Or shall we assert the rights of a diviner principle within us, restless, yearning, unsatisfied, which if it is not allowed to soar up and grasp after a goodness, like unto God, will attempt to absorb its energies in the pursuit of evil, wreaking upon humanity around it, the power of a fiend to make wretched, the cunning of a devil, to seduce and destroy?
It is reserved for the Millenium, to give us all the knowledge, all the good, all the perfection we are striving after; until then, who will—any, who can—rest satisfied? When “the lion and the lamb shall lie down together,” and man shall cease to war upon his brother, the philosophy of Experiment and of Observation shall be perfect, man shall cease from struggling, shall be contented and be HAPPY.
G. R. G.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Poems and Prose Writings. By Richard Henry Dana. New York: Baker & Scribner. 2 vols. 12mo.
In reading these elegantly printed volumes one is surprised that a collection of poems and essays, possessing excellencies so original and striking as this, should not have been made before. Mr. Dana is, unquestionably, in his own department, one of the deepest, most original and most suggestive thinkers that the country has produced, and although his writings may not be familiar to a large class of readers, his name is generally known and honored. We think that the present work will fully sustain his reputation, and that many who have heretofore been content with acknowledging his fame as a poet and thinker, will now be glad of an opportunity of testing it, by reading his productions. The first volume contains his poems and the essays and narratives originally published under the title of The Idle Man. These are better known than the reviews and dissertations contained in the second volume, now for the first time collected. It is curious that compositions of such excellence and permanent interest should so long have slumbered undisturbed in old magazines and reviews. They are marked by great force and fertility of thought, singular felicity in discerning the spirit and meaning of things, and singular sweetness, richness and harmony of style. The reviews bear the unmistakable stamp of a poetic mind, interpreting by the freemasonry of genius the intellectual excellence and moral beauty of other minds, and flashing light into every corner of the subject of which it treats. The articles on Allston, Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, The Sketch Book, Pollock’s Course of Time, Henry Martyn, not to mention others, are replete with sound and searching judgment as well as imaginative beauty.
In a short notice of a work of such literary pretensions as the present, it is more appropriate to indicate its positive merits than to allude to its defects. A mind so vital, powerful and individual as Mr. Dana’s can claim the privilege of being judged by its own laws of thought and production, and an application to it of external rules, which it does not profess to regard, would be little better than an impertinence. Still there are some peculiarities in the volumes which are slightly unpleasing, not because they are peculiar expressions of the author’s nature, but because they occasionally manifest an ungenial development of it. It is said that Mr. Carlyle’s opinion on any social reform can be accurately calculated from the speeches of the Exeter Hall reformers—he being sure to contradict them, whatever they may say. Accordingly, he defends slavery when they denounce it, and is in favor of dealing powder and shot to Ireland, when they are in ecstasies of philanthropic horror at its misgovernment. Something of this reactionary disgust we discern in a few of Mr. Dana’s compositions, and it gives to them as much willfulness as can possibly have its seat in a mind so gentle and just as his. His poems often have a roughness which is evidently intentional, and which indicates not so much a desire to produce new musical tones as to express contempt for old ones. Some of his speculations on society and government appear to us not fair expressions of his really large and solid intellect, but to spring from a morbid dislike, rather than from a calm objective vision, of the present. With these slight drawbacks, we hardly know of a recent work which contains so much to nourish the mind, to develop its finer tastes and affections, and give breadth to its thinking, than this collection of Mr. Dana’s poems and prose writings.