E. Tilton & Company. 1860.
pp. 352.

It is very plain that we have got a new poet,--a tremendous
responsibility both for him who will have to learn how to carry the
brimming vase of Art from the Pierian spring without squandering a drop,
and for us critics who are to reconcile ourselves to what is new in him,
and to hold him strictly to that apprenticeship to the old which is the
condition of mastery at last.

Criticism in America has reached something like the state of the old
Continental currency. There is no honest relation between the promises
we make and the specie basis of meaning they profess to represent. "The
most extraordinary book of the age" is published every week; "genius"
springs up like mullein, wherever the soil is thin enough; the yearly
catch of "weird imagination," "thrilling pathos," "splendid
description," and "sublime imagery" does not fall short of an ordinary
mackerel-crop; and "profound originality" is so plenty that one not in
the secret would be apt to take it for commonplace. Now Tithonus, whom,
as the oldest inhabitant, we have engaged to oversee the criticism of
the "Atlantic," has a prodigiously long memory,--almost as long as one
of Dickens's descriptive passages,--he remembers perfectly well all the
promising young fellows from Orpheus down, and has made a notch on the
stalk of a devil's-apron for every one who ever came to anything that
was of more consequence to the world than to himself. His tally has not
yet mounted to a baker's dozen. Accordingly, when a young enthusiast
rushes to tell Tithonus that a surprising genius has turned up, that
venerable and cautious being either puts his hand behind his ear and
absconds into an extemporary deafness, or says dryly, "American kind, I
suppose?" This coolness of our wary senior is infectious, and we confess
ourselves so far disenchanted by it, that, when we go into a library,
the lettering on the backs of nine-tenths of the volumes contrives to
shape itself into a laconic _Hic jacet_.

It is of prime necessity to bring back the currency of criticism to the
old hard-money basis. We have been gradually losing all sense of the
true relation between words and things,--the surest symptom of
intellectual decline. And this looseness of criticism reacts in the most
damaging way upon literature by continually debasing the standard, and
by confounding all distinction between fame and notoriety. Ought it to
be gratifying to the author of "Popular