This is unquestionably very fine. True, there is some contradiction in nudity and attire; but splendid contradiction is an eternal element of poetry. What would Milton's "Paradise Lost" be without it? The reader cannot tell whether the surprise of the poet is at the lady or her drapery. There is no use in asking a great poet what he meant in writing his brilliant lines. If as candid as Browning, he would answer as Browning did, that "he had not the slightest idea what he meant." Nothing remains for us but to congratulate the public on the advent of a new poet who is equally great on subjects of land or sea. There is a good deal of reviewing done on this principle, and reputations made by this sort of writing as fully without foundation, and I looked forward to further employment. The editor to whom I sent these primal specimens of my new vocation seemed undecided what to do with them--throw them into his waste-paper basket or submit them to his readers. I assured him I had seen a number of criticisms less restrained than mine, on performances quite as slender as the sonnets I had described. With kindly consideration, lest he might be repressing a rising genius in me, he asked me to give my opinion upon a charming little poem by Longfellow--to commend, as he hoped I could, as a new edition in which he was interested was about to be published. The object of the poet, I found, was to awaken certain young ladies, whose only fault consisted in getting up late in the morning. The lines addressed to them, if I rightly remember, began thus:-- "Awake! Arise! and greet the day. Angels are knocking at the door. They are in haste and may not stay, And once departed come no more." This verse reminds the readers of Omar Khayyam. Two ideas in it are his, and the terms used are his; but I resisted this temptation to imitate those popular critics, whose aim is not to discover the graces of a new poet, but his plagiarisms, and to show that everybody reproduces the ideas of everybody else, and prove that-- "Nothing is, and all things seem And we the shadows of a dream"--