of their immediate progenitors; and unless some Manhattanese scholiast should write a commentary on the poem in time, its allusions, and with them most of its wit, will be in danger of perishing entirely.  What we can judge of in Fanny are one or two graceful lyrics interspersed in it, though even these are marred by untimely comicality and local allusions.  The nominal hero, while wandering about at night after the wreck of his fortunes, hears a band playing outside a public place of entertainment.  It must have been a better band than that which now, from the Museum opposite the Astor House, drives to frenzy the hapless stranger....  In Halleck’s subsequent productions the influence of Campbell is more perceptible than that of Byron, and with manifest advantage.  It may be said of his compositions, as it can be affirmed of few American verses, that they have a real innate harmony, something not dependent on the number of syllables in each line, or capable of being dissected out into feet, but growing in them, as it were, and created by the fine ear of the writer.  Their sentiments, too, are exalted and ennobling; eminently genial and honest, they stamp the author for a good man and true,—­Nature’s aristocracy....  For some unexplained reason Halleck has not written, or at least not published, anything new for several years, though continually solicited to do so; for he is a great favorite with his countrymen, especially with the New Yorkers.  His time, however, has been by no means passed in idleness.  Fashionable as writing is in America, it is not considered desirable or, indeed, altogether reputable, that the poet should be only a poet.  Halleck has been in business most of his life; and was lately head-clerk of the wealthy merchant, John Jacob Astor, who left him a handsome annuity.  This was increased by Mr. Astor’s son and heir, a man of well-known liberality; so that between the two there is a chance of the poet’s being enabled to ‘meditate the tuneful Muse’ for the remainder of his days free from all distractions of business.

“LONGFELLOW, the pet poet of Boston, is a much younger man than either Bryant or Halleck, and has made his reputation only within the last twelve years, during which time he has been one of the most noted lions of American Athens.  The city of Boston, as every one knows who has been there, or who has met with any book or man emanating from it, claims to be the literary metropolis of the United States, and assumes the slightly-pretending soubriquet just quoted.  The American Athenians have their thinking and writing done for them by a coterie whose distinctive characteristics are Socinianism in theology, a praeter-Puritan prudery in ethics, a German tendency in metaphysics, and throughout all a firm persuasion that Boston is the fountain-head of art, scholarship, and literature for the western world, and particularly that New York is a Nazareth in such things, out of which can come nothing good.  For the Bostonians,