Mountainous mutterings, or through the vale
Roll the long roar from startled side to side,
When whoso, lifting up his sudden voice
A moment, speaketh of his meditation,

And thinks again. There shalt thou learn to stand

One in that company, and to commune

With them, saying, 'Thou, oh Alp, and thou and thou,
And I. Nathless, proud equal, look thou take

Heed of thy peer, lest he perceive thee not-
Lest the wind blow his garment, and the hem
Crush thee, or lest he stir, and the mere dust
In the eternal folds bury thee quick."

Coleridge, in his "Hymn to Mont Blanc"-a hymn, of which it is the highest praise to say that it is equal to the subject, to Thomson's hymn at the end of "The Seasons," to Milton's hymn put into the mouth of our first parents, and to this grand effusion of Sydney Yendys—says,

"Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,

And straight stood still,

Motionless torrents-silent cataracts!"

Balder has thus nobly expanded, if he ever (which we doubt) thought of the Coleridgean image:

"The ocean of a frozen world;

A marble storm in monumental rage:

Passion at nought, and strength still strong in vain

A wrestling giant, spell-bound, but not dead,

As though the universal deluge pass'd

These confines, and when forty days were o'er,
Knew the set time obedient, and arose

In haste. But Winter lifted up his hand,
And stayed the everlasting sign, which strives
For ever to return. Cold crested tides,
And cataracts more white than wintry foam,
Eternally in act of the great leap

That never may be ta'en-these fill the gorge,
And rear upon the steep uplifted waves
Immovable, that proudly feign to go."

There follow a number of verses, striving like ante-natal ghosts for an incarnation worthy of their grandeur, but not so clearly representing the magnificent idea in the author's mind to ordinary readers as we might have wished. Yet all this dim gulf of thought and image is radiant, here and there, with poetry. But how finely this passage sweetens and softens the grandeur before and after

So sings the mother as she milks within
The chalet near thee, singing so for him
Whom every morn she sendeth forth alone
Into the waste of mountains, to return
At close of day, like a returning soul
Out of the Infinite: lost in the whirl
Of clanging systems, and the wilderness
Of all things, but to one remember'd tryste,
One human heart, and unforgotten cell,

True in its ceaseless self, and in its time
Restored."

Our readers will notice, in these and the foregoing extracts, a vast improvement over "The Roman" in the music of the versification. The verse of "The Roman" was constructed too much on the model of Byron, who often closes and begins his lines with expletives and weak words. The verse of Yendys is much more Miltonic. We give, as a specimen of this, and as one of the finest passages in the poem, the following description of Morn:

"Lo, Morn,

When she stood forth at universal prime,

The angels shouted, and the dews of joy

Stood in the eyes of earth. While here she reign'd,
Adam and Eve were full of orisons,

And could not sin; and so she won of God,

That ever when she walketh in the world,
It shall be Eden And around her come

The happy wonts of early Paradise.
Again the mist ascendeth from the earth,
And watereth the ground; and at the sign,
Nature, that silent saw our wo, breaks forth
Into her olden singing; near and far
To full and voluntary chorus tune
Spontaneous throats.

Morn hath no past.

Primeval, perfect, she, not born to toil,

Steppeth from under the great weight of life,
And stands as at the first.

As love, that hath his cell

In the deep secret heart, doth with his breath
Enrich the precincts of his sanctuary,
And glorify the brow, and tint the cheek;
As in a summer-garden, one beloved,
Whom roses hide, unseen fills all the place
With happy presence; as to the void soul,
Beggar'd with famine and with drought, lo, God!
And there is great abundance; so comes MORN,
Plenishes all things, and completes the world."

We could select a hundred passages of equal merit; but, as faithful critics, are bound now to take notice, and that at some little length, of what we think the defects of this remarkable poem.

We think that the two main objections to "Balder" will be monotony and obscurity. We will not say of the hero, what an admirer of Yendys said of the Monk in "The Roman," that he is a great bore and humbug; but we will say that he talks too much, and does too little. The poem is little else than one long soliloquy-a piece of thinking aloud; and this kind of mental dissection, however masterly, begins, toward the end of 282 pages, to fatigue the reader. "Balder" is in this respect a poem of the Manfred and Cain school, but is far longer, and thus palls more on the attention than they. A more fatal objection is the great obscurity of much in this poem. The story does not pervade it, as a clear road passes through a noble landscape, or climbs a lofty hill, distinct even in its windings, and forming a line of light, connecting province with province: it is a footpath piercing dark forests, and often muffled and lost amid their umbrage. The wailings of Balder toward the close become oppressive, inarticulate, and half-frenzied; and from the lack of interest connected with him as a person, seem unnatural, and produce pain rather than admiration. This obscurity of Yendys has been, as we hinted before, growing on him. We saw few traces of it in "The Roman." It began first to appear in some smaller poems he contributed to the "Athenæum," and has, we trust, reached its climax in the latter pages and scenes of "Balder." It is produced partly by his love of personification and allegory-figures in which he often indeed

greatly excels; partly by a diseased subtlety of introspective
thought; partly by those fainting-fits to which his demon (like
a very different being, Giant Despair in the "Pilgrim ") is sub-
ject at certain times, and partly by a pedantry of language,
which is altogether unworthy of so masculine a genius.
Take two specimens of this last-mentioned fault :-

"Adjusting every witness of the soul,
By such external warrants I do reach
Herself; the centre and untaken core
Of this enchanted castle, whose far lines
And strong circumvallations, in and in
Concentring, I have carried, but found not
The foe that makes them deadly; and I stand
Before these most fair walls; and know he lies
Contain'd, and in the wont of savage war
Prowl round my scathless enemy, and plot,

Where, at what time, with what consummate blow,

To storm his last retreat, and sack the sense

That dens her fierce decease."

The second is worse, with the exception of the first four

lines:

"As one should trace

An angel to the hill wherefrom he rose

To heaven, and on whose top the vacant steps,
In march progressive, with no backward print,
A sudden cease. Sometimes, being swift, I meet
His fallen mantle, torn off in the wind
Of great ascent, whereof the Attalic pomp
Between mine eyes and him perchance conceals
The bare celestial. Whose still happier speed
Shall look up to him, while the blinding toy,
In far perspective, is but as a plume
Dropp'd from the eagle? Whose talarian feet
Shall stand unshod before him while he spreads
His pinions?"

His description of the heroine, with all its exquisite touches, is considerably spoiled by a similar unwise elaboration and intricacy of language:

"But when the year was grown

And sweet by warmer sweet to nuptial June,
The flowery adolescence slowly fill'd,

Till, in a passion of roses, all the time

Flush'd, and around the glowing heavens made suit,

And onward through the rank and buxom days," &c.

There is a mixture of fine fancy with the quaintness and odd phraseology of what follows:

"She came in September,

And if she were o'erlaid with lily leaves,
And substantived by mere content of deus,
Or limb'd of flower-stalks and sweet pedicles,
Or make of golden dust from thigh of bees,
Or caught of morning mist, or the unseen
Material of an odor, her pure text

Could seem no more remote from the corrupt

And seething compound of our common flesh!"

A splendid passage near this is utterly spoiled by language as apparently affected as anything in Hunt's "Foliage," or Keats'"Endymion:"

'Nature thus

The poet Nature singing to herself

Did make her in sheer love, having delight
Of all her work, and doing all for joy,
And built her like a temple wherein cost
Is absolute; dark beam and hidden raft
Shittim; each secret work and covert use
Fragrant and golden; all the virgin walls
Pure, and within, without, prive and apert.
From buried plinth to viewless pinnacle,
Enrich'd to God."

In justice, we must add one of the better passages of this very elaborate, and in many points signally felicitous descrip

tion:

"Yet more I loved

An art, which of all others seem'd the voice

And argument, rare art, at better close

A chosen day, worn like a jewel rare

To beautify the beauteous, and make bright

The twilight of some sacred festival

Of love and peace. Her happy memory
Was many poesies, and when serene

Beneath the favoring shades, and the first star
She audibly remember'd, they who heard
Believed the Muse no fable. As that star
Unsullied from the skies, out of the shrine
Of her dear beauty beautifully came

The beautiful, untinged by any taint

Of mortal dwelling, neither flush'd nor pale,
Pure in the naked loveliness of heaven,
Such and so graced was she."

Smith and Yendys differ very materially in their conception