Passing some half dozen poems, every way worthy of special notice, but omitted on account of our confined space, we come to “The Beggar of Naples.” This is one of the longest and most striking poems in the book; in a versification the most irregular but the most harmonious, indulging in the wildest flights of fancy, but never soaring beyond the common ken. The story is simple, and turns on the power with which a virtuous love may shape the destiny of the meanest. The picture of the beggars hanging round the sunny corners of the streets, tells with a few skillful touches more than a whole library of statistics. “Avoiding every wintry shade, The lazzaroni crawled to sunny spots; At every corner miserable knots Pursued their miserable trade, _And held the sunshine in their asking palms,_ _Which gave unthanked its glowing alms,_ Thawing the blood until it ran As wine within a vintage runs.” The italicized lines are eminently suggestive; and in the contemplative mind, awaken a long train of the most solemn thoughts—thoughts of Heaven’s indiscriminate bounty, and man’s unthankful forgetfulness, of the beggar’s hands overflowing with the gifts of nature, but all empty of the gifts of churlish human charity. The listlessness of the beggar’s life, the vacant sense and brain of the purposeless idler, is admirably portrayed in the following lines:— “Upon the beggar’s heart the matin hymn Fell faint and dim; As when upon some margin of the sea The fisher breathes the briny air, And hears the far waves symphony, But hears it unaware. The music from the lofty aisle, And all the splendor of the sacred pile— The pictures hung at intervals Like windows, giving from the walls Clear glimpses of the days agone. * * * * * All were unheeded, And came but as his breath; Or if there came a thought, that thought unheeded Even in its birth met death.” The awakening from this lethargy, at the first touch of love, is unrivaled:— “At once upstarting from his knees, He watched her as she went; The blood awakened from its slothful ease, Through all his frame a flaming flood was sent; _He stood as with a statue’s fixed surprise,_ _Great wonder making marble in his eyes!_” What can surpass the simple grandeur of the concluding lines of this passage? The new light which at once bursts on his aroused senses is thus happily described:— “All things at once became a glorious show; Now could he see the sainted pictures glow; And instantly unto his lips Rolled fragments of old song— Fragments which had been thrown Into his heart unknown.” &c.