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ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

The rural and beautiful village of Cumberland, about twelve miles from Portland, Maine, is the birthplace of Elizabeth Smith. Her family name was Prince. Precocity indeed is not always a sign of genius,-for sometimes those minds which are ripe the soonest, the soonest decay,-yet the little Elizabeth (like many of her sister-poetesses) was a most precocious child. She used to improvise as soon as she could talk, but finding that people stared at her, and that some checked her, she grew nervous at three or four, and repeated her rhymes only in secret.

She began to write from the time she could initiate printed letters, and continued for a long time to write in this way. Possessing acute sensibilities, a quiet thoughtfulness, a loving disposition, and a marked dislike of pretension, the attributes of a true poet might have been discerned in her at a very early age; and perhaps were, by that father and grandfather at whose feet she loved to sit, hearing and asking them questions, when other children were out at play. As she grew up she devoted herself to study; chosing philosophy both natural and moral, and abstruse subjects which required much close and steady thought, on which to feed her love for knowledge. But liberal nature gave her a very strong mind, capable of bearing intense application, and as capacious as it was strong, fit apartment for the wealthy stores that native thought and foreign learning brought in. She was married at sixteen to Seba Smith, Esq., of Portland, well-known as the author of the humorous Jack Downing Letters. Since her marriage Mrs. Smith has been a constant contributor to the magazines of the day. When she first wrote, she did so merely from the impulse within; afterwards, necessity lorded it over her genius; and often when her social and womanly nature would have been content with the pleasures of friendly intercourse, this stern master, she dared not disobey, has driven her to her pen, to coin her thoughts of purest gold, for gold " of a baser sort." About eight years ago she left Portland to reside in New York; lately she has removed to Brooklyn.

In 1842, Mrs. Smith published "The Sinless Child, and other Poems,"
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a little volume which has been much praised by able critics, and widely circulated. The Acorn, one of her most imaginative and faultless productions, is contained in this book. We give the whole of it: for though the growing oak spreads out far and wide, we could not find it in our hearts to cut off a single bough. Within a short time, she has completed a tragedy, called The Roman Tribute, which is to be acted in the coming autumn; and a prose romance, now in the press. Many of her smaller poems indicated genius of a high order; they vary in their style of thought and expression, however, very considerably. Sometimes, as in The April Rain, there is a fresh simplicity in them, as if a little child were singing out her pure and happy feelings in musical rhyme; and then again, as in the two sonnets we have quoted, there is a sublimity, a deep solemn calmness of thought, as if breather from the heart of one made patient by experience, and wise by inward suffering. Some of Mrs. Smith's best poems and essays have been published under the name of Ernest Helfenstein. We have often wondered who this quaint, but deep-souled, mellow -voiced writer was; our delight and surprise were equal, on finding, not long ago, that the original and instructive articles we had read from the pen of poet-philosopher, Ernest Helfenstein, sprang from the fertile mind of the philosophical poetess, Elizabeth Oakes Smith.

THE ACORN.

An acorn fell from an old oak tree,
And lay on the frosty ground-
"O, what shall the fate of the acorn be!"
Was whispered all around,
By low-toned voices, chiming sweet,
Lie a floweret's bell when swung-
And grasshopper steed were gathering fleet,
And the beetle's hoofs up-rung-

For the woodland Fays came sweeping past
In the pale autumnal ray,
Where the forest leaves were falling fast,
And the acorn quivering lay;

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