IN SPEAKING of the Poetic Principle, I have no design to be either thorough or profound. While discussing, very much at random, the essentiality of what we call Poetry, my principal purpose will be to cite for consideration, some few of those minor English or American poems which best suit my own taste, or which, [...]
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THE WORD “Verse” is here used not in its strict or primitive sense, but as the term most convenient for expressing generally and without pedantry all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, metre, and versification. There is, perhaps, no topic in polite literature which has been more pertinaciously discussed, and there is [...]
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CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of “Barnaby Rudge,” says– “By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his ‘Caleb Williams’ backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, [...]
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THESE TRIFLES are collected and republished chiefly with a view to their redemption from the many improvements to which they have been subjected while “going the rounds of the press.” I am naturally anxious that if what I have written is to circulate at all, it should circulate as I wrote it. In defence of [...]
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A BIOGRAPHIST of Berryer calls him “l’homme qui, dans ses description, demande le plus grande quantite possible d’ antithese,”– but that ever–recurring topic, the decline of the drama, seems to have consumed of late more of the material in question than would have sufficed for a dozen prime ministers– even admitting them to be French. [...]
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By Nathaniel Hawthorne. James Munroe & Co.: Boston WE HAVE always regarded the Tale (using this word in its popular acceptation) as affording the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent. It has peculiar advantages which the novel does not admit. It is, of course, a far finer field than the essay. It [...]
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By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of “Voices of the Night,” “Hyperion,” &c. Second edition. John Owen, Cambridge. “IL Y A A PARIER,” says Chamfort, “que toute idee publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand notore.”– One would be safe in wagering that any given public idea is erroneous, [...]
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[Graham's Magazine, January, 1842] IN Commencing, with the New Year, a New Volume, we shall be permitted to say a very few words by way of exordium to our usual chapter of Reviews, or, as we should prefer calling them, of Critical Notices. Yet we speak not for the sake of the exordium, but because [...]
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A Satire. By L. A. Wilmer A SATIRE, professedly such, at the present day, and especially by an American writer, is a welcome novelty indeed. We have really done very little in the line upon this side of the Atlantic– nothing certainly of importance– Trumbull’s clumsy poem and Halleck’s “Croakers” to the contrary notwithstanding. Some [...]
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THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, AND OTHER TALES By Charles Dickens, With Numerous Illustrations by Cattermole and Browne. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. MASTER HUMPHEREY’S CLOCK By Charles Dickens. (Boz.) With Ninty-one Illustrations by George Cattermole and Hablot Browne. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. WHAT WE here give [the above titles] is the duplicate title, on two separate [...]
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