate in hall," in that most as a whole does not approach the best of beautiful passage which describes Elaine's Byron's narrative poems. "The Palfrey," admiration of Lancelot, occurs word for word and "Wallace," are poor beside Sir Walter in Lorenzo's lamentation over the body of Scott's lays and ballads. The "Ode to the Sun," perhaps the highest flight of poetry in the volume, falls short of the simplicity and grandeur of the "Ode to Immortality." "Godiva," though it contains the choice line, "Hear how the boldest naked deed was clothed in saintliest beauty," has not the strange transparency of Mr. Tennyson's fragment on the same subject, and is not comparable to his masterpieces on kindred subjects. The result is, that although Mr. Hunt has written real poetry, and not mere rhetoric and metaphysics in verse, he is scarcely numbered among English poets, and probably has more honor with the less discriminating but more sympathetic American public than in his own country. Corso. Mr. Leigh Hunt is much more successful in what may be called "cabinet poems," where sustained power is less necessary than poetical sympathy and grace of expression. "Mahmoud," "Kilspindie," and the "Trumpets of Doolkarnein," are happy examples of what is rapidly becoming a lost art-the art of telling a story graphically without marring its effect by subjective interpolations. The mine of self-consciousness had, in Mr. Hunt's earlier days, scarcely been opened to poets. Byron himself, though he formed a kind of dark background to his pictures out of his own blighted existence, sought his materials and refreshed his imagination in the inexhaustible richness of The present volume, as we learn from the nature. Even the misanthropy of Manfred introduction, contains those of his poetical and Childe Harold is not the misanhtropy works, which the author thought worthy of of the hero in "Maud"-the Byronic melpreservation, and the plan of arrangement ancholy is not the melancholy which gives was settled by himself before his death. They its charm to "In Memoriam." Leigh Hunt's are distributed into "Narrative Poems," poetry-more nearly related to that of Keats "Narrative Modernizations," "Narrative than to that of Byron-still essentially beImitations," "Political and Critical Poems," longs to the earlier manner of the present "Sonnets," "Blank Verse," "Miscellaneous century. It abounds in glowing descripPoems," and "Translations." Adopting this classification, we should be inclined to give the preference to the least ambitious works -to the Translations, the Imitations of The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Now finally collected, revised by himself, and edited by his son, Thornton Hunt. London and New York: Routledge and Co. 1860. tions, ingenious turns, and lively sallies; but it is strictly confined within the dominion of fancy, and never aspires to teach or to interpret. Perhaps its most attractive characteristic is the cheerful tone which pervades it, in spite of trials and misrepresentations which might well have soured a less equable temper. There is no bitterness of Till I return, and find thec doubly fair. "Wait then my coming, on that lightsome land, Health, and the joy that out of nature springs, And Freedom's air-blown locks;-but stay with me, Friendship, frank entering with the cordial hand, And Honor, and the Muse with growing wings, And Love Domestic, smiling equably." On the other hand, we think a wise discretion would have forborne to reprint such "specimens of political verse as the lines on the "St. James' Phenomenon" and the "Coronation Soliloquy." Clever and witty they certainly are, but the interest of such squibs is quite ephemeral, their vulgarity is of the broadest kind, and the contrast of their spirit with that of the "Odes to the Queen," and on the births of the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales, and the Princess Alice, is somewhat too glaring. No living writer of reputation would venture on satire so scurrilously personal as the whimsical pasquinade on the prince regent's habits and appearance :— "Hard by St. James' Palace You may see this prince of shockings, For at one, d'ye see, He begins to put on his stockings. "His head, or else what should be In the place that's on his shoulders, Frizz'd here and there, To the terror of all beholders. His drinkings and his vap'rings; That he cannot see, For he'll take a pig for a prince. "To tell you what his throat is, Is a matter a little puzzling; That more or less, It was forty yards of muslin." On the other hand, we question whether the Family Herald would accept from the most maudlin correspondent loyalty so insipid as this: : "Blest be the queen! Blest when the sun goes down; When rises blest. May love line soft her crown. May music's self not more harmonious be, Than the mild manhood by her side, and sheMay she be young forever-ride, dance, sing, 'Twixt cares of state, carelessly carolling," etc. Or again, the description of the assemblage at the Prince of Wales' christening, the third and fourth lines of which are considerately explained in a note to allude to the late king of Prussia and Alexander von Humboldt: "Young beauties mixed with warriors gray, And princes, and the genial king, And the mild manhood, by whose side Walks daily forth his two years' bride,” etc. On the same principle, Mr. Hunt, in the notes, makes a general recantation of his jokes on the Lake poets. This is "coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb " with a vengeance, and would be pitiable if it were not so very common. The poetical development of individuals, no less than of nations, has a tendency to begin with prophecies and war-songs, and to end with glorified nursery rhymes in the language of adulation and compliment. There are two thoroughly modern attributes which Mr. Leigh Hunt's poems possess; viz., obscurity of thought, and want of finish in composition. Whatever excuse may be made for either of these qualities taken separately, they make up a grave blemish when combined. Keats is sometimes quoted as the founder of a system according to which metre and sound are subordinated to the complete development of an idea. But if the ear is to be offended, the understanding should be propitiated, and the difficulties of syntax and prosody should be presented alternately. At all events, triple rhymes, trochees for iambics, and grammatical liberties, should be introduced only where there is a dignus vindice nodus, and the gush of inspiration may be supposed to have been too strong for the restrictions of form. But no such indulgence can be claimed for passages so tamely slipshod as the following:: "An aged nurse had Hero in the place, |