learning, and does not attempt Latin or Greek composition during his stay at Trinity.  Thus he escapes the fate of many quick minds, which, running easily upon college grooves, that end in the indorsement of a corporation, never make out to accept their own individuality for better and for worse.  Arthur enters upon legal studies with acuteness, and not without interest.  A few anonymous writings occupy his leisure.  He is now just rising upon the world,—­a brilliant orb, as yet seen only by a few watchers, who congratulate each other upon the light to be.  A fatal tour to Germany, and all ends in darkness and mystery.

Judging from the writings before us, we should say that this young man was destined to a greater eminence in philosophy than in poetry.  His father’s opinion, in reverse of this, was perhaps based upon average tendencies of character, instead of selected specimens of production.  The best prose papers here printed, the “Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero,” and the “Review of Professor Rossetti,” are far more remarkable for the ease with which accurate information is subjected to original, and even profound thought, than are the poems for brilliancy of imagination or mastery over the capacities of language.  Still, it must be confessed, that the sonnets are full of melody and refinement,—­indeed, we can recall no poet who has written much better at the same age.  In all Arthur’s compositions we recognize an exquisite delicacy of feeling, without any of the daintiness of mind commonly found in intellectual youths.  He seems to have acquired much of his father’s command of reading, and to have inherited those rarer faculties of selection and generalization which give to learning its coherence and significance.  In contrast to the precise and somewhat hard literary style of the elder Hallam, the diction of the son glows with the sensitiveness of a highly artistic nature.  Arthur’s attainments in the modern languages appear to have been considerable.  He is said to have spoken French readily, and to have ranged its literature as familiarly as that of England.  His Italian sonnets are pronounced by competent authority to be very remarkable for a foreigner.  They are certainly marvellous for a boy of seventeen after an eight months’ visit to Italy.  In fine, upon the testimony presented in this volume, we think that no considerate reader will hesitate to credit Arthur Hallam with a rich and generous character, a wide sweep of thought rising from the groundwork of solid knowledge, and the delicate aerial perceptions of high imaginative genius.

Surely the life whose untimely end called forth “In Memoriam” was not lost to the world.  Perhaps it was by dying that the moral and intellectual gifts of this youth could most effectively reach the hearts of men.  He was not unworthy his noble monument.  As we turn to the familiar lyrics, they swell and deepen with a new harmony.  Again, the genius of Tennyson bears us onward through tenderest allegory and subtlest analogy, until, breaking from cares and questionings so melodiously uttered, his soul soars upward through thin philosophies of the schools, and at length, in grandest spiritual repose, rests beside the friend “who lives with God.”  It is good to know that the “A.H.H.” forever encircled by the halo of that matchless verse does not live only as the idealization of the poet.