general pure Saxon-their matter strong, manly, and his own-their figures always forcible, and never forced-their theology sound and scriptural-and would to God such sermons were being preached in every church and chapel throughout Britain! They might recall the many wanderers who, with weary heart and foot, are seeking rest elsewhere in vain, and might counteract that current which is drawing away from the sanctuaries so much of the talent, the virtue, and the honesty of the land.

Dr Croly's contributions to periodicals | after a careful perusal of them, we would are, as might have been expected, of va- suggest, even without a public phrenorious merit. We recollect most vividly his logical examination of those auditors' papers on Burke (since collected), on Pitt, heads, that, whatever be their situation and a most masterly and eloquent outline in life, they are, if unable to understand of the career of Napoleon. This is as these discourses, incapable of their duties, rapid, as brief almost and eloquent, as are endangering the public, and should one of Bonaparte's own bulletins, and be remanded to school. Clearer, more much more true. It constitutes a rough, nervous, and, in the true sense of the red, vigorous chart of his fiery career, term, simpler discourses have not apwithout professing to complete philoso- peared for many years. Their style is in phically the analysis of his character. This task Emerson lately, in our hearing, accomplished with much ingenuity. His lecture was Napoleon in essence. He indicated his points with the ease and precision of a lion-showman. Napoleon, to Emerson, apart from his splendid genius, is the representative of the faults and the virtues of the middle class of the age. We heard some of his auditors contend that he had drawn two portraits instead of one; but in fact Napoleon was two, if not more, men. Indeed, if you draw first the bright and then the black side of Dr Croly, as a preacher, in his best any character, you have two beings, which manner, is faithfully represented in those the skin and brain of the one actual man discourses, particularly in his sermons on can alone fully reconcile. The experience "Stephen," the "Theory of Martyrdom," of every one demonstrates at the least a and the "Productiveness of the Globe." dualism; and who might not almost any We admire, in contrast with some modern day sit down and write a letter, objur- and ancient monstrous absurdities to the gatory, or condoling, or congratulatory contrary, his idea of God's purpose in to "my dear yesterday's self?" Each making his universe-not merely to disman, as well as Napoleon, forms a sort of play his own glory, which, when interSiamese twins-although, in his case, it preted, means just, like the stated purwas matter of thankfulness that the cord pose of Cæsar, to extend his own name. could not be cut. Surely to circulate his essence and image Of Dr Croly's book on the "Revela--to proclaim himself merciful, even tion" we have spoken formerly. Under through punishment-and even in hellthe shadow of that inscrutable pyramid flames to write himself down Love, is, it stands, one of the loftiest attempts to as Dr Croly proclaims it, "the chief end" scale its summit and explain its construc- of God! His sermon on Stephen is a tion; but to us all such seem as yet in-noble picture-we had almost said a effectual. A more favourable specimen daguerreotype-of that first martyrdom. of his theological writing is to be found His "Productiveness of the Globe" is in his volume of "Sermons," published richer than it is original. His "Theory some time ago. The public has reason to of Religion" is new, and strikingly illuscongratulate itself on the little squabble trated. His notion is, that God, in three which led to their publication. Some different dispensations-the Patriarchal, conceited persons, it seems, had thought the Mosaic, and the Christian-has deproper to accuse Dr Croly of preaching veloped three grand thoughts-first, the sermons above the heads of his audience, being of God; secondly, in shadow, the and suggested greater simplicity. Now, doctrine of atonement; and thirdly, that

of immortality. With this arrangement ful and commanding. Hogg, the Ettrick we are not entirely satisfied, but reserve Shepherd, we remember, describes him our objections till the "conclusion of the as rather disposed to take the lead, but whole matter," in the shape of three suc- so exceedingly intelligent that you encessive volumes on each of these periods, tirely forgive him. He has been, as a and the idea of each, has appeared, as we literary man, rather solitary and selftrust it speedily shall. asserting has never properly belonged to any clique or coterie and seems to possess an austere and somewhat exclu

We depicted, some time since, in a periodical, our visit to Dr Croly's chapel, and the impression made by his appear-sive standard of taste. ance, and the part of his discourse we heard. It seemed to us a shame to see the most accomplished clergyman in London preaching to so thin an audience; but perhaps it is accounted for partly by the strictness of his conservative principles, and partly by the stupid prejudice which exists against all literary divines. Latterly, we are told, his attendance has greatly increased.

We are sorry we cannot, ere we conclude, supply any particulars about his history. Of its details we are altogether ignorant. In conversation, he is power

It is to us, and must be to the Christian world, a pleasing thought to find such a man devoting the maturity of his mind to labours peculiarly professional; and every one who has the cause of religion at heart must wish him God speed in his present researches. Religion has in its abyss treasures yet unsounded and unsunned, though strong must be the hand, and true the eye, and retentive the breath, and daring, yet reverent the spirit of their successful explorer-and such we believe to be qualities possessed by Dr Croly.

man

SYDNEY YENDY S.

THIS book* we hesitate not to pronounce In two things only does "Balder" yield the richest volume of recent poetry next to "The Roman." It has, as a story, to "Festus." It is a ९९ wilderness" of little interest, being decidedly subjective thought a sea of towering imagery and rather than objective; and, secondly, its surging passion. Usually a man's first writing is not, as a whole, so clear. In book is his richest, containing, as it gene-"The Roman," he was almost always rally does, all the good things which had been accumulating in his portfolio for years before he published. But while "The Rowas full of beauties, "Balder" is overflowing, and the beauties, we think, are of a rarer and profounder sort. There was much poetry in "The Roman," but there was more rhetoric. Indeed, many of the author's detractors, while granting him powers of splendid eloquence, denied The object of the poet is to show that him the possession of the purely poetic natural goodness, without the divine guidelement. "Balder" must, unquestion-ance, is unable to conduct even the loftiably, put these to silence, and convince all worth convincing, that Yendys is intensely and transcendently a poet.

"Balder." By the Author of "The Ro

man.

distinctly, dazzlingly clear. The Monk was never in a mist for a moment; but Balder, as he has a Norse name, not unfrequently speaks or bellows from the centre of northern darkness. We speak, we must say, however, after only one reading; perhaps a second may serve to clear up a good deal that seems obscure and chaotic.

est of the race to any issue but misery and despair. This he does in the story of Balder—a man of vast intelligence, and aspiring to universal intellectual power —who, partly through the illness of his

By what a strong, rough, daring figure does Balder describe the elements of his power:

wife, represented as the most amiable of women, and partly through his own unsatisfied longings of soul, is reduced to absolute wretchedness, and is left sa"Thought, Labour, Patience, crificing her life to his disquietude and And a strong Will, that, being set to boil baffled ambition. The poem has one The broth of Hecate, would shred his flesh Into the caldron, and stir deep, with arms or two interlocutors besides Balder and Flay'd to the seething bone, ere there default Amy, but consists principally of solilo-One tittle from the spell-these should not quies uttered and songs sung by these two in alternate scenes, and has very In vain!"

strive

"The repose

Of what follows death he says

The first, last secret all men hear, and none
Betray."
"My hand shakes;
Who buys an Indian kingdom with a bead."
But with the trembling eagerness of him

little dramatic interest. It is entitled Of Beauty-where she lieth bright and still Balder, Part First; a title which As some spent angel, dead-asleep in light pretty broadly hints that a second poem On the most heavenward top of all this world, with a far sublimer argument (the in- Wing-weary." evitable sequel of the former), showing how, since natural goodness fails in reforming the world, or making any man happy, divine Goodness must be expected to perform the work-may be looked for. We pass from the general argument and bearing of the poem, to speak more in detail of its special merits and defects. The great merit of the book, as we have already hinted, is its Australian wealth of thought and imagery. Bailey must look after his laurels; Tennyson, Smith, and Bigg are all in this one quality eclipsed by Yendys. Nor are the pieces of gold small and of little value; many of them are large nuggets-more precious than they are sparkling. Here, for instance, is a cluster of noble similitudes, reminding you of Jeremy Taylor's thick rushing "So have I seen:

"Nature from my birth
Confess'd me, as one who in a multitude
Confesseth her beloved, and makes no sign;
Or as one all unzoned in her deep haunts,
If her true love come on her unaware,
Hastes not to hide her breast, nor is afraid;
Or as a mother, 'mid her sons, displays
The arms their glorious father wore, and, kind,
In silence, with discerning love commits
Some lesser danger to each younger hand,
But to the conscious eldest of the house
The naked sword; or as a sage, amid
His pupils in the peopled portico,
Where all stand equal, gives no precedence,
But by intercalated look and word,
Of equal seeming, wise but to the wise,
Denotes the favour'd scholar from the crowd;
Or as the keeper of the palace-gate
Denies the gorgeous stranger, and his pomp
Of gold, but at a glance, although he come
In fashion as a commoner, unstarr'd,
Lets the prince pass."

Fancy, like the image that our boors
Set by their kine, doth milk her of her tears,
And loose the terrible unsolved distress
Of tumid Nature."

"Men of drug and scalpel still are men.
I call them gnomes
Of science, miners who scarce see the light,
Working within the bowels of the world
Of beauty."

Makes us all poets

"Love

"From the mount

Of high transfiguration you come down
Into your commmon lifetime, as the diver
Breathes upper air a moment ere he plunge,
And by mere virtue of that moment lives
In breathless deeps, and dark. We poets
live

Upon the height, saying, as one of old,
'Let us make tabernacles: it is good
To be here.'

"Dauntless Angelo, Who drew the Judgment, in some daring hope That, seeing it, the gods could not depart From so divine a pattern."

"Sad Alighieri, like a waning moon Setting in storm behind a grove of bays."

The descriptions which follow, in pages 91 and 92-of Milton and Shakspereare very eloquent, but not, it appears to us, very characteristic. They are splendid evasions of their subjects. Reading Milton is not like swimming the Alps, as an ocean sinking and swelling with the

billows; it is rather like trying to fly to heaven, side by side with an angel who is at full speed, and does not even see his companion-so eagerly is he straining at the glorious goal which is fixing his eye, and from afar flushing his cheek. Nor do we much admire this:

"Either his muse

Was the recording angel, or that hand
Cherubic which fills up the Book of Life,
Caught what the last relaxing gripe let fall
By a death-bed at Stratford, and henceforth
Holds Shakspere's pen."

The sudden gust that, like a headsman wild,
Uplifteth beauty by her golden hair,
To show the world that she is dead indeed.”
"The bare hill-top

Shines near above us; I feel like a child
Nursed on his grandsire's knee, that longs
to stroke

The bald bright forehead; shall we climb?"
"She look'd in her surprise

As when the Evening Star, ta'en unaware,
While fearless she pursues across the Heaven
Her Lover-Sun, and on a sudden stands
Confest in the pursuit, before a world
Upgazing, in her maiden innocence
Disarms us, and so looks, that she becomes
A worship evermore."

"The order'd pomp and sacred dance of
things."

"This is that same hour

black

and orbs,

Till that which was a shining spot in space
Flames out between us and the universe,
And burns the heavens with glory."

We quoted his description of Night once before from MS. We give it again,

however:

No, no, dear Sydney Yendys, Shakspere was no cherub, or seraph either; he was decidedly an "earth spirit," or rather, he was just honest, play-acting, ale-drinking Will of Stratford, with the most marvel- That I have seen before me as a star lous daguerreotypic brow that ever man Seen from a rushing comet through the possessed, and with an immense fancy, And forward night, which orbs, and orbs, imagination, and subtle, untrained intellect besides. He knew well a Book of Life;" but it was not "the Lamb's!"-it was the book of the wondrous, living, loving, hating, maddening, laughing, weeping heart of man. Call him rather a diver than a cherub, or, better still, with Hazlitt and Scott, compare him to that magician in the eastern tale who had the power of shooting his soul into all other souls and bodies, and of looking at the universe through all human eyes. We are, by this comparison of Shakspere to an angel, irresistibly reminded, of Michael Lambourne in "Kenilworth," who, after in vain trying to enact Arion, at last tears off his vizard, and cries "Cog's-bones!" He was none of Arion, or Orion either, but honest Mike Lainbourne, that had been drinking Her Majesty's health from morning till midnight. Lambourne was just as like Orion, or his namesake the archangel Michael, as Shakspere like a

cherubic recorder.

Now for another cluster of minor, but exquisite, beauties, ere we come to give two or three superb passages:

"And lo! the last strange sister, but though last,

in heaven.

Elder and haught, called Night on earth,
Nameless, for in her far youth. she was
given,

Pale as she is, to pride, and did bedeck
Her bosom. with innumerable gems.
And God He said, 'Let no man look on her
For ever;' and, begirt with this strong spell,
The Moon in her wan hand, she wanders
forth,

Seeking for some one to behold her beauty;
And wheresoe'er she cometh, eyelids close,
And the world sleeps."

estimated. Some have called it magni-
This description has been differently
ficent, and others fantastic; some a match-
But we think there can be but one opi-
less gem, and others a colossal conceit.
nion about the following picture of Even-

"Sere leaf, that quiverest through the sad-ing. It seems to us as exquisitely beau

still air;

Sere leaf, that waverest down the sluggish
wind;

Sere leaf, that whirlest on the autumn gust,
Free in the ghastly anarchy of death:

tiful as anything in Spenser, Wordsworth, or Shelley:

"And seest thou her who kneeleth clad in gold And purple, with a flush upon her cheek,

And upturn'd eyes, full of the love and sor

row

Of other worlds? 'Tis said, that when the

sons

Of God did walk the earth, she loved a star."

Of Phoebus' shoulder'd arrows, I will shake
The laden manna round me, as I shake
Dews from this morning tree."

He has, two or three pages after this, a strange effusion, called the "Song of Here the description should have stop- the Sun," which we predict shall divide ped, and here we stop it, wishing that opinion still more than his "Night." the author had. But it is curious and Some will call it worthy of Goethe; others characteristic, not so much of the genius will call it a forced extravaganza, a halfas of the temperament (or rather of bo- frenzied imitation of Shelley's "Cloud." dily weakness, influencing that tempera- We incline to a somewhat intermediate ment) of this gifted poet, that he often notion. At the first reading, it seemed sinks and falls on the very threshold of to us to bear a suspicious resemblance, perfection. Another word, and all were not to Shelley's "Cloud," but to that tisgained, to the very measure and stature of Miltonic excellence; but the word comes not, or the wrong word comes instead; and as Yendys, like the tiger, takes no second spring, the whole effect is often lost. We notice the same in Shelley, Keats, and especially in Leigh Hunt, who has made and spoiled many of the finest poetic pictures in the world. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Alexander Smith, are signal in this, that all their set descriptions and pet passages are finished to the last trembling articulation; complete even to a comma. Yendys has, perhaps, superior, or equal genius; he has also an equal will and desire to elaborate; but, alas! while the spirit is always willing, the flesh is often weak.

Speaking of the Resurrection to Amy, Balder says:

sue of noisy nonsense (where, as there
was no reason, there ought at least to
have been rhyme), Warren's "Lily and
the Bee." Hear this, for instance. Mark,
it is Sol that speaks:-
"Love, love, love, how beautiful, oh love!
Art thou well-awaken'd, little flower?
Are thine eyelids open, little flower?
Are they cool with dew, oh little flower?
Ringdove, Ringdove,

This is my golden finger;
Come forth, come forth, and sing unto my
Between the upper branches of the pine
day."

3

Who will encore the sun in such dit

ties as these? But he has some more
vigorous strains, worthy almost of that
voice wherewith Goethe, in his "Prologue
to Faust," has represented him making
"music to the spheres: "-

"I will spend day among you like a king!
Your water shall be wine because I reign!
Arise, my hand is open, it is day!
Rise! as men strike a bell, and make it
music,

So have I struck the earth, and made it

day.

As one blows a trumpet through the valleys,
So from my golden trumpet I blow day.
And, like a sudden harvest in the land,
White-favour'd day is sailing on the sea,

The windy land is waving gold with day!
I have done my task;
Do yours. And what is this that I have
And wherefore? Look ye to it! As ye can,
given,
Be wise and foolish to the end. For me,
I under all heavens go forth, praising God."

Well sung, old Baal! Thou hast become a kind of Christian in these latter days. But we have seen a far stronger,