But her who asks, though first among The good, the beautiful, the young, The birthright of a spell more strong Than these have brought her. _The Lines on the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake_, we prefer to any of the writings of Halleck. It has that rare merit in compositions of this kind--the union of tender sentiment and simplicity. This poem consists merely of six quatrains, and we quote them in full. Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days! None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise. Tears fell when thou wert dying, From eyes unused to weep, And long, where thou art lying, Will tears the cold turf steep. When hearts whose truth was proven, Like thine are laid in earth, There should a wreath be woven To tell the world their worth. And I, who woke each morrow To clasp thy hand in mine, Who shared thy joy and sorrow, Whose weal and woe were thine-- It should be mine to braid it Around thy faded brow, But I've in vain essayed it, And feel I cannot now. While memory bids me weep thee, Nor thoughts nor words are free, The grief is fixed too deeply, That mourns a man like thee. If we are to judge from the subject of these verses, they are a work of some care and reflection. Yet they abound in faults. In the line, Tears fell when thou wert dying; _wert_ is not English. Will tears the cold turf steep, is an exceedingly rough verse. The metonymy involved in There should a wreath be woven To _tell_ the world their worth, is unjust. The quatrain beginning, And I who woke each morrow, is ungrammatical in its construction when viewed in connection with the quatrain which immediately follows. "Weep thee" and "deeply" are inaccurate rhymes--and the whole of the first quatrain, Green be the turf, &c. although beautiful, bears too close a resemblance to the still more beautiful lines of William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love. As a versifier Halleck is by no means equal to his friend, all of whose poems evince an ear finely attuned to the delicacies of melody. We seldom meet with more inharmonious lines than those, generally, of the author of _Alnwick Castle_. At every step such verses occur as, And _the_ monk's hymn and minstrel's song-- True _as_ the steel of _their_ tried blades-- For _him_ the joy of _her_ young years-- Where _the_ Bard-peasant first drew breath-- And withered _my_ life's leaf like thine-- in which the proper course of the rhythm would demand an accent upon syllables too unimportant to sustain it. Not unfrequently, too, we meet with lines such as this, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, in which the multiplicity of consonants renders the pronunciation of the words at all, a matter of no inconsiderable difficulty.