The diet of Denmark has just voted to three poets of that nation a yearly pension of 1,000 thalers each. Two of them were H. Herz and Puludan Müller; the name of the third we do not know.
The book of the month in New-York has been Lavengro (published by Putnam and by the Harpers in large editions.) Its success was a consequence of the fame won by the author in his "Bible in Spain," &c., and of clever trickery in advertising. Generally, we believe, it has disappointed. We agree very nearly about it with the London Leader, that—
"It is worth reading, but not worth re-reading. A certain freshness of scene, with real vigor of style, makes you canter pleasantly enough through the volumes; but when the journey is over you find yourself arrived Nowhere. It is not truth, it is not fiction; neither biography nor romance; not even romantic biography; but three volumes of sketches without a purpose, of narratives without an aim. Mr. Borrow has hit the English taste by his union of the clerical and scholarly with what we may call manly blackguardism. His sympathies are all with the blackguards. Not with the ragged nondescripts of the streets, but the poetic vagabonds of the fields—the Rommany Chals—the Gipsies, who are as great in "horse-taming" as Hector of old, and great in the art of "self-defence" as any Greek before the walls of Troy—not to mention other peculiarities in respect of property and its conveyance which they share with the Greeks—the Gipsies in short who are vagabonds in the true wandering sense of the term."
James T. Fields has in press a new edition of his Poems, embracing the pieces which he has written since the edition of 1849. Mr. Fields has a just sense of poetical art; his compositions are happily conceived, and uniformly executed with the most careful elaboration. A few days ago we saw a letter from Miss Mitford, addressed to a friend in this country, in which he is referred to as one of the "living classics of our tongue." We perceive that he is to be the next anniversary poet of the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard.
W. G. Simms has published at Charleston a fine poem entitled The City of the Silent, written for the occasion of the consecration of a cemetery near that city. It flows in natural harmony, and in thought as well as in manner has an appropriate dignity. We wonder that there has appeared no complete collection of the poems of Mr. Simms, which fill at least a dozen volumes, nearly all of which are now out of print. Some of his pieces have remarkable merit.