We have seen no notices of the work with which we can entirely agree; some, perhaps, are exorbitant in their praise; others, certainly, are unjust in their censure. With the latter we have no patience. It is easy to detect the faults of a young writer, and to expose them to ridicule; but is it not illiberal? Such wholesale censures, however, have their use; they show that there is some merit in a book, from which they take such pains to hunt out imperfections. We shall attempt to express our opinion of these Poems,' with candor. The author is not without his faults. In many instances his metre is bad; and his words are sometimes ill-chosen; yet he seems to us to have been betrayed into a carelessness of expression, in his anxiety for the thought; to have forgotten the "cura verborum" in the "solicitudo rerum." In confirmation of this remark, we need only refer to the rich poetic diction with which some of his poems abound. With a few of his 'occasional pieces' our readers are already familiar, having seen them in this periodical. "Fanny Willoughby," and "Pen and Ink," were never favorites with us; though their style is playful and somewhat humorous, yet we should judge that they were perpetrated when the author felt in a rhyming mood. Mr. Bacon has chosen Wordsworth for his model; he could not have made a better selection, nor would the 'poet of nature' have been ashamed of his disciple in his day. Yet while these 'Poems' exhibit much of that delicate perception of the beauties of nature,—that purity of thought, that refinement of philosophy for which Wordsworth is celebrated, they are not free from the errors of that poet. The too frequent repetition of the conjunction 'and' is an error, which is most observable in the poem entitled, the "Influence of Nature." Take this passage:

"And greatness sits upon him naturally!

And goodness-when the bad world is shut out,

And virtue-when the heart lives in itself,

And sweetness-when its sweet streams are all free :

And woman gives him her warm heart to keep,

And children climb his knee and lisp his name,

And widows call down blessings on his head,

And orphans steep his ashes in their tears,

And he is that bright being Heaven designed."-(p. 118.)

Here the author has gone to work as if he were making out a bill, each item of which must be prefaced with a 'ditto;'-'and' is repeated no less than nine times in as many lines. This is bad taste; those fine thoughts would have been much better expressed, if in some lines a dash had been substituted for the conjunction. When we saw the piece entitled "The Dream," the remembrance of Byron's dream at once suggested itself, and we trembled for our author; for, notwithstanding his modest 'note,' he is thus brought into a hazardous comparison. Byron has dreamed so

bers.

well, that few can dare to follow in his track; and hence we almost wish " queen Mab," had never disturbed our author's slumYet his dream is beautiful;-forgetting Byron, it is exquisite. Witness the following passage, which shows that Mr. Bacon possesses fine descriptive powers.

"He took a beggar's sandals, scrip, and staff,
And turned him to the silence of the hills,

And this:

The old magnificent mountains, where the forests,
Slumbering for ages in the solitudes,

Their lightning-scorch'd, primeval branches threw
Upward in many a fold, and the gray rocks
Gigantic as the fragments of a world,

Frown'd in their silent massiveness, and the cataract
Shook with its anthem the deep wilderness."-(p. 105.)

And ofttimes in his solitude would come

The voice of waters, and they would leap up
Sparkling and clear amid the dells and steeps
Of his own native mountains, and their voices
Would seem so like realities, that oft

The still sad whispers of that exquisite

And passionate love of beauty, might be heard

Echoing through all the chambers of his heart.”—(p. 107.)

We cannot concur in the charge of egotism, which so many have heaped upon the author. True, the pronoun 'I' is not uncommon in this book; yet it occurs most in soliloquies, which are in many instances, the best form in which the author's sentiments could be expressed. Nor do we suppose that all these first persons refer to Mr. Bacon; but that the reader is often to be the I,' and use the language furnished by the poet. No one, surely, who has read the author's preface, can accuse him of ostentation. Nor are his repetitions at all general; and some of them are very beautiful. Read the following stanzas, from the "Lesson of Life."

""Tis very strange, 'tis very strange,
The fancies of our early years,
Despite of chance, despite of change,
Can thus melt manhood into tears!

"'Tis very strange, the simplest things,
No matter what they were, we loved,
Are those the memory eagerest brings,
And those the last to be removed."

We cannot speak particularly of each of these productions; much less can we quote from them all; yet we must say that he who reads the stanzas "To a Little Boy," will not be satisfied till he has committed them to memory. "Thanatos" is superior to "Athanatos," though both are meritorious. In the former the

author has taken a just view of man and of his destiny, in which he pictures with too much truth the crimes and punishment of the miser, the oppressor, and the blasphemer. After contemplating the ravages of the fell Destroyer, induced by man's transgression, he concludes with this beautiful prayer. It is filled with such reverence and humility, that it must open the fountains of feeling in every heart.

"Father, and God!

Thou didst spread out these heavens; thou didst set
The stars upon their thrones, the rolling orbs,
And central worlds, and systems, that on high

Do chant thy praises. Thou didst deign to fashion

This planet where we dwell, give it its form,
Its poetry of action, and its life;

Thou didst spread round it all its loveliness,

Thou gavest the flowers their time, the winds their soft

And gentle avocation, and the streams,

Thou gavest them their increase, the floods their charge,
The rocking ocean its solemnity :

O, blast it not, Almighty!"

Hitherto it may have been supposed that Mr. Bacon excels in beautiful and delicate description; but the "Vision of War," his best piece, shows that he can dive into the depths of the soul and rouse the fiercer passions. We are not extravagant in our praise, when we say that the book is worth its price, for the sake of this piece. We regret that our limits prohibit us from copying it entire; we shall give one or two extracts, however, which will determine the reader to purchase the volume at once.

""Twas a field of blood,

A battle field, where Carnage rioted,
And War went thundering on his iron car,
Grinding its damning wheels on bones, and skulls,
And corses gashed-the red wounds spouting yet
The heart's blood freshly, and the upturned eye
Quivering beneath the vengeance."

His description of Hannibal, which follows, shows that he has no mean conception of the character of that military prodigy.

"I saw him walk

The ocean like a god, and when he sat

His armies on the shores of Italy,

The land shook to receive him. He strode on

As if the earth were his, and he a thing

Superior to the elements. The storms

Elanced by the Almighty on his breast,
He seemed to take up and hurl back again,
Daring their worst. He laid his hand upon

The icy regions of eternal frost,

The old and mighty barriers of Nature,

And, like a bauble in an infant's hand,

They crumbled and let him pass them!—He pass'd on."

The preface informs us that "these Poems are the result of leisure at College;” we hope that others may improve their leisure as well; and that hereafter, the author will not be satisfied with devoting his leisure only to the department of Poetry. In entering upon an almost untrodden field, he has displayed an independence which the public must approve. He will be sustained in an effort to purify the fountain of the Muses from the corruption with which it has been tainted, and to restore to Helicon its beauty and its verdure. In the poem entitled "The Influence of Nature," the author thus apostrophizes philosophy.

"6 Philosophy! that other name for thought—
And wisdom, when that thought is purified—
And holiness, when God hath sanctioned it-
How shall we, in these dim and twilight times,
Approach thy fount and drink at thy pure stream?"

We will answer the question; let him lead and we will follow.

LINES ADDRESSED TO HER, WHO, TRANSCENDing the doctriNES OF MAHOMET, THAT WOMEN HAVE NO SOULS, EXPRESSED A BELIEF THAT THEY HAVE NO HEARTS, AND APPEALED TO HERSELF AS AN INSTANCE IN POINT.

SEA SKETCHES.

(CONTINUED.)

THE CHASE.

"Sons, brothers, husbands, all

Who ever gazed with fondness on the forms
Which grew up with you round the same fireside,
Stand forth be men! repel an impious foe,
Impious and false, a light yet cruel race,
Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth
With deeds of murder."

Coleridge.

"FAREWELL to thee, Amsterdam! thou old-fashioned city of canals, pipes and seven-story houses!" Such was my exclamation as I leaped on board the canal boat, about to join the ship at New Dieppe.

Ridicule, an' thou wilt, the lazy smoking Mynheer and his square-sided daughters, (heaven bless their full-moon faces,) I love them after all. I love the kind heart and open brow, where truth writes its name. I love the nonchalance with which they thrust aside the ills that torture life, and the simple-hearted smile returned in gratitude for its blessings. The old fat burgomaster nodding in his chair, with eyes half closed, legs half crossed, and pipe half tumbling from his mouth, while the smoke once in fifteen minutes curls stealthily out from the lips as if afraid of arousing the old gentleman; the right plump burgomaster, I say, who is too lazy to think of the past and present, and who would deem it downright heresy to pry into the future, fills my eye as the personification of independent happiness. It was therefore with no little reluctance that I tore myself away from this antique city, again to toss for sixty or seventy days upon the solitary ocean; not to mention a pretty little damsel, five feet by four, who delayed my departure at least one day, and concerning whom I might pass a whole night in discoursing, did I deem it prudent, my reading friend, to trust thee.

The third day after leaving Amsterdam, I was at sea, bound for Cuba. Nothing transpired worthy of note for the first fifty days of our passage, with the exception of a single event, which, as it may serve as a proper introduction to the subject of this sketch, shall be mentioned. It was on one of those empurpled mornings which the tropical sun so often ushers in with all his pageantry, while gliding along with our sails all filled by a stiff trade wind, that I discovered on the weather-quarter a black rakish looking