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By Root 16044 0

which put to shame the mature skill of our forefathers. While yet in leading-strings, we proved ourselves adepts in all the arts and sciences which promote he [[the]] comfort of the animal man. But the arena of exertion, and of consequent distinction, into which our first and most obvious wants impelled us, has been regarded as the field of our deliberate choice. Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make railroads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse. Because it suited us to construct an engine in the first instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the second. Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too cavalierly taken for granted that we shall be all Jeremy Benthams to the end.

But this is the purees insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him. The poet in ARCADY, is, in KAMSCHADTKA, the poet still. The self-same Saxon current animates the British and the American heart; nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions, do more than momentarily repress the impulses, which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.

Those who have taken most careful note of our literature for the last ten or twelve years, will be most willing to admit that we are a poetical people; and in no respect is this fact more strikingly evinced than in the eagerness with which we ourselves seek information in regard to our poetry and our poets. But, alas ! we seek what is not easily to be found. A distinct, connected, and, especially, a comparative view of our poetical literature, has been long a desideratum. But how, or where, shall we supply it? Shall we pick it out for ourselves, piecemeal, from the columns of the ephemeral press? Shall we look here for even a few well-considered and honest opinions at random? The idea is preposterous. The corrupt character of our ordinary criticism has become notorious. Its powers have, been prostrated by its own arm. The intercourse between critic and publisher, as it now almost universally stands, is comprised either in the paying and pocketing of black-mail, as the price of a simple forbearance, or in a direct system of petty and contemptible bribery, properly so called — a system even more injurious than the former to the true interest of the public, and more degrading to the buyers and sellers of good opinion, on account of the more positive character of the service here rendered, for the consideration received.

We smile at the idea of any denial of our assertions upon this topic; — they are infamously true. In the charge of general corruption, there are, undoubtedly, some noble exceptions to be made. There are, indeed, some editors, who, maintaining, an entire independence, will receive no books from publishers at all, or who will receive them with a perfect understanding, on the part of these latter, that unbiassed critiques will be given. But these cases have always been insufficient to have much effect upon the popular mistrust; — a mistrust heightened by the exposure, no great while ago, of the machinations of coteries in BOSTON — coteries which, at the bidding of leading booksellers, manufactured, as required from time to time, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale, for the benefit of any little hanger-on of the party, or pettifogging protector of the firm. We scarcely expect to be believed — but to so high a pitch of methodical assurance had the system of puffery at one time arrived, that certain publishers, in the city to which we allude made no scruple of keeping on hand an assortment of commendatory notices, prepared by their men of all-work, and of sending their notices around to the multitudinous papers within their influence, done up within the fly-leaves of the book. The grossness of these base attempts, however, has not escaped indignant rebuke from the more honorable portion of the press. Tricks such as