When suddenly a sound arose, it seemed from | on far ahead, their tongues lolling out, their white the very ice beneath my feet. It was loud and tushes gleaming from their bloody mouths, their tremendous at first, until it ended in one long yell. dark shaggy breasts freckled with foam; and as I was appalled. Never before had such a noise they passed me, their eyes glared, and they howled met my ears. I thought it more than mortal-so with rage and fury. The thought flashed on my fierce, and amid such an unbroken solitude, that it mind that by this means I could avoid them, viz., by seemed a fiend from hell had blown a blast from an turning aside whenever they came too near; for infernal trumpet. Presently I heard the twigs on they, by the formation of their feet, are unable to the shore snap as if from the tread of some animal, run on ice except on a right line. and the blood rushed back to my forehead with a bound that made my skin burn, and I felt relieved that I had to contend with things of earthly and not spiritual mould, as I first fancied. My energies returned, and I looked around me for some means of defence. The moon shone through the opening by which I had entered the forest, and considering this the best means of escape, I darted towards it like an arrow. 'T was hardly a hundred yards distant, and the swallow could scarcely excel my desperate flight; yet as I turned my eyes to the shore, I could see two dark objects dashing through the under brush, at a pace nearly double that of my own. By their great speed, and the short yells which they occasionally gave, I knew at once that they were the much dreaded grey wolf.

I had never met with these animals, but from the description given of them, I had but little pleasure in making their acquaintance. Their untameable fierceness and the untiring strength which seems to be a part of their nature, render them objects of dread to every benighted traveller. "With their long gallop, which can tire

The hound's deep hate, the hunter's fire,"

they pursue their prey, and nought but death can separate them. The bushes that skirted the shore flew past with the velocity of light, as I dashed on in my flight. The outlet was nearly gained; one second more and I would be comparatively safe, when my pursuers appeared on the bank directly above me, which rose to the height of some ten feet. There was no time for thought; I bent my head and dashed wildly forward. The wolves sprang, but miscalculating my speed, sprang behind, while their intended prey glided out into the

river.

Nature turned me towards home. The light flakes of snow spun from the iron of my skates, and I was now some distance from my pursuers, when their fierce howl told me that I was again the fugitive. I did not look back-I did not feel sorry or glad; one thought of home, of the bright faces awaiting my return, of their tears if they should never again see me, and then every energy of mind and body was exerted for my escape. I was perfectly at home on the ice. Many were the days I spent on my skates, never thinking that at one time they would be my only means of safety. Every half minute an alternate yelp from my pursuers made me but too certain they were close at my heels. Nearer and nearer they came; I heard their feet pattering on the ice, nearer still, until I fancied I could hear their deep breathing. Every nerve and muscle in my frame was stretched to the utmost tension.

I immediately acted on this plan. The wolves having regained their feet, sprang directly towards me. The race was renewed for twenty yards up the stream; they were already close on my back, when I glided round and dashed past my pursuers. A fierce growl greeted my evolution, and the wolves slipped upon their haunches and sailed onward, presenting a perfect picture of helplessness and baffled rage. Thus I gained nearly a hundred yards each turning. This was repeated two or three times, every moment the wolves getting more excited and baffled, until coming opposite the house, a couple of stag hounds, aroused by the noise, bayed furiously from their kennels. The wolves taking the hint, stopped in their mad career, and after a moment's consideration turned and fled. I watched them till their dusky forms disappeared over a neighboring hill. Then, taking off my skates, I wended my way to the house, with feelings better to be imagined than described.

The Poems of ALFRED B. STREET. New York,

Clark & Austin, 130 Fulton-street.

We are pleased to see this complete edition of Mr. Street's poems, for it is difficult justly to estimate a man of genius, when his productions are strewed at random through the periodical publications of the day, like so many scattered rays of light. Our national literature is steadily growing up into manhood, for the reason that the intellect of the country is daily becoming less imitative and more original. It is idle for our authors to attempt occupying any themes of transatlantic origin, unless as they are connected with or terminate on this continent. We should not look too much abroad for subjects of thought and disquisition. American talent can never be developed into fulness upon a foreign nutriment, it must be fed at home; every nation has its peculiar place and sphere in literature, just as much as it has a geographical position, and when confined to this limit the national mind must sooner or later create a peculiar and characteristic national literature. We have been led to these remarks from observing that the marked feature of Mr. Street's poems is their Americanism, and in this we trace an essential cause of his success as a poet. He deals with historical incidents and legends belonging to our own country, and in which we all feel that we have a common property. He describes nature as seen in the depths of our noble forests, by the side of our glorious rivers, on the lakes and mountains, and he thus strikes a chord to which every heart responds.

With all his truthfulness and life-like painting, with all his vivid and spirited sketching of nature, animate and inanimate, we feel that his genius would have been wasted and misapplied upon any other than home scenes and events, and we are so far jealous of his muse, as to hope that his fine poetic powers will never be diverted from illustrating the history and scenery of his native land.

The trees along the shore seemed to dance in the uncertain light, and my brain turned with my own breathless speed: yet still they seemed to hiss forth with a sound truly horrible, when an involuntary motion on my part turned me out of my course. The wolves close behind, unable to stop and as unable to turn, slipped, fell, still going-Protestant Churchman.

PAST AND PRESENT CONDITION OF BRITISH POETRY.

The effect of the Reliques was more immediate than some have been willing to imagine. The Hermit of Goldsmith, a publication of the following year, originated in the Reliques; and the Minstrel of Beattie, a publication of the year 1771, in the preliminary dissertation prefixed to the volumes. If Percy had rendered no other service to literature "The Minstrel," says than the suggestion of the Minstrel, his name would deserve respect.

Southey,

umes.

66

cessfully before. In the same year in which Beat- | Young, the sole survivor of the poets of the last tie appeared, a new candidate came forward to generation, died, at the great age of eighty-four, The reputation of on the 5th of April; and Mr. Rogers, the still surstartle, astonish, and annoy. a poet of higher powers than Beattie seemed like- viving patriarch of the past generation of poets, was born on the 30th of July of the samne year. ly to exhibit would have sunk before the fame of the new aspirant. I allude to Churchill, whose first publication, The Rosciad, appeared in the March of 1761, and without the author's name. This was a lucky, and, what is more, a clever hit. The town, a little republic in itself, went mad about the poem; and when the author's name was prefixed to a second edition, the poet was welcomed by the public as no new poet had ever been before. Nor was his second publication-his Apology-inwas an incidental effect of Percy's volferior to his first. His name was heard in every Their immediate consequence was to procircle of fashion, and in every coffee-house in town. Nor did he suffer his reputation to flag, but kept duce a swarm of legendary tales,' bearing, in the public in one continual state of excitement for their style, about as much resemblance to the the remainder of his life. He attacked the whole genuine ballad as the heroes of a French tragedy race of actors in his Rosciad; the Critical Review- to the historical personages whose names they ers, (the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers of bear, or a set of stage-dances to the lads and lasses the day,) in his Apology; the whole Scottish na-of a village-green in the old times of the Maytion, in his Prophecy of Famine; Dr. Johnson, in The Ghost; and Hogarth, in A Familiar Epistle. Every person of distinction expected that it was to be his turn next; and there was no saying where his satire would not have reached, for he was busy with a caustic dedication to Warburton when, on the 4th of November, 1764, he died at Boulogne, at the too early age of three-and-thirty. Dr. Young survived him nearly a year. What the predecessor of Pope in satire thought of the new satirist, no one has told us.

pole." This was the more immediate effect; the lasting result of the Reliques was their directing the rude gropings of genius in a Scott, a Southey, a Coleridge, and a Wordsworth.

Beattie reappeared in 1766 with a volume of poems, better by far than what he had done before, but still insufficient to achieve the reputation which the Minstrel subsequently acquired for the author of the volume. A second candidate was Cunningham, a player, still remembered for his Kate of Aberdeen, a short but charming piece of simpleWhile the noisy Churchill" engrossed to him-hearted poetry. Poor Cunningham made no great self the whole attention of the public, a poem appeared in May, 1762, likely to outlive the caustic effusions of the satirist, because, with equal talent, it is based on less fleeting materials. This was The Shipwreck, a Poem, in Three Cantos, by a Sailor; better known as Falconer's Shipwreck, and deservedly remembered for its "simple tale," its beautiful transcripts of reality, and as adding a congenial and peculiarly British subject to the great body of our island poetry. The popularity of Churchill kept it on the shelves of the booksellers for a time, but it soon rose into a reputation, and nothing can now occur to keep it down.

When Goldsmith published his first poem (The Traveller) in the December of 1764, Churchill had been dead a month, and there was room for a new poet to supply his place. Nor were critics wanting who were able and willing to help it forward. "Such is the poem," says Dr. Johnson, who reviewed it in the Critical Review, "on which we now congratulate the public, as on a production to which, since the death of Pope, it will not be easy to find anything equal." This was high praise, not considered undeserved at the time, nor thought Such, indeed, was the reputation of the Traveller, that it was likely to have led to a further succession of poets in the school of Pope, but for the timely interposition of a collection of poems which called our attention off from the study of a single school, and directed the young and rising poets to a wider range for study and imitation.

so now.

This collection of poems was Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, one of the most tasteful collections of poems in any language, and one of the best and most widely known: "The publica"must form an tion of which," says Southey, epoch in the history of our poetry whenever it is written." The first edition appeared in 1765, a Dr. year remarkable in more ways than one.

way with his verse; he had dedicated his volume, with all the ambition of an actor, to no less a personage than Garrick; but the head of the patentee players received the stroller's poetry with indifference, and did not on this occasion repay-which he commonly did-his encomiums "in kind." But the poet of the year 1766 was Anstey, with his New Bath Guide.

"There is a new thing published," says Walpole, "that will make you split your cheeks with It is called the New Bath Guide. It laughing. stole into the world, and, for a fortnight, no soul looked into it, concluding its name was its true No such thing. It is a set of letters in name. verse, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally everything else; but so much wit, so much humor, fun, and poetry, never met together before. I can say it by heart, and, if I had time, would write it you down; for it is not yet re-printed, and not one to be had."

Gray commended it to Wharton, and Smollett wrote his Humphrey Clinker (the last and best of his works) on Anstey's principle in his Guide.

66

A publication of the year 1767, called the Beauties of English Poesy, selected by Oliver Goldsmith, deserves to be remarked. The selection seems to have been made as a sort of antidote to Percy's My bookseller having informed me,' Reliques. he says, "that there was no collection of English poetry among us of any estimation, *** I therefore offer this," he adds, "to the best of my judgment, as the best collection that has yet appeared. I claim no merit in the choice, as it was obvious, for in all languages the best productions are most easily found." It will hardly be believed by any one who hears it for the first time, that a poet of Goldsmith's taste in poetry could have made a selection from our poets without including a single poet (Milton excepted) from the noble race of

poets who preceded the restoration. Yet such, vorite stanza: it is true poetry, it is inspiration.” however, is the case; and I can only account for The stanza is well known

the principle on which the selection would appear to have been made, that it was meant as an antidote to Percy's publication, or that Goldsmith (and this is not unlikely) was perfectly unacquainted with the poets of a period previous to Dryden and Pope.

Michael Bruce, a young and promising poet, died in the year 1767, at the too early age of twenty-one. Some of his poems-and they were posthumously published, without the last touches of the author-possess unusual beauties. His Lochleven is called, by Coleridge, "a poem of great merit;" and the same great critic directs attention to what he calls "the following exquisite passage, expressing the effects of a fine day on the human heart:'

Fat on the plain and mountain's sunny side, Large droves of oxen, and the fleecy flocks, Feed undisturbed; and fill the echoing air With music grateful to the master's ear. The traveller stops, and gazes round and round O'er all the scenes that animate his heart With mirth and music. Even the mendicant, Bowbent with age, that on the old grey stone, Sole sitting, suns him in the public way, Feels his heart leap, and to himself he sings." Another poet, whose song ceased before he had time to do still better things, was poor Falconer, who perished at sea in the Aurora frigate, in the year 1769. He had sung his own catastrophe in his Shipwreck only a few years before.

The poem of the year 1770 was The Deserted Village-in some respects a superior poem to The Traveller. It was immediately a favorite, and in less than four months had run through five editions. Gray thought Goldsmith a genuine poet. "I was with him," says Nicholls, "at Malvern, when he received the Deserted Village, which he desired me to read to him; he listened with fixed attention, and soon exclaimed, This man is a poet!'

If The Deserted Village was, as it certainly is, an accession to our poetry, the death of Akenside and the far too premature removal of Chatterton were real losses in the very same year in which Goldsmith's great poem appeared. Akenside had, no doubt, sang his song, but Chatterton was only in his eighteenth year. What a production for a boy was the ballad of "Sir Charles Bawdin!" There is nothing nobler of the kind in the whole compass of our poetry. "Tasso alone," says Campbell, can be compared to him as a juvenile prodigy. No English poet ever equalled him at the same age."

66

66

"O, how canst thou renounce,"

and shares with a stanza in the Castle of Indolence, the applause of nations.

Mason, in 1771, put forth a new edition of his Poems, and in a separate publication the same year the first book of his English Garden. To the Poems he has made a few additions, but nothing so beautiful as his epitaph on his wife, inscribed upon her grave in Bristol cathedral. The lines are well known, but not so the circumstance, only recently published, that the last four lines were written by Gray :

Tell them, though 't is an awful thing to die,

('T was e'en to thee,) yet the dread path once trod,

Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high,

And bids the pure in heart behold their
God.'"'

We learn from the same unquestionable quarter, (the Reminiscences of the Rev. Norton Nicholls,) that Gray thought very little of what he had seen of the English Garden. "He mentioned the poem of the Garden with disapprobation, and said it There are lines and passages, however, of true should not be published if he could prevent it." poetry throughout the poem, which form in themselves an agreeable accession to our stock of favorite passages. How exquisite, for instance, is this:

The haunt of wood-gods only; where, if art
Many a glade is found
E'er dared to tread, 't was with unsandalled foot,
Printless, as if the place were holy ground."

The poem, however, made but a very slender impression on the public mind, nor is it now much read, save by the student of our poetry, to whom it affords a lesson of importance.

The only remembered publication in poetry of the year 1773 was The Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers-a caustic attack, replete with wit, humor, and invective, on the architect's Chinese eccentricities in the gardens at Kew. It was long before Mason was suspected of the satire. Tom Warton was the first to attribute it to his pen; he said it was Walpole's buckramed up by Mason. But Walpole, from a letter to Mason only recently published, would appear to have had nothing to do with it. "I have read it," writes Walpole, "so very often, that I have got it by heart, and now I am master of all its beauties. I confess I like it infinitely better than I did, though I liked it infinitely before. But what signifies what I think! All the world thinks the same. No soul has, 1 have heard, guessed within a hundred miles. I catched at Anstey's, and have, I believe, contributed to spread the notion. It has since been called Temple Luttrell's, and, to my infinite honor, mine. But now that you have tapped this mine of talent, and it runs so richly and easily, for Heaven's and for England's sake, do not let it rest.

The Deserted Village of the year 1770 was followed in 1771 by the first book of The Minstrel, a poem which has given more delight to minds of a certain class, and that class a high one, than any other poem in the English language. Since Beattie composed his poem on which his fame relies, and securely too for an hereafter, many poems of a far loftier and even a more original character have been added to the now almost overgrown body of our poetry, yet Beattie is still the poet for the young; and still The Heroic Epistle was followed, in 1774, by the in Edwin-that happy personification of the poetic Judah Restored, of Roberts-" a work," temperament-young and enthusiastic readers de- Campbell," of no common merit." Southey calls light and recognize a picture of themselves. Gray the author a poet of the same respectable class as lived to commend and to correct it-with the taste the author of Leonidas and the Athenaid, and adds of a true poet and the generosity of an unselfish in a note, "Dr. Roberts' Judah Restored was one "This of all others," he says, "is my fa- of the first books that I ever possessed. It was

one.

says

The

given me by a lady whom I must ever gratefully of Gray, appeared two years later, (1781,) and, and affectionately remember as the kindest friend like the former portion of the work, was read with of my boyhood. I read it often then, and can still deserved avidity. The effect was catching. recur to it with satisfaction; and perhaps I owe school of Dryden and Pope revived. Hayley something to the plain dignity of its style, which wrote his Triumphs of Temper in the verse recomis suited to the subject, and everywhere bears the mended by Johnson; Crabbe composed his Library stamp of good sense and careful erudition. To and his Village in the same versification; Cowper acknowledge obligations of this kind is both a his Table Talk, and even Mason (though the last pleasure and a duty."* I have Southey's copy person in the world to admit it) his translation of of the Judah before me at this moment; on the fly- Du Fresnoy, in Johnson's only measure. leaf is inscribed, in the neat hand-writing of the But the fear of Dr. Johnson did not reach bepoet, "Robert Southey-given me by Mrs. Do-yond the grave, and when Cowper put forth his lignon, 1784." "The poet of Kehama was born the Task in the spring of 1785, the great critic was no year in which the Judah appeared, and was only more. Not that Cowper was likely to be deterred ten years old when a copy of the poem was given from blank verse by the criticisms of Johnson, for to him by the lady he remembers so affectionately the Task was commenced in Johnson's lifetime, and as "the kindest friend of his boyhood." This one in the same structure of versification. That Johnbook may have had the same effect on Southey son could have hurt the sale for a time by a savage that Spenser's works had upon the mind of Cow-remark at the table of Reynolds, no one acquainted ley: "I had read him all over," he says, "before with the literature of the period will for a moment I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet doubt. That he could have kept the poem from as immediately as a child is made an eunuch. what it now possesses and deserves-a universal On the 4th of April, 1774, died Oliver Gold-admiration, it would be equally absurd to suppose smith, leaving unfortunately unfinished one of the for a single moment. best of his lighter pieces-his well-known and inimitable Retaliation. It was published a fortnight after his death, and became immediately a favorite. A second posthumous publication of the same poet was The Haunch of Venison, a clever epistle to Lord Clare, full of characteristic beauties peculiar to its author. Both pieces owe something to Anstey and his Guide-the suggestion certainly.

In 1776 Mickle put forth his translation of the Luciad-free, flowery, and periphrastical, full of spirit, and not devoid of beauties, but untrue to the majestic simplicity of the great Portuguese.

When Cowper put forth his Task there was no poet of any great ability or distinguished name in the field. Hayley ambled over the course, to use an expression of Southey, without a competitor. But Hayley had done his best, poor as that was, though his day was hardly by. It was Cowper who forced us from the fetters which Johnson had forged for future poets, and Hayley had done his best to rivet and retain. Nor was Cowper without some assistance at this time. Evans' old ballads did something to extend a taste for the early but unknown masters of our poetry. Some of Mickle's While Goldsmith was confining his selection imitations, in the same collection, were read by from our poets to a period too narrow to embrace younger minds with an influence of which we enmany of the nobler productions of the British joy the fruits to this day. Charlotte Smith put muse, Gray was annotating Lydgate, and the forth a volume of her sonnets, replete with touchyounger Warton collecting materials for his Histo-ing sentiment, eminently characteristic of the softer ry of English Poetry. Our literature lies under graces of the female mind, and the late Sir Egerother obligations to the younger Warton-great ton Brydges, a volume of poems, containing one as that obligation is for his noble and unfinished noble sonnet (" Echo and Silence") which, though History. He was the first to explain and direct neglected at the time, will live as long as any attention to many of the less obvious beauties of poem of its length in the English language. The Faerie Queene, and, in conjunction with Ed- The Task was followed by a volume of poems wards, the first to revive the sonnet among us, a from a provincial press full of the very finest poefavorite form of verse with our Elizabethan poets, try, and one that has stood its test, and will stand with Shakspeare and with Milton, but entirely forever. The author of the Task was of noble exabandoned by the poets who came after them. traction, and counted kin with lord chancellors and The first volume of Warton's History was pub-earls. His fellow author was a poor Scottish lished in 1774; his Poems containing his sonnets peasant, nameless and unknown when his poems in 1777. The effect produced by their publica-were put forth, but known, and deservedly known, tion was more immediate than has hitherto been wherever the language of his country has been thought. We owe the sonnets of Bampfylde (4to. heard. This poet was Robert Burns. Cowper and 1778) to the example of the younger Warton. Burns were far too nobly constituted to think disNor is the pupil unworthy of the master, or unwil-couragingly of one another. "Is not the Task," ling to own his obligation. Some of the Sixteen says Burns, "a glorious poem?" The religion of Sonnets of Bampfylde (for such is the title of his the Task, bating a few scraps of "Calvinistic dithin unpretending quarto) are "beautiful exceed-vinity, is the religion of God and nature; the reingly," and in one (the tenth) Warton is addressed ligion that exalts and ennobles man.' "I have in a way which he could well appreciate. read Burns' poems,' says Cowper, "and have

The good effects of Percy's Reliques, Warton's read them twice; and though they be written in a volume of History, and Warton's Poems, received language that is new to me, and many of them on a temporary check in the year 1779, by the publi- subjects much inferior to the author's ability, I cation of the first part of Johnson's well-known think them on the whole a very extraordinary proLives of the Poets, containing his celebrated criti-duction. He is, I believe, the only poet these cism on the Lycidas of Milton, and his noble parallel between Dryden and Pope. The concluding portion of the Lives, containing his famous abuse

* Southey's Cowper, vol. iii., p. 32.

kingdoms have produced in the lower rank of life save Shakspeare, (I should rather say save Prior,) who need not be indebted for any part of his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, and the disadvantages under which he has labored. It will