tle wall."

As to "Babie Bell," that ballad has passed too deeply into the popular
heart to be affected for good or ill by criticism,--and we have only to
express our love of it. Simple, pathetic, and real, it early made the
poet a reputation and friends in every home visited by the newspapers,
in which it has been printed over and over again. It is but one of
various poems by Mr. Aldrich which enjoy a sort of perennial fame, and
for which we have come to look in the papers, as we do for certain
flowers in the fields, at their proper season. In the middle of June,
when the beauty of earth and sky drives one to despair, we know that it
is time to find the delicately sensuous and pensive little poem
"Nameless Pain" in all our exchanges; and later, when the summer is
subject to sudden thunderstorms, we look out for "Before the Rain," and
"After the Rain." It is very high praise of these charming lyrics, that
they have thus associated themselves with a common feeling for certain
aspects of nature, and we confess that we recur to them with greater
pleasure than we find in some of our poet's more ambitious efforts.
Indeed, we think Mr. Aldrich's fame destined to gain very little from
his recent poems, "Judith," "Garnaut Hall," and "Pythagoras"; for when
it comes to be decided what is his and what is his period's, these poems
cannot be justly awarded to him. To borrow a figure from the polygamic
usages of our Mormon brethren, they are sealed to Mr. Aldrich for time
and to Mr. Tennyson for eternity. They contain many fine and original
passages: the "Judith" contains some very grand ones, but they must bear
the penalty of the error common to all our younger poets,--the error of
an imitation more or less unconscious. It is to the example of the
dangerous poet named that Mr. Aldrich evidently owes, among other minor
blemishes, a mouse which does some mischief in his verses. It is a
wainscot mouse, and a blood-relation, we believe, to the very mouse that
shrieked behind the mouldering wainscot in the lonely moated grange.
This mouse of Mr. Aldrich's appears twice in a brief lyric called
"December"; in "Garnaut Hall," she makes

"A lodging for her glossy young
In dead Sir Egbert's empty coat of mail,"

and immediately afterwards drags the poet over the precipice of
anti-climax:--

"'T was a haunted spot.
A legend killed it for a kindly home,--
A grim estate, which every heir in turn
Left t