Critics have a good-natured way of stigmatizing, for the initiated, all poetry that is not poetry, by saying that it is “elegant,” “harmonious,” or, worse than all, “descriptive.”  This last commonly means that the author has done for his readers precisely what they could do for themselves,—­that he has made a catalogue of the natural objects to be found in a certain number of acres, which differs from the literary efforts of an auctioneer only in this, that each line begins with a capital and contains the same number of syllables.  He counts the number of cabbages in a field, of cows in a pasture, and tells us how many times a squirrel ran up (or down) a given tree in a given time.  He informs us that the bark of the shagbark is shaggy, that the sleep-at-noon slumbers at mid-day, that moss is apt to grow on fallen tree-trunks in damp places,—­treats us as the old alchemists do, who give us a list of the materials out of which gold (if it had any moral sense) would at once consent to be made, but somehow won’t,—­and leaves us impressed with that very dead certainty, that things are so-and-so, which is the result of verses that are only so-so.

Readers of the “Atlantic” need not be told that Dr. Palmer is not a descriptive poet of this fashion.  They have known how to appreciate his sketches of East Indian life, so vivid, picturesque, and imaginative that they could make “Griffins” feel twinges of liver-complaint, and so true that we have heard them pronounced “incomparable” by men familiar with India.  Dr. Palmer is no mere describer; he sees with the eye of a poet, touches only what is characteristic, and, while he seems to surrender himself wholly to the Circe Imagination, retains the polished coolness of the man of the world, and the brownness of the man of the nineteenth century.  He not only knows how to observe, but how to write,—­both of them accomplishments rare enough in an age when everybody is ready to contract for their display by the column.  His style is nervous and original, not harassingly pointed like a chestnut-burr, but full of esprit or wit diffused,—­that Gallic leaven which pervades whole sentences and paragraphs with an indefinable lightness and palatableness.  It is a thoroughly American style, too, a little over-indifferent to tradition and convention, but quite free of the sic-semper-tyrannis swagger.  Uncle Bull, who is just like his nephew in thinking that he has a divine right to the world’s oyster, cannot swallow it properly till he has donned a white choker, and refuses to be comforted when Jonathan disposes of it in his rapid way with the shell for a platter.  We confess that we prefer the free-and-easy manner in its proper place to the diplomatic way of always treating the reader with sentiments of the highest consideration, and like a book all the more for having an Occidental flavor.