of any meaning as the silver chime of sleigh-bells.  “The Legend of the Woodpecker” is remarkable for its simplicity and terseness:  it is one of the best of all the poems; only we wish that in the last verse but one she had not thought it necessary to use the word “chode” for “chided.”  So in the fine ballad called “The Reapers of Landisfarne” it is a pity to mar a good stanza by using the queer participle “strawed” as a rhyme to sod and abroad, especially as the latter words do not rhyme either, save in New England parlance.  But such blemishes as these in Mrs. Preston’s work are rare, and therefore it is worth while to point them out.  Poems of so much vigor as these give fair promise for the future, and deserve something more than merely general commendation.

    Among my Books. (Second Series.) By James Russell Lowell. 
    Boston:  James R. Osgood & Co.

The essays in this volume have an advantage over the former series published under the same title in the greater homogeneousness of the subjects.  These are all poets, and with one exception English poets.  They are poets, too, so to speak, of one family, unequal in rank, but having that resemblance of character which marks the higher and lower peaks of the same mountain-chain.  All are epic and lyric, none in a proper sense dramatic.  All are poets de pur sang, endowed by nature with the special qualities which cannot be confounded with those of a different order, and which forbid all doubt as to a true “vocation.”  Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, differing as they do in intellectual greatness and imaginative power, have all, as a distinguishing characteristic, that magic mastery over the harmonies of language which renders them responsive to subtle thoughts and ethereal conceptions.  We find, however, no intimation that it is from any view of this kind that these essays have been collected, in a single group.  It seems indeed more probable that they have simply been reprinted, in the order in which they first appeared, on being found of sufficient bulk to fill a volume of the desired size.  Nor is it to be supposed that they indicate a particular course of study pursued with reference to their production.  Though the author has had the works on which he comments beside him while he wrote, his long and close familiarity with them, as well as with the range of literature to which they belong, and with the principles and necessary details which help to illustrate them, is apparent throughout.  Seldom, indeed, except in the case of a specialist devoting himself to some single field, has a critical panoply been more complete than that with which Mr. Lowell has armed himself.  He discusses with equal learning and enthusiasm the profoundest and the minutest questions, mysteries of consciousness and niceties of metre and accent.  Yet this laboriousness is curiously conjoined with something of a sybaritic tone, as of a taste cultivated to hyper-fastidiousness and