(Famed were these tresses in Provençal song,)’ etc.
“The following sketch of ‘Joan of Arc in Rheims,’ is in a loftier and more ambitious vein, but sustained with equal grace, and as touching in its solemn tenderness. We can afford to extract but a part of it:—
——‘Within, the light,
Through the rich gloom of pictured windows flowing,’ etc.
“There are several strains of a more passionate character, especially in the two poetical epistles from Lady Arabella Stuart and Properzia Rossi. We shall venture to give a few lines from the former. The Lady Arabella was of royal descent; and having excited the fears of our pusillanimous James by a secret union with the Lord Seymour, was detained in a cruel captivity, by that heartless monarch, till the close of her life—during which she is supposed to have indited this letter to her lover from her prison-house:—
‘My friend, my friend! where art thou? Day by day,
Gliding, like some dark mournful stream, away,’ etc.
“The following, though it has no very distinct object or moral, breathes, we think, the very spirit of poetry, in its bright and vague picturings, and is well entitled to the name it bears—‘An Hour of Romance:’
‘There were thick leaves above me and around,
And low sweet sighs, like those of childhood’s sleep,’ etc.