[In the following favorable review, the author praises Dana's poetic diction, his style, and his artistic character.]

Our first remark is, that Mr. Dana's language is made up in a great degree of Saxon. It is free, more than that of most authors, from Latinisms, Gallicisms, from modern conventionalisms, and all pert and dainty expressions. He eschews, as by instinct, such words as "emanate," "develop," "position," "responsibility," "elevated," "exposition," etc., unless in cases where they may be absolutely needed to give the sense. It is hardly necessary to say that his pages are never disfigured by "stand-points," "hand-books," "being done," "transpired" in the sense of happen, "governmental," and that large class of words, which, if found in the dictionaries, are not wanted to express any idea, and whose occurrence gives pain to a delicate ear. By making use of this pithy, sturdy old Saxon, Mr. Dana is able to address a larger number of readers. Those who are familiar only with the English language, can feel the full force of his style, can relish what they could not if it were mixed up with elements that are only half naturalized. By this means he can, also, give us more thoughts. More ideas will be crowded into a page, than if the common proportion of words were transplanted from the Latin or French soil. We have thoughts, ideas, beautiful images, instead of two or three dim conceptions on a page, wrapped up in a wordy dress. There is, besides, in the style, a force, a homely, sinewy strength, which are so natural to the Anglo-Saxon, and which he can not possibly have, who goes away from home for a stock of words. To our minds, there is a kind, gentle, home-feeling about these old monosyllables which leads us back to the hearth-stones of our rude ancestors in Kent and Suffolk. How barren of these dear remembrances and associations is such a stilted genius as Dr. Johnson, or his "painful" imitators in our days! The writer who wishes to make the deepest and most abiding impression on our hearts, must clothe his thoughts in the language of Alfred. At the same time, we would not imply that a writer may not, on fitting occasions, and in a becoming measure, use all the elements of our noble, composite language. How inseparable the Latin terminations are in some of the marvelous passages in Paradise Lost, or in that divine prototype and epos, the Apocalypse, or in the vision of Daniel! No stringing together of Saxon syllables could express the majesty of Him, before whom "thousand thousands ministered."

Again, Mr. Dana's style and manner of thinking show the utmost familiarity with the early writers in the English language. He dwells among them as with old friends with whom he has often taken sweet counsel. He looks up to them with reverent affection. There is a heart-kindliness beneath their stern looks, a freshness of feeling, an unexpected breaking out of beautiful thoughts from under the crust of their quaint phrases, which no one knows how to relish better than our author, which no one had described in more loving and befitting terms. We recognize this familiarity with the writers of the seventeenth century by the occurrence of such phrases as these: "to do the service of all or any who happened not to be at hand;" "very like to honest out-of-door flowers;" "tangled and by-path overgrowings;" "it is ten to one;" "that love of nature which all the old are so full of and so sincere in;" "we are not making excuses for these givings in," etc. We might copy any number of such phrases, where very expressive little words are joined by hyphens, so common in some of the writers of Elizabeth's time, and which are so contrary to Dr. Blair's rules for forming rotund sentences. Where this love for the old authors is hearty, and is under the control of a pure taste and sound judgment, where it is not carried to an extreme, and is joined to a due appreciation of existing styles of thought and writing, the effect is very happy. It gives an antique richness to the diction. The thoughts come to us with the authority of a well known stamp. They have not the suspicious look of recent coinage. They have somewhat of the golden yellow of the old masters. We pick them out with the same instinct that we go to the corner where a Titian or a Claude hangs among hundreds of lesser lights, and our hearts are drawn to the writer whose thoughts have been fused, as it were, in this antique mould, who throws aside what is uncouth and unsavory in the ancient, and what is ambitious and finical in the modern, and sweetly blends what is true and precious of two generations which are widely apart. If we mistake not, this is characteristic of Mr. Dana's style and thoughts. His works could have been written in no century but the nineteenth, yet they have much of the air and spirit of the seventeenth.

Another characteristic, which we will name, is a musical flow and cadence in many of the prose sentences, as if the author were meditating poetic measures. There is a class of writers, that pay great attention to the structure of their sentences. Possessing a cultivated taste and an ear more or less musical, they elaborate their style and round their periods with the nicest care. That form is chosen, and those words are sought which will be most effective, or which will strike most pleasantly on the ear. But after all their pains, they have not the art to hide the art. They are like men of a managing disposition. The artifice comes to light. The trick is apparent. We see that the author meant to make that sentence emphatic, to set off another with his choicest flowers, to point a third with his sharpest antithesis, and to see how a fourth would awaken admiration by its delicious cadences. But there is another class of authors who have melody in the soul as well as music in the ear. Their memory is a storehouse of beautiful conceptions. Their feelings are attuned to the finest harmonies. They have gazed on truth in its delicate and almost evanescent relations. They are familiar with those subtler elements which the common eye overlooks. To them it has been given to hear voices which others can not hear, to discover harmonies in nature and in the depths of their own souls, to which others are blind. Accordingly, when they put their thoughts into poetry or prose, we are often struck with the outflow of sweet sounds. In the poetry, there is a music besides that of the numbers. In the prose, there is nothing artificial, nothing intended for effect, but the sentence moves along as if self-inspired, as if endowed with an innate melody. There is a most exact fitness between the thought and the expression. Both appear to have come out of the depths of a musical soul. How poetical is much of Milton's prose! How "involuntary," we may say, did his spirit "move harmonious numbers!" We think, also, that this quality strikingly characterizes much of Mr. Dana's prose. Had we space, we could quote many sentences which have a kind of natural music, where there is a sweet accordance between the thought and the form of the sentence.

Leaving the less important matter of style and diction, we may say, that Mr. Dana's works are strikingly characterized by sincerity. This is true alike of the prose and the poetry. They come from the heart. They are not the product of passion, of over-wrought sensibility, as much of Lord Byron's poetry is. Neither are they the results of a powerful intellect, working in the absence or in the subjection of the affections. They are not formed according to the rhetoric and logic of the schools. Yet they are better than anything which mere passion or mere intellect can create. They have an order which no formal logic ever taught. The thoughts are unfolded from within outward. To use a term which we do not like, they are evolved, rather than argued. One grows out of another. They are held together by a natural affinity, or by veins of sentiment or feeling more than by a chain of deductive reasoning. It is for this very reason that Mr. Dana strikes us as one of the most original authors. He writes from a full heart. If we may say it without irreverence, he can not but speak what he has felt. His thoughts appear to be a part of himself, to have grown up with him. They may be like what others have uttered, but in passing through his soul, they have been shaped and colored and stamped with his own individuality. In opening these volumes, we feel that we are reading the author's works, not those of any body else. They are the sincere, honest utterance of a deeply meditative spirit. They are the golden ore in the vein, not the sweepings of some industrious miner, or the casual drift of some wintry torrent. This may account in part for the small number of Mr. Dana's works. Some seem disposed to complain that two not very large volumes contain the whole of them. But heart-work is not very prolific. It will hardly do to call genius prodigal. Original trains of thought are rare. The blended product of sterling thought and a rich experience are rarer still. Some men write several thousand sermons. But how few come from the depths of their own experience! Of how small a number can it be said with truth, they are the transcript of the writer's own inward life! A busy observation or a retentive memory are forced to meet most exigencies. It is only at long intervals that thoughts break forth from the soul, fresh and strong, like the plants of spring, bursting into life through an inherent vigor.

We may, again, mention as characteristic of much which Mr. Dana has written, that they have a melancholy or sorrowful tone. They dwell, to a great degree, on the "night side" of nature and providence. We have heard it alleged as a defect, that they make the reader sad if not misanthropic, that they disturb his equanimity with painful pictures of the crimes and wretchedness of man, that some, both of his poems and prose pieces, lead us into the awful depths of man's depraved spirit, where there is nothing but "sights and sounds of woe," and whence we gladly escape into the sweet upper air. This melancholy tone is one cause, we have no doubt, why some readers have been repelled from the author's pages. But is it really a defect? In answer, we may say, that the charge does not apply to all of Mr. Dana's works. There are pieces of a cheerful and hopeful tone. Some of the small poems are animated by a joyous though chastened spirit. The views taken of society as it is, and as it may be hereafter, are not all sombre. Especially is a brightness thrown over the aspect of things, so far as a pure Christian faith shall have sway. Still, it is to be acknowledged, that a sad if not a despondent tone characterizes much of what Mr. Dana has written. But if this is the honest and genuine result of the author's modes of thought and feeling, would we have it otherwise? Ought he not to preserve his individuality? If his experience has been different from that of most others, if he has looked more profoundly into the mysteries of his own being, if his spirit has been pained by the tricks and hollow conventionalities of much which appears in modern society, if he has gazed with a more thoughtful eye on time, death and eternity, if he has listened oftener than most others "to the still, sad music of humanity," can we blame him for giving utterance to his feelings? Cowper's poetry is regarded by many as dark and cheerless. But would a wise man desire to have it altered? Some of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers think that a profounder apprehension of the mysteries of a Christian faith on his part would have stamped some of his poetry with a more solemn and abiding impress. "The Churchyard among the mountains" is not all which the student of Christianity would desire. A deep thinker, with a poetic temperament, is often necessarily sad. Consider the Othello and the Hamlet. Homer is the "tearful" poet. His was a sorrowing spirit. At the same time, we must confess, that in some of Mr. Dana's pieces we should have preferred a less sombre hue. We are drawn towards Mr. Wordsworth because he can extract a kindly lesson from all things and all men. The "motherly spirit of humanity" pervades all which he wrote. He can not chastise our "repudiating" countrymen without mingling in a hopeful view. We have great reverence for England, the old home of most of our fathers; we delight to dwell upon her laws, her gentle manners, her integrity. We look with admiration on the great lights of the seventeenth century. Still, we should not carry this reverence quite as far as Mr. Dana does. We should probably see more good than he does in revolutionary and republican France. In looking at her disorders and almost infinite confusion, we are touched with pity. Her masses have been more sinned against than sinning. Notwithstanding the gorgeous church that has had them professedly in charge for ages, they have been like sheep on the mountains without a shepherd. When we look at the atheism of continental Europe, we are angry rather with the degenerate, inefficient churches, both Catholic and Protestant, than with the forsaken, and deluded people.

We find in Mr. Dana's works, both in the poetry and the prose, a true perception of inanimate nature, of the wondrous changes which are going on around us. His descriptions are remarkably clear and distinct. He hits upon the exact expression which is needed. His language is so apposite, that we see the point of the application or the force of the comparison at once. The word itself, or the phrase, is a picture. There is no need of a long enumeration of particulars. The imagination of the reader is set busily at work. Mr. Dana sees these various objects in their poetic light, freed from their ordinary prosaic dress. They are revealed in true yet fresher and nobler aspects. They are real objects, the same which we every day behold, yet transfigured, as it were, by the light which comes from the poet's imagination. We everywhere see what it is so hard to describe, the difference between what is called a fine description and the magic pen of genius. There are no unmeaning or common-place epithets. Every word is apt, and it seems instinct with a mysterious life. Let us take two stanzas at random:

But when the light winds lie at rest,
And on the glassy, heaving sea,
The black duck, with her glossy breast,
Sits swinging silently,—
How beautiful! no ripples break the reach,
And silvery waves go noiseless up the beach.

And where the far-off sand-bars lift
Their backs in long and narrow line,
The breakers shout, and leap, and shift,
And toss the sparkling brine
Into the air; then rush to mimic strife:
Glad creatures of the sea, and full of life!

In a poet who reflects so profoundly on the great problems of life, death and immortality, it is refreshing to meet with sweet and soothing lessons from outward nature. What a relief are the moon and the waves of the sea amid the terrific stanzas of the "Ancient Mariner"! There is nothing strange, however, in this. Every great poet loves nature. However he may delight in inward meditation, his joy is also to hold communion with visible forms, with all that wondrous panorama which the goodness of God has spread out before us. How transcendently sublime are some of Shakspeare's brief allusions to the starry heavens! How beautiful are some of his images which he seems carelessly to borrow from various objects in nature. These, no less than human passions, come and go at his bidding.

The works of Mr. Dana, in the moral impression which they are fitted to produce, deserve the heartiest praise. It is literature consecrated to the worthiest objects. There is no line, which, the author dying, would wish to blot. It is an offering of genius laid on the altar of heavenly truth. Many things could have been written only by one who had felt the preciousness of the great "Sacrifice," who knows not where to solve the bitter doubts which harass the human soul except in the message of Him who is the Light of the world. In reading many of these pages, one feels that he is in companionship, not merely with the "sweet singers" of earth, but with those who have attuned their harps in heaven. . . .

The productions of Mr. Dana are admirably fitted, both in style and thought, to do good to those who are learning to think and to write. Nothing can be more free from pretence and affectation. The critical remarks, for example those upon the poems of Thomson, are eminently just and considerate. The article suggested by Pollok's Course of Time, we have always regarded as a model of candid, yet profound and discriminating criticism. Such reviews teach how necessary it is to meditate long and feel deeply, before one sits in judgment on a work of genius or of original investigation. We feel thankful that we have in the English language such specimens of reviewing as that of Mr. Dana on Hazlitt's English Poets, and that of Coleridge on Wordsworth's Excursion. In mentioning the works which do honor to American literature, and which are likely to live while the language is spoken, we do not know why the list should begin and end with a few historical writers like Mr. Prescott and Mr. Irving. The poetry of Mr. Dana and Mr. Bryant constitute a solid addition to the treasures of our noble language. They repay in some degree the great debt which we owe to England. They will be read ages hence with delight and profit.