With its huge rivers and sky-piercing peaks,
Its sea-like lakes and mighty cataracts,
Its forests vast and hoar, and prairies wide,
And mounds that tell of wondrous tribes extinct;
But Poesy springs not from rocks and woods;
Her womb and cradle are the human heart,
And she can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight,
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore
Between the frozen deserts of the poles.
All nations have their message from on high,
Each the messiah of some central thought,
For the fulfilment and delight of Man:
One has to teach that Labor is divine;
Another, Freedom; and another, Mind;
And all, that GOD is open-eyed and just,
The happy centre and calm heart of all.

It is impossible to read such sentiments as these, without feeling our
hearts open to him who gives them utterance. Mr. LOWELL is one of those
writers who gain admiration for their verses and lovers for themselves. We
can pay him no higher compliment.

There is nothing in the title-page or appearance of this elegant volume to
indicate that it is not published in Cambridge, England; but unlike the
majority of American books of poetry, any page in the work will give out
too strong an odor of Bunker-Hill, though we find no allusion to that
sacred eminence, to allow the reader to remain long in doubt of its
paternity. Although we hold that any writing worthy of being called poetry
must be of universal acceptance, and adapted to the longings and
necessities of the entire human family, as the same liquid element
quenches the thirst of the inhabitants of the tropics and the poles, yet
every age and every clime must of necessity tincture its own productions.
We do not therefore diminish in the slightest degree the high poetical
pretensions of Mr. LOWELL'S poems, when we claim for them a national
character, silent though they be upon 'the stars and stripes,' and a
complexion which no other age of the world than our own could have given.
They are not only American poems, but they are poems of the nineteenth
century. There is a spirit of freedom, of love for GOD and MAN, that
broods over them, which our partiality for our own country makes us too
ready perhaps to claim as the natural offspring of our land and laws. The
volume is dedicated to WILLIAM PAGE, the painter, in a bit of as sweet and
pure language as can be found in English prose. It might be tacked on to
one of DRYDEN'S ded