University of Virginia Library

The name of Wells illustrates this Lyric. That it should be needful here to state, that Mr. Wells is the author of a great Poem, in the dramatic form, entitled “Joseph and his Brethren,” and published many years since, is a disgrace to our best and leading Reviewers, whose most holy duty it should be to dispel the clouds which veil genius from the public eye: “bis dat qui citò dat;” but these gentlemen ever tarry till the force of its own fire has done the work; and then they sedulously hasten, one and all, to assure the world that a new glory is burning in the heaven of Mind!

Of the noble Poem of Mr. Wells, one personally but a stranger to him can say, with a fervid conviction of the truth of his assertion, that, to go from the “Paradise Lost,” the “Samson Agonistes,” the “Antony and Cleopatra,” to the finer—and they not few—passages and scenes of “Joseph and his Brethren,” is but to sail in spirit down one and the same stream of sublime, subtle, and unsurpassed Poetry.