world, which first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with undue dispraise.  ‘Festus’ is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace.  Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty.  The author’s whole heart and brain were poured into it, and neither was a common one.  With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it was such a tour de force for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees.  Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain.  It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts.  Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem.  Even now it has passed through numerous editions, and been but lately republished in sumptuous form after fifty years of life; and in the catalogue of higher metaphysico-religious poetry it will long maintain an honorable place.  It is cited here among the books whose fame rather than whose importance demand recognition.

     FROM ‘FESTUS’

     LIFE

Festus—­ Men’s callings all Are mean and vain; their wishes more so:  oft The man is bettered by his part or place.  How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

     Lucifer—­What men call accident is God’s own part. 
     He lets ye work your will—­it is his own: 
     But that ye mean not, know not, do not, he doth.

Festus—­What is life worth without a heart to feel The great and lovely harmonies which time And nature change responsive, all writ out By preconcertive hand which swells the strain To divine fulness; feel the poetry, The soothing rhythm of life’s fore-ordered lay; The sacredness of things?—­for all things are Sacred so far,—­the worst of them, as seen By the eye of God, they in the aspect bide Of holiness:  nor shall outlaw sin be slain, Though rebel banned, within the sceptre’s length; But privileged even for service.  Oh! to stand Soul-raptured, on some lofty mountain-thought, And feel the spirit expand into a view Millennial, life-exalting, of a day When earth shall have all leisure for high ends Of social culture; ends a liberal law And common peace of nations, blent with charge Divine, shall win for man, were joy indeed:  Nor greatly less, to know what might be now, Worked will for good with power, for one brief hour.  But look at these, these individual souls:  How sadly men show out of joint with man!  There are millions never think a noble thought; But with brute hate of brightness bay a mind Which drives the darkness out of them, like hounds.  Throw but a false glare round them, and in shoals They rush upon perdition:  that’s the race.  What charm is in this world-scene to such minds?  Blinded by dust?  What can they do in heaven, A state of spiritual means and ends?  Thus must I