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POEMS BY W. W. — We took this volume to bed with us, prepared, by the outcry of the critics, to find in its dulness a short road. to sleep. It soon satisfied us, however, that nothing will please the critics short of fruit before blossoms. We never saw a first book of a new author, in our life, that had as many indications of the rarer qualities of genius, full as it is of such defects as a school usher would correct in an exercise of prosody. We have no idea who the author is (more than his name) or what have been his advantages; but whether he starts from the lark's nest of unfavorable circumstances, or the pyramid-top of culture and encouragement, he flies high and with his own wings. We have not room for more than the “brick”’ of the Scholastikos “as a specimen of the, house,” but here is one among fifty thoughts against which we ran our pencil in reading:
“Think, heedless one, or who, with wanton step,
Tramplest the flowers, the flowers are God's thoughts!
Beautiful thoughts -that long before he gave
Their loveliness to bless thy thankless sight,
Perennials of an eternal year,
Blossom’d and shed their fragrance in His soul,
And, ere beheld on earth, did garden Heav’n.
There is in Nature nothing mean or base
But only as our baseness thinks it so,
Making that common by the touch and sight,
Which, if as distant as the stars, would seem
As sacred and as marvellous as they.”
We could show many more thoughts in this volume quite at the lift of Wordsworth's best flight, but wanting, all of them, a little more of the uninspired labor of polish on the versification.
New York Evening Mirror.
Mr. Willis, the distinguished editor of the Mirror, an eminent and most charming poet himself, has a heart to feel and appreciate the poetry of others, and a magnanimity of soul that makes him delight in bestowing warm praise wherever it is due. We have not seen the volume of Mr. Lord, but we have met with several extracts from it which prove to us that its author is one of the eagle-spirits of the age.
We perceive that Mr. Lord's poetry is black guarded by the notorious Edgar A. Poe of the Broadway Journal and by Mr. Sullivan of the New York Morning News. Poe is not without talent, but he has ten times more malignity than talent, and his time seems to be about equally divided between writing strange and rather indifferent poetry himself and abusing the good poetry of others. Sullivan has considerable talent, but he is an envenomed Locofoco, and Mr. Lord's, noble and beautiful tributes to Henry Clay have stirred up all his rancor. The one or two hundred lines that we have seen from Mr. Lord's book are worth everything that Poe and Sullivan ever wrote or ever can write. The eagle is a more glorious creature than a pair of snapping-turtles.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - LDJ, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poems by W. W. Lord (Anonymous, 1845)