Can track him, yea, up to
The Presence and the Throne of the Most High:
For thence he is, and tho’ he dwell below,
To the Soul only he his genuine Form will show!”
Mr. Ellison was a boy of twenty-three when he wrote this. That, with so much command of expression and of measure, he should run waste and formless and even void, as he does in other parts of his volumes, is very mysterious and very distressing.
How we became possessed of the poetical Epistle from “E. V. K. to his Friend in Town,” is more easily asked than answered. We avow ourselves in the matter to have acted for once on M. Proudhon’s maxim—“La propriété c’est le vol.” We merely say, in our defence, that it is a shame in “E. V. K.,” be he who he may, to hide his talent in a napkin, or keep it for his friends alone. It is just such men and such poets as he that we most need at present, sober-minded and sound-minded and well-balanced, whose genius is subject to their judgment, and who have genius and judgment to begin with—a part of the poetical stock in trade with which many of our living writers are not largely furnished. The Epistle is obviously written quite off-hand, but it is the off-hand of a master, both as to material and workmanship. He is of the good old manly, classical school. His thoughts have settled and cleared themselves before forming into the mould of verse. They are in the style of Stewart Rose’s vers de société, but have more of the graphic force and deep feeling and fine humor of Crabbe and Cowper in their substance, with a something of their own which is to us quite as delightful. But our readers may judge. After upbraiding, with much wit, a certain faithless town-friend for not making out his visit, he thus describes his residence:—
“Though its charms be few,
The place will please you, and may profit too;—
My house, upon the hillside built, looks down