BOKERS' KCENIGSMARK AND OTHER POEMS.* Ma. BOKER has found a

tragic theme to work out in the annals of a dull and neglected territory and period, and has elsev/here made good use of familiar contemporary events, though without renouncing the remote and mysterious springs of legend. Not- withstanding this variety, his "other poems "—those "slender young waiting damsels" that attend the heiresses of imagination —form by no means a promiscuous crowd, but a select and attractive retinue, whom we could be equally content to stay and daily with, or to leave in expectation of more a imposing pre- sence. We hear among them lively martial airs, in which there is much intermingled sweetness ; we hear of modern warfare as if from one who has seen it on land and water. We hear a patriotic Thanksgiving-day Ode which is lyrical and frankly pious ; and we have " patriotic " banter in "Captain Semmes," which is amusing, though popularly flippant,—just rude enough, as Landor • K6nigsmark; the Legend of the Hounds, and other Poems. By George H. Boker. London: Trlibner and Co. Philadelphia : Lippincott and Co. 1869.-

might represent, to make John Bull fancy it must be a person worthy of some respect that can take such liberties with him. We have a few tributes to beauty which are graceful and delicate, like the dirge beginning :—

" Isabel, Isabel !

This is dreary work,—ah, wall! Dreary work to weave in verse Something to bedeck thy hearse : I who fain would only weep, Gazing on thee laid to sleep By a spell the ages keep.

"Isabel, Isabel !

When thy footsteps lightly fell On the May-day flowers, less fair Than thy virgin graces were, Little did I think the vow, Made to thee with laughing brow, Would be kept at last as now.

"Isabel, Isabel !

Thus you said '0 ring my knell! Never sing of any one, Till these mortal sands be ran: Beauty flees, and leaves no trace; Honour changes to disgrace ; Death alone can crown the race.'"

These stanzas will bear witness to the music in the author's soul, and to the purity and loftiness of his fancy ; perhaps their lan- guage wants point and correctness in several details, but this de- fect will be found to disappear when the author's themes are more complex and substantial. There is much very picturesque writing, and a fine romantic conception, in the idyl (as we may call it) of Countess Laura. We are told how a lovely bride has died by some unascertainable malady, or by some sorrow of which her confessor could not learn the cause ; how her husband, while grieved and desperate, enters among a group of artists, and asks which of them will rescue from oblivion her already faded beauty. Carlo undertakes the work with a strange, sad devotion ; he seeks the chapel where her body is laid out in the most splendid attire, and he completes his task with a most humble and patient energy. He then protests to himself that she has died for love of him ; he clears her of all guilty indulgence to him or to herself by volun- tary disclosure or intimation ; but he has known her heart by one glance cast over his easel, one movement of her neck which almost brought her cheek to meet his own. Then a supernatural voice assures him of the truth of his suspicion; a dark-winged phantom offers to him that Laura, if he consents, shall live again, that she shall grant all to him if he will but sue to her. Carlo shud- ders at the temptation ; but cries that he must leave her to God., shuts his eyes on the work of the spectre, protests that Laura must not twice bear the burden and peril of life. But a glorious change comes over his visitant, who reveals himself as the Angel of Death ; then Carlo demands his hand to be led where Laura waits him. The solution will satisfy any reader for the moment, and an impulsive mind much longer ; and yet why, a moralist might ask, should we renew the question of the Sadducee, "Whose shall she be ? "

"The Legend of the Hound" is of coarser material, and com- prises horrors which in a more advanced period will be deemed to border on the vulgar ; but it is told with all the necessary spirit to make it palatable in our winter's-night moods. And most vividly is that season recalled by the admirable description of Flora's uneasiness for her belated and drunken master, and her rushing out to find him in the snow. Then comes a tale of man's ingratitude and devilish cruelty, and of a supernatural retribution which is introduced with a ghastly and boldly imagined omen; but it were unfair to enter further into particulars, or to charac- terize the appropriate landscape to which the tale is fitted. There seems something of a spiteful prejudice traceable in our author's picture of an English squire and his peasantry, and of a bit of country disfigured by ironworks, and dis- graced by one who is made rich by them ; but it is such as might for the humour of it be excusably affected by a young poet. There is something more striking in a view he brings forward of the native and indelible goodness of the ordinary human heart ; but this we notice chiefly because the idea is repeated in " Kiinigsmark," and occupies almost the only place where he seems too much to employ as his own mouthpiece a- character otherwise interesting enough by the sentiments most naturally and opportunely attributed to her.

But we must now proceed at once to this drama of K6nigsmark, which is not merely the longest of our author's poems, but the most mature in style and thought, and the most substantially able and successful in all the leading features of its execution. We are impressed from the first scene onward with a dialogue at once natural and weighty ; we admire on reflection how the author has been able to dispense with all petty description and mimicry of local scenery, costume, and mannerisms. His development of the action is a severe but engrossing appeal to our attention, such as might have been studied in the school of Alfieri far more easily than from our age of novel-writers. His characters have been realized from the heart outwards, and are such as history must trace through many generations to one corrupt influence in society. It is without a touch spared or wasted that he depicts a court demoralized by marriages of policy, a prince openly addicted to mistresses, and cruelly neglecting and insulting a wife whom he yet watches with the keenest jealousy, because it is her chastity that must secure a common heir to the territories of two families ; a wife ignorant of the world till lately, meek, highly principled, and wise in her ordinary judgments, yet driven by indignation and confident virtue to trust too far to the friendship and counsel of a man of notorious proffigacy,—a designing courtier, who can use with her the remembrances of childish companionship as a screen for unworthy solicitations ; another woman, jilted and vindictive, who is plotting against 'this plotter, and making it the object of her life to slander and destroy him with or without the princess ; a knot of men and women whom guilty compliances have so bound to one another that they are easily made tools or associates of this fury's machinations ; and an old Elector who justly pities the situation of his daughter-in-law, but has grown too indolent and cautious to make for her sake any effort that may endanger the fruits of his long-established policy. In all these delineations the author is carefully tender of the Princess Sophia's character, and endows her with a candour and frank purity which often disarm the villainy of her favourite, compel him to desist from covert importunities and to give her honest though daring counsel, so that he is made to appear at moments really worthy of fraternal confidence from her. The author shows some tenderness even for Konigsmark, who has some accesses of real compunction, although he jests himself out of them because ashamed to exhibit' them to his worldly associates. There is something more cynical in the portrait given of Prince Max, who is an imitator of his elder brother's lewdness from mere curiosity ; nevertheless, Mr. Boker scorns to look with any sordid or volup- tuous particularity on the little world of vice that constitutes his subject ; he exposes moral wrongs to our indignation as presup- posing moral rights, but does not dwell upon the gross tastes to which the former may conduct us ; he is always the vehement satirist of Courts, but never lowers himself as a poet to the element of his own satire.

The first device by which suspicion is thrown on Sophia and Kiinigsmark is a handkerchief-trick that might have been sug- gested by Othello, but is skilfully adapted to the situation, and enables us in its progress to make interesting observations on the minds and manners of a variety of personages. We may inform the reader that the Princess, according to Mr. Boker, preserves her innocence to the end, though her tempter, when he has at last shown his nature, is treated by her with an uncommon leniency, under the pressure of a peril which they share and of various other feelings. As the interest of the play is well sustained through the unravelling of the plot, it remains to be considered whether the catastrophe is proportionately affecting, whether the dramatist has a command of pathos proportioned to his general intellectual power. And here, indeed, he seems to have laid grave obstacles in his own way, for at one time we look forward to the historical termination of his story, and think we shall find his heroine almost too hardy and heroic for our pity, if she should pity herself too little ; and again, her lover too base to deserve the sentiment. But we see this diffi- culty fully overcome in the progress of the fifth act, where new cir- cumstances are continually introduced to strengthen our horror and commiseration; the last gazes of Sophia on the children whom she prepares herself to quit, the forged note that brings her lover to her chamber, his better resolves in the last moments of his career, and the death before her eyes of the last friend on whom she has relied for aid.

Then our interest is unexpectedly revived in Countess von Platen, the woman who had loved and then hated Konigemark, and who has contrived his ruin, but to whom its execution has been made too personal a matter by the old Elector's making her the bearer of a warrant for his arrest or death. We see her imploring forgiveness of the dying man ; then again, we see the extinct furies of her hatred revived by jealousy of Sophia, so that she retires from them unforgiven, then reappears to steel the mind of the Elector against both her victims. It may, perhaps, be suspected from our general description that the play embodies an ideally fine conception, which it has been impossible to realize with sufficient regard to nature and probability ; but against this judgment we must appeal to the details of the composition, details

too numerous to give any idea of here by quotation. Grant that there are extraordinary lives and transactions, and that it is step by step we must proceed in making them conceivable, and

that problem Mr. Boker has performed so as to satisfy our imagi- nation; the historic truth of his hypothesis we do not profess to criticize. The dramatic style of Mr. Boker is somewhat plain, but earnest, and on occasion illustrated with original and subtle metaphors. His verse is correct and flowing, so that it will not withdraw too much attention from his general import :—

0 My lady's virtues are the Court's new cry.

All the light dames and graceless reprobates, Whose time is taxed to dodge discovery Of their own slips, rain satire on themselves By lauding her. She is a minater screen, Behind whose holy blazoning the choir

Make mouths at heaven, while their accorded throats

Join in its praise."