“Talent is strength and subtlety of mind, genius is mental inspiration and delicacy of feeling. Talent possesses vigor and acuteness of penetration, but is surpassed by the vivid intellectual conceptions of genius. The former is skillful and bold, the latter aspiring and gentle; but talent excels in practical sagacity, and hence those striking contrasts so often witnessed in the world, the triumph of talent through its adroit and active energies, and the adversities of genius in the midst of its boundless but unattainable aspirations. “Talent is the Lion and the Serpent; Genius is the Eagle and the Dove. “Or the first is like some conspicuous flower which flaunts its glory in the sunshine, while the last resembles the odoriferous spikenard’s root, whose sweetness is concealed in the ground. “The flower displays itself openly, the root must be extracted from the earth.” Here is a piece of verse, in a different vein, on a very common dispensation of Providence, the Mean Fellow. We fear that few are so fortunate as not to be able to apply it to some acquaintance or enemy: “Born but to be some snarl or plague, Vile product of a rotten egg, In every feature of thy face, A want of heart, of soul, we trace; By every honest man contemn’d, By your own looks betray’d, condemn’d— Of shame in front there is no lack, And curses ride upon your back.” * * * * * _The Sacred Poets of England and America, for Three Centuries. Edited by Rufus W. Griswold. Illustrated by Steel engravings. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 8vo._ There is a strange impression current even among people who ought to know better, that religious poetry is a form of composition confined to poets of the third or fourth class, and chiefly valuable for Hymn Books. The existence of any verse, instinct with the finest essence of poetry, and glowing with the rapt and holy passions of the religious bard, is practically denied. Now nothing is more certain than that poetry, impassioned imagination, is essentially religious both in its nature and its expression. It springs from that raised mood of mind in which the object present to thought is worshiped. This is true even in poetry relating to the senses and to human passion, for if we scrutinize it sharply, we shall find that the object which fills the poet’s mind, however low in itself, is still deified for the moment, and made the exclusive object of his adoration. In this way bards often make gods of persons and things very questionable in themselves, but this is owing rather to the direction than the nature of the poet’s powers. If these powers instead of being devoted to the idealization of appetite or destructive passions, be directed upward to the true object of worship, the poetry will be really more beautiful and sublime than if it were merely confined to spiritualized sensations.