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By Root 15923 0

than ours; the following tribute is from the London Quarterly Review.” What this lady — for whom and for whose opinion we still have the highest respect — can mean by calling the praise of Southey “more authoritative” than her own, is a point we shall not pause to determine. Her praise is at least honest, or we hope so. Its “authority” is in exact proportion with each one’s estimate of her judgement. But it would not do to say all this of the author of “Thalaba.” It would not do to say it in the hearing of men who are sane, and who, being sane, have perused the leading articles in the “London Quarterly Review” during the ten or fifteen years prior to that period when Robert Southey, having concocted “The Doctor,” took definite leave of his wits. In fact, for anything that we have yet seen or heard to the contrary, the opinion of the laureate, in respect to the poem of “Amir Khan,” is a matter still only known to Robert Southey. But were it known to all the world, as Miss Sedgwick supposes with so charmingly innocent an air; we mean to say were it really an honest opinion, — this “authoritative praise,” — still it would be worth, in the eyes of every sensible person, only just so much as it demonstrates, or makes a show of demonstrating. Happily the day has gone by, and we trust forever, when men are content to swear blindly by the words of a master, poet-laureate though he be. But what Southey says of the poem is at best an opinion and no more. What Miss Sedgwick says of it is very much in the same predicament. “Amir Khan,” she writes, “has long been before the public, but we think it has suffered from a general and very natural distrust of precocious genius. The versification is graceful, the story beautifully developed, and the orientalism well sustained. We think it would not have done discredit to our most popular poets in the meridian of their fame; as the production of a girl of fifteen it seems prodigious.” The cant of a kind heart when betraying into error a naturally sound judgement, is perhaps the only species of cant in the world not altogether contemptible.

We yield to no one in warmth of admiration for the personal character of these sweet sisters, as that character is depicted by the mother, by Miss Sedgwick, and by Mr. Irving. But it costs ­us no effort to distinguish that which, in our heart, is love of their worth, from that which, in our intellect, is appreciation of their poetic ability. With the former, as critic, we have nothing to do. The distinction is one too obvious for comment; and its observation would have spared us much twaddle on the part of the commentators upon “Amir Khan.”

We will endeavor to convey, as concisely as possible, some idea of this poem as it exists, not in the fancy of the enthusiastic, but in fact. It includes four hundred and forty lines. The metre is chiefly octo-syllabic. At one point it is varied by a casual introduction of an anapæst in the first and second foot; at another (in a song) by seven stanzas of four lines each, rhyming alternately; the metre anapæstic of four feet alternating with three. The versification is always good, so far as the meagre written rules of our English prosody extend; that is to say, there is seldom a syllable too much or too little; but long and short syllables are placed at random, and a crowd of consonants sometimes renders a line unpronounceable. For example:

He loved, — and oh, he loved so well

That sorrow scarce dared break the spell.

At times, again, the rhythm lapses, in the most inartistical manner, and evidently without design, from one species to another altogether incongruous; as, for example, in the sixth line of these eight, where the tripping anapaestic stumbles into the demure iambic, recovering itself, even more awkwardly, in the conclusion:

Bright Star of the Morning! This bosom is cold —

I was forced from my native shade,

And I wrapped me around with my mantle’s fold,

A sad, mournful Circassian maid!

And I then vow’d that rapture should never move

This changeless check, this rayless eye,

And I then vowed to feel