HOYT'S SKETCHES OF LIFE AND LANDSCAPE.

ART. VII.-Sketches of Life and Landscape, in Ten Poems. By Rev. R. HOYT. New York: Spalding & Shepherd.

1848. 8vo.

THE true poet must be a genuine lover of nature. The eye, "in fine frenzy rolling," must survey the world without, as well as the world within. The moonlight scene, the woodland walk, the mountain glen, and the forest glade, what atattends and surrounds us in our daily paths,

"The common earth, the air, the skies,

familiar sounds and familiar landscapes, the opening bud and the rustling leaf, the velvet lawn and the waving grain, the rock, the tree, the streamlet, the ocean, all combine to elicit the poet's power and to awaken him to the perception and enjoyment of nature, in her varied beauty. And the exquisite perfection of his art, lies as truly in the graphic description of these, as in the masterly delineation of intense human passions, or of excited human feelings. We can give no definition of poetry, that will confine it to a particular class of objects and employments. It is as various as the passions and characters of mankind and the aspects of inanimate nature. And readers and critics are equally various in their tastes and judgments. Some love only the verse which exhibits glowing pictures of dramatic scenes,-which portrays the energies called into exercise by struggle and conflict, and kindles alike men's sympathies and imaginations; or which, selecting a single passion, traces it through all its wanderings and windings, and thus gives more of the soul of intense passion than of the features of nature. Others with minds of a more sober or more antique cast, are enamored of the old ballad and the old Romance, the Border Minstrelsy with scattered traditions and reminiscences of the past. They love best the Lyric Lays, the minstrel whose delight it is, like Wordsworth,—

"Alone in summer shade

To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts."

And there are others, again, who would have the music of the poet's mind always attuned to the service of the Church; who would mingle the tide of song with the tide of religious feeling, and commend nothing " dipped in the dews of Castalia" unless baptized also with the HOLY GHOST, and with the fire of Divine Truth. We rejoice at the consecration of genius to holy and Christian themes. We rejoice when the smooth and flow

ing numbers of the poet are given to God and his Church; and had the muse endowed us with the gift of song-had we bathed our lips in the Caballine fount, or slept on double-topped Parnassus-we would seize the way

"Distinct with signs-through which, in fixed career,

As through a zodiac, moves the ritual year
Of England's Church."

But in saying this, we must not be understood as ready to exclude from the rank of tasteful and touching and noble poetry, "harmonious numbers" devoted to the consideration of less holy themes. Wordsworth is as truly a poet in his "Excursion," as in his "Sonnets," and the Christian Cowper has no more of the vivida vis animi, in his Hymns, than in his "Task" and "Table Talk." "The groves were God's first temples," and in their calm and solemn shades men may meditate

“His milder majesty,

And, to the beautiful order of his works,

Learn to conform the order of their lives."

The truth is, poetry holds up the mirror to nature. Wher ever a being exists, actuated by the thoughts and feelings and passions of man; wherever a landscape spreads, or the mighty and majestic ocean rolls, wherever the blue arch of heaven bends, or the stars twinkle, or the clouds lower; wherever the shrill wind whispers, or the storm rages, or the birds sing, there are the elements of poetry; and whoever has an eye to see and a soul to feel them, has the spirit of poetry. "Man," says Hazlitt in his Lectures on the English Poets, "is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the GiantKiller; the Shepherd boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the sayage who paints his idol with blood; the slave who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant who fancies himself a god; the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and açt." He must, indeed, study in the school and imbibe the spirit of a Holy Religion. He must look upon whatever passes before

his mental vision with a fixed devotion to truth and purity. If his verse is not what would be called religious poetry, he must make his readers feel,-whether he sings of nature or of human life, that they are all along in company with the spirit of a single-hearted and meditative Christian. There must be no chilling misanthropy; no brilliant corruscations of a splendid genius flashing forth, only to make the darkness of error and immorality more painfully evident.

The "Sketches of Life and Landscape," are from the pen. of a clergyman of the Church. They are printed in a style of really elegant typography, and first appeared in the fugitive form of numbers. The volume before us is a collection of these numbers, arranged by the author, and sent forth without a line of Preface, or a note of explanation. The themes are familiar ones, but he touches the "Old" and "New" with beautiful simplicity and grace. We do not, it is true, find in Mr. Hoyt's "Sketches," the membra disjecta of a great Epic poet, but there is a vein of truthfulness, and freshness, and originality pervading them, which shows him to be, beyond question, a true poet, and one possessing no ordinary powers of description. We may confirm our opinion by the following quotation from "Snow, a Rural Sketch of Winter."

The "Sketches" are not all marked by the same degree of merit. That his muse, as Burns has said, "though hamely in attire, may touch the heart," he appears in some to have studied too much simplicity. His personal histories and the allegory of the "White Dragon," as they are among the first, so they are among the most inferior of his "Ten Poems." We can not withhold from the reader a few stanzas from the "World Sale-a Moral Sketch."

"THE WORLD FOR SALE!-Hang out the sign;

Call every traveler here to me;

Who'll buy this brave estate of mine,

And set me from earth's bondage free!

"Tis going!-yes, I mean to fling
The bauble from my soul away;
I'll sell it, whatsoe'er it bring;-
The World at Auction here to-day!

"Ah cheating earth!-could man but know,
Sad soul of mine, what thou and I,—
The bud would never wish to blow,
The nestling never long to fly!
Perfuming the regardless air;

High soaring into empty space;
A blossom ripening to despair,

A flight-without a resting place!

"No more for me life's fitful dream;

Bright vision, vanishing away!
My bark requires a deeper stream:
My sinking soul a surer stay.-
By Death, stern sheriff! all bereft,
I weep, yet humbly kiss the rod:
The best of all I still have left,—

My Faith, my Bible, and my God."

*

We should be glad to extract freely from the succeeding Poems, but our limits will restrict us to a single quotation from "Old,-a Sketch of Rural Life." The "hoary pilgrim" is first introduced sitting

By the way side, on a mossy stone,"

in sad meditation, when a sweet spirit breaks the silent spell

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and invites him to her cottage, while she asks the cause of his wandering hither.

"All the picture now to me how dear!

E'en this grey old rock where I am seated,
Seems a jewel worth my journey here;

Ah, that such a scene must be completed
With a tear!

All the picture now to me how dear!

"Old stone School-house!-it is still the same!
There's the very step so oft I mounted!
There's the window creaking in its frame,
And the notches that I cut and counted
For the game;

Old stone School-house! it is still the same!"

We would go on and give more of the old man's musings upon the spot where his youthful joys had been passed-but we must bring our Review to a close, by recommending the admirers of descriptive poetry to possess themselves of Mr. Hoyt's life-like "Sketches." Though a Clergyman of the Church, we have seen nothing from his pen, that speaks her praises or encourages a steady love of her shining excellence. We say not this to doubt the piety of the poet-for this is evident from his published verse-but simply to suggest whether" Life and Landscape" might not sometimes be left, and descriptive powers so ample, employed in the noblest of all services the service of the Church. The gift of song is God's, and to turn it to his highest glory must be the pleasure alike of the Pastor and the Poet.