s. Vague and
objectless longings--the cold lights of mere fancy, are the
characteristics of those writers. Sometimes we discover a regret, or a
mournful remembrance, but so obscure as to be nearly lost in a vastly
diffused hope of some good which is not realized. We have endeavored to
discover if the sentiment of conjugal love were there, but we are
disappointed. To us, Europeans, who are overwhelmed with romances, in
which this chaste sentiment is analyzed and written of in a manner to
produce absolute nausea, it is not, perhaps, known how much discretion
there is in this passionless exterior, and how commendable it is that so
holy a sentiment should not pass the sacred inclosures of the female
heart; that it should not wound the delicacies of its own natural
reserve and silence. The talents of these writers are exercised upon
permitted subjects, and not, as too often among our own female poets,
upon subjects at once easy and unlawful.

This modesty and reserve throughout the work become necessarily
monotonous--but it is of no great consequence to us. We would not have
written if it had not been to acknowledge specimens of real literary
excellence. But we have in the work itself what is of considerable value
as reflecting in some degree the American character. We can use these
elegies, reveries and monodies as a means of discovering the nature of
the virtues thus brought out from obscurity, though in coloring too pale
and uniform. The life of these women possesses nothing adventurous,
passionate, or eccentric. It is composed of three facts: birth,
marriage, and death. As to the intervals between these three solemn
events, the biographer says little, and we suppose they are filled with
exemplary virtues and the accomplishment of duties which human and
divine law imposes upon the woman. Three of these, however, are
distinguished from the others by their position in society, or by their
talents, and constitute the only singularities of the work.

We have just remarked, that these _poesies_ are all written by the
daughters of rich merchants, lawyers, and doctors of divinity; two,
however, are of low condition--a negress, Philis Wheatley Peters; and a
domestic, Maria James. The negress belonged to the close of the
eighteenth century, and was born at a time to justify the pamphlets of
Franklin on slavery, and the demands of philanthropy. This "daughter of
the murky Senegal," as one of her critics called her, has been, thank