There are some of the poems that do more justice to the abilities of the author. In "The Year is Gone" there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression; "Love Disposed of" is a pretty fancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which over crests all the others like a decuman wave is "The Brave Old Ship, the Orient." It is a truly masculine poem, full of vigor and imagination, and giving evidence of true original power in the author. There is scarce a weak verse in it, and the measure has a swing, at once easy and stately, like that of the sea itself. We know not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name "Orient," but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the finest of its kind. The writer's heart seems more in the work here than in the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us particularly fine:-- "We scanned her well, as we drifted by: A strange old ship, with her poop built high, And with quarter-galleries wide, And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now, And carvings all strange, beside: A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark Long years and generations ago; Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow. * * * * * "Down her old black side poured the water in a tide, As they toiled to get the better of a leak. We had got a signal set in the shrouds, And our men through the storm looked on in crowds: But for wind, we were near enough to speak. It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by, That we read in winter-evens about; As if to other stars She had reared her old-world spars, And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out." _Hester, the Bride of the Islands_. A Poem. By SYLVESTER B. BECKETT. Portland: Bailey & Noyes. Mr. Beckett is evidently an admirer of Walter Scott; and it is not the least remarkable fact in connection with "Hester," that an author with the good sense to propose to himself such a model, disregarding the more elaborate poets of a later date, should have proved himself so utterly unable to follow that model, except in a few phrases, which were quite appropriate as Scott used them, but are ludicrously out of place in his own verse. In adopting the brief lines and irregularly recurring rhymes of Scott, he has taken a hazardous step. The curt lines are excellent with Sir Walter's liveliness and dash; but when dull commonplaces are to be written, their feebleness would be more decorously concealed by a longer and more conventional dress. The cutty sark, so appropriate when displaying the free, vigorous stops of Maggie Lauder, is not to be worn by every lackadaisical lady's-maid of a muse. In the moral reflections, with which "Hester" abounds, there is a most comical imitation of Scott,--as if the poem were written as a parody of "The Lady of the Lake," by Mrs. Southworth, or Sylvanus Cobb, Junior.