diaphanous translucency, so does the beauty of a poem upon its rhythmical crystallization of the Divine Idea." One cannot turn a page of Chivers without recognizing that he at his best was very closely allied to Poe at his worst. Such a verse as the following was not an imitation, but a twin blossom:-- "On the beryl-rimmed rebecs of Ruby Brought fresh from the hyaline streams, She played on the banks of the Yuba Such songs as she heard in her dreams, Like the heavens when the stars from their eyries Look down through the ebon night air, Where the groves by the Ouphantic Fairies Lit up for my Lily Adair, For my child-like Lily Adair, For my heaven-born Lily Adair, For my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair." It is easy to guess that Longfellow, in his "North American Review" article, drew from Dr. Chivers and his kin his picture of those "writers, turgid and extravagant," to be found in American literature. He farther says of them: "Instead of ideas, they give us merely the signs of ideas. They erect a great bridge of words, pompous and imposing, where there is hardly a drop of thought to trickle beneath. Is not he who thus apostrophizes the clouds, 'Ye posters of the wakeless air!' quite as extravagant as the Spanish poet, who calls a star a 'burning doubloon of the celestial bank'?"{51} It is a curious fact that this exuberant poet Chivers claimed a certain sympathy{52} with the Boston "Dial" and with the transcendental movement, which had a full supply of its own extravagances; and it is clear that between these two rhetorical extremes there was needed a voice for simplicity. Undoubtedly Bryant had an influence in the same direction of simplicity. But Bryant seemed at first curiously indifferent to Longfellow. "Voices of the Night" was published in 1839, and there appeared two years after, in 1841, a volume entitled "Selections from the American Poets," edited by Bryant, in which he gave eleven pages each to Percival and Carlos Wilcox, nine to Pierpont, eight to himself, and only four to Longfellow. It is impossible to interpret this proportion as showing that admiration which Bryant seems to have attributed to himself five years later when he wrote to him of the illustrated edition of his poems, "They appear to be more beautiful than on former readings, much as I then admired them. The exquisite music of your verse dwells more than ever on my ear."{53} Their personal relation remained always cordial, but never intimate, Longfellow always recognizing his early obligations to the elder bard and always keeping by him the first edition of Bryant's poems, published in 1821. Both poets were descended from a common pilgrim ancestry in John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, whose story Longfellow has told.{54}