_rococo_ landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a “sincere” art and an “earnest” literature. In these Gems and Albums, the gemmy and albuminous illustrations alternated with romantic tales of mediæval or eastern life and with “Lines on Seeing----,” or “Stanzas occasioned by” something. “The May-Flowers of Life,” for example, “suggested by the author’s having found a branch of May in a volume of poems which a friend had left there several years ago.” In the Annual dialect a ship was a “bark,” a bed was a “couch,” a window was a “casement,” a shoe was a “sandal,” a boat was a “shallop,” and a book was a “tome.” Certain properties became gemmy by force of association, as sea-shells, lattices, and Æolian harps. In England L. E. L. and in America Percival and Mrs. Sigourney were perhaps the gemmiest poets. But much of Willis’s poetry was album verse, with an air of the boudoir and the ball-room about it, a silky elegance and an exotic perfume that smack of that very sentimental and artificial school. This passage from “The Declaration” is in point:-- “’Twas late and the gay company was gone, And light lay soft on the deserted room From alabaster vases, and a scent Of orange leaves and sweet verbena came From the unshuttered window on the air, And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints, Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things Seemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle, The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle, Was leaning on her harp.”