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By Root 16659 0

is before us. With Tennyson’s works beside her, and a keen appreciation of them in her soul — appreciation too keen to be discriminative; — with an imagination even more vigorous than his, although somewhat less ethereally delicate; with inferior art and more feeble volition; she has written poems such as he could not write, but such as he, under her conditions of ill health and seclusion, would have written during the epoch of his pupildom in that school which arose out of Shelley, and from which, over a disgustful gulf of utter incongruity and absurdity, lit only by miasmatic flashes, into the broad open meadows of Natural Art and Divine Genius, he — Tennyson — is at once the bridge and the transition.

R. H. HORNE.

MR. R. H. HORNE, the author of “Orion,” has, of late years, acquired a high and extensive home reputation, although, as yet, he is only partially known in America. He will be remembered, however, as the author of a very well-written Introduction to Black’s Translation of Schlegel’s “Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature,” and as a contributor with Wordsworth, Hunt, Miss Barrett, and others, to “Chaucer Modernized.” He is the author, also, of “Cosmo de Medici,” of “The Death of Marlowe,” and, especially, of “Gregory the Seventh,” a fine tragedy, prefaced with an “Essay on Tragic Influence.” “Orion” was originally advertised to be sold for a farthing; and, at this price, three large editions were actually sold. The fourth edition, (a specimen of which now lies before us) was issued at a shilling, and also sold . A fifth is promised at half a crown; this likewise, with even a sixth at a crown, may be disposed of — partly through the intrinsic merit of the work itself — but, chiefly, through the ingenious novelty of the original price.

We have been among the earliest readers of Mr. Horne among the most earnest admirers of his high genius; — for a man of high, of the highest genius, he unquestionably is. With an eager wish to do justice to his “Gregory the Seventh,” we have never yet found exactly that opportunity we desired. Meantime, we looked, with curiosity, for what the British critics would say of a work which, in the boldness of its conception, and in the fresh originality of its management, would necessarily fall beyond the routine of their customary verbiage. We saw nothing, however, that either could or should be understood — nothing, certainly, that was worth understanding. The tragedy itself was, unhappily, not devoid of the ruling cant of the day, and its critics (that cant incarnate) took their cue from some of its infected passages, and proceeded forthwith to rhapsody and æsthetics, by way of giving ­a common-sense public an intelligible idea of the book. By the “cant of the day” we mean the disgusting practice of putting on the airs of an owl, and endeavoring to look miraculously wise; — the affectation of second sight — of a species of ecstatic prescience — of an intensely bathetic penetration into all sorts of mysteries, psychological ones in especial; — an Orphic — an ostrich affectation, which buries its head in balderdash, and, seeing nothing itself, fancies, therefore, that its preposterous carcass is not a visible object of derision for the world at large.

Of “Orion” itself, we have, as yet, seen few notices in the British periodicals, and these few are merely repetitions of the old jargon. All that has been said, for example, might be summed up in some such paragraph as this:

“ ‘Orion’ is the earnest outpouring of the oneness of the psychological MAN. It has the individuality of the true SINGLENESS. It is not to be regarded as a Poem, but as a WORK — as a multiple THEOGONY — as a manifestation of the WORKS and the DAYS. It is a pinion in the PROGRESS — a wheel in the MOVEMENT that moveth ever and goeth alway a mirror of SELF -INSPECTION, held up by the SEER of the Age essential — of the Age in esse — for the SEERS of the Ages possible — in posse. We hail a brother in the work.”

Of the mere opinions of the donkeys who bray thus — of their mere dogmas and doctrines, literary,