he beheld the clearing spotted with stumps, with the thin rye growing between-instead of the comfortable farm-house peeping from its orchards, he saw the log-cabin stooping amid the halfcleared trees;—the dark ravine took the place of the mossy dell, and the wild lake of the sail-spotted and far-stretching river.

Thus communing with nature, Mr. Street embodied the impressions made upon him in language, and in that form most appropriate in giving vent to deep enthusiastic feeling and high thought the form of verse, Poem after poem was written by him, and being published in those best vehicles of communication with the public, the periodicals soon attracted general attention. Secluded from mankind, and surrounded with nature in her most impressive features, his thought took the direction of that of which he saw most, and thus description became the characteristic of his verse. Equally cut off from books, his poetry found its origin in his own study of nature scenes, and in the thoughts that rose in his own bosom. The leaves and flowers were his words-the fields and hills side were his pages-and the whole volume of Nature, his treasury of knowledge. This, while it may have made him less artistic, was the means of that originality and unlikeness to any one else which are to be found in his pages.

But while thus employing his leisure in tracing his thoughts in language, Mr. Street was engaged in studying his profession of law in the office of his father, and in due time was admitted to the bar. After practicing for a few years at Monticello, in 1839, he removed to Albany, where he has continued to reside until the present time. In 1841, Mr. Street married, Elizabeth, daughter of Smith Weed, Esq., a retired merchant of fortune and great respectability of character.

We have spoken of the general characteristics of Mr. Street's poetry, or rather of the peculiar mental training he received, and which gave a direction to his imagination. And beautifully has a writer* in the Democratic Review summed up this view we have given : "Street is a true Flemish painter, seizing upon objects in all their veri-similitude. As we read him, wild flowers peer up from among brown leaves; the drum of the partridge, the ripple of waters. the flickering of autumn light, the sting of

*Henry T. Tuckeman.

sleety snow, the cry of the panther, the roar of the winds, melody of birds, and the odor of crushed pine boughs, are present to our senses. In a foreign land, his poems would transport us at once to home. He is no second hand limner, content to furnish insipid copies, but draws from reality. His pictures have the freshness of originals. They are graphic, detailed, never untrue, and often vigorous; he is essentially an American poet." A writer* in the American Review remarks thus of his poetry: "The rhythm in general runs with an equable and easy strength; the more worthy of regard because so evidently inartificial; and there is often in the frequent minute pictures of nature a heedless but delicate movement of the measure, a lingering of expression corresponding with some dreamy abandonment of thought to the objects dwelt upon, or a rippling lapse of language where the author's mind seemed conscious of playing with them -caught as it were from the flitting of birds among leafy boughs, from the subtle wanderings of the bee, and the quiet brawling of woodland brooks over leaves and pebbles. In the use of language, more especially in the blank verse, Mr. Street is simple yet rich and usually very felicitous. This is peculiarly the case in his choice of appellatives which he selects and applies with an aptness of descriptive beauty not surpassed, if equalled, by any poet amongst us-certainly by none except Bryant."

"Besides his observation, keen as the Indian Hunter's, of all Nature's slight and simple effects in quiet places, Mr. Street has a most gentle and contemplative eye for the changes which she silently throws over the traces where men have once been. For instance, in "The Old Bridge" and "The Forsaken Road." When he comes to the quiet scenes in America which he has seen and felt, he has passages which in their way, Cowper, Thomson, Wordsworth, or Bryant, never excelled.

Thus of Spring.

"In the moist hollows and by streamlet sides

The grass grows thickly. Sunny banks have burst

Into blue streets of scented violets.

The woodland warbles, and the noisy swamp

How deepened in its tones.

* The late George H. Colton.

And of summer :

"O'er the branch-sheltered stream the laurel hangs
Its gorgeous clusters, and the bass-wood breathes
From its pearl blossoms, fragrance.

But now the wind stirs fresher; darting round
The spider tightens its frail web; dead leaves
Whirl in quick eddies from the mounds; the snail
Creeps to its twisted fortress, and the bird
Crouches amid its feathers. Wafted up,
The stealing cloud with soft gray blinds the sky,
And, in its vapory mantle, onward steps
The summer shower: over the shivering grass
It merrily dances, rings its tinkling bells
Upon the dimpling stream, and, moving on,
It treads upon the leaves with pattering feet
And softly murmured music.

"How exquisite are these pictures! With what an appreciation, like the minute stealing in of light among leaves, does he touch upon every delicate feature! And then, in how subtle an alembic of the mind must such language have been crystallized. The curiosa felicitas' cannot be so exhibited except by genius.'" Another critic says "Mr. Street is the Teniers of American poets. Perfect in his limited and peculiar range of Art, as Longfellow in his more extended and higher sphere, Street is the very daguerreotype of external nature. And yet his portraits are not mere mechanical copies of her features-so much feeling, as well as truth, is there in his microscopic delineations." And the Columbian Magazine, in noticing his poems, remarks: "His Sunset on Shawangunk Mountain" alone would make a poet's reputation. It is a true picture from nature, redolent of Summer-evening's balmy air, and rivalling in poetic beauty and minuteness some of the most choice passages of Thomson's Seasons." And in England his claims as a poet have been fully recognised. We find his poem of "The Lost Hunter," finely illustrated in a recent London periodical, and the Foreign Quarterly Review speaks of him as "a descriptive poet at the head of his class." It remarks that "his pictures of American scenery are full of gusto and freshness." The Westminster Review, in noticing the collection of his poems by Clark and Austin, says: “It is long since we met with a volume of poetry from which we

* Charles F. Hoffman.

have derived so much unmixed pleasure as from the collection now before us. Right eloquently does he discourse of nature, her changeful features and her varied moods, as exhibited in "America with her rich green forest robe," and many are the glowing pictures we would gladly transfer to our pages, in proof of the poet's assertion that "nature is man's best teacher."

Besides the numerous pieces published by Mr. Street in different periodicals, he delivered three very able poems before the Englossian Society of Geneva, and the Phi Beta Kappa and Philomathean Societies of Union College, from which latter institution in 1841 he received the honorary degree of A. M. A complete and beautiful edition of his poems, in a large octavo volume of more than three hundred pages, was published two years since by Messrs Clark and Austin, of New York, and has already passed through several editions. We have room to quote from it but two specimens to illustrate the view we have given. One is a picture of Autumn :—

"The beech-nut falling from its opened burr
Gives a sharp rattle, and the locust's song
Rising and swelling shrill, then pausing short,
Rings like a trumpet. Distant woods and hills
Are full of echoes, and all sounds that strike
Upon the hollow air let loose their tongues.
The ripples, creeping through the matted grass,
Drip on the ear, and the far partridge-drum
Rolls like low thunder. The last butterfly,
Like a winged violet, floating with the meek
Pink-colored sunshine, sinks his velvet feet
Within the pillared mullein's delicate down,
And shuts and opens his unruffled fans.
Lazily wings the crow, with solemn croak,
From tree-top on to tree-top. Feebly chirps
The grasshopper, and the spider's tiny clock
Ticks from its crevice."

Is not this a painting? as much as any ethereal and dreamy landscape by Cole or Durand?

The other is a pencil sketch of an ancient forest road.

"Old winding roads are frequent in the woods,

By the surveyor opened long ago,

When through the depths he led his trampling band,
Startling the crouched deer from the underbrush

With unknown shouts and axe-blows. Left again
To solitude, soon nature touches in

Picturesque graces. Hiding here in moss
The wheel-track-blocking up the vista there

In bushes-darkening with her soft cool tints
The notches on the trees, and hatchet-cuts
Upon the stooping limbs-across the trail
Twisting, in wreaths, the pine's enormous roots,
And twining, like a bower, the leaves above.
Now skirts she the faint path with fringes deep
Of thicket, where the checkered partridge hides
Its downy brood, and whence, with drooping wing
It limps to lure away the hunter's foot
Approaching its low cradle; now she coats
The hollow, stripped by the surveyor's band,
To pitch their tents at night, with pheasant grass,
So that the doe, its slim fawn by its side,
Amidst the fire-flies in the twilight feeds;
And now she hurls some hemlock o'er the track
Splitting the trunk that in the frost and rain
Asunder falls, and melts into a strip

Of umber dust."

We are writing of one, however, who we feel has only commenced his career. His next publication will, we think, add to his reputation, in a way to exceed the hopes even of his most ardent friends. For several years Mr. Street has been engaged on a poem called "Frontenac," a tale of the Iroquois in 1696, which is now finished. The writer of this sketch has had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript, and has no hesitation in asserting that it will stand at the very head of American poems. It is no small evidence of Mr. Street's reputation in England, that the distinguished London publisher, Mr. Bentley, to whom this poem was casually mentioned, at once made propositions to the author to have it brought out by his house. Arrangements to this effect have been made, and the poem will appear in England in a few months. Its descriptions of natural scenery-so bright and vivid and its sketches of life in the forest and the Indian village will be something most novel to the reading public abroad. There is a freshness about it which cannot but charm those accustomed to the poetry of the Old World, and we believe that shortly no American poet will be better known in England than Mr. Street.