James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

“ [192] Ode,” which is incomparably the greatest of his poems. All this vindicated in some degree the discernment, though it could not justify the sweeping manner of Margaret Fuller's criticism; and her tone of arrogance is more than counterbalanced by the fierce personalities with which the poet retaliated upon her in the “Fable for critics.”

The criticisms on English poets in this collection seem to me singularly admirable; they take rank with those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her “Essays on the poets.” There are many single phrases that are unsurpassed in insight and expression, as where she speaks of the “strange, bleak fidelity of Crabbe.” “Give Coleridge a canvas,” she says, “and he will paint a picture as if his colors were made of the mind's own atoms.” “The rush, the flow, the delicacy of vibration in Shelley's verse can only be paralleled by the waterfall, the rivulet, the notes of the bird and of the insect world.” “It is as yet impossible to estimate duly the effect which the balm of his [Wordsworth's] meditations has had in allaying the fever of the public heart, as exhibited in Byron and Shelley.” This is a rare series of condensed criticisms, on authors about whom so much has been written, and her remarks on the new men — Sterling, Henry Taylor, and Browning — were almost as good. She was one of the first in America to recognize the genius of Browning, and, while his “Bells and pomegranates” was yet in course of publication, she placed him at the head of contemporary English poets.

There is much beside, in these rich volumes; a brief criticism on “Hamlet,” for instance, in one of the dialogues, which is worthy to take rank with those of Mrs. Jameson; and an essay on “Sir James MacKINTOSHintosh,” which, in calm completeness and thorough workmanship, was her best work, as it was one of her latest. Indeed, the “Papers on literature and art” always seemed to me her best book; far superior to the