of the victims. The Corinthian capital is sixteen | entry of Maria Louisa into Paris, a wooden and feet and a half wide, with a railing. On it is a canvass model was thrown over the good intengilt globe, with the "Genius of Liberty," with a tions. These intentions remained good until the torch in one hand, and a broken chain in the Duke of Angoulême, having stifled Spanish reother, ready to fly as a propagandist. The bellion, needed some celebration of the barbaric height of the column is one hundred and sixty-order; so the arch rose as high as the architrave three feet. Beneath the whole is a sarcophagus. of the entablature. The government of Louis But may Mephistopheles fly off with such monu- Philippe carried it through, thereby helping to ments! But the other day, and, it was said, glorify Napoleon and destroy the citizen king: more than 150,000 people left crowns of immor- for the Emperor, not the Bourbons, figures in it. telles at the base of the pyramid; and, the last We stand in presence of this great work, imanniversary, the police interfered, and took thirty pressed with its vastness. The central arch is prisoners! Had they been left at the Emperor's ninety feet in height by forty-five in width; there column, they would not have been seized. is a traversal arch, fifty-seven by twenty-five feet: the total height, one hundred and fifty-two feet, breadth, one hundred and thirty-seven, depth, sixty-eight feet. On one side, the Genius of War. a colossal figure, summons the nation to armthe height of the figures is eighteen feet, and the corresponding group, thirty-six feet. Victory, on the other side, is represented as crowning Napoleon. Fame is over him; History recording the towns he sacked, which are, figuratively, at his feet. Passing from this amiable and Christianlike typification we go to the other side, and we find fresh delineations of Havoc, afoot and mounted, and a dash of Peace, in the shape of twenty-five per cent. of the ornamentation in her favour,-being colossal figures of a warrior sheathing his sword, another taming a bull, a mother and children seated at their feet, and Minerva very wisely presiding over the whole. Then, above the impost cornice, are various battle scenes, in high-relief; the principal figures twenty-nine feet. There are too many of these to record, portraits though they be, heroes all. Then all the battles, and skirmishes, and great names, are multitudinously piled inside the arch; -a wilderness of glory and grandeur. We ascend to the top. To the south, close at hand, stands the Hippodrome, where bloodless warriors are showing their skill and courage.

Let us now turn to the Boulevards, to view another and an older monument;-the triumphal arch of the Porte St. Denis. It was built in 1672, and scoured in 1851. Louis XIV., having despatched many of his enemies and of his friends, was thus commemorated. It is seventytwo feet in height. The principal arch is twentyfive feet wide, and forty-three in height; and in the piers are two miniature arches. It is variously covered with trophies showing the degradation of the enemies,-and of France, too, ruined by such victories. Above the arch is Louis, on horseback; and Fame comes in for her share, along with some Latin inscriptions. It is a very fine monument, and was the scene of hot fighting in 1830.

The Porte St. Martin, in the same street and neighbourhood, was built in 1674. It is fifty-four feet by fifty-four. It has three arches. The fronts display what are called "vermiculated rustics," and the spandrils bas-reliefs. This also celebrates the triumphs of Louis XIV., provided with a wig in the first place, and the costume and club of Hercules in the second, indicating artistic harmonies, at least, whatever political ones may be wanting.

But the truly grand heroic arch is the Arc de Triomphe de L'Etoile. Napoleon, or an architect (which is the same thing in history), conceived the idea of this monument. It stands in a magnificent situation, in the grand drive of the Champs Elysées, about a mile and a half west of the Place de la Concorde. In 1806, when Napoleon had become fairly the Great, and France the Little, the corner-stone of this was laid. On the

How gloriously spreads the capital before us! But we might have had as good a view at less cost. For every person of the million in the capital, the arch testifies to one that was murdered to raise it into form. Where is the madhouse? In that direction.

DECEIVED.

BY HARRIET CECIL HUNT.

On hearts that faint in exile.

Swift my soul
The pleasant lie believed;-nor now in scorn,
But with such tears as human grief might shed
O'er the proved treason of her guardian saint,
Puts by the dear delusion.

Bless ye yet
For the sweet vision faded! Should your feet
On the wild path that wends away from Home-
Earth's yet unforfeit Eden-wandering fail,
Yet still, O God! I pray thee, speed them safe
Towards the one goal, towards the true Father-
land!

Heaven send your loneliness such ministers
As ye have been to mine!

And may the lips
That bid ye hail be true! and may the kiss
That seals your sweet adoption, not betray!

"The merit of Poetry in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth."-MACAULAY.

There lived once a plain republican mechanic, It may be that there is, indeed, "no new thing a man who never felt uncomfortable, but stood under the sun," and that sheer necessity is the erect, in his place, looking majesty in the face, mainspring of the mania for imitation, which without winking; and contemporary with him, seems a peculiar characteristic of our nation in was another ancient worthy, who planned a cermatters of literature and art. We run wild in tain document, that has kept kings awake o`nights, model-worship; our authors, painters, and musi- ever since daylight shone upon it. These men, cians are rabid on "schools." From the tyro called familiarly, the one, Ben Franklin, the other, colour-mixer filching a Madonna, the sly "word. Tom Jefferson, were wont to consider their native catcher," plagiarising from Tennyson or Tupper, land worthy of all honour, and reverence, and high or the embryo contrapuntist "adapting" a psalm- filial love. But could the Endor witch of modern tune, up to the gigantic panoramist, wholesale curiosity exorcise them from their sacred restingcompiler, or majestic scorer of old oratorios, we places, to reveal to this shivering and gaping see developed in sliding scale, the entire philo-generation, our Republic's destiny,-how would

their venerable heads droop at the decadence of that patriotism which they prized so highly! how would they shrink at the blasphemy of our modern Sadducees, who " wrest the scriptures" of freedom "to their own destruction!"

|

uncommon astuteness to foresee the penalties which contumacy in any hapless author will entail upon his devoted head.

tradition, and swayed by what they are pleased to term the "classic" school of writing. They have set up for the worship of the public a few literary gods and goddesses, of whom they constitute themselves high priests; and woe to the Genius, as I before remarked, is of no creed nor hapless Shadrachs, Meshechs, and Abednegos, of country. The true afflatus will make itself felt, intellect, who refuse to bow down to and worwhether it emanate from Greek, Russian, Gaul, or ship these golden images, or, at least, assent to Briton; and the noble-souled of all lands should the comfortable literary creed which they inculbe revered by Americans as the common posses- cate! "Reputation-making" has become so wellsion of humanity, "priests for ever," by divine ap-recognised a process of late, that it requires no pointment. But model-worship becomes not the dignity of an intellectual nation, and is a wrong, moreover, to its best interests. Around us are men of genius, high-souled, great-hearted men, sinking through poverty, neglect, or, haply, despairing dissipation, into early ruin, whilst no helping band is outstretched to save or succour. Hundreds more are struggling, in misery and misfortune, to reach a point whence the inner light of their genius may shine out, a beacon to the world. Who knows, who cares a jot about their fate? Our eyes are turned from within, and fixed adoringly upon idols afar off. And so our Malibrans and Cushmans must cross the sea, and make their bow professional at shilling-a-head provincial theatres, from Birmingham to Belfast; our sculptors must dig their marble from the Pontine marshes; our poets must be judged by British Laureatic standard; our essayists make bad grammar, like Carlyle, or clinch factitious nails with an argumental sledge-hammer, like Macaulay; our lawyers must cling, tooth and nail, to musty old English common law, striving, ever and anon to put life into bones drier than even those of Ezekiel's vision; in fine, as a people, we must remain continually in leading-strings, swayed by such grotesque traditions and dogmas, that an intelligent foreigner might be led to deem us afflicted with a sort of king's evil, only to be cured by the imposition of royal hands.

Now, what we want, and must have, if we would preserve the legacy of freedom which our fathers left us, because they thought us able to appreciate its value, is a sound, republican spirit, to permeate and freshen our national mind. We need a new dispensation of intellect, imbued with American feeling, warm with American blood, and vigorous with American sinews. For, in the name of Common Sense, and Benjamin Franklin, its apostle, what have we to do with the rest of the world, but to trade our products for theirs, buy of them what they have and we have not, and send missionaries of peace and freedom to enlighten their darkness? We need neither their teachings nor their example, for our own work is before us. We have had a magnificent tablet of stone fashioned for us by the hand of the Almighty, and we have but to carve upon it the glorious Decalogue which He revealed to us from the Burning Bush of our Revolution. Why shall we, then, stoop to learn the old, dark Egyptian riddles, with which bewildered Europe perplexes herself, or bend like her in grovelling ape-worship? Our country is yet to be formed, completed, raised like a noble city upon a mountain-a shining mark, a wonder afar off, to all the nations of the earth.

It behooves us, therefore, to consider the subject of American literature, and literary men, with reference to its claims as involving national chaOur critics or those who arrogate to themselves the title-are too much governed by

racter.

It is right that a poetic talent like that possessed by the elder Bryant should have made its mark in its own legitimate season, and that Dana, Willis, and Longfellow, should be esteemed as cording to their worth; but that one, or all, judged by a meretricious foreign standard, should be identified as the incarnation of American poetry, to the disparagement of all after-comers, --or that the genius of the latter should be measured by the gauge or school of the former. without reference to its own spontaneous and inherent excellence,—is a manifest evil, doing great injustice to our younger bards, both at home and abroad.

It is useless to repeat the truism that Genius is its own Destiny, and that true merit will sooner or later make itself evident. Though the argument be convenient, it begs the question; for of what avail is tardy justice to the disgraced, or a reprieve to a man just hanged? Between the young author of America, talented however he may be, and the public to whom he would appeal, there intervenes a system of brokerage, which allows the influence of selfishness, mercenary and personal, to operate in an alarming degree against our national intellect. Grub Street machinery is at work now, as in the days of Pope; and literary "patronage," with its accompanying servility, is, unhappily, as prevalent as in the times when authors sold their dedications for a great man's guineas. The avenues and gateways to literary reputation are held by individuals not too honest to neglect self-interest, nor too exalted to fear rivalry; and various are the musty requisitions with which they hedge a too ambitious young author. Vain is appeal from the decision of such immaculate judges as they who decide what constitutes merit by the infaliible water-level of “ British classics.”

This cant about "classics" is very fashionable among certain self-appointed conservative legis lators, who assume to dictate in matters of mind; and it might be interesting to inquire what is meant by the word, and to what golden age it is the "open sesame." The conjecture might be hazarded as to whether literature is not pretty nearly as pure, finished, and elevating, now, as when Butler or Swift printed ribald verses, Smollett and Fielding vented coarse humour, Addison polished a threadbare essay, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Congreve, poisoned the “legitimate drama." Probably the lives of modern authors, if compared with those of "classic" prototypes, might be acknowledged quite as refined as were those of Savage and Chatterton, and the incentives to refinement as positive now, as when “Paradise Lost," "The Vicar of Wakefield," etc., went begging through the “classic” haunts of London.

I have before had occasion to remark that Thought is an essential of Poetry. Wallace's verse possesses this element in a notable degree; for its author seeks not to outwardly bedizen his muse with pretty conceits or inflated fancies, but enters the pith of his subject, and thence evolves its inner, electric life. Pausing not to choose his phrases, he strikes at a meaning, letting the perfectness of the soul give symmetry to the body. And herein, let me parenthesize, lies the genuine, integral power of the Poet:-that he creates, first, the breath, or spirit, of his work, and permits it to grow, as it inevitably will, into the proportions necessary to a perfect life. The mere versifier, the analyst of language, - however polished and erudite he may be, can never create. He may adapt, improve, adorn; but he cannot breathe into his words the afflatus which can alone make them divine. Pygmalion may shape his statue into the semblance of being, but of himself he cannot endow it with a single spark of that element, without which it is but polished ivory. Hence, then, all who are truly poets are essentially creators, and not mere artificers. Do we say that Ossian is not Shakspeare? It is true; but, nevertheless, Ossian is perfect, as the Bard of Morven. The thought, which finds its fitting language-the soul, which seeks its peculiar body-in the wild words and imagery of Ossian, is as perfectly a creation as are the sublime ideas of Milton, or the lofty, loving, or

Providentially, a Court of Errors exists above our classical tribunal;-an Areopagus of popular feeling often reverses the dicta of conservative wiseacres, and, to a degree, restores the equilibrium of literary reputation. While the critics encourage their protégés, the people foster theirs. A stray song, welling up from the heart of some neglected child of genius, finds a thousand echoes in the hearts of those whose books are newspapers, whose library is a scrap-book. A pure thought, in a corner of some humble sheet, may preserve the memory of an author more surely than would all the tinsel fancy which could be compressed between octavo covers of crimson and gold. The hearts and minds of the people are the empire of genius, if it be true to itself,- | an empire not to be shaken by all the machinery of criticism. Popular sympathy is a compensating force, which is slowly, but sensibly, weakening the autocratic sway of traditional usage, even in its own sphere; for the appreciation that it insures is not passive, but reactive. Popular Appreciation whispers to Literary Brokerage, "We have our protégés, as you have yours." And it will not be long, perhaps, before Literary Brokerage will say to itself, "It is best to make friends with Popular Appreciation, and respect those whom it protects.' Critics are preparing to alight from their stilts, and be more companionable with humble genius. The gate of advancement is unbarred, and the portcullis creaks as it begins to ascend. Maybe, repub-inspiring thoughts of Avon's bard. This, then, licanism may displace aristocracy even in litera

ture.

is the poet's test:-that he, firstly, create or inbreathe a soul; and that, secondly, such soul be capable of moulding, in its growth, the body that encloses it. A poet in thought cannot be a bungler in language; though "classic" language may contain no thought at all. An angel cannot wear the garb of a hypocrite, though "a hypocrite may steal Heaven's livery."

Among those who have, during the last dozen years, cast their poetic bread upon the waters, is one who may be called a genuine American bard, and for whose special introduction, to such as do not know him, this paper, so far, has been written. WILLIAM ROSS WALLACE, a native of Lexington, Kentucky, now in his thirty-third or thirty-fourth year, and at present a resident of New York, is the bard in question, a volume of whose poems, bearing the title of "Meditations in America," and the motto, "Of thine own country sing!" is now lying suggestively before"Hymn to a Wind going Seaward,"

me.

Wallace's poetry is marked, as I said, by thought;-not mere speculation, but suggestive, synthetic thought, creating whole images and complete forms, satisfying to the reader's sense of entirety. The following couplet, from the

"Freedom must be calm, if she would fix

is an example of this, involving an entire thought,
and presenting cause, effect, and result, with
notable terseness and simplicity of expression.
In ideality, it is matched by these other lines,—
"The mountains lift

Their silent tops to heaven, like thoughts

Too vast for speech,"

I first encountered Mr. Wallace's writings Her mountain moveless in a heaving world,"— some ten years since, when he appeared as the author of "The Croton Wreath,"- -a collection of Cold-Water melodies, published at Boston by Charles H. Brainard, to which gentleman, after the lapse of a decade, the "Meditations" are now dedicated,- -a circumstance worthy of a place in some new Curiosities of Literature," as an evidence of good feeling between an American author and his quondam publisher, highly suggestive of fair dealing on the part of the latter (who, by the way, is no longer one of "the trade," but is himself no mean aspirant for poetic laurels, as the author of many graceful verses). Mr. Wallace is classically educated, and a lawyer, though he seems to have advanced but little in his profession;-unlike my Endymionic friend, Hirst, who oscillates between Lyceum and Portico, making himself quite as much at home with the Prytanes as with the Rhapsodists. But true genius is equal to any task dependent upon will; and if Wallace has not yet signalized himself in Amphictyonic fields, no proof exists that he cannot. At present, however, we have to do with his achievements in literature.

from a poem every way worthy of the genius of the bard whose name makes its title," Wordsworth,"-and a hundred fold better than much written by the amiable author of "The Excur

sion."

Now, thought, when searching and earnest, finds its natural utterance in blank verse; and thus many of Wallace's best imaginings are clothed in such garb. A fine example occurs in a passage of "The Mounds of America," where the poet muses upon the great works of old, dimly chronicled by those giant vestiges.

"Here empires rose and died;
Their very dust, beyond the Atlantic borne
In the pale navies of the chartered wind,
Stains the white Alp. Here the proud city ranged
Spire after spire, like star ranged after star

Along the dim empyrean, till the air
Went mad with splendour, and the dwellers cried,
"Our walls have married Time!" Gone are the marts,
The insolent citadels, the fearful gates,

The pictured domes that curved like starry skies:
Gone are their very names! The royal ghost
Cannot discern the old imperial haunts,

But goes about perplexed, like a mist
Between a ruin and the awful stars.
Nations are laid beneath our feet. The bard,
Who stood in song's prevailing light, as stands
The apocalyptic angel in the sun,

And rained melodious fire on all the realms,-
The prophet pale, who shuddered in his gloom,
As the white cataract shudders in its mist;
The hero shattering an old kingdom down
With one clear trumpet's will; the boy, the sage,
Subject and lord, the beautiful, the wise-
Gone, gone to nothingness."

poetry,-to make himself and the world better in
heart, and clearer in mind. Will be stand, a
mendicant, at the door of Apollo's house, or enter
boldly, as the guest whom his lord would honour!
That is the question which such a bard should put
to his genius and his pride. And if he would be
Apollo's guest, let him straightway cover himself
with the "wedding-garment" of a pure and aspi-
ring life-a life made fresh by WILL and Ex-
ERGY, the birthright powers of all true genius.
Let him no longer sit, vainly asking
"Who lives aright?"

but arise, and in the might of renovated endea-
vour, "live the Epic," while he writes its spon-
taneous notes in a sublime accompaniment.

It is his wide-reaching scope of imagination, which gives Wallace a peculiar faculty of discovering noble themes for song in the great soli- I tudes of our country, those vast fields of conjecture, tracked and landmarked only by Nature's convulsions, or by some inexplicable monument of human labour. Such a bard needs no Old World pilgrimage to make him a Childe Harold; his Vesuvius flows still, for him, in the extinguished crater of some Rocky Mountain peak; his Herculaneum slumbers beneath Western tumuli; his Lake Lemans are in every vale of his own native land. He beholds a Rhineland and a Greece glowing beneath his poet-gaze, wheresoever it rests,—

"Or where the Hudson goes unchallenged past,
The ancient warder of the Palisades;

Or, where, rejoicing o'er the enormous cloud,
Beam the blue Alleghanies,"--

and full of the glorious visions, he hears the "wild-
eyed Genius of our Land," chanting solemnly to
her devotee:-

"But know thy Highest dwells at Home,-there Art
And choral Inspirations spring;

If thou wouldst touch the universal Heart,
Of thine Own Country, sing!"

Grand, indeed, is his task, who shall feel the constraining power within him to write the American Epic. Wallace has every poetic constituent to fit him for the trial, and give his genius such a grasp upon the ages yet to come, as the blind bard of Scio holds upon our own. Every constituent, did I say? Ah, no! I recall the word. He has not the will,-the inflexible, iron will, coupled with the child-humility that marks the poetic hero-that will, and that humility, of which he caught an inspired glimpse, as pictured in his "Mahomet," during the inception of his great mission, when

"Wandering in the solemn desert, he has wondered like a child,

Not, as yet, too proud to wonder."

I say, he has not the will, though his poetic power is evident; for, with the great range of thought evinced in his poems, thus far, the susceptibility of beauty, and the faculty of condensed description, which he possesses, nothing but paucity of volition could have restrained the natural gush of his soul into some melodious Homeric river of imagination. This is high praise for a young bard, but is of little account if the bard weakens the critic's position, by attempting nothing higher in desert, than he has yet accomplished. Wallace is, I repeat, capable of writing the American Epic; and he is, likewise, capable of so draggling his divine wings in the mire of common things, as to be rendered for ever an earth-worm, as far as regards the great end of all

For with all his faults as a writer,-and, were disposed to dissect, minutely, many minor imperfections could be cited in his poems,-with all his faults, WALLACE is a bard who can be hardly spared, and whose stagnation, or decay, as a poet would be a sin against his own genius and public weal. He possesses thought, fervour, a brilliant descriptive vein, and great breadth of imagination. He lacks care, judgment, and forgetfulness of self. He is, at the same time, epigrammatically terse, and redundantly diffuse, startling us at one moment with a trip-hammer sort of appositeness, the next, involving us in a coil of words. Like Brooke, the actor, he seems to nurse himself for certain points, at which applause will be tremendous, and then subside into comfortable tameness, as if satisfied to be dull because he has been brilliant. But Wallace needs not such claptrap; he can sustain his flights if he desires so to do, and must, if he would conquer fame. He must discard, too, numberless pet words and phrases, which disfigure his verses. A very appropriate word in a single poem, when occurring some hundred times in a collection, becomes unpleasantly familiar; and this pet phraseology is a manifest fault of Wallace's, as it is of many other of our poets.

I shall hope for this bard, and trust he may yet win a name as the interpreter of his native cour try's poetic history. In his "Chant of a Soul," a poem which has a Promethean fire about it suggestive of Shelley's mystic strength and beauty, the following adjuration occurs, which, in its concluding resolve "to live," seems to emanate from one who has the power to be immortal, if he dares. I leave the author to accept the challenge.

"O suffering Bards! Oh, spirits, black
With storm on many a mountain rack!
Our early splendour's gone,

Like stars into a cloud withdrawn-
Like music laid asleep

In dried-up fountains-like a stricken dawn
Where sudden tempests sweep.

I hear the bolts around us falling,
And cloud to cloud for ever calling;
Yet we must not despair nor weep.
Did we this evil bring?

Or from our fellows did the torture spring?
Titans forgive, forgive!

Oh, know ye not 'tis victory but to live?
Therefore, I say rejoice, with harp and voice;
I know not what our fate may be:

I only know that he who hath a Time
Must also have Eternity;

One billow proves and gives a whole wide sea
On this I build my trust,

And not on mountain dust,

Or murmuring woods, or starlit clime,
Or sunset glories in the western sky:
Enough, I am, and shall not choose to die
No matter what my future fate may be;
TO LIVE is in itself a majesty!"