"Blaze the vast domes inwrought with fretted gold, The sumptuous pavements veins or pearl unfold, Arch piled on arch with columned pride ascend, Grove linked to grove their mingling shadows blend." Or this— "Let narrow prudence boast its grovelling art To chill the generous sympathies of heart, Teach to subdue each thought sublimely wild, And crush, like Herod, fancy’s new-born child." It is highly probable that the learned Justice, knowing his taste for the poetical and fanciful, and his aptitude at the harmony of language, often erred in his judicial writings and treatises, by avoiding beauty of expression, in fear lest the dignity of his subject should be injured by too much association with the creatures of fancy. We have known most accomplished lawyers err through this same caution. Our biographer himself (Mr. William W. Story) has certainly done himself great injustice as a writer in his work on "Contracts," when, in the pages before us, he presents us with so much delicacy of fancy and rhetorical finish. Blackstone in his "Commentaries," Jones in his "Bailment" treatise, Stephens in his essay upon "Pleading," time-honored Fearne in his "Contingent Remainders," have shown how grateful and how suitable it is for the legal readers to find brilliancy of rhetoric adorning the most profound learning. But certainly Judge Story possessed to a remarkable degree the faculty of condensation in his poetical works. His rhyme was not reason run mad; but reason in modest holiday attire. Where are lines at once so compact and so searching in their wisdom as the following, penned in 1832, as matters of advice to a young law student: