The “Tragedy of Errors” presents, with the vivid idealization of art, some of the results of American Slavery.  Travellers, novelists, ethnologists have spoken with various ability of the laborers of the South; and now the poet breaks through the hard monotony of their external lives, and lends the plasticity of a cultivated mind to take impress of feeling to which the gift of utterance is denied.  And it is often only through the imagination of another that the human bosom can be delivered “of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart.”  For it is a very common error to estimate mental activity by a command of the arts of expression; whereas, at its best estate, speech is an imperfect sign of perception, and one which without special cultivation must be wholly inadequate.  Thus it will be seen that an employment of the dialect and limited vocabulary of the negro would be obviously unsuitable to the purpose of the poem; and these have been wisely discarded.  In doing this, however, the common license of dramatists is not exceeded; and the critical censure we have read about “the extravagant idealization of the negro” merely amounts to saying that the writer has been bold enough to stem the current of traditional opinion, and find a poetic view of humanity at the present time and in its most despised portion.  The end of dramatic writing is not to reproduce Nature, but to idealize it; a literal copying of the same, as everybody knows, is the merit of the photographer, not of the artist.  Again, it should be remembered that the highly wrought characters among the slaves are whites, or whites slightly tinged with African blood.  With the commonest allowance for the exigencies of poetic presentation, we find no individual character unnatural or improbable; though the particular grouping of these characters is necessarily improbable.  For grace of position and arrangement every dramatist must claim.  If the poet will but take observations from real persons, however widely scattered, discretion may be exercised in the conjunction of those persons, and in the sequence of incidents by which they are affected.  An aesthetic invention may be as natural as a mechanical one, although the materials for each are collected from a wide surface, and placed in new relations.  Thus much we say as expressing dissent from objections which have been hastily made to this poem.

Of the plot of the “Tragedy of Errors” we have only space to say that the writer has cut a channel for very delicate verses through the heart of a Southern plantation.  Here, at length, seems to be one of those thoroughly national subjects for which critics have long been clamorous.  The deepest passion is expressed without touching the tawdry properties of the “intense” school of poetry.  The language passes from the ease of perfect simplicity to the conciseness of power, while the relation of emotion to character is admirably preserved.  The moral—­which, let us observe in passing,