“When a dreary light is wading
      Thro’ this waste of sunless greens,
  When the flashing lights are fading
      On the peerless cheek of queens,
  When the mean shall no more sorrow,
      And the proudest no more smile;
    While the dawning of the morrow
  Widens slowly westward all that while?”

And he implores them to “let fall one tear, and set him free.”  The past was no mere pretence; it was true while it lasted; but it is gone now, and the East is white with day.  Shall they meet again, only that he may ask whose blank face that is?

  “Pluck, pluck cypress, oh pale maidens;
    Dusk the hall with yew.”

This poem must be read as a whole; for not only would it be difficult to select particular passages for extraction, but such extracts, if made, would fail in producing any adequate impression.

We have already quoted so larely from the concluding piece, “Resignation,” that it may here be necessary to say only that it is in the form of speech held with “Fausta” in retracing, after a lapse of ten years, the same way they had once trod with a joyful company.  The tone is calm and sustained, not without touches of familiar truth.

The minor poems comprise eleven sonnets, among which, those “To the Duke of Wellington, on hearing him mispraised,” and on “Religious Isolation,” deserve mention; and it is with pleasure we find one, in the tenor of strong appreciation, written on reading the Essays of the great American, Emerson.  The sonnet for “Butler’s Sermons” is more indistinct, and, as such, less to be approved, in imagery than is usual with this poet.  That “To an Independent Preacher who preached that we should be in harmony with nature,” seems to call for some remark.  The sonnet ends with these words: 

  “Man must begin, know this, where nature ends;
  Nature and man can never be fast friends;
    Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave.”

Now, as far as this sonnet shows of the discourse which occasioned it, we cannot see anything so absurd in that discourse; and where the author confutes the Independent preacher by arguing that

  “Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood: 
  Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore: 
  Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:” 

we cannot but think that, by attributing to nature a certain human degree of qualities, which will not suffice for man, he loses sight of the point really raised:  for is not man’s nature only a part of nature? and, if a part, necessary to the completeness of the whole? and should not the individual, avoiding a factitious life, order himself in conformity with his own rule of being?  And, indeed, the author himself would converse with the self-sufficing progress of nature, with its rest in action, as distinguished from the troublous vexation of man’s toiling:—­

    “Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee,
    Two lessons that in every wind are blown;
    Two blending duties harmonised in one,
  Tho’ the loud world proclaim their enmity.”—­p. 1.