| North's Specimens of the British Critics, | 133 |
| The Tower of London. By Thomas Roscoe,, | 158 |
| Poems and Ballads of Goethe. No. III.,, | 165 |
| Spain as it Is,, | 181 |
| The Superfluities of Life,, | 194 |
| The Overland Passage,, | 204 |
| Mesmerism,., | 219 |
| Aesthetics of Dress. About a Bonnet,, | 242 |
| German-American Romances,, | 251 |
Poetry, according to Lord Bacon a Third Part of Learning, must be asocial interest of momentous power. That Wisest of Men—so our dearfriends may have heard—extols it above history and above philosophy, asthe more divine in its origin, the more immediately and intimatelysalutary and sanative in its use. Are not Shakspeare and Milton two ofour greatest moral teachers? Criticism opens to us the poetry wepossess; and, like a magnanimous kingly protector, shelters and fostersall its springing growths. What is criticism as a science? Essentiallythis—FEELING KNOWN—that is, affections of the heart and imaginationbecome understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence.Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? Quite thereverse. Greatest minds are those in which, in and out of poetry, theunderstanding contemplates the will. Then first the soul has its properstrength. Disorderly passions are then tamed, and become the massypillars of high-built virtue. Criticism? It is a shape ofself-intuition. Confession and penitence, in the church, are a moral anda religious criticism. The imagination is less august and solemn, but ofthe same character. The first age of the world lived by di