By all creation swore, A British champion round his loins With strange great oaths they swore it, And felt his arm, and saw him hit, Three years the mystic girdle The champion's strength had graced, Pelides' belt, or that which spanned The sinewy loins of Hector grand, No braver heart embraced. VIII. And in three years no foeman And loafed, and chewed, and cursed, and spit, But now the loud defiance And sent him to the fray. II. Sooth was this picked American As wheat to Indian-corn; But 'tis the boast of that free land To take the stranger in, III. I do not know that great men Or the man of many wives, Still seeks that land, and thrives. IV. America's step-champion Went forth upon the wave, High hopes pursued him from the shore, And prophesyings brave, "Dollars to cents he wins it; Yes, sir, I guess he's spry; He'll whip the cussed Britisher, Our prime Benecia B'y." v. Like ancient heroes fabled Of strange descent to be, The Transatlantic hero claimed A curious pedigree; His dam an alligator, A fiery steed his sire, Remoter (thus the tale I read) A snapping-turtle crossed the breed, Infusing force and fire. VI. Full many a practised warrior Fall many a gouger dexterous, But Heenan (so 'twas said) could give Defeat in such debate. VII. Three years against all comers The champion keeps the ring, Keeps it against what fistic might The universe can bring; Across the Atlantic hurled, Warned Sayers he must guard his fame; Quoth Tom, "All right, my boys, I'm game; Old England 'gainst the world!" IX. Then out spake Harry Brunton, Quoth he, "I've at your service, Tom, X. Across the sea came Heenan, The willing foe he sought, For in times so tender-hearted, 'Tis the fashion to prevent All personal damage to a man, E'en with his own consent. ΧΙ. So where'er a champion goeth (I wish our volunteers may watch Where this vigilance doth cease, And many hazards strange they ran, And pondered many a cunning plan, Ere they could war in peace. XII. At London Bridge there waited A train immensely long. And with the dawn the champions came, Of men in shawls deep-muffled, Unshaven and unwashed Men who, forewarned, sat up all night To see the long-expected fight; Each carriage crammed, the word "All right!" Was passed, and off they dashed. XIII. But quicker still the telegraph "Look out, police, and stop the fight!" The wires officious say. From east and west came breathless in The myrmidons of Mayne, Each stands aghast and gapes and stares, Its freight the engine past them bearsLives not the constable that dares Arrest a special train! A BOAT left idly rocking at its chain While ever past it, to the glad blue main, Foam in their wake, and sunlight on their sails, Have we not Our brave Entellus too? And I would some worthier poet, In more melodious rhyme, Should sing the Battle of the Belt, And send it down through time. SONG. HARK, hark, hark! The lark sings high in the dark. H. The raven croaked from the raven stone; The lark sings high in the dark. The lark sings high in the dark. Long have I wandered by land and by sea, While hark, hark, bark! The lark sings high in the dark. -Fraser's Magazine. C. K. STILL LIFE. pass; They speed, their white wings spread before the Chained to the narrow inlet's dull green tide Oh! for an hour of motion and of life, Goes sweeping freee! Action, and purpose, and the wholesome task I feel the freshness of the rising gale, -N. Y. Evening Post. ENUL. NOVEMBER LEAVES. THESE gray November days Suit well my temper; so these fallen leaves lying In all the miry ways, Part rotten, part just dead, part only dying, Preach homilies for me most edifying. My hopeful spring is past, My rustling summer and my harvest season My fall-of-leaf hath come; and there is treason Within my heart, although I know 'tis reason. November leaves must fall, And hopes outworn, the timely frost must sever, Leaving their branches tall All gaunt and bare and black; but not forever. Thrice-strong to whom befall These kindly frosts! Let such forget them never. -Ladies' Companion. J. A. From The Saturday Review. Chaucer and Spenser, and those of the NarTHE POETICAL WORKS OF LEIGH HUNT.*rative Poems which are really metrical tales, LEIGH HUNT was one of a class of authors and turn, like fables, on the description of who fail to achieve eminence chiefly because simple incidents. It is natural that an authey are overshadowed by the vicinity of thor should regard with partial fondness his greater reputations. Ambitious men, of more elaborate efforts; and Mr. Hunt, like powers below the highest, should choose & Southey, does "not pretend to think that line of their own. A thirdrate physician there is no merit in the larger pieces," and, may become immortal by cultivating one of like him, appeals to the fact that " they have the waste places of natural science, and a not ceased to be called for by the public." barrister who has scarcely held a brief in We attach very little value to this test. It Westminster Hall may dash into the attor- varies with the attractiveness of the subject, ney-generalship of an obscure colony. It is the notoriety of the writer, and the greater the same in literature. The public prefers or less urgency of the puffing. Undismayed relative to absolute excellence. With a just by their alleged popularity, and by the aseconomy of time it will read a book, or go sertion that the first is the " finest narrative to see a sight, which is reputed to be the poem which has appeared in the English first of its class. It does not care to dis- language since the time of Dryden," we procriminate between the comparative elevation nounce "Rimini," "Corso and Emilia," of two different careers, or to balance the "The Palfrey," and even "Hero and Leandifficulty of success in that which is open der," to be second-rate productions, deficient and that which is crowded. Mr. Leigh in originality, and but for their pictures of Hunt wrote, and wrote well, in a variety of scenery very little above the level of the styles, but in each one he was fairly beaten prize-poem. It is perhaps worth while to by some contemporary poet. The "Story remark, by the way, that the line, "That of Rimini" contains some fine passages, but ever among ladies ate in hall," in that most as a whole does not approach the best of beautiful passage which describes Elaine's Byron's narrative poems. "The Palfrey," admiration of Lancelot, occurs word for word and "Wallace," are poor beside Sir Walter in Lorenzo's lamentation over the body of Scott's lays and ballads. The "Ode to the Sun," perhaps the highest flight of poetry in the volume, falls short of the simplicity and grandeur of the "Ode to Immortality." "Godiva," though it contains the choice line, "Hear how the boldest naked deed was clothed in saintliest beauty," has not the strange transparency of Mr. Tennyson's fragment on the same subject, and is not comparable to his masterpieces on kindred subjects. The result is, that although Mr. Hunt has written real poetry, and not mere rhetoric and metaphysics in verse, he is scarcely numbered among English poets, and probably has more honor with the less discriminating but more sympathetic American public than in his own country. Corso. Mr. Leigh Hunt is much more successful in what may be called "cabinet poems," where sustained power is less necessary than poetical sympathy and grace of expression. "Mahmoud," "Kilspindie," and the "Trumpets of Doolkarnein," are happy examples of what is rapidly becoming a lost art-the art of telling a story graphically without marring its effect by subjective interpolations. The mine of self-consciousness had, in Mr. Hunt's earlier days, scarcely been opened to poets. Byron himself, though he formed a kind of dark background to his pictures out of his own blighted existence, sought his materials and refreshed his imagination in the inexhaustible richness of The present volume, as we learn from the nature. Even the misanthropy of Manfred introduction, contains those of his poetical and Childe Harold is not the misanhtropy works, which the author thought worthy of of the hero in "Maud"-the Byronic melpreservation, and the plan of arrangement ancholy is not the melancholy which gives was settled by himself before his death. They its charm to "In Memoriam." Leigh Hunt's are distributed into "Narrative Poems," poetry-more nearly related to that of Keats "Narrative Modernizations," "Narrative than to that of Byron-still essentially beImitations," "Political and Critical Poems," longs to the earlier manner of the present "Sonnets," "Blank Verse," "Miscellaneous century. It abounds in glowing descripPoems," and "Translations." Adopting this classification, we should be inclined to give the preference to the least ambitious works -to the Translations, the Imitations of The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Now finally collected, revised by himself, and edited by his son, Thornton Hunt. London and New York: Routledge and Co. 1860. tions, ingenious turns, and lively sallies; but it is strictly confined within the dominion of fancy, and never aspires to teach or to interpret. Perhaps its most attractive characteristic is the cheerful tone which pervades it, in spite of trials and misrepresentations which might well have soured a less equable temper. There is no bitterness of |