Mr. Stoddard's sympathies are almost entirely given up to ancient Grecian art. He can scarcely realize that the dream has passed forever. He sees something vital in its very ruins. For him the Phidian friezes yet crown the unplundered Parthenon; the gigantic Athena yet gleams through sacerdotal incense, in all her ivory whiteness, smiling upon reeking altars and sacrificing priests; Delphos has yet an oracular voice; Bacchus and Pan and his Satyrs yet lead their riotous train through a forest whose every tree is alive with its dryad, and whose every fountain is haunted by its potamid; there are yet patriot veins to glow at the Iliad; AEschylus can yet fill a theatre; Pericles yet thunders at Cimon from the Cema, or woos Aspasia, or tempers the headlong Alcibiades, or prepares his darling Athens for the Peloponnesian war. These things Mr. Stoddard feels while the locomotive shrieks in his ears, while the omnibus, speeding to the steamship, rattles the glass of his window, while the newsboy cries his monotonous advertisement, or his servant hands to him a telegraphic dispatch; and he is right. The body in which Grecian art existed, is indeed dead, but the spirit which animated it is indestructible. There will be poets to worship and reproduce it, there will be scholars to admire and preserve it, when every man's field is bounded by a railway, when every housetop is surmounted by a telegraph wire, and when the golden calf is again set up amid the people, to be worshipped as the living God. From the force of his sympathies, Mr. Stoddard can lean but in that direction. Throughout his volume there is scarcely a poem which is not the offshoot of these feelings. Some of them are confessedly upon Grecian subjects, and all of them are animated by a corresponding spirit. Even his few domestic poems are not treated after that modern manner, which moralizes in the last stanza, simply to let the reader understand how well the poet knows his own meaning. Whatever is beautiful in Mr. Stoddard's themes is distinctly brought forward, while the darker side of his subject is scarcely touched upon. Take, for example, a poem of great simplicity and tenderness, filled with a sorrow so beautiful as almost to make one in love with grief, and contrast it with a poem, on a similar subject, by Bayard Taylor: "Along the grassy slope I sit, And dream of other years; My heart is full of soft regrets, My eyes of tender tears! The wild bees hummed about the spot, The sheep-bells tinkled far, Last year when Alice sat with me Beneath the evening star! The same sweet star is o'er me now, Around, the same soft hours, But Alice moulders in the dust With all the last year's flowers! I sit alone, and only hear The wild bees on the steep, And distant bells that seem to float From out the folds of sleep!" _Stoddard_, _page_ 116.