It is saying much for this little volume, that it is by the author of "The New Priest," and bears the impress of the same powerful hand. None but a true poet could write "Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago," and the other poems found in the book here noticed. Doubtless, to constitute a poet, it is not enough to have a degree of cleverness and a certain knack of rhyming. If it were so, we should have poets in abundance, instead of the elect few, born, not made, who sit laurelled, crowned and apart, marvelously endowed and exalted above their fellows. It is only in this select number that we see manifested that easy capability of loftiest flight, that sustained strength and sweep of pinion, which is typified in the eagle, with his soaring and imperial instinct, borne and bearing upward, calmest when highest, towering in the serene of Heaven as his proper home and rest. This buoyant quality, which comes from power, and is its most sublime expression, may nevertheless, to the undiscerning, be less impressive in its show, than that visible struggle and effort which is really the sign and token of weakness rather than strength. To be vehement is not necessarily to be strong. Thunder is by no means the greatest of Nature's forces.

It can, to be sure, "with sharp and sulphurous bolt, Split the unwedgeable and gnarled oak." But what is that to the unintermittent actings of that quiet agency which rolls planets in their orbits, and holds the sun in its place. It is a vulgar error to be carried away with this false show of strength. Some of Byron's most admired passages are, we think, his weakest and worst. There is an acted and artificial intensity, a sham earnestness, a visible striving for effect, a willingness seemingly to "use the heaven for thunder, nothing but thunder;" but, in spite of this tremendous pother attendant upon imprecated attempts to " wreak thought upon expression," only a feeble result is obtained. This vice of theatricality, exhibiting the mere outward grimace and not the heart of passion, however, is much oftener met with in the numerous imitators of Byron, than in Byron in himself. -- The Church Review , Vol. 13.