Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878, page 229 by Various Authors
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tected, readers of to-day having been so long unfamiliar with poetry of that character as to be sure to set it down as original and hail the reviver of it as a new light. Perhaps he may turn out to have been right in that impression, and figure as the herald, if not an active inaugurator, of a new era of taste in verse. He cannot remain the only practical asserter of the theory that it is better to steal good poetry than to write bad. Should his followers, however, shrink from downright theft, they might consent to shine as adapters. Some who are masters of English undefiled might help the cause by translating some of the best bits of Browning, Swinburne and Rossetti, to say nothing of Tennyson, who has gradually constructed a dialect of his own and trained us to understand it.
By fugitive poetry we mean the work of those usually classed as song-writers and lyrists, leaving out the big guns, if we have had any of the latter tribe since Milton, who was himself strongest in short poems. Most modern poets have made their début in the periodical press, and those who did not have shown a painful tendency to run to epic. The age respectfully declines epics.
We should not despair of the suggested revival. Ours is not the first period that has suffered under the dealers in concetti. They have had things somewhat their own way before--in the century which included Spenser and Donne, for instance. Our euphuists may pass away like those of the Elizabethan era, or, like the best of them, live in spite of faults with which they were gratuitously trammelled.
E. B.
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LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Bits of Travel at Home. By H. H. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The author's present home we should incline to fix in Colorado, but she includes New England and California in her travels, and finds something beautiful to describe wherever she goes within those broad limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees