easily out of its severer lines.  What resistless magic is there in the fingers whose touch upon the same rich banks of keys, summons solemn, vibrant peals as of Beethoven’s grandest fugues, endless harmonies as of the deep seas, and the light and graceful fantasies of Rossini, which are as the glad sunshine upon their waves.  Truly the poet’s gift is a divine and an awful one.  His heart must needs be proud and humble too, who is claimed as nearer of kin than a brother by myriads of stranger souls, each, perhaps, owning its separate creed, and in whose unspoken prayers his name is ever present.  In his ’Conversations on some of the old Poets,’ we discover the alembic through which his crude opinions, his glowing impulses, his exquisitely minute discrimination were distilled;—­the old poets, to whom the heart turns ever lovingly as to the wide west at eve.  They were the nursing mothers of his intellectual infancy, and it is probably to his reverent but not blind esteem for them, his earnest study of them, not merely as poets, but as men, citizens, and friends, that much of the buoyancy and vigor of his poetry is to be attributed.  The ‘Conversations’ themselves are alive with that enthusiasm and sympathetic inquiry that disproves the false saying of the Parisian Aspasia of Landor—­’Poets are soon too old for mutual love.’  They are the warm photographs of feeling as it bubbles from a burning heart; sometimes burned over-deep, with a leaning to fanaticism, but with so much of the generosity and justice of maturity in their decisions that these necessary errors of an ardent youth are overlooked, and the more as they have disappeared almost entirely from the productions of later years.  He betrays in his quick conception of an author’s mood and meaning a delicacy so extreme, an organization so nervously alive to beauties and discords, and a religious sentiment so cultured to the last degree of feeling, that we dread lest we shall encounter the weakness, morbidness or bigotry that naturally results from the contact of such a soul with the passions of everyday life, recalling the oft-quoted ’Medio in fonte leporum’—­

  ’In the bowl where pleasures swim,
  The bitter rises to the brim,
  And roses from the veriest brake
  May press the temples till they ache.’

But among the roses of his criticisms we look in vain for thorns.  In style, it is true, these essays are halting and unequal.  His adoption of the colloquial form for the expression of opinion to the public has never seemed to us remarkably felicitous, in spite of its venerable precedents.  Where his imagery becomes lofty and his flow of thought should be continuous, we are indignant at its sudden arrest, and involuntarily devote the intruder to a temporary bungalow in Timbuctoo.