work for annexation still went on, but it was in secret. England's position in the mean while became more threatening, and Andrew Jackson grew anxious to have Texas annexed. He privately wrote letter after letter to my father in regard to it, and at the same time urged continuously two Tennessee Representatives, Messrs. A. V. Brown and Cave Johnson, to do all they could to influence the President in that direction. Father was anxious that Andrew Jackson should come out publicly in favor of annexation, as his name was still a power in the land and such an action would militate against any man who favored it. Jackson's Congressional friends, however, knew nothing of the negotiation then going on, nor did they know that the President was in personal communication with Andrew Jackson. They would bring Jackson's private letters to them to President Tyler and read them to him. "At last one day father said, 'I am inclined to do as Mr. Jackson desires; but these letters are private. If I do this I must have a letter from Andrew Jackson of which the publication is authorized.' The two Congressmen went away highly elated. They wrote to Jackson and procured the letter. They then came with it to the White House. Father told them to have it published and bring the paper to him, and that he would give his answer. The following day it appeared in the Globe over Andrew Jackson's signature, and that afternoon Messrs. Brown and Johnson came to the White House, walking as if on air, with the paper in their hands. When they showed it to the President he coolly replied,— "Gentlemen, I have to inform you that such negotiations as you ask have been pending for several months, and that they are now about completed.' You can imagine the tableau. The airy look faded out of the faces of Johnson and Brown, and they walked away weighing several pounds more than when they had come in. "So father obtained Jackson's declaration against Van Buren. This was, however, very near the date of the nominating conventions, and he found upon looking over the field that Van Buren had already a majority of the delegates. If Jackson would declare in favor of the two-thirds rule the spirit of the party was such that it would take twothirds of the convention to secure a nomination. Father then sends Robert J. Walker to the Hermitage to get Jackson to declare for the two-thirds rule. Jackson so comes out, and he advises his friends among the delegates to insist upon this. "Notwithstanding all this, father still feared that Van Buren might yet be nominated, and to make surety sure he decided to enter the race himself and thus divide Van Buren's strength, intending in case he should get the nomination to resign in favor of some one else than Van Buren. "President Tyler never had any idea of being a bona fide candidate for a renomination. I can say this emphatically; for I remember well the day he first mentioned the subject to his family. This was the first time he had spoken of it to any one. It was one morning at breakfast, when only the family was present. Father told us he intended to be a candidate for another term as President, and he told us why he had concluded to do so. He said it was solely to defeat Van Buren, and that he intended to resign if he got the nomination. Soon after this he caused a convention to be called at Baltimore at the same time as that of the Democratic convention. There were seventeen or eighteen hundred at this Tyler convention, and it renominated my father. President Tyler's friends stuck to him well, and they succeeded in adopting the two-thirds rule, and through it Van Buren was defeated and James K. Polk was nominated. My father, having now accomplished his end, resigned. It was no ordinary man who could, with only a corporal's guard to help him, crush two such men as Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay." Frank G. Carpenter. BALLADE OF THE, ARCADIAN IN BUSINESS. N streets, amid the city signs, Where Law abuts on Ales and Wines, Through alleys bare of bud or tree, Some twitter in the civic vines; For comfort of the flowing bowl,- His entries ever run to "lines," As "sheepskin" leads to "shady knoll;" ENVOI. But hearken, Runners at the goal, Float out to fluting Arcady! Harrison S. Morris. OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [The Monthly Gossip will henceforth be an editorial department in which information will be volunteered upon any literary, scientific, or miscellaneous topic of general interest, and queries on such topics will be answered. Queries from all sources are invited, and every effort will be made to answer them fully and entertainingly. But it is requested that correspondents will refrain from sending queries to which sufficient answers may be found in such familiar books of reference as Brewer's "Reader's Handbook," Brewer's "Phrase and Fable," Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Wheeler's "Noted Names of Fiction," Lippincott's "Biographical Dictionary," Chambers's and other Encyclopædias, Classical Dictionaries, etc. All queries received before the 26th of February will be answered in the April number, and so on.] WHAT is the secret of poetry? What is the nameless power that resides in certain combinations of words, so that, though they express nothing new or deep or striking, they eat into the memory with phosphoric eagerness? Gray's "Elegy," for instance, has been called a mosaic of quotations, but no one has yet discovered the recipe for producing another mosaic of the same kind. Cowper's "Wreck of the Royal George" is a mere string of commonplaces. “Given an ordinary newspaper paragraph about wreck or battle," says Leslie Stephen, "turn it into the simplest possible language, do not introduce a single metaphor or figure of speech, indulge in none but the most obvious of all reflections,―as, for example, that when a man is once drowned he won't win any more battles,— and produce as the result a copy of verses which nobody can ever read without instantly knowing them by heart. How Cowper managed to perform such a feat, and why not one poet even in a hundred can perform it, are questions which might lead to some curious critical speculation." Longfellow has performed the same feat over and over again. There are poems of his which once read become for ever after a portion of your best and truest self. Yet you would be at a loss to defend them against the logic or the satire of the Philistine. Take "The Psalm of Life" as an instance. There is not an original thought in it. The most striking expressions are plagiarisms; the rest are commonplaces. "Art is long and time is fleeting" is a paraphrase of Horace's Ars longa, vita brevis est. The comparison of the heart to a muffled drum is to be found in the Bishop of Chichester's poem on the death of his wife, etc. Furthermore, there is an extraordinary confusion of metaphors. Here is how a critic in the Saturday Review once exposed this confusion. "The Psalm of Life, if there be any meaning in the English language, is gibberish. Let us analyze two of the verses: "Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, "Footprints that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solemn main, "Even if one can conceive of life as a 'solemn main,' bordered by the 'sands of time,' how can the mariners on the main leave their footprints on the sands? And what possible comfort can footprints on the sands be to a shipwrecked brother who, despite his shipwreck, still keeps persistently sailing o'er life's solemn main? The brother must have very sharp eyes if he could see footprints on the sand from his raft, for his ship is supposed to have been wrecked long ago. Perhaps Mr. Longfellow was thinking of the footstep which Robinson Crusoe found on the sand of his desert island. But Robinson was not sailing when he detected that isolated phenomenon; nor, when he saw it, did he 'take heart again.'” You can't but agree with every word of this criticism. Yet you go back to the poem and find that it has lost none of its power to charm and to comfort. If five people of healthy critical judgment were asked to select from Byron the most striking and magnificent passage, probably three of them would choose the "Address to the Ocean" in "Childe Harold." The Address is as vulnerable as anything in Longfellow. No less a person than Christopher North once fell foul of it and danced upon its prostrate corpse with ghoulish glee. The whole criticism is too long to quote, but here is how the first stanza is treated: "Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue ocean, roll!" says the critic, "is spirited and sonorous-and that is well-but it is nothing more -and the initial line should have been a nobler burst. 'Deep and dark-blue' are epithets that can neither be much praised nor blamed-to our mind they had been better away-for the images they suggest, if not in dissonance-are not in consonance with the thoughts that follow them-and seem not to suggest them but to stand by themselves as silent images-or rather forms of speech. "Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. In vain? That is-without injuring thee? But they were not seeking to do so -nor can imagination conceive how they could-and if that be not the poet's meaning, what is it? Ten thousand fleets sweeping over the deep, dark-blue ocean it may not be easy to picture to oneself-but he who can will have glorious conception of the power of man on the amplitude of the sea. The poet's meaning now becomes less obscure-and he says well, 'man marks the earth with ruin,' but not well, 'his control stops with the shore.' That is prosaic-and does not tell. How could he mark the sea with ruin? There is nothing there to ruin-and there can be no contrast. "Upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deeds. Call you that poetry? With the ocean personified before his own eyes, by his own soul, he yet speaks of his deeds on 'the watery plain.' To a poet inspired that had been impossible-but 'the vision and the faculty divine' were not with him and he was merely inditing verses. "Nor doth remain A shadow of man's ravage save his own, is hard to scan, and full of confusion. To extricate any meaning from the words you must alter them, but 'tis hardly worth the pains. You frown-tell us then what you understand by 'shadow of man's ravage save his own'? "Like a drop of rain He sinks into thy depths, to please you, we shall say is good-though we hardly think so-for wrecks on wrecks are shown to our imagination, and thousands of creatures perish-'man' here means men-if not, how unimpassioned the tale of his doom--but 'a drop of rain'-one single drop-was never yet seen by itself sinking into the depths of the sea-and further be assured by us, oh neophyte ! with Byron in thy breast, that 'with bubbling groan' ought not to be there, for a drop of rain melts silently in a moment, and since it is said that 'like a drop of rain he sinks,' erase the words from your copy, and for rhyme have reason. "Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. What do we find fault with that line? Yes-erase it. The poet is not singing a lament for sailors drowned at sea. He is singing the sea's wrath to man. The sea bids the ship go down-and down she goes-he wastes no thought on the crew nor on their wives and sweethearts. What can it possibly be to him that they sink 'without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown'? "But to cut the matter short-or to take the bull by the horns-the line as it stands, viewing it as an expression of human sympathy and sorrow in the poet's heart, forgetting the sea in the sailors, is an ambitious failure. 'Tis a cold accumulation of melancholy circumstances which were all inevitable—of which the opposites were impossible-debarred by nature and fate. There is no pathos in it not a bit.' It is absurd, it is ludicrous-yes, it makes us laugh— though rather than laugh at misery, human or brute, we would choose to pass all our life in the Cave of Trophonius. 'Without a grave'-who was to dig it? Show us sexton, spade, sod. As on the dry land no man ever yet was drowned-so at sea no man ever yet was buried but in the water-that is first— till the sea perhaps stamps him into the sand. Notwithstanding all that, all men speak of the sailor's grave-though, were they to ask themselves what they meant, they would probably answer-fish. 'Uncoffined'-why, the carpenter had other work during all this stormy home-bound voyage than to get coffins for the crew. The last thing he did was to cut away her masts. But she was waterlogged, and would not right-blew up without powder which by that time was mire-and then was sucked into the jaws of the Old One-like Jonah into the whale's belly. Uncoffined, indeed! Why, the whole four hundred men were in blue jackets-most of them sober enough in all conscience-but not a few drunk as blazes-some capering about stark mad-and one delirious Jacky Tar dancing a hornpipe on the quarter-deck, maugre the remonstrances of the chaplain. 'Unknelled' who was to toll the bell? Davy Jones,-and he did toll it-the ship's bell-a very Paganini ringing a full peal on its single self-and with most miraculous organ multiplying triple-bobs and bob-majors-in mockery of the funeral-as if it were a marriage-and strange must it have been to the ears of the more tenacious of life and timber among the sinking crew to hear below all that booming, and above it the well-known music from the steeples in both towns -both Devonport and Plymouth-welcoming the old frigate back again to the quiet Tamar." Pope excelled in satire. Of all his satirical portraits the most terrible is that he has drawn of Addison. De Quincey has pointed out that the whole passage rests upon a blunder, "and the blunder is so broad and palpable that it |