Sole Lord of Lords and very King of Kings, He sits within the desert, carved in stone; Inscrutable, colossal, and alone, And ancienter than memory of things. Graved on his front the sacred beetle clings; Disdain sits on his lips; and in a frown Scorn lives upon his forehead for a crown. The affrighted ostrich dare not dust her wings Anear this Presence. The long caravan's Dazed camels stop, and mute the Bedouins stare. This symbol of past power more than man's Presages doom. Kings look--and Kings despair: Their sceptres tremble in their jewelled hands And dark thrones totter in the baleful air! L. MIFFLIN. NOTES. American poetry before Bryant was considerable in amount, but, with few exceptions, it must be looked for by the curious student in the graveyard of old anthologies. Who now reads "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam in America," "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America," "The Day of Doom," "M'Fingal," or "The Columbiad?" Skipping a generation from Barlow's death, who reads with much seriousness any one of the group of poets of which Bryant in his earliest period was the centre: Halleck, Pierpont, Sprague, Drake, Dana, Percival, Allston, Brainard, Mrs. Osgood, and Miss Brooks? A few of them, to be sure, are remembered by an occasional lyric,--Halleck by "Marco Bozzaris," a spirited ode in the manner of Campbell; Pierpont by his ringing lines, "Warren's Address to the American Soldiers;" Drake by "The American Flag," conventional but not commonplace, and marked by one very imaginative line; and Allston by two rather excellent lyrics, "Rosalie" and "America to Great Britain." The first poet to accomplish work of high sustained excellence was Bryant. His poetry, though never impassioned, is uniformly elegant. It is often as chaste as Landor at his best. But it never surprises; it is not emotional, personal, suggestively imaginative. In fact, Bryant's muse is not lyrical. With the exception of Pinkney and Hoffman, whose "Sparkling and Bright," if technically defective, is a true song, we must wait for our lyric poet till we reach Edgar Allan Poe, the greatest--one inclines to say the only--master of musical quality in verse whom America has produced. _The Wild Honeysuckle._--Philip Freneau, born in 1752, was a soldier in the American Revolution. Though never rising quite into the highest class of poets, he is our first genuine singer. "The Indian Burying-ground" and "To a Honey-bee" are only less successful than the graceful lines quoted.