of publication of recent poems. It has become a real
pleasure to see their paper, type, and binding, and their neat garments
of fine linen, delicately trimmed and lettered with burnished gold. Such
a highly ornamented work at present adorns every table, and appears
right well in the white little hand of its fair possessor.

"The poems of Jeanne Marie, the popular romance writer, are by an
intelligent and well educated lady. She has evidently observed and
reflected much in the world, and had also her own experiences
therein--yet knows how to express with propriety and consciousness her
most passionate feelings. She is, however, in her poems, rather witty
and calculating, than inspired with heart and soul. Those productions
are, for the greater part, images and comparisons--not unfrequently very
exquisitely conceived and executed--the _point_ being occasionally a
gross antithesis, as for example in the poem, _Alles nur Du_:

"'What I most longed for, thou hast to me given,
What I possess, belongeth all to thee;
Thou art mine _I_--thine is my life and heaven,
My life is thine, and thine my all _To-Be_.'

"Or in other poems, the conclusion merely amounts to the explanation of
a comparison, as in the _New Cloak Song_, in which on a rusty nail, a
torn cloak explains itself as the cloak of Christian love. But where our
poetess simply narrates or describes, her art is truly agreeable, only
that the lively and closely detailed perceptions, which shoot forth in
her soul, often appear obscure from a want of practice in poetic
language, and not unfrequently entirely perverted on account of an utter
deficiency in logical acuteness.

"But since this poetess is endowed with far more than her
cotemporaries--_id est_, a peculiar talent to conceive and represent in
a lively manner epic details--let us, for the sake of art, gently beg of
her to do something for this her talent. She is by far too ignorant of
the art of application of terms in lyrical poetry, her delivery is too
variable and inaccurate, while botched-up expressions (_Flickwoerter_)
and startling instances of incorrectness in language are in her writings
every where to be met with. As yet she is a mere amateur and
_dilettant_, and her right, to lay before the literary world her poetic
inspirations, may very correctly be doubted; and yet she has evidently
in her the material for something far better. This she can attain in
only one way. She must lay as