Green be the turf, &c.
although beautiful, bears too close a resemblance to the still more beautiful lines of William Wordsworth,
| She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love. |
As a versifier Halleck is by no means equal to his friend, all of whose poems evince an ear finely attuned to the delicacies of melody. We seldom meet with more inharmonious lines than those, generally, of the author of Alnwick Castle. At every step such verses occur as,
| And the monk's hymn and minstrel's song— True as the steel of their tried blades— For him the joy of her young years— Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath— And withered my life's leaf like thine— |
in which the proper course of the rhythm would demand an accent upon syllables too unimportant to sustain it. Not unfrequently, too, we meet with lines such as this,
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree,
in which the multiplicity of consonants renders the pronunciation of the words at all, a matter of no inconsiderable difficulty.
But we must bring our notice to a close. It will be seen that while we are willing to admire in many respects the poems before us, we feel obliged to dissent materially from that public opinion (perhaps not fairly ascertained) which would assign them a very brilliant rank in the empire of Poesy. That we have among us poets of the loftiest order we believe—but we do not believe that these poets are Drake and Halleck.