There is no tinsel in the grove--
I've shut my garden gate.

"What boots continual glare and strife?
I cannot always climb;
I would not struggle all my life--
I need a breathing time.
Pass on--I've sanctified these grounds
To friendship, love, and lore:
Ye cannot come within the bounds--
I've shut the garden door."

* * * * *

POETICAL COMPOSITION.--If metre and melody be worth anything at all, let
them be polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine
years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can--at
least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel
dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in
the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil,
and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and
weary polishing and grinding must follow, before your sword-blade will
cut. And melody is what makes poetry cut; what gives it its life, its
power, its magic influence, on the hearts of men. It must ring in their
ears; it must have music in itself; it must appeal to the senses as well
as to the feelings, the imagination, the intellect: then, when it seizes
at once on the whole man, on body, soul, and spirit, will it "swell in
the heart, and kindle in the eyes," and constrain him, he knows not why,
to believe and to obey.--_Fraser, for June._

* * * * *

POETRY OF THE LAST AGE AND THE PRESENT.--A writer in the last number of
_Fraser's Magazine_ says well that, "there is in periodicals and
elsewhere, a vast amount of really poetic imagery, of true and tender
feeling, and cultivated ingenuity, scattered up and down in the form of
verse. We have no new great poets, but very many small ones--layers, as
it were, and seedlings from the lofty geniuses of the last generation,
showing in every line the influence of Scott, Shelley, Burns,
Wordsworth, and their compeers, seeing often farther than their masters
saw, but dwarfs on giants' shoulders. Not that we complain of this.
Elizabethan ages must be followed by Caroline ones; and our second
Elizabethan galaxy is past; Tennyson alone survives, in solitary
greatness, a connecting link between the poetry of the past and that of
the future. In poetry, and in many other things, ours is a Caroline age;
greater than the first one, as every modern cycle in a God-taught world,
will be nobler, rich