We know
not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name
"Orient," but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the
finest of its kind. The writer's heart seems more in the work here than in
the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us
particularly fine:--
"We scanned her well, as we drifted by:
A strange old ship, with her poop built high,
And with quarter-galleries wide,
And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now,
And carvings all strange, beside:
A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark
Long years and generations ago;
Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard
With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.
* * * * *
"Down her old black side poured the water in a tide,
As they toiled to get the better of a leak.
We had got a signal set in the shrouds,
And our men through the storm looked on in crowds:
But for wind, we were near enough to speak.
It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by,
That we read in winter-evens about;
As if to other stars
She had reared her old-world spars,
And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out."
_Hester, the Bride of the Islands_. A Poem. By SYLVESTER
B. BECKETT. Portland: Bailey & Noyes.
Mr. Beckett is evidently an admirer of Walter Scott; and it is not the
least remarkable fact in connection with "Hester," that an author with the
good sense to propose to himself such a model, disregarding the more
elaborate poets of a later date, should have proved himself so utterly
unable to follow that model, except in a few phrases, which were quite
appropriate as Scott used them, but are ludicrously out of place in his own
verse.
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