than in the popular view:

The shadows lay along Broadway,
'Twas near the twilight-tide--
And slowly there a lady fair
Was walking in her pride.
Alone walk'd she; but, viewlessly
Walk'd spirits at her side.

Peace charm'd the street beneath her feet,
And honor charm'd the air;
And all astir looked kind on her,
And called her good as fair--
For all God ever gave to her
She kept with chary care.

She kept with care her beauties rare
From lovers warm and true--
For heart was cold to all but gold,
And the rich came not to woo--
But honor'd well her charms to sell,
If priests the selling do.

Now walking there was one more fair--
A slight girl, lily-pale;
And she had unseen company
To make the spirit quail--
Twixt Want and Scorn she walk'd forlorn,
And nothing could avail.

No mercy now can clear her brow
From this world's peace to pray,
For as love's wild prayer dissolved in air,
Her woman's heart gave way!--
But the sin forgiven by Christ in Heaven,
By man is cursed alway!

In this composition we find it difficult to recognise the Willis who has
written so many mere "verses of society." The lines are not only richly
ideal but full of energy, while they breathe an earnestness, an evident
sincerity of sentiment, for which we look in vain throughout all the
other works of this author.

While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity
is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of
the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded
by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in
the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have
accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all
its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of _The Didactic_. It
has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that
the ultimate object of all Poetry is truth. Every poem, it is said,
should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the
work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy
idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We
have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's
sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to
confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity an