is a reminiscence of “The Isles of Greece.” The second poem, which is equally melodramatic in its catastrophe, is in blank verse and in the form of a dialogue between the Lady Isidore and her father, Lord Ivon. He tells his daughter (with a few interruptions from her, such as “Impossible!” and “Nay, dear father! Was’t so indeed?”) how he had in vain wooed her grandmother with minstrelsy and feats of arms, and then her mother more successfully with gold: marrying whom, he had begotten Isidore, and afterwards, in remorse for having dragged his young bride to the altar, had been on the point of draining a poisoned chalice, when she had anticipated him by running away with a younger lover, leaving to his care the babe, now grown to a woman, who dutifully concludes the dialogue with, “Thank God! Thank God!” Both of these poems were imitative and artificial, and the last not a little absurd. Willis had no genius for narrative or dramatic poetry, and when he tried to be impersonal and “objective,” he wrought against the grain. The lyrical pieces in the book were almost all of them graceful and sweet. He himself thought that the best thing in the volume was “Birth-Day Verses,” addressed to his mother on January 20, 1835. Similar in theme were the lines, “To my Mother, from the Apennines,” written at an _auberge_ on the mountains, August 3, 1832. The verses to Mary Benjamin, written in Scotland in September, 1834, have been already mentioned. They stand in his collected poems as “To M----, from Abroad,” and were also incorporated in “Edith Linsey,” under the title “To Edith, from the North.” “The Confessional,” dated Hellespont, October 1, 1833, was also meant for Mary Benjamin. This and “Florence Gray” had the note of travel. But a Boston poem, “The Belfry Pigeon,” was the most popular of anything in the book and has retained a place in readers and collections to the present day. These shorter pieces, like all of Willis’s truest poetry, were purely poems of sentiment. His description, in “Edith Linsey,” of Job Smith’s verses as “the mixed product of feeling and courtesy” applies consciously to his own. They were “the delicate offspring of tenderness and chivalry,” airy, facile, smooth, but thin in content: not rich, full, concrete, but buoyed up by light currents of emotion in a region, to quote his own words again, of “floating and colorless sentiments.” This disembodied character is a mark of almost all the American poetry of the Annual or _Gemmiferous_ period, and is seen at its extreme in the unsubstantial prolixity of Percival and the drab diffuseness of Mrs. Sigourney. It was the reflection on this side the water from Shelley, from Byron’s earlier manner, from Wordsworth’s most didactic passages, and from the imitations of all these by secondary poets, like Mrs. Norton and L. E. L. Willis’s verses were much better than Percival’s or Mrs. Sigourney’s--defter, briefer, more pointed. But they