did of the
good Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men."

ROBERT DINSMORE.

The great charm of Scottish poetry consists in its simplicity, and
genuine, unaffected sympathy with the common joys and sorrows of daily
life. It is a home-taught, household melody. It calls to mind the
pastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, the
song of the lark in the sunrise, the cry of the quail in the corn-land,
the low of cattle, and the blithe carol of milkmaids "when the kye come
hame" at gloaming. Meetings at fair and market, blushing betrothments,
merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades of
domestic life, its bereavements and partings, its chances and changes,
its holy death-beds, and funerals solemnly beautiful in quiet kirkyards,
--these furnish the hints of the immortal melodies of Burns, the sweet
ballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rustic
drama of Ramsay. It is the poetry of home, of nature, and the
affections.

All this is sadly wanting in our young literature. We have no songs;
American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by the
sweet and graceful and tender associations of poetry. We have no Yankee
pastorals. Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are
otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint
ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and
parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the
tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and
imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the
spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly
sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the
joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the
opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is
that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian
Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected
to homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and its
utterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions and
yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot be
uttered." If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights and
sounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vague
analogy between them and its internal experienc