The evident source of Mr. Stoddard's inspiration is a love for ideal beauty, in whatever form it may be manifested. Like all admirers of ideal beauty, he has a strong sensual element in his composition. He is not satisfied with the mere dreams of his imagination, but he must also attempt to realize them through the medium of imitative art. Among the various modes for expressing the same feelings and ideas, painting, poetry, sculpture and music, he has chosen poetry as the one best adapted to his purpose. We would not be understood to assert that an artist may, at will, express his emotions in any of the arts; for a man may be insensible to an idea expressed in sculpture or music, which is perfectly clear to him in poetry or painting; but we assert that all the arts are but different languages to convey the same ideas. True art addresses itself to the moral, the intellectual, or the sensual man; and by the predominance of one of these qualities in the artist, or by various combinations of the three, all the radical differences between men of genius can be accounted for, and all the seeming mysteries explained. This truth is the groundwork of genuine criticism; and the critic who busies himself about the accidental circumstances, which have influenced an artist, is only prying into his history, without sounding the depth of his nature. At least let criticism start here: it may afterward indulge in microscopic comparisons of style, and in worn-out accusations of imitation: but it is a sorry thing to see persons assuming the dignified office of the critic magnifying molehills into mountains, and similarities into thefts. All men are gifted with various faculties, but it is not in the superiority of any or all of them that we can account for the existence of the poet, who has something of the divine nature in him, having a creative energy that is not a result of the degree in which he possesses one or more of the ordinary faculties, but is a special distinction with which he is clothed by the deity.