For Milton, weary of his youth’s young wife,
To her, to king, to church, to law untrue,
Warred for divorce and discord to the knife,
And proudest wore his plume of darkest hue:
And Dante, when his Florence, in her strife,
Robbed him of office and his temper, threw
’Mongst friends and foes a bomb-shell of fierce rhymes,
Shivering their names and fames to all succeeding times.
The two closing stanzas of this fragment are so perfectly, chastely and inimitably beautiful, that they induce a strong hope that Mr. Halleck’s fastidious judgment—for it is neither indolence of habit, nor difficulty of composition, which keeps our poet for periods so long and tedious behind the curtain, but the severe taste and chariness of his muse, which causes him to reject as unworthy of his pen what most writers would rejoice to put forward as the cope-stone of their renown—will suffer him ere long to give us his “Connecticut” entire.
XXIV.