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Poems of Nature make the felicitous occasion this year for one of Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin's rich and attractive series of their authors' selected works. An admirable etching of the poet faces the title-page, and the poems, chiefly descriptive of New England scenes, are illustrated by designs from nature, the work of a single artist. That Mr. Kingsley is in sympathy with the poet, and that he is an impassioned lover of nature and the various moods of nature, no one can doubt, and the impression of truthfulness which his work produces on the mind makes his pictures interesting and full of sentiment even when they are not entirely successful. Perhaps he aims in general at rather too large effects to bring them out vividly; for when the scene he chooses is least composite he is at his best.
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Deer Island Pines, for example, and
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The Merrimac are excellent, and we find much charm in
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A Winter Scene and in a Boughton-like
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November Afternoon.
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Childe Harold, which, if it has been read at all, has aroused its own distinct conceptions of scenery in the mind of its reader which must make any ordinary pictures setting off familiar lines tame and insipid. It is the triumph of art when the artist can bring out meanings and beauties in the text hitherto undreamed of; but we acquit the artists of the present book of any failure in that respect, for their intention seems never to have gone beyond amiable commonplace. The little cuts are all pleasant, trim, and, if not suggestive, at least not sufficiently the reverse to be displeasing. The head-pieces to the cantos are extremely good, and the two scenes
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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods and
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There is a rapture on the lonely shore
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Last Leaf.
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Just when it was written, the author says in his delightful and characteristic
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to the reader,
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I cannot exactly say, nor in what paper or periodical it was first published. It must have been written before April, 1833, --that is, when he was in the early twenties. The poem has always been a favorite, its sentiment suggesting Lamb's
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All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.