Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-11-09 00:00:00

LITE RAT UR it

Nara As. Foams : By Thomas Buchanan Read. London :
Longman & Co.

leeverson'a compensation principle appears to prevail
nawhere more strongly than in the poetic literature of the
?vestal day. What we have gained in diffusion we have
best in power. Never was there more widely-flowing
paretic feeling, and seldom, if ever, less of poetry. The
Whence of the great age of creative genius just extinct
is beginning to be fully felt. It could not bequeath i's
vital strength, but it has left Its memory and its influence
iqt refined appreciation, purified fancy, and awakened
sympathy. Its own tones have ceased, but number.
bee echoes from all sides repeat faintly the sound.
Mat a great era of poetry has just closed is
evidenced by the appearance of numberless little
vslinmee, lull of fancy and feeling, which win our
iv:apathies, which cannot he read without pleasure, and
wikkh are continually making us fur the moment almost
teetelieve that a new poet has been born among us. The
time has happily gone by when volumes of ringing non-
nesse were issued every day from the press, "at the
request of friends," to be the jest and laughing stock
of the reviewers. If it be true that one cannot help
abseseing that there is little of the very poet in the
Tames of verse now daily published, neither can he in
justice keep back the remark that in most instances a
genial sympathy with nature, a pure appreciation for all
elljects of beauty, a refinement of thought—in short, a
deeply poetio feeling appeals to the heart and the
intellect of the reader. The volume we have now before
us its one of the highest specimens of this class we have
seen of late days. It has the leading characteristics of
the meat modern poets—the love of outward nature, and
the appreciation of her mysterious appealings to man :
tlialeaaobled fancy which extracts high meanings and moral
from the humblest objects; and the ten lerness of feeling
which gives what may be recognised as a religious tone
to rrery thought. Mr. Read's poems resemble those of
Xis countryman, Longfellow, more perhaps, than any
ether; but the resemblance is not so close as to suggest
acyt hing more than an occasional memory of the • Voices
stifle Night," or" Evangeline." So much of the poetic
aubigh thought and susceptible fancy, quickeued by the
bee of nature and the sense of beauty and harmony can
produce, this volume evinces. Many of the poems have
a quiet suggestive beauty, of which the hid ience is felt
growing stronger when more ambitious efforts would
Dave wholly faded out of memory. It is a somewhat
singular circumstance, that this quiet beauty and refined
sympathetic appreciation of the he mbler aspects of nature,
should be the chief attributes of the poets of a ;land where
grandeur and vastness are everywhere the external
elmracteristies. The poets of America are like the minor
German poets, susceptible of beauty most keenly in its
aanst limited range, tender lovers of nature's softest
expressions, quiet interpreters of the gentler emotions of
Densasity. Such are the attributes of Mr. Read's ballads,
mid we cannot avoid doing him the justice to remark,
that many a German has been admitted to something not
very far removed from a classic rank in poetry, who did
met deserve so much of the world as the author of some of
the thoughtful and feeling poems in this volume. " The
Chasing Scene" evinces the eye of the truthful
?sinter, as well as the melody and the heart of the
"The Summer Shower" makes us to se
the falling:drops, and hear them patter on the earth. A
very beautiful ballad is that entitled " Nightfall." It
b somewhat too mystic perhaps, but the reader is
!ouuhed and his sympathies are stirred to awakening
3y its vague, melodious, scarcely-expressed sadness.
litany extracts might be made, but one at least we cannot
retrain frOm giving to the reader. It is called

PASSING ICEBERGS.

A azABLEss shape of brave device,
Our vessel drives through mist and rain,
lietween the floating fiedt of ice,
'lhose navies of the =them main.

Those arctil ventnr_s blindly hurled,
Tce proofs of Nature's olden force,
Like fragments of a crystal world
Long shattered from its skiey course.

There are the blecateers that fright
The middle sea with dream of wrecks.
And freeze the south winds in their flight.
And cha n the Gulf-streams to their decks.
There stands some Viking as or yor',
Grim heroes from the boreal realm
Where Odin ra'es the spee'ral shore.

And oft beneath th 2 sun or moot?,
Their swift and eager f.lchions glow;
Whil., like a storm-vexed wins, th 3 rune
Comes chafing through some beard of snow.

And when the far north Mabee np
With fires of mingled red and gold,
Ihey know that many a blazing cup
11 brimming to the absent bold.

Up signal there! and let us hail
Ton looming ph.ntom as we pass;
Note all her fashion, hall ana sail,
Within the comp as of your glass!

See at her mast the stedfast glow
Of that one star of Cd;n's throne;
Up wi h our flag. and let us show
The Constellat on on our own

And speak her well ; for she might say,
II from her heart the words could thaw,
Great news from some far frozen bay,
Or the remotest Esqn:manx.

Might tell of channels yet untold,
That saeep the pole from sea to sea,
Of lands a Nth God designs to hold,
A mighty pes:ple yet to be,

Of wonlers which alone prevail
Where day and darkr:ess dimly meet;
Of all which spreals the Arctic sail ;
Of Franklin an.l Lie venturous Beet.

How, haply, at come glorious goal
His anchor holds, his sans are furled;
That fame has named him on her scroll,
"Columbus of the Polar World."

Or how Lis ploughing barques wedge on
Through 8,11 .tering fields, with battered shares,
Lit only by that spectral dawn,
The mask that mocking ditrkness wears;

Or how, o'er embers black and few,
The last of shivered masts and spars,
Hs sits amid his frozen crew
In council with the norland stars.

:To answer, but the sullen fl)w
Of ocean heaving long and vast!
An argosy of ice an I snow,
The voiceless north swings proudly pass.

We may mention that Arr. Read is an artist as well as
a poet. lacked this fact becomes almost apparent to
every reader in his faithful poetic renderings of glimpses
*ma nature. The graceful picture of the " Lost Pleiad,"
at present displayed in our Academy's exhibition, is the
work of Mr. Read'a pencil.

A LETTER OF "BRANCH RAILWAYS, addressed to the
Right Hon. Lord Stanley, of Alderley, President of
the Board of Trade, &c., &c.„ by Edmund Sharpe,
M.A., Fellow of the Royal Institute of Architects.
London : Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.
" The littl3 pamphlet, bearing the above heading, new
before us, is one deserving every consideration, not only
because of the importance of the subject of which it treats,
but also because of the simple but withal lucid
and comprehensive manner in which the writer deals with
H. He does not indulge in vain regrets at the extrava-
gance and want almost of ordinary prudence and
foresight exhibited until a very recent period, when
experience began to bear its fruit of wisdom, in most of
ear railway undertakings, but at once proceeds to the
consideration of the question,' how the trunk lines of
railway, which now intersect the country, can be made
the remunerative speculations, which, at their starting, it
'was confidently predicted they would become, and, at the
same time, how the outlying districts bordering on them
eon bo made participators in the benefits which railways
invariably confer on those places having immediate com-
munication with them. No one will controvert the axiom
I aid down by the late Sir Robert Peel, that the greater
the extension of railways, the larger will be the benefit to
tie country, but bitter experience has shown that
unhappily it does not follow, as a consequence, that all
extensions will be equally profitable to those who Invest
money in: their construction. On the contrary, it hap