mity. It was also found, that, striking as some of the images, metaphors, and similes were, they gave little poetic satisfaction or delight, A certain thinness of sentiment, poverty of idea, and shallowness of experience, were not hidden from view, to one who looked sharply through the gorgeous wrappings of words. A small, but sensitive and facile nature, capable of fully expressing itself by the grace of a singularly fluent fancy, with an appetite for beauty rather than a passion for it, with no essential imagination and opulence of soul,—this was the mortifying result to which we were conducted by analysis. Still, it was asserted that the luxuriance of the young poet’s mind promised much; let a few years pass, and Tennyson and Browning and Elizabeth Barrett would be at his feet. A few years have passed, and here is his second volume. It has less richness of fancy than the first, but its merits and demerits are the same. The man has not yet grown into a poet,— has not yet learned that the foliage, flowers, and fruits of the mind should be connected with primal roots in its individual being. These are still tied on, in his old manner, to a succession of thoughts and emotions, which have themselves little vital connection with each other. The "hey-day in his blood," which gave an appearance of exulting and abounding life to his first poems, has somewhat subsided now, and the effect is, that "The City Poems," as a whole, are leaner in spirit, and more morbid and despondent in tone, than the "Life Drama." Yet there is still so much that is superficially striking in the volume, such a waste of imagery and emotion, and so many occasional lines and epithets of real power and beauty, that we close the volume with some vexation and pain at our inability to award it the praise which many readers will think it deserves.
FOREIGN
Der Reichspostreiter in Ludwigsburg, Novelle Auf Geschichtlichem Hintergrunde Von Robert Heller. 1858.
A Very interesting novel indeed, sketching life at the little court of the Duke of Wurtemberg at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the overthrow of the government of a famous mistress of the Duke, the Countess Würben. The main points of interest in the story are historical, and the tissue of fiction interwoven with these is remarkably well arranged. Herr Heller belongs to the school of German novelists who, like Hermann Kurz, and others of minor mark, make a copious and comprehensive use of historical facts in Art. Their object and aim seem to be rather to illustrate and embody the historical facts in the flesh and blood of tangible reality, than merely to amuse by transforming history into a material for poetical entertainment. With all that, the abovenamed little volume is amply worth reading.
Une Ete dans le Sahara, par Eugene Fromentin. Paris. 1857.
A Painter describes here a summer journey through the Desert of Sahara, as far south from Algiers as El Aghouat, in the year 1853. There is not much that is now in this book, considering the many later and far more comprehensive and extensive illustrations of life in the Great Desert, since published by Bayard Taylor, Barth, and others; but it is a very interesting picture of this life, as seen and drawn by a painter. His descriptions contain many landscape and genre pictures, by means of which a vivid idea of the scenery and life are conveyed to the imagination of the reader.
