We have a serious complaint to make of W. T. GRAYSON, Esq., of Charleston, S. C., or of his publishers, Messrs. McCarter & Co., that the Messenger was honored with no copy of his recent volume of poems. Judging from certain extracts that we have seen in other literary publications, these poems must possess a very high order of merit. It seems to have been Mr. Grayson's object to vary the method of the slavery argument by presenting it in a versified form, and the largest poem of his volume "The Hireling and the Slave" is devoted to a parallel between the laboring classes of Free and Slave Society. We applaud both the design and the poetry—what we have seen of it and should be gratified to have an opportunity of doing fuller justice to the author's literary claims.

Of the settlement of South Carolina, and the tearful adieux of the Huguenots to the sunny land of France, so plaintively sung in Macaulay's exquisite poem of Moncontour, the earlier lines of the following extract furnish a soft and pathetic picture, while the latter portion describes the features of the Southern landscape with rare felicity and a most musical lapse of verse

To exile flying from a perjured state,
From royal bigotry and papal hate,
The Huguenot, among his ancient foes,
Found shelter here and undisturbed repose;
Sad the long look the parting exile gave
To France receding on the rising wave!
Her daisied meads shall smile for him no more,
Her orchards furnish no autumnal store,
With memory's eye alone the wanderer sees
The vine-clad hills, the old familiar trees,
The castled steep, the noonday village shade,
The trim quaint garden where his childhood
played;

No more he joins the labor of the fields,
Or shares the joy the merry vintage yields;
Gone are the valley homes, by sparkling

streams

That long shall murmur in the exile's dreams And temples, where his sires were wont to

pray,

With stern Farel and chivalrous MornayScenes with long-treasured memories richly fraught,

Where Sully counseled, where Coligni fought,
And Henri's meteor plume in battle shone,
A bacon-light to victory and a throne.

These all are lost; but smiling in the West,
Hope, still alluring, calms the anxious breast;
And, dimly rising through the landward haze,
New forms of beauty court his wistful gaze:
The level line of strand that brightly shines
Between the rippling waves and dusky pines,
A shelving beach that sandy hillocks bound,
With clumps of palm and fragrant myrtle
crowned;

Low shores, with margins broad of marshy green,

Bright winding streams the grassy wastes between,

Wood-crested islands that o'erlook the main,
Like dark hills rising on a verdant plain;
Trees of new beauty, climbing to the skies,
With various verdure meet his wondering eyes:
Gigantic oaks, the monarchs of the wood,
Whose stooping branches sweep the rising
flood,

And, robed in solemn draperies of moss,
To stormy winds their proud defiance toss ;
Magnolias bright with glossy leaves and flow-

That whispers deep, mysterious things,
Dim shadowy visions, half discerned,
But beautiful, and with them brings
Thoughts of remembered worlds, that, learned
We know not where, before us pass,
Like faees in a magic glass.

We feel the more indebted to Mr. GRAYSON for these graceful contributions to Southern Literature because in his choice of subjects he has most effectually refuted a favorite charge of the opponents of slavery that the tendency of our institutions is to depress literary effort and to stifle the promptings of the Muse. Insanely perverting the meaning of Freedom, and insisting that letters must al ways flourish best under free institutions-which nobody pretends to gainsay-the more intemperate of the AntiSlavery writers have affected to sneer at the South as intellectually sterile, in the face of Legaré, Wilde, Pinkney, Poe, Tucker, Simms, Meek, the Cookes, Miss Hawes-indeed of a host of the most popular and successful essayists, novelists and poets that the country has produced. Mr. GRAYSON has bravely combatted the prejudice by weaving into beautiful and striking verse the very social institution, which is assumed to be the bar to all intellectual effort.

The London Times, in a recent editorial, very happily contrasts English and Frence eloquence apropos of an oration before the French Academy by Nisard, on the occasion of the admission of the Duc de Broglie. The following paragraph seems to us highly felicitous

"Imagine a distinguished literary or scientific character inaugurating his admission into the Royal Society with a long discourse, elaborately polished and delicately phrased, abounding in graceful compliments to those who had preceded and those who surrounded him; glancing, rather than touching, on every contemporaneous and many a past incident; hovering with coy temerity about the ardent embers of forbidden politics; fluttering with well poised rhetoric over the memory of departed or suspected greatness, and rousing, by the mesmeric touch of shadowy inuendo, a response and a sympathy which more emphatic and more positive eloquence would have failed to excite. And imagine the reply, not less rhythmical in its periods, not less soft in its cadences, not less pointed in its allusions, not less impressive by its omissions, not less artistic in its compliments, not less thrilling in its brief reminiscences, not less dexterous in its photographic sketches of forbidden history; turning from the praise of the living to regrets for the dead, and blending with the olive offered to the neophite the cypress due to the memories of men who had won fame in other times under other laws. With us all this would be simply impossible. There is scarcely one distinguished man, however acute as a philosopher or able as a lecturer, who would not break down in an ungraceful retrospect or a clumsy compliment after the third or fourth paragraph. We should have the stock cantilena of "the present occasion" reiterated through a stammering jangle of disjointed sentences and the usual formulas so deeply cherished in our parochial oratory-"most proud," "most happy," rnd "sensible of the high honour"-both speakers and listeners being extremely bored by a most uncongenial and distasteful task. In fact, such is our education and such our habits that it is doubtful whether, putting aside great constitutional questions, Englishmen can be eloquent or fluent, except on positive matters, such as dividends and percentage, or religious matters as seen from the platform or the chapel pulpit. M. T.

In that very remarkable book of Jno. Ruskin, entitled “Modern Painters: of Many Things," but recently brought out, the author, in speaking of the Idealism of Religious Art, uses the following language which will be rejected, perhaps, by some dreamy devotees of the gold-leaf school, but which certainly addresses

itself with singular force to the students and admirers of painting in the present day

"On a certain class of minds, however, these Raphaelesque and other sacred paintings of high order, have had, of late years, another kind of influence, much resembling that which they had at first on the most pious Romanists. They are used to excite certain conditions of religious dream or reverie; being again, as in earliest times, regarded not as representations of fact, but as expressions of sentiment respecting the fact. In this way the best of them have unquestionably much purifying and enchanting power; and they are helpful opponents to sinful passion and weakness of every kind. A fit of unjust anger, petty malice, unreasonable vexation, or dark passion, cannot certainly, in a mind of ordinary sensibility, hold its own in the presence of a good engraving from any work of Angelico, Memling, or Perugino. But I nevertheless believe, that he who trusts much to such helps will find them fail him at his need; and that the dependence, in any great degree, on the presence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully feeble sense of the presence and power of God; I do not think that any man, who is thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room, will care what sort of pictures of Christ he has on its walls; and, in the plurality of cases, the delight taken in art of the kind is, in reality, nothing more than a form of graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of a disciplined life restrain in other directions. art is, in a word, the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than this, and the love of it is the mask under which a general thirst for morbid excitement will pass itself for religion. The young lady who rises in the middle of the day, jaded by her last night's ball, and utterly incapable of any simple or wholesome religious exercise, can still gaze into the dark eyes of the Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the whiteness of an ivory crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily life in full persuasion that her morning's feverishness has atoned for her evening's folly. And all the while, the art which possesses these very doubtful advantage is acting for undoubtful detriment, in the various ways above examined, on the inmost fastness of faith; it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, obscuring real events with unlikely semblances, and enforcing false assertions

Such

Some inquiries having been made of us as to the authorship of four lines quoted by Gov. Wise in his Oration at Lexington, we take occasion to give our readers the whole poem. Many of them have perhaps seen it already in the newspapers, but it is well worth preserving as an exquisite specimen of lyric poetry. The Governor's quotation was the last stanza.

THE SONG OF THE CAMP.

A CRIMEAN INCIDENT. "GIVE us a Song!" the soldiers cried, The outer trenches guarding, When the heated guns of the camps allied Grew weary of bombarding.

The dark Redan, in silent scoff,

Lay, grim and threatening, under; And the tawny mound of the Malakoff No longer belched its thunder.

There was a pause. The guardsman said: "We storm the forts to-morrow ; Sing while we may, another day

Will bring enough of sorrow."

They lay along the battery's side,

Below the smoking cannonBrave hearts from Severn and from Clyde, And from the banks of Shannon.

They sang of love, and not of fame;

Forgot was Britain's glory:
Each heart recalled a different name,
But all sang "Annie Laurie."

Voice after voice caught up the song,

Until its tender passion

Rose like an anthem, rich and strongTheir battle-eve confession.

Dear girl, her name he dared not speak, Yet, as the song grew louder, Something upon the soldier's cheek

Washed off the stains of powder. Beyond the darkening ocean burned

The bloody sunset's embers, While the Crimean valleys learned How English love remembers. And once again a fire of hell

Rained on the Russian quarters, With scream of shot, and burst of shell, And bellowing of the mortars.

We deviate, for the first time in our editorial experience, from an established rule, to call the attention of our readers to the announcement in the advertising pages of the present number of the Messenger, of Miss Mary Pegram's school for Young Ladies. Miss Pegram is a person of very great cultivation and accomplishment, and we doubt if there be in Virginia one more thoroughly qualified for the difficult and delicate office of instruction. We feel assured that her discharge of its duties will fully justify what we have here said and more, and we suspect that all Miss Pegram's friends who read these lines will wonder rather at the moderate tone of our commendation, than at our mentioning her design in this place. But all will give us credit for having written thus much only that the claims of a most meritorious lady may be more fully recognized.

The literary circles of Richmond have recently had an acquisition in the removal of G. P. R. James, Esq., H. B. Majesty's Consul in Virginia, from Norfolk to the former place. Mr. James has already settled down into the regular pursuit of his official and literary avocations in his new abode, for though he has produced more books than any other writer of his day, except, perhaps, the French Leviathan of Letters, Mons. Alexandre Dumas, he has all the industry of a young novelist, and, unlike the Marquis de la Pailleterie, affixes his name only to such volumes as he has actually written. Mr. James is at this moment engaged upon the concluding pages of another work of fiction which will very shortly appear.

A letter from our esteemed friend Mr. TEFFT directs our attention to the fact, which had been pointed out to us before by another correspondent, that Gov. Wise was in error in attributing the often quoted words of "First in War, First in Peace, and First in the hearts of his Countrymen" to Judge Marshall. They were originally spoken by General Henry Lee in a funeral eulogium on General Washington pronounced in Richmond in the latter part of December 1799.

THE LAST OF THE FORESTERS; or, Humors on the Border; a Story of the Old Virginia Frontier. By JOHN ESTEN COOKE. New York: Derby & Jackson, 119 Nassau Street. 1856.

For a novel of more than four hundred pages there are fewer changes of scene and less of incident in this work, than any other that we can call to mind. The characters are scarce a dozen in number, and carry on the plot (which from its simplicity can hardly be called so, without a misuse of terms,) in Winchester, or its immediate vicinity; and though the ante-revolutionary period selected by the author gives promise of stirring border occurrences in the course of his story, we have nothing of action more exciting than a village disturbance between the German and Irish residents, ending in a broken head or so, and a plentiful effusion of beer.

It is

From what we have said, the reader may, perhaps, suppose that we do not think highly of the "Last of the Foresters." As a dramatic work, we do not, but to quote the author's own language, "it would be unjust to apply to this volume the tests which are brought to bear upon an elaborate romance." rather a series of sketches of scenery and character a succession of little comedies in village life than a grave attempt to lay bare the motives of human conduct in another age and under other circumstances than our own. The hero is a white boy, who, having been stolen by the Indians in infancy, is thrown into intimate association with the whites before reaching manhood, with all the roving propensities of the savage, and under the belief that he belongs to the race of the red men. How this boy, Verty, was impressed by the conventional existence upon which he thus entered, how his wild, restless nature was softened and subdued by the tender eyes and loving heart of the fresh and beautiful Redbud, and how he came at last to play the part of a good, quiet citizen of colonial Virginia-all this Mr. Cooke has told with infinite skill, though the sweet shadows of the youthful lovers glide past us rather as the images of the poet in an atmosphere of unreal brightness, than as creatures of flesh and blood, in the world around us. Jinks, the dangerous knight of the needle, and Roundjacket, at once

disciple of Themis and votary of the Muses, are more like life, and the adventures of the former in winning his way to the bosom of the affectionate and grandiloquous Salliana, are highly diverting. As for Ralph Ashley and Miss Fanny, they are two as utterly insipid young persons as can be found, making love to each other, in the whole range of fiction.

The charm of the "Last of the Foresters," which makes it delightful midsummer reading, is to be detected in the humor running over the surface of the author's style, like rippling sunshine over a lake, and in the rare perception of the "beauties of nature" (not like Miss Salliana's) which betrays itself in so many exquisite landscapes to vary the pictures in the artist's gallery. The pomp of Virginia woods, and the fires of our autumnal sunsets, have never been painted so gorgeously anywhere else as in Mr. Cooke's pages.

In dismissing this volume, and commending it to the reader, we may say that, while it seems to us eminently successful, it does not indicate any higher degree of talent, or farther reach of genius, than the very first novel Mr. Cooke ever wrote. He is wonderfully facile with the pen, and with his fun, his pathos, his eye for pictorial effects in the external world, and his quick apprehension of the superficial in character, we believe he could produce just such books every ninety days-books doing him great credit and affording us no small degree of entertainment, but not such as we have reason to believe him capable of writing, with greater care and more painful elaboration. Mr. Cooke writes too rapidly and revises too little. By devoting a longer time to the construction of his plots, and by studying the subtler workings of the human heart, he would be able, in our judgment, to enrich the literature of his country with works of fiction that would long survive the period that brought them forth.

THE SPANISH CONQUEST IN AMERICA, and its Relation to the History of Slavery and the Government of Colonies. By ARTHUR HELPS. 2 vols., small 8vo. New York: Harper & Brothers. [From A. Morris, 97 Main Street.

No one who has read the "Friends in Council," and the "Companions of my