t the sacredness of misery which a poet ever
perpetrated.

Schlegel said of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, and A
Yorkshire Tragedy, that they were not only Shakspeare's, but in his
opinion deserved to be classed among his best and maturest works. This
is the most ridiculous judgment which a great critic ever made, and
coming as it does, after the author's profound view of Shakspeare's
genius, is as singular as it is ridiculous.

_Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By Alphonse de Lamartine.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 2 vols. 12mo._

Lamartine is a man of fine genius and great courage, but both as an
author and politician is a sentimentalist. His characteristic mental
quality, that of seeing all external objects through a luminous mist
exhaling from his heart and imagination, is as prominent in the
present volume of travels as in his political speeches and state
papers. He sees nothing in clear, white light; every thing through a
personal medium. To use a distinction of an ingenious analyst, he
tells you rather of the beauty and truth of his feelings than the
beauty and truth he feels; and accordingly his sentimentality is
closely allied to vanity. This absence of clear perception is not the
result of his being a poet, but of his being a poet of the second
class. Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, even Milton, would not fail in
politics from a similar lack of seeing things as they are. We believe
that Homer and Shakspeare might have made better statesmen than
Pericles and Bacon. The great poet fails in practical life not from
seeing things through a distorting medium, but from viewing them in
relation to an ideal standard. This was the case with Milton. Now
Lamartine is in the habit of _Lamartinizing_ the whole world in his
writings. The mirror he holds up to life and nature simply reflects
himself. He cannot pass beyond his own individuality--he has no
objective insight.

We will guarantee that every reader of the present volumes will rise
from their perusal with a knowledge of the author rather than the
subject. He will obtain no information of men, scenery, or remarkable
places, such as he might receive from a common tourist, deficient
equally in sentiment and imagination; neither will he carry away such
clear pictures and representations as Scott or Goethe might stamp upon
his memory. He will simply be informed of the thoughts, fancies,
opinions, and varying moods of Lamartine, as awakened by the objects