He shall return no more—to thee no more.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Lillian and Other Poems. By William Mackworth Praed. Now first Collected. New York: Redfield. 1 vol. 12mo.
Praed, one of the most brilliant, fanciful and peculiar poets of the century, has met with singular ill-luck in his native land in not finding either an editor or a public for the chance-offsprings of his sparkling muse. To Dr. Griswold belongs the credit of rescuing his pieces from oblivion, of collecting them in a permanent form, and of introducing them with a preface which presents, with condensed felicity of expression, the leading incidents of Praed’s life, and the subtle peculiarities of his genius. Poet, scholar, and politician, Praed was also a most popular and accomplished man of society, and not a little of the raciness of his poems consists in their curious combination of the romantic and the worldly. They suggest one of those modern parlors opening on one side into a greenhouse, with a strange blending in the atmosphere of musk and sweet-briar, eau de cologne and lilies. In such a forced union of the ideal and the conventional we are, of course, all the more piquantly reminded of their essential contrast. With all this clever deviltry, however, in the instinctive action of Praed’s mind, he has still given us some poems which indicate that a stout English heart beats beneath the embroidered waistcoat of the man of fashion, and will sometimes gush out in natural tenderness or passion. But his exquisitely nice perception of the falsehood of cultivated and conventual life, combined with a laughing charity for its pleasant hypocricies, commonly interferes with his poetic faith; and he is continually provoking sentimental readers by raising their serious sympathies only to give the greater force to the flush of sarcasm which dissolves them. This peculiarity springs, perhaps, from a deeper source than mere intellectual mischievousness, and refers to a humorous sadness of mood which is apt to characterize men who are both poets and wits—who see things at once in their ideal and conventional relations, and are fascinated by both. The observing reader will also detect, as a result of this, a certain fine misanthropy in the poems, but a misanthropy which is without malice or hatred. His description of the Troubadour, in his delicious poem of that name, may stand in some degree for his own portrait:
A wandering troubadour was he;
He bore a name of high degree,
And learned betimes to slay and sue,
As knights of high degree should do.
While vigor nerved his buoyant arm,