———Now the infant morning raised
Her rosy eyelids. But no soft breeze moved
The forest lords to shake the dews of sleep
From their green coronals. The curtaining mist
Hung o'er the quiet river, and it seemed
That Nature found the summer night so sweet
That 'mid the stillness of her deep repose
She shunned the wakening of the king of day.

All this is exquisite, and in Zinzendorff there are many passages of a like kind. The poem, however, is by no means free from faults. In the first paragraph we have the following:

———Through the breast
Of that fair vale the Susquehannah roam'd,
Wearing its robe of silver like a bride.
Now with a noiseless current gliding slow,
Mid the rich velvet of its curtaining banks
It seemed to sleep.

To suppose the Susquehannah roaming through the breast of any thing—even of a valley—is an incongruity: and to say that such false images are common, is to say very little in their defence. But when the noble river is bedizzened out in robes of silver, and made to wash with its bright waters nothing better than curtains of velvet, we feel a very sensible and a very righteous indignation. We might have expected such language from an upholsterer, or a marchande des modes, but it is utterly out of place upon the lips of Mrs. Sigourney. To liken the glorious objects of natural loveliness to the trappings and tinsel of artificiality, is one of the lowest, and at the same time, one of the most ordinary exemplifications of the bathos. At page 21, these verses occur:

No word was spoke,
As when the friends of desolated Job,
Finding the line of language all too short
To fathom woe like his, sublimely paid
That highest homage at the throne of grief,
Deep silence.

The image here italicized is striking, but faulty. It is deduced not from any analogy between actual existences—between woe on the one hand, and the sea on the other—but from the identity of epithet (deep) frequently applied to both. We say the "deep sea," and the expression "deep woe" is certainly familiar. But in the first case the sea is actually deep; in the second, woe is but metaphorically so. Sound, therefore—not sense, is the basis of the analogy, and the image is consequently incorrect.

Some faults of a minor kind we may also discover in Zinzendorff. We dislike the use made by the poetess of antique modes of expression—here most unequivocally out of place. For example.

Where the red council-fire
Disturbed the trance of midnight, long they sate.
What time, with hatred fierce and unsubdued,
The woad-stained Briton, in his wattled boat,
Quailed 'neath the glance of Rome.

The versification of Zinzendorff is particularly good—always sweet—occasionally energetic. We are enabled to point out only one defective line in the poem, and in this the defect has arisen from an attempt to contract enthusiasm into a word of three syllables.

He who found
This blest enthusiasm nerve his weary heart.