New Miscellanies Author:Charles Kingsley General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1860 Original Publisher: Ticknor and Fields Subjects: Literary Collections / General Literary Collections / American / General Literary Collections / Essays Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or miss... more »ing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. [Fraser's Magazine, October, 1853.] On reading this little book, and considering all the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us. There are those, even, who say that we have none; an assertion which, as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying. But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to succeed him ? And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset, than of the dawn, -- of the autumn, than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying ; but all around is winter, -- a mild one, perhaps, wherein a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world. Such is poetry in England; while in America, the case is not much better. What more enormousscope for new poetic thought than that which the New World gives? Yet the American poets, ev...« less