ering poor.

BOOKS RECEIVED TOO LATE FOR REVIEW.

LYRICS OF A DAY; OR, NEWSPAPER POETRY. By a Volunteer of the U. S.
Service. New York: Carleton, publisher, 413 Broadway.

RED-TAPE AND PIGEON-HOLE GENERALS: as Seen from the Ranks during a
Campaign in the Army of the Potomac. By a Citizen Soldier.

'We must be brief when traitors brave the field.'

New York: Carleton, publisher, 413 Broadway.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

ADELAIDE A. PROCTER AND JEAN INGELOW.

Extremes ever meet, and our age, which is preeminently occupied with
physical science and material comfort and aggrandizement, is also
eminently productive in good poetry. There should be no antithesis
between the words _physical science_ and _poetry_. The secrets of the
Universe, the ways of God's working, are surely the highest poetry; but
the greater number of scientists have willed a divorce between the
material and the spiritual, and decry that very imaginative faculty
which, in the case of Kepler, bore such wonderful fruits for science.
Facts are very well, and induction is also well, but science requires
the aid of the creative and divining imagination to order the details
and draw thence the broader and higher generalizations. Let us hope that
the good common sense of the in-coming half-century will annul the
divorce, and again unite on a solid basis spheres that should never have
been so far sundered.

Meantime, we cannot but remark the number of good poems meeting us on
every hand, not only from writers known to fame, but also from the
living tombs of obscure country newspapers. We know it is the fashion to
deride such productions, and sneer at the 'would-be poets.' Let critics
speak the truth fearlessly, but let them never prefer the glitter of a
self-glorifying search for faults to the more amiable but less piquant
occupation of discovering solid thought, earnest feeling, and poetic
fancy. It is well to discourage insipidity, impudent pretension, and
every species of affectation; but critics are, like authors, fallible,
and not unfrequently present glaring examples of the very faults they
condemn. In any case where the knife is needed, let it be used firmly
but gently, that, while the patient bleeds, he may feel the wound has
been inflicted by no unloving, cynical hand, but was really intended for
his ultimate good. Let the instrument be finely tempered, and neither
coarse nor rough. We can all recall a few cases where a rude treatment
has