Does an iceberg write in that strain, we should like to know? Or does it mourn the death of the flowers, in this wise: "And then I think of one, who in her youthful beauty died, The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side, In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf, And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief. Yet not unmeet it was that one like that young friend of ours, So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers." Or do icebergs yearn thus for communion in the after world with the beloved spirits of this: "In meadows fanned by Heaven's life-breathing wind In the resplendence of that glorious sphere, And larger movements of the unfettered mind Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here? The love that lived through all the stormy past, And meekly with my harsher nature bore, And deeper grew and tenderer to the last, Shall it expire with life and be no more?" Truly, that iceberg theory must be surrendered, it must melt and give way before the gentle warmth of these words, and the thousand other such words which any reader of Bryant will instantly recall. But, having convinced and confuted Mr. Critic, we will proceed to observe that there is after all a foundation of truth--a slender one--for his towering superstructure of ridicule. It is this: that in the outset of his career, Mr. Bryant's sympathies were, not too much with external Nature, but too little with Man. At the same time, we maintain that he has been constantly correcting this fault, and has written more and more, the older he has grown, to the human heart. He is not, and we hope never will be, a passionate writer, like Byron: he is not one who deals, like Burns, with the warm, gushing, homely affections of the poor every where: he has none of Schiller's energy of conviction: none of the naive, playful garrulous bonhomie of Beranger; simply, because he is of another order of man from all these. He is quiet, gentle, contemplative, modest,--wise. Yet if no lava-tides of passion burn through his veins, as were said to run through the veins of Alfieri; if he is not, as Carlyle said of Dante, "a red-hot cone of fire" shooting steadily up into the sky; if he cannot, with Shakespeare, or Goethe, make the blood quiver and thrill for weeks by a single word; he is still not a frigid, heartless writer, not altogether an ice mountain, which dazzles always but never warms. He is too earnest, too truthful, too good for that; too deeply penetrated by the spiritual realities of life, too democratic in his aspirations for our race, too hopeful of the future developments of society, in short, too finely touched with that feminine element which is the characteristic of genius. Besides, the great internal fires of the Earth, which shoot up in terrific and explosive violence, stupendous as they are, do not