y number of intellectual cherry-trees. It is
a sight more surprising than pleasant; and her Ladyship must not be
astonished that the critics should not treat her with the respect due to
her age, when she herself labors so hard to make them forget it.

_Bitter-Sweet. A Poem_. By J.G. HOLLAND, Author of "The Bay Path,"
"Titcomb's Letters," etc. New York: Charles Scribner, 124 Grand Street.
pp. 220. 1859.

Unexpectedness is an essential element of wit,--perhaps, also, of
pleasure; and it is the ill-fortune of professional reviewers, not only
that surprise is necessarily something as rare with them as a June
frost, but that loyalty to their extemporized omniscience should forbid
them to acknowledge, even if they felt, so fallible an emotion.

Unexpectedness is also one of the prime components of that singular
product called Poetry; and, accordingly, the much-enduring man whose
finger-ends have skimmed many volumes and many manners of verse may be
pardoned the involuntary bull of not greatly expecting to stumble
upon it in any such quarter. Shall we, then, be so untrue to our
craft,--shall we, in short, be so unguardedly natural, as to confess
that "Bitter-Sweet" has surprised us? It is truly an original poem,--as
genuine a product of our soil as a golden-rod or an aster. It is as
purely American,--nay, more than that,--as purely New-English,--as the
poems of Burns are Scotch. We read ourselves gradually back to our
boyhood in it, and were aware of a flavor in it deliciously local and
familiar,--a kind of sour-sweet, as in a _frozen-thaw_ apple. From
the title to the last line, it is delightfully characteristic. The
family-party met for Thanksgiving can hit on no better way to be jolly
than in a discussion of the Origin of Evil,--and the Yankee husband (a
shooting-star in the quiet heaven of village morals) about to run away
from his wife can be content with no less comet-like vehicle than
a balloon. The poem is Yankee, even to the questionable extent of
substituting "locality" for "scene" in the stage-directions; and we feel
sure that none of the characters ever went to bed in their lives, but
always sidled through the more decorous subterfuge of "retiring."

We could easily show that "Bitter-Sweet" was not this and that and
t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately
charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a
certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always