Richard Henry Stoddard doubtless has been styled a promising young poet
by half the newspaper press; therefore if we venture to say that Mr.
Stoddard has performed, and that the promising season is over with him,
it is not because we do not think that his future poems will exhibit new
and greater excellencies, but because we recognize merits in his present
collection which eminently entitle him to respectful consideration.

The evident source of Mr. Stoddard's inspiration is a love for ideal
beauty, in whatever form it may be manifested. Like all admirers of
ideal beauty, he has a strong sensual element in his composition. He is
not satisfied with the mere dreams of his imagination, but he must also
attempt to realize them through the medium of imitative art. Among the
various modes for expressing the same feelings and ideas, painting,
poetry, sculpture and music, he has chosen poetry as the one best
adapted to his purpose. We would not be understood to assert that an
artist may, at will, express his emotions in any of the arts; for a man
may be insensible to an idea expressed in sculpture or music, which is
perfectly clear to him in poetry or painting; but we assert that all the
arts are but different languages to convey the same ideas. True art
addresses itself to the moral, the intellectual, or the sensual man; and
by the predominance of one of these qualities in the artist, or by
various combinations of the three, all the radical differences between
men of genius can be accounted for, and all the seeming mysteries
explained. This truth is the groundwork of genuine criticism; and the
critic who busies himself about the accidental circumstances, which have
influenced an artist, is only prying into his history, without sounding
the depth of his nature. At least let criticism start here: it may
afterward indulge in microscopic comparisons of style, and in worn-out
accusations of imitation: but it is a sorry thing to see persons
assuming the dignified office of the critic magnifying molehills into
mountains, and similarities into thefts. All men are gifted with various
faculties, but it is not in the superiority of any or all of them that
we can account for the existence of the poet, who has something of the
divine nature in him, having a creative energy that is not a result of
the degree in which he possesses one or more of the ordinary faculties,
but is a special distinction with which he is clothed by the deity.

W