SOURCE: American Quarterly Review, Vol. XXI, No. XLII, June, 1837, pp. 399-415.

In the following excerpt, the reviewer comments on various poems in Halleck's 1836 collection, Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems, and discusses his transition from social satire to descriptive nature and landscape poetry and narrative.

[Halleck's] city residence, … did not seduce our author away from the remembrance of the country. He reverted to its calmness, its seclusion, and its purity, in many a melodious line. To him there was a charm in recollected rocks, waters, and vernal uplands—"ruris amoeni rivos, et musco circumlita saxa nemusque." He heard, even in the crowded and garish ways of the town, those celestial voices which breathe at night from echoing hills and thickets, over land and sea. The power of these entered into his heart of hearts; but he was environed by the every day realities of a crowded capital; the follies...