It was Goethe, we believe, who objected to some poet, that he put too much water in his ink. This objection would apply to the uncounted host of our amateur versifiers, and poets by the grace of verbiage. If an idea, or part of an idea, chances to stray into the brain of an American gentleman, he quickly apparels it in an old coat from his wardrobe of worn phrases, and rushes off in mad haste to the first magazine or newspaper, in order that the public may enjoy its delectable beauty at once. We have on hand enough MSS. of this kind, which we never intend to print, to freight the navy of Great Britain. But mediocrity and stupidity are not the only sinners in respect to this habit of writing carelessly. Hasty composition is an epidemic among many of our writers, whose powers, if disciplined by study, and directed to a definite object, would enable them to produce beautiful and permanent works. So general is the mental malady to which we have alluded, that it affects the judgments of criticism, and if a collection of lines, going under the name of a poem, contains fine passages, or felicitous flashes of thought, it commonly passes muster as satisfying the requirements of the critical code. Careless writers, therefore, are sustained by indulgent critics, and between both good literature is apt to be strangled in its birth.

Now it is due to Mr. Hirst to say that his poem belongs not to the class we have described. It is no transcript of chance conceptions, expressed in loose language, and recklessly huddled together, without coherence and without artistic form, but a true and consistent creation, with a central principle of vitality and a definite shape. He has, in short, produced an original poem on a classic subject, written in a style of classic grace, sweetness and simplicity, rejecting all superfluous ornament and sentimental prettinesses, and conveying one clear and strong impression throughout all its variety of incident, character and description. It is no conglomeration of parts, but an organic whole. This merit alone should give him a high rank among the leading poets of the country, for it evidences that he has a clear notion of what the word poem means.

We have neither time nor space to analyze the poem, and indicate its merits as a work of art. It displays throughout great force and delicacy of conception, a fine sense of harmony, and a power and decision of expression which neither overloads nor falls short of the thought. In tone it is half way between Shelley and Keats, neither so ideal as the one nor so sensuous as the other. Keat's Endymion is so thick with fancies, and verbal daintinesses, and sweet sensations, that with all its wonderful affluence of beautiful things it lacks unity of impression. The mind of the poet is so possessed by his subject that, in an artistic sense, he becomes its victim, and wanders in metaphor, and revels in separate images, and gets entangled in a throng of thoughts, until, at the end, we have a sense of a beautiful confusion of "flowers of all hues, and weeds of glorious feature," and applaud the fertility at the expense of the force of his mind. The truth is that will is an important element of genius, and without it the spontaneous productions of the mind must lack the highest quality of poetic art. True intellectual creation is an effort of the imagination, not its result, and without force of will to guide it, it does not obey its own laws, and gives little impression of real power. Art is not the prize of luck or the effect of chance, but of conscious combination of vital elements. Mr. Hirst, though he does give evidence of Keats' fluency of fancy and expression, has really produced a finer work of art. We think it is so important that a poem, to be altogether worthy of the name, should be deeply meditated and carefully finished, that we hazard this last opinion at the expense of being berated by all the undeveloped geniuses of the land, as having no true sense of the richness of Keats' mind, or the great capacity implied, rather than fully expressed, in his Endymion.

Mere extracts alone can give no fair impression of the beauty of Mr. Hirst's poem as a whole, but we cannot leave it without quoting a few passages illustrative of the author's power of spiritualizing the voluptuous, and the grace, harmony and expressiveness of his verse:

From the conclusion of the poem we take a few stanzas, describing the struggle of Dian with her passion, when Endymion asserts his love for Chromia:

In conclusion, we cannot but congratulate Mr. Hirst on his success in producing a poem conceived with so much force and refinement of imagination, and finished with such consummate art, as the present. It is a valuable addition to the permanent poetical literature of the country.

This long expected work has at last been published, and we think it will realize the high expectations raised by its announcement two or three years ago. It is mostly composed of extracts from the letters, journals, and unpublished sermons of Dr. Channing, and is edited by his nephew, Wm. H. Channing, who has also supplied a memoir. It conveys a full view of Dr. Channing's interior life from childhood to old age, and apart from its great value and interest, contains, in the exhibition of the steps of his intellectual and spiritual growth, as perfect a specimen of psychological autobiography as we have in literature. Such a work subjects its author to the severest tests which can be applied to a human mind in this life, and we have risen from its perusal with a new idea of the humility, sincerity, and saintliness of Dr. Channing's character. In him self-distrust was admirably blended with a sublime conception of the capacity of man, and a sublime confidence in human nature. He was not an egotist, as passages in his writings may seem to indicate, for he was more severe upon himself than upon others, and numberless remarks in the present volumes show how sharp was the scrutiny to which he subjected the most elusive appearances of pride and vanity. But with his high and living sense of the source and destiny of every human mind, and his almost morbid consciousness of the deformity of moral evil, he reverenced in himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by directing his aspirations to God.

The present volumes give a full length portrait of Dr. Channing in all the relations of life, and some of the minor details regarding his opinions and idiosyncrasies are among the most interesting portions of the book. We are glad to perceive that he early appreciated Wordsworth. The Excursion he eagerly read on its first appearance, and while so many of the Pharisees of taste were scoffing at it, he manfully expressed his sense of its excellence. This poem he recurred to oftener than to any other, and next to Shakspeare, Wordsworth seems to have been the poet he read with the most thoughtful delight. When he went to Europe, in 1822, he had an interview with Wordsworth, and of the impression he himself made on the poet there can be no more pertinent illustration, than the fact that, twenty years afterward, Wordsworth mentioned to an American gentleman that one observation of Channing, respecting the connection of Christianity with progress, had stamped itself ineffaceably upon his mind. Coleridge he appears to have profoundly impressed. In a letter to Washington Allston, Coleridge says of him—"His affection for the good as the good, and his earnestness for the true as the true—with that harmonious subordination of the latter to the former, without encroachment on the absolute worth of either—present in him a character which in my heart's heart I believe to be the very rarest on earth. . . . . Mr. Channing is a philosopher in both the possible renderings of the word. He has the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. . . . . I am confident that the few differences of opinion between him and myself not only are, but would by him be found to be apparent, not real—the same truth seen in different relations. Perhaps I have been more absorbed in the depth of the mystery of the spiritual life, he more engrossed by the loveliness of its manifestations."

In nothing is Dr. Channing's humility better seen than in his relations to literature. He became an author almost unconsciously. All his intellectual convictions were so indissolubly woven into the texture of his life, so vitalized by his heart and imagination, that writing with him was never an end but a means. Literary fame followed him; he did not follow it. When, however, he found that his reputation not only rung through his own country but was reverberated from Europe, he appears to have feared that it might corrupt his motives for composition. He studiously avoided reading all eulogistic notices of his works or character, though they were interesting to him as indications of the influence his cherished opinions were exerting. The article in the Westminster Review, which exceeded all others in praise, he never read. Dr. Dewey's criticism in the Christian Examiner he only knew as far as related to its objections, and his only disappointment was in finding them so few. Brougham's criticism on his style provoked in him no retort. Hazlitt's coarse attack on him in the Edinburgh Review he considered as an offset to the undue praise he had received from other quarters. "The author of the article," he says, in one of his letters, "is now dead; and as I did not feel a moment's anger toward him during his life, I have no reproach for him now. He was a man of fine powers, and wanted nothing but pure and fixed principles to make him one of the lights of the age."

It would be impossible in our limits to convey an adequate impression of the beauty, value, or interest of the present volumes. They are full of matter. The letters are admirable specimens of epistolary composition, considered as the spontaneous expression of a grave, high and warm nature, to the friends of his heart and mind. They are exceedingly original of their kind, and while they bear no resemblance to those of Cowper, Burns, Byron, or Mackintosh, they are on that very account a positive addition to the literature of epistolary composition. Few biographies have been published within a century calculated to make so deep an impression as this of Dr. Channing, and few could have admitted the reader to so close a communion with the subject, without sacrificing that delicacy in the treatment of frailties due to the character of the departed.

The present work is to some extent an attempt "to head" Mr. Headley. For our part, we profess to have as much patience as any of the descendants of Job, but we must acknowledge that we have broken down in every effort to master the merits of the quarrel between the publishers of the present volumes and the Author of Napoleon and his Marshals. Accordingly we can give no opinion on that matter. In respect to the value of the volumes under consideration, as compared with a similar work by Mr. Headley, there can be little hesitation of judgment. It is idle to say, as some have said, that a work which has run through fifteen editions, as Mr. Headley's has done, is a mere humbug. On the contrary, it is a book evincing a mind as shrewd as it is strong, aiming, it is true, rather at popularity than excellence, but obtaining the former by possessing the sagacity to perceive that accounts of battles, to be generally apprehended, must be addressed to the eye and blood rather than to the understanding; and this power of producing vivid pictures of events Mr. Headley has in large measure. Hence the success of his book, in spite of its exaggerations of statement, sentiment and language.

The present work evinces a merit of another kind. It is a keen, accurate, well-written production, devoid of all tumult in its style and all exaggeration in its matter, and giving close and consistent expositions of the characters, and a clear narrative of the lives, of Napoleon and his Marshals. It is evidently the work of a person who understands military operations, and conveys a large amount of knowledge which we have seen in no other single production on the subject of the wars springing out of the French Revolution. The portraits of fifteen of the marshals, in military costume, are very well executed.

The portion of the work devoted to Napoleon, about one third of the whole, is very able. Its defect consists in the leniency of its judgment on that gigantic public criminal. Napoleon was a grand example of a great man, who demonstrated, on a wide theatre of action, what can be done in this world by a colossal intellect and an iron will without any moral sense. In his disregard of humanity, and his reliance on falsehood and force, he was the architect at once of his fortune and his ruin. No man can be greatly and wisely politic who is incapable of grasping those universal sentiments which underlie all superficial selfishness in mankind, and of discerning the action of the moral laws of the universe. Without this, events cannot be read in their principles. The only defect in Napoleon's mind was a lack of moral insight, the quality of perceiving the moral character and relations of objects, and, wanting this, he must necessarily have been in the long run unsuccessful. It is curious that of all the great men which the Revolution called forth, Lafayette was almost the only one who never violated his conscience, and the only one who came out well in the end. Intellectually he was below a hundred of his contemporaries, but his instinctive sense of right pushed him blindly in the right direction, when all the sagacity and insight of the masters in intrigue and comprehensive falsehood signally failed.

The romantic element in historical events is that which takes the strongest hold upon the imagination and sensibility; and it puts a certain degree of life into the fleshless forms of even the commonplace historian. The incidents of a nation's annals cannot be narrated in a style sufficiently dry and prosaic to prevent the soul of poetry from finding some expression, however short of the truth. It seems to us that there is much error in the common notions regarding matters of fact. Starting from the unquestionable axiom that historians should deal with facts and principles, not with fictions and sentimentalities, most people have illogically concluded that those histories are the worthiest of belief which address the understanding alone, and studiously avoid all the arts of representation. Now this is false in two respects—such histories not only giving imperfect and partial views of facts, but disabling the memory from retaining even them. Facts and events, whether we regard them singly or in their relations, can be perceived and remembered only as they are presented to the whole nature. They must be realized as well as generalized. The sensibility and imagination, as well as the understanding are to be addressed. As far as possible they should be made as real to the mind as any event which experience has stamped on the memory. History thus written, is written close to the truth of things, and conveys real knowledge. Far from departing from facts, or exaggerating them, it is the only kind of history which thoroughly comprehends them. We should never forget that the events which have occurred in the world, are expressions of the nature of man under a variety of circumstances and conditions, and that these events must be interpreted in the light of that common humanity which binds all men together. History, therefore, differs from true poetry, not so much in intensity and fullness of representation; not so much in the force, vividness and distinctness with which things are brought home to the heart and brain, as in difference of object. The historian and the poet are both bound to deal with human nature, but one gives us its actual development, the other its possible; one shows us what man has done, the other what man can do. The annalist who does not enable us to see mankind in real events, is as unnatural as the poetaster who substitutes monstrosities for men in fictitious events.

We accordingly welcome with peculiar heartiness all attempts at realizing history, by evolving its romantic element, and thus demonstrating to the languid and lazy readers of ninepenny nonsense, that the actual heroes and heroines of the world have surpassed in romantic daring the fictitious ones who swell and swagger in most novels and poems. Mr. Gayarre's work is more interesting, both as regards its characters and incidents, than Jane Eyre or James's "last," for, in truth, it requires a mind of large scope to imagine as great things as many men, in every country, have really performed. The History of Louisiana affords a rich field to the poet and romancer, who is content simply to reproduce in their original life some of its actual scenes and characters; and Mr. Gayarre has, to a considerable extent, succeeded in this difficult and delicate task. The work evinces a mind full of the subject; and if defective at all, the defect is rather in style than matter. The author evidently had two temptations to hasty composition—a copious vocabulary and complete familiarity with his subject. There is an occasional impetuosity and recklessness in his manner, and a general habit of tossing off his sentences with an air of disdainful indifference, which characterizes a large class of amateur southern writers. Such a style is often rapid from heedlessness rather than force, and animated from caprice rather than fire. The timid correctness of an elegant diction is not more remote from beauty than the defiant carelessness of a reckless one is from power; and to avoid Mr. Prettyman, it is by no means necessary to "fraternize" with Sir Forcible Feeble. Mr. Gayarre has produced so pleasant a book, and gives evidence of an ability to do so much toward familiarizing American history to the hearts and imaginations of the people, that we trust he will not only give us more books, but subject their style to a more scrupulous examination than he has the present.

Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language By Joseph E. Worcester. Boston: Wilkins, Carter, & Co. 1 vol. 8vo.