ellectual quality. Let it not be
supposed that we wish to hold the two latter elements as superior to the
former for poetical purposes; nor do we by asserting the greater
preponderance of any one, deny the possession of the other two. To the
sensuous in man we are indebted for the great body of Grecian poetry,
and Keats wholly, and Tennyson in part, are modern instances of what may
be achieved by imbibing the spirit of the ancient classics. Shallow
critics have professed to discover a resemblance between these English
poets and Mr. Stoddard, and Mr. Taylor has also fallen under the same
accusation, for no better reason, that we can conceive, than that all
four have drunk at the same fountain, and enjoyed its inspirations.

Mr. Stoddard's sympathies are almost entirely given up to ancient
Grecian art. He can scarcely realize that the dream has passed forever.
He sees something vital in its very ruins. For him the Phidian friezes
yet crown the unplundered Parthenon; the gigantic Athena yet gleams
through sacerdotal incense, in all her ivory whiteness, smiling upon
reeking altars and sacrificing priests; Delphos has yet an oracular
voice; Bacchus and Pan and his Satyrs yet lead their riotous train
through a forest whose every tree is alive with its dryad, and whose
every fountain is haunted by its potamid; there are yet patriot veins to
glow at the Iliad; AEschylus can yet fill a theatre; Pericles yet
thunders at Cimon from the Cema, or woos Aspasia, or tempers the
headlong Alcibiades, or prepares his darling Athens for the
Peloponnesian war. These things Mr. Stoddard feels while the locomotive
shrieks in his ears, while the omnibus, speeding to the steamship,
rattles the glass of his window, while the newsboy cries his monotonous
advertisement, or his servant hands to him a telegraphic dispatch; and
he is right. The body in which Grecian art existed, is indeed dead, but
the spirit which animated it is indestructible. There will be poets to
worship and reproduce it, there will be scholars to admire and preserve
it, when every man's field is bounded by a railway, when every housetop
is surmounted by a telegraph wire, and when the golden calf is again set
up amid the people, to be worshipped as the living God.

From the force of his sympathies, Mr. Stoddard can lean but in that
direction. Throughout his volume there is scarcely a poem which is not
the offshoot of these feelings. Some of them are confessedly upon
Grecian sub