verses in 66

Red Jacket" to be complimentary to Mr. Cooper or not; some suppose there is a gentle sarcasm on the great novelist's national egotism.

"Cooper, whose name is with his country's woven,

First in her files her Pioneer of mind,

A wanderer now in other climes, has proven

His love for the young land he left behind.

"And faithful to the act of Congress quoted
As law authority-it passed 'nem. con. ;'
He writes that we are, as ourselves have voted,
The most enlightened people ever known.
"That all our week is happy as a Sunday

In Paris, full of song, and dance, and laugh,
And that from Orleans to the Bay of Fundy,
There's not a bailiff or an epitaph.

And furthermore, in fifty years or sooner,
We shall export our poetry and wine,
And our brave fleet, eight frigates and a schooner,
Will sweep the seas from Zembla to the line."

There are somewhere about half-a-dozen more verses, but they are not written with the poet's usual felicity.

This inconsistency of mood betrays itself in most of Mr. Halleck's productions. Byron had the power to check this feeling. When he wrote a Mephistophilean poem he openly worked it out; in his serious productions he never suffered this disturbing, inharmonious spirit, to appear. He was too much of an artist to do this. But his American brother in verse seems to be governed by this mood, and not to rule it.

In the verses to "Alnwick Castle" we have an instance of this besetting sin. To be sure, the author may turn round and say that he meant it should assume this bantering tone, but there is an instinct in every reader which tells him how far such a purpose is legitimate. In "Beppo" and "Don Juan" we feel the whole work is in keeping, but in "Alnwick Castle" we only observe the poet's infirmity of purpose. We feel pretty well convinced that Mr. Halleck intended to write a serious heroic poem, when he commenced the lines in question, but finding his impulse or inspiration dying, he resuscitated it by calling upon the Genius of Banter. Notwithstanding this centaur-like appearance, it possesses some fine stanzas.

"Home of the Percies' high-born race,

Home of their beautiful and brave,
Alike their birth and burial-place,
Their cradle and their grave.

"Still sternly-o'er the castle-gate
Their house's lion stands in state,

As in his proud departed hours:
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners flout the sky
Above his princely towers.

"A gentle hill its side inclines,

Lovely in England's fadeles green,
To meet one quiet stream which winds

Through this romantic scene.

"As silently and sweetly still

As when at evening on that hill,

While summer's winds blow soft and low,

Seated at gallant Hotspur's side,
His Katharine was a happy bride,

A thousand years ago.

"Gaze on the abbey's ruined pile;

Does not the succoring Ivy, keeping
Her watch around it seem to smile,

As o'er a loved one sleeping.
One solitary turret grey

Still tells, in melancholy glory,

The legend of the Cheviot day,

The Percy's proudest border story.

"That day its roof was triumph's arch;
Then rang from aisle to pictured dome
The light step of the soldier's march,

The music of the trump and drum.
And babe and sire, the old and young,

And the manly hymn and minstrel's song,

And woman's pure kiss, sweet and long,

Welcomed her warrior home.

After two or three more stanzas, written in the same spirit, the jeering fiend comes over Mr. Halleck, and he breaks off thus:

"I wandered through the lofty halls,

Trod by the Percies of old fame,
And traced upon the chapel's walls

Each high, heroic name.

From him who once his standard set,

Where now o'er mosque or minaret

Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons,

To him who when a younger son

Fought for King George at Lexington,

A major of dragoons!"

Was the temptation of rhyming "dragoons" to "moons" too strong for the poet, or did his American indignation, to find a Percy against the cause of freedom, in the old war, dissipate the chivalric vision?

When we read this for the first time, we were under the momentary impression that we had got hold of, by mistake, "The Rejected Addresses," so like a parody on Sir Walter Scott did the verses sound:

To proceed, however, with Mr. Halleck's own account of the matter, he says:

"The last half stanza: it has dashed

From my warm lips the sparkling cup,
The light that o'er my eye-beam flashed,
The power that bore my spirit up,
Above this bank-note world is gone,
And Alnwick's but a market town,

And this, alas! its market day,

And beasts and borderers throng the way,
Oxen and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots,

Men in the coal and cattle line,

From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexam, and
Newcastle upon Tyne."

The poet concludes this address to the Home of the Percies:

"You'll ask if yet the Percy lives

In the armed pomp of feudal state?
The present representatives

Of Hotspur and the gentle Kate,
Are some half-dozen serving men,
In the drab coat of William Penn;

A chambermaid whose lip, and eye,

And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling,

Spoke nature's aristocracy,

And one, half-groom, half-seneschal,

Who bowed me through the court, bower, hall,
From donjon-keep to turret wall,

For ten and six pence sterling."

As a proof of the fire with which Halleck treats a congenial theme, we quote some verses from his Marco Bozzaris. This brave warrior fell in an attack on the Turkish camp, during the Grecian war for independence, in 1823. The opening is full of spirit and beauty.

"At midnight in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece her knee in suppliance bent
Should tremble at his power.

In dreams through camp and court he bore
The trophies of a conqueror.

In dreams his song of triumph heard ;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring!
Then prest that monarch's throne—a king!
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden bird."