The city so fair to behold, The redeemed in their vestments of white-- In those mansions of rest, where, mid pleasures untold, They finally hope to unite: Where ceaseless ascriptions of praise shall ascend To God and the Lamb in a world without end. But of all these poetesses, the most remarkable, certainly to us, is Maria Brooks, who died in 1845, the author of a curious poem entitled _Zophiel_, which Southey admired, and which Charles Lamb declared to be too extraordinary to have been conceived in the mind of a woman. Unfortunately, in Mr. Griswold's volume, we have only an incomplete analysis, with some brief fragments, of this poem. Notwithstanding its incompleteness, however, there is enough to show a powerful life and a wonderful imagination. There is in the poem a surprising union of Thomas Moore and Shelley. Imagine the bowers of _Lalla Rookh_, through which is sweeping the northern tempest of Shelley, bending the trees and scattering the roses. The odes _To Cuba_, to the _Shade of her Child_, and all her other lyrics, have, in a word, a very remarkable movement, and are full of mysterious inquietudes and inexplicable burnings. We cannot have an idea of the sweetness, and at the same time the impetuosity which mingle in her verses, without thinking of the impossible combination of the eagle and the dove--a dove with the stroke of an eagle's wing, and which would yet, in spite of its power, retain the timid nature of the dove, be frightened at its own strength, and tremble in looking upward to the sun. Her compositions are full of daring ideas imperfectly expressed, as if she were afraid of the boldness of her heart. Often, however, her thoughts fall into the _alambique_, the abstract and metaphysical. Her love to her child inspired the best lines she ever composed. The sports of the little one, whom she should see no more, associated with the remembrance of forests, plains, and cataracts, give to that love the grandeur and infinitude of American Nature. Of all the female poets of the new world, Maria Brooks seems to possess most the sibylline inspirations of the celebrated women of contemporaneous Europe. Yet she has none of that Byronean spirit that reigns so much among them; and if we would indicate the European poetry school to which she should be attached, we would cite, rather than that of Byron, the names of Southey, her admirer, of Coleridge, and of John Wilson, the author of the _City of the Plague_.