lore of Indian life-the once indomitable spirit of the Aborigines now quelled by the power of the European-and the melancholy remembrance that they are fast shrinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away and must soon hear the roar of the last wave which will settle over them for ever.

In the volume before us the living spirit and the striking natural features of America are presented to the reader in all their vividness, while a beautiful vein of morality runs through the whole.

To discuss individual merits-William Cullen Bryant as he has had local precedence of the rest assigned to him in the volume, so, in point of excellence he is entitled, in our opinion, to the first rank. How exquisitely true to nature is his delightful Song of Pitcairn's island;" circumscribed as are our limits, we yet only refrain from giving it at full length because we believe it to be fresh in the memories and on the hearts of all his admirers.

With Bryant, Dana alone appears worthy to dispute the palm. From his beautiful poem on "day-break," in the Spenserian stanza, as he is probably less generally read than his illustrious contemporary, we select, unable to give the whole, two stanzas. After describing the prevailing peace and quiet of the dawn,

he says

"But wrong, and hate, and love, and grief, and mirth
Will quicken soon; and hard, hot toil and strife,
With headlong purpose, shake the sleeping earth
With discord strange, and all that man calls life.
With thousand scattered beauties nature's rife ;
And airs, and woods, and streams breathe harmonies :
Man weds not these, but taketh art to wife;
Nor binds his heart with soft and kindly ties:
He, feverish, blinded, lives, and, feverish, sated, dies.
And 't is because man useth so amiss

Her dearest blessings, Nature seemeth sad;
Else why should she, in such fresh hour as this,

Not lift the veil, in revelation glad,

From her fair face?-It is that man is mad!

Then chide me not, clear star, that I repine,

When Nature grieves; nor deem this heart is bad.

Thou look'st toward earth; but yet the heavens are thine; While I to earth am bound:-When will the heavens be mine?"

The collection is also enriched by the productions of Brainard, Percival, Pierpont, Willis, Sprague, Washington Irving, &c. &c. &c. which are generally speaking, however beautiful, too long

for extract.

Passing them by therefore we select from the con

tributions by anonymous writers the following "lines."

"A cloud lay near the setting sun,
As he smiled in the glowing west;

And his glorious beams, as he slowly sunk,
Fell full on its shining breast;

And it sent him back again his rays,

And grew brighter and more bright,

Till it seemed, as its glowing colours changed,

An embodiment of light.

But the sun sunk down at the close of day,
And in rain drops it wept itself away.

A fair young bride at the altar stood,

And a blush was on her cheek,

And her voice was so low, that the vows she vowed

Seemed scarce from her lips to break;

Yet joy sat on her placid lip,

And in her downcast eye,

For a long long life of happiness

Before her seemed to lie.

But her lord soon bowed to death's stern doom,

And she wept herself to her silent tomb."

On the whole then, for truth of delineation, depth of feeling, force of imagination, and tenderness of sentiment, we have the greatest pleasure in recommending the contents of this volume to such of our readers as may not yet have met with it. It is a perfect gem in the lighter walks of literature, and deserving of a place in every library; and the high poetic talent evinced gives, we think, ample promise of the rich cluster of beauties yet to be revealed, when the sons of America shall take their stand beside Milton, and Shakspeare, and Spenser, and Byron-the masterspirits of our own enlightened land.

EPIGRAM

ON AN INANIMATE BEAUTY.

From the Greek.

Beauty, unadorn'd by grace,
Exhibits oft a pretty face;
Such an inexpressive look

Is the bait without the hook.

PRINTED BY J. FLETCHER, UPPER HAYMARKET, NORWICH.

In the whole compass of literary investigation, there is not probably a more interesting inquiry than the one which this question suggests. When the orator, with his "thoughts that breathe and words that burn," annihilates every sensation, but that of fixed attention,-carrying into captivity every faculty of the soul, and bearing us along as atoms by a whirlwind to the object which he contemplates,we naturally inquire into the arcana of the process, and into the character of his genius. When the poet in the very land of enchantment, and under the influence of a spirit-stirring fancy,

"Glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, turns them to shape,
And gives to airy nothings a local
Habitation and a name,"-

we acknowledge the mysterious influence, and tremble under the excitement; but we never rest contented without ascertaining, at least to the satisfaction of our own minds, the causes of this emotion, and the nature of that energy which produced it. What then is the genius of the orator and the poet? What is the faculty which enabled Demosthenes to sting to madness his Athenian audience, when he sent them against Philip; and which invested the "olden bard of Greece" with such transcendent influence, that wherever he went, a multitude had assembled, to listen to the recitations of his muse? It is the noble faculty of invention. It is the creation of new combinations of thought, and new associations of ideas. It is the spontaneous movement of a brilliant imagination, which sits enthroned upon the riches of the universe, and appropriates to itself all that is fair and

beautiful, all that is awful and sublime. The doctrine of innate ideas, as originally maintained, has been long since exploded, and the fact, that for all our perceptions we are indebted to the operation of our senses, is generally received. Hence the man of genius, like the rest of the world, is dependent on his eye, on his ear, on his feelings; and probably even his imagination and judgment are more intimately allied to the peculiarities of his physical conformation, than at first thought we should be led to conjecture. The truth is, we cannot analyze and decompose the principles of mind. There is no process of gauging its contents, and of ascertaining with infallible precision, what portions of our various faculties are the result of mere intellect, and what other portions are consequent on our organized being. In other researches, we have not these difficulties to encounter. The astronomer has his systems upon systems external to himself, and every discovery that he makes is added to his previous storehouse of well-established and tangible data. The mathematician has his "cycles and epicycles" obvious to his senses;-every stage of his inquiries is bounded by an accurate admeasurement, and, nothing of an evanescent character approaching his path, he can leisurely survey the ground which he has trodden, conscious that his territory is his own, and fearless of any inroads that fresh discoveries may make upon his acquisitions. To the natural philosopher, a material universe is presented, and all his senses are so many avenues, by which light and information are accurately imparted. Or if, now and then, he is betrayed by one sense into mistaken conceptions, another is at hand to dissipate the illusion, and he is soon in possession of those indisputable data, which enable him to erect a beautiful structure of wisdom and of philosophy. But the science of mind is as yet in a well, and the dawn of many a century may be witnessed, before the buckets of investigation will bring up the whole of its ever-shifting deposits. On the subject before us, the probability is, that the man of genius is largely indebted for all its exhibitions to his material organization. But whatever be the cause, the effect is striking and resplendent. He throws into inanity every common-place idea, by the freshness, the novelty, the brilliancy of his combinations. While others are content to take things as they are, he is perpetually roving throughout the universe of God, and having secured to himself every cast and colour of being, he links into

union the most unexpected and apparently dissimilar elements, and is thus enabled to present new worlds, and new orders of existence, to our astonished contemplation. Nothing on which

his eye can repose, satisfies his mind. His imagination is ever

on the wing, piercing through the mists of time and space, as the mountain-top breaks through the lowering atmosphere; and having enriched herself with the fragrance of unseen objects, she descends from her elevation, with the full impression of the poet,

"Surely there are more things in heaven and earth,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

We have said that invention is the grand characteristic of
genius. But invention, as already remarked, is restricted to
the materials furnished by the senses; and hence this faculty is
usually associated with a delicate ear, with exquisite feelings,
and with a sound and discriminating judgment.
This last qua-

lification is especially important, for in the absence of steady consecutive thinking, there may be much of brilliancy of thought, much of splendour of imagination, and much of new and unexpected association of ideas, but they will originate the contortions of genius rather than her divinest inspirations. The line of separation between a high order of the imaginative faculty, and the aberrations of the intellect is supposed to be inconsiderable, and it not unfrequently happens, that where the former predominates, the latter is the distressing result. The late Robert Hall, than whom a more splendid exemplification of the capabilities of our nature never existed, was a remarkable proof of this. His imagination was occasionally too daring for our nature; and her flights beyond "this visible diurnal sphere," where she inhaled an atmosphere too etherial for flesh and blood, and had glimpses of visions too unapproachable for human ken, overpowered his judgment, and compelled the bystander to exclaim,

"Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm a God!.

how reason reels!

Surprised, aghast, and wondering at her own!"

The reminiscences of that great man show us, that there is indeed but a step between the sublime and the ridiculous; and that the inhabitants of the "chambers of imagery," into which the unprivileged community are forbidden to enter, are sometimes in danger of falling from their elevation, and sinking into the