"The Mourner a la Mode" contains some good instances of the neatness and felicity with which the author floods a whole stanza with humor by a single epithet. "What tears of _vicarious_ woe. That else might have sullied her face, Were kindly permitted to flow In ripples of ebony lace While even her fan, in its play, Had quite a lugubrious scope, And seemed to be waving away The ghost of the angel of Hope!" The sentiments of a young lover on finding that the object of his adoration had an excellent appetite, and was always punctual at lunch and dinner, are expressed with a Sheridan-like sparkle in the concluding stanza of "The Beauty of Ballston." "Ah me! of so much loveliness It had been sweet to be the winner; I know she loved me only less-- The merest fraction--than her dinner; 'T was hard to lose so fair a prize, But then (I thought) 't were vastly harder To have before my jealous eyes _A constant rival in my larder!_" There is one practical consideration in regard to the poetry of Saxe, which may excite the distrust of those critics who, with Horace, hate the profane multitude. Fortunately or unfortunately for his reputation, Saxe's poems are _popular_, and--not to put too fine a point of it--_sell_. His books have a regular market value, and this value increases rather than diminishes with years. This is, we confess, rather a suspicious circumstance. Did Milton sell? Did Wordsworth sell? Must not the fame that is instantaneous prove hollow and ephemeral? Are we not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless, the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those poems--well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put forth a volume that should prove, in a mercantile sense, a failure, we think he would be surprised to find how happily he would hit certain critics who can now see little in his writings to justify their success. Let him once join the fraternity of unappreciated geniuses, and he will find compensation,--though not, perhaps, in the form of what some vulgar fellow has called "solid pudding." _The Giant Cities of Bashan; and Syria's Holy Places._ By the Rev. J. L. PORTER, A. M., Author of "Murray's Hand-Book for Syria and Palestine," etc., etc. New York: T. Nelson and Sons.