is that of the earth as a great sepulchre; and its lesson is to inculcate on the death-devoted dust, which we call man, the duty of dropping into its kindred dust as quietly and gracefully as possible. It is, as a poem, chiefly remarkable for its solemn music, which reminds you of a burial-march, but is far inferior to the Scottish poem in lofty moral, in theological truth, and in illustrative power. Blair, and not Bryant, remains the laureate of the Grave. It is much to have one's name and fame connected with one of the great centrical truths of the universe, especially when that truth is related to a fact. Suppose a writer to have produced a great poem on Light and the Sun--or on Absolute Being and God--or on Immortal Life and Heaven--how sublime and how enviable were his reputation! It were for ever bound up, in the bundle of life, with these great Ideas and Facts. Now, Blair has sung, in notes as yet unequalled, one of the cardinal, although one of the gloomiest thoughts and actualities in existence, and his name ought to stand proportionally high. He has, in a solemn yet happy hour, turned aside from the highways, and the byeways too, of the world, and gone a-musing and meditating, like Isaac in the evening fields, and found among these a field of the dead, a place of skulls; and, returning home, has recorded that one brief meditation in verse, and made it and himself immortal. Such, precisely, is this Poem, and such the experience of this Poet. As long as "the mourners go about the streets," or assemble in their crowds, blackening the silent 'braes' on their way to the country churchyard--as long as the grass of the grave murmurs out its moral in the western wind, and the sunshine seems to sadden as it shines upon the memorials and monuments of the dead--so long shall men read the "The Grave," and turn with pensive joy and tearful gratitude to the memory of its poet. BLAIR'S POEMS. THE GRAVE.