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 Poets of America, 
 
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POETS OF AMERICA. 
 
POETS 
 
 OF AMERICA 
 
 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF "VICTORIAN POETS " 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
G.S. Ull 
 
 '.Copyrighr, 1885, 
 By EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
TO 
 THE YOUNGER WRITERS OF AMERICA 
 
 THIS WORK, 
 
 CHIEFLY A REVIEW OF OUR FIRST DISTINCTIVE 
 IVRICAL PERIOD, 
 
 \% totlitallg 3In0crflbeli. 
 
INTRODUCTION, 
 
 ' I ^EN years have passed since the completion of my 
 -•- critical survey of the poets and poetry of England 
 from the beginning of the present reign. The scheme of 
 the Victorian Poets included, besides an extended review 
 of acknowledged leaders, a concise analysis of groups 
 forming the general choir of the period represented. 
 The work thus became somewhat complete in scope, and 
 doubtless has served as a critical handbook and means 
 of reference. This incidental result, however, was quite 
 subordinate to the author's main design; and I think 
 that such a fact was evident not only to a professional 
 class, but to all readers interested concerning the spirit 
 and methods of poetry, — especially of our English song. 
 To that design I wish shortly to refer, as it is the 
 chief motive of the present volume also. But first I 
 would reproduce a statement made in the Preface to the 
 former work, viz., — that the author originally had under- 
 taken to write upon the poets of this country and the 
 causes of their successes and failures ; that on examina- 
 tion he had found modern and radical changes in the 
 conditions affecting ideal effort, at home and abroad ; 
 
Vlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 that for this and other reasons he could "more freely 
 and graciously begin by choosing a foreign paradigm 
 than by entering upon the home-field, and that none could 
 be so good for the purpose as the poetry of Great 
 Britain." It seemed to him, also, that, until after some 
 training of this kind, "affection, reverence, national feel- 
 ing, or some less worthy emotion, might be thought to 
 prevent an American from writing without prejudice " 
 of the poets of his own country. Certainly he could at- 
 tempt this more profitably when the changes mentioned 
 should be more complete, and the careers more rounded 
 of the chief American writers who would pass under 
 review. 
 
 The time came when I felt emboldened to renew my 
 original undertaking, and the result is set forth in this 
 volume. My belief is strengthened that the earlier trea- 
 tise was essential to it, and, in fact, the most expedient 
 preliminary task that could be chosen. The modern con- 
 ditions, as far as they relate to both countries, could be 
 observed more directly in England than in America, 
 their stress being there of earlier origin and less dif- 
 fused. My previous synopsis of them now has only to 
 be condensed, and supplemented by discussion of those 
 other conditions that are peculiar to this country alone. 
 Furthermore, I regard the treatise on British poetry as 
 of less significance, in its field of observation, than the 
 work now following it ; and I trust that reasons for this 
 opinion — to which some at first may demur — will be- 
 come apparent to those who give more than a cursory 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 reading to these essays. Even now few Americans set 
 a proper value on the relative bearing of our ideal and 
 intellectual progress thus far. The instinctive deference 
 of a young nation to its elders, and the frequent assur- 
 ance of the latter that our progress has been restricted 
 chiefly to physical achievement, have united until a re- 
 cent date to make us accept that view of the matter. 
 Aesop's lion discovered that the honors of a contest de- 
 pend largely upon the sculptor that commemorates it. 
 If there were a stake-boat, a winning-post, by which the 
 comparative import (waiving the question of inherent 
 value) of national activities could be measured exactly, 
 various estimates might be disestablished. What is of 
 most concern, in relation to the theme of this work, is 
 the fact that the literature — even the poetic literature — 
 of no country, during the last half-century, is of greater 
 interest to the philosophical student, with respect to its 
 bearing on the future, than that of the United States. 
 My judgment is to this effect, after years in which I have 
 read a good deal of native and foreign comment upon 
 the subject. The reasons for it are generally perceptible 
 in the ensuing chapters, but three may be stated here 
 succinctly : i. American poetry, more than that of Eng- 
 land during the period considered, has idealized — often in- 
 spired — the national sentiment, the historic movements, 
 of the land whose writers have composed it. 2. This 
 nation already, — in the second century of a growth 
 which began not in barbarism, but in political civiliza- 
 tion, — is gaining in strength, population, and the liberal 
 
INTRO D UCTION. 
 
 arts, at an accelerative speed that soon must make it a 
 typical exemplar of ideal as well as material productioa 
 Nor can there be a time when the bent of its ideality 
 will be more suggestive than now, for the present angle 
 determines the arc of the future. 3. The first true 
 course of American poetry has distinguished the prin- 
 cipal term covered in these essays ; a first heat has 
 been run during that time, to whose leaders special 
 chapters are devoted. It is rare that an epoch so def- 
 initely begun and ended can be selected as the object 
 of synthetic examination. The reader is invited to study 
 a period as distinct in literature as our Constitutional 
 period in politics, or the Thirty Years' War in history ; 
 one, moreover, in which poetry bore closer relations to 
 the life and enthusiasm of a people than it often has 
 borne in other lands and times. 
 
 We see, also, that this term has been singularly con- 
 current with that of the Victorian hemicycle, so that an 
 examination of the poetry of our English tongue for the 
 last fifty years is compassed in my two books. In order 
 to perceive the evolution of a new minstrelsy from its 
 foreign and native germs, the opening chapters of this 
 volume are occupied partly with the efforts of the Colo- 
 nial verse - writers and their immediate successors. A 
 final chapter contains a rapid summary of what is now 
 doing, as a basis for speculation on the outlook and the 
 chances of a revival in the future. The reader thus ob- 
 tains a general view of American poets and poetry from 
 their outset to the present date.- 
 
INTRODUCTION. Xl 
 
 Nevertheless, the main purpose of this work, as sug- 
 gested heretofore, is to continue my former effort, by 
 obtaining further illustrations of the poetic life, and ideas 
 with respect to the spirit and methods of the art of 
 poetry. The marginal Analysis and topical Index are 
 planned to accord with this intention. My views were 
 formulated to some extent in our consideration of the 
 transatlantic field. They can be emphasized in no way 
 more readily than by fresh and personal examples which 
 are a kind of object-lessons ; by criticism of a new 
 series of poets, employing the same tongue, but varying 
 in genius and temperament, and influenced by the con- 
 ditions of a distinct environment. 
 
 The tenor of the original discussion, which I have no 
 reason to modify seriously, was in favor of simplicity, 
 impulse, sincerity, as opposed to obscurity, didacticism, 
 and the affectation either of refinement or a "saucy 
 roughness," — always in behalf of imagination, and against 
 the multiform devices proffered, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously,- in lieu of that supreme quality. It placed con- 
 struction before decoration, the tone of a composition 
 above its detail, and looked to the spirit rather than the 
 structure, — not content, however, with the half-truth of 
 a writer who declares that poetry is a spirit, not a 
 form, — the truth being that poetry is a spirit, taking 
 form. Finally, I welcomed every sign of healthy passion 
 and every promising dramatic tendency, both invigorat- 
 ing after a prolonged reflective period. Various sins of 
 commission were discoverable among the lesser pupils of 
 
Xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Wordsworth, the "spasmodic" lyrists, the Neo-Romantic 
 artificers, etc., and frequently an absence was noted of 
 merits that undoubtedly are found in our native verse — 
 simplicity and honest impulse. The last-named traits do 
 not of themselves suffice, for spontaneity must be allied 
 with power. American singers often have been more 
 natural than imaginative, and have risen to passion only 
 in rare individual or public crises. Our most noted 
 group, that of New England, distinguished for grace 
 and scholarship, fervent in conviction and of marked in- 
 tellectuality, has been pronounced too thin blooded ; 
 what sensuousness enriches American poetry has ap- 
 peared chiefly in the work of its middle and younger 
 schools. On the other hand, our verse has been meas- 
 urably free from the vice of over-decoration, prevalent 
 in the writings of the minor British romanticists ten 
 years or more ago. It is to be hoped that the trace 
 of this now observed is something from which the new 
 school soon will free itself. And I here say to our 
 young writers, as I have said again and again .with re- 
 spect to their foreign standards, that in literature, as in 
 architecture, construction must be decorated, not decora- 
 tion constructed, — that invention must precede them 
 both, — and that, if imagination be clouded and the glow 
 of passion unfelt, it is utter and worthless jugglery to 
 compose at all. An enumeration, in a closing chapter, 
 of younger poets and their efforts is purposely uncritical, 
 except in the case of Lanier ; it aims to show these at 
 their best, but the fact is not ga.nsaid that there is a 
 
INTRODUCTION. Xlll 
 
 lull in the force and efficacy of American song. My 
 conclusion is that we are not experiencing a decadence, 
 but rather a diversion of imaginative energy to new 
 forms of employment, and this not without a fair com- 
 pensation. It may be well that our verse thus should 
 escape the phase of minute realism and analysis through 
 which modern literature is passing, and which probably 
 will give way before a dramatic and inventive impulse 
 by the time a second epoch of poetic achievement shall 
 be inaugurated. 
 
 My review of the exquisite productions of Tennyson 
 and his compeers led to consideration of the methods of 
 poetry as an art. Apt illustrations were at hand, and 
 my remarks often and designedly were addressed to fel- 
 lows of the craft. The present work is less technical; 
 I have more to say of the poetic temperament and the 
 conditions that affect it ; more of poetry as the music 
 of emotion, faith, aspiration, and all the chords of life. 
 The atmosphere in which our poets have flourished is 
 observed, as well as their special aids and hindrances 
 and whatever has been significant in their various ca- 
 reers. The personality of the noted American minstrels 
 has been more suggestive than that of their English 
 contemporaries. In this respect they bear a likeness to 
 the poets of the Georgian era. With few exceptions the 
 Victorian brotherhood, living under advanced social and 
 literary systems, have been neither greatly involved with 
 the action and history of their time nor picturesquely 
 conspicuous as individuals. Nevertheless, it is not the 
 
XIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 main thing, in writing of a poet, to consider the expe- 
 riences which he shares in common with other men. 
 He must be judged by things peculiar to himself — the 
 creative gift and work that bring him within the franchise 
 of hterary criticism. The estimate, then, to a certain 
 extent must be technical ; and so far as my own com- 
 ment has been addressed to the literary class, its en- 
 deavor is, as a Californian author pleases me by saying, 
 to get down to the bed-rock of poetry as an art and to 
 its pure gold as an inspiration. If passages occur where 
 the agreement of polite thinkers, as to established proc- 
 esses and conclusions, is not assumed as a matter of 
 course, it is because I hope this volume will be read by 
 some who hitherto have paid slight attention to its topics. 
 There is no good reason why a critical treatise, like any 
 other work, should not appeal to both select and general 
 readers, though possibly on very diverse grounds of in- 
 terest. 
 
 During the preparation of this work, the last of its 
 kind that I shall pubUsh, I have had my share of the 
 ills from which none are quite exempt. It has been de- 
 layed by the rarity of intervals at which I could devote 
 a wholesome energy to its completion, and feel assured 
 that it would betray no tinge of personal discourage- 
 ment. If injustice has been done, in the delicate task of 
 making even the slightest reference to one's literary as- 
 sociates, it has not been of malice aforethought. 
 
 Acknowledgment is due to friends, — especially to 
 Messrs. Gilder, Johnson, Buel, and Carey, of "The Cen- 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 tury" office, — and to Mr. G. T. Elliot, the scholarly cor- 
 rector at the Riverside Press, and his assistants, for pro- 
 fessional courtesies in aid of my labor now ended ; also, 
 to my son, Arthur Stedman, for expert revision of copy 
 ,and verification of names and dates. Where authorities 
 differ, or are silent, with respect to matters of fact, I 
 have consulted — as far as practicable — the persons di- 
 rectly interested, except in the cases of living female 
 writers whose dates of birth are not given already in 
 standard compilations. t. r^ e 
 
 New York, September, 1885. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Page 
 
 Early and Recent Conditions . . . <> e i i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Growth of the American School 31 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 William Cullen Bryant 62 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 John Greenleaf Whittier 95 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson . . 133 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 180 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Edgar Allan Poe 225 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes ....«•• 273 
 
XVUl CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 James Russell Lowell 304 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Walt Whitman 349 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Bayard Taylor 396 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 The Outlook 435 
 
 INDEX 
 
 477 
 
POETS OF AMERICA. 
 
POETS OF AMERICA. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 IT is my design to trace the current of poesy, deep- 
 ening and widening in common with our streams 
 of riches, knowledge, and power ; to show an influence 
 upon the national sentiment no less potent, if less ob- 
 vious, than that derived from the historic records of 
 our past ; to watch the first dawning upon an eager 
 people of " the happy, heavenly vision men call Art " ; 
 to observe closely and to set down with an honest 
 hand our foremost illustrations of the Rise of Poetry in 
 America. Such is my purpose, and I deem it not a 
 mean one. We think of power and wealth as things in 
 themselves, but they are strong and rich only in their 
 relations to the life of man. The essential part of that 
 life is in his spirit, of which imagination is the king, — 
 and the sister arts, with poetry at their front, are to be 
 accounted its highest forms of expression. 
 
 The song of a nation is accepted as an ultimate test 
 of the popular spirit ; as the earliest form of speech 
 and the ripest, — whether the utterance of feelings 
 common to all, or of the fine and daring speculations 
 of the noblest minds. Examine it, and form opinions 
 of the country's general literature, of the hold upon 
 art and action and scientific achievement. If we have 
 I 
 
 Tht au- 
 thor's pun 
 pose. 
 
 National 
 sang. 
 
EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Cf. " Vk- 
 iorian Po- 
 ets" : p. I. 
 
 SMggexiion 
 to the 
 reader. 
 
 seen a true poetic movement in America, we may be 
 sure that we have had marches in other fields of prog- 
 ress. The inquiry concerning the genuineness and 
 value of such a movement affords a title to this work, 
 and a review of the conditions that have helped or hin- 
 dered it must be included. Upon the method chosen 
 for a study of the recent period in England, my present 
 researches are devoted chiefly to the careers and pro- 
 ductions of leading poets whose reputations are long- 
 established, and who, upon the whole, fairly represent 
 the various tendencies of American song. And thus, 
 incidentally and with fresh opportunities, we may ex- 
 tend our knowledge of "the aim and province of the 
 art of Poetry," and obtain under a new atmosphere fur- 
 ther illustrations of the poetic temperament and life. 
 
 The subject cannot be lightly entered upon, and as 
 if for entertainment merely. Properly considered, 
 there is no more suggestive undertaking than to re- 
 view the first -displays of Ijrical genius in a land as 
 notable as any upon earth. These may seem crude 
 and familiar to ourselves, and possibly are not fully 
 estimated by older nations whose very age and glory 
 make them self-contained. But, if the future is to 
 have a greatness of its own, a study of New World 
 poetry is of equal importance with that devoted to 
 the earlier or contemporary verse of the mother-land. 
 The reader, then, will do well to bear with the de- 
 tails of a prefatory analysis, though they lack that in- 
 terest which adheres to the lives and works of the 
 various poets to whom his attention will be invited. 
 The points which I shall make will not be wholly 
 novel, but by grouping them newly, and in a logical 
 manner, we may get some notion of the real quality 
 of the first genuine awakening of our home-song. 
 
 For that there has been such an awakening is the 
 
LAWS OF GROWTH. 
 
 very cause and foundation of these essays, and if I 
 did not perceive this fact I should have no excuse 
 for their general endeavor. It is true that a nation's 
 literature will not appear out of season. Poetry, its 
 most spontaneous form, is a growth rather than an 
 artifice, or it does not come to strengthen and to 
 stay. Let me acknowledge, as heretofore, the bear- 
 ing of the conditions under which it is produced, and 
 that a poet must be viewed in the light and shadow 
 of his environment ; furthermore, that when a time is 
 ripe there are found both idealists and men of action 
 to represent it, — springing up as when, in the phys- 
 ical world, the pines and fir-trees of a virgin forest 
 have been cleared away, and a novel flora suddenly 
 appears, whose germs have been hidden in the under- 
 mould, awaiting their own season of room and light 
 and air. But let me also, and at present no less 
 than in our foreign excursions, include a factor which 
 the new criticism often overlooks. Too little allow- 
 ance is made for the surprises of genius. We forget 
 that now and then some personage comes without a 
 summons, like a stray leader from the skies ; that 
 works appear under adverse circumstances, so new, 
 so strong, so revolutionary, as to seem inspired cre- 
 ations, — men and works that overleap the stages of 
 development, that demand the spiritual factor, the 
 personal equation, the allowance for exception, in the 
 problem of national growth. In the absence of a 
 sunlit atmosphere, they shine by inward light, and 
 communicate heat and lustre to their surroundings. 
 When a link in the chain of evolution is missing, such 
 are the forces that make up for it. But there are 
 other forces, and certain modes of intellectual effort, 
 which assist growth and somewhat forestall the ordi- 
 nary process. Even criticism may do a share, and 
 
 Law of 
 environ" 
 ment ; 
 
 and the 
 factory 
 which 
 Tnodify its 
 effect. 
 
EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Matters 
 first to be 
 considered. 
 
 Question of 
 a Home- 
 School and 
 its charcLC- 
 teristics. 
 
 Essential 
 quality 
 
 often by penetrative study of the leaders that reflect 
 or stimulate the various tendencies of a people's ide- 
 ality. Of course a poet must represent his age and 
 habitat ; a Grecian temple beside an Alleghanian 
 trout-brook might be lovely, but surely would be out 
 of place and date. It is now my province to discover 
 what special aids the poets of America have expe- 
 rienced, and what hindrances. In no modern coun- 
 try has ideality been more retarded than in our own ; 
 and I think that certain restrictions have peculiarly 
 limited production in the field of Poetry, — the chief 
 of imaginative arts. Yet I see that, in spite of these, 
 the ultimate rise of an American school of poetry 
 was swift and strong, and that its chiefs have had 
 their aids no less than their obstacles, and have 
 bravely confronted the latter. And thus we are 
 brought directly to the preliminary issue. 
 
 II. 
 
 Much has been written of late upon the topic of 
 our native literature. Is there a distinctly American 
 school ? If not, when and where shall we look for 
 one ? What are, or should be, its special character- 
 istics ? These and similar questions are frequently 
 and somewhat vaguely discussed. 
 
 Now, it is first to be observed that the radical 
 quality of any national school, in any country or pe- 
 riod, does not wholly depend upon the types, per- 
 sonages, localities, and other materials utilized by its 
 artists and men of letters ; and this is especially true 
 with regard to the work of a poet, in distinction from 
 that of a painter. The specific tone of the former 
 artist is not derived from the images which his gen- 
 ius informs with life, and from the plots that serve 
 
NATfONAL QUALITY. 
 
 his expression of the thought, passion, imagination, 
 of his people and time. Mere reliance upon these 
 will not suffice. Even a painter might devote his life 
 to copying the groups he finds in his own streets, the 
 streets themselves, and the fields and woods beyond 
 them, yet not produce an original art, nor execute it 
 in a fresh and native way. The mere dialect and 
 legends of a province or section are powerless to 
 convey their essential quality to the song of a poet 
 who calls them to his aid. Mr. Grant White, there- 
 fore, was perfectly right when he suggested, for these 
 and other reasons, that it is the spirit, not the letter, 
 which giveth life ; that we must pay regard to the 
 flavor, rather than to the form and color, of the fruit, 
 — to the distinctive character, not the speech and 
 aspect, of the personage. Unless the feeling of our 
 home-poet be novel, his vision a fresh and distinctive 
 vision, — unless these are radically different from the 
 French, or German, or even the English feeling and 
 vision, — they are not American, and our time has 
 not yet come. 
 
 But I am not with this distinguished writer in his 
 further claim that we still are essentially English, and 
 shall be so for a long series of years to come ; that 
 our literature, like the language we inherit, is wholly 
 English, and must remain so for centuries, until " An- 
 glo-Saxon and Hollander and German and Irishman 
 and negro and Chinese shall have so blended their 
 blood . . . that from the fusion a new race shall have 
 sprung." What I first call to mind is that there are 
 few Americans, even those of but one remove, who 
 are not instantly recognized abroad as being very dif- 
 ferent from Englishmen, not only with respect to fea- 
 ture, mould, and speech, — which vary according to the 
 sections from which they come, — but in their senti- 
 
 R. G. 
 
 theN. Y. 
 
 Feb. ,. 
 i88o. 
 
 A reserve 
 tian. 
 
EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 "The 
 
 Scarlet 
 
 Letter." 
 
 A distinc- 
 tive na- 
 tional 
 iharacter. 
 
 ment, modes of thought and feeling, and way of look- 
 ing at things. In both outward and inward traits 
 they are pronounced distinctively un-English and 
 " American," however divided among themselves. 
 Again, by so much as the style is the man, I believe 
 that the literary product of this new people differs 
 from the literary product of the English, or any other 
 people of the Old World, and I hope to make that 
 difference clear in the course of these chapters. And 
 I will remark, in passing, that " The Scarlet Letter," 
 a romance which Mr. White cited in illustration, to 
 me appears thoroughly un-English in its mystical 
 temper, and its undertone and atmosphere ; if not 
 broadly American, it is locally so, — the fruit and out- 
 giving of the New England sentiment that brooded 
 in its author's spirit, and of which it is a soul-wrought 
 witness and dramatic chronicle. 
 
 In fine, recognizing the error of those who, by a 
 forced effort, would anticipate creations that will come 
 only of themselves, or through the natural impulse of 
 foreordained artists, I also perceive that already, in 
 various walks of art, and in none more than in that 
 to which our present study is devoted, we have ex- 
 hibited the new and broad results, both of acclima- 
 tion and of a blending process, to which the ruling 
 divisions of our population thus far have been sub- 
 jected. Equally obvious are the minor distinctive 
 phases, which, on the other hand, arise from the dif- 
 ferentiation of the American people by influences that, 
 in widely separated districts, have acted upon their 
 inhabitants from the early settlements to the present 
 time. The first-named phenomena are national, while 
 those of the latter class may be termed sectional ; but 
 all are American, whether they appertain to the whole, 
 or to the subdivisions, of our intellectual yield. 
 
THE AMERICAN TYPE. 
 
 The type first suggested, that of a broadly national 
 character, is plainly incomplete, and has wide room for 
 maturer development. Let us measure it only at its 
 worth. A restless and ill-adjusted spirit still pervades 
 the heterogeneous elements of our nationality. Here 
 is a country as large as all Europe, embracing zones 
 as far apart, in physical attributes, as those of Norway 
 and Sicily. Here are the emigrants or descendants 
 of every people in Europe, — to go no farther, — and 
 all their languages, and customs, and traditions, and 
 modes of feeling, at one time or another, have come 
 with them. Hence our unconscious habitude of va- 
 riety, the disinclination to cling to one way of life 
 or thought until its perfect conclusion. There is a 
 ferment in new blood. The American travels, and 
 at first is delighted with the color and flavor of the 
 region to which he has come, but soon wearies of them, 
 and pushes on to some new place where novel char- 
 acteristics can be enjoyed. This is observable of all 
 Anglo-Saxons, capricious yet steadfast as they are, 
 but more so among ourselves than with respect to our 
 British kinsmen. America has absorbed the traits 
 of many lands and people ; the currents still set this 
 way ; our modern intercourse with the world at large 
 is close and unintermitting, so that the raw ingredients 
 of our national admixture are supplied quite as rapidly 
 as the whirl and stir of the popular system can trit- 
 urate and commingle them. It is too much, then, 
 to expect that our art or song, from whatever section 
 either may come, will exhibit a quality specifically 
 American in the sense that the product of Italy is 
 Italian, or that of France is French. At this dis- 
 tance, we who watch others as we are watched our- 
 selves can readily see that the same causes which make 
 our civilization assume the composite type are blend- 
 
 Its incotn^ 
 pleteness 
 must he 
 acknowl- 
 edged. 
 
 The na- 
 tional el*' 
 ments : 
 
EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 To what 
 extent ho- 
 mogetie- 
 
 A recog- 
 nizable 
 type. 
 
 Foreign 
 criticism. 
 
 ing the politics, manners, dress, art, and letters of the 
 several European countries, — and this, however dis- 
 tinct their nationalities, in proportion to the growth 
 of travel and interculture. But the United States are 
 homogeneous in what pertains to the language and 
 methods of their master-race, and to this extent their 
 homogeneity is definitely assured. Concerning the 
 primal influences that affect the general tone of art 
 and literature, mutual communication and understand- 
 ing are so perfect that any changes or advances are 
 almost simultaneous throughout our territory. This 
 being the situation, foreign critics are not far wrong 
 in requiring that our home-product shall differ from 
 their own ; that it shall be, at least, un-European, — 
 manifestly of the New World, and not of the Old. 
 Return to a consideration of the family likeness, 
 physical and mental, which instantly is apparent to 
 others as we visit the mother-land. If we ourselves 
 are unconscious of it, or wonted to it ; if the air and 
 fashion that we display seem to us imperceptible or 
 of small account, they are not so regarded by our 
 kinsmen, or by the guest who lands upon these shores. 
 The stranger quickly perceives, and holds at its value, 
 the general, the national, type. Material and psy- 
 chological changes are correlative, and almost equally 
 sure of external recognition. 
 
 So far, therefore, from demanding absolute novelty 
 in structure, language, or theme, of our home-poet, it 
 is the duty of the critic to value the Americanism 
 which great and small have displayed in quality of 
 tone, and in faithful expression of the dominant pop- 
 ular moods. Thus considered, it will be found they 
 have not fallen short. Those arbiters of foreign taste 
 who do not acknowledge this may be suspected of some 
 unconscious insincerity. Not every mother as fail 
 
LOCAL PRODUCTIONS. 
 
 and ripe as England, however affectionate, can look 
 with perfect complacence upon a daughter growing 
 to her own height and beauty before the world. To 
 her eyes the maiden is still a child, and she owns with 
 reluctance and very slowly that child's attractiveness 
 and the claims of her suitors. One by one the points 
 of youth and inferiority, brought against America, have 
 worn away, and now, when so many of us grant Eng- 
 land this last defence of her supremacy, it is with the 
 respect due a mother, and with a courtesy perchance 
 no less insincere than her avowal. The new Ameri- 
 canism is not so modest as to surrender any freehold or 
 to be unconscious of its smallest advantages. 
 
 The less essential novelties of structure, theme, and 
 dialect already are discernible in the yield that rep- 
 resents our territorial subdivision. The local flavor 
 of our genre and provincial literature has long been 
 unquestioned, but our conceit was not overfed by an 
 acknowledgment almost wholly due to grotesque and 
 humorous exploits, — a welcome such as a prince in 
 his breathing-hour might give to a new-found jester 
 or clown. American poetry, however, has not repre- 
 sented the popular life of our continental slopes and 
 corners merely in their coarser traits. These sections 
 are not so isolated as the Scottish highlands, or as 
 those mountain nooks in Italy, where peasant women 
 contentedly whirl the spindle, and never visit the 
 plains that glisten below ; yet some of them are long- 
 settled and have an abiding population, with habits 
 more or less confirmed. Where there is the least of 
 change and interruption, and the colonial blood is 
 most unmixed, the national ennui does not prevail ; 
 the sentiment and instinct of the people, if limited, 
 are clearly understood, and have been fairly expressed 
 in poetry and prose romance. 
 
 Minor 
 
 character" 
 
 istics. 
 
lO 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 The new 
 Ameri- 
 canism, 
 
 Republi- 
 canism in 
 these re- 
 spects is on 
 trial. 
 
 In a certain sense, it is natural for the citizen of 
 so vast and various a country to find his patriotism 
 and his gift of expression respond most easily to the 
 appeals of his own locality. There is still a lagging 
 behind full nationality, just as Federal supremacy, in 
 the hearts of a great multitude, gives precedence to 
 " state rights." Yet there are signs of growth toward 
 an imagination in keeping with our political enlarge- 
 ment. The new Americanism, with relation to liter- 
 ature and the arts of beauty and construction, is seen 
 in the very search for it, in the closer inspection of 
 our own ground, in our more realistic method, in the 
 genuine quality of our modern poetry and creative 
 prose, so much more indigenous than the work of the 
 Neo-Romantic English school, and presenting so fresh 
 a contrast to the poetry and prose of our early peri- 
 ods ; finally, in the greater value set upon our home- 
 workers, upon our ventures for ourselves. It is curi- 
 ous to note the minor sjrmptoms of this change. 
 As time has lessened our yearning for the mother- 
 country, native Americans less fondly cling to the 
 old words and traditions. The landlords who cater 
 to foreign or provincial guests still give English and 
 French names to their hotels, and a fresh English 
 colony, after the manner of our ancestors, calls its 
 village Rugby ; but the reproach of this barrenness 
 of nomenclature is fast passing away, and the time 
 has come when the declaration of our independence 
 may be made to include the fields of literature and 
 art. 
 
 And indeed, if art, under the free system of a de- 
 mocracy, does not show in time as proud a result — 
 whether in the product of its disciples or in the 
 wealth of its libraries and museums — as in countries 
 where it is fed by governmental patronage and sub» 
 
RESTRICTIONS OF OUR POETS. 
 
 II 
 
 sidies, then our republicanism, upon its aesthetic side, 
 is itself a failure. So far as poetry is concerned, I 
 see that we have already had the first period of what 
 may be called, for want of a better term, a true 
 American school. I see that this school was slow to 
 rise, until suddenly a number of its leaders appeared 
 at once ; that its first tuneful season has been com- 
 pleted, so that, in the temporary pause, we now, for 
 ?he first time, may honestly recount its triumphs. 
 But that our lyrical product has not been so obvious 
 as our material grandeur, that it has put on a na- 
 tional type less complete than the types of various 
 sections, that it has been but a delightful promise of 
 what a new song will create for us when poetry 
 comes in vogue again throughout the world, — this, 
 too, is not to be gainsaid. Before examining what 
 we have done, let us see what we have not been 
 able to do until recently, and what not at all. It is 
 time to indicate the early and later restrictions that 
 have hemmed in the poets, and limited the poetry, 
 of the Western world. 
 
 III. 
 
 The poets themselves, naturally, would be slow to 
 perceive the causes of their difficulties. The brain 
 is not always conscious of its own malaise. Never- 
 ttiel-ass, I think that to each true singer, as he ar- 
 rived at a period when his intellectual faculty sought 
 the rationale of his successes and failures, the facts 
 have been more or less apparent. The idealism of 
 \his people was long retarded by certain interdicts, 
 and at last forced its way to expression under very 
 baffling and perplexing conditions, some of which are 
 even now felt. So far as the embarrassments pecul- 
 
 Early ani 
 later Re- 
 strictions 
 of the 
 Arnerican 
 poets. 
 
12 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Thtfirst 
 two hun- 
 dredyears. 
 
 iar to the new epoch are involved, it was a percep- 
 tion of these that led me to observe their bearing on 
 the poets of England, before venturing to write upon 
 our own. To these matters I shall again refer, after 
 some mention of the absolute barriers which shut out 
 the Muses from these shores until so late a time. 
 
 For two centuries, in truth, the situation here was 
 so adverse to art, and especially to song, as to nul- 
 lify even our complement to Taine's theory ; to stifle^ 
 or to divert to other than ideal uses,^ any exceptional 
 genius that existed, and that would have made its 
 way against restrictions not of themselves quite as 
 exceptional. The modified results of this situation 
 may still be observed. As a rider to all I have said 
 of the essential superiority of art to its materials, we 
 must not fail, also, to consider the repugnance of the 
 general mind to disassociate things and ideas, — to 
 separate the spirit of a work from what is used for 
 its construction. There is a natural expectation that 
 the art of a country will convey to us something of 
 the national history, aspect, social law. On the whole, 
 it has been the instinct of masters to avail them- 
 selves, so far as might be, in their plots, manners, 
 and scenery, of the region nearest them ; a wise in- 
 stinct, through which they reach closely to nature, 
 and are more sure to make their work of interest 
 elsewhere and afterward. Shakespeare's men are apt 
 to be Englishmen, though they may figure in Illyria 
 
 ^ I am not considering the question whether a pbet of the 
 first rank may, or may not, find his natural vocation under the 
 most adverse conditions, and overcome tliem ; but am trying to 
 see why a general poetic movement, embracing many true poets, 
 was deferred until Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, 
 Whitman, and others of their generation appeared almost simul 
 taneously. 
 
THE COLONISTS. 
 
 13 
 
 or Rome. Nor is it entirely through unfairness and 
 caprice that the free range allowed to English poets 
 has been denied our own. The Old World has drawn 
 its countries together, like elderly people in a tacit 
 alliance against the strength of youth which cannot 
 return to them, the fresh, rude beauty and love which 
 they may not share. There is, also, something worth 
 an estimate in the division of an ocean gulf, that 
 makes us like the people of a new planet j and when 
 those on the other side hear us sounding the changes 
 upon familiar themes, with voices not unlike their 
 own, they well may feel as if the highest qualities of 
 our song were not full compensation for its lack of 
 "something rich and strange." A response may fairly 
 be expected to the search for novelty, to the curious 
 yearning of those who look to us from across the 
 seas. 
 
 Here begin the special restrictions of an American 
 poet. He represents, it is true, the music and ardor 
 of a new country, of a land his race has peopled 
 for two hundred and fifty years, a nation that has 
 completed its first century. A new land, a new na- 
 tion, yet not forced, like those which have progressed 
 from barbarism to a sense of art, to create a lan- 
 guage and literature of their own ; a new land with 
 an old language, a new nation with all the literature 
 and traditions behind it of the country from whose 
 colonies it has sprung. While the thought and learn- 
 ing of this people began in America just where it 
 had arrived in the mother-land at the dates of the 
 Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, the physical 
 state and environment of Americans were those of 
 men who find themselves encountering the primitive 
 nature of a savage world ; with this difference, that 
 they were equipped for the struggle, not as an abo- 
 
 Noveliy of 
 the sitwif 
 Hon. 
 
14 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 The " Co- 
 
 lontal" 
 
 restric- 
 
 iioH : 
 
 its dissim- 
 Uar effects 
 upon Po- 
 etry and 
 Painting. 
 
 riginal race, but with the logic, courage, experience, of 
 the civilization behind them. All the drags, the an- 
 chorage, the limitations, involved in the word " colo- 
 nial " retarded a new ideality. The colonial restric- 
 tion has been well determined. It made the western 
 lyre, until the period covered by this survey, a mech- 
 anism to echo, without fresh and true feeling, notes 
 that came from over sea. It so occupied this people 
 with a stern, steadfast, ingenious, finally triumphant 
 contest with Nature that their epic passion was ab- 
 sorbed in the clearing of forests, the bridging of rivers, 
 the conquest of savage and beast, the creation of a 
 free government ; and this labor is not yet ended, — 
 it goes on with larger cohorts and immensely widen- 
 ing power. But the imagination never dies, and when 
 our first leisure came for its exercise it was awakened 
 by contact with the nature thus tamed, — by commun- 
 ion with the broadest panorama of woods and hills 
 and waters, under the most radiant skies, that civil- 
 ized man has ever found himself confronting. Pio- 
 neers in art and poetry here caught their inspiration, 
 and naturally the field of painting was the first to 
 give token of novel results. The very ease with 
 which books containing the world's best literature 
 were obtainable in the backwoods made our early 
 writers copyists. The painters, meanwhile, had to la- 
 ment the absence of galleries in this country, and 
 their own inability to go abroad and study. Thrown 
 upon themselves, and deficient in technical knowl- 
 edge, they sought for models in the nature about 
 them ; and thus began our landscape-school of paint- 
 ing, the work of which, however rude and defective, 
 was more original than the verse wherewith it was 
 contemporary. 
 
 A poet of the first rank is not given to every coun- 
 
A BARREN TIME. 
 
 15 
 
 try, nor to every age. But poets of gifts approaching 
 those of our living favorites doubtless have been born 
 in America, according to Nature's average, at differ- 
 ent times of our history. Until recently, the stimu- 
 lants of their genius must have been wanting. It 
 may be that the people had no real heed of them, 
 and song and art, like invention, come not without 
 necessity. What poetry was latent here and there 
 does not concern us. The stone on which our colo- 
 nial life was founded was frigid as an arctic boulder, 
 ^- there was no molecular motion to give out life and 
 heat. Who were the mute, inglorious Milton s ? Of 
 what kind is the verse that was produced ? Does it 
 move us ? Is it poetry ? However fine the cast of 
 individuals, the effect of a perpetual contest with the 
 elemental, often sinister, always gigantic forces of a 
 new continent would be so adverse to art, so directly 
 in the line of necessity and temporal gain, as to sti- 
 fle their poetic fire, to develop a heroism that was 
 stolid and unimaginative, to mark persons and com- 
 munities with sternness and angularity, leading them 
 to a homely gauge of values, not wont to esteem the 
 ideal at its true worth. The aspiration of a refined 
 nature would seem to the multitude foolishness and a 
 stumbling-block. For a prolonged season the art of 
 writing verse was almost solely a luxury of the pro- 
 fessional classes in America, and its relics bear wit- 
 ness to their pedantry and dulness. It is not to the 
 wigged and gowned that we instinctively listen for 
 the music and freedom of creative song. And if 
 poetry even in England, from the middle of the sev- 
 enteenth century to the close of the eighteenth, stu- 
 pidly fashioned itself upon the models of worn-out 
 schools, how should it do more in England's colo- 
 nies, that brought hither certain shoots of taste and 
 
 Latentgew 
 ius not to 
 he consid* 
 ered. 
 
 Colonial 
 pedajUry. 
 
i6 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Prolonged 
 sterility. 
 
 The first 
 stages of 
 Repuhli- 
 tanism 
 opposed to 
 ideal art. 
 
 i. leveller. 
 
 learning from the Old World, and found it hard to 
 protect them at all in the sterile wild-woods of the 
 New? 
 
 Such was the nature of the barriers which, in the 
 early and later colonial periods, absolutely defied the 
 overleaping of a single notable poet. We find little 
 of more significance in the transition era of the Rev- 
 olution, although a nation took on life. No poetry 
 was begotten in the rage of that heroic strife ; its hu- 
 mor, hatred, hope, suffering, prophecy, were feebly 
 uttered, as far as verse was concerned, in the mode 
 and language inherited years before from the coarsest 
 English satirists. There came at last a time when 
 the nation felt itself in vigorous youth, and began to 
 have a song. Some few original notes were heard 
 among our pipings. The positive barriers were broken, 
 and in their stead came the restrictions that are felt 
 in some degree down t6 the present time. 
 
 At the outset it may be said of Republicanism it- 
 self — in which our pride and faith are based, and 
 which we trust is ultimately to promote a literature 
 and an art not below the standard of our bravest 
 hope — that it originally somewhat lessened the ardor 
 of our poets, or kept this within temperate bounds. 
 There was a craving for ideality of a certain kind, 
 and in our liberal regions the sense of utility was not 
 the sole controlling power. There was a wide man- 
 ifestation of that which bears to pure ideality an in- 
 ferior relationship. Our system diffused the intelli- 
 gence which lifts our people quite above the dulness 
 and stolidity of the middle classes elsewhere, but did 
 not speedily bring them to the pitch of high emotion. 
 It is a leveller, and in its early stages raises a multi- 
 tude to the level of the commonplace ; so that there 
 have been few tall heads of grain above the even field. 
 
OUR REPUBLICANISM. 
 
 17 
 
 The general independence and comfort have not bred 
 those dramatic elements which imply conditions of 
 splendor and squalor, glory and shame, triumph and 
 despair. In their stead we have the spirit of the Amer- 
 ican homesteads, and the loss to the artist of some 
 darker contrast, that would make their virtue and piety 
 more inspiring, certainly is their gain. In no other 
 country are there so many happy little households, — 
 although there is a curious foreign belief to the con- 
 trary, derived from travelling acquaintanceship. This 
 must be so in the one land where every man can own 
 a portion of the soil and be a freeholder, and where 
 a man's toil meets no doubtful reward. The popular 
 thrift and freedom, joined with the necessity for labor 
 to steadily maintain them, are not at first productive 
 of the tragic or entrancing dreams of effective art. 
 Wisely bettering their material chances, men are too 
 busy to feel a spiritual want. And the labor of our 
 representative men is so extended and heroic as of 
 itself to feed the popular imagination. In default of 
 Homer, we at least have Hector and Achilles ; and 
 the peerless exploits of our engineers, capitalists, dis- 
 coverers, speak louder than a minstrel's words. In 
 all this amazing drama of triumphant effort and or- 
 ganization ; in the adjustment of our political theory, 
 dependent on statesmanship, and leading to oratory 
 and journalism rather than to art and song; in the 
 despotism of our social unwritten law that an Amer- 
 ican must be a good citizen first of all, and that the 
 first duties of a citizen are to rear and maintain a 
 family; in the implied doubt as to the sanity of en- 
 during privations for the sake of the ideal, when, by 
 deserting it, a practical success may be had, — amid 
 all this the man of genius has too often betaken him- 
 self to the work of his neighbors, and those who keep 
 
 Tke Amer- 
 ican hom» 
 stead. 
 
 MaieruU 
 effort. 
 
l8 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Diffusion 
 of the com- 
 Wallace. 
 
 Technical 
 difficvlties; 
 wkichj 
 however^ 
 do7tot 
 greatly af- 
 fect the lyr- 
 ic poet. 
 
 Totvftat 
 txteni the 
 
 faith with the Muse have found themselves perplexed 
 and out of time. Nevertheless, I repeat that, up to 
 a certain grade, our people have required their poetry, 
 — just as they will have their votes, their seats in 
 church, their county papers, and the piano or melo- 
 deon in every house. A throng of minor singers have 
 answered to the demand with very natural and unaf- 
 fected voices. The select few, whose efforts placed 
 them above their comrades, often have suffered from 
 the undue favor awarded their minor and ordinary 
 productions. 
 
 These adverse influences, belonging to the soil and 
 air, perhaps have not been so directly comprehended 
 by the American poet as the obvious and technical 
 impediments which had force when he essayed a sus- 
 tained and novel work. 
 
 In considering these, let us acknowledge that they 
 do not greatly concern the emotional and lyric poet. 
 He is at no loss for a method or a theme ; the latter 
 is at once the cause and modulator of his song. Per- 
 sonal joys and griefs, special occurrences in history 
 or related to the individual life, — these have inspired, 
 and do inspire, the briefer pwems, the lyrics which 
 still make up the choicest portion of our verse. Their 
 range is wide, from the simple fireside ballad to the 
 impassioned ode, and my estimate of their remarkable 
 freshness and variety will be given more fully here- 
 after. At present I would say that among them are 
 many admirable of their kind, and that the relative 
 number of these is not less than can be found in the 
 popular verse of other lands. An American critic fails 
 in discernment or independence who does not see this 
 and avow it. 
 
 But, while the lyrical songster need not cast about 
 for a subject, and does not even look into his heart 
 
PRIMITIVE ABSENCE OF THEME. 
 
 19 
 
 to write, — for his heart has already moved him, — 
 the ambitious poet is best equipped for a larger ef- 
 fort by some adequate theme awaiting his hand. The 
 moment arrives when poets of the upper cast desire 
 to forego their studies and brief lyrical flights, and to 
 produce the composite and heroic works that rank as 
 masterpieces. These leaders often have been arrested, 
 with respect to romantic or inventive structures, by a 
 scarcity of home-themes, no less than by the lack of 
 sharp dramatic contrast in our equable American life. 
 I am aware that this statement frequently is derided, 
 and that many poets, while realizing that their prod- 
 uct is too meagre, will not acknowledge its force. 
 Others, and these among our foremost, who have 
 thought to analyze their experience, confess that it 
 is true in no small measure, and have stated this 
 over their own hands. 
 
 Up to a recent date, absence of theme for a na- 
 tional masterpiece, for a work belonging to our own 
 atmosphere and history, has been a result of the 
 condition under which we started. Original art is 
 long deferred among a people cultured at the outset. 
 A writer has well said that " the cause of the ab- 
 sence of the legendary and poetic in our early his- 
 tory may be attributed to the mental development 
 of the colonists, who had already passed through 
 that historic stage." They started at once with both 
 church and school-house. The imagination was con- 
 trolled by precedent, and "Art was cheated of its 
 birthright." They made little history in a dramatic 
 sense. What there was of the poetic or wondrous in 
 their arduous compelling life had a local range, — 
 such as the trials for witchcraft, finely utilized by New 
 England's great romancer, and too inadequately, it 
 must be owned, by her most famous poet. In Park- 
 
 more am- 
 'bitious 
 have feli 
 ikeir 
 •weight. 
 
 Primitive 
 absence of 
 thetne. 
 
 Otis^ in 
 " Sacred 
 and Con- 
 structive 
 Art." 
 
20 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 " Evange- 
 Utte" 
 
 Indistinct 
 
 ^ack- 
 
 zraund. 
 
 man's elegant survey of certain picturesque epochs in 
 colonial history, the feminine element, essential to 
 complete dramatic quality, is usually wanting ; in 
 other annals, like those of Spanish-American adven- 
 ture, it scarcely appears at all. American antiquity 
 is a rude settler's antiquity ; a homely fashion that 
 palls, because not long out of date ; a story every- 
 where the same, — furnishing at times the basis of 
 some exquisite idyl, like "Evangeline,'' but fornone 
 too many of the class. " Evangeline " still remains 
 the most notable of the longer American poems ; 
 and how much of that is otherwise than scenic and 
 idyllic, and how much of it does not fit the story to 
 the landscape, rather than the landscape to the story ? 
 No material, no stirring theme, with all your freedom, 
 your conquest, your noble woods and waters, your 
 westward spread of men ! These are motives, acces- 
 sories, atmosphere, often grander in magnitude than 
 elsewhere to be found, but not perforce more new. 
 The poetic instinct does not always hold the macro- 
 cosm superior to the microcosm, the prairie to the 
 plain of Marathon, the Hudson to the Cephisus or 
 the Tweed. As for latter-day history, this is not far 
 enough removed. From the Revolution to the Civil 
 War, the incidents of our life and passion are so re- 
 cent and so plainly recorded as to gather no lumi- 
 nous halo from the too slight distance at which we 
 observe them. The true poet will profit by them to 
 the uttermost ; the limits are to be overcome, but 
 still are limits and in his way. He is thrown upon 
 the necessity of inventing dramatic themes for the 
 broader range of poetic venture. This the great poets 
 always have avoided, for the product of such inven- 
 tion usually has seemed artificial and remote fronj 
 human concern. 
 
LACK OF BACKGROUND. 
 
 21 
 
 Bear in mind, also, that our wide-awake people are 
 removed, not only from the superstitions that were a 
 religion to our forefathers, but from the. wondercraft 
 and simple faith prevailing among the common folk 
 of other lands than our own. The beautifying lens 
 of fancy has dropped from our eyes. Where are our 
 forest and river legends, our Lorelei, our Venusberg, 
 our elves and kobolds ? We have old-time customs 
 and traditions, and they are quaint and dear to us, but 
 their atmosphere is not one in which we freely move. 
 Just so with our heroism. No national changes and 
 struggles have been of more worth than our own, but 
 critics are not far wrong who point out that, how- 
 ever lofty the action and spirit of our latest crisis, 
 heroism is not with us so much the chief business 
 that one must be always " enthusiastic and on guard." 
 One of our poets aims to be especially national. He 
 sings, upon theory, as the American bard must sing 
 when the years have died away. The result is a 
 striking assumption of what can only come of itself, 
 and after long time be past ; a disjointed series of 
 kaleidoscopic pieces, not constituting a master-work, 
 but, with all their strength and weakness, as unsatis- 
 factory as the ill-assorted elements which he strives 
 to represent. Yet, even in this effort, he is represent- 
 ative and a personage of mark, if not precisely in the 
 direction of his own choice and assurance. 
 
 More clearly to understand how far, and in what 
 way, our poets have felt the lack of background, of 
 social contrasts, and of legendary and specific inci- 
 dent, we may observe the literature of some region 
 where different conditions exist. In an isolated coun- 
 try of established growth and quality, a native genius 
 soon discovers his tendency and proper field. 
 
 Look at Scotland. Her national melodies were 
 
 chani- 
 tnents. 
 
 Thtfor- 
 cing pro- 
 cess. 
 
22 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 A n illus- 
 tration by 
 contrast. 
 
 Thepoees 
 food and 
 fame. 
 
 ready and waiting for Burns ; her legends, history, 
 traditions, for Walter Scott. The popular tongue, cos- 
 tumes, manners, all distinctively and picturesquely her 
 own, affect the entire outcome of her song and art. 
 Embraced in English literature, her literature is so un- 
 English that it aSords the paradigm we need. Enter 
 the cathedral in Glasgow. Within the last thirty 
 years that edifice has been refitted throughout with 
 stained glass, contributed by the ancient families and 
 clans. What associations are called up by the de- 
 vices upon the windows in the chancel and nave, and 
 in the impressive crypt below ! Among all the shields 
 and names, — those of Sterling, Hay, Douglas, Mont- 
 rose, Campbell, Montgomerie, Lawrie, Buccleuch, 
 Hamilton, — not one that is not utterly, purely Scot- 
 tish. Even in our oldest and most characteristic sec- 
 tions in Virginia or New England, influences like 
 these are discovered to no such extent. In a cer- 
 tain sense, they are not only influences, but aids : 
 they move, they stimulate, they belong to the life and 
 memory of the native poet, and he avails himself of 
 them without effort or consciousness. Not that they 
 are the essential, the imperative aids. But to be 
 without them is a restriction, and one which our first 
 genuine school ' of poets has had more or less to en- 
 dure. 
 
 Strange, indeed, if the material wants of New 
 World life, its utilitarian test of values, and the gen- 
 eral conditions of a primitive democracy had not 
 forced our early idealists into a struggle for existence 
 which even the sturdiest found it hard to prolong. 
 Two things are essential to the poetic aspiration that 
 results in fine achievement : the sympathetic applause 
 which ministers to the last infirmity of noble minds, 
 and the common wage that enables a laborer to do 
 
COPYRIGHT. 
 
 23 
 
 his work. The rewards of authorship have been suf- 
 ficiently doubtful and varying in times before our 
 own. In older lands, the poet, like his predecessor 
 the minstrel, was at least protected and nourished by 
 the good or great to whom he dedicated his song. 
 Happily this kind of support was from the first im- 
 practicable in a liberal republic. But it long was im- 
 possible, on material grounds alone, — although en- 
 thusiasts might attempt to live upon love and fame 
 — that any vigorous and prevailing flood of poesy 
 should be sustained in toiling, practical, frugal Amer- 
 ica. We now know that in art, as in life, ideal pro- 
 ductiveness follows, and does not precede, material 
 security and wealth. The most creative eras of his- 
 toric lands were those when their cities were the rich- 
 est, when their galleons sought out distant ports, and 
 their nobles and burgesses, sure of life's needs, craved 
 for the luxuries of taste and emotion. Literature 
 thrives as a means of subsistence, nor is poetry an 
 exception to the rule. The supply answers to the de- 
 mand. Not long ago in this country, few books, ex- 
 cept school-books, were required by the people ; and 
 how should poetry, that looked from the printed page 
 for its welcome and sustenance, be naturally com- 
 posed ? We are speaking of an ethereal art, but 
 quietly examining the law of its activity. 
 
 It is, moreover, in America that the popular in- 
 stinct, which resists whatever is asserted to be a tax 
 upon knowledge, has worked with peculiar force 
 against the development of a home-school. So long 
 as our purveyors could avail themselves without cost 
 or hindrance of foreign master-works, they scarcely 
 could be expected to risk their means in behalf of 
 native authorship. Pure idealists, men like Poe and 
 Hawthorne, are little able to push their own fortunes. 
 
 Law of 
 productioiu 
 
 The copy- 
 right ques^ 
 tion. 
 
24 
 
 EARL Y AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Interna- 
 tional 
 copyright. 
 
 Disastrous 
 tffect upon 
 A merican 
 Werature. 
 
 Until a state of law shall exist that will induce 
 American publishers, driven from their distant for- 
 aging-grounds, to seek for genius at home and make 
 it available, the support of our authors will not be 
 so assured as to tend " in the end to the advance- 
 ment of literature.'' International copyright at least 
 would have made it feasible for the poet to earn his 
 living by general literary work, and to reserve some 
 heart and thought for his nobler calling. Now, when 
 an organized movement at last seems under way to- 
 ward copyright reform, it still is so hampered with 
 reservations and class-interests that many ask whether 
 it were not better to have no change at all than to 
 have one that is partial, and that may postpone in- 
 definitely the one thing needful, to wit : honest rec- 
 ognition of an author's right of property in his own 
 creations, without any more limits of space and time 
 than those appertaining to other kinds of estate. 
 
 Literature verily has been almost the sole product 
 of human labor that has not been rated as the last- 
 ing property of the producer and his heirs or assigns. 
 This want of permanent copyright has borne severely 
 upon authors in all countries, but most severely upon 
 those of America, who have had to await the forma' 
 tion of public taste, to create their audiences, and 
 who, while willing to suffer in their own persons, 
 are less ready to devote lifetimes to the production 
 of what will be valueless to those whom they hold 
 most dear. The want of international copyright has 
 been a wrong to our brother-writers in Europe. Their 
 complaints are just ; their cry has gone up for years. 
 Great as the spoliations have been which they have 
 endured, the effect upon our native literature and au- 
 thorship has been far more disastrous. Our authors 
 themselves do not comprehend it. A few of the great 
 
AMERICAN CRITICISM. 
 
 25 
 
 publishing houses, grown rich upon the system of free 
 reprints, of late have felt this wrong, and the men of 
 heart and culture who control them are generously 
 atoning for it. We see them leaders in artistic and 
 literary movements, the friends of authors and artists, 
 receiving for their public and private humanities our 
 warmest tributes of honor and affection. It is said 
 that every wrong in this world is surely, if slowly, 
 righted ; and the wrongs of authors doubtless will be 
 set right. But who shall pick up water spilled to the 
 ground? The writers of a new generation will never 
 realize how bitter was the bread eaten by those who 
 went before them and made their paths straight. 
 
 Critical periods are sometimes un creative, yet there 
 is little doubt that our poetry has suffered, also, from 
 the lack of those high and exquisite standards of criti- 
 cism which have been established in older lands. The 
 poet, the artist, alike need the correction of a fine cen- 
 sorship and the tonic of that just appreciation which 
 is the promise of fame. American verse, within re- 
 cent memory, has experienced, first, a popular favor 
 gained by its weakest and most effeminate sentiment ; 
 and, secondly, a rude exaggeration of its defects, a re- 
 fusal to acknowledge its value as compared with that 
 of the foreign product, or to consider its higher as- 
 pirations as practicable and worthy of respect. The 
 people at large have passed from sham emotion to 
 irreverence, and to a relish for what is flippant and 
 ephemeral. Then, too, our most sincere and pains- 
 taking authorities often seem at a loss to estimate 
 the nature of art, and criticise it from metaphysical 
 or doctrinarian points of view. The poet or painter 
 feels the wrong and the error, and, though he makes 
 no complaint, they tell upon his buoyancy and appli- 
 cation. Only of late have we begun to look for criti- 
 
 factory 
 tests of 
 merit. 
 
26 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 Criticism 
 
 asUskmtld 
 be. 
 
 These local 
 andprimi- 
 tive diffi- 
 culties are 
 nmv suc- 
 ceeded Ity 
 the gener- 
 al restric- 
 tiotts of the 
 jtew era. 
 
 cism which applies both knowledge and self-knowl 
 edge to the test ; which is penetrative and dexterous, 
 but probes only to cure ; which enters into the soul 
 and purpose of a work, and considers every factor 
 that makes it what it is ; — the criticism which, above 
 all, esteems it a cardinal sin to suffer a verdict to be 
 tainted by private dislike, or by partisanship and the 
 instinct of battle with an opposing clique or school. 
 Such criticism is now essayed, but often is too much 
 occupied with foreign or recondite subjects to search 
 out and foster what is of worth among ourselves. 
 
 IV. 
 
 These, it seems to me, have been the local and or- 
 ganic difficulties with which the American poet, wit- 
 tingly or unwittingly, has had to contend. They are 
 not figments of the brain ; their force has been real ; 
 time and national development alone have lessened 
 them ; during the continuation of their serious pres- 
 sure the rise of poetry was delayed. It is curious to 
 note that, just as their adverse influence began to pass 
 away, a new class of restrictions came in play through- 
 out the enlightened world, affecting our own idealists 
 in common with those of the mother-land. When I 
 long since began to think of the present work, I saw 
 that the modem intellectual change was so absolute 
 that I was compelled to seek for the general conditions 
 of the period, and to attempt a review of the poets 
 of England before entering upon our home-field, in 
 order to comprehend justly the effect of the new at- 
 mosphere upon the spirit of poetry itself. In the first 
 chapter of the Victorian Poets, certain perplexing ele- 
 ments are considered which have made the recent 
 time one to vifhich a hackneyed word, " transitional," 
 
THE MODERN WORLD. 
 
 27 
 
 is more correctly applied than to any former period. 
 The new learning — the passage from the childlike 
 and phenomenal way of regarding things to the ab- 
 solute, scientific penetration of their true entities and 
 relations — has directly told upon the work of the poet, 
 requiring new language, imagery, invention, as he 
 adapts himself to a deeper purpose and the hope of 
 a sublimer faith. I have pointed out, as well, the 
 struggles, devices, defeats, and victories of the Eng- 
 lish minstrels under the stress of latter-day iconoclasm 
 and the invincible demands of modern thought ; tak- 
 ing into account, also, the minor and obvious forces 
 antagonistic to a devoted pursuit of the ideal, — among 
 the rest the world's material activity, displayed in la- 
 bor, invention, construction, — the world's realistic 
 eagerness, that makes of the newspaper, the novel, 
 and the bulletins of science the food and outlets of 
 the imagination, and renders mankind intent alone 
 upon each day's labor, so to hasten on the golden 
 year. Reluctant to confront these ceaseless and per- 
 turbing manifestations, until out of them the world 
 shall have derived a more assured philosophy, many 
 of the latest singers have ignored them altogether : 
 the weaker busying themselves with mere dilettante- 
 ism and the technique of their vocation, the nobler 
 being devoted to the worship of beauty pure and sim- 
 ple, and often going back to its early revelations and 
 the antique forms. 
 
 These generic burdens of the age itself have borne 
 even more severely upon American idealists than upon 
 their transatlantic brethren. Yet it was when they 
 first began to have their weight and not until then. 
 
 Cf. ''Vic- 
 torian Po- 
 ets" : tl>. 
 
 ?-21. 
 
 Davjn at 
 last. 
 
28 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 special ad- 
 vatUages 
 of our 
 home-poeis. 
 
 A tftericati 
 JaTidscape. 
 
 Naiioitai 
 feeHnff 
 
 that the true light of Poetry in America ventured to 
 appear. Under the very shadow of the whirlwind it 
 brightened into dawn. Possibly the new learning was 
 most of all needed here, as an offset to puritanism, 
 superstition, and sentimentalism in its mawkish forms. 
 Honest fact and a search for our own resources gave 
 an impulse to healthy inspiration. But the opportu- 
 nity for the achievements of our leading poets, so fa- 
 mous and beloved in their hoary years, really came 
 when the specific restrictions, to which so much space 
 has been here devoted, at last yielded measurably to 
 time and national progress. Coincidently with their 
 decline, certain positive aids to our lyrical genius be- 
 came apparent, and were felt, and aroused to joyous 
 activity its instinct, courage, and imagination. 
 
 First of all, as I have shown, the American with 
 an eye for natural beauty, led by his seclusion to close 
 and musing observation, had a subject for poetic ex- 
 pression in the landscape of the New World, by turns 
 impressive, bewildering, reposeful, but always beauti- 
 ful and strong. If its primeval aspect stupefied the 
 toiling setders, while its grandeur seemed to belittle 
 humanity and to defer the proper study of mankind, 
 it afterward compelled our ideal recognition, and in- 
 spired the early and reverent anthems of the father 
 of our choir. Next, and most vital of the elements 
 required for the promotion of a home-s^;hool, a na- 
 tional feeling grew up when the compactness and 
 growth of the United States, as a nation, became as- 
 sured. Half a century was needed to bring this feel- 
 ing to the blossoming form of art. Meanwhile, if 
 had been strengthening and finding expression in other 
 ways ; for example, in the patriotic eloquence which 
 marked our oratory, and which warmed the blood and 
 stirred the impulse of many a poetic youth, as he read 
 
AIDS OF OUR POETS. 
 
 29 
 
 in his school-books the speeches of the founders and 
 preservers of liberty. Hence our strongest emotional 
 traits, — love of freedom, hatred of oppression, respect 
 for ancestral faith, the sense of independence which 
 makes an American stand erect and believe himself 
 the peer of any man, the audacity and ambition found 
 among no other people ; finally, an adventurous habit 
 of experimenting without much regard to precedent 
 or training. Out of some of these traits came, it is 
 true, a commonplace and widely scattered product in 
 literature. But if a host of writers ended in medioc- 
 rity, this, too, was in the order of evolution. The 
 feeble books of one generation are often horn-books 
 for the people, the promise and cause of better work 
 in the next. The late Civil War was not of itself an 
 incentive to good poetry and art, . nor directly pro- 
 ductive of them. Such disorders seldom are ; action 
 is a substitute for the ideal, and the thinker's or 
 dreamer's life seems ignoble and repugnant. But we 
 shall see that the moral and emotional conflicts pre- 
 ceding the war, and leading to it, were largely stim- 
 ulating to poetic ardor; they broke into expression, 
 and buoyed with earnest and fervid sentiment our 
 heroic verse. Lastly, it must be observed that, about 
 the time from which I date the appearance of a group 
 of noteworthy poets, a material support was afforded 
 to ideal work. Both artists and writers began to be 
 paid, and found their respective gifts to some extent 
 a means of subsistence. American publishers, as I 
 have said, took heart, and made ventures in behalf 
 of our own literature. Jt)urnalism also lent its aid, 
 paying critical attention to native authors, and en- 
 abling not a few of them to gain a foothold by labor 
 upon the great newspapers and magazines. All these 
 aids, I repeat, came into service after the scientific 
 
 Growth t^ 
 the mar- 
 ket. 
 
30 
 
 EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 
 
 fidveni of 
 It true po- 
 ntic sclwoL 
 
 restraint of the modern period began to have weight. 
 They assisted us to bear up against it, and alleviated 
 the special restrictions of an earlier time. The sweet 
 and various measures of a band of genuine singers 
 at length were heard, and found an audience in what- 
 soever regions know the English tongue. American 
 poetry took its place in literature, and entered upon 
 a first term, now brought to an end, and constitut- 
 ing the main field of this review. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 I. 
 
 HAVING given an outline of the situation which 
 rendered the new country, in the earlier pe- 
 riods of settlement, an untoward region for the pur- 
 suit of song, and also of the specific aids which at 
 last have enabled America to have some voice and 
 inspiration of her own, I now wish to glance at the 
 actual record of her lyrical exploits that culminated 
 with the rise of the group of poets to whom this work 
 is chiefly devoted. To do this minutely would re- 
 quire us to travel over dreary wastes indeed, though 
 gaining rest at last upon the borders of a land of 
 promise. From what has been written, I shall rightly 
 be understood to agree with Mr. Whipple in his state- 
 ment that the course of our literature has been, upon 
 the whole, subsidiary to the general movement of the 
 American mind ; that our imagination has found ex- 
 ercise in the subjugation of a continent, in establish- 
 ing liberty, in war, politics, and government, — above 
 all, in the inventive and constructive energy and the 
 financial boldness needed to develop and control the 
 material heritage which has fallen to us. But to this 
 let me add that the course of our poetry, for the same 
 reasons, was long subsidiary to the course of other 
 literature, — at once, or by turns, to our theological, 
 political, and educational achievements in prose, and 
 
 A retrth- 
 spective 
 summary'. 
 1607-1860. 
 
 "Tlte First 
 Century oj 
 the Repub- 
 lic": 
 Harper's 
 Mag., 187& 
 
32 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Autkori- 
 ties. 
 
 Prof. 
 
 Moses Coii 
 Tyler's re- 
 view of the 
 Colonial 
 ^riods. 
 
 to those in the departments of historical narrative and 
 romance. 
 
 The means for a survey of the early waste, and of 
 its few and unimportant oases, are to be found in the 
 libraries of collectors, and in the compilations of the 
 Duyckincks, Griswold, and others, who have made 
 for us as cheery a showing as they could. But a 
 reader who has not access to the rare books of a 
 succession of by-gone authors gains with more satis- 
 faction a correct idea of their worth and purport by 
 the study of such a work as Professor Tyler's " His- 
 tory of American Literature." He well may avail 
 himself, so far as it is completed, of a critical digest 
 whose facts will not be gainsaid, a clear and whole- 
 some exposition of our early literature, presenting judg- 
 ments and inferences with which he usually must be 
 in accord. It is a result of scholarly labor, closely 
 examining the field, and failing not to detect what- 
 ever may be found of value in those new planta- 
 tions. Can this mould of the Colonial period be 
 touched with the sunlight of to-day.? Can these dry 
 bones live ? Yes, under the hands of a man with 
 the patience, enthusiasm, and kindly humor of their 
 historian, to whom American literature is so indebted 
 for this review of its progress that his name will be 
 enviably connected with it henceforth. 
 
 And in the two large volumes, covering our first 
 and second periods, more than a century and a half, 
 — from 1607 to 1765, — the product of the poets ap- 
 pears so valueless and meagre that, if the narrative 
 depended on them alone, there would be no great rea- 
 son for its compilation. A larger proportion of edu- 
 cated men belonged to the early colonies than is to b« 
 found elsewhere upon the rolls of emigration. Nearly 
 all writers then wrote verse, at first printing theil 
 
PURITAN RHYMESTERS. 
 
 33 
 
 works in London, and afterward by means of the few 
 and meanly furnished presses along this coast. These 
 folk were simply third-rate British rhymesters, who 
 copied the pedantry of the tamest period known. 
 The only marks of distinction between their prose 
 and verse were that, while the former might be dull, 
 the latter must be, and must pay a stilted regard to 
 measure and rhyme. How hard for our amiable his- 
 torian to make poetical finds that can lighten the 
 pages of his record ! How he seizes upon some 
 promising estray, — like the anonymous ode on the 
 death of picturesque Nat. Bacon, like Norton's "Fu- 
 neral Elegy " upon Mistress Anne Bradstreet, or Urian 
 Oakes's upon Thomas Shepard, — and makes the most 
 of it ! Surely a time that fed its imagination with the 
 offerings of the " Tenth Muse,'' and expressed relig- 
 ious exaltation in those measures of the Bay Psalm 
 Book that seem to break from a cow's horn or a 
 Roundhead's nose, and in the lyrical damnations of 
 Michael Wigglesworth, — such a time, from its begin- 
 ning with George Sandys even to the generation that 
 ?ounded hopes of a native drama upon the genius of 
 Thomas Godfrey, had derived few creative impulses 
 from its own experience, and could give no real inti- 
 mation of a national future. This was a time which 
 now seems more venerable to us than the daylight 
 eras of ancient civilization, — drearily old-fashioned, 
 like its town halls and college barracks, still remain- 
 ing, all the older and mouldier because they are not 
 antique. To its very close, when the different colo- 
 nies began to move .toward cohesion, the most of it 
 seems to me night, — utter night. Its poetical relics 
 are but the curios of a museum, — the queer and ugly 
 specimens of an unhistoric age. 
 
 Manifestly, and as at a later time, New England 
 3 
 
 Ode on the 
 Death of 
 Nathaniel 
 Bacon : 
 1676. 
 
 yohn Nor- 
 ton : 1651- 
 1716. 
 
 Urian 
 Oakes : 
 1631-81. 
 
 Anne 
 Brad- 
 street : 
 1612-72. 
 
 The ''Bay 
 
 Psalm 
 
 Book » ; 
 
 Cam- 
 
 bridge^i 
 
 1640. 
 
 Michael 
 Wiggles' 
 worth : 
 1631-1705. 
 
 Sandysj 
 the trans- 
 lator of 
 Ovid : 
 1 577-1644. 
 
 Thomas 
 Godfrey : 
 1736-63. 
 
 A ray less 
 period. 
 
 New Eng> 
 
34 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 land i 
 van. 
 
 •.the 
 
 The Early 
 Chroni- 
 clers. 
 
 HUtori' 
 ans. 
 
 Pisines. 
 
 The Mid- 
 
 claimed the lead in whatsoever there was of thought, 
 or wit, or fancy ; and Cambridge even then had her 
 poets, who accounted themselves true children of Par- 
 nassus. Tyler plainly shows how the feudal policy 
 of dispersion, and a contempt for book-learning as 
 compared with active life, placed a ban upon letters 
 in Virginia ; while the New England policy of numer- 
 ical and intellectual concentration brought forward 
 the learned men of that region, and made its colo- 
 nists a literary people from the first. In spite of their 
 moroseness, pedantry, asceticism, a lurking perception 
 of beauty, an aesthetic sensibility, was to be found 
 among them. But the manifest, the sincere genius of 
 the colonies is diplayed elsewhere than in their labo- 
 rious verse. Noble English and a simple, heroic 
 wonder give zest to the writings of the early chron- 
 iclers, the annals of discovery and adventure. Such 
 traits distinguish the narratives of the gallant and 
 poetic Captain John Smith, and of Strachey, whose 
 picture of a storm and wreck in the Bermudas so 
 roused the spirit that conceived "The Tempest." 
 They pervade the memorials of Bradford and Win- 
 throp, of Johnson and Gookin, of Francis Higginson 
 and Winslow and William Wood. There are power 
 and imagination in the discourses of the great preach- 
 ers, — Hooker, Cotton, Roger Williams, Oakes, — who 
 founded .a dominion of the pulpit that was not shaken 
 until after the time of Edwards and Byles. Verse- 
 making was but the foible of the colonial New Eng- 
 landers ; law, religious fervor, superstition, were then 
 the strength of life; and the time that produced In- 
 crease and Cotton Mather fostered a progeny quite 
 as striking and characteristic as the melodists of our 
 late Arcadian morn. 
 
 When the Middle Colonies began to have a literar 
 
REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 
 
 35 
 
 ture, it was natural that the chief writers — men of 
 the learned professions, busied in affairs, and already 
 feeling that instinct of government which animates 
 territorial centres — should be publicists, setting forth 
 the principles of order, economy, and social weal. The 
 colonial separation ended ; the national movement be- 
 gan with stormy agitation, and progressed to union in 
 council and war. With the Revolution came not only 
 the great orators, but an outburst, otherwise than tune- 
 ful, of patriotic ballads, songs, and doggerel satires, — 
 to all of which, at this distance, the sounds of the 
 Continental fife and drum seem a fitting accompani- 
 ment. Nor did staid and learned personages disdain 
 to pay homage to the precept of Andrew Fletcher, 
 and to supplement the new-born national ardor by the 
 aid of their muses. Trumbull's M'Fingal is a work 
 that will not go quite out of repute. It still speaks 
 well for the character, wit, and facility of the staunch 
 and acute author, and shows genuine originality al- 
 though written after a model. Not even " Hudibras " 
 more aptly seizes upon the ludicrous phases of a tur- 
 bulent epoch. In New York, bluff Captain Freneau, 
 mariner, journalist, and poet, proved himself the ready 
 laureate of the war. Read the story of his impetuous 
 life, and look through the collection of his ditties and 
 poems, with their pretentious defects and unwittingly 
 clever touches. A strange and serio-comic medley they 
 are, and no less a varied representation of the poetic 
 standards reached in America a hundred years ago. 
 Among the relics which I call to mind of the jin- 
 gling verse produced in quantity by Treat Paine and 
 his contemporaries, there is scarcely a lyric that 
 breathes what we now recognize as the essential po- 
 etic spirit, excepting five or six of Freneau's, such 
 as "The Wild Honeysuckle," "The Parting Glass," 
 
 die Colo- 
 nies. 
 
 RevolVf 
 tionary 
 Period: 
 1765-87. 
 
 John 
 
 Trumhdl! 
 
 1750-1831. 
 
 Philip 
 Freneau : 
 1752-1831. 
 
 Rhyme' 
 siers of kii 
 time. 
 
36 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Royall 
 Tyler : 
 1757-1826. 
 
 Waiiam 
 Puritap ; 
 1766-1839. 
 
 1787-1815. 
 
 7imothy 
 Dwighi : 
 1752-1817. 
 
 yoel Bar- 
 low: 1755- 
 1812. 
 
 Patriotu: 
 ditties. 
 
 A natural 
 course of 
 develop- 
 vtent. 
 
 "To a Honey Bee " (which last is good enough to 
 be Landor's), and a delicate little song, by John Shaw, 
 of Maryland, entitled " Who has Robbed the Ocean 
 Cave ? " Practical efforts, however, were made in the 
 composition and production of native dramas, by Ty- 
 ler and Dunlap, — our earliest playwrights, — in Bos- 
 ton and New York respectively. 
 
 After the close of the Revolution, and until the 
 War of 1812, the genius of our people was devoted to 
 the establishment, through peaceful labor, of the secu- 
 rity and resources which should be the first-fruits of 
 a conflict for independence. Writers occupied them- 
 selves with analyzing the science of government, its 
 principles and practice. No American library, how- 
 ever, was complete without copies of Dr. Dwight's his- 
 torico-didactic masterpiece, Greenfield Hill, and Joel 
 Barlow's quarto epic, The Columbiad. The popular 
 ear was content with patriotic songs, among them 
 " Hail Columbia," which owed their general adoption, 
 like a successor, " The Star-Spangled Banner," to the 
 music that carried them and to an early possession 
 of the field. It was not until peace, for a second 
 time, became a habit that the imagination of a young 
 people, assured of nationality, slowly found expres- 
 sion upon the written page. In view of the condi- 
 tions already described, what traits might we reason- 
 ably expect would characterize poetic effort at this 
 stage of development ? 
 
 First, — and although the form and ideal of Amer- 
 ican verse still should correspond, like all our early 
 fashions, to the modes prevailing in England, — it 
 would seem that, gradually, poets should appear, ham- 
 pered by this instinct of correspondence, and not quite 
 knowing or daring to be original, yet possessing graces 
 and thoughts of their own, and looking at things, after 
 
PIERPONT. — DANA. —ALLSTON. 
 
 37 
 
 ail, In a diiferent way from the English ; that they 
 should seek for home themes, and study their sur- 
 roundings, most likely in a doubtful and groping man- 
 ner ; that a diversity of subject, thought, and language 
 should be observed in the distinct sections of the re- 
 public, — the poets of the South being more courtly 
 and romantic, and those of the Middle States more 
 national and more upon the search for aboriginal and 
 historical flavor ; that local successes should be marked 
 where there was the least inflow of new foreign ele- 
 ments, the sincerest faith, the most intelligent thought ; 
 that poetry should be the more learned, the more sub- 
 tle and earnest, in the scholarly region of the East, 
 and that poets should thrive best there, where the 
 practice of literature had long obtained, — since all 
 forms of art require more time for growth than other 
 products of national organization. 
 
 Somewhat after this wise, in fact, as we recur to 
 the earliest promise of an American school, we find 
 that it began with the second quarter of this century. 
 Imaginative youths, born and educated in the new 
 republic, discovered that they were poets, and strove 
 to express the spirit of their birth and training. 
 Among them, Pierpont, Dana, Allston, Sprague, Bry- 
 ant, — the gentle stars of the East, — began to show 
 their light, and offered their tender or patriotic lyrics, 
 their meditative verse, their placid monographs on the 
 phases of American scenery and tradition. Of these, 
 Bryant was the one whose genius had the elements 
 that give permanence to the work of poets. In the 
 South, a few scattered minstrels, such as Wilde and 
 Pinkney, sang their Lovelace lyrics. Their type has 
 survived, almost to our day. Throughout the swift 
 development of the Northern States, the South — agri- 
 cultural, feudal, provincial — loyally clung to its eight-. 
 
 Differenti' 
 ation. 
 
 Earliest 
 promise of 
 a Home- 
 Schoolt 
 1815- 
 
 JohnPier- 
 poni : 
 I 785- 1866. 
 
 Rickard 
 Henry 
 Dana : 
 1787-1879. 
 
 Washing- 
 ion All- 
 ston: 1779- 
 1843. 
 
 Charles 
 Sprague : 
 1791-1875. 
 
 Bryant. 
 
 Richard 
 Henry 
 Wilde : 
 1789-1847. 
 
 Edward 
 Coaie 
 Pinkney I 
 1802-28. 
 
38 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 The South. 
 
 WiUiam 
 Gilmore 
 Sinttns : 
 1806-70. 
 
 Philip 
 Petidleion 
 Cooke : 
 1816-50. 
 
 Poe. 
 
 yanus 
 Abrahatn 
 HUlhouse : 
 1789-1841. 
 
 yo&n Gar- 
 diner Cal- 
 kifts 
 Brainard; 
 
 1796-182 8. 
 
 James 
 Gates 
 Percival: 
 1795-1856. 
 
 Allow- 
 ances to be 
 made. 
 
 eenth-century taste, making no intellectual changes 
 so long as human slavery was the basis of its physical 
 life. I shall hereafter refer to the quality of the new- 
 born Southern imagination. That it exists, in fresh 
 and hopeful promise, is now beyond doubt. A few of 
 the earlier Southern writers — one of whom was Simms, 
 the novelist-poet — worked courageously, but with more 
 will and fluency than native power ; so that, in spite 
 of their abundant verse, such a lyrist as Pendleton 
 Cooke was long the typical Southern poet, — a name 
 joined with the memory of a single song. A collec- 
 tion of the earlier Southern poetry worth keeping would 
 be a brief anthology, which a little volume might con- 
 tain, and in which more than one of Albert Pike's 
 productions certainly should be found. Poe, whose 
 pieces would occupy one third of it, sought the literary 
 market, deserting Richmond and Baltimore for Phila- 
 delphia and New York. He lived in the Northern 
 atmosphere, and, like Bryant, took his part in the busy 
 movement of its civic life and work. 
 
 Besides the Eastern poets whom I have named, 
 there were others who still more closely followed 
 English models : among them, the orthodox bards of 
 Connecticut, Hillhouse and Brainard, compared with 
 whom Percival, the eccentric scholar and recluse, 
 shines by virtue of a gift improved by no mean cul- 
 ture. His lyrics and poems of nature, though infe- 
 rior to Bryant's, so resemble them that he would be 
 called the latter's pupil, had not the two composed 
 in the same manner from the outset. 
 
 These writers and some others of their time must, 
 in all fairness, be judged by it. They had their mod 
 est laurels and rewards, and were the bright selected 
 few of their country and period, — no less distin- 
 guished, though within a smaller horizon, than theii 
 
HALLECK.— DRAKE. 
 
 39 
 
 latter-day successors. Their work was the best of its 
 kind which America could show; it had the knack 
 of making itself read in the annuals and school-books, 
 and influenced the sentiment of more than one gen- 
 eration. Were Dana and Allston flourishing now, 
 they would accomplish feats then impracticable, and 
 doubtless would be at no disadvantage among our 
 present favorites, nor less receive our honor and sup- 
 port. Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to 
 judge between the temporary and the lasting. Are 
 we sure that our popular poets are better in native 
 faculty.'' If they have a finer understanding and a 
 defter handling of their craft, these may be partly a 
 consequence of the fact that not Montgomery and 
 Wilson, but Keats, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, 
 and their greater masters, have supplied the models 
 of a recent school. 
 
 It was natural, also, that the literary centre should 
 shift from place to place, along a sea-board whose 
 capital was scarcely yet defined. New York early 
 drew together a number of bright young wits and 
 songsters. The fame of the prose-romancers, Cooper 
 and Irving, and their success with home themes, were 
 gratifying to the local and national pride, and en- 
 couraged at the time, as far as literature was con- 
 cerned, a broader American sentiment than prevailed 
 in New England. That was a spirited little group of 
 rhyming satirists whose fancy brightened the pages 
 of Coleman's "Evening Post." Two young writers, 
 Halleck and Drake, worked in comradeship until the 
 one sustained a more than common misfortune in the 
 other's untimely death. These two men were real 
 poets ; such is the impression left as one reads, after 
 many years, the verse composed by them. Had they 
 been born half a century later, they now would work 
 
 New Yorh 
 
 Cooper and 
 Irving, 
 
 ''The 
 
 Croakers,^ 
 
 1819-23. 
 
40 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Pioneers. 
 
 John 
 Howard- 
 Payne : 
 1791-1853. 
 
 Joseph 
 Rodman 
 Drake : 
 1795-1820. 
 
 Fitz- 
 Greette 
 Halleck : 
 s 790-1867. 
 
 more elaborately, but with less certainty of reputa- 
 tion. Their best pieces were at once so received 
 into popular affection that the authors' names still 
 last. Both of these poets had humor, and a percep- 
 tion of its legitimate use. They, with Bryant and his 
 school, — with Brockden Brown, Paulding, Cooper, Ir- 
 ving, and Miss Sedgwick, writers of prose, and the 
 dramatist Payne, author of " Brutus " and other by- 
 gone plays, and of that abiding carol, " Home, Sweet 
 Home," — were the first Americans whose work gave 
 any substantial evidence of a native movement in 
 ideal or creative literature. Drake died in his twenty- 
 sixth year, leaving a daughter, through whom his 
 poetic gift has been transmitted to our day. He had 
 a quick, genuine faculty, and could be frolicsome or 
 earnest at will. As an exercise of that delicate imag- 
 ination which we term fancy, The Culprit Fay, although 
 the work of a youth schooled in fairy-lore and the 
 metres of Coleridge, Scott, and Moore, boded well for 
 his future. " The American Flag " is a stirring bit of 
 eloquence in rhyme. The death of this spirited and 
 promising writer was justly deplored. His talent was 
 healthy ; had he lived, American authorship might not 
 so readily have become, in Griswold's time, a vent for 
 every kind of romantic and sentimental absurdity. 
 Drake also would have stimulated the muse of Hal- 
 leck, whose choicest pieces were composed before he 
 had outlived the sense of that recent companionship. 
 He, too, was a natural lyrist, whose pathos and elo- 
 quence were inborn, and whose sentiment, though he 
 wrote in the prevailing English mode, was that of his 
 own land. As we read those favorites of our school 
 boy days, " Burns " and " Red Jacket " and " Marco 
 Bozzaris," we feel that Halleck was, within his bounds, 
 a national poet. Circumstances dulled his fire, and 
 
INCREASED ACTIVITY. 
 
 41 
 
 be lived to write drivel in his old age. But the early- 
 lyrics remain, nor was there anything of their kind in 
 our home-poetry to compete with them until long after 
 their first production. 
 
 The impulse given to poetry and belles-lettres by 
 the example of the early poets and novelists increased 
 with the appearance of fresh strivers after literary 
 fame. In the East, names began to be mentioned 
 that now are great indeed ; others, then more com- 
 monly known, have passed almost out of memory. 
 A few teachers of sound literary doctrine, like E. T. 
 Channing, of Cambridge, were sowing good seed for 
 future harvests. In New York, the writings of Willis 
 and Tuckerman, of the song-makers Hoffman, Mor- 
 ris, and English, of Verplanck, the Duyckincks, Benja- 
 min, Griswold, and other editors and bookwrights, and 
 the parade of new versifiers, male and female, betok- 
 ened a taste, however crude "and ill-regulated, for the 
 pursuit of letters. Occasionally a note of promise was 
 heard, from some quaint genius like Ralph Hoyt, or 
 some aspirant like Lord, of whom great things were 
 predicted, and who, in spite of Poe's vindictive on- 
 slaught, was and is a poet. A good deal of eloquent 
 and high-sounding verse was produced by such writers 
 as Ross Wallace and Albert Pike. In the East, John 
 Neal, William Ware, Lunt, Hillard, Mrs. Child, — 
 and in regions farther south, Conrad, Kennedy, and 
 Simms, — were active at this time. There were others 
 whose claim to attention will be frequent throughout 
 this work. But to enumerate all who, in the second 
 quarter of this century, held themselves of much ac- 
 count is quite beyond my need and intention. Of 
 the New York group, Willis perhaps had the most 
 adroit and graceful talent, b'ut it was not always exer- 
 cised as by one possessing convictions. His kindness. 
 
 Growing 
 
 literary 
 
 activity, 
 
 Henry 
 TJieodore 
 Tucker- 
 man: 
 1813-71. 
 
 Charles 
 Fenno 
 Hoffman : 
 1806-84. 
 
 George 
 Pope Mor- 
 ris: 1802- 
 64. 
 
 Thomas 
 
 Du7t7t 
 
 English : 
 1819- 
 
 Park Ben- 
 jaTttin : 
 1809-64. 
 
 Ralph 
 Hoyt: 
 1810-78. 
 
 William 
 Wilber- 
 force 
 Lordt 
 1819- 
 
 William 
 Ross Wal- 
 lace: iSig- 
 81. 
 
 Albert 
 
 Pike: 
 
 1809- 
 
 John 
 Neal: 
 1793-1876, 
 
 George 
 Lunt : 
 1803-85. 
 
 Robert 
 Taylor 
 Cofirad: 
 1810-58. 
 
42 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Haihaniel 
 Parker 
 IVillh : 
 1806-67. 
 
 " The Lit- 
 trait." 
 
 Pseudth 
 
 ^Tnerican- 
 
 ism. 
 
 tact, and experience of the world made him an arbi- 
 ter in a provincial time. They also seriously exposed 
 him to the three worldly perils of which, no less than 
 in the days of the Apostle John, the children of the 
 Lord must have a care. A few of his lyrics are charm- 
 ingly tender and delicate, but he never did himself 
 full justice as a poet, nor realized the purpose of his 
 ambitious boyhood. The bustle of the Literati, as Poe 
 chose to call them, and the concentration of thriving 
 journals and book-houses in Philadelphia and New 
 York, — whither most roads then seemed to lead, — 
 made for a while the scribbling class of this middle 
 region very conspicuous and alert. Their kith and 
 kin, scattered throughout the States, multiplied in 
 numbers. The first green fruit of a school-system, 
 under which boys and girls had models set before 
 them, and were incited to test their own skill in com- 
 position, fell in plenty Trom the tree. Each county 
 had its prodigy contributing to the annuals and maga- 
 zines. Lowell's " mass-meeting " of poets was in con- 
 tinuous session, — made up of those who wrote verse, 
 read and praised it one to another, and printed it for 
 their countrymen to read and praise. The dull and 
 authoritative felt the responsibilities of the situation. 
 Never was a more united effort made, with malice pre- 
 pense, to create an indigenous school. It was thought 
 essential that purely American themes and incidents 
 should be utilized. Cockney poets, emulating the 
 method of Cooper, sent fancy ranging through the 
 aboriginal forest, and wreaked their measures upon 
 the supposititious Indian of that day. Powhatan and 
 Tecumseh became the heroes of hot-pressed cantos, 
 now extinct. The Spirit of Wakondah was invoked 
 by one bard, and made 'to tower above the Rocky 
 Mountains, more awe-inspiring than Camoens's Spirit 
 
PASTOR ET OVES. 
 
 43 
 
 of the Cape. Each poet, moreover, tried his hand at 
 every form of work, and each thought it specially in- 
 cumbent upon himself to write a drama, — not solely 
 for the stage, but that America might not be deficient 
 in the most complex order of poetical composition. 
 Since the heyday of the Delia Cruscans never were 
 so many neophytes and amateurs suffered to bring 
 their work before the public. Women took part in 
 the campaign, and, truth to say, were often more 
 spontaneous and natural than their brother-writers. 
 One of the sex, Mrs. Sigourney, long had been sup- 
 plying the prose and verse that answered to the sim- 
 ple wants of a primitive constituency. Another, 
 " Maria del Occidente," gained something like fame, 
 and even beyond the seas. She was, in fact, a woman 
 of ardent feeling, instinctive art, and undoubted met- 
 rical talent, though scarcely meriting the praise which 
 Lamb and Southey awarded her, or the extravagant 
 eulogium of her modern editor. There was no lack of 
 rivals to her success among the American pupils of 
 Mrs. Hemans and Miss Landon. Such caterers to 
 the literary market were found not only upon this side 
 of the Atlantic. England was slowly escaping from 
 her own sentimentalists ; the " Annuals " and " Souve- 
 nirs " were still in vogue, and the fashions of the two 
 countries were less divided than now. Poe, with a 
 critical eye made somewhat keen by practice, saw the 
 ludicrous side of all this, and poured out vials of 
 wrath upon his contemporaries, though with no just 
 claim to impartiality. Lowell, from a classical dis- 
 tance, celebrated their follies in the lines beginning, 
 
 ' But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on 
 The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on ! " 
 
 But this reminds us that Poe, Lowell, Longfellow, 
 
 Lydia 
 
 Howard 
 
 Huntley 
 
 Sigour- 
 
 my : 1791- 
 
 1865. 
 
 Maria 
 Gowen 
 Brooks * 
 1795-1845. 
 
 The Senti- 
 Ttientalists. 
 
 Curative 
 applica- 
 tions. 
 
44 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 SurviT'al 
 o/thefit- 
 Ust. 
 
 Experi- 
 mental 
 failures 
 needful to 
 ultimate 
 success. 
 
 Genuine 
 quality 
 of the more 
 recent 
 school. 
 
 and Emerson were gaining influence at that very time ; 
 that others since eminent in our literature were gradu- 
 ally distinguished from the multitude ; that, however 
 absurd and depressing the condition just set forth, a 
 superficial literary movement may be better than no 
 movement at all. As the voyage progressed, it really 
 was surprising how soon the dullards and pretenders 
 went below, while the born sailors helped the vessel 
 forward. The fit survivors of a brood of poets and 
 authors soon obtained a grateful hearing, and a few 
 publishers found pleasure and profit in nursing the 
 works of these home-writers. A number of poets — 
 men of individual traits, but allied in sentiment and 
 taste, and belonging to the same generation — seemed 
 to arise at once, and gained the position which they 
 have steadfastly held to the present day. 
 
 II. 
 
 All this preliminary ferment, then, was in some 
 way needful. The experiments of many who thought 
 themselves called enabled the few who were chosen 
 to find motives and occasions for work of real import. 
 The first year of the new dispensation was worth more 
 in its product than the score of years preceding it. 
 The poets who now came to the front have gained 
 distinction justly, vying with those of other coun- 
 tries in finish and thought, and in that reflection of 
 the life about them which alone could make them 
 the leaders of a national school. At the recent date 
 when the formation of such a school became manifest, 
 these poets spoke truthfully for our people as they 
 were and had been. One who gives their verse the 
 fair consideration which he would extend to that of 
 any foreign land or language is led to this conclusion. 
 
POETRY OF NATURE. 
 
 45 
 
 The new poetry was not autochthonous in the sense of 
 differing from all previous outgrowth of the universal 
 human heart, and as at variance with forms that have 
 long seemed natural to our mother-tongue, but rather 
 in unaffected presentation of the feeling and ideas of 
 its constituency, and after this wise was as national, 
 fresh, and aspiring as America herself. If this land 
 has not yet grown to full voice, it has not lacked a 
 characteristic expression in the verse of our favorite 
 poets. Their careers, we have seen, began almost si- 
 multaneously at the close of the second fifth of this 
 century, and have been prolonged until now, through 
 a period of nearly fifty years. Let me again briefly 
 refer to the elements which our literature hitherto 
 might justly be called upon to idealize, and make 
 some mention of the leading poets whose song has 
 been the response to such a call. 
 
 III. 
 
 I HAVE said that a fellowship with the spirit of 
 natural Landscape, and the recognition of its beauty 
 and majesty, were the earliest, as they are the most 
 constant, traits of American verse. The contemplation 
 of nature has not often been the first step, or the 
 second, in the progress of ideality. But this remark 
 applies to primitive races. The aborigines of a coun- 
 try are almost a part of its mould, — or, at least, so 
 closely related to its dumb fauna that they reflect but 
 little on the mountains, woods, and waters which ap- 
 pear to surround them as a matter of course. Heroic 
 or savage deeds of prowess are their first incitements 
 to poetic utterance. Even an extended period of cul- 
 ture and growth has not always led them to consider 
 the landscape objectively. Of this the Greeks, with 
 
 Traits of 
 A merican 
 
 verse. 
 
 I. Truth- 
 ful rejiec- 
 tion of No 
 iure. 
 
46 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Tft£ usual 
 order re- 
 versed. 
 
 Our first 
 
 distiftciive 
 ^oufi of 
 painters. 
 
 their curious disregard of natural scenery, are a fa- 
 miliar example. Tliey observed nature only to inform 
 it with their own life, until there was no river or tree 
 without its genius. First, epic action ; next, patriotism 
 and devotion ; afterward, dramatic passion ; last of all, 
 analysis and reflective art. In our own settlements, 
 a race that already had gone through these stages 
 took possession of a new world. A struggle with its 
 conditions involved a century of hardship and dis- 
 trust. The final triumph, the adjustment of the people 
 to their locality, brought a new understanding, out of 
 which came the first original quality in our poetry and 
 design. Here it is to be remembered that descriptive 
 literature, poetry or prose, though not earlier upon 
 the record of intellectual development, is lower as re- 
 spects the essential worth of Art than that which is 
 emotional or dramatic. In the full prime of creative 
 work, the one must serve as a background for the 
 other, upon which attention chiefly is concentrated. 
 All in all, it was a foregone conclusion that our first 
 independent artists should betake themselves to the 
 study and utilization of American scenery. In paint- 
 ing, our first distinctive school — for such I do not 
 term the early group of historical and portrait painters, 
 from West to Allston — has been that of the land- 
 scapists. Let us own that when either poetry or 
 painting deals with nature in no copyist's fashion, but 
 with a sense of something " deeply interfused," it may 
 reach the higher plane of art-expression. To this end 
 our modern painters, upon the whole, have striven, 
 from the time of Cole. The hands of Durand, In- 
 ness, Kensett, the two GifEords, Whittredge, McEntee, 
 Church, Bierstadt, Brown, Martin, Wyant, have given 
 us a landscape-school that, for sincerity and freshness, . 
 is notable on either continent, and is constantly gain- 
 
BRYANT AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 
 
 47 
 
 ing in technique and variety from the experiments of 
 younger men. The literary counterpart of this school 
 began with Bryant, the Druid of our forests, the high- 
 priest of Nature in her elemental types. These he 
 has celebrated with the coolness and breadth that 
 were traits of the earlier painters named, though lack- 
 ing the freedom and detail of their successors. It is 
 dangerous to measure one art by another, or to con- 
 fuse their terms ; yet we feel that the relationship 
 between the pictures of Durand and Kensett, for ex- 
 ample, and the meditative verse of Bryant — from 
 " Thanatopsis " and " A Forest Hymn " to " The 
 Night Journey of a River " — is near and suggestive. 
 Bryant was at the head of our reflective poets, find- 
 ing his bent at the outset, and holding it to the very 
 close. His work rose to an imaginative height which 
 descriptive poetry of itself rarely attains. 
 
 He was followed — at an obvious distance — by 
 Percival, Wilcox, Street, and other mild celebrants of 
 nature, who failed of his breadth and elevation. Their 
 patient measures show how strongly the scenery of 
 America has impressed her people. To the present 
 day, the landscape, however incidental to the poetry 
 of Emerson, Whittier, Thoreau, Lowell, and Taylor, is 
 constantly there, and fresh as a rocky pasture-ground 
 in New England or Pennsylvania compared with a 
 storied park of Warwickshire. In the work of Mrs. 
 Thaxter, Piatt, and other recent idyllists, it is natural, 
 sympathetic, — in short, thoroughly American. And 
 for me the value of the poetry of Whitman and Joa- 
 quin Miller does not belong to the method and dem- 
 ocratic vistas of the one, and the melodramatic ro- 
 mance of the other ; but to Whitman's fresh, absolute 
 handling of outdoor nature, and to the fine surprises 
 which Miller gives us in haunting pictures of the] 
 plains, the sierra, and the sundown seas. 
 
 Their com* 
 feers in 
 Song. 
 
 Bryant. 
 
 Carlos 
 
 Wilcox: 
 
 1794-J827. 
 
 Alfred 
 Billings 
 Street : 
 
 Fresh atti 
 original 
 treattnent 
 of land- 
 scape. 
 
48 
 
 GROWTH OF THE ^AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 2. Presen- 
 iatiofi of 
 th£ nation- 
 al senti' 
 went. 
 
 Ourfioetx 
 true to 
 their own 
 iiTne and 
 kind. 
 
 Bryant. 
 
 Whittiir. 
 
 Pro aris ei 
 focis. 
 
 Our poetry has been equally fortunate as the lan- 
 guage of the ideas and human emotions to which, as 
 a people, we most readily incline. Notwithstanding 
 the change and unrest of a new country, the milieu 
 which Taine found in England here exists, and with 
 fewer qualifications. Not that America is all middle 
 class, as some have asserted. But her ideal is de- 
 rived from sentiments which, even more than in Great 
 Britain, preserve a Saxon quality, — those of domes- 
 ticity, piety, freedom, loyalty to the institutions of the 
 land. If unessential to various dramatic and impas- 
 sioned art-creations, they have an art and passion of 
 their own, and, in recognizing this, our singers are 
 more national than their English contemporaries. The 
 latter, except through the odes and idyls of Tennyson, 
 have conveyed to us little of the home-sentiment, the 
 English faith and feeling, which brought the mother- 
 land to greatness. Doubtless it is because these qual- 
 ities were so general in the song of their predecessors 
 that the Victorian choir has earnestly concerned itself 
 with mediaeval and legendary work, and -with those 
 technical diversions which are counted as art for art's 
 sake. 
 
 The instinct of our poets has led them first to 
 charge their lyrics with the feeling of their time and 
 people, and in doing this they have, almost without 
 exception, given voice to their own heart. Bryant's 
 verse is an illustration. It everywhere breathes of 
 liberty and patriotism. But as an apostle of all the 
 sentiments just named, — taken singly or in combina- 
 tion, — Whittier, the Quaker bard of Amesbury, whose 
 art is by turns so homely and so refined, certainly is 
 preeminent, and in a sense has made himself that 
 uncrowned laureate, the people's poet. His legend 
 is pro aris et focis. He glows with faith, strong bj 
 
NATIVE SENTIMENT AND EMOTION. 
 
 49 
 
 heredity in New England, and thence outflowing to the 
 West, nor forgets the beauty and duty of temperance, 
 charity, and virtue. Nothing restrains his democratic 
 conception of the freedom of the soil, the nobility of 
 work, the right to labor for one's self. He represents 
 (to borrow Hugo's formula) our conflict with oppres- 
 sion, and was the herald and inspired seer of the 
 enduring fiery conflict that preceded the antislavery 
 war. His earnestness and burning effort contrast 
 with Bryant's stern repose. In various national qual- 
 ities the more polished work of Longfellow and Low- 
 ell has rivaled Whittier's, and sustained it. They, in 
 their ways, and Gallagher, Holland, Trowbridge, and 
 Taylor, each in his own, have paid tribute to the 
 charm of American home-life, and have repeated the 
 ancestral and prevalent feeling of regions which they 
 thoroughly comprehend. In this direction they have 
 been accompanied by many writers in verse or prose, 
 — simple balladists like the Vermonter, Eastman, and 
 tale-writers with the insight and fidelity that belong 
 to Sylvester Judd, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and 
 Rose Terry Cooke. In times of concentrated emo- 
 tion, our poets of all degrees have brokein out in 
 vivid strains. Mrs. Howe's " Battle Hymn " is mem- 
 orable. There is native fire in the lyrics of McMas- 
 ter, Melville, O'Hara, Finch, Palmer, Randall, For- 
 ceythe Willson, and that brave, free singer, Brownell, 
 to whom Ticknor, sounding the war-cry of the South, 
 bore a half-likeness in manner and spirit. There have 
 been many single voices, heard but for a moment, of 
 this class. Nor should we quite forget the humbler 
 song-makers for the people, such as Foster, the negro 
 melodist, — and Work, to whose stirring music our 
 soldiers marched with a will, and of whose songs two 
 or three at least should preserve the name of their 
 4 
 
 Confiici 
 with op- 
 pression. 
 
 William 
 Davis Gat 
 lagker : 
 1808- 
 
 Josiah 
 Gilbert 
 Holland: 
 1819-81. 
 
 John 
 
 Townsend 
 Trow- 
 bridge : 
 1827- 
 
 Charles 
 Gatnage 
 Eastman I 
 1816-61. 
 
 yuiia 
 
 Ward 
 Howe: 
 1819- 
 
 Herman 
 Melville : 
 1819- 
 
 Byron 
 Forceythe 
 Willson : 
 I837-67. 
 
 Henry 
 Howard 
 BrownellX 
 1820-72. 
 
 Francis . 
 Orrery 
 Ticknor I 
 1822-74. 
 
 {See In- 
 dex.') 
 
50 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Religious 
 Verse. 
 
 A rtkur 
 Cleveland 
 Coxe : 
 1818- 
 
 {See In- 
 dex.) 
 
 A merican 
 
 feTHtde 
 
 poets. 
 
 The early 
 aTtd later 
 sisterhoods 
 of son^. 
 {See In^ 
 dex.) 
 
 University 
 p'oup. 
 
 composer. In closing this section I will add a word 
 in regard to a kind of verse which, of all, is the most 
 common and indispensable, — that devoted to rever- 
 ence and worship. The religious verse of America, 
 whether the work of poets at large, or of those whose 
 range is chiefly confined to it, — Muhlenberg, Coxe, 
 Doane, Peabody, Croswell, Sears, S. Johnson, S. Long- 
 fellow, Abraham Coles, Ray Palmer, Harriet Kimball, 
 Hedge, Dr. Frothingham, Randolph, Chadwick, Sav- 
 age, and many other orthodox or liberal composers, — 
 ranks in quality, if not in quantity, with the hym- 
 nology of other lands. 
 
 No one can enter upon the most cursory review of 
 our literature without being struck by the share which 
 women have had in its production. A sisterhood of 
 song, expressing its own delicate and heroic nature, 
 and many thoughts and affections that are sweet and 
 high and impassioned, has won in America a just and 
 distinctive regard. The female voices early added 
 softness, and at times strength, to the general song. 
 The names of Maria Lowell, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Whit- 
 man, the Gary sisters, Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Sewall, Eliz- 
 abeth Lloyd Howell, Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. E. C. 
 Kinney, and Mrs. Botta, some of whom have passed 
 away, are cherished by not a few. They have had 
 successors — of whom are Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Stoddard, 
 Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Whitney, Mrs. Dorr, Mrs. Greenough, 
 Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Hudson, and others to whom I 
 shall refer in a later chapter — some of whose names 
 are veritably household words throughout the country, 
 and much of whose work, in verse and prose, has 
 taken a subtler range, a better finish, a definite and 
 influential hold upon the public attention. 
 
 American culture, if not so exact and diligent as 
 that of more learned nations, is sympathetic, and ex- 
 
CAMBRIDGE. — CONCORD. 
 
 5' 
 
 plores all literatures for its delight and betterment. 
 It is most advanced in the sections where it took its 
 start, but there and elsewhere is well represented in 
 our poetry. A university school has sent out rays 
 from Cambridge, the focus being the home of a poet 
 with whose rise the new poetic movement fairly began. 
 He grew to be not the poet of a section, nor even of 
 a people, but one rendered into many languages, and 
 known throughout the world. Longfellow, on the 
 score of his fame, and his almost exclusive devotion 
 to the muse, became the centre of a group distin- 
 guished by culture, elegant learning, regard for the 
 manner of saying no less than for what is said. His 
 early legend rightly was Outre Mer, for he stimulated 
 our taste by choice presentation of what is rare abroad, 
 until it grew able to perceive what is rare and choice 
 at home. With thoughts of this singer come thoughts 
 of peace, of romance, of the house made beautiful by 
 loving hands. Lowell and Holmes, no less than 
 Longfellow, and wonted to the same atmosphere, rep- 
 resent our conflict with rudeness, ignorance, and ascet- 
 icism. They laugh the Philistine to scorn, and with 
 their wit and learning advance the movement toward 
 sweetness and light. Near them are others, such as 
 Parsons, Story, Robert Lowell, Mrs. Fields, who may 
 be classed more readily with a composite group of 
 whom I have yet to speak. But first let us observe 
 that an imaginative and unique division of the recent 
 school is that which represents the liberal philosophy 
 of New England and its conflict with ancestral super- 
 stition. The mind and soul of Transcendentalism 
 seemed to find their predestined service in the land 
 of the Puritans. The poetry which sprang from it 
 had a more subtle aroma than that whose didacticism 
 infected the English Lake school. The latter made 
 
 Longfejr 
 low. 
 
 "Otdre 
 Mer." 
 
 Conflict 
 with ascei 
 
 Robert 
 Traill 
 Spence 
 Lowell 
 1816- 
 
 Transcetb. 
 
 dental 
 
 group. 
 
 Concord 
 and Gras 
 Tnere. 
 
52 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Andrews 
 Norton : 
 1786-1853. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 Autos 
 Branson 
 Alcott: 
 1799- 
 
 Henry 
 David 
 Thorea-u : 
 1817-62. 
 
 Sarah 
 Margaret 
 Fuller 
 Ossoli : 
 1810-50. 
 
 Jones 
 Very : 
 1813-80. 
 
 Christo- 
 pker 
 Pearse 
 Cranck : 
 1813- 
 
 IVilliajn 
 Ellery 
 Channing; 
 j8i8- 
 
 David A t- 
 woodtJVas- 
 son : 1823- 
 
 Thomas 
 WetU- 
 •aiortk 
 Biggin- 
 son : 1823- 
 
 Franklin 
 Benjamin 
 Sanborn : 
 1831- 
 
 Erastus 
 IFolcott 
 Ellsworth: 
 182Z- 
 
 William 
 Bull 
 Wright: 
 1838-80. 
 
 prosaic the verse of famous poets ; out of the formel 
 the quickest inspiration of our down-East thinkers 
 seemed to grow. Their philosophy, beginning with 
 the prose and verse of Andrews Norton, and the ex- 
 alted spirituality of Dr. Channing, and soon going 
 beyond the early liberties, has attained its riper ex- 
 pression in lyrical work, prophetic, mystical, or quaintly 
 wise. It borrowed, in truth, the wisdom of the Orient 
 and the speculations of Germany, but has not failed 
 to apply the vision that so inspired it to the life and 
 action of the New World. The white light of Emer- 
 son, the pure and elevated master of the Concord 
 group, has been a steadfast beacon for his companions. 
 Among these, Alcott, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Jones 
 Very, Cranch, Ellery Channing, Wasson, Higginson, 
 and Sanborn may be reckoned, with due allowance for 
 the individuality of each. Here and there stray sing- 
 ers, like the shy and philosophic minstrel, Ellsworth, 
 have seemed to belong to this peculiarly American 
 caste. Another such was the lamented Dr. Wright, 
 whose gift was delicately pure and thoughtful. Poe 
 was right in claiming that the speculative tendency 
 of these poets was at odds with the artistic effect of 
 their work, but ought to have seen that a more ex- 
 quisite feeling and insight, allied with that tendency, 
 often made amends for it. 
 
 Meantime, as I was about to point out, we have 
 had a number of poets, including most of those who 
 do not live in New England, who have clung to their 
 art from sheer love of the beautiful, under varying 
 chances of favor and discouragement. They have paid 
 slight regard to their respective localities, writing after 
 their own versatile moods, and looking wherever they 
 pleased for models and themes. Some have followed 
 other than literary pursuits, or, if earning their bread 
 
NEW YORK AND HER POETS. 
 
 53 
 
 by the pen, have accepted the vicissitudes of their craft 
 nnder the conditions heretofore mentioned. Their 
 tastes and habits have made them composite, if not 
 cosmopolitan. Their work is not provincial, though 
 often less original than that of some whom we have 
 named. But in escaping the rigors of a chosen sec- 
 tion, they have also foregone its distinctions. The 
 East has loved its poets, and, what is more, has lis- 
 tened to them. The New England spirit has been that 
 of Attica, which state, we are told, " secure in her 
 sterility, boasted that her land had never been inun- 
 dated by these tides of immigration," and that "she 
 traced the stream of her population in a backward 
 course through many generations." With respect to 
 philosophy and economics, and in fields of taste and 
 literary judgment, the trust of the modern Athens is 
 founded on her own usage and her men of note. It 
 is true that the reverence paid our elder poets is now 
 general throughout the land, and as sincere and beau- 
 tiful as that which the bards of Germany and Scan- 
 dinavia always have received at the hands of their 
 countrymen. It even has its jealous side, and renders 
 it hard for new aspirants to gain their share of wel- 
 come. But New York has been to her later poets, 
 somewhat as Oxford Street was to De Quincey, a stony- 
 hearted mother. This is partly due to the standards 
 of success established by monetary power and prosper- 
 ity, and partly to the accident that here, more than in 
 the East, idealists have had to live by all sorts of very 
 practical work. Writers have been tolerated and even 
 welcomed, but not honored and taken as counsellors 
 until they have proved themselves worldly wise, or 
 gained their influence elsewhere. Then New York 
 has been proud of them, in her awkward way, and 
 used them at need, but has assigned to the provinces 
 
 A n tTtde- 
 
 pendeni 
 
 class. 
 
 Eastern 
 regardfoi* 
 letters and 
 song. 
 
 IVords- 
 ivorth^s 
 " Greectj' 
 
 p. ^i. 
 
 Metropol^ 
 tan indif. 
 feretice. 
 
54 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Poets of 
 the artistic 
 and cosmo- 
 politan 
 type. 
 
 {See Chap. 
 XII. ^ and 
 Indnx.) 
 
 the duty of reading their works. Bryant came to be 
 her most honored citizen, and for some years was a 
 kind of literary Doge ; his city knew that he was a 
 poet, for the country had told her so. It would be 
 interesting to learn how large' a proportion of the 
 wealthy classes among whom he was a peer, and who 
 placed him at the head of feasts and civic gather- 
 ings, knew this through an appreciative knowledge 
 of his poetry. Such, however, is apt to be the state 
 of things in a great commercial centre, — so great 
 that it matures slowly, and must long await that 
 splendid prime of which smaller towns earlier furnish 
 types in miniature ; and under just such conditions 
 many a poet has struggled, yet gone down to time 
 and fame. 
 
 The artistic bent of Parsons and Story, of Poe, 
 Taylor, Stoddard, and Aldrich, in New York; of the 
 Philadelphians, Boker and Read; of the Southerners, 
 Thompson, Timrod, Hayne, Lanier, and Esten Cooke ; 
 and of various younger writers who justify future no- 
 tice, has been plainly seen in the application of each 
 man's gift, whatever its degree. They have cared for 
 poetry alone, and have believed its country to be uni- 
 versal, and that England, whose poets conspicuously 
 avail themselves of the materials and atmosphere of 
 other lands, should be the last to lay down a law of 
 restriction. Herein, nevertheless, they subject their 
 work, upon its general merits, to comparison with 
 models which they scarce could hope to surpass ; for 
 only the highest excellence could draw attention to 
 them as poets of America. Some of our verse com- 
 posed in this wise has been so charming, and withal 
 so original, as to make reputations. Poe's lyrics are 
 an example, and others besides Poe, less conspicuous 
 as victims of unrest and heroes of strange careers, 
 
PARSONS. — NORTON. —STORY. 
 
 55 
 
 also have represented the conflict with materialism, 
 and have shown as genuine a gift and a wider range. 
 Dr. Parsons holds a place of his own. He is one of 
 those rare poets whose infrequent work is so beauti- 
 ful as to make us wish for more. In quality, at least, 
 it is of a kind with Landor's ; his touch is sure, and 
 has at command the choicer modes of lyrical art, — 
 those which, although fashion may overslaugh them, 
 return again, and enable a true poet to be quite as 
 original as when hunting devices previously unessayed. 
 His independence, on the other hand, is exhibited in 
 his free renderings of Dante. These, with Eliot Nor- 
 ton's exquisite translation of the "Vita Nuova," and 
 Longfellow's of the entire " Commedia," with Bry- 
 ant's of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," Brooks's of vari- 
 ous German authors, Taylor's of " Faust," and with 
 the kindred achievements of Munford, Cranch, Le- 
 land, Macdonough, Alger, Long, Duffield, Wilstach, 
 Coles, Howland, Miss Preston, Miss Frothingham, and 
 Emma Lazarus (whose poetic version of Heine re- 
 cently appeared), have made the American school of 
 translation somewhat eminent. Parsons' briefer po- 
 ems often are models, but occasionally show a trace 
 of that stiffness which too little employment gives 
 even the hand of daintier sense. "Lines on a Bust 
 of Dante," in structure, diction, loftiness of thought, 
 is the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. Inver- 
 sion, the vice of stilted poets, becomes with him an 
 excellence, and old forms and accents are rehandled 
 and charged with life anew. It is to be regretted 
 that Dr. Parsons has not used his gift more freely. 
 He has been a poet for poets, rather than for the 
 people ; but many types are required to fill out the 
 hemicycle of a nation's literature. Story's various 
 talents and acquirements as a scholar, painter, sculp- 
 
 Thomas 
 William 
 Parsons .' 
 1819- 
 
 Traftsla- 
 tions. 
 
 Charles 
 Eliot Nor- 
 ton : 1827- 
 
 Charles 
 Timothy 
 Brooks : 
 1813-83. 
 
 {See Iitr 
 dex.) 
 
 Parsons a 
 master of 
 lyric verse. 
 
 WiUiavi 
 WetTnort 
 Story: 
 1819- 
 
56 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Taylor. 
 
 Confiicts 
 •with di- 
 dacticism 
 and iradi- 
 tian. 
 
 Thoynas 
 Buchanan 
 Read : 
 1822-72. 
 
 George 
 Henry 
 Boker : 
 1823- 
 
 tor, author, and what not, and his prolonged resi- 
 dence and studies abroad, are mirrored in his verse. 
 This, indeed, is so un-American that I was held to 
 blame by a prominent London journal for not review- 
 ing him as a British-born and Victorian poet. He 
 has extreme refinement, but is a close follower of 
 Browning's lyrico-dramatic method, and more novel in 
 his choice of themes than in their treatment. " Cleo- 
 patra " and " Praxiteles and Phryne " are striking 
 pieces, and show him at his best. Among the group 
 under notice was the ardent and generous Taylor, 
 whose seniority in death has caused my selection of 
 him as one of those who illustrate the rise of the 
 American school, and upon whom alone I venture any 
 extended criticism. Poe, the eldest of the art-group, 
 and the subject of a future chapter, is related to the 
 others as a toiling professional writer, whose ideality 
 maintained itself apart from the atmosphere about 
 him. In many respects he is an exception to the 
 rest, but, on the whole, may be counted the first to 
 revolt against didacticism, from the artist's point of 
 view; while Whitman, on the other hand, is hostile 
 to art-tradition and conventionalism, as an apostle of 
 the democracy of the future. Another artist-poet was 
 Buchanan Read, whose song was of a more genuine 
 quality than the painting which he made his vocation. 
 His idyllic verse fairly portrayed the rural life of his 
 own State, but his successes were a few rhymed lyr- 
 ics and idyls that will be preserved. "The Closing 
 Scene" gained a reputation through its descriptive 
 beauty and clever treatment of a standard form of 
 verse. His townsman, Boker, is the eldest of a little 
 group to be described in a chapter on Bayard Tay- 
 lor. A close study of the English poets, especially 
 of the Elizabethan brotherhood, led him to dramatic 
 
READ. — BOKER. — STODDARD. 
 
 57 
 
 composition. Although his plays follow old models, 
 and are founded upon the historic themes of foreign 
 lands, they have sterling dramatic and poetic quali- 
 ties. Thirty-five years ago, in an essay upon the con- 
 dition and prospect of our literature, Dr. Griswold 
 said that " the success of the plays of Bird and Con- 
 rad, and the failure of those of Longfellow and Wil- 
 lis," showed that there was still "patriotism enough 
 among us to prefer -works with the American inspira- 
 tion to those of any degree of artistic merit without 
 it." But it is recorded to the credit of some of Bo- 
 ker's plays, which are of a poetic and literary mould, 
 and bear the test of reading, that, like their humbler 
 prototypes, — the acting plays of Bird, Conrad, Sar- 
 gent, Mathews, and others, — they were found to have 
 the life and substance that could gain them favor, 
 not only in the closet, but on the stage. Some of 
 them are antecedent to the realistic manner of our 
 own time ; others have won renewed success in the 
 present day, and proved themselves to be of a type 
 superior to the chance and change of fashion. They 
 show, one and all, a manly hand, and the healthy im- 
 agination of the poet, their author. His minor pieces 
 are of uneven quality, some of them thoroughly na- 
 tional and spirited. Such lyrics as "On Board the 
 Cumberland," " A Ballad of Sir John Franklin," and 
 the " Dirge for a Soldier," often continue a poet's 
 name more surely than the efforts which in truth are 
 his masterpieces. 
 
 Stoddard, the life-long friend and brother in song 
 of Taylor and Boker, is still in full voice. A New 
 Englander born, the honors of his life and service 
 belong to New York. The whole range of his poetry 
 has the unrestricted or cosmopolitan tendency of which 
 I speak. He had poor advantages in youth, but anj 
 
 Iniroduc- 
 iion to 
 "■The 
 Prose 
 Writers of 
 A merica?'' 
 ByR. W. 
 Griswold. 
 1847. 
 
 Epes Sar~ 
 
 gent : 
 1813-80. 
 
 Coriteliits 
 Mathews ; 
 1817- 
 
 Boktf's 
 lyrics. 
 
 Richard 
 Henry 
 Stoddard 
 182s- 
 
58 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 A n imag- 
 inative 
 poet. 
 
 His blank- 
 verse f lyr- 
 ics, etc. 
 
 absolute bent for letters, and a passion for the beau- 
 tiful resembling that of Poe. His knowledge of Eng- 
 lish literature, old and new, early became so valuable 
 that his younger associates, drawn to him by admira- 
 tion of his poetry, never failed to profit by his learn- 
 ing and suggestions. His life has been peculiarly 
 that of a writer, with its changes and pleasurable 
 pains, and is marked by independence, sensitiveness, 
 devotion to his calling, and pride in the city with 
 whose literary growth and labor he is identified. The 
 characteristics of Stoddard's verse are affluence, sin- 
 cere feeling, strength, a manner unmistakably his own, 
 very delicate fancy, and, above all, an imagination at 
 times exceeded by that of no other American poet. 
 This last quality pervades his ambitious pieces, and 
 at times breaks out suddenly in the minor verse 
 through which he is best known. The exigencies of 
 his profession have too constantly drawn upon his re- 
 sources; the bulk of his miscellaneous verse is large, 
 and to this is somewhat due its unevenness. No 
 poet is more unequal ; few have more plainly failed 
 now and then. On the other hand, few have reached 
 a higher tone, and a selection could be made from 
 his poems upon which to base a lasting reputation. 
 " The Fisher and Charon," " The Dead Master," and 
 the " Hymn to the Sea," are noble pieces of English 
 blank verse, the secret of whose measure is given 
 only to the elect ; one is impressed by the art, the 
 thought, the imagination, which sustain these poems, 
 and the Shakespeare and Lincoln odes. Stoddard's 
 abundant songs and lyrics are always on the wing 
 and known at first sight, — a skylark brood whose 
 notes are rich with feeling. The sweet and direct 
 method of The King's Bell placed him high in .the 
 ranks of writers of narrative verse. Among poets 
 
SAKE. — LELAND. — BUTLER. 
 
 59 
 
 equal to him in years, he is, perhaps, the foremost of 
 the artistic or cosmopolitan group. 
 
 If I cared to give, in detail, various by-road illus- 
 trations of the American spirit, I could cite, many in- 
 stances where the brooding humor, the quaintness 
 and frankness, the pluck and fun and carelessness, of 
 our new people long since cropped out in rhyme. 
 These characteristics give life to the wise and witty 
 purpose of Holmes's and Lowell's satires, and to the 
 verses of Saxe, Leland, Fields, and Butler. We have 
 their continuance and diversity in the clever, off-hand 
 fantasies of younger men. There is no lack of dia- 
 lect, bric-k-brac, and society verse. Some of our young 
 Bohemians all at play, twenty years ago, — of whom 
 George Arnold was American by birth, as were Hal- 
 pine and O'Brien by adoption, — while not without 
 Ihcir earnest moods, did rollicking work of this kind, 
 and in Arnold's case it seemed to his friends but an 
 offshoot of the better work he had it in him to do. 
 The Dean among our writers of poems for occasions 
 is unquestionably Dr. Holmes, by virtue of his apt 
 response to the instant call, and of the wit, wisdom, 
 conviction, and the scholarly polish that relegate his 
 lightest productions to the select domain of art. 
 
 To Whitman a chapter will be given, and is needed 
 for the fair consideration of his traits and attitude. 
 He represents, first of all, his own personality ; sec- 
 ondly, the conflict with aristoctacy and formalism. 
 Against the latter he early took the position of an 
 iconoclast, avowing that the time had come in which 
 to create an American art by rejection of all forms, 
 irrespective of their natural basis, which had come to 
 us from the past. In their stead he proffered a form 
 of his own. If I rightly understand the meaning of 
 one or two recent papers by Mr. Whitman, his ex- 
 
 American 
 satire and 
 Jeux- 
 d'' Esprit. 
 
 jfokn God-, 
 frey Saxe ." 
 1816-87. 
 
 Charles 
 Godfrey 
 Leland: 
 1824- 
 
 James 
 Thomas 
 Fields : 
 1816-81. 
 
 William 
 
 Allen 
 
 Butler: 
 
 1825- 
 
 (See Chap. 
 XII.) 
 
 Holmes. 
 
 Whitman 
 
6o 
 
 GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 
 
 A genuine 
 home- 
 sckoolf thus 
 havhig 
 txisted^ 
 should be 
 valued at 
 its worth. 
 
 See " No. 
 
 Am. Re- 
 vieTV^^ : 
 fan. 1881. 
 
 Thefirst 
 
 fourse 
 
 tnded. 
 
 treme views, in deprecation of what is and anticipa- 
 tion of what is to be, are now somewhat tempered 
 by years and experience. He is a man of striking 
 physical .and mental qualities, and excels most writers 
 in personal influence, tact, and adroitness as a man 
 of the world. He is an avowed champion of democ- 
 racy, and accepted as such by the refined classes at 
 home and abroad. I shall refer to his minute knowl- 
 edge and healthy treatment of the American land- 
 scape, of the phases and products of outdoor Nature, 
 for in this respect his most fragmentary pieces show 
 the handicraft of an artist and poet. 
 
 We need not continue farther the analysis suggested 
 in the previous chapter. I have not tried to make a 
 rigid classification of all who have borne a part in 
 the rise of a home-school, but to observe the general 
 groups of which some of our elder poets may be 
 called the leaders, and the condition and sentiment 
 by which their work has been affected. Enough has 
 been said, I think, to justify the assertion that such 
 a school already has had a career which Americans 
 should be swift to recognize and slow to undervalue. 
 One " of your own poets " has taken a different view, 
 declaring that a barren void exists, — that our poetry 
 has been marked by an absence of patriotism, and 
 that it has shown brain and no soul. A more incor- 
 rect or wilfully pessimistic statement never was made. 
 In every department of art, times of energy are di- 
 vided by times of calm. The first course is run, and 
 there is a temporary halt, so far as poetry is con- 
 cerned. The imaginative element in our literature is 
 active as ever, but in other directions. Meantime, 
 we have singers in their prime, resting their voices 
 for the moment, and others whose fresh notes will 
 soon be more definitely heard. Both these classes 
 
THE WRITER'S PROVINCE. 
 
 6i 
 
 will come within our review. The younger poets, 
 upon whom the future depends, must prove them- 
 selves well endowed, if they are to succeed to the 
 laurels of those who, blessed with years and honors, 
 have held the affection of life-long readers scattered 
 far and wide. It is of those elders only, the repre- 
 sentative founders of our school, that I have under- 
 taken to write at any length. To pass critical judg- 
 ments upon those of my own, or a younger, genera- 
 tion is beyond my province. The time will come 
 when some of them will in turn occupy the high 
 places, and furnish typical illustrations of poetry and 
 the poetic life. In that near future there will not be 
 wanting critics to measure their works, nor hands to 
 award the recompense that is due to them who add 
 to the sum of human pleasure by their ministry of 
 song. 
 
 {,See Chap- 
 ter XU.'i 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 Impressive 
 feeling 
 excited by 
 the poefs 
 death. 
 
 Born in 
 Cutnming- 
 ton^ Mass,^ 
 Nov. 3, 
 J794. 
 
 WHEN Bryant died, in the flowery season that 
 had inspired his sweetest lyric, the general 
 pause and hush were singularly impressive. To the 
 death of no other American, for a long time before 
 and after, could be applied so aptly that Indian met- 
 aphor of the sound of the fall of a great oak in the 
 forest. The feeling was not one of unexpectedness, 
 although his old age was free from decrepitude, — as 
 if some deity kinder than Aurora had given him im- 
 mortality without decay ; not one of sorrow, for he 
 lived beyond the usual limit of life ; not that which 
 we have when some man of office, rank, entanglement 
 in great affairs, suddenly passes away. Yet the sta- 
 tion of " the father of American song " was unique, 
 and his loss was something strange and positive. He 
 atbod alone, — in certain respects, an incomparable 
 figure. He had become not only a representative cit- 
 izen, journalist, poet, but the serene, transfigured ideal 
 of a good and venerable man. 
 
 As a writer he had been before the public from a 
 date near the beginning of the century, and so 
 changeless through all its changes that his critics, in 
 estimating the poet just dead, really were judging the 
 poet of fifty years before, instead of guessing at the 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 
 
 63 
 
 verdict of time upon his productions. Howsoever 
 they might differ as to the measure of Bryant's gift, 
 and of Bryant the man, one thing was sure : no minor 
 personage could gain, and retain to the last, such a 
 hold upon popular interest, honor, deferential esteem. 
 Others, before reaching his years, have had their rise 
 and decline, outlasting themselves, and finding occa- 
 sion to declare with Cato Major, " It is a hard thing, 
 Romans, to render an account before the men of a 
 period different from that in which one has lived ! " 
 But here was one who steadily grew to be the emblem 
 of our finest order of citizenship, possibly its most 
 acceptable type. This, as constantly was evident, be- 
 came impressed even upon coarse and ordinary per- 
 sons, singly or associated in legislative bodies ; hardly 
 judges, one would think, of such a matter, but accept- 
 ing without cavil the public conception and the esti- 
 mate of the thoughtful and refined. There is good 
 reason at the base of every sustained opinion of the 
 sort. What gave Bryant just this degree of special 
 eminence? Not alone that he was a virtuous man,' 
 and a patriot in every sense ; a journalist, linked 
 with traditions of sturdy service in the past ; a clear 
 and vigorous writer and thinker ; a wise and reverend 
 sage, most sound of body and mind. He was not a 
 great and representative editor, according to our mod- 
 ern standard. Otherwise, he was all these, and in 
 their combination held a rank excelled by none and 
 reached only by the excepted few. Beyond and in- 
 cluding all these, he was a poet. It may be placed 
 to the credit of the art of song that, being a person 
 of such attributes, the addition of the poetic gift made 
 him a bright, particular star. It is the poet, above 
 all, that we must observe and estimate. 
 
 Yet in order to discover the quality and limitations 
 
 " Fash- 
 ioned to 
 ynuch 
 hoTior.'" 
 
 The "fore- 
 most citi- 
 zen." 
 
 The poet. 
 
 Thet 
 
64 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 A typical 
 republican. 
 
 Menial 
 and moral 
 traits. 
 
 His posi- 
 tion 
 
 strength- 
 ened by 
 worldly 
 success. 
 
 o£ his genius, he must be considered not only as an 
 American poet who represented his country at a cer- 
 tain time, but as a man speaking for himself. And in 
 this wise, first seeking a key to his literary value, we 
 see that he had become a most satisfying type of the 
 republican, joining the traditional gravity, purity, and 
 patriotic wisdom of the forefathers with the modern- 
 ness and freshness of our own day. His life, public 
 and private, was in keeping with his speech and writ- 
 ings. We often say of a poet or artist that he should 
 not be judged like other men by his outward irrele- 
 vant mark or habit; that to see his best, his truest 
 self you must read his poems or study his paintings. 
 In reading Bryant's prose and verse, and in observing 
 the poet himself, our judgments were the same. He 
 always held in view liberty, law, wisdom, piety, faith ; 
 his sentiment was unsentimental ; he never whined nor 
 found fault with condition or nature ; he was robust, 
 but not tyrannical ; frugal, but not too severe ; grave, 
 yet full of shrewd and kindly humor. Absolute sim- 
 plicity characterized him. Ethics were always in sight. 
 He was, indeed, an " old man for counsel " ; what he 
 learned in youth from the lives and precepts of 
 Washington, Hamilton, and their compeers, that he 
 taught and practised to the last. His intellectual 
 faculties, like his physical, were balanced to the dis- 
 creetest level, and this without abasing his poetic fire. 
 His genius was not shown by the advance of one 
 faculty and the impediment of others ; it was the 
 spirit of an even combination, and a fine one. 
 
 It is true that his practical success — the worldly 
 substance he had gained .by the thrift and prudence 
 that " poor Richard's " maxims inculcate — gave him 
 a prestige in the wealth-respecting metropolis which as 
 a poet alone he could not, in his generation, have 
 
LENGTH OF SERVICE. 
 
 65 
 
 secured. It brought him near, as Mr. Hazeltine has 
 pointed out, to the hosts of the Philistines, but it 
 also impressed them with a conviction that there 
 must be something in poetry after all. They saw him 
 visibly haloed with a distinction beyond that which 
 wealth and civic influence could bestow. Besides, 
 even Philistia has its aesthetic rituals and pageantry, 
 and it was with a gracious and picturesque sense of 
 the fitness of things that he bore his stately part in 
 our festivals and processions. To this extent he was 
 conventional, but he made conventionalism suggestive 
 and often the promoter of thought and art. 
 
 II. 
 
 Here, then, was a minstrel who, in appearance, 
 more than others of a readier lyrical genius, seemed 
 not unlike the legendary bard of Gray : — 
 
 "The poet stood, 
 (Loose his beard and hoary hair 
 Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air), 
 And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire, 
 Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre." 
 
 Look at the extent of the period through which he 
 flourished. He began in the early springtime of 
 Wordsworth, and long outlived new men like Baude- 
 laire and Poe. The various epochs of his career 
 scarcely bear upon our consideration of its product, 
 which, after his escape from the manner of Pope, 
 was of an even quality during seventy years. In this 
 he was fortunate and unfortunate. The former, be- 
 cause his early pieces were so noteworthy that, in the 
 dearth of American poetry, they at once became home 
 classics for a homely people, and one generation after 
 another learned them admiringly by heart. At this 
 5 
 
 Philistia* 
 
 "■The 
 Bard.'''' 
 
 A pro- 
 longed and 
 equable car- 
 reer. 
 
66 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 Hisfeeling 
 A Tnerican. 
 
 Emerson^ 
 nt ike Cen- 
 tury Club, 
 on Bry- 
 nnt's yotk 
 iirtkday. 
 
 time, even though composed in the latest fashion and 
 of greater merit than Bryant's, an author's pieces 
 could not obtain for him such recognition and fame. 
 But, owing to this otherwise good fortune, he worked 
 under restrictions from which he never was even meas- 
 urably freed. Before observing these, it again may be 
 noted that his poetic career had neither rise, height, 
 nor decline. He formed certain methods wholly nat- 
 ural to him in early youth, and was at once as admi- 
 rable a poet as he ever afterward became. Through- 
 out his prolonged term of- life he sang without haste 
 or effort, and always expressed himself rather than 
 the varying methods of the time. 
 
 P'rom the. first he was in sympathy with the aspect, 
 atmosphere, feeling, of his own country. His ten- 
 dency and manner were determined during the idyllic 
 period of this republic, when nature and the thoughts 
 which it suggested were themes for poets, rather than 
 the dramatic relations of man with man. His senti- 
 ment was affected by the meditative verse of Cowper 
 and Wordsworth, who rose above didacticism, or 
 made it imaginative by poetic insight. Emerson said 
 of Bryant : " This native, original, patriotic poet. I 
 say original : I have heard him charged with being of 
 a certain school. I heard it with surprise, and asked, 
 What school? For he never reminded me of Gold- 
 smith, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Moore. I found 
 him always original, — a true painter of the face of 
 this country, and of the sentiment of his own peo- 
 ple." This is, in a sense, true ; yet there can be little 
 doubt that, in most respects, Wordsworth was the 
 master of his youth. All pupils must acknowledge 
 masters at the beginning, but Murillo was Murillo 
 none the less, although he ground colors for Castillo 
 and studied with Velasquez. Bryant ground his colors 
 
NATURE'S CELEBRANT. 
 
 67 
 
 in the open air. His originality consisted in deriv- 
 ing from his studies a method natural to his own gift 
 and condition. The elder Dana puts him on record 
 as saying that " upon opening Wordsworth a thousand 
 springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and 
 the face of nature of a sudden to change into a 
 strange freshness and lif6." Certainly he was not 
 cradled into poetry by wrong, nor perturbed by the 
 wild and morbid passions of a wayward youth. We 
 can imagine him a serious and meditative lad, directed 
 by the guidance of a scholarly father, well versed in 
 the favorite poets of that day, — Pope, Thomson, Aken- 
 side, Cowper, — and at first accepting them as models ; 
 finally, obtaining for himself the clues to a true per- 
 ception of Nature, and with his soul suddenly exalted 
 by a sense of her 
 
 " Authentic tidings of invisible things ; 
 0£ ebb and flow, and ever-during power ; 
 And central peace, subsisting at the heart 
 Of endless agitation." 
 
 This sense was fostered, throughout the changing 
 year, by the landscape of the pastoral region of Mas- 
 sachusetts in which he had his growth. I have re- 
 ferred in a previous chapter to Hugo's works illus- 
 trating the conflicts by which man progresses to his 
 enfranchisement, the conflicts with Nature, Supersti- 
 tion, Tyranny, and Society. From the third of these 
 opponents our fathers fled to a new continent, choosing 
 to found a nationality, and entering upon that primeval 
 conflict with nature which to an already civilized peo- 
 ple is not without compensations. It results, like a 
 quarrel between generous lovers, in a betrothal of the 
 one to the other, and of such an alliance Bryant was 
 our celebrant. The delights of nature, and medita- 
 tions upon the universality of life and death, withdrew 
 
 Words- 
 worth's 
 pupil. 
 
 Our medi. 
 tative poet 
 of nature. 
 
68 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 Allied to 
 fur early 
 landscape 
 fainters. 
 Seep. 47. 
 
 him from the study of the individual world. Thus he 
 became a philosophic minstrel of the woods and wa- 
 ters, the foremost of American landscape-poets. In 
 the contest with primeval Nature, man signalizes his 
 victories by educating and rendering more beautiful 
 his captive ; she, in turn, gains a potent influence over 
 him, for a long while driving her rivals from his heart, 
 and compels him in his art and song to express her 
 features and her inspiration. 
 
 The first enduring American school of painting was 
 a landscape-school. We have observed the analogy 
 between Bryant's poetry and the broad, cool canvas 
 of the founders of that school, — the works of Durand, 
 Cole, Kensett, Inness, various as they may be in depth, 
 tranquillity, or power. Such a harmony exists between 
 the soil, the climate, the fauna, and the flora of an 
 isothermal zone. Bryant, who at once became emi- 
 nent in his special walk, therein excelled and has 
 outlasted all his compeers and followers. It is not 
 unlikely that he will outlast many of his latest succes- 
 sors, notwithstanding his inferiority when persistence 
 and minuteness of observation are taken into account. | 
 Others group together details, compose with enthu- 
 siasm, but are deficient in tone, sentiment, imagina- 
 tive receptivity. Tone is the one thing needful to a 
 true interpretation of nature. Thoreau felt this when 
 he wrote in his diary, " I have just heard the flicker 
 among the oaks on the hillside ushering in a new 
 dynasty. . . . Eternity could not begin with more se- 
 curity and momentousness than the Spring. The 
 Summer's eternity is reestablished by this note. All 
 sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time 
 and eternity; and when the eternity of any sight or 
 sound strikes the eye or ear, they are intoxicated with 
 delight. . . . It is not important that the poet should 
 
 Tone, and 
 Weadih of 
 treatment. 
 
HIS LIMITATIONS. 
 
 69 
 
 iay some particular thing, but that he should speak in 
 harmony with nature. The tone and pitch of his' voice 
 is the main thing." Bryant is, in one respect, pecu- 
 liarly unraodern. Thoreau, despite his own language, 
 caught and observed every detail. Our poet's learn- 
 ing was not scientific ; he lacked the minor vision 
 which, an added gift, enables Tennyson and others 
 to give such charm and variety to their work. The 
 ancients may have recognized all shades and colors, 
 but they specified fewer than we specify. Byron, 
 among moderns, painted Nature in her simple, broad 
 manifestations, — the sea, the mountains, the sky, — 
 subordinating her spirit to his own passion, as Bryant 
 allies it with his own tenderness and wisdom, but even 
 he was not her poet in the delicate, microcosmic, re- 
 cent sense. Both certainly lacked the cleverness and 
 infinite precision of the new school. Bryant regarded 
 nature in its phenomenal aspect, careless of scientific 
 realities. What he gained in this wise was the ab- 
 sence of disillusionizing fact, and a fuller understand- 
 ing of the language of nature's " visible forms " ; what 
 he lost was the wide and various range opened by the 
 endless avenues of new-found truth. 
 
 III. 
 
 Right here it is well for us to observe his limit- 
 ations as a poet, — limitations so undeniable as to 
 be a stumbling-block in the way of those who lightly 
 consider his genius, and sometimes to throw him out 
 of the sympathetic range of elegant and impartial 
 minds. His longevity was not allied with intellectual 
 quickness and fertility, but seemed almost the bio- 
 logic result of inborn slowness and deliberation. He 
 was not flexible, not facile of ear and voice. He con- 
 
 Unscien 
 
 iific 
 
 vision 
 
 BryajlVs 
 
 litnita- 
 
 tions. 
 
 ^irffness. 
 
70 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 Infertility. 
 
 DeficitnA ■ 
 inpassumf 
 hufnoTy 
 and indi- 
 viduality. 
 
 sorted with nature in its still or majestic moods, and 
 derived wisdom and refreshment from its tenderness 
 and calm. His gift, as expressed by its product, was 
 not affluent, and scarcely availed itself of his length 
 of years. [ TTj'; rptirpnr e in verse w as hahitiiaL In 
 old age, ^ets are apt to write the most, and often 
 to the least advantage, but his pen through much of 
 this period was chiefly devoted to translation. How 
 little of his own poetry he produced in seventy years, 
 — a few scant volumes ! Think of Milton, Landor, 
 Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hugo, Longfellow; of the 
 impetuous work of Scott and Byron ; of what Shel- 
 ley, who gave himself to song, accomplished before 
 -lie died, at twenty-nine. \ Bryant was thought to be 
 cold, if not severe, of temperament. The most fervent 
 social passions of his song are those of friendship, o f 
 filial and__fEaternal -kace ; his intellectual passiilBLJs 
 
 alwaysjnder rgstrajntj eyei^ffh^n_mov^^ by patriot- 
 ism, liberty, jr.e1igi ruga jEaith. There, is still less of-ac— 
 tion ajid _drarnati£_guajity. jnji Humor , the 
 
 oyerflow- Qf strength, is almost ab sent fram it, — when 
 present, sufficiently awkward ; yet it should be noted 
 that in conversation, or in the after-dinner talks and 
 speeches so frequent in his later years, his humor 
 was continuous and charming, full of kindly gossip, 
 wisdom, and mirth. He made, as we have seen, little 
 advance upon the early standard of his work. It 
 would seem as if, under the lessons of a father, " who 
 taught him the-value-jQi-CQirectness-and. compression, 
 and enabled him to distinguish between poetic en- 
 thusiasm and fustian," he__thfire— and— then matured^- 
 reached axertai-npokrt,— and- -became~set -and— station- - 
 ary. There are few notable expressions and separable 
 lines in his poetry. In his stanzaic verse, following 
 the established eighteenth-century patterns, he scarcely 
 
STYLE AND DICTION. 
 
 71 
 
 can be said to have a style of his own. Stanzas might 
 be quoted from Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper, even Watts, 
 any one of which would pass for Bryant's. A painter 
 said to me, when I referred to the mannerism of a 
 " characteristic " picture by a certain artist, " Yes, but 
 it is well that it should not look like anybody else's ; 
 it is well to be known by one's manner, and to have 
 one's manner known." W here Bryant was most im- 
 pressivej::^ that is to say, in hi s blank-verse poems — 
 he had a positive and unmistakable style, quite distinct 
 even from that of his master, Wordsworth. Finally, 
 his diction, when not confined to that Saxon English at 
 every man's use, is bald and didactic, — always senten- 
 tious, but less frequently rich and full. He had a lim- 
 ited vocabulary at command ; I should think that no 
 modern poet, approaching him in fame, has made use 
 of fewer words. His range is like that of Goldsmith, 
 restricted to the simpler phrases of our tongue. Other 
 poets, of an equally pure diction, show here and there, 
 by rare and fine words, the extent of their unused re- 
 sources, and that they voluntarily confine themselves 
 to "the strength of the positive degree." 
 
 In the face of all this, Bryant's poetry has had, and 
 will continue to have, a lasting charm for many of the 
 noblest minds. Since this is not due to his length 
 of years, — for he was not alone in that possession, 
 — nor to richness of detail and imagery, nor to his 
 having adapted himself, like Whittier, to successive 
 changes of thought and diction, how is it that his 
 genius triumphed over its confessed limitations ? To 
 understand this, his poetry must be judged as a whole, 
 and not by its affluence or flexibility ; and it also must 
 be studied in connection with its author's surround- 
 ings and career. 
 
 A sca-tii vc 
 cabulary. 
 
72 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 A child of 
 ike far 
 fast. 
 
 "TheEm- 
 
 hargo^'* 
 
 j8o8. 
 
 " Thana- 
 topsis." 
 
 Its influ- 
 ence on our 
 ioets. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The fact must be kept in sight that he was the 
 creature of our early period. Owing to an ejda;eme_ 
 precocit y, his literary career began at a date prior even 
 to that which the record of his age would suggest ; 
 he was writing and printing verse in a time when the 
 eighteenth-century notabilities on his father's shelves 
 were still the approved models of style. We find him 
 in his fourteenth year publishing The Embargo, a po- 
 litical satire, of course in rhymed pentameters, and it 
 reached a second edition. With the anticipatory in- 
 stinct of youth, he shortly passed fr2m_^sJ'*S»««^e-- 
 oi_EoEe_Jo__ttiat_fiO!i[Qrda.worth,. and quite before the 
 founder of a natural school brought the writers of Eng- 
 land into a saving consciousness of his worth. So 
 that Bryant's quick allegiance, fostered by companion- 
 ship with nature in his own region, really placed him 
 then as far ahead of his time as he seemed, half a 
 century afterward, to be behindhand. " Thanatopsis " 
 was not printed in the " North American Review " until 
 his twenty-first year, but some of it probably was com- 
 posed when he was sixteen, and it certainly was com- 
 pleted two years before its appearance. Other youths 
 have written good verse as precociously, but no one 
 else of like years ever composed a single poem that 
 had so continuous and elevating an effect upon the 
 literature of a country. Its natural tone, its solemn 
 and majestic cadences, deeply impressed writers other 
 than himself, so that " Thanatopsis," and the lyric, " To 
 a Waterfowl," and various pieces which followed it, 
 became the suggestive models of American poets until 
 the rise of Longfellow. The latter's early verse, and 
 more than one poem in the "Voices of the Night," 
 show very plainly the influence of Bryant, — that Long- 
 
POETICAL WORKS. 
 
 73 
 
 fellow was Bryant's pupil until he formed his own pe- 
 culiar style, and, in fact, we have his word for it. 
 
 The "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," 
 given to the " Review " at the same time with " Thana- 
 topsis," is of interest as the earliest specimen in blank- 
 verse of Bryant's nature-painting. His grave, didac- 
 tic poem, in Spenserian stanzas. The Ages, which was 
 delivered before the Harvard alumni, would make lit- 
 tle impression in these days, but nothing so good of 
 its kind then had been written in America, and it is 
 marked by occasional fervor and touches of imagina- 
 tion. The author's specific dignity of handling is 
 everywhere maintained. " The Ages " was printed at 
 Cambridge, together with his other poems then written, 
 in a little book of forty-four pages, now excessively 
 rare. The product of his muse grew very slowly ; he 
 was nearing middle age before there was enough of it 
 toZ^SmiJESUssiKfi- -fiditi am The London counter- 
 part of this was edited, with a laudatory preface, by 
 Washington Irving, and gave the .poet a foreign repu- 
 tation. His verse was received as the metrical sup- 
 plement of Cooper's prosej.3iid as .gflnfirmiB g livin g 's 
 praise of its imaginative and thoroughly national de- 
 
 liQeation of American landscape " in its wild, solitary, 
 and magnificent forms." Small volumes of new poems 
 appeared in 1840 and 1844, and illustrated editions of 
 Bryant's poetical works, which foreign and native art- 
 ists made attractive, were brought out in Philadelphia 
 and New York respectively. When he reached the age 
 of threescore years and ten a collection was made of 
 his later poems. This embraced not a few as sonorous 
 and imaginative as " Thanatopsis " and " A Forest 
 Hymn," and lyrics in every way equal to those of his 
 youthful prime ; yet, if I remember rightly, there was 
 little sale for it, and the chief profit which the poet and 
 
 "The 
 Ages'''': 
 readhefore 
 the *. B. K. 
 0/ Har- 
 vard, A ug. 
 30, 182 1. 
 
 " Poems,^^ 
 
 182 1. 
 
 '■'Poems," 
 1832. 
 
 " The 
 Fountain, 
 and Other 
 Poe-nts^'' 
 1842. 
 
 "The 
 White- 
 footed 
 Deer^^ eic^ 
 1844. 
 
 Illustrated 
 Editions, 
 1847, 1858. 
 
 " Thirty 
 Poetns," 
 1864. 
 
74 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 No change 
 in style. 
 
 \/ 
 
 Thepoefs 
 life midoc- 
 cupations. 
 
 Distaste 
 (or the 
 law. 
 
 yournal- 
 istn. 
 
 his publishers received from his metrical works came 
 through new editions, some of which were elaborately 
 illustrated, that were issued when his conspicuousness 
 as a personaye, as a striking figure at all civic and lit- 
 erary gatherings of note, increased with his increasing 
 years. T'^^^ ^Thirty Poems ^ in fact, displayed the sam e 
 inflpYJ^hlg_rpj|fj- irtion_ t£L-.aji-earJjLJcey, -nowjjiiit^ 
 popular accord ; not a particle of concession, — scarcely 
 any consciousness of the radical changes, the advance 
 in diction, imagery, variety of motive, and rhythm, ef- 
 fected by successive generations. 
 
 All this indicated a rigid and seW-c^nt^tied njturej_ 
 but his Jong ,,aJt«orBtioji_in_the_ practical affairs of life 
 must be taken^ injp^ccouijj;,^ As a youth, with slender 
 means, he started out to make a living ; first, as a law- 
 yer in Berkshire County. After nine years at the bar, 
 he threw up his profession, in view of chances offered 
 by a growing literary reputation, and somewhat out of 
 temper with the chicanery which even then seemed in- 
 separable from the practice of the law, and which in 
 any form was repugnant to his life-long and Roman 
 sense of justice. Yet in the very traits we are observ- 
 ing — in diffident reserve, apparent coldness, real 
 warmth of feeling and personal tenderness vouched 
 for by those who knew him best, respect for abstract 
 truth and right, wrath vehemently aroused by public 
 and private wrongs — he was not unlike the great ad- 
 vocate, Charles O'Conor, who nevertheless devoted his 
 life to enforcing the law's original claim to the perfec- 
 tion of reason and the majesty of power without taint. 
 Bryant came to New York and entered upon journal- 
 ism as the editor of a literary magazine, but soon 
 found himself connected with the daily newspaper of 
 which he ultimately became the chief proprietor and ea- 
 itor, and so remained until his dying day. During the 
 
NOT DEVOTED TO SONG. 
 
 75 
 
 early portion of this town-life he took an active part, 
 that of a leader, in what there was of literary effort 
 and production, — associated with Dana, Halleck, 
 Drake, Verplanck, Sands, young Willis, and other 
 poets and wits of the time. But he became more en- 
 grossed in political and economic journalism, seldom 
 yielding to the lyrical impulse, and when in age he 
 again found leisure and desire for song, his voice had 
 grown somewhat alien to modern ears, although there 
 is no sign that he himself perceived it. I am speak- 
 ing of his poetry: at intervals he wrote books of 
 travels, made up chiefly of letters to the " Evening 
 Post,'' besides many essays, addresses, orations, which 
 were always clear and adequate, but rarely displaying 
 anything like genius, or striking in their effect. 
 
 It is quite plain that hg did- .rot ■gjjm-hi.mself-Jn 
 poetry, but adde^jpoetry to his ordinary life_and_j3c- 
 CjipatiMT "Tht^jeverse of this, only,, ,can_.make,.Jhe 
 greatest pogJu,„_His lack of devotion to a jealous mis- 
 tress was the fault of his time, and of circumstances 
 which decided his course in life. To him the parting 
 of the ways came early ; and what was there in our 
 literary atmosphere and opportunities, sixty years ago, 
 to make poetry the vocation of any thorough-trained, 
 aspiring, and resolute man ? The nation called for 
 workers, journalists, practical teachers. If, after ac- 
 complishing their daily tasks, they found time to sing 
 a song, it thanked them, and did little more. Poetry 
 was the surplusage of Bryant's labors, or, more likely, 
 their restoring complement In all likelihood his med- 
 itations would not have been expressed in song but 
 for the influence of those early readings, under a dis- 
 cerning father's care. Otherwise, though he <ibuld not 
 have failed to become a writer, as a poet he might have 
 been one of the mute oracles whose lot is mourned by 
 Wordsworth : — 
 
 Absorp- 
 tion in this 
 profession. 
 
 " Letters 
 
 of a Trav' 
 
 eller^^ awi 
 
 similar 
 
 prose 
 
 ivorksy 
 
 1850-69. 
 
 " Orations 
 and Ad- 
 dresses y''^ 
 1873; and 
 see his 
 " Life and 
 Works;'' 
 byGod- 
 wzH| 18S3. 
 
 Poetry lit" 
 
 tie more 
 than his 
 avocation. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " ; 
 //. 81, 82. 
 
76 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 A hsolute 
 sincerity. 
 
 Effect of 
 early stud- 
 ies on lit- 
 erary dic- 
 tion. 
 
 — " men endowed with highest gifts, 
 The vision and the faculty divine ; 
 Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, 
 Which, in the docile season of their youth, 
 It was denied them to acquire." 
 
 But read " The Evening Wind," see him in his most 
 spontaneous mood, and you feel that, once having 
 learned the art of verse, the poet within him thereafter 
 must break out from time to time. He did not hoard 
 his reputation. But his passion and tenderness did 
 not so readily force him to metrical expression as a 
 feebler amount of either has forced many a weak but 
 more facile singer trained in a less rude and inartistic 
 age. 
 
 On the other hand, he never, by any chance, affected 
 passion or set himself to artificial song. He had the 
 triple gift of Athene, " self-reverence, self-knowledge, 
 self-control." He was incapable of pretending to rap- 
 ture that he did not feel, and this places him far above 
 a host of those who, without knowing it, hunt for emo- 
 tions and make poetry little better than a trade. As 
 for his diction, he began when there was no Feast of 
 Pentecost with its gift of tongues. I think that the 
 available portion of a poet's vocabulary is that which 
 he acquires in youth, during his formative period. It 
 is easier for an adult to learn a foreign language than 
 to enlarge greatly his native range of words, and have 
 them at every-day command. Bryant's early reading 
 was before the great revival which brought into use the 
 romance-words of Chaucer, Spenser, and the Eliza- 
 bethan age. It was derived from the poorest, if the 
 smoothest, English period — that which began with 
 Pope and ended with Cowper. The rich advantage 
 of a modern equipment is visible in Tennyson, who 
 had Keats and Shelley for his predecessors ; not to 
 
DORIC SIMPLICITY. 
 
 n 
 
 consider Swinburne, who, above his supernatural gifts 
 of rhythm and language, owes much to youthful explo- 
 rations in classic and Continental tongues. No doubt 
 Bryant's models confirmed his natural restrictions of 
 speech. But even this narrow verbal range has made 
 his poetry strong and pure ; and now, when expression 
 has been carried to its extreme, it is an occasional re- 
 lief to recur to the clearness, to the exact appreciation 
 of words, discoverable in every portion of his verse 
 and prose. It is like a return from a florid renaissance 
 to the antique ; and indeed there was something Doric 
 in Bryant's nature. His diction, like his thought, often 
 refreshes us as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
 land. He refused to depart from what seemed to him 
 the natural order of English verse, — that order which 
 comes to the lips of childhood, and is not foreign to 
 any life or age. The thought was like the measure, 
 that which was old with the fathers and is young in 
 our own time, the pure philosophy of nature's lessons. 
 Give his poems a study, and their simplicity is their 
 charm. How easy it seems to write those natural 
 lines ! Yet it is harder than to catch a hundred fan- 
 tastic touches of word-painting and dexterous sound.^ 
 He never was obscure, because he dared not and would 
 not go beyond his proper sight and knowledge, and 
 this was the safeguard of his poetry, his prose, and his 
 almost blameless life. ~" 
 
 Verse, to Bryant, was the outflow of his deepest 
 emotions ; a severe taste and discreet temperament 
 made him avoid the study of decoration. Thus he was 
 always direct and intelligible, and appealed to the com- 
 mon people as strongly as to the select few. I have 
 compared him to our stately men of an older time. 
 Among others Daniel Webster might be mentioned as 
 one whose mood and rhetoric are in keeping with the 
 
 A pure 
 and sitnp^i 
 
 style. 
 
 Webster 
 and Bry- 
 ant. 
 
78 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 BryanVs 
 favorite 
 measures. 
 
 The iutftf 
 iic guai- 
 
 poetry of Bryant. Like Webster, our poet always _se:, 
 lectedjhe leading. i5vpressi^;£-l]lcmdlt~aIldJ2aJ&h,e4Jbe. 
 rest_ aside. This he put in with a firm and glowing 
 touch. Many have thought the works of both the 
 statesman and the poet conventional, but the adjective 
 might be brought to apply to all simple and essential 
 truth and diction. Adopting Arnold's distinction, we 
 see that Bryant's simplicity was not simplesse, but 
 simplicitk. Everett made a good presentation of its 
 strongest claim when he said that poetry, at its best, is 
 " easily intelligible, touching the finest chords of taste 
 and feeling, but never striving at effect. This is the 
 highest merit in every department of literature, and 
 in poetry it is well called inspiration. Surprise, con- 
 ceit, strange combinations of imagery and expression, 
 may be successfully managed, but it is merit of an 
 inferior kind. The beautiful, pathetic, and sublime 
 are always simple and natural, and marked by a cer- 
 tain serene unconsciousness of effort." "This," he 
 added, " is the character of Mr. Bryant's poetry." 
 
 Let us again, then, observe its forms and themes, 
 and discover clues to the quality of the genius which 
 idealized them. Bryant's chosefa measures were few 
 and simple. Two were special _fay"ritps, miasi- fre- 
 quently used for his picturesof nature_aGiJbis medi- 
 tations"'on"the soul of things, and in their use he was 
 a mgsteiu—- 
 
 One was the iambic quatrain, in octosyllabic verse, 
 of which the familiar stanza, " Truth crushed to earth 
 will rise again," may be recalled as a specimen. Many 
 of his best modern pieces are composed in this meas- 
 ure, so evenly and firmly that the slightest change 
 
HIS BLANK-VERSE. 
 
 79 
 
 would mar their sound and flow. " A Day Dream," 
 written in the poet's old age, is perfect of its kind, 
 and may rank almost with Collins's nonpareil, "To 
 fair Fidele's Grassy Tomb." Witness such stanzas as 
 these : — 
 
 I sat and watched the eternal flow 
 
 Of those smooth billows toward thfe shore, 
 
 While quivering lines of light below 
 Ran with them on the ocean floor." 
 
 " Then moved their coral lips ; a strain 
 Low, sweet and sorrowful, I heard, 
 As if the murmurs of the main 
 
 Were shaped to syllable and word." 
 
 His variations upon the iambic quatrain, as in the 
 celebrated poems, " To a Waterfowl " and " The Past," 
 are equally successful. The second of the forms re- 
 ferred to is that blank-verse in which his supremacy 
 always was recogruzeclr Among the distinct phases 
 of our grandest English measure that have been ob- 
 served in literature, Bryant's may be classed with the 
 Reflective, of which Wordsworth, succeeding the di- 
 dacticians, held unquestioned control, but from the 
 outset it was marked by a quality plainly his own. 
 The essence of its cadence, pauses, rhythm, should be 
 termed American, and it is the best ever written in the 
 New World. Blank-verse is the easiest and the most 
 difficult of all measures ; the poorest in poor hands ; 
 the finest when written by a true poet. Whoever 
 essays it is a poet disrobed ; he must rely upon his 
 natural gifts ; his defects cannot be hidden. In this 
 measure Bryant was at his height, and he owes to it the 
 most enduring portion of his fame. However narrow 
 his range, we must own that he was first in the first. 
 He reached the upper air at once in " Thanatopsis," 
 and again and again, though none too frequently, he 
 
 His blank* 
 verse. 
 
8o 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 mtnic se- 
 ries. 
 
 Lofty co?> 
 iempUUive 
 ^oems. 
 
 renewed his flights, and, like his own waterfowl, pur- 
 sued his "solitary way." 
 
 The finest and most sustained of his poems of na- 
 ture are those written in blank-verse. At intervals so 
 rare throughout his life as to resemble the seven-year 
 harvests, or the occasional wave that overtops the rest, 
 he composed a series of those pieces which now form 
 a unique panorama of nature's aspects, moving to the 
 music of lofty thoughts and melodious words. Such 
 are " A Winter Piece," the " Inscription for the En- 
 trance to a Woo~d7' " A Forest JHymn," " glimmer 
 Wind," "The Prairies," "The Fountain," " A Hymn 
 of the Sea," ''A Rain-Dream " ; also a few written 
 late in life, showing that the eye of the author of 
 " Thanatopsis " had not been dimmed, nor was his 
 natural force abated : these are " The Constellations," 
 "The River, by Night," and "Among the Trees." 
 In all the treatment is large and ennobling, and dis- 
 tinctly marks each as Bryant's. The method, that of 
 invocation, somewhat resembles the manner of Col- 
 eridge's Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. When in a 
 less enraptured strain, they exhibit repose, feeling, wise 
 and reverent thought. 
 
 In the same eloquent verse, and with like caesura! 
 pauses and inflections, we find his more purely medi- 
 tative. poems, upon an equal or still higher plane 
 of feeling, — " Thanatopsis," the " Hymn to. Death," 
 "Earth," "An Evening Revery," "The Antiquity of 
 Fjreedpm," and one of his latest and longest, "The 
 Flood of Years." Yet, in both his reflective verse 
 and that devoted to nature, he often employed lyrical 
 measures with equal excellence ; as in the breezy, 
 exquisite poem on "Life," "The Battle Field," "The 
 Future Life," and " The Conqueror's Grave," — the 
 latter one of his most elevating pieces. Especially 
 
AN ELEMENTAL L\f AGINATION. 
 
 8i 
 
 in his lyrics he seemed like a wind-harp yielding ten- 
 der music in response to every suggestion of the great 
 Mother whom he loved. Such poems as "June," 
 "The Death of the Flowers," and "The Evening 
 Wind " show this, and also indicate the limits within 
 which his song was spontaneous. Each is the gen- 
 uine expression of a personal mood, and has by this 
 merit taken its place in metrical literature. 
 
 At last, then, we are brought to a recognition of the 
 power in Br^anfs_v erse w hich, has g iven, him ia.,statiD.n 
 'above~thatwhich he could hope to win by its amount 
 or range. I ^is the elemental quality g f hi.s .song . Like 
 the bards of old, his spirit delights in fire, air, earth, 
 and water, — the apparent structures of the starry 
 heavens, the mountain recesses, and the vasty deep. 
 These he apostrophizes, but over them and within them 
 he discerns and bows the knee to the omniscience of 
 a protecting Father, a creative God. Poets, eminent 
 in this wise, have been gifted always with imagination. 
 The verse of Bryant often is full of high imaginings. 
 Select any portion of " Thanatopsis " : — 
 
 " Pierce the Barcan wilderness, 
 Or lose thyself in the continuous woods 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
 Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there ! " 
 
 or this, from " The Prairies " ; 
 
 'The bee 
 
 Fills the savannas with his murmurings, 
 And hides his sweets, as in the golden age. 
 Within the hollow oak. I listen long 
 To his domestic hum, and think I hear 
 The sound of that advancing multitude 
 Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground 
 Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice 
 Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn 
 6 
 
 A bard of 
 
 the ele- 
 ments. 
 
 Imagina^ 
 
 tion. 
 
82 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 His 
 
 ^ hand on 
 
 Nature^s 
 
 keys," 
 
 Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds 
 Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain 
 Over the dark-brown furrows. All at once 
 A fresher wind sweeps by and breaks my dream> 
 And I am in the wilderness alone." 
 
 Read the entire poem of " Earth." 
 zas as this, from "The Past": — 
 
 Take such stan 
 
 "Far in thy realm withdrawn 
 Old empires sit in suUenness and gloom, 
 
 And glorious ages gone 
 Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb " ; 
 
 such phrases as, 
 
 " Old Ocean's gray atid melancholy waste " ; 
 
 or, from "A Rain-Dream," an impersonation of 
 
 "the Wind of night, 
 A lonely wanderer between earth and cloud, 
 In the black shadow and the chilly mist. 
 Along the streaming mountain-side, and through 
 The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields, 
 Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes 
 The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets 
 A welcome or a friend, and still goes on 
 In darkness." 
 
 Take passages like these, — and they are not infre- 
 quent in Bryant's poetry, — make allowance for the 
 law by which any real poet's work is sure to grow 
 upon us in close examination, and we still are con- 
 fronted with an " elemental " imagination often highei 
 than that of more productive poets. Modern singers 
 excel in richness of phrase, redundant imagery, elab- 
 orate word-painting ; but every period has its fore- 
 runners and masters, and our rising men must ac- 
 knowledge Bryant as a laurelled' master of the early 
 American School. He seldom touched the keys, yet 
 they gave out an organ tone. 
 
TRANSLATION OF HOMER. 
 
 83 
 
 Indeed, when he essayed piano-music, and was in 
 a light or fanciful mood, he was unable to vie with 
 sprightlier and defter hands. His lyricSj, in swift and 
 simple in,ea§ures, had_ a ringing quality, noticeable in 
 the " Song q£. ,MariQji,l§„Msn," the best of them, and in 
 "The Hunter of the Prairies." A pleasant surprise 
 awaits us in certain later pieces, such as " The Plant- 
 ing of the Apple-Tree," the delicate " Snow-Shower," 
 and " :^ob.exLM-Lincflln^ — so full of bird-music and 
 fancy. Usually^ it . was with a p.na.i,r n f u nco.uthness and 
 doubtjhat Jig ventured, b£yj3M.estaJ]iIish£d...prM 
 as if , he jKexfe J«..SS!ajagSJSaiSfS»aii^ -touch 
 
 firm landj_^ but Jiyigflt,Jia^,ae]ilciiii™Jjeiiturfidw As he 
 
 g rew older, beyond th e asper ities of life, he became 
 lessjbrooding, sad, and grave. H is Fancy, what ther e 
 
 was ot it, caroS-^^ in. hi? later.. years, and suggested two 
 of his longest pieces, " Sella-''- and " The Little People 
 o£i-illS~Snow," tales of folk-lore, in which his lighter 
 and more graceful handling of blank-verse may be 
 studied without fatigue. 
 
 VI. 
 
 A SHREWD confidence in his own mental and bodily 
 strength was justified by the execution, in his old age, 
 of that monumental task, — a full translation of the 
 epics of Homer. Such labor undoubtedly is adapted 
 to the afternoon of life, when creative energy is spent 
 and the discretionary faculties are trained to their ex- 
 treme ; still, the completed evidence of Bryant's vigor, 
 even at life's sunset, is hardly less notable than Lan- 
 der's retention of ideality to his ninetieth year. 
 
 After the manner of De Smectute, one well might 
 recommend this special labor to a poet of Bryant's 
 cast, as the solace of his advancing age. There was 
 
 Slight lyr- 
 ical/acui- 
 ty. 
 
 Fancy, 
 
 His trans' 
 
 lation of 
 
 Homer : 
 
 "■The 
 
 Iliad," 
 
 1870; 
 
 ''The 
 
 Odyssey,^'* 
 
 1871. 
 
 A congen 
 ial task. 
 
84 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 fjowfar 
 BryanVs 
 work may 
 be com- 
 mended. 
 
 The de- 
 scriptive 
 passages. 
 
 Od. v., 
 
 something in the old bard himself which his admirers 
 called Homeric ; and there were these traits, at least, 
 common to the genius of the epics and that of their 
 translator, — a p'"',"?'tiYfi '"""y "^ rpgarHing jtlliflgs, a 
 stately .„ulleiance, a visian, , nl,F.aiL,.aad,._§Mltg.d. Jo -Jjie 
 the me. The best characteristics of Bryant's The Iliad 
 and The Odyssey are : (i), general, though not invaria- 
 ble, fidelity to the text, as compared with former ver- 
 sions by poets of equal rank ; (2), simplicity of phrase 
 and style ; (3), approximate transfusion of the heroic 
 spirit ; (4), a purity of language that pFeases a sensible 
 reader. It is not likely that Bryant possessed a schol- 
 ar's mastery of even the familiar Ionic Greek, but the 
 text of Homer long has been substantially agreed upon 
 by European editors, there are special lexicons devoted 
 to it, and it is faithfully rendered in German and Eng- 
 lish translations : so that the poet could have little 
 trouble in adjusting it to his metrical needs. His 
 choice of words is meagre, and so — in a modern sense 
 — was that of Homer ; there is no lack of minstrels, 
 nowadays, who ransack their vocabularies to fill our 
 jaded ears with " words, words, words." As a pre- 
 sentment of standard English the value of these trans- 
 lations is beyond serious cavil. When they are com- 
 pared with the most faithful and poetic blank-verse 
 rendering which preceded them, the work of Cowper, 
 they show an advance in both accuracy and poetic 
 quality. Lord Derby's contemporaneous version is 
 dull and inferior. Bryant naturally handled to best 
 advantage his descriptive passages, — the verses in the 
 Fifth Odyssey, which narrate the visit of Hermes to 
 Calypso, furnishing a case in point. His rendering of 
 these is more literal than the favorite transcript by 
 Leigh Hunt, and excels all others in ease and choice 
 of language. The following extract from another pas- 
 
IDIOMATIC STYLE. 
 
 85 
 
 sage will show how well he occasionally substitutes, for 
 the Greek color and rising harmony, the gloom and 
 vigor of our Saxon tongue : — 
 
 " The steady wind 
 Swelled out the canvas in the midst ; the ship 
 Moved on, the dark sea roaring round her keel, 
 As swiftly through the waves she cleft her way. 
 And when the rigging of that swift black ship 
 Was firmly in its place, they filled their cups 
 With wine, and to the ever-living gods 
 Poured out libations, most of all to one, 
 Jove's blue-eye'd daughter. Thus through all that night 
 And all the ensuing morn they held their way." 
 
 Very often, in fact, where the original text is high- 
 sounding and polysyllabic, he obtains his English 
 effect by reliance upon the strength of monosyllabic 
 words : — 
 
 " For his is the black doom of death, ordained 
 By the great gods." 
 
 " Hear me yet more : 
 When she shall smite thee with her wand, draw forth 
 Thy good sword from thy thigh and rush at her 
 As if to take her life, and she will crouch 
 In fear." 
 
 " I hate 
 To tell again a tale once fully told." 
 
 But occasionally he uses to advantage the Latinism 
 peculiar to his reflective poems. Such lines as Shake- 
 speare's 
 
 " The multitudinous seas incarnadine " 
 
 show by what process the twin forces of our language 
 are fully brought in play. Verses of this sort, formed 
 by the juxtaposition of the numerous Greek particles 
 with ringing derivative and compound words, make up 
 a good deal of the Homeric song. Bryant accordingly 
 varied his translation with lines which remind us of 
 " Thanatopsis " or "A Forest Hymn": — 
 
 Od. II. 
 
 427-434- 
 
 Style and 
 langttage. 
 
86 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 The Meas- 
 ure chosen 
 for this 
 transla- 
 tion. 
 
 "The innumerable nations of the dead." 
 
 "That strength and these unconquerable hands." 
 
 "And downward plunged the unmanageable rock." 
 
 His paraphrases of the Greek idioms are noticeable for 
 English idiomatic purity, so much so that the idea of 
 a translation frequently absents itself from the reader's 
 mind. While in one respect this is the perfection of 
 such work, in another it is the loss of that charm per- 
 taining to the sense of all rare things which are foreign 
 to our own mode and period. His restraint, also, is 
 carried to the verge of sterility by the repetition of 
 certain adjectives as the equivalents of Greek words 
 varying among themselves. The words " glorious " 
 and " sagacious," for example, not uncommon in this 
 translation, do not always represent the same, or even 
 synonymous, expressions in the original text. But 
 some of his epithets and renderings, such as "the 
 large-souled Ulysses," " the unfruitful sea," " passed 
 into the Underworld," and his retention of Cowper's 
 paraphrase of yipw/ oAios, " the Ancient of the Deep," 
 give a more elevated and poetical tone to the work. 
 It must be acknowledged that these translations, ex- 
 ecuted without haste or rest during eight years of an 
 old man's life, are not without dignity and value. The 
 question is debatable whether there was any real need 
 of a new rendering of Homer into our rhymeless iam- 
 bic pentameter. If so, did Mr. Bryant's labors fill the 
 void ? It was proper and natural that he should make 
 blank-verse the vehicle for his use, as the one above 
 all others in which he was sure to reach a measure 
 of success. And had Tennyson undertaken the full 
 translation of Homer, after the manner indicated by 
 that magnificent early production, the " Morte d' Ar- 
 thur," something very fine would have been the re^ 
 
THE VERSE EMPLOYED. 
 
 87 
 
 suit. Bryant's verse is noticeably difEerent from that 
 of Tennyson. Only in an occasional passage, like the 
 following, the one reminds us of the other : — 
 
 " The formidable baldric, on whose band 
 Of gold were sculptured marvels, — forms of bears. 
 Wild boars, grim lions, battles, skirmishings, 
 And death by wounds, and slaughter." 
 
 Yet in every blank -verse rendering there is an in- 
 efScacy, — least felt, perhaps, in those elevated pas- 
 sages, the fiery glow of which for a time lifts us 
 above contemplation of the translator's art. In the 
 more mechanical portions blank -verse cannot of it- 
 self, by the music and flexibility of its structure, have 
 the converse effect of holding us above the level of 
 the theme. Here the deficiency is painful ; and for 
 this reason, amongst others, that in Greek the names 
 of the most common objects are imposing and me- 
 lodious. Those lines whose poverty of thought is 
 greatest, upborne by the long roll of the hexameter, 
 have a quality as aristocratic as the grace and dig- 
 nity of a Spanish beggar. A translator discovers the 
 weakness of blank -verse in those intercalary lines 
 which are such a feature in Homer, and which consti- 
 tute a kind of refrain, affording rest at intervals along 
 the torrent of the song. In the best lyric and epic 
 poetry of all nations a disdain of minor changes is 
 observable; but Bryant, seeing that blank-verse does 
 little honor to a purely mechanical office, often varied 
 his translations of such lines, instead of following 
 the Homeric method of recurrence to one chosen 
 form. The very directness of his syntax, leading 
 to the rejection, even, of such inversions as Tenny- 
 son's 
 
 •' To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath " 
 
 Imffi- 
 ca^y of 
 hlank- 
 
 Prosaic 
 lapses. 
 
88 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 T^ack of 
 movement. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets": 
 |). i66. 
 
 made it almost prosaic in this respect. Such lines 
 
 as 
 
 " Teleraachus, the prudent, thus rejoined " 
 
 ■■ And then discreet Telemachus replied " 
 
 " Ulysses, the sagacious, answered her " 
 
 are tame substitutes for the courtly and sonorous in- 
 terludes, 
 
 T^y 5' ad TT]\€fLaxos -K^irvviievos avriov tjCSa • 
 
 Tiiv S" airaneiPiiievos ■7rpoiT4<j>ri vo\ifniTis 'OSuaaeis • 
 
 We feel still more the shortcomings of blank-verse in 
 the paraphrases of those resonant dactylic lines, which 
 make up so large a portion of the Iliad and Odys- 
 sey, and give splendor to the movement of whole 
 cantos. We might cite innumerable examples, like 
 the following : — 
 
 ''Hfios S' Tjpiyevita. tpdvTj ^oSoSaHrvXos *H£»ts. 
 " But when the Morn, 
 
 The rosy-fingered child of Dawn, looked forth." 
 
 Ai/rap e'lrel iroTapZio kIttcp fi6ov 'ClKeavoto 
 NijvSj airh 5' 'Uero Kvfia 8a\ii(r(T7js evpvTrSpoto. 
 
 " Now when our bark had left Oceanus 
 And entered the great deep." 
 
 All this points to the one deficiency in a blank- 
 verse translation, and this, unquestionably, relates to 
 the movement. Can a version in our slow and stately 
 iambics, which are perfectly adequate to represent 
 the dialogue of the Greek dramas, approximate to 
 the rhythmic effect of a measure which originally was 
 chanted or intoned? The rush of epic song has 
 been caught by Chapman, in his " Iliads," and to 
 some extent by Pope and others, at the expense of 
 matter and style. But only in one instance, that I 
 now recall, has modern blank-verse attained to any- 
 thing like the Homeric swiftness. I refer to the 
 
'ENGLISH hexameter: 
 
 89 
 
 tournament scene, which closes the fifth book of 
 " The Princess." Even the splendid movement of 
 this passage is unrestful, and like the fierce spurt 
 of a racer that can win by a dash, but has not the 
 bottom needed for a three-mile heat. 
 
 To the present date I know of no metrical version 
 of Greek hexameter text, epic or idyllic (unless in 
 brief experiments like one or two of Dean Haw- 
 trey's), that can vie in beauty and fidelity with the 
 prose rendering of Homer by Butcher and Lang, and 
 with Mr. Lang's exquisite translation of Theocritus, 
 Bion, and Moschus. 
 
 There are two of our metrical forms in which, I 
 think, the Homeric rhythmus may be more nearly 
 approached than by the means of blank-verse. A 
 good objection has been made to the rhymed heroic 
 measure, as used by Pope (and by Dryden in his 
 Virgil), that it disturbs the force of the original by 
 connecting thoughts not meant to be connected ; that 
 it causes a " balancing of expression in the two lines 
 of which it consists, which is wholly foreign to the 
 Homeric style." Professor Hadley suggested that this 
 might be obviated by a return to the measure as writ- 
 ten by Chaucer, not pausing too often at the rhymes, 
 but frequently running the sentences over, with the 
 csesura varied as in blank-verse. This usage, in fact, 
 was revived by Keats and Leigh Hunt, and is nota- 
 ble in William Morris's flowing poetry, to which 
 Hadley referred for illustration. Chapman translated 
 the Odyssey upon this plan, but in a slovenly fashion, 
 not to be compared with his other Homeric work. 
 There is room, perhaps, for a new translation of 
 Homer into the rhymed Chaucerian verse. The mer- 
 its of the so-called " English hexameter " were long 
 ago so clearly set forth by Mr. Arnold, the main 
 
 Recent 
 prose 
 transla- 
 tions. 
 
 A vailabU 
 forms of 
 verse. 
 
 The 
 
 rhymed 
 
 iambic 
 
 fientamC' 
 
 ter. 
 
 The 
 
 " English 
 hexame- 
 ter.'' 
 
90 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 See " No. 
 Am. Rev." 
 CXII. 
 328. 
 
 Cp. ''Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets": 
 p. 251- 
 
 See Chaf. 
 VI. 
 
 points of whose argument seem to me irrefutable, that 
 I shall write at no great length upon it here. Pro- 
 fessor C. T. Lewis, in his brilliant review of Bry- 
 ant's Homer, after justly stating that our hexameter 
 verse could not be written classically, says that it is 
 peculiar among English metres, because it is so very 
 like prose. It is less metrical than any form of Eng- 
 lish verse. " Blank-verse," he adds, " can stoop to the 
 simplest speech without approaching prose." True, 
 but it does not always do so. Run together the 
 opening lines of Bryant's Odyssey, which in Greek 
 are made highly poetical by the structure and sound, 
 and see if they have not a prosaic effect : — 
 
 " Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man who, 
 having overthrown the sacred town of Ilium, wan- 
 dered far and visited the capitals of many nations, 
 learned the customs of their dwellers, and endured 
 great suffering on the deep.'' 
 
 Now where, in Mr. Kingsley's " Andromeda," — 
 a fair specimen of English hexameter, with liquid 
 cadences throughout, — can five lines be made to 
 read like that ? In a future chapter, when we come 
 to Longfellow's " Evangeline," it may be worth while 
 to consider the features that this measure is likely to 
 assume. No master has brought it to the perfection 
 which attracts both scholars and laymen ; yet I am 
 confident that we shall have an English verse of six 
 feet, with the billowy roll of the classical hexameter, 
 and that by its form it will be suited to the repro- 
 duction of Homer, line for line. If Bayard Taylor, 
 who, by argument and practice, demonstrated the 
 value of Form to the translator's work, could reach 
 so near his mark in rendering the hundred metres 
 of " Faust," surely there is encouragement for a 
 future attempt to represent more closely the one de- 
 
A DEFENDER OF LIBERTY. 
 
 91 
 
 fiant measure of heroic song. To the point made 
 that English is too consonantal for such representa- 
 tion, we reply that it is no more consonantal in hex- 
 ameter than in pentameter verse, and that, of the two 
 kinds, the former is nearer to the verse of Homer. 
 This objection would apply more forcibly to the still 
 harsher German ; yet we conceive Voss's Iliad to have 
 given German readers a truer idea of the original 
 than any English translation has conveyed to our- 
 selves. 
 
 In a review of Bryant's Odyssey, ab the date of its 
 completion, I criticised his employment of those Ro- 
 man names by which the deities of Grecian mythol- 
 ogy have been familiarly known. It was a failure to 
 realize the advances in taste and learning even then 
 nearly popularized by Grote, Tennyson, the Brownings, 
 Swinburne, and by younger poets and scholars with- 
 out end. If Lord Derby in England, and Mr. Bryant 
 in America, had adopted the true nomenclature, the 
 transition speedily would have been complete. But 
 the order of our poet's mind, even in its epic mood, 
 was slow and stately, Latin rather than Grecian. 
 Hence, as a translator from the Spanish he was suc- 
 cessful, reproducing the calm and royal quality of 
 Castilian song. 
 
 VII. 
 
 American poets have been true to their own land 
 in expressing its innate freedom, patriotism, aspiring 
 resolve. Throughout Bryant's life his scattered poems 
 upon political events, at home and abroad, have been 
 consecrated to freedom and its devotees. He breathed 
 a spirit of independence with the wind of his native 
 hills. The country is the open wild of liberty. All 
 our poets of nature are poets of human rights. Should 
 
 See "The 
 Atlantic 
 Monthly ^^^ 
 May, 1872. 
 
 Poets of 
 freedottu 
 
92 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 Bryant^s 
 ^oem on 
 the EmatP' 
 cipcUion. 
 
 America ever become monarchical it will be due to 
 the influence of cities and those bred in them. Bry- 
 ant's regard for law, for the inheritance of just polit- 
 ical and social systems, was unquestionable. He might 
 have been a constitutionalist in France ; here, though 
 bred a Federalist, he was sure to oppose undue cen- 
 tralization. After all, he was of no party further than 
 he conceived it to be right. Witness his contest with 
 slavery and his desertion of a Democracy which finally, 
 he thought, belied its name. That he did not, with 
 Lowell and Whittier, summon his muse to oppose the 
 greatest wrong of our history was owing to two causes : 
 First, it was his lyrical habit to observe and idealize 
 general principles, the abstract rather than the con- 
 crete. Whittier's poems are alive with incident, and 
 burn with personal feeling. Once, only, Bryant wrote 
 a mighty poem on Slavery : when it had received its 
 death-blow, when the struggle ended and the right pre- 
 vailed. Jehovah had conquered, His children were 
 free, and Bryant raised a chant like that of Miriam, — - 
 
 "O thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years, 
 Didst hold thy millions fettered ; 
 
 " Go, now, accursed of God, and take thy place 
 With hateful memories of the elder time ! 
 
 " Lo ! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom 
 Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room." 
 
 This swelling poem, " T]if» nc-ati^ nf gjl^yf^r^r," was 
 not needed to assure us that the cause of freedom 
 touched his heart. For, secondly, his true counterpart 
 to Whittier's work was to be found in the vigorous 
 antislavery assaults he made for years jn the journal 
 of which he died the editor, lliere it waa^ that "He 
 exercised, his influence and mental po-wer upon "the 
 
THE CLOSING SCENE. 
 
 93 
 
 rebuke of fiaud^ aa(L-Qppressioii of whatever clime or 
 race." 
 
 His prose labors were an outlet, constantly afforded 
 in his journalism, through which much of that energy 
 escaped which otherwise would have varied the mo- 
 tives and increased the body of his song. On the 
 whole, though he was without a philologist's equipment, 
 there were few better writers of simple, nervous Eng- 
 lish. He made it for half a century the instrument of 
 his every-day thought and purpose ; as a leader-writer, 
 a traveller and correspondent, an essayist and orator, 
 a political disputant. His polemic vigor and acerbity 
 were worked off in his middle-life editorials, and in de- 
 fence of what he thought to be right. There he was, 
 indeed, unyielding, and other pens recall the traditions 
 of his political controversies. He never confused the 
 distinct provinces of prose and verse. Refer to any- 
 thing written by him, of the former kind, and you find 
 plainness, well-constructed syntax, free from any clieap 
 gloss of rhetoric or the "jingle of an effeminate 
 rhythm." 
 
 As in written prose and verse, so in speech and 
 public offices. The long series of addresses on civic 
 occasions closed with one which brought him to his 
 death. Mastering his work to the very end, it was his 
 lot at last to bow, as became a poet of Nature, be- 
 fore her own life-nurturing, life-destroying forces^ and 
 thus submit to her kindest universal law. The ques- 
 tion of a passage in "An Evening Revery" was an- 
 swered, and the prophecy fulfilled : — 
 
 " O thou great Movement o£ the Universe, 
 Or Change, or Flight of Time — for ye are one ! 
 That bearest, silently, this visible scene 
 Into night's shadow and the streaming rays 
 Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me ? 
 
 His prose 
 labors. 
 
 W. C. B. 
 died in 
 NewYorky 
 N. Y., 
 yune 12, 
 1878. 
 
94 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 I feel the mighty current sweep me on, 
 
 Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar 
 
 The courses of the stars ; the very hour 
 
 He knows when they shall darken or grow bright} 
 
 Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death 
 
 Come unforewarned." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 I. 
 
 A PLEASANT story, that went the round shortly 
 after the close of our Civil War, shows the char- 
 acter of Whittier's hold upon his countrymen. It was 
 said that one among a group of prominent men, when 
 conversation on politics and finance began to lag, 
 asked the question, Who is the best American poet? 
 Horace Greeley, who was of the party, replied with 
 the name of Whittier, and his judgment was instantly 
 approved by all present. These active, practical Amer- 
 icans, patriots or demagogues, — some of them, doubt- 
 less, of the "heated barbarian" type, — for once found 
 their individual preferences thus expressed and in ac- 
 cord. At that climacteric time the Pleiad of our elder 
 poets was complete and shining, — not a star was lost. 
 But the instinct of these stern, hard-headed men was 
 in favor of the Quaker bard, the celibate and prophetic 
 recluse ; he alone appealed to the poetic side of their 
 natures. We do not hold a press item to absolute ex- 
 actness in its report of words. The epithet "best", 
 may not have been employed by the questioner on that 
 occasion ; were it not for the likelihood that those to 
 whom he spoke would not have laid much stress upon 
 verbal distinctions, one might guess that he said the 
 most national, or representative, or inborn, of our poets. 
 The value of the incident remains ; it was discovered 
 
 His siaTtd- 
 ing ivitk 
 typical 
 A meri- 
 cans of his 
 own iinte* 
 
96 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 English 
 opinwnj 
 " Pall ' 
 MaU Ga- 
 zette," 
 Jan. 30, 
 1882. 
 
 How far c 
 
 national 
 
 •See pp. 5- 
 
 that Whittier most nearly satisfied the various poetic 
 needs of the typical, resolute Americans, men of his 
 own historic generation, who composed that assem- 
 blage. 
 
 With this may be considered the fact that it is the 
 habit of compilers and brief reviewers, whose work is 
 that of generalization, to speak of him as a "thor- 
 oughly American " poet. An English critic, in a no- 
 tice marked by comprehension of our home-spirit, and 
 with the honest effort of a delicate mind to get at 
 the secret of Whittier's unstudied verse, and gain the 
 best that can be gained from it, finds him to be the 
 " most national " of our writers, and the most charac- 
 teristic through his extraordinary fluency, narrow ex- 
 perience, and wide sympathy, — language which im- 
 plies a not unfriendly recognition of traits which have 
 been thought to be American, — loquacity, provincial- 
 ism, and generosity of heart. 
 
 In sentiments thus spoken and written there is a 
 good deal of significance. But the words of the for- 
 eign verdict cannot be taken precisely as they stand. 
 Has there been a time, as yet, when any writer could 
 be thoroughly American ? What is the meaning of the 
 phrase, — the. most limited meaning which a citizen, 
 true to our notion of this country's future, will enter- 
 tain for a moment? Assuredly not a quality which 
 is collegiate, like Longfellow's, or of a section, like 
 Whittier's, or of a special and cultured class, which 
 alone can enjoy Whitman's sturdy attempt to create a 
 new song for the people before the accepted and ac- 
 cepting time. During the period of these men Amer- 
 ica scarcely has been more homogeneous in popular 
 characteristics than in climate and topography. I have 
 discussed the perplexing topic of our nationalism, and 
 am willing to believe that these States are blending 
 
NEW ENGLAND'S BARD. 
 
 97 
 
 into a country whose distinctions of race and tendency 
 will steadily lessen ; but whether such a faith is well 
 grounded is still an open question. And whatsoever 
 change is to ensue, in the direction of homogeneity, 
 will be the counterswing of a vibration whose first im- 
 pulse was away from the uniformity of the early colo- 
 nies to the broadest divergence consistent with a com- 
 mon language and government. At Whittier's time 
 this divergence was greater than before, — greater, 
 possibly, than it ever can be again. In fact, it is 
 partly as a result of this superlative divergence that 
 he is called our most national poet. If his song was 
 not that of the people at large, it aided to do away 
 with something which prevented us from being one 
 people ; and it was national in being true to a char- 
 acteristic portion of America, — the intense expression 
 of its specific and governing ideas. 
 
 The most discriminating prkis is that which Mr. 
 Parkman contributed at a gathering in honor of the 
 Quaker bard. The exact eye of the author of " Fron- 
 tenac " saw the poet as he is : " The Poet of New Eng- 
 land. His genius drew its nourishment from her soil ; 
 his pages are the mirror of her outward nature, and 
 the strong utterance of her inward life." The gloss 
 of this sentiment belonged to the occasion ; its anal- 
 ysis is specifically correct, and this with full recogni- 
 tion of Whittier's most famous kinsmen in birth and 
 song. The distinction has been well made, that the 
 national poet is not always the chief poet of a nation. 
 As a poet of New England, Whittier had little com- 
 petition from the bookish Longfellow, except in the 
 latter's sincere feeling for the eastern sea and shore, 
 and artistic handling of the courtlier legends of the 
 province. He certainly found a compeer in Lowell, 
 whose dialect idyls prove that only genius is needed 
 7 
 
 Distinc- 
 tively^ 
 the Poet of 
 New Eng- 
 land. 
 
98 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 A test of 
 this state- 
 tnent. 
 
 New Eng- 
 land's in- 
 ■fizKnce 
 upon thi 
 country ai 
 large. 
 
 to enable a scholar, turned farmer, to extract the rich- 
 est products of a soil ; and the lyric fervor of Low- 
 ell's odes is our most imaginative expression of that 
 New England sentiment which has extended itself, an 
 ideal influence, with the movement of its inheritors 
 to the farthest West. Emerson, on his part, has vol- 
 atilized the essence of New England thought into 
 wreaths of spiritual beauty. Yet Mr. Parkman, than 
 whom no scholar is less given to looseness of expres- 
 sion, terms Whittier the poet of New England, as if 
 by eminence, and I think with exceeding justice. The 
 title is based on apt recognition of evidence that we 
 look to the people at large for the substance of na- 
 tional or sectional traits. The base, not the peak, of 
 the pyramid determines its bearings. There is, to be 
 sure, as much human nature in the mansion as in the 
 cottage, in the study or drawing-room as in the shop 
 and field. But just as we call those genre canvases, 
 whereon are painted idyls of the fireside, the roadside, 
 and the farm, pictures of " real life," so we find the 
 true gauge of popular feeling in songs that are dear 
 to the common people and true to their unsophisti- 
 cated life and motive. 
 
 Here we again confront the statement that the six 
 Eastern States were not and are not America ; not 
 the nation, but a section, — the New Englanders seem- 
 ing almost a race by themselves. But what a section ! 
 And what a people, when we take into account, su- 
 peradded to their genuine importance, a self-depen- 
 dence ranking with that of the Scots or Gascons ! As 
 distinct a people, in their way, as Mr. Cable's Creoles, 
 old or new. Go by rail along the Eastern coast, and 
 note the nervous, wiry folk that crowd the stations ; 
 — their eager talk, their curious scrutiny of ordinary 
 persons and incidents, make it easy to believe that the 
 
HIS DA Y AND GENERA TION. 
 
 99 
 
 trait chosen by Sprague for the subject of his didactic 
 poem still is a chief motor of New England's progress, 
 and not unjustly its attribute by tradition. This hive 
 of individuality has sent out swarms, and scattered its 
 ideas like pollen throughout the northern belt of our 
 States. As far as these have taken hold, modified by 
 change and experience, New England stands for the 
 nation, and her singer for the national poet. In their 
 native, unadulterated form, they pervade the verse of 
 Whittier. It is notable that the sons of the Puritans 
 should take their songs from a Quaker ; yet how far 
 unlike, except in the doctrine of non-resistance, were 
 the Puritans and Quakers of Endicott's time ? To me, 
 they seem grounded in the same inflexible ethics, and 
 alike disposed to supervise the ethics of all mankind. 
 Time and culture have tempered the New England 
 virtues ; the Eastern frugality, independence, propa- 
 gandism, have put on a more attractive aspect; a 
 sense of beauty has been developed, — the mental rec- 
 ognition of it finally granted to a northern race, who 
 still lack the perfect flexibility and grace observable 
 wherever that sense comes by nature and directs the 
 popular conscience. As for the rural inhabitants of 
 New England, less changed by travel and accomplish- 
 ments, we know what they were and are, — among 
 them none more affectionate, pious, resolute, than 
 Whittier, beyond doubt their representative poet. 
 
 He belongs, moreover, — and hence the point of 
 the incident first related, — to the group now rapidly 
 disappearing, of which Horace Greeley was a conspic- 
 uous member, and to an epoch that gave its workers 
 little time for over-refinement, Persian apparatus, and 
 the cultivation of aesthetics. That group of scarred 
 and hardy speakers, journalists, agitators, felt that "he 
 was of them, and found his song revealing the highest 
 
 A notahU 
 constiiueK 
 
lOO 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 The lard 
 of an his- 
 toric time. 
 
 purpose of their boisterous, unsentimental careers. 
 These men — like all men who do not retrograde — ■ 
 had an ideal. This he expressed, in measures that 
 moved them, and whose perfection they had no thought 
 or fa,culty of questioning. Many of them came from 
 obscure and rural homes, and to read his verse was to 
 recall the scent of the clover and apple -bloom, to hear 
 again the creak of the well-pole, the rattle of the bars 
 in the lane, — the sights and freshness of youth pass- 
 ing for a moment, a vision of peace, over their bat- 
 tlefield. They needed, also, their own pibroch and 
 battle-cry, and this his song rang out ; their determi- 
 nation was in it, blended with the tenderness from 
 which such men are never wholly free. 
 
 His ultimate reputation, then, will be inseparable 
 from that of his section and its class. He may not 
 hold it as one of those whose work appeals to all times 
 and races, and whose art is so refined as to be the 
 model of after-poets. But he was the singer of what 
 was not an empty day, and of a section whose move- 
 ment became that of a nation, and whose purpose in 
 the end was grandly consummated. We already see, 
 and the future will see it more clearly, that no party 
 ever did a vaster work than his party ; that he, like 
 Hampden and Milton, is a character not produced in 
 common times ; that no struggle was more momentous 
 than that which preceded our Civil War, no question 
 ever affected the destinies of a great people more 
 vitally than the antislavery issue, as urged by its pro- 
 moters. Neither Greece nor Rome, not even England, 
 the battle-ground of Anglo-Saxon liberty, has supplied 
 a drama of more import than that in which the poets 
 and other heroes of our Civil Reformation played theit 
 parts. 
 
THE QUAKER. 
 
 lOI 
 
 II. 
 
 Whittier's origin and early life were auspicious 
 for one who was to become a poet of the people. His 
 muse shielded him from the relaxing influence of lux- 
 ury and superfine culture; These could not reach the 
 primitive homestead in the beautiful Merrimack Val- 
 ley, five miles out from the market-town of Haverhill, 
 where all things were elementary and of the plainest 
 cast. The training of the Friends made his boyhood 
 still more simple ; otherwise, as I have said, it mat- 
 tered little whether he derived from Puritan or Quaker 
 sources. Still, it was much, in one respect, to be de- 
 scended from Quakers and Huguenots used to suffer 
 and be strong for conscience' sake. It placed him 
 years in advance of the comfortable Brahmin class, with 
 its blunted sense of right and wrong, and, to use 
 his own words, turned him " so early away from what 
 Roger Williams calls 'the world's great trinity, pleas- 
 ure, profit, and honor,' to take side with the poor 
 and oppressed." The Puritans conformed to the rule 
 of the Old Testament, the Friends to the spirit of 
 the New. One has only to read our colonial annals 
 to know how the Jews got on under the Mosaic law, 
 inasmuch as to the end of the Mather dynasty the 
 pandect of Leviticus, in all its terror, was sternly en- 
 forced by church and state. The Puritans had two 
 gods, Deus and Diabolus ; the Quakers recognized 
 the former alone, and chiefly through his incarnation 
 as the Prince of Peace. They exercised, however, 
 the right of interference with other people's code and 
 practice, after a fashion the more intolerable from a 
 surrender of the right to establish their own by rope 
 and sword. Whittier's Quaker strain, as Frothingham 
 nas shown, yielded him wholly to the " intellectual pas- 
 
 Jahn 
 Greenleaf 
 Whittier: 
 born near 
 Haverhill^ 
 Mass., 
 Dec. 17, 
 1807. 
 
 The 
 
 Puritans 
 and the 
 Quakers, 
 
 The poefs 
 
 Quaker' 
 
 istn. 
 
I02 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Youth on 
 ihe/arnt. 
 
 Influence 
 ^ Burns. 
 
 sion " that Transcendentalism aroused, and still keeps 
 him obedient to the Inward Light. And it made him 
 a poet militant, a crusader whose moral weapons, since 
 he must disown the carnal, were keen of edge and 
 seldom in their scabbards. The fire of his deep-set 
 eyes, whether betokening, like that of his kinsman 
 Webster, the Batchelder blood, or inherited from some 
 old Feuillevert, strangely contrasts with the benign 
 expression of his mouth, — that firm serenity, which 
 by transmitted habitude dwells upon the lips of the 
 sons and daughters of peace. 
 
 There was no affectation in the rusticity of his youth. 
 It was the real thing, — the neat and saving homeli- 
 ness of the Eastern farm. All the belongings of the 
 household were not the equivalent of a week's ex- 
 penses in a modern city home, yet there was no want 
 and nothing out of tone. We see the wooden house 
 and barn, set against the background of rugged acres j 
 indoors, still the loom and wheel, and still the Quaker 
 mother, dear old toiling one, the incarnation of faith 
 and charity, beloved by a loyal, bright-eyed family 
 group. There was little to read but the Bible, " Pil- 
 grim's Progress," and the weekly newspaper ; no 
 schooling but in the district school-house ; nothing to 
 learn of the outer world except from the eccentric 
 and often picturesque strollers that in those days ped- 
 dled, sang, or fiddled from village to village. Yet the 
 boy's poetic fancy and native sense of rhythm were 
 not inert. He listened eagerly to the provincial tra- 
 ditions and legends, a genuine folk-lore, recounted by 
 his elders at the fireside ; and he began to put his 
 thoughts in numbers at the earliest possible age. A 
 great stimulus came in the shape of Burns's poems, 
 a cheap volume of which fell into his possession by 
 one of those happenings that seem ordained for poet& 
 
NEWSPAPER LIFE. 
 
 103 
 
 His first printed efforts were an imitation of the dia- 
 lect and measures of the Scottish bard, and perhaps 
 no copybook could have been more suitable until he 
 formed his own hand — a time not long postponed. 
 He well might have fancied that in his experience there 
 was much in common with that of his master ; that 
 he, too, might live to affirm, though surely in words 
 less grandiloquent, " The Genius of Poetry found 
 me at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over 
 me." Of our leading poets, he was almost the only 
 one who learned Nature by working with her at all 
 seasons, under the sky and in the wood and field. So 
 much for his boyhood ; his after course was affected 
 greatly by the man then coming into notice as a fa- 
 natic and agitator, the lion-hearted champion of free- 
 dom, long since glorified with the name he gave to 
 his first pronunciamento, the Liberator. A piece of 
 verse sent by young Whittier to the Newbur3rport 
 " Free Press " led Garrison, its editor, to look up his 
 contributor, and to encourage him with praise and 
 counsel. From that time we see the poet working up- 
 ward in the old-fashioned way. A clever youth need 
 not turn ganger in a land of schools and newspapers. 
 Whittier's training was supplemented by a year or 
 more at the academy, and by a winter's practice as a 
 teacher himself, — fulfilling thus the customary Lehr- 
 fakre of our village aspirants. In another year we 
 find him the conductor of a tariff newspaper in Bos- 
 ton. Before his twenty-fifth birthday he had experi- 
 enced the vicissitudes of old-time journalism, chang- 
 ing from one desk to another, at Haverhill, Boston, 
 and Hartford, still pursuing literature, erelong some- 
 what known as a poet and sketch-writer, and near the 
 close of this period issuing his first book of Legends, 
 in prose and verse. At Hartford also he edited, with 
 
 First ac- 
 quaintance 
 with Wil- 
 liam Lloyd 
 Garrison. 
 
 See p' in 
 
I04 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHJTTIER. 
 
 Consecra- 
 tion to the 
 anti-slav- 
 ery Strug' 
 
 a well-composed preface, the posthumous collection of 
 his friend Brainard's poems. 
 
 But the mission of his life now came upon him. 
 He received a call. In 183 1 Garrison had begun 
 " The Liberator." He was Whittier's ally and guide ; 
 the ardor of the poet required an heroic purpose, and 
 Garrison's crusade was one to which his whole na- 
 ture inclined him. It was no personal ambition that 
 made him the psalmist of the new movement. His 
 verses, crude as they were, had gained favor ; he al- 
 ready had a name, and a career was predicted for 
 him. He now doomed himself to years of retarda- 
 tion and disfavor, and had no reason to foresee the 
 honors they would bring him in the end. What he 
 tells us is the truth : " For twenty years my name 
 would have injured the circulation of any of the lit- 
 erary or political journals in the country.'' During 
 this term his imaginative writings were to be " simply 
 episodical," something apart from what he says had 
 been the main purpose of his life. He was bent 
 upon the service which led Samuel May to declare 
 that of all our poets he " has, from first to last, done 
 most for the abolition of slavery. All my anti-slavery 
 brethren, I doubt not, will unite with me to crown 
 him as our laureate." Bryant, many years later, 
 pointed out that in recent times the road of others 
 to literary success had been made smooth by anti- 
 slavery opinions, adding that in Whittier's case the 
 reverse of this was true ; that he made himself the 
 champion of the slave " when to say aught against 
 the national curse was to draw upon one's self the 
 bitterest hatred, loathing, and contempt of the great 
 majority of men throughout the land." Unquestion- 
 ably Whittier's ambition, during his novitiate, had 
 been to do something as a poet and man of letters. 
 
THE CAMPAIGN WITH GARRISON. 
 
 105 
 
 Not that he had learned what few, in fact, at that 
 time realized, that the highest art aims at creative 
 beauty, and that devotion, repose, and calm are es- 
 sential to the mastery of an ideal. But he was a 
 natural poet, and, if he had not been filled with con- 
 victions, might have reached this knowledge as soon 
 as others who possessed the lyrical impulse. The 
 fact that he made his rarest gift subsidiary to his 
 new purpose, in the flush of early reputation, when 
 one is most sensitive to popular esteem, has led me 
 to dwell a little upon the story of his life, and to 
 observe how life itself may be made no less inspiring 
 than a poem. I would not be misunderstood; we 
 measure poetry at its worth, not at the worth of its 
 maker. This is the law ; yet in Whittier's record, if 
 ever, there is an appeal to the higher law that takes 
 note of exceptions. Some of his verse, as a pattern 
 for verse hereafter, is not what it might have been 
 if he had consecrated himself to poetry as an art; 
 but it is memorably connected with historic times, 
 and his rudest shafts of song were shot true and far 
 and tipped with flame. This should make it clear 
 to foreigners why we entertain for him a measure of 
 the feeling with which Hungarians speak of Petofi, 
 and Russians of Turgdnieff. His songs touched the 
 hearts of his people. It was the generation which 
 listened in childhood to the Voices of Freedom that 
 fulfilled their prophecies. 
 
 Garrison started his journal with the watchword of 
 "unconditional emancipation,'' and the pledge to be 
 " harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice ; . . . 
 not to retreat a single inch, and to be heard." Whit- 
 tier reenforced him with lyre and pen, — though some- 
 times the two differed in policy, — and soon was 
 writing abolition pamphlets, editing "The Freeman," 
 
 His gift 
 subsidiary 
 to " the 
 cause." 
 
 "Tie 
 Voices 0/ 
 Freedom^''^ 
 1849, etc., 
 etc. 
 
 Record 
 aTid exjis' 
 rience. 
 
io6 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 In the 
 pld. 
 
 After the 
 ^mpaign. 
 
 and active in the thick of the conflict. He was the 
 secretary of the first anti-slavery convention, a signer 
 of the Declaration of Sentiments, and, at an age 
 when bardlings are making sonnets to a mistress's 
 eyebrow, he was facing mobs at Plymouth, Boston, 
 Philadelphia. After seven or eight years of this 
 stormy service, he settled down in quarters at Ames- 
 bury, sending out, as ever, his prose and verse to 
 forward the cause. But now his humane and fer- 
 vent motives were understood even by opponents, 
 and the sweetness of his rural lyrics and idyls had 
 testified for him as a poet. In 1843 the most eclec- 
 tic of publishing houses welcomed him to its list ; the 
 rise of poetry had set in, and Longfellow, Emerson, 
 Lowell, were gaining a constituency. As he grew in 
 favor, attractive editions of his poems appeared, and 
 his later volumes came from the press as frequently 
 as Longfellow's, — more than one of them, like 
 " Snow - Bound," receiving in this country as warm 
 and wide a welcome as those of the Cambridge lau- 
 reate. After the war. Garrison — at last crowned with 
 honor, and rejoicing in the consummation of his 
 work — was seldom heard. Whittier, in his hermit- 
 age, the resort of many pilgrims, has steadily re- 
 newed his song. While chanting in behalf of every 
 patriotic or humane effort of his time, he has been 
 the truest singer of our homestead and wayside life, 
 and has rendered all the legends of his region into 
 familiar verse. The habit of youth has clung to him, 
 and he often misses, in his too facile rhyme and 
 rhythm, the graces, the studied excellence of modern 
 work. But all in all, as we have seen, and more than 
 others, he has read the heart of New England, and ex- 
 pressed the convictions of New England at her height 
 of moral supremacy, — the distinctive enjoyment oi 
 
TECHNICAL CARELESSNESS. 
 
 107 
 
 which, in view of the growth of the Union, and the 
 spread of her broods throughout its territory, may 
 not recur again. 
 
 III. 
 
 It would not be fair to test Whittier by the quality 
 of his off-hand work. His verse always was auxiliary 
 to what he deemed the main business of his life, and 
 has varied with the occasiofts that inspired it. His 
 object was not the artist's, to make the occasion serve 
 his poem, but directly the reverse. Perhaps his ndi- 
 vett and carelessness more truthfully spoke for his 
 constituents than the polish of those bred in seats 
 of culture ; many of his stanzas reflect the homeliness 
 of a provincial region, and are the spontaneous out- 
 come of what poetry there was in it. His feeling 
 gained expression in simple speech and the forms 
 which came readily. Probably it occurred somewhat 
 late to the mind of this pure and duteous enthusiast 
 that there is such a thing as duty to one's art, and 
 that difEuseness, bad rhymes, and prosaic stanzas are 
 alien to it. Nor is it strange that the artistic moral 
 sense of a Quaker poet, reared on a New England 
 farmstead, at first should be deficient. A careless 
 habit, once formed, made it hard for him to master 
 the touch that renders a new poem by this or that 
 expert a standard, and its appearance an event. His 
 ear and voice were naturally fine, as some of his 
 early work plainly shows. "Cassandra Southwick," 
 "The New Wife and the Old," and "The Virginia 
 Slave Mother " were of an original flavor and up to 
 ■the standards of that day. If he had occupied him- 
 self wholly with poetic work, he would have grown 
 as steadily as his xao^t successful compeers. But his 
 
 Unstudied 
 Quality oj 
 his verse. 
 
 Its defects, 
 
io8 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Hasty 
 
 composi- 
 tion. 
 
 Cf. "Vic- 
 ttfrian Po- 
 ets" : pp. 
 8i, 82. 
 
 vocation became that of trumpeter to the impetuous 
 reform brigade. He supplied verse on the instant, 
 often full of vigor, but often little more than the 
 rallying-blast of a passing campaign. We are told 
 by May that "from 1832 to the close of our dreadful 
 war in 1865, his harp of liberty was never hung up. 
 Not an important occasion escaped him. Every sig- 
 nificant incident drew from his heart some pertinent 
 and often very impressive or rousing verses." It is 
 safe to assume that if he had been more discrimi- 
 nating, or had cherished the resolve of Longfellow or 
 Tennyson to make even conventional pieces artistic, 
 many occasions would have escaped him. We see 
 again that Art will forego none of its attributes. 
 Sincerity and spontaneity are the well-springs of its 
 clearest flow ; yet, if dependent on these traits alone, 
 it may become cheap and common, and utterly fail 
 of permanence. In the time under notice there was 
 nothing more likely to confuse the imagination than 
 the life of a journalist, especially of a provincial or 
 reform editor. The case of Hood, one of the truest 
 of poets by nature, has shown us something of the 
 dangers that beset a journalist-poet. This Whittier 
 emphatically became, though in every way superior 
 to the band of temperance, abolition, and partisan 
 rhymesters that, like the shadows of his own failings, 
 sprang up in his train. He wrote verses very much 
 as he wrote editorials, and they were forcible only 
 when he was deeply moved by stirring crises and 
 events. Some of his best were tributes to leaders, 
 or rebukes of great men fallen. But he was too apt 
 to write weak eulogies of obscurer people ; for every 
 friend or ally had a claim upon his muse. 
 
 His imperfections were those of his time and class, 
 and he was too engrossed with a mission to overcome 
 
REFORM- VERSE. 
 
 log 
 
 them. He never learned compression, and still is 
 troubled more with fatal fluency than our other poets 
 of equal rank, — by an inability to reject poor stanzas 
 and to stop at the right place. Mrs. Browning was 
 a prominent sufferer in this respect. The two poets 
 were so much alike, with their indifference to method 
 and taste, as to suggest the question (especially in 
 view of the subaltern reform-verse-makers) whether 
 advocates of causes, and other people of great moral 
 zeal, are not relatively deficient in artistic conscien- 
 tiousness and in what may be called aesthetic recti- 
 tude. 
 
 An occasional looseness in matters of fact may be 
 forgiven one who writes from impulse. We owe 
 " Barbara Frietchie " to the glow excited by a news- 
 paper report ; and the story of " Skipper Ireson's 
 Ride," now challenged, if not true, is too well told to 
 be lost. Whittier became, like a mother's careless, 
 warm-hearted child, dearer for his very shortcomings. 
 But they sometimes mar his bravest outbursts. Slight 
 changes would have made that eloquent lyric, " Ran- 
 dolph of Roanoke," a perfect one. Feeling himself 
 a poet, he sang by ear alone, in a somewhat primitive 
 time ; but the finest genius, in music or painting for 
 example, with the aid of a commonplace teacher can 
 get over more ground in a month than he would cover 
 unaided in a year j since the teacher represents what 
 is already discovered and established. There came a 
 period when Whittier's verse was composed solely with 
 poetic intent, and after a less careless fashion. It is 
 chiefly that portion of it, written from i860 onward, 
 that has secured him a more than local reputation. 
 His ruder rhymes of a day bear witness to an ex- 
 perience which none could better illustrate than by 
 citing the words of the poet himself : 
 
 The Poets 
 of Reform* 
 
 Czdiure an 
 aid to gfitt- 
 
no 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHJTTJER. 
 
 Prose 
 writings. 
 
 " Mar- 
 garet 
 Smithes 
 yournalf^ 
 1849. 
 
 Whittier's 
 foetical 
 style, gen- 
 ius., and 
 works. 
 
 " Hater of din and riot, 
 He lived in days unquiet; 
 And, lover of all beauty, 
 Trod the hard ways of duty." 
 
 In prose he soon became skilled. His letters often 
 are models of epistolary style ; the best articles and 
 essays from his pen are , written with a true and di- 
 rect hand, though rather barren of the epigram and 
 original thought which enrich the prose of Lowell, 
 Holmes, and Emerson. Margaret Smith's journal is 
 a charming nuova antica ; a trifle thin in plot, but 
 such a quaint reproduction of the early colonial pe- 
 riod — its people, manners, and discourse — as scarcely 
 any other author save Hawthorne, at the date of its 
 production, could have given us. 
 
 IV. 
 
 His metrical style, except in certain lyrics of marked 
 individuality, is that of our elders who wrote in dif- 
 fuse measures, and whose readers favored sentiment 
 more than beauty or wit. It is a degree more old- 
 fashioned than styles which are so much older as to 
 become new by revival ; that is to say, its fashion was 
 current within our own recollection and is now pass- 
 ing away. Some forms put on a new type with each 
 successive period, such as blank-verse and the irreg- 
 ular ode-measures in which Lowell, Taylor, and Stod- 
 dard have been successful. Whittier uses these rarely, 
 and to less advantage than his ballad-verse. He has 
 conformed less than any one but Holmes to the 
 changes of the day. Imagine him with an etching, 
 needle, tracing the deft lines of a triolet or villanelle! 
 If he could, and would, it would be seen that when 
 one leaves a natural vein, the yield, lacking what is 
 
EARLY POEMS. 
 
 Ill 
 
 characteristic, is superfluous. Even his recent son- 
 nets, " Requirement," " Help," . etc., are little more 
 than fourteen-line homilies. Those who know their 
 author find something of him in them, but such ef- 
 forts do not reveal him to a new acquaintance. A 
 poet's voice must have a distinct quality to be heard 
 above the general choir. 
 
 We turn to his early verse, as still acknowledged, 
 to see in what direction his first independent step was 
 made, and we note an effort to become a true Amer- 
 ican poet — to concern himself with the story and 
 motive of his own land. For a time it was rather in- 
 effective. The author of Mogg Megone and The Bridal 
 of Pennacook was on the same trail with the New 
 York squadron that sought the red man's path. It 
 is queer, at this distance, to see the methods of Scott 
 and Coleridge applied to the Indian legendary of 
 Maine. Among works of this sort, however, these 
 were the best preceding " Hiawatha." Longfellow 
 had the tact to perceive that if the savage is not po- 
 etical his folk-lore may be made so. The prelude 
 to Whittier's " Bridal " is quite modern and natural. 
 It contains a suggestive plea that this experiment in 
 a home field may not seem amiss even to those who 
 are best pleased 
 
 " while wandering in thought, 
 Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world." 
 
 And, after all, "Mogg" was a planned and sustained 
 effort, and full of promise. Its writer's later manage- 
 ment of local themes was more to the point. The 
 Songs of Labor are American chiefly in topic, — in 
 manner they are much like what Mackay or Massey 
 might have written, — yet they became popular, and 
 their rhetorical flow adapted them to recitation in the 
 
 A whole- 
 some in- 
 tent. 
 
 " Mogg 
 
 Megone" 
 
 1836. 
 
 "The 
 Bridal of 
 Pen?ta- 
 cook" 
 1848. 
 
 *' Songs i 
 
 Labor^^ 
 
 1850. 
 
112 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Indica- 
 tions of his 
 •rue bent. 
 
 Our fore- 
 most bal- 
 ladisi. 
 
 country schools. The poet's distinctive touch first 
 appears in the legendary ballads which now precede 
 the " Voices of Freedom '' in his late editions. " The 
 New Wife and the Old " is almost our best specimen 
 of a style that Mrs. Hemans affected, and which Miss 
 Ingelow, Mrs. Browning, and others have employed 
 more picturesquely. It is a weird legend, musically 
 told, and clearly the lyric of a poet. The early 
 Quaker pieces are as good, and have all the traits of 
 his verse written forty years afterward. His first bal- 
 lads give the clew to his genius, and now make it 
 apparent that most of his verse may be considered 
 without much regard to dates of production. " Cas- 
 sandra South wick," alone, showed where his strength 
 lay : of all our poets he is the most natural balladist, 
 and Holmes comes next to him. The manner of 
 that poem doubtless was suggested by Macaulay's 
 " Battle of Ivry," and nothing could better serve the 
 purpose. The colonial tone is well maintained. Here 
 is a touching picture of the inspired maid's tempta- 
 tion to recant, of her endurance, trial, and victory. 
 A group, also, of the populace — cloaked citizens, 
 grave and cold, hardy sea - captains, and others — 
 gathered where 
 
 " on his horse, with Rawson, his cruel clerk, at hand, 
 Sat dark and haughty Endicott, the ruler of the land." 
 
 The bigoted priest, a " smiter of the meek," is a 
 type that was to reappear in our poet's scornful in- 
 dictments of the divines who, within public remem- 
 brance, upheld the slavery system under the sanction 
 of Noah's curse of Canaan. This ballad is well-pro- 
 portioned, and thus escapes the defect of " The Ex- 
 iles," which is otherwise a good piece of idiomatic 
 verse. 
 
THE BALLADIST. 
 
 113 
 
 On the whole, it is as a balladist that Whittier dis- 
 plays a sure metrical instinct. The record of the 
 Quakers has always served his muse, from the date 
 of " Cassandra Southwick " to the recent production 
 of "The Old South," "The King's Missive," and 
 " How the Women went from Dover." Neither Ber- 
 nard Barton nor Bayard Taylor is so well entitled to 
 the epithet of the Quaker Poet. His Quaker strains, 
 chanted while the sect is slowly blending with the 
 world's people, seem like its swan-song. It is worth 
 noting that of the nine American poets discussed in 
 these essays, one is still a Friend, and two others. 
 Whitman and Taylor, came of Quaker parentage on 
 both sides. The strong ballad, " Barclay of Ury," 
 would be almost perfect but for the four moralizing 
 stanzas at the close. It is annoying to see a fine 
 thing lowered, and even in moral effect, by an offence 
 against the ethics of art. Whittier's successes prob- 
 ably have been scored most often through ballads of 
 our eastward tradition and supernaturalism, such as 
 those pertaining to witchcraft, — a province which, 
 from " Calef in Boston " to " The Witch of Wenham," 
 he never has long neglected. Some of his miscella- 
 neous ballads are idyllic ; others, in strong relief, 
 were inspired by incidents of the War, during which 
 our non-combatant sounded more than one blast, like 
 that of Roderick, worth a thousand men. His bal- 
 lads vary as much in excellence as in kind ; among 
 the most noteworthy are " Mary Garvin," " Parson 
 Avery," " John Underbill," and that pure bit of mel- 
 ody and feeling, the lay of "Marguerite." Yet some 
 of the poems which he classes in this department 
 properly are eclogues, or slow-moving narratives. He 
 handles well a familiar measure ; when aiming at 
 something new, as in " The Ranger," he usually is 
 8 
 
 Ballads on 
 
 Qztaker 
 
 themes. 
 
 Ballads of 
 
 •witch- 
 crafty 
 colonial 
 rotnance, 
 etc. 
 
114 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEIi. 
 
 ' Skipper 
 
 Iresoji's 
 
 Ride." 
 
 17847-) 
 
 » The 
 Tent on 
 ihe 
 
 Beach," 
 1867. 
 
 less at ease, despite the fact that the nonpareil of his 
 briefer pieces is thoroughly novel in form and refrain, 
 and doubtless chanced to corae to him in such wise. 
 " Skipper Ireson's Ride " certainly is unique. Dia- 
 lect-poems are too often unfaithful or unpoetic. Im- 
 agination, humor, and dramatic force are found in the 
 ballad of the Marblehead skipper's dole, and its move- 
 ment is admirable. The culmination is more effec- 
 tive than is usual in a piece by Whittier., We have 
 the widow of the skipper's victim saying " God has 
 touched him ! why should we ? " — an old dame, whose 
 only son has perished, bidding them " Cut the rogue's 
 tether and let him run " ; and 
 
 " So, with soft relentings and rude excuse. 
 Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose. 
 And gave him. a cloak to hide him in. 
 And left him alone with his shame and sin. 
 Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 
 Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
 By the women of Marblehead ! " 
 
 The change of feeling is indicated by the single word 
 " poor." This is only a minor piece, but quantity is 
 the plane, and quality the height, of lyrical verse. 
 Were it not for two of Collins's briefest poems, where 
 would his name be ? 
 
 A balladist should be a good reciter of tales. Our 
 poet's prose work on The Supernaturalism of New 
 England was devoted to the ghost and witch stories 
 of his own neighborhood. In general design his chief 
 story-book in verse, The Tent on the Beach, like Long- 
 fellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn," — the first series 
 of which it post-dated and did not equal, — follows 
 the oft-borrowed method of Boccaccio and Chaucer. 
 The home tales of this group are the best, among then; 
 " The Wreck of Rivermouth " and " Abraham Daven- 
 
POEMS OF COUNTRY LIFE. 
 
 115 
 
 port." Throw out a ballad or two, and, but for a 
 want of even finish, " The Tent on the Beach " might 
 be taken for a portion of Longfellow's extended work. 
 As a bucolic poet of his own section, rendering its 
 pastoral life and aspect, Whittier surpasses all rivals. 
 This is established chiefly by work that increased, 
 after he reached middle age, with a consciousness of 
 his lost youth. In some breathing-spell from the 
 stress of his reform labors, he longed for the renewal 
 of 
 
 "boyhood's painless play, 
 Sleep that wakes in laughing day, 
 Health that mocks the doctor's rules, 
 Knowledge never learned of schools." 
 
 His eye fell upon the Barefoot Boy, and memory 
 brought back a time when he too was 
 
 "rich in flowers and trees, 
 Humming-birds and honey-bees." 
 
 To rate the country life at its worth, one must have 
 parted from it long enough to become a little tired of 
 that for which it was. exchanged. The best eclogues 
 are those which, however simple, have a feeling added 
 by the cast of thought. Poets hold Nature dear when 
 refined above her. Goldsmith, after years of wander- 
 ing ; Burns, when too well acquainted with the fickle 
 world. The maker of rural verse, moreover, should be 
 country-bred, or he will fall short. Unless Nature has 
 been his nurse in childhood, he never will read with 
 ease the text of her story-book. The distinction be- 
 tween artifice and sincerity is involved. Watteau's 
 pictures are exquisite in their way, but Millet gave us 
 the real thing. Longfellow's rural pieces were done 
 by a skilled workman, who could regard his themes 
 objectively and put them to good use. Lowell delights 
 in outdoor life, and his Yankee studies are perfect ; 
 
 Our chief 
 
 bucolic 
 
 poet. 
 
 Rural 
 verse, and 
 its beget- 
 ters. 
 
II6 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 WhUtie^s 
 
 pastoral 
 
 tpirit. 
 
 Still, we feel that he is, intellectually and socially, miles 
 above the people of the vale. Whittier is of their 
 blood, and always the boy-poet of the Essex farm, 
 however advanced in years and fame. They are won 
 by the sincerity and ingenuousness of his verse, rooted 
 in the soil and native as the fern and wild rose of the 
 wayside. His brother-poets are more exact : which of 
 them would hit upon " Maud " as a typical farm-girl's 
 name ? But incongruities are the signs manual of a 
 rural bard, as one can discover from Burns's high- 
 sounding letters and manifestoes. Whittier himself de- 
 spises a sham pastoral. There is good criticism, a 
 clear sense of what was needed, in his paper on Rob- 
 ert Dinsmore, the old Scotch bard of his childhood. 
 He says of rural poetry that "the mere dilettante and 
 the amateur ruralist may as well keep their hands off. 
 The prize is not for them. He who would success- 
 fully strive for it must be himself what he sings, — 
 part and parcel of the rural life, . . . one who has 
 added to his book-lore the large experience of an ac- 
 tive participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amuse- 
 ments, the trials and pleasures he describes." I need 
 not dwell upon our poet's fidelity to the landscape 
 and legends of the Eastern shore and the vales of 
 the Piscataqua and Merrimack. Those who criticise 
 his pastoral spirit as lacking Bryant's breadth of tone, 
 Emerson's penetration, and Thoreau's detail, confess 
 that it is honest and that it comes by nature. His 
 most vivid pictures are of scenes which lie near his 
 heart, and relate to common life — to the love and 
 longing, the simple joys and griefs, of his neighbors 
 at work and rest and worship. Lyrics such as " Tell- 
 ing the Bees," " Maud Muller," and " My Playmate " 
 are miniature classics ; of this kind are those which 
 confirmed his reputation and still make his volumes 
 real household books of song. 
 
' SNO w-bound: 
 
 117 
 
 These rastic verses, as we have seen, came like the 
 sound of falling waters to jaded men and women. 
 Years ago, when Snow-Bound was published, I was 
 surprised at the warmth of its reception. I must have 
 underrated it in every way. It did not interest one 
 not long escaped from bounds, to whom the poetry of 
 action then was all in all. And in truth such poetry, 
 conceived and executed in the spirit of art, is of the 
 higher grade. But I now can see my mistake, a purely 
 subjective one, and do justice to " Snow-Bound " as a 
 model of its class. Burroughs well avows it to be the 
 " most faithful picture of our northern winter that has 
 yet been put into poetry." If his discussion had not 
 been restricted to " Nature and the Poets," he perhaps 
 would have added that this pastoral gives, and once 
 for all, an ideal reproduction of the inner life of an old- 
 fashioned American rustic home ; not a peasant-home, 
 — far above that in refinement and potentialities, — 
 but equally simple, frugal, and devout ; a home of 
 which no other land has furnished the coadequate type. 
 
 This poem is not rich in couplets to be quoted for 
 their points of phrase and thought. Point, decoration, 
 and other features of modern verse are scarcely char- 
 acteristic of Whittier. In " Snow-Bound " he chose 
 the best subject within his own experience, and he 
 made the most of it. Taken as a whole, it is his most 
 complete production, and a worthy successor to " The 
 Deserted Village " and "The Cotter's Saturday Night." 
 Here is that air which writers of quality so often fail to 
 capture. " Hermann and Dorothea," " Enoch Arden," 
 even " Evangeline," memorable for beauty of another 
 kind, leave the impression that each of their authors 
 said, as Virgil must have said, " And now I will com- 
 pose an idyl." Whittier found his idyl already pic- 
 tured for him by the camera of his own heart. It is a 
 
 ^^ SfMW- 
 
 Bound. A 
 Winter 
 Idyl» 
 1866. 
 
 Antongthe 
 famous 
 poems 0/ 
 lis class. 
 
ii8 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 RedHsnu 
 
 work that can be praised, when measured by others of 
 the sort, as heartily as we praise the " Biglow Papers " 
 or " Evangeline," and one that ranks next to them as 
 an American poem. This " Winter Idyl " is honestly 
 named. Under the title, however, is a passage from 
 Cornelius Agrippa on the " Fire of Wood," followed 
 by Emerson's matchless heralding of the snow-storm. 
 Devices of this kind add to the effect of such a poem, 
 only, as " The Ancient Mariner." The texts are need- 
 less at the outset of a work whose lovely and unlit- 
 erary cast is sufficient in itself. From the key struck 
 at the opening to the tender fall at the close, there 
 is a sense of proportion, an adequacy and yet a re- 
 straint, not always observed in Whittier. This is a 
 sustained performance that conforms to the maxim ne 
 quid nimis. Its genuineness is proved by a severe test, 
 the concord with which imaginative passages glide 
 into homely, realistic verse : 
 
 " The wind blew east : we heard the roar 
 Of Ocean on his wintry shore, 
 And felt the strong pulse throbbing there 
 Beat with low rhythm our inland air. 
 
 " Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, — 
 Brought in the wood from out of doors, 
 Littered the stalls, and from the mows 
 Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows ; 
 Heard the horse whinnying for his comj 
 And, sharply clashing horn on "horn, 
 Impatient down the stanchion rows 
 The cattle shake their walnut bows." 
 
 The gray day darkens to 
 
 " A night made hoary with the swarm 
 And whirl-dance of the blinding storm; 
 
 The white drift piled the window-frame. 
 And through the glass the clothes-line posts 
 Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts." 
 
A DOWN-EAST TENTERS. 
 
 119 
 
 The poet's child-vision makes this fancy natural and 
 not grotesque. The whole transfiguration is recalled : 
 
 " The old familiar sights of ours 
 Took marvellous shapes ; strange domes and towers 
 Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, 
 Or garden-wall, or belt of wood ; 
 
 The bridle-post an old man sat 
 
 With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; 
 
 The well-curb had a Chinese roof ; 
 
 And even the long sweep, high aloof, 
 
 In its slant splendor, seemed to tell 
 
 Of Pisa's leaning miracle." 
 
 Imaginative touches follow : 
 
 "The shrieking of the mindless wind. 
 The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind. 
 And on the glass the unmeaning beat 
 Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. 
 
 From the crest 
 Of wooded knolls that ridged the west. 
 The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank 
 From sight beneath the smothering bank." 
 
 The building and lighting of the wood-fire, the hov- 
 ering family group that 
 
 "watched the first red blaze appear, 
 Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam 
 On whitewashed wall and sagging beam," 
 
 the rude-furnished room thus glorified and transformed, 
 while even 
 
 "The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
 A couchant tiger's seemed to fall," — 
 
 all this is an interior painted by our Merrimack Te- 
 niers. His hand grows free in artless delineations of 
 each sharer of the charmed blockade: the father, with 
 his stories of woodcraft and adventure ; the Quaker 
 mother rehearsing tales from Sewell and Chalkley 
 
 Fancy. 
 
 Imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 A graphic 
 interior. 
 
I20 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 The poets 
 
 ntasier' 
 
 Hece. 
 
 " of faith fire-winged by martyrdom " ; then a foil to 
 these, the unlettered uncle " rich in lore of fields and 
 
 brooks," 
 
 "A simple, guileless, childlike man. 
 Content to live where life began " ; 
 
 the maiden aunt ; the elder sister, full of self - sacri' 
 fice, a true New England girl; lastly, the "youngest 
 and dearest," seated on the braided mat, 
 
 " Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes." 
 
 The guests are no less vividly portrayed. The school- 
 master, distinct as Goldsmith's, is of an original type. 
 The group is completed, with an instinct for color and 
 contrast, by the introduction of a dramatic figure, the 
 half-tropical, prophetic woman, who was born to startle, 
 
 "on her desert throne, 
 The crazy Queen of Lebanon 
 With claims fantastic as her own." 
 
 The poem retwrns to its theme, and records the days 
 of farm-house life during the chill embargo of the 
 
 snow, until 
 
 "a week had passed 
 Since the great world was heard from last." 
 
 But the treading oxen break out the highways, the 
 rustic carnival of sledding and sleighing is at hand, 
 
 " Wide swung again our ice-locked door. 
 And all the world was ours once more." 
 
 From the subject thus chosen and pursued, an un- 
 adventured theme before, our poet has made his mas- 
 terpiece. Its readers afterward loved to hear his voice, 
 whether at its best or otherwise ; and the more so 
 for his pleased and assured reflection, 
 
 " And thanks untraced to lips unknown 
 Shall greet me like the odors blown 
 From unseen meadows newly mown." 
 
ANTI-SLAVERY LYRICS. 
 
 121 
 
 A claim that he has found and preserved in fit and 
 winning verse the poetic aspect of his own section can 
 be grounded safely on this idyl. We return from the 
 work in which his taste, is most effectual to that in- 
 spired by his life-long convictions. It is in this that 
 the faults heretofore noted are most common, but here 
 also his natural force is at its height, and results from 
 what is lacking in some of his group — the element 
 of passion. The verse of his period, especially the 
 New England verse, is barren enough of this. For 
 what there was, and is, of love-poetry we must look 
 south of the region where poets are either too fortunate 
 or too self-controlled to die because a woman 's fair. 
 The song of the Quaker bard is almost virginal, in so 
 far as what we term the master-passion is concerned. 
 Its passion comes from the purpose that heated his 
 soul and both strengthened and impeded lyrical expres- 
 sion. Active service in any strife, even the most hu- 
 mane, is unrest, and therefore hostile to the perfection 
 of art. But the conflict often engenders in its cloud 
 the flash of eloquence and song. Three-fourths of 
 Whittier's anti-slavery lyrics are clearly effusions of the 
 hour; their force was temporal rather than poetic. 
 There are music and pathos in " The Virginia Slave 
 Mother," and "The Slave-Ships" is lurid and gro- 
 tesque enough to have furnished Turner with his theme. 
 The poet's deep-voiced scorn and invective rendered 
 his anti-slavery verse a very different thing from Long- 
 fellow's, and made the hearer sure of his " effectual 
 calling." Even rhetoric becomes the outburst of true 
 passion in such lines as these upon •' Elliott " : — 
 
 " Hands off ! thou tithe-fat plunderer ! play 
 No trick of priestcraft here ! 
 Back, puny lordling ! darest thou lay 
 A hand on Elliott's bier ? " 
 
 The pul- 
 sion of a 
 fiery 
 heart 
 
122 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Personal 
 lyrics. 
 
 "Icha- 
 \'ad." 
 
 A little of this, however, goes quite far enough in 
 poetry. As a writer of personal tributes, whether 
 pseans or monodies, the reform bard, with his peculiar 
 faculty of characterization, has been happily gifted. 
 Scarcely one of these that might not be retouched to 
 advantage, but they are many and various and strik- 
 ing. John Randolph lives for us in the just balanc- 
 ing, the masterly and sympathetic portraiture, of Whit- 
 tier's fine elegy. Channing, Elliott, Pius IX., Foster, 
 Rantoul, Kossuth, Sumner, Garibaldi, — all these his- 
 toric personages are idealized by this poet, and haloed 
 with their spiritual worth ; his tributes are a lyrical 
 commentary, from the minstrel's point of view, upon 
 an epoch now gone by. The wreath his aged hands 
 have laid upon the tomb of Garrison is a beautiful 
 and consecrated offering. One of his memorable im- 
 provisations was " Ichabod," the lament for Webster's 
 defection and fall, — a tragical subject handled with 
 lyric power. In after years, his passion tempered by 
 the flood of time, he breathes a tenderer regret in 
 " The Lost Occasion " : — 
 
 " Thou shouldst have lived to feel below 
 Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow, — 
 The late-sprung mine that underlaid 
 Thy sad concessions vainly made. 
 
 Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee, 
 O sleeper by the Northern sea, 
 The gates of opportunity ! " 
 
 But the conception of " Ichabod " is most impressive ; 
 those darkening lines were graven too deeply for ob- 
 literatian. In thought we still picture the deserted 
 leader, the shadow gathering about his " august head," 
 while he reads such words as these : — 
 
 " All else is gone ; from those great eyes 
 The soul has fled : 
 
RELIGIOUS EXALTATION. 
 
 123 
 
 When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
 The man is dead. 
 
 " Then, pay the reverence of old days 
 To his dead fame ; 
 Walk backward, with averted gaze. 
 And hide the shame ! " 
 
 Among our briefer poems on topics of dramatic gen- 
 eral interest, I recall but one which equals this in ef- 
 fect, — and that, coming from a hand less familiar 
 than Whittier's, is now almost unknown. I refer to 
 the " Lines on a Great Man Fallen," written by Wil- 
 liam W. Lord, after the final defeat of Clay, and in 
 scorn of the popular judgment that to be defeated 
 is to fall. The merit of this eloquent piece has been 
 strangely overlooked by the makers^of our literary 
 compilations. 
 
 It is matter of history that our strictest clerical 
 monitors, during the early struggle for abolition, op- 
 posed agitation of the slavery question, and often with 
 a rancor that Holy Willie might envy. Not even this 
 one-sided odium theologicum could long debar Whit- 
 tier from the respect of the church-going classes, for he 
 is the most religious of secular poets, and there is no 
 gainsaying to a believer the virtues of one who guides 
 his course by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. 
 A worshipful spirit, a savor " whose fragrance smells to 
 heaven," breathes from these pages of the Preacher- 
 Poet's song. The devotional bent of our ancestors 
 was the inheritance of his generation. Domesticity, 
 patriotism, and religion were, and probably still are, 
 American characteristics often determining an author's 
 success or failure. A reverent feeling, emancipated 
 from dogma and imbued with grace, underlies the 
 wholesome morality of our national poets. No country 
 has possessed a group, equal in talent, that has pre- 
 
 Deep relig- 
 iotts feel- 
 ing. 
 
 Morality 
 of Afner- 
 ican verse. 
 
124 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 A poet mil- 
 itant and 
 minu- 
 trani. 
 
 sented more willingly whatsoever things are pure, 
 lovely, and of good report. There is scientific value in 
 an influence, during a race's formative period, so clar- 
 ifying to the general conscience. We have no proof 
 that the unmorality of a people like the French, with 
 exquisite resources at command, can evolve an art or 
 literature greater than in the end may result from the 
 virile chastity of the Saxon mind. Whittier is the Gal- 
 ahad of modern poets, not emasculate, but vigorous 
 and pure ; he has borne Christian's shield of faith and 
 sword of the Spirit. His steadfast insistence upon 
 the primitive conception of Christ as the ransomer of 
 the oppressed had an effect, stronger than argument or 
 partisanship, upon the religiously inclined ; and of his 
 lyrics, more than of those by his fellow-poets, it could 
 be averred chat the songs of a people go before the 
 laws. Undoubtedly a flavor smacking of the caucus, 
 the jubilee, and other adjuvants of " the cause " is 
 found in some of his polemic strains ; but again they 
 are like the trumpeting of passing squadrons, or the 
 muffled drum -beat for chieftains fallen in the fray. 
 The courage that endures the imputation of coward- 
 ice, as in " Barclay of Ury," the suffering of man for 
 man, the cry of the human, never fail to move him. 
 He celebrates all brave deeds and acts of renuncia- 
 tion. The heroism of martyrs and resistants, of the 
 Huguenots, the Vaudois, the Quakers, the English re- 
 formers, serves him for many a song and ballad. At 
 every pause after some new devotion, after some su- 
 preme offering by one of his comrades, it was the 
 voice of Whittier that sang the pjean and the requiem. 
 His cry, — 
 
 " Thou hast fallen in thine armor, 
 Thou martyr of the Lord 1 " 
 
 compares with Turg^nieff's thought of the Russian 
 
PRAYER AND PRAISE. 
 
 125 
 
 maiden crossing the threshold of dishonor and mar- 
 tyrdom, the crowd Crying " Fool ! " without, while from 
 within and above a rapturous voice utters the words, 
 " Thou saint ! " His sympathy flows to prisoners, 
 emancipationists, throughout the world ; and in " The 
 May-Flower " he has a lurking kindness even for the 
 Puritans, — but of the sort that Burns extends to 
 Auld Hornie. This compassion reaches a climax in 
 the lyric of the two angels who are commissioned to 
 ransom hell itself. The injunction to beware of the 
 man of one book applies to the poet whose Bible was 
 interpreted for him by a Quaker mother. Its letter 
 rarely is absent from his verse, and its spirit never. 
 His hymns, than which he composes nothing more 
 spontaneously, are so many acts of faith. The eman- 
 cipationists certainly fought with the sword in one 
 hand and the Bible in the other, — and Whittier's 
 hymns were on their lips. The time came when these 
 were no longer of hope, but of thanksgiving. Often 
 his sacred numbers, such as the " Invocation," have 
 a sonorous effect and positive strength of feeling. It 
 was by the common choice of our poets that he wrote 
 the " Centennial Hymn " ; no one else would venture 
 where the priest of song alone should go. The com- 
 position begins imposingly : — 
 
 " Our fathers' God ! from out whose hand 
 The centuries fall like grains of sand " ; 
 
 and it is difficult to see how a poem for sacred music, 
 or for such an occasion, could be more adequately 
 wrought. 
 
 His occasional and personal pieces reveal his tran- 
 scendental habit of thought. We find him imagining 
 the after-life of the good, the gifted, the maligned. 
 The actuality of his conceptions is impressive : — 
 
 Hymns of 
 prayer 
 and 
 praise. 
 
 Transcen- 
 dental 
 spirit. 
 
126 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 li n abid- 
 ing tnood- 
 
 " I have friends in spirit-land ; 
 Not shadows in a shadowy band, 
 
 Not others, but themselves, are they." 
 
 The change is only one from twilight into dawn : — 
 
 " TAou livest, Fallen I — not in vain 
 Hath thy fine spirit meekly borne 
 The burthen of Life's cross of pain." 
 
 And in " Snow-Bound " he thus invokes a sister of 
 his youth : — 
 
 " And yet, dear heart, remembering thee. 
 Am I not richer than of old ? 
 Safe in thy immortality, 
 
 What change can reach the wealth I hold ? " 
 
 Whittier's religious mood is far from being super- 
 ficial and temporary. It is the life of his genius, out 
 of which flow his ideas of earthly and heavenly con- 
 tent. In outward observance he is loyal to the sim- 
 ple ways of his own sect, and still a frequenter of the 
 Meeting, where — 
 
 "from the silence multiplied 
 By these still forms on either side, 
 The world that time and sense have known 
 Falls off and leaves us God alone." 
 
 God should be most, he says, — 
 
 " where man is least ; 
 So, where is neither church nor priest, 
 And never rag of form or creed 
 To clothe the nakedness of need, — 
 Where farmer-folk in silence meet, — 
 I turn my bell-unsummoned feet." 
 
 He clings in this wise to the formal formlessness of 
 the Quakers, as he would cling, doubtless, to the 
 usages of any church in which he had been bred, pro- 
 vided that its creed rested upon the cardinal doctrines 
 j of the Master. Channing seemed to him a hero and 
 
THE INWARD LIGHT. 
 
 127 
 
 saint, with whom he could enter into full Commun- 
 ion: — 
 
 " No bars of sect or clime were felt, — 
 
 The Babel strife of tongues had ceased, — 
 And at one common altar knelt 
 The Quaker and the priest." 
 
 With this liberal inclusion of all true worshippers, he 
 is so much the more impatient of clerical bigotry. 
 " Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, h3^ocrites ! " 
 has been often on his lips, — sometimes the outbreak 
 of downright wrath, — 
 
 " Woe to the priesthood ! woe 
 To those whose hire is with the price of blood, — 
 Perverting, darkening, changing, as they go, 
 
 The searching truths of God ! " 
 
 at other times varied with grim and humorous con- 
 tempt, as in " The Pastoral Letter " and " The Hasch- 
 ish " ; and never more effectively than in the vivid and 
 stinging ballad of the fugitive slave-girl, captured in 
 the house of God, in spite of tearful and defying 
 women's eyes, and of the stout hands that rise be- 
 tween " the hunter and the flying." Down comes the 
 parson, bowing low : — 
 
 " Of course I know your right divine 
 To own and work and whip her; 
 Quick, deacon, throw that Polyglot 
 Before the wench, and trip her ! " 
 
 The basic justification of Whittier's religious trust 
 appears to be the " inward light " vouchsafed to a 
 nature in which the prophet and the poet are one. 
 This solvent of doubt removes him alike from the 
 sadness of Clough and Arnold and the paganism of 
 certain other poets. In the striking " Questions of 
 Life," a piece which indicates his highest intellectual 
 mark and is in affinity with some of Emerson's dis- 
 
 Scorn oj 
 bigotry. 
 
 The " in. 
 
 ward 
 
 light." 
 
128 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTJER. 
 
 Faitk^ es- 
 sential to 
 ike highest 
 art. 
 
 American 
 foets, as 
 person- 
 ages. 
 
 course, he fairly confronts his own share of our mod- 
 ern doubts ; questioning earth, air, and heaven ; per- 
 plexed with the mystery of our alliance to the upper 
 and lower worlds ; asking what is this 
 
 " centred self, which feels and is ; 
 A cry between the silences." 
 
 He finds no resource but to turn from 
 
 "book and speech of men apart 
 To the still witness in my heart." 
 
 His repose must come from the direction in which 
 the Concord transcendentalists also have sought for 
 it, the soul's temple irradiated by the presence of the 
 inward light. I have seen a, fervent expression of 
 this belief, in a voluntary letter of Whittier's, to a 
 poet who had written an ode concerning intuition as 
 the refuge of the baffled investigator. In fine, the 
 element of faith gives a tone to the whole range of 
 his verse, both religious and secular, and more dis-r 
 tinctively than to the work of any other living poet 
 of equal reputation. What he has achieved, then, is 
 greatly due to a force which is the one thing needful 
 in modern life and art. Faith, of some kind, in things 
 as they are or will be, has elevated all great works 
 of human creation. The want of it is felt in that in- 
 sincere treatment which weakens the builder's, the 
 painter's, and the poet's appeal ; since faith leads to 
 rapture and that to exaltation, — the passio vera, with- 
 out which art gains no hold upon the senses and the 
 souls of men. 
 
 The leaders of our recent poetic movement, with 
 the exception of Longfellow, — who, like Tennyson 
 
COMPARED TO MRS. BROWNING. 
 
 129 
 
 and Browning, devoted himself wholly to ideal work, 
 — seem to have figured more distinctively as person- 
 ages, in both their lives and writings, than their Eng- 
 lish contemporaries. This remark certainly applies to 
 Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Holmes, and Lowell, and to 
 none more clearly than to the subject of this review. 
 His traits, moreover, have begotten a sentiment of 
 public affection, which, from its constant manifesta- 
 tion, is not to be overlooked in any judgment of his 
 career. In recognition of a beautiful character, critics 
 have not found it needful to measure this native bard 
 with tape and calipers. His service and the spirit of 
 it offset the blemishes which it is their wont to con- 
 demn in poets whose exploits are merely technical. 
 A life is on his written page ; these are the chants of 
 a soldier, and anon the hymnal of a saint. Contem- 
 porary honor is not the final test, but it has its 
 proper bearing, — as in the case of Mrs. Browning, 
 whom I have called the most beloved of English poets. 
 Whittier's audience has been won by unaffected pic- 
 tures of the scenes to which he was bred, by the pu- 
 rity of his nature, and even more by the earnestness 
 audible in his songs, injurious as it sometimes is to 
 their artistic purpose. Like the English sibyl, he has 
 obeyed the heavenly vision, and the verse of poets 
 who still trust their inspiration has its material, as 
 well as spiritual, ebb and flow. 
 
 It must be owned that Goethe's calm distinction 
 between the poetry of humanity and that of a high 
 ideal is fully illustrated in Whittier's reform-verse. 
 Yet even his failings have "leaned to virtue's side." 
 Those who gained strength from his music to endure 
 defeat and obloquy cherish him with a devotion be- 
 yond measure. For his righteous and tender heart 
 they would draw him with their own hands, over paths 
 9 
 
 Whittier's 
 endearing 
 traits. 
 
 Purity and 
 zeaL 
 
 Pkilan- 
 thro^. 
 
I30 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Pro aruet 
 facts. 
 
 Hebraic 
 fervor. 
 
 strewed with lilies, to a shrine of peace and remem- 
 brance. They comprehend his purpose — that he has 
 " tried to make the world a little better, ... to awaken 
 a love of freedom, justice, and good will," and to have 
 his name, like Ben Adhem's, enrolled as of " one that 
 loved his fellow-men." In their opinion a grace is 
 added to his poetry by the avowal, " I set a higher 
 value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery 
 Declaration of 1833, than on the title-page of any 
 book." 
 
 Our eldest living poet, then, is canonized already 
 by his people as one who left to silence his personal 
 experience, yet entered thoroughly into their joy and 
 sorrow ; who has been, like a celibate priest, the con- 
 soler of the hearts of others and the keeper of his 
 own ; who has best known the work and feeling of 
 the humble household, and whose legend manifestly 
 is pro arts et focis. He has stood for New England, 
 also, in his maintenance of her ancient protest against 
 tyranny. He is the veteran of an epoch that can 
 never recur; that scarcely can be equalled, however 
 significant future periods may seem from the artist's 
 point of view. The primitive life, the old struggle for 
 liberty, are idealized in his strains. Much of both his 
 strength and incompleteness is due to his Hebraic 
 nature ; for he is the incarnation of Biblical heroism, 
 of the moral energy that breathed alike, through a 
 cycle of change from dogma to reason, in Hooker, 
 Edwards, Parker, Garrison, and Emerson. In his 
 outbursts against oppression and his cries unto the 
 Lord, we recognize the prophetic fervor, still nearer 
 its height in some of his personal poems, which pop- 
 ular instinct long ago attributed to him. Not only of 
 Ezekiel, but also of himself, he chanted in that early 
 time of anointment and consecration : — 
 
'AD vatem: 
 
 131 
 
 " The burden, of a prophet's power 
 Fell on me 'n that fearful hour ; 
 From ofif unutterable woes 
 The curtain of the future rose; 
 I saw far down the coming time 
 The fiery chastisement of crime ; 
 With noise of mingling hosts, and jar 
 Of falling towers and shouts of war, 
 I saw the nations rise and fall, 
 Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall." 
 
 Oliver Johnson's tribute, a complement to Park- 
 man's, paid honor to " The Prophet Bard of America, 
 poet of freedom, humanity, and religion ; whose words 
 of holy fire aroused the conscience of a guilty nation, 
 and melted the fetters of the slaves." This eulogy 
 from a comrade is the sentiment of a multitude in 
 whose eyes their bard seems almost transfigured by 
 the very words that might be soonest forgotten if pre- 
 cious for their poetry alone. I confess to my own 
 share of this feeling. It may be that he has thought 
 too little of the canons which it is our aim to discover 
 and illustrate ; yet it was to him above all that the 
 present writer felt moved to dedicate a volume with the 
 inscription "Ad Vatem," and to invoke for Whittier 
 
 "the Land that loves thee, her whose child 
 Thou art, — and whose uplifted hands thou long 
 Hast stayed with song availing like a prayer." 
 
 For surely no aged servant, his eyes having seen in 
 good time the Lord's salvation, ever was more en- 
 dowed with the love and reverence of a chosen peo- 
 ple. They see him resting in the country of Beulah, 
 and there solacing himself for a season. From this 
 comfortable land, where the air is sweet and pleasant 
 (and he is of those who here have " met abundance 
 of what they had sought for in all their pilgrimage "), 
 
 The 
 
 Prophet 
 
 Bard. 
 
 ''AdVa- 
 tetn.^^ 
 
132 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 they are not yet willing to have him seek the Golden 
 City of his visions, but would fain adjure him, — 
 
 " And stay thou with us long ! vouchsafe us long 
 This brave autumnal presence, ere the hues 
 Slow-fading, ere the quaver of thy voice. 
 The twilight of thine eye, move men to ask 
 Where hides the chariot, — in what sunset vale. 
 Beyond thy chosen river, champ the steeds 
 That wait to bear thee skyward." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE grasses had scarcely taken root on Emer- 
 son's grave among the pines when a discussion 
 of his genius began, to which so many have contrib- 
 uted, that we already are asking Lowell's question 
 concerning Shakespeare, — Can anything new be said 
 of him ? One thing, it seems to me, may be said, at 
 least in a new way and as a clew to his work as a 
 poet. While, of all his brotherhood, he is the radi- 
 ant exemplar of his own statement, that in spirit " the 
 true poet and the true philosopher are one," never- 
 theless, of all verse his own shows most clearly that 
 the Method of the poet not only is not one with that 
 of the philosopher, but is in fact directly opposed to 
 it. The poet, as an artist, does not move in the di- 
 rection which was Emerson's by instinct and selec- 
 tion. The Ideal philosophy scrutinizes every phase 
 of Nature to find the originating sense, the universal 
 soul, the pure identity ; it follows Nature's trails to 
 their common beginning, inverting her process of evo- 
 hition, working back from infinite variety to the pri- 
 mal unity. This, too, is the spirit of the poet, — to 
 find the soul of things. But in method he is an ar- 
 tist : his poetry is an art that imitates Nature's own 
 habit. He works from unity to countless results and 
 formations, from the pure thought to visible symbols, 
 
 A clewt» 
 his tuork 
 as a poet. 
 
 DiffereTici 
 
 heiween 
 
 artistic 
 
 andphUo- 
 
 Sophie firm 
 
 cesses. 
 
134 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 A comhi- 
 vation. 
 
 ideal prose 
 itttd verse. 
 
 His nat- 
 ural disci- 
 ties. 
 
 from the ideal to the concrete. As a poet, Emerson 
 found himself in a state, not of distraction, but often 
 of indecision, between the methods of philosophy and 
 art. To bear this in mind is to account more read- 
 ily for the peculiar beauties and deficiencies of his 
 verse, — and thus to accept it as it is, and not with- 
 out some understanding of its value. 
 
 Hermann Grimm recurs to the dispute whether our 
 sage was a poet, a philosopher, or a prophet. The; 
 fact is that he was born with certain notes of song ;i 
 he had the poet's eye and ear, and was a poet justl 
 so far as, being a philosopher, he accepted poetry as \ 
 the expression of thought in its rare and prophetic ' 
 moods, and just so far as, in exquisite moments, he 
 had the mastery of this form of expression. 
 
 Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems 
 are light and air. But this statement, like so many 
 of his own, gives only one side of a truth. His prose 
 is just as full of every-day sense and wisdom ; and 
 something different from prose, however sublunary 
 and imaginative, is needed to constitute a poem. 
 His verse, often diamond-like in contrast with the 
 feldspar of others, at times is ill-cut and beclouded. 
 His prose, then, is that of a wise man, plus a poet ; 
 and his verse, by turns, light and twilight, air and 
 vapor. Yet we never feel, as in reading Wordsworth, 
 that certain of his measures are wholly prosaic. He 
 was so careless of ordinary standards, that few of his 
 own craft have held his verse at its worth. It is said 
 that his influence was chiefly, like that of Socrates, 
 upon the sensitive and young, and such is the case 
 with all fresh influences ; but I take it that those who 
 have fairly assimilated Emerson's poetry in their youth 
 have been not so much born poets as born thinkers 
 of a poetic cast. It is inevitable, and partakes of 
 
POET AND THINKER. 
 
 135 
 
 growth by exercise, that poets in youth should value 
 a master's sound and color and form, rather than his 
 priceless thought. They are drawn to the latter by 
 the former, or not at all. Yet when poets, even in 
 this day of refinement, have served their technical ap- 
 prenticeship, the depth and frequent splendor of Em- 
 erson's verse grow upon them. They half suspect 
 that he had the finest touch of all when he chose to 
 apply it. It becomes a question whether his discords 
 are those of an undeveloped artist, or the sudden 
 craft of one who knows all art and can afford to be 
 on easy terms with it. I think there is evidence on 
 both sides; — that he had seasons when feeling and 
 expression were in circuit, and others when the wires 
 were down, and that he was as apt to attempt to 
 send a message at one time as at the other. But he 
 suggested the subtilty and swiftness of the soul's 
 reach, even when he failed to sustain it. 
 
 I have said that of two poets, otherwise equal, the 
 one who acquires the broadest knowledge will draw 
 ahead of him who only studies his art, and the poet 
 who thinks most broadly and deeply will draw ahead 
 of all. 'There can be little doubt of Emerson as a 
 thinker, or as a poet for thinkers satisfied with a deep 
 but abstract and not too varied range. Yet he did 
 not use his breadth of culture and thought to diver- 
 sify the purpose, form, symbolism, of his poems. 
 They are mostly in one key. They teach but one 
 lesson ; that, to be sure, is the first and "greatest of 
 all, but they fail to present it, after Nature's method, 
 in many forms of living and beautiful interest, — to 
 exemplify it in action, and thus bring it within unir 
 versal sympathy. That this should be so was, I say, 
 inevitable from the field of Emerson's research, — 
 that of pure rather than of applied philosophy. Thus 
 
 At times 
 the finest 
 touch of 
 all. 
 
 A single 
 thought 
 conveyed^ 
 hut that tH 
 greatest. 
 
136 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Bsseniial- 
 iy a poet. 
 
 An apt 
 paradox. 
 
 far, however, he represents Thought in any adjust- 
 ment of our poetic group, and furthermore, — his 
 thought being independent and emancipatory, — the 
 American conflict with superstition, with servility to 
 inherited usage and opinion. 
 
 We shall see that he had himself a noble and com- 
 prehensive ideal of what a typical poet should be, 
 and was aware that his own song fell short of it. 
 Still, he called himself a poet, and the consent of the 
 best minds has sustained him in his judgment. His 
 prose alone, as Lowell said, showed that he was es- 
 sentially a poet; another with reason declared of his 
 spoken essays that they were "not so much lectures 
 as grave didactic poems, theogonies," adorned with 
 " odes " and " eclogues.'' Thirty years later a cool 
 and subtile writer looks back to find them the " most 
 poetical, the most beautiful, productions of the Amer- 
 ican mind." For once the arbiters agree, except in 
 a question akin to the dispute whether all things con- 
 sist solely of spirit or solely of matter. Common 
 opinion justified Mr. Sanborn's fine paradox that, in- 
 stead of its being settled that Emerson could not 
 write poetry, it was settled that he could write noth- 
 ing else. We know his distaste for convention, his 
 mistrust of " tinkle " and " efficacious rhymes." But 
 his gift lifted him above his will ; even while throw- 
 ing out his grapnel, clinging to prose as the firm 
 ground of his work, he rose involuntarily and with 
 music. And it well may be that at times he wrote 
 verse as an avowal of his nativity, and like a noble 
 privileged to use the language of the court. Cer- 
 tainly he did not restrict himself to the poet's calling 
 with the loyalty of Tennyson and Longfellow. In 
 verse, however careful of his phrase, he was some- 
 thing of a rhapsodist, not apt to gloss his revelations 
 
THE GREAT MAN'S INTELLECT. 
 
 ^n 
 
 and exhortings with the nice perfection of those oth- 
 ers. He must be reviewed as one whose verse and 
 parable and prophecy alike were means to an end, — 
 that end not art, but the enfranchisement and stimu- 
 lation of his people and his time. When Longfellow, 
 the poet of graceful art and of sympathy as tender 
 as his voice, took his departure, there went up a cry 
 as from a sense of fireside loss. People everywhere 
 dwelt upon the story of his life and recalled his folk- 
 songs. Emerson glided away almost unperceived un- 
 der the shadow of the popular bereavement. But 
 soon, and still multiplying from the highest sources, 
 tributes to his genius began to appear, — searching, 
 studying, expounding him, — as when a grand nature, 
 an originating force, has ceased to labor for us. This 
 is the best of fame : to impress the selected minds, 
 which redistribute the effect in steadfast circles of ex- 
 tension. Mote than his associates, Emerson achieved 
 this fame. / He had the great man's intellect, which, 
 according to Landor, " puts in motion the intellect of 
 others." /He was, besides, so rare a personage, that 
 one who seeks to examine his writings apart from the 
 facts and conduct of his life needs must wander off 
 in contemplation of the man himself. Yet anything 
 that others can write of him is poor indeed beside a 
 collect of his own golden sayings. He felt his work 
 to be its own and best interpreter, and of recent au- 
 thors who have justly held this feeling he doubtless 
 was the chief. 
 
 II. 
 
 His writings, then, are the key to his biography — 
 the scroll of a life which, as for essential matter, and 
 as he said of Plato's, was chiefly "interior." To 
 quote his own language further, " Great geniuses have 
 
 His ofiice^ 
 
 Order of 
 intellect. 
 
 R. W. E.: 
 born in 
 Boston, 
 Mass., 
 May 25, 
 1803. 
 
138 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 rf ncestry. 
 
 Training. 
 
 Influence 
 ef ChaTir 
 »ing. 
 
 ^etire- 
 tnent from 
 Va pulpit. 
 
 the shortest biographies." Among the external points 
 of significance in Emerson's story are those derived 
 from his ancestral strain, for he was of pure and 
 even gentle English blood, " through eight genera- 
 tions of cultured, conscientious, and practical minis- 
 ters." He himself, as we know, assumed the profes- 
 sion of his father and forefathers, and for a time 
 was a Unitarian preacher in Boston ; this, after the 
 stated courses at Harvard, where he read and wrote 
 philosophy, nor failed to cultivate the Muse — for 
 whose art he had shown a rare aptness even in child- 
 hood. The office and honors of the Class Poet fell 
 to him, as to Lowell in after years. In letters he had 
 Everett, Ticknor, and Edward Channing for instruc- 
 tors. In theology he was deeply influenced by Chan- 
 ning, the divine, — the true founder, through the work 
 of Emerson and lesser pupils, of our liberal religious 
 structure. Emerson projected the lines of the master 
 so far beyond their first draft that he was unable 
 long to remain within the Unitarian limits of that 
 day. Some one has cleverly said that his verse, 
 " Good-bye, proud world ! " came from one whose 
 future gave no cause for epigrams like that of Ma- 
 dame de S^vign6 on Cardinal de Retz — of whom she 
 wrote that he pretended to retire from a world which 
 he saw was retiring from him. The separation from 
 the church, and the retreat to Concord, were the be- 
 ginning of Emerson's long career as poet, lecturer, 
 essayist, thinker and inspirer. The details of his 
 social, domestic, and civic relations are all upon rec- 
 ord. Nothing could be more seemly than his life- 
 long abode in the New England village of Concord, 
 the home of his line, the birth-place of our liberties ; 
 and it became, largely through his presence, the 
 
THE ACADEME. 
 
 139 
 
 source of our most resultful thought. Here he 
 blended, in his speech and action, the culture of the 
 university, nigh at hand, with the shrewd prudence 
 of the local neighborhood, as became a poet and 
 sage imbued with patriotism, morals, and the wisdom 
 of practical life. Here, though crossing the ocean 
 more than once, and inspecting other lands with the 
 regard that sees for once and all, he otherwise exem- 
 plified during half a century his own conception of 
 the clear spirit — that needs not to go afar upon its 
 quests, because it vibrates boundlessly, and includes 
 all things within reach and ken. For the rest, the 
 life of Emerson appertained to the household, the 
 library, the walk, the talk with all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men, communion with rare natures, the 
 proper part in local and national movement. As a 
 lecturer, his range was the country at large, but the 
 group that drew about him made Concord a modern 
 Academe. Unconsciously he idealized them all with 
 the halo of his own attributes. To him they all were 
 of the breed so exquisitely characterized in his ref- 
 erence to Margaret Fuller's " Friends." " I remem- 
 ber," he says, " these persons as a fair, commanding 
 troop, every one of them adorned by some splendor 
 of beauty, of grace, of talent, or of character, and 
 comprising in their band persons who have since dis- 
 closed sterling worth and elevated aims in the conduct 
 of life." Thus year after year a tide, that ceases not 
 with the death of him who mainly attracted it, has set 
 toward Concord, — a movement of pilgrims craving 
 spiritual exaltation and the interplay of mind with 
 mind. The poet's moral and intellectual experiences 
 are revealed in discourses, always beginning with the 
 memorable sermon on the Lord's Supper, which pre- 
 
 After-life 
 aftd 
 
 Pupils and 
 associates. 
 
 Concord. 
 
 Sermon on 
 the Com- 
 viunion, 
 1831. 
 
140 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Bssay on 
 "Nature,' 
 1836. 
 
 The tran- 
 fcendenial 
 vwvemenU 
 
 Hh per- 
 ionaltraits 
 »nd bear- 
 ing- 
 
 figured his emancipation from dogma,^ and the es- 
 say on Nature, wherein he applied a new vision to 
 the world about us. These were the Alpha of his 
 conviction and insight ; his after-speech followed con- 
 sistently and surely, " as the night the day." He 
 created his own audience, whose demand for his 
 thought grew by what it fed on, beginning in a sec- 
 tion, and spreading not only through a country but 
 over many lands. If it is true that " he was not the 
 prince of transcendentalists but the prince of ideal- 
 ists," the history of New England transcendentalism 
 is no less a corollary to the problem of Emerson's 
 life. 
 
 Our starry memories of the places and people that 
 once knew Emerson radiate always from one centre 
 — the presence of the sage himself. Many pupils, 
 catching something of his own sure and precise art 
 of delineation, have drawn his image for us, dwelling 
 upon the sinewy bending figure, the shining and ex- 
 pectant face, the union of masculinity and sweetness 
 in his bearing. His "full body tone" is recalled, 
 " full and sweet rather than sonorous, yet flexible, 
 and haunted by many modulations." Persuasion sat 
 upon his lips. The epithet " sun-accustomed " is 
 applied to Emerson's piercing eyes by one, a woman 
 and a poet, who marked the aquiline effect of his 
 noble profile. I, too, remember him in this wise, 
 and as the most serene of men : one whose repose, 
 whose tranquillity, was not the contentment of an 
 idler housed in worldly comforts, but the token of 
 spiritual adjustment to all the correspondences of 
 life ; as the bravest and most deferential, the proud- 
 
 1 Definitely set forth in his Address before the Senior Clast 
 in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838. 
 
HIS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 141 
 
 est in self-respect, yet recognizing in deep humility 
 the supremacy of universal law. No man so recep- 
 tive, and none with so plain and absolute a reser- 
 vation of his own ground. Even in the shadow and 
 silence of his closing years, he bore the mien of one 
 assured that 
 
 " the gods reclaim not from the seer 
 Their gift, although he ceases here to sing, 
 And, lilce the antique sage, a covering 
 Draws round his head, knowing what change is near.'' 
 
 III. 
 
 It is not my province to take part in the discus- 
 sion of Emerson's philosophy, his system or lack of 
 system. Some notion of this, however, must affect 
 our thoughts of him as a poet, since of all moderns 
 he most nearly fulfilled Wordsworth's inspired pre- 
 diction, uttered sixty years ago, of the approaching 
 (union of the poet and the philosopherTj He deemed 
 the higher office that of the poet, — 6f~him who quaffs 
 the brook that flows fast by the oracles, — yet doubt- 
 less thought himself not so well endowed with melody 
 and passion that his teaching should be subordinate 
 to his song. But the latter was always the flower- 
 ing of his philosophic thought, and it is essential to 
 keep in view the basis of that pure reflection. Qle 
 looked upon Nature as pregnant with Soul ; for hii 
 the Spirit always moved upon the face of the waters 
 The incomprehensible plan was perfect : whatever is, 
 is right. Thus far he knew, and was an optimist with 
 reverent intent. It was in vain to ask him to assert 
 what he did not know, to avow a creed founded upon 
 his hopes. If a theist, with his intuition of an all- 
 pervading life, he no less felt himself a portion of 
 
 :^J 
 
 Died at 
 Concord, 
 Mass,, 
 April 27, 
 
 1882. 
 
 Effiersoj^s 
 philosophy. 
 
 Optimism. 
 
142 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Reverence 
 
 without 
 
 dognicu 
 
 A?t idealist 
 and eclec' 
 tic. 
 
 Morals. 
 
 Life taken 
 at its full 
 worth. 
 
 that life, and the sense of omnipresence was so clearly 
 the dominant sense of its attributes, that to call him 
 a theist rather than a pantheist is simply a dispute 
 about terms ; to pronounce him a Christian theist is 
 to go beyond his own testimony. Such a writer must 
 be judged by the concurrence of his books ; they are 
 his record, and the parole evidence of no associate 
 can weigh against his written manifest for an instant. 
 His writings assure us that he accepted all bibles 
 and creeds for what good there was in them. One 
 thing for him was " certain " : [^>Religions gjg^ ob- 
 solete when lives do not proceed from them." He 
 saw that '' unlovely, nay frightful, is the setttCae of 
 the soul which is without God in the world " ; but 
 the creeds and dogmas of anthropomorphic theology 
 were merely germinal. " Man," thus far, has " made 
 all religions, and will yet make new and even higher 
 faiths." 
 
 Emerson, a man of our time, while a transcenden- 
 talist, looking inward rather than to books for his 
 wisdom, studied well the past, and earlier sages were 
 the faculty of his school. A latter-day eclectic, he 
 took from all literatures their best and essential. A 
 Platonic idealist, he was not averse to the inductive 
 method of Aristotle ; he had the Alexandrian faith 
 and ecstasy, the Epicurean zest and faculty of selec- 
 tion ; like the Stoics, he observed morals, heroism, 
 self-denial, and frugality. There is much in his teach- 
 ings that recalls the beautiful ethics of Marcus Au- 
 relius, and the words of Epictetus, as reported by 
 Arrian. His spiritual leanings never stinted his re- 
 gard of men and manners. He kept a sure, eye on 
 the world ; he was not only a philosopher, but the 
 paragon of gentlemen, with something more than the 
 Oriental, the Grecian, or the Gallic, tact. He relished 
 
A PLATONIC IDEALIST. 
 
 143 
 
 to the full the brave distinctions, the portraitures and 
 tests of Plutarch, and found the best of all good 
 company in the worldly wise, the cheery and comfort- 
 able Montaigne. One may almost say that he refined 
 and digested what was good in all philosophies, and 
 nothing more. He would get hold of Swedenborg, 
 the mystic, yet not be Swedenborg exclusively, nor 
 imitate the rhetoric of the Sophists, the pride of the 
 Cynics. From all he learned what each confesses in 
 the end, — the limitations of inquir}', — that the Finite 
 cannot measure, though it may feel, the Infinite. No 
 more would he formulate a philosophy, but within it 
 he could recognize nature, art, taste, morals, laws, re- 
 ligion, and the chance of immortality. When it was 
 said that he had no new system, he thought that he 
 needed none, and was sceptical of classification. 
 
 It appears that he found the key to his own na- 
 ture in Plato, being an idealist first of all. His intu- 
 itive faculty was so determined that ideality and mys- 
 ticism gave him the surest promise of realities ; his 
 own intellect satisfied him of the power of intellect. 
 Plainly hearing an interior voice, he had no doubt 
 that other men were similarly monished. Plato, the 
 guide of his youth, remained his type of philosopher 
 and man. To Plato's works alone should Omar's 
 saying of the Koran be applied : " Burn the libraries, 
 for their value is in this book." Nowhere else was 
 there such a range of speculation. " Out of Plato 
 come all things." And thus he held to the last. 
 " Of Plato," he said, years afterward, " I hesitate to 
 speak, lest there should be no end. . . . Why should 
 not young men be educated on this book ? It would 
 suffice for the tuition of the race." Yet Emerson's 
 philosophy was a greater advance from Neo-Platonism 
 than the Alexandrians were able to make upon the 
 
 His ivis- 
 dofK itn- 
 /ortnnlat- 
 ed. 
 
 Plato hii 
 early 
 guide a7td 
 type. • 
 
144 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 special 
 likeness of 
 Enter soti 
 to Ploti- 
 nus. 
 
 Standards 
 
 ffgreaU 
 
 M£SS. 
 
 lines indicated by their elemental master. In per- 
 sonal life and bearing, Plotinus, with whom our poet 
 seems to have been most in sympathy, was very closely 
 his prototype. There is first to be noted the curious 
 resemblance between the eclectic, investigating Alex- 
 andrian age and our present time ; and secondly, it 
 is Plotinus of whom we are told that " He lived at 
 the same time with himself and with others, and the 
 inward activity of his spirit ceased only during his 
 hours of sleep. . . . His written style was close, preg- 
 nant, and richer in thought than in words, yet enthu- 
 siastic, and always pointing to the main object. He 
 was more eloquent in his oral communications, and 
 was said to be very clever in finding the appropriate 
 word, even if he failed in accuracy on the whole. 
 Besides this, the beauty of his person was increased 
 when discoursing ; his countenance was lighted up 
 with genius." Taylor's translations of selections from 
 the Works of Plotinus, published in 1817 and 1834, 
 must have fallen into Emerson's hands, and I am 
 satisfied of their impression upon his mind. As one 
 examines the lives and writings of the two men, the 
 likeness is still more notable, especially with respect 
 to their views of fate, will, ethics, the "higher law," 
 the analysis of the beautiful, and in the ardor with 
 which young students, and many of the elderly and 
 wise, listened to their respective teachings. Emerson 
 was a Plotinus reanimate after the lapse of sixteen 
 centuries of Christianity. He has now, like the Neo- 
 Platonist, " led back the Divine principle within " him 
 "to the God who is all in all." 
 
 To the great thinkers of the past, the New England 
 teacher, without fear or boasting, well might feel him- 
 self allied. The accepted great, free of the ordinary 
 bounds of place and time, recognize one another 
 
MASTER AND SCHOOL. 
 
 145 
 
 across the vague, like stars of the prime magnitude in 
 the open night. Emerson knew the haps and signs 
 of genius : " Whenever we find a man higher by a 
 whole head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure 
 to come in doubt what are his real works." We can- 
 not say " What is master, and what school." " As 
 for their borrowings and adaptings, they know how to 
 borrow. ... A great man is one of the afi&nities, who 
 takes of everything." But they are not above the law 
 of perfect life ; virtue, simplicity, absolute sincerity, 
 these are their photosphere. " Live as on a moun- 
 tain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who 
 lives as he was meant to live." To this Roman stand- 
 ard the New Englander subjoined the shrewd, kindly 
 wisdom of his stock and region. He was eminent 
 among those whose common sense is the most telling 
 point to be made against Locke's negation of innate 
 ideas, — whose judgment is so apt that, granting 
 Locke's theory, it can be accounted for only by the 
 modern theory of ideas prenatal and inherited. His 
 written wisdom is more effective than Montaigne's, be- 
 ing less dependent on citations. He knew by instinct 
 what our novelists learn from observation and experi- 
 ence ; or is it that they study chiefly their own time 
 and neighborhood, while he sat aloof and with the 
 ages ? Thus strong in equipment, sound in heart, 
 and lofty of intellect, we find him revered by his pu- 
 pils, and without a living peer in the faculty of ele- 
 vating the purpose of those who listened to his buoy- 
 ant words. We must confess that a differentiation 
 between master and school, and between members of 
 the school, after awhile became manifest. That such 
 a process was inevitable is plain, when Emerson's 
 transcendental and self-reliant laws of conduct are 
 kept in mind. 
 
 Intutte 
 ivisdafHt 
 
146 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Trati- 
 sceTtdental 
 and in- 
 ductive 
 methods 
 contrasted. 
 
 The mas- 
 ter and his 
 fupils. 
 
 One may say, in illustration, that his philosophical 
 method bears to the inductive or empirical a relation 
 similar to that between the poetry of self-expression 
 and the poetry of aesthetic creation, — a relation of 
 the subjective to the objective. The former kind of 
 verse often is the more spontaneous, since it has its 
 birth in the human need for utterance. It is the 
 cry of adolescence and femininity, the resource of 
 sensitive natures in which emotion outvies the sense 
 of external beauty or power. It was the voice of 
 Shakespeare's youth, nor was it ever quieted through- 
 out the restless careers of Byron, Heine, and De 
 Musset. But we accept as the great works of the 
 poets their intellectual and objective creations, wherein 
 the artist has gone beyond his own joy and pain, his 
 narrow intro-vision, to observe, combine, transfigure, 
 the outer world of nature and life. Such the epics, 
 idyls, dramas, of the masters. When subjective poe- 
 try is the yield of a lofty nature, or of an ideal and 
 rapturous womanhood like Mrs. Browning's, it is a 
 boon and revelation to us all ; but when, as too often, 
 it is the spring-rise of a purling, commonplace stream- 
 let, its egotism grows pitiful and repulsive. This 
 lesson has been learned, and now our minor poets, 
 in their fear of it, strive to give pleasure to our sense 
 of the beautiful, and work as artists, — though some- 
 what too delicately, — rather than to pose as excep- 
 tional beings, "among men, but not of them." 
 
 As with the subjective poets, so with many of the 
 transcendental acolytes. The force of Emerson lay 
 in the depth and clearness of his intentions. He 
 gave us the revelation and prophecy of a man among 
 millions. Such a teacher aids the self-development 
 of noble minds ; his chief peril is that of nurturing 
 a weaker class that cannot follow where he leads. 
 
EFFECT OF HIS TEACHINGS. 
 
 147 
 
 Some of its enthusiasts will scarcely fail to set too 
 high a value upon their personal impulses. They 
 " still revere," but forget to " still suspect " them- 
 selves " in lowliness of heart." For the rest, the 
 down-East instinct is advisory and horailetic; New 
 Englanders are prone to teach, and slower to be 
 taught. Emerson, however, grew to be their superior 
 man, the one to whom all agreed to listen, and from 
 whom all quote. His example, also, has somewhat 
 advanced the art of listening, in which he was so 
 perfect, with forward head and bright, expectant vis- 
 age. His inculcations were of freedom, of the self- 
 guidance that learns to unlearn and bears away from 
 tradition ; yet this, too, will breed false liberty of 
 conceit in minor votaries, whose inward light may do 
 well enough for themselves, yet not suffice for the 
 light of the world. Hence the public, accepting 
 Emerson, has been less tolerant of more than one 
 Emersonian, with his ego, et rex meus. After all is 
 said, we must see that our transcendentalists were a 
 zealous, aspiring band of seekers after the true, the 
 beautiful, and the good; what they have lacked in 
 deference they have made up in earnestness and 
 spirituality. There have been receptive natures 
 among them, upon whom, as indeed upon the genius 
 of his people far and wide, the tonic effect of Emer- 
 son's life and precept has been immeasurable. Goe- 
 the's declaration of himself that he had been " to the 
 Germans in general, and to the young German poets 
 in particular, their liberator,'' may, with perfect truth, 
 be applied to Emerson, and to a generation that has 
 thriven on his word. He has taught his countrymen 
 the worth of virtue, wisdom, courage, — above all, to 
 fashion life upon a self-reliant pattern, obeying the 
 dictates of their own souls. 
 
 Diverse 
 results of 
 his injiu- 
 en£e. 
 
 A libera^ 
 tor. 
 
148 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Emerson^ 
 Vie Poet. 
 
 " Poems," 
 
 1847. 
 
 " May- 
 Day, and 
 Other 
 Pieces," 
 1867. 
 
 "■Poems," 
 1876. 
 
 Philosophy 
 
 iransfig- 
 
 ured. 
 
 His view 
 of Art. 
 
 Fitness of 
 things. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Recognizing Emerson's high mood as that of a 
 most original poet, I wish chiefly to consider his 
 relations to poetry and the poetic art. His imagi- 
 native essays are not poems. Speech is not songj 
 the rarest mosaic lacks the soul of the canvas swept 
 by the brush. The credentials that he presented from 
 time to time, and mostly in that dawn when poets 
 sing if ever, are few and fragmentary, but they will 
 suffice. They are the trophies, the wreaths and • 
 golden vessels, the spolia qpima, which he set before 
 the shrine of the goddess. They are the avowal of 
 a rare spirit that there are things which cannot be 
 rendered in prose; that Poetry claims a finer art, a 
 supremer utterance, for her service, and that she 
 alone can stamp the coins and bronzes which carry 
 to the future the likeness of her viceroy. 
 
 In his verse, Emerson's spiritual philosophy and 
 laws of conduct appear again, but transfigured. AaJ- 
 ways the idea of Soul, central and pervading, of 
 which Nature's forms are but the created symbolsrH 
 As in his early discourse he recognized two entities, 
 Nature and the Soul, so to the last he believed Art 
 to be simply the union of Nature with man's will — 
 Thought symbolizing itself through Nature's aid. 
 Thought, sheer ideality, was his sovereign ; he was 
 utterly trustful of its guidance. The law of poetic 
 beauty depends on the beauty of the thought, which, 
 perforce, assumes the fittest, and therefore most 
 charming, mode of expression. The key to art is 
 the eternal fitness of things ; this is the sure test and 
 solvent. Over and again he asserted his conviction : 
 " Great thoughts insure musical expression. Every 
 word should be the right word. . . . The Imagina- 
 
THE UNIVERSAL SOUL. 
 
 149 
 
 tion wakened brings its own language, and that is 
 always musical. . . . Whatever language the poet uses, 
 the secret of tone is at the heart of the poem." He 
 cites Moller, who taught that the building which was 
 fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to 
 be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. 
 (The enforced beauty of even the rudest sailing craft 
 always has seemed to me the most striking illustra- 
 tion of this truth.) In fine, Emerson sees all forms 
 of art symbolizing but one Reason, not one mind, 
 but The Mind that made the world. He refers " all 
 production at last to an aboriginal Power." It is 
 easy to discern that from the first he recognized " the 
 motion and the spirit," which to Wordsworth were 
 revealed only by the discipline of years ; but his song 
 went beyond the range of landscape and peasant, 
 touching upon the verities of life and thought. 
 " Brahma " is the presentation of the truth manifest 
 to the oldest and most eastern East, and beyond 
 which the West can never go. How strange that 
 these quatrains could have seemed strange ! They 
 reveal the light of Asia, but no less the thought of 
 Plato — who said that in all nations certain minds 
 dwell on the " fundamental Unity," and " lose all 
 being in one Being." Everywhere one stuff, under 
 all forms, this the woven symbolism of the universal 
 Soul, the only reality, the single and subdivided Iden- 
 tity that alone can " keep and pass and turn again," 
 that is at once the doubter and the doubt, the slayer 
 and the slain, light and shadow, the hither and the 
 yon. Love is but the affinity of its portions, the de- 
 sire for reunion, the knowledge of soul by soul, to 
 which the eyes of lovers are but windows. Art is the 
 handiwork of the soul, with materials created by it- 
 self, building better than it knows, the bloom of at- 
 traction and necessity. 
 
 A U art a 
 reflex of 
 the univey 
 sal soul* 
 
 " SraA- 
 
ISO 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Otir lyric 
 fott. 
 
 Margaret 
 
 Fuller's 
 
 comtnettt. 
 
 Why Di- 
 dacticism 
 repels us. 
 
 Thus far the theory of Emerson's song. It does 
 not follow that he composed upon a theory. At 
 times I think him the first of our lyric poets, his 
 turns are so wild and unexpected ; and he was never 
 commonplace, even when writing for occasions. His 
 verse changes unawares from a certain tension and 
 angularity that were congenital, to an ethereal, un- 
 hampered freedom, the poetic soul in full glow, the 
 inner music loosed and set at large. Margaret Fuller 
 wrote that his poems were "mostly philosophical, 
 which is not the truest kind of poetry." But this 
 depends upon the measure of its didacticism. Emer- 
 son made philosophical poetry imaginative, elevating, 
 and thus gave new evidence that the poet's realm is 
 unbounded. If he sought first principles, he looked 
 within himself for them, and thus portrays himself, 
 not only the penetrative thinker, but the living man, 
 the citizen, the New England villager, whose symbols 
 are drawn from the actual woods and hills of a neigh- 
 borhood. Certainly he went to rural nature for his 
 vigor, his imagery and adornments. An impassioned 
 sense of its beauty made him the reverse of the tra- 
 ditional descriptive poet. Most poetry of nature justly 
 is termed didactic ; most philosophical verse the same. 
 Miss Fuller failed to make distinctions. All feel what 
 didacticism signifies, but let us try to formulate it. 
 
 Didacticism is the gospel of half-truths. Its senses 
 are torpid ; it fails to catch and convey the soul of 
 truth, which is beauty. Truth shorn of its beauty is 
 tedious and not poetical. We weary of didactic verse, 
 therefore, not because of its truth, but because of its 
 self-delusive falsehood. It flourishes with a dull and 
 prosaic generation. The true poet, as Mrs. Browning 
 saw, is your only truth-teller, because he gives the 
 truth complete in beauty or not at all. 
 
ON NA TURK'S HIDDEN TRAIL. 
 
 151 
 
 Emerson doubts his power to capture the very truth 
 of nature. Its essence — its beauty — is so elusive ; 
 it flees and leaves but a corpse behind ; it is the 
 pearly glint of the shells among the bubbles of the 
 latest wave : — 
 
 " I fetched my sea-born treasures home ; 
 But the poor, unsightly, noisome things 
 Had left their beauty on the shore, 
 With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar." 
 
 But such poems as the " Forerunners " show how 
 closely he moved, after all, upon the trail of the evad- 
 ing sprite. He seemed, by the first intention, and 
 with an exact precision of grace and aptness, to put 
 in phrases what he saw and felt, — and he saw and 
 felt so much more than others ! He had the aborig- 
 inal eye, and the civilized sensibility ; he caught both 
 the external and the scientific truth of natural things, 
 and their poetic charm withal. As he triumphed over 
 the untruthfulness of the mere verse-maker, and the 
 dulness of the moralist, his instant, sure, yet airy 
 transcripts gave his poems of nature a quality with 
 out a counterpart. Some of his measures had at least 
 the flutter of the twig whence the bird has just flown. 
 He -did not quite fail of that music music-born, 
 
 " a melody bom of melody, 
 
 Which melts the world into a sea. 
 Toil could never compass it ; 
 Art its height could never hit." 
 
 He infused his meditations with the sheen of Day it- 
 self, — of 
 
 " one of the charmed days 
 
 When the genius of God doth flow; 
 
 The wind may alter twenty ways, 
 
 A tempest cannot blow ; 
 
 It may blow north, it still is warm ; 
 
 Or south, it still is clear; 
 
 Elusive 
 Tiaiure, 
 
 Emerson 
 close upon 
 her trail. 
 
 " Wood' 
 noUs." 
 
152 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 "The 
 Problem,^' 
 
 Day." 
 
 A Iways 
 ike one afit 
 word. 
 
 A riless- 
 %ess. 
 
 Or east, it smells like a clover-farm ; 
 Or west, no thunder fear." 
 
 He returns with delight to Nature's blending of hei 
 laws of beauty and use, perceiving that she 
 
 "beats in perfect tune. 
 
 And rounds with rhyme her every rune, 
 
 Whether she work in land or sea. 
 
 Or hide underground her alchemy. 
 
 Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake. 
 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
 
 And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 
 
 " Woodnotes " is full of lyrical ecstasy and light- 
 some turns and graces. To assimilate such a poem 
 of nature, or "The Problem," that masterpiece of 
 religion and art, is to feed on holy dew, and to com- 
 prehend how the neophytes who were bred upon it 
 find the manna of noontide somewhat rank and innu- 
 tritious. " May-Day " is less lyrical, more plainly de- 
 scriptive of the growth and meaning of the Spring, but 
 not in any part didactic. It is the record of the poet's 
 training, a match to Wordsworth's portrayal of his 
 subjective communing with Nature in youth ; its spirit 
 is the same with Lowell's woodland joyousness, one 
 of child-like and unquestioning zest. Finally, this 
 poet's scenic joinery is so true, so mortised with the 
 one apt word, as where he says that the wings of 
 Time are "pied with morning and with night,'' and the 
 one best word or phrase is so unlooked for, that, as I 
 say, we scarcely know whether all this comes by grace 
 of instinct, or with search and artistic forethought. It 
 seems " the first fine careless rapture " ; the labor, 
 which results in the truth of Tennyson's landscape 
 and the pathos of Longfellow's, may be there, but is 
 not to be detected, and in these touches, if not other- 
 wise, he excelled his compeers. His generalizations 
 
PROPHETIC INTUITION. 
 
 153 
 
 pertain to the unseen world ; viewing the actual, he 
 puts its strength and fineness alike into a line or epi- 
 thet. He was born with an unrivalled faculty of se- 
 lection. Monadnock is the " constant giver," the Titan 
 that " heeds his sky-affairs " ; the tiny humming-bee a 
 "voyager of light and noon," a "yellow-breeched phi- 
 losopher," and again an " animated torrid zone " ; the 
 defiant titmouse, an " atom in full breath." For a 
 snow-storm, or the ocean, he uses his broader brush, 
 but once only and well. His minute truth and sense 
 of values are held in honor by his pupils Whitman 
 and Burroughs, our poetic familiars of the field, and 
 by all to whom the seasonable marvels of the pas- 
 toral year are not unwelcome or unknown. 
 
 Thus keenly Emerson's instinct responded to the 
 beauty of Nature. I have hinted that her secure 
 laws were the chief promoters of his imagination. It 
 coursed along her hidden ways. Ln this he antedated 
 Tennyson, and was less didactic than Goethe and 
 kindred predecessors. His foresight gave spurs to 
 the intellect of Tyndall and other investigators, — to 
 their ideal faculty, without which no explorer moves 
 from post to outpost of discovery. Correlatively, each 
 wonder-breeding point attained by the experimental- 
 ists was also occupied by our eager and learned thinker 
 from the moment of its certainty. Each certainty gave 
 him joy ; reasoning a priori from his sense of a spirit- 
 ual Force, the seer anticipated the truths demonstrated 
 by the inductive workers, and expected the demon- 
 stration. Even in " The Sphinx," the first poem of 
 his first collection, the conservation of force, the evo- 
 lution from the primordial atom, are made to subserve 
 his mystical faith in a broad Identity. Here, thirty 
 years before Tennyson made his most compact ex- 
 pression of the central truth, — 1 
 
 His epi- 
 thets. 
 
 Scientific 
 prescience. 
 
 Darwin 
 
 aniici~ 
 
 pated. 
 
 'The 
 ^phitix.'^ 
 
154 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The seer 
 of evolw 
 tioH. 
 
 " Flower in the crannied wall . . . 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is," 
 Emerson had put it in this wise : — 
 " Thorough a thousand voices 
 Spoke the universal dame : 
 ' Who telleth one of my meanings, 
 Is master of all I am.'" 
 
 The reference, in " Bacchus," to the ascent of life 
 from form to form, still remains incomparable for terse- 
 ness and poetic illumination : — 
 
 " I, drinking this. 
 
 Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ; 
 
 Kings unborn shall walk with me ; 
 
 And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
 
 What it will do when it is man." 
 
 And in " Woodnotes " he discoursed of 
 
 "the genesis of things, 
 
 Of tendency through endless ages. 
 Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages, 
 Of rounded worlds, of space and time. 
 Of the old flood's subsiding slime " ; 
 
 but always thinks of the universal Soul as the only 
 reality, — of creation's process as simply the meta- 
 morphosis which 
 
 " Melts things that be to things that seem. 
 And solid nature to a dream." 
 
 Even in the pathetic "Threnody" he stays his an- 
 guish with faith in the beneficence of Law. With 
 more passion and less method than afterward gave 
 form to "In Memoriam," he declared that the "mys- 
 teries of Nature's heart " were " past the blasphemies 
 of grief." He saw 
 
 "the genius of the whole, 
 
 Ascendant in the primal soul. 
 Beckon it when to go and come." 
 
HIS THEORY OF SECLUSION. 
 
 155 
 
 Such a poet was not like to go backward. The 
 " Song of Nature " is his paean to her verities, still 
 more clearly manifest in his riper years. This superb 
 series of quatrains, cumulative as thunder-heads and 
 fired with lyric glory, will lend its light to whatsoever 
 the poetry of the future has in reserve for us. 
 
 It should be noted that Emerson's vision of the sub- 
 lime in scientific discovery increased his distaste for 
 mere style, and moved him to contentment with the 
 readiest mode of expression. It tempered his eulogy 
 of " Art," and made him draw this contrast : " Nature 
 transcends all moods of thought, and its secret we do 
 not yet find. But a gallery stands at the mercy of our 
 moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivo- 
 lous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention 
 habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns, 
 should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke 
 found to admire in 'stone dolls.'" 
 
 Right here we observe (deferring matters of con- 
 struction) that our seer's limitations as a poet are in- 
 dicated by his dependence on out-door nature, and by 
 his failure to utilize those higher symbols of the prime 
 Intelligence which comprise the living, acting, suffer- 
 ing world of man. With a certain pride of reserve, 
 that did not lessen his beautiful deference to individ- 
 uals, he proclaimed " the advantage which the country 
 life possesses for a powerful mind over the artificial 
 and curtailed life of cities." He justified solitude by 
 saying that great men, from Plato to Wordsworth, did 
 not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to 
 time as benefactors. Above all he declared — " I am 
 by nature a poet, and therefore must live in the coun- 
 try." But here a Goethe, or De Musset, or Browning 
 might rejoin : " And I am a poet, and need the focal 
 life of the town." If man be the paragon of life on 
 
 " Song of 
 Nature.'''' 
 
 Science 
 and A ri. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 12-16. 
 
 EmersOTCs 
 
 lijnita^ 
 
 iions. 
 
 Narrow- 
 ing' tlie 
 poef sfraitF. 
 ckise. 
 
156 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Life^ ac- 
 tion^ and 
 passion, 
 wanting 
 in his 
 King. 
 
 this globe, his works and passions the rarest symbols 
 of the hfe unseen, then the profoundest study is man- 
 kind. Emerson's tlieorem was a restriction of the 
 poet's liberties. One can name great poets who would 
 have been greater but for the trammels of their seclu- 
 sion. I believe that Emerson's came from self-knowl- 
 edge. He kept his range with incomparable tact and 
 philosophy. Poets of a wider franchise — with Shake- 
 speare at their front — have found that genius gains 
 most from Nature during that formative period when 
 one reads her heart, if ever, and that afterward he may 
 safely leave her, as a child his mother, to return from 
 time to time, but still to do his part among the ranks 
 of men. 
 
 Emerson makes light of travel for pleasure and ob- 
 servation, but ever more closely would observe the 
 ways of the inanimate world. Yet what are man's 
 works but the works of Nature by one remove? To 
 one poet is given the ear to comprehend the murmur 
 of the forest, to another the sense that times the heart- 
 beats of humanity. Few have had Emerson's inward 
 eye, but it is well that some have not been restricted 
 to it. He clung by attraction, no less than by circum- 
 stance, to " a society in which introspection," as Mr. 
 James has shrewdly written, " thanks to the want of 
 other entertainment, played almost the part of a so- 
 cial resource." His verse, in fact, is almost wholly 
 void of the epic and dramatic elements which inform 
 the world's great works of art. Action, characteriza- 
 tion, specific sympathy, and passion are wanting in his 
 song. His voice comes " like a falling star '' from a 
 skyey dome of pure abstraction. Once or twice, some 
 little picture from life, — a gypsy girl, a scarcely out- 
 lined friend or loved one, — but otherwise no person- 
 age in his works except, it may be, the poet himself, 
 
RADIANT BUT HIGH-REMOVED. 
 
 157 
 
 the Saadi of his introspective song : even that wise 
 and joyous bard restored in fragments, suggested rather 
 than portrayed. Emerson would be the " best bard, 
 because the wisest," if the wisdom of his song illus- 
 trated itself in living types. He knew the human 
 world, none better, and generalized the sum of its at- 
 tainments, — was gracious, shrewd, and calm, — but 
 could not hold up the mirror and show us to ourselves. 
 He was that unique songster, a poet of fire and vision, 
 quite above the moralist, yet neither to be classed as 
 objective or subjective ; he perceived the source of all 
 passion and wisdom, yet rendered neither the hearts of 
 others nor his own. His love poetry is eulogized, but 
 it wants the vital grip wherewith his " Concord Fight " 
 and " Boston Hymn " fasten on our sense of manhood 
 and patriotism. It chants of Love, not of the beloved ; 
 its fiame is pure and general as moonlight and as 
 high-removed. " All mankind love a lover," and it is 
 not enough to discourse upon the philosophy of " Love," 
 " Experience," " Power," " Friendship." Emerson's 
 " Bacchus " must press for him 
 
 " wine, but wine which never grew 
 
 In the belly of the grape." 
 
 His deepest yearnings are expressed in that passion- 
 ate outburst, — the momentary human wail over his 
 dead child, — and in the human sense of lost com- 
 panionship when he tells us, — 
 
 " In the long sunny afternoon. 
 The plain was full of ghosts." 
 
 Oftener he moves apart ; his blood is ichor, not our 
 own ; his thoughts are with the firmament. We rev- 
 erence his vocation, and know ourselves unfitted for 
 it. He touches life more nearly in passages that have 
 the acuteness, the practical wisdom of his prose works 
 and days ; but these are not his testimonials as a poet. 
 
 Cfuirac- 
 ieristics. 
 
158 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 A layer on 
 qfjlands. 
 
 Rossetti. 
 
 Metrical 
 ityle. 
 
 His laying on of hands was more potent ; a trans- 
 mitted heat has gone abroad through the ministry of 
 his disciples, who practise as he preached, and some- 
 times transcend both his preaching and his practice. 
 All the same, the originator of a force is greater than 
 others who add four-fold to its momentum. They are 
 never so manifestly his pupils as when they are ''scar- 
 ifying " and " sounding and exploring " him, "re- 
 porting where they touch bottom and where not," on 
 ground of their own, but with a pleasant mockery of 
 the master's word and wont. There was a semblance 
 between the poets Emerson and Rossetti, first, in the 
 small amount of their lyrical work, and again in the 
 positive influence .which each exerted upon his pupils. 
 In quality the Concord seer, and the English poet who 
 was at once the most spiritual and sensuous of his 
 own school, were wholly unlike. Rossetti was touched 
 with white fire, but dreamed of souls that meet and 
 glow when disembodied. The spirits of his beatified 
 thrill with human passion. Our seer brought some- 
 thing of heaven to earth, while Rossetti yearned to 
 carry life through death to heaven. 
 
 The technical features of Emerson's verse corre- 
 spond to our idea of its meaning. In fact, his view of 
 personal culture also applied to his metrical style. 
 " Manners are not to be directly cultivated. That is 
 frivolous ; leave it to children. . . . We must look at 
 the mark, not at the arrow, and perhaps the best rule 
 is Lord Bacon's, — that to attain good forms one only 
 needs not to .despise them." Delicate and adroit 
 artisans, in whose eyes poetry is solely a piece of 
 design, may find the awkwardness of Emerson's verse 
 a bar to right comprehension of its frequent beauty 
 and universal purpose. I am not sure but one must 
 be of the poet's own country and breeding to looi 
 
SLIGHT CONSTRUCTIVE FACULTY. 
 
 159 
 
 quite down his vistas and by-paths : for every Amer- 
 ican has something of Emerson in him, and the secret 
 of the land was in the poet, — the same Americanism 
 that Whitman sees in the farmer, the deck-hand, the 
 snag-toothed hostler, atoning with its humanities for 
 their sins past and present, as for the sins of Harte's 
 gamblers and diggers of the gulch. It may be, too, 
 that other conditions are needed to open the ear to 
 the melody, and to shut out the discords, of Emerson's 
 song. The melody is there, and though the range be 
 narrow, is various within itself. The charm is that of 
 new-world and native wood-notes wild. Not seldom a 
 lyrical phrase is the more taking for its halt, — helped 
 out, like the poet's own speech, by the half-stammer 
 and pause that were wont to precede the rarest or 
 weightiest word of all. 
 
 Among the followers of any art there are those 
 whose compositions are effective in the mass, their 
 treatment broad, the beauty pervasive ; again, those 
 who with small constructive feeling are rich in detail, 
 and whose work is interspersed with fine and origi- 
 nal touches ; lastly, the complete artists, in whom, 
 however vivid their originality and great their special 
 beauties, the general design is always kept in hand. 
 Emerson never felt the strength of proportion that 
 compels the races to whom art is a religion and a law. 
 He has given many a pang to lovers of the beautiful, 
 who have endured his irreverence by allowing for his 
 supposed disabilities. He satisfied his conscience in 
 the same easy way, declaring that he was from his 
 " very incapacity of mechanical writing " a " chartered 
 libertine." But his speech bewrayeth him. Who sounds 
 one perfect chord can sound again. His greater ef- 
 forts in verse, as in prose, show that he chose to 
 deprecate the constructive faculty lest it might limit! 
 
 Native 
 
 wood-^toUs 
 
 •wild. 
 
 Deficient 
 sense 0/ 
 proportion. 
 
i6o 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 formist. 
 
 Miss Ful- 
 ler on his 
 synthesis. 
 
 Unique 
 lyrics aTid 
 notable 
 sayings. 
 
 his ease and freedom. And his instinct of person- 
 ality, not without a pride of its own, made him a non- 
 conformist. We are told of his mode of preparing an 
 essay, — of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a 
 topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like 
 a child's variegated beads. But I do not find that his 
 best essays read backward as well as forward ; I sus- 
 pect an art beneath their loose arrangement, and I 
 see at times the proof of continuous heat. His early 
 critic declared that he had not " written one good 
 work, if such a work be one where the whole com- 
 mands more attention than the parts." But again we 
 see that she too rarely qualified her oracles. At that 
 time he had written poems of which the whole and the 
 parts were at least justly related masterpieces, — lyrical 
 masterpieces, of course, not epic or dramatic ; of such 
 were the " Threnody " and " Woodnotes," to which 
 was afterward added the " May-Day." Breadth and 
 proportion, in a less degree, mark "The Problem," 
 " Monadnock," " Merlin," and a few other pieces. 
 But- working similarly he falls short in the labored 
 dithyrambic, " Initial, Dsemonic, and Celestial Love." 
 He was formal enough in youth, before he struck out 
 for himself, and at the age of eleven, judging from his 
 practice-work, was as precocious as Bryant or Poe. 
 But he soon gave up construction, putting a trade- 
 mark upon his verse, and trusting that freedom would 
 lead to something new. So many precious sayings en- 
 rich his more sustained poems as to make us include 
 him at times with the complete artists. Certainly, both 
 in these and in the unique bits so characteristic that 
 they are the poet himself, — "Terminus," "Character," 
 " Manners," " Nature," etc., — he ranks with the fore- 
 most of the second class, poets eminent for special 
 graces, values, sudden meteors of thought. In that 
 
'SAYINGS GRAVED IN GOLD.' 
 
 i6i 
 
 gift for " saying things," so notable in Pope and Ten- 
 nyson, he is the chief of American poets. From what 
 other bard have so many original lines and phrases 
 passed into literature, — inscriptions that do not wear 
 out, graven in bright and standard gold ? It is worth 
 while, for the mere effect, to group some of them 
 together, and especially those which, appearing in his 
 first book forty years ago, long since became a con- 
 stituent part of our literary thought and expression : — 
 
 " 'T is the law of bush and stone, 
 Each can only take his own." 
 
 " The thoughts that he shall think 
 Shall not be forms of stars, but stars, 
 Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars." 
 
 " Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
 Loved the wood- rose and left it on its stalk?" 
 
 " Heartily know. 
 When half-gods go 
 The gods arrive." 
 
 " What is excellent, 
 As God lives, is permanent ; 
 Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain." 
 
 " Bom for the future, to the future lost." 
 
 " Not for all his faith can see 
 Would I that cowled churchman be." 
 
 " Not from a vain or shallow thought 
 His awful Jove young Phidias brought ; 
 
 Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old." 
 
 "The hand that rounded Peter's dome 
 II 
 
 " jfewels 
 . . . on tht 
 stretched 
 forejinger 
 of all 
 Time." 
 
l62 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
 Himself from God he could not free ; 
 He builded better than he knew ; — 
 The conscious stone to beauty grew." 
 
 " Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
 As the best gem upon her zone ; 
 And Morning opes with haste her lids. 
 To gaze upon the Pyramids." 
 
 " One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world hath never lost." 
 
 " Or ever the wild Time coined itself 
 Into calendar months and days." 
 
 " Set not thy foot on graves." 
 
 " Good-bye, proud world ! I 'm going home." 
 
 " What are they all, in their high conceit. 
 When man in the bush with God may meet ? " 
 
 " — If eyes were made for seeing. 
 Then Beauty is its own excuse for being." 
 
 " Leave all thy pedant lore apart, 
 God hid the whole world in thy heart." 
 
 " And conscious Law is King of kings." 
 
 " — Mount to paradise 
 By the stairway of surprise." 
 
 " Here once the embattled farmers stood. 
 And fired the shot heard round the world.* 
 
 " Great is the art. 
 Great be the manners, of the bard." 
 
 " The silent organ loudest chants 
 The master's requiem." 
 
RHYTHMICAL COMPRESSION. 
 
 163 
 
 Verses from Emerson's later poems, — which came 
 at rare intervals, after the public had learned to seek 
 for the sweet kernel in every nut that fell from his 
 tree, — are scarcely less familiarized and put to use : — 
 
 "Deep in the man sits fast his fate 
 To mould his fortunes mean or great: 
 Unknown to Cromwell as to me 
 Was Cromwell's measure or degree." 
 
 "O tenderly the haughty day 
 Fills his blue urn with fire ! " 
 
 " I hung my verses in the wind, 
 Time and tide their faults may find; 
 All were winnowed through and through, 
 Five lines lasted sound and true." 
 
 " Winters know 
 Easily to shed the snow, 
 And the untaught Spring is wise 
 In cowslips and anemones." 
 
 " It is time to be old, 
 To take in sail, — 
 
 Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
 ' Lowly faithful, banish fear. 
 Right onward drive unharmed ; 
 The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
 And every wave is charmed.' " 
 
 " He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
 Brought the Age of Gold again ; 
 His action won such reverence sweet 
 As hid all measure of the feat." 
 
 The poet's rhythm and gift of compression made 
 verse like the foregoing a kind of ambrosial pemmi- 
 can, easily carried for spiritual sustenance. Phrases 
 in his prose, which have become more current, move 
 
 New felic- 
 ities. 
 
 Rhytk. 
 tnical com- 
 pression. 
 
1 64 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Unsur- 
 passed in 
 lyrical 
 'Equality." 
 
 in foot-beats, such as, — " Hitch your wagon to a 
 star," " Nature is loved by what is best in us," and 
 "The hues of sunset make life great." He thought 
 rhythm indispensable, and rhyme most efficacious, as 
 the curators of poetic thought. " Every good poem I 
 know I recall by its rhythm also." 
 
 Popular instinct, recognized by those who compile 
 our anthologies, forbids an author to be great in more 
 than one way. These editors go to Emerson for 
 point and wisdom, and too seldom for his truth to 
 nature and his strictly poetic charm. Yet who excels 
 him in quality ? That Margaret Fuller had a fine 
 ear, and an independent one, is proved by her admis- 
 sion that " in melody, in subtilty of thought and ex- 
 pression," he took the highest rank. He often cap- 
 tures us with absolute beauty, the poetry that poets 
 love, — the lilt and melody of Shelley (whose vague- 
 ness irked him) joined to precision of thought and 
 outline. Poe might have envied " Uriel " his lutings 
 of the spangled heaven ; he could not have read 
 "Woodnotes," or he would have found something kin- 
 dred in the bard who said, — 
 
 "Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, 
 And build to them a final tomb ; 
 Let the starred shade that nightly falls 
 Still celebrate their funerals, 
 And the bell of beetle and of bee 
 Knell their melodious memory." 
 
 Emerson "listened to the undersong," but rejoiced 
 no less in the "divine ideas below " of the Olympian 
 
 bards, 
 
 "Which always find us young 
 And always keep us so." 
 
 His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imag- 
 inative. The snow is " the north-wind's masonry " f 
 
' THRENOD K' — ' MERLIN.' 
 
 165 
 
 feeling and thought are scarcely deeper than his 
 speech ; he puts in words the " tumultuous privacy of 
 storm," or the " sweet varieties of chance." With 
 what high ecstasy of pain he calls upon the deep- 
 eyed boy, the hyacinthine boy, of his marvellous 
 " Threnody ! " Time confirms the first impression 
 that this is the most spontaneous, the most elevating, 
 of lyrical elegies, — that it transcends even the divine 
 verse of Bishop King's invocation to his entombed 
 wife. How abrupt, how exquisitely ideal, the open- 
 ing phrase ! Afterward, and throughout, the pure 
 spirit of poetry rarefied by the passion of its theme : 
 the departed child is the superangelic symbol of the 
 beauty, the excellence, that shall be when time ripens 
 and the harmonies of nature are revealed, — when life 
 is no longer a dream within a dream. Read the 
 " Threnody " anew. What grace ! What ^olian 
 music, what yearning ! What prophecy and exalta- 
 tion ! See how emotion becomes the soul of art. Or 
 is it that true passion cannot but express itself in 
 verse at once simple and sensuous, thus meeting all 
 the cardinal points of Milton's law? 
 
 One readily perceives that "Merlin" conveys Em- 
 erson's spirited conception of the art and manners of 
 the bard. His should be no trivial harp : — 
 
 " No jingling serenader's art, 
 Nor tinkle of piano strings ; 
 
 The kingly bard 
 
 Must smite the cords rudely and hard, 
 
 As with hammer or with mace ; 
 
 He shall not his brain encumber 
 With the coil of rhythm and number ; 
 But leaving rule and pale forethought. 
 He shall aye climb 
 For his rhyme.'' 
 
 The 
 
 " ThniF 
 
 ady." 
 
 \-' 
 
 " Merlin.'* 
 
1 66 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Emerson 
 and Whit- 
 man. 
 
 Favorite 
 poets and 
 measures. 
 
 Thus fearlessly should a poet compel the Muse j 
 and even to a broader liberty of song one, at least, 
 of Emerson's listeners pushed with deliberate zeal. 
 Walt Whitman was stimulated by this teaching, and 
 by the rugged example of Carlyle, to follow resolutely 
 the method which suited his bent and project; and 
 Emerson's " Mithridates," we may say, is at once the 
 key-note and best defence of Whitman's untrammelled, 
 all-heralding philosophy. The descriptive truth, the 
 lusty Americanism, of the democratic chanter took 
 hold upon the master's expectant heart. A later mod- 
 ification of the first welcome, and the omission of the 
 new songs from "Parnassus," had no bearing upon 
 the question of their morals or method ; Emerson 
 was moved solely by his taste, — and New England 
 taste has a supreme dislike of the unsavory. The 
 world, even the Concord world, is not wholly given 
 over to prudery. It has little dread, nowadays, of 
 the voluptuous in art, ancient or modern. But to 
 those of Puritan stock cleanliness is even more than 
 godliness. There is no " fair perdition " tempting us 
 in the " Song of Myself" and the " Children of Adam." 
 But here are things which, whether vessels of honor 
 or dishonor, one does not care to have before him 
 too often or too publicly, and which were unattractive 
 to the pure and temperate seer, whose race had so 
 long inhabited the clean-swept keeping-rooms of the 
 land of mountain breezes and transparent streams. 
 The matter was one of artistic taste and of the incli- 
 nations of Emerson's nature, rather than of prudery 
 or censorship. 
 
 As for his own style, Emerson was impressed in 
 youth by the free-hand manner of the early drama- 
 tists, whom he read with avidity. He soon formed his 
 characteristic measure, varying with " sixes," " sevens," 
 
THE LA TER POEMS. 
 
 167 
 
 and "eights," resembling Ben Jonson's lyrical style, 
 but even more like that of Milton, Marvell, and other 
 worthies of the Protectorate. In spirit and imagery, 
 in blithe dithyrambic wisdom, he gained much from 
 his favorite Orientals — Saadi and Hafiz. One stately 
 and various measure he rarely essayed, but showed 
 that it was well suited to his genius. In "Musketa- 
 quid" and "Sea-Shore" we see the aptness of his ear 
 and hand for blank verse. The little poem of " Days," 
 imitated from the antique, is unmatched, outside of 
 Landor, for compression and self-poise : — 
 
 "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
 Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
 And marching single in an endless file, 
 Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
 To each they offer gifts after his will, 
 Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 
 I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
 Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
 Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
 Turned and departed silent. I, too late. 
 Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." 
 
 We could wish that Emerson had written more 
 blank verse, — a measure suited to express his highest 
 thought and imagination. Probably, however, he said 
 all that he had . to say in verse of any kind. He was 
 not one to add a single line for the sake of a more 
 iberal product. 
 
 He is thought to have begun so near the top that 
 there was little left to climb. None of his verse is 
 more pregnant than that which came in the first glow, 
 but the later poems are free from those grotesque 
 sayings which illustrate the fact that humor and a 
 lively sense of the absurd often are of slow develop- 
 ment in the brain of an earnest thinker. There was, 
 it must be owned, a tinge of provincial arrogance. 
 
 '■Days.''^ 
 
 Changes iH 
 style. 
 
i68 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " The 
 Sphinx " 
 ugain. 
 
 Strength 
 and 
 
 •weakness 
 of tran- 
 scendental 
 
 and there were expressions little less than ludicrous, 
 in his early defiance of usage. He was too sincere 
 a personage to resort to the grotesque as a means of 
 drawing attention. Of him, the leader, this at least 
 could not be suspected. Years afterward he revised 
 his poems, as if to avoid even the appearance of af- 
 fectation. On the whole, it is as well that he left 
 " The Sphinx " unchanged ; that remarkable poem is 
 a fair gauge of its author's traits. The opening is 
 strongly lyrical and impressive. The close is the 
 flower of poesy and thought. The general tone is 
 quaint and mystical. Certain passages, however, like 
 that beginning "The fiend that man harries," are cu- 
 riously awkward, and mar the effect of an original, 
 almost an epochal, poem. This would not be ad- 
 mitted by the old-fashioned Emersonian, — never, by 
 any chance, a poet pure and simple, — who makes it 
 a point of faith to defend the very passages where 
 the master nods. Just so the thick-and-thin Brown- 
 ingite, who testifies his adoration by counting the 
 m's and n's of the great dramatist's volumes, and 
 who, also, never is a poet pure and simple, celebrates 
 Mr. Browning's least poetic experiments as his mas- 
 terpieces. I think that the weakness of "transcen- 
 dental " art is as fairly manifest in Emerson's first 
 and chief collection of verse as were its felicities, — 
 the former belonging to the school, the latter to the 
 seer's own genius. Poe, to whom poetry was solely 
 an expression of beauty, was irritated to a degree not 
 to be explained by contempt for all things East. He 
 extolled quaintness, and justly detested obscurity. He 
 was prejudiced against the merits of such poets as 
 Channing and Cranch by their prophetic bearing, 
 which he berated soundly as an effort to set up as 
 poets " of unusual depth and very remarkable powers 
 
SELF-CRITICISM. 
 
 169 
 
 of mind." Admitting the grace of one, he said that it 
 was "laughable to see that the transcendental poets, 
 if beguiled for a minute or two into respectable Eng- 
 lish and common-sense, are always sure to remem- 
 ber their cue just as they get to the end of their 
 song, and round off with a bit of doggerel." Their 
 thought was the " cant of thought," in adopting which 
 " the cant of phraseology is adopted at the same 
 time." This was serviceable criticism, et ab hoste, 
 though Poe's lack of moral, and keenness of artistic, 
 sense made him too sure of the insincerity of those 
 who place conviction above expression. And Mr. 
 James sees that Emerson's philosophy was "drunk 
 in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense 
 of intoxication." The seer himself was intoxicated at 
 times, and spoke, like the hasheesh-eaters, with what 
 then seemed to him music and sanity. In a more 
 reflecting season he excluded from his select edition 
 certain pieces from which too many had taken their 
 cues, — for example, the " Ode " to W. H. Channing, 
 "The World-Soul," and "Tact." The Ode begins 
 finely with a manner caught from Ben Jonson's ode 
 " To Himself," and we can ill spare one passage 
 (" The God who made New Hampshire ") ; but was 
 it the future compiler of " Parnassiis " who preceded 
 this with laughter-stirring rhymes, and shortly avowed 
 that " Things are of the snake," and again that 
 " Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind " ? 
 Well, he lived to feel that to poets, "of all men, the 
 severest criticism is due," and that " Poetry requires 
 that splendor of expression which carries with it the 
 proof of great thoughts." 
 
 But the forte of bardlings is the foible of a bard. 
 Emerson became his own censor, and did wisely and 
 well. We have seen that his art, even now, upon its 
 
 Poeon iku 
 school. 
 
 Philo- 
 sophic 
 " inioxi' 
 catioti.^^ 
 
 Emerson 
 his own 
 best critic* 
 
170 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Essay on 
 Art. 
 
 Its chief 
 vinon. 
 
 constructive side, must often seem defective, — unsat- 
 isfactory to those whose love of proportion is a moral 
 instinct. Many poets and critics will feel it so. The 
 student of Emerson learns that he, too, moved upon 
 their plane, but would not be confined to it. More 
 than other men, he found himself a vassal of the un- 
 written law, whether his impulse lifted him above, or 
 sent him below, the plane of artistic expression. If 
 he could not sustain the concert-pitch of his voice at 
 his best, he certainly knew what is perfection, and said 
 of art much that should be said. He was not, he did 
 not wish to be, primarily an artist : he borrowed Art's 
 aid for his lofty uses, and held her at her worth. His 
 essay on Art would be pronounced sound by a Goethe 
 or a Lessing, though such men probe less deep for the 
 secret principle of things, and deal more featly with 
 the exterior. Elsewhere he insists that we must " dis- 
 abuse us of our superstitious associations with place 
 and time, with number and size. . . . Where the heart 
 is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn. ... A 
 great man makes his climate genial in the imagina- 
 tion of man, and its air the beloved element of all 
 delicate spirits." And again (like Arnold) he speaks 
 of the modernness of all good books : " M'hat is well 
 done, I feel as if I did ; what is ill done, I reck not 
 of." He revised his prose less carefully, for republi- 
 cation, than his verse, and doubtless felt surer of it. 
 He himself would have been the first to declare, as 
 to the discordant and grotesque portions 01 his verse 
 or prose, that the thought was proportionately defec- 
 tive, — not strong and pure enough to insure the beauty 
 of the art which was its expression. Above all he 
 knew, he confessed, that it is the first duty of a poet 
 to express his thoughts naturally, counting among " the 
 traits common to all works of the highest art, — that 
 
PROSE WRITINGS. 
 
 171 
 
 they are universally intelligible, that they restore to us 
 the simplest states of mind." This was his own canon. 
 Where he failed of it, he might not surely know ; where 
 he knew, there he rebuked himself. He struck out, in 
 his self-distrust, many things of value to those who 
 loved his verse. We dwell with profit on the fact that 
 he retained so little that should be stricken out. 
 
 V. 
 
 It is but a foolish surmise whether Emerson's prose 
 or verse will endure the longer, for they are of the 
 same stuff, warp and woof, and his ideality crosses and 
 recrosses each, so that either is cloth-of-gold. Of 
 whichever a reader may first lay hold, he will be led 
 to examine the whole fabric of the author's work. Few 
 writers, any one of whose essays, met with for the first 
 time, seems more like a revelation ! It will not be, I 
 think, until that time when all his prose has passed 
 into a large book, such as the volume we call Mon- 
 taigne, that its full strength and importance can be 
 felt. In certain respects it dwarfs other modern writ- 
 ing, and places him among the great essayists. These 
 are not the efforts of a reviewer of books or affairs, 
 but chapters on the simplest, the greatest, the imme- 
 morial topics, those that lie at the base of life and 
 wisdom : such as Love, Experience, Character, Man- 
 ners, Fate, Power, Worship — lastly. Nature herself, 
 and Art her ideal counterpart. If to treat great themes 
 worthily is a mark of greatness, the chooser of such 
 themes begins with the instinct of great design. Ba- 
 con's elementary essays excepted, there are none in 
 English of which it can be more truly averred that 
 there is nothing superfluous in them. Compare them 
 with the rest in theme and method. Carlyle, outside 
 
 His prose 
 writings. 
 
 "Nature," 
 1836. 
 
 " Essays," 
 
 First 
 
 Series, 
 
 " Essays," 
 
 Second 
 
 Series, 
 
 1844, 
 
 " Miscella- 
 nies," 
 1849- 
 
 " Repre- 
 sentative 
 Men," 
 1850. 
 
 " English 
 
 Traits," 
 
 1856. 
 
 " Conduct 
 o/Li/e," 
 i860. 
 
172 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " Society 
 and Soli- 
 tude," 
 1870. 
 
 " Letters 
 aiid Social 
 Aims" 
 1876. 
 
 His style. 
 
 Apo- 
 ihegms. 
 
 of " Sartor Resartus " and " Hero-Worship," usually 
 reviews books, histories, individuals, at extreme length, 
 and with dramatic comment and analysis. Emerson 
 treats of the principles behind all history, and his 
 laconic phrases are the very honey-cells of thought. 
 There are let-downs and surplusage even in Landor. 
 Throughout Emerson's writings each word is of value ; 
 they are the discourse of one who has digested all the 
 worthy books, and who gives us their results, with 
 latter-day discoveries of his own. He is the citizen of 
 a new world, observing other realms and eras from an 
 unrestricted point of view. 
 
 The intent of our essayist is the highest, and by no 
 means that of writing for the exercise or glory of au- 
 thorship. "Fatal," he declares, "to the man of let- 
 ters is the lust of display. ... A mistake of the main 
 end to which they labor is incidental to literary men, 
 who, dealing with the organ of language . . . learn to 
 enjoy the pride of playing with this splendid engine, 
 but rob it of its almightiness by failing to work with it." 
 He estimates books at their worth. They " are for 
 nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book 
 than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my 
 own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." 
 
 Thus the thought of Style, it may be, should enter 
 into the mind of neither writer nor reader. Style makes 
 itself, and Emerson's is the apothegmatic style of one 
 bent upon uttering his immediate thoughts, — hence 
 strong in sentences, and only by chance suited to the 
 formation of an essay. Each sentence is an idea, an 
 epigram, or an image, or a flash of spiritual light. His 
 letters to Carlyle show that he was at one time caught 
 by the manner of the author whose character,. at least; 
 seemed of the most import to him. This was but a 
 passing trace. When he was fresh from the schools, 
 
TERSE AND POETIC STYLE. 
 
 173 
 
 his essays were structural and orderly, but more ab- 
 stract than in latter years. During his mature and 
 haply less spiritual period, had he cared to write a 
 history, the English would have been pure English, 
 the narrative racy and vigorous. Portions of the 
 " English Traits " make this plain. Since De Foe, 
 where have we found anything more idiomatic than his 
 account of Wordsworth delivering a sonnet ? 
 
 " This recitation was so unlocked for and surprising, — 
 he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me 
 in a garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming, — that I at 
 first was near to laugh ; but recollecting myself, that I had 
 come thus far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to 
 me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly 
 gave myself up to hear." 
 
 Note also Emerson's account of an ocean voyage. 
 For charm of landscape-painting, take such a passage 
 as that, in the second essay on Nature, beginning : 
 "There are days which occur in this climate." But 
 tersenes s is the distinctivefeatureof_his_sljde. " Men," 
 he says, " descend to meet." " We are all discerners 
 of spirits." " He [a traveller] carries ruins to ruins." 
 No one has compressed n\ore sternly the pith of his 
 discourse. 
 
 No poet, let us at once add, has written prose and 
 shown more incontestably his special attribute. Emer- 
 son's whole argument is poetic, if that work is poetic 
 which reaches its aim through the analogies of things, 
 and whose quick similitudes have the heat, the light, 
 the actinism, of the day-beam, and of which the lan- 
 guage is rhythmic without degeneracy, — clearly the 
 language of prose, always kept from weakness by the 
 thought which it conveys. No man's writing was more 
 truly his speech, and no man's speech so rhythmic : 
 " There are Muses in the woods to-day, and whispers 
 
 Native 
 E7tglisK 
 
 Compres- 
 sion, 
 
 The prose 
 of a poet. 
 
174 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 RkythmiCf 
 attd/ull 
 of itohle 
 itnagery. 
 
 to be heard in the breezes " ; and again, " Hawthorne 
 rides well his horse of the night." As he spoke, so 
 he wrote : " Give me health and a day, and I will 
 make the pomp of emperors ridiculous " ; " The con- 
 scious ship hears all the praise " ; of young idealists, 
 "The tough world had its revenge the moment they 
 put the horses of the sun to plough in its furrow " ; 
 of Experience, "was it Boscovich who found out that 
 bodies never come in contact ? Well, souls never 
 touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with 
 silent waves between us and the things we aim at and 
 converse with." In the same essay, — " Dream de- 
 livers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. 
 Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as 
 we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored 
 lenses which paint the world their own hue." ^ And 
 of Love's world, with the cadences of Ecclesiastes, — 
 " When the day was not long enough, but the night, 
 too, must be consumed. . . . When the moonlight was 
 a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the 
 flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song ; 
 v/hen all business seemed impertinence, all the men 
 and women running to and fro in the streets mere 
 pictures." But to show the poetry of Emerson's prose 
 is to give the whole of it ; these essays are of the few 
 which make us tolerate the conceit of " prose poems." 
 Their persistent recourse to imagery and metaphor, 
 their suggestions of the secret relations of things, at 
 times have subjected them to the charge of being ob- 
 scure. The fault was not in the wine : — 
 
 " Hast thou a drunken soul ? 
 Thy bane is in thy shallow skull, not in my silver bowl ! " 
 
 i"Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity." 
 
 Shelley's " Adonais." 
 
SECULAR ESSAYS. 
 
 175 
 
 In mature years the essayist pays more regard to 
 life about him, to the world as it is ; he is more equa- 
 torial, less polar and remote. His insight betrays it- 
 self in every-day wisdom. He is the shrewd, the be- 
 nignant, the sagacious, Emerson, writing with pleasant 
 aptitude, like Hesiod or Virgil, of domestic routine, 
 and again of the Conduct of Life, of Manners, Be- 
 havior, Prudence, Grace. This is in the philosophic 
 order of progress, from the first principles to the ap- 
 plication of them. Some of his followers, however, 
 take him to task, unwilling that the master should 
 venture beyond the glory of his cloud. As for his 
 unique treatises upon Behavior, it was natural that he 
 should be led to think upon that topic, since in gen- 
 tle bearing, in his sweetness, persuasiveness, and 
 charm of smile and voice, he was not excelled by any 
 personage of our time, and what he said of it is of 
 more value than the sayings of those who think such 
 a matter beneath his regard. His views of civic duty 
 and concerning the welfare of the Republic are the 
 best rejoinder to his early strictures upon Homer and 
 Shakespeare for the temporal and local features of 
 their master-works. As a critic he was ever- expect- 
 ant, on the lookout for something good and new, and 
 sometimes found the one good thing in a man or 
 work and valued it unduly. When he made a com- 
 plete examination, as in his chapter on Margaret Ful- 
 ler, he excelled as a critic and delineator. Far- 
 nassus is not judicial, but oddly made up of his own 
 likings, yet the best rules of criticism are to be found 
 in its preface. With the exception of " English 
 Traits," he published no long treatise upon a single 
 theme. His general essays and lectures, however, 
 constitute a treatise upon Man and Nature, and of 
 themselves would serve as America's adequate con- 
 
 Seethe 
 
 " Complete 
 
 Works," 
 
 1885. 
 
 * Farnas- 
 nis," 1874 
 
176 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Our most 
 typical 
 and itispir- 
 ing poet. 
 
 tribution to the English literature of his period. We 
 are told of an unprinted series of his essays that may 
 be grouped as a book on the Natural History of the 
 Intellect. Should these see the light, it would be 
 curious to compare them with the work of some pro- 
 fessional logician — with the standard treatise of Pres- 
 ident Porter, for instance — upon a similar theme. 
 Something in quantity may yet be added to Emerson's 
 literary remains. But it will not difEer in quality ; 
 we have had the gist of it : for he was a writer who, 
 though his essays were the fruit of a prolonged life, 
 never wrote himself out. Often an author has gained 
 repute by one or two original works, while his ordi- 
 nary efforts, if not devoted to learned or scientific re- 
 search, have been commonplace. The flame of Emer- 
 son's intellect never fades or flickers, and never irks 
 us. It burns with elemental light, neither of artifice 
 nor of occasion, serene as that of a star, and with an 
 added power to heat the distance which receives it. 
 
 VI. 
 
 In summing up the traits of Emerson one almost 
 ceases to be critical, lest the highest praise may not 
 be quite undue. More than when Bion died, the 
 glades and towns lament him, for he left no heir to 
 the Muse which he taught his pupils. In certain re- 
 spects he was our most typical poet, having the finest 
 intuition and a living faith in it, — and because there 
 was a sure intellect behind his verse, and because his 
 influence affected not simply the tastes and emotions, 
 but at last the very spirit, of his countrymen. He 
 began where many poets end, seeking at once the 
 upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. 
 His speech was wisdom, and his poesy its exhalation. 
 
FREE, TYPICAL AND INSPIRING. 
 
 177 
 
 When he failed in either, it seemed to be through 
 excess of divining. His triumphs were full of promise 
 for those who dare to do their best. He was as far 
 above Carlyle as the affairs of the soul and universe 
 are above those of the contemporary, or even the 
 historic, world. His problem, like that of Archimedes, 
 was more than the taking of cities and clash of arms. 
 The poet is unperturbed by temporal distractions ; yet 
 poets and dreamers, concerned with the ideal, share 
 in the world's battle equally with men of action and 
 practical life. Only, while the latter fight on the 
 ground, the idealists, like the dauntless ghosts of the 
 Huns and Romans, lift the contest to the air. Emer- 
 son was the freest and most ideal of them all, and 
 what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast 
 he gave like a victor. He strove not to define the 
 creeds, but to stimulate the intellect and purpose of 
 those who are to make the future. If poetry be that 
 which shapes and elevates, his own was poetry in- 
 deed. To know the heart of New England you must 
 hear the songs of his compeers ; but listening to those 
 of Emerson, the east and west have yielded to the 
 current of its soul. 
 
 The supreme poet will be not alone a seer, but also 
 a persistent artist of the beautiful. Of those who 
 come before the time for such a poet is ripe, Long- 
 fellow on the whole has done the most to foster the 
 culture of poetry among us as a liberal art. Emerson 
 has given us thought, the habit of thinking, the will 
 to think for ourselves. He drained the vats of poli- 
 tics and philosophy, for our use, of all that was sweet 
 and fructifying, and taught his people self-judgment, 
 self-reliance, and to set their courses by the stars. 
 He placed chief value upon those primitive laws 
 which are the only sure basis of national law and let- 
 is 
 
 E-merson 
 a7id Long' 
 fellow. 
 
178 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 -* A poet 
 hidden in 
 the light of 
 thought." 
 
 " Unbod- 
 ied joy," 
 
 ters. And as a poet, his verse was the sublimation 
 of his rarest mood, that changed as water into cloud, 
 catching the first beams of sunrise on its broken 
 edges, yet not without dark and vaguely blending 
 spots between. Emerson and Longfellow came at the 
 parting of the ways. They are of the very few whom 
 we now recognize as the true founders of an American 
 literature. No successors with more original art and 
 higher imagination can labor to more purpose. If the 
 arrow hits its mark, the aim was at the bowstring ; 
 the river strengthens and broadens, but the sands of 
 gold wash down from near its source. 
 
 Not a few are content with that poetry which re 
 turns again and again to its primal conceptions, yet 
 suggests infinite pathways and always inspires, — the 
 poetry of a hermitage whose Lar is Nature, and whose 
 well-spring flows with clear and shining Thought. To 
 such, — who care less for sustained flights of objective 
 song, who can withdraw themselves from passion and 
 dramatic life, who gladly accept isolated cadences and 
 scattered, though exquisite, strains of melody in lieu 
 of symphonic music " wandering on as loth to die," — 
 Emerson will seem the most precious of our native 
 poets. He will not satisfy those who look for the 
 soul incarnate in sensuous and passionate being. 
 Such readers, with Professor Dowden, find him the 
 type of the New World transcendentalist, the creature 
 of the drpng American climate, one " whose nervous 
 energy has been exalted," so "that he loves light 
 better than warmth." He is not the minstrel for 
 those who would study men in action and suffering, ' 
 rather than as heirs to knowledge and the raptured 
 mind. He is not a warrior, lover, raconteur, drama- 
 tist, but an evangelist and seer. The greatest poet 
 must be all in one, and I have said that Emerson 
 
A FORERUNNER. 
 
 179 
 
 was among the foremost to avow it. Modern bards 
 poorly satisfy him, being meagre of design, and fail- 
 ing to guide and console. Wordsworth was an ex- 
 ception, yet he had "written longer than he was 
 inspired." Tennyson, with all his tune and color, 
 " climbs no mount of vision." Even Shakespeare was 
 too traditional, though one learns from him that " tra- 
 dition supplies a better fable than any invention can." 
 In face of the greatest he felt that " the world still 
 wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle 
 with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves 
 with Swedenborg the mourner ; but who shall see, 
 speak, and act with equal inspiration." Thus clearly 
 he conceived of the poet's office, and equally was he" 
 assured that he himself was not, and could not be, 
 the perfect musician. He chose the part of the fore- 
 runner and inspirer, and when the true poet shall 
 come to America, it will be because such an one as 
 Emerson has gone before him and prepared the way 
 for his song, his vision, and his recognition. 
 
 Etnersoril 
 conception 
 o/the 
 future 
 hard. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Fortunate 
 in life and 
 death. 
 
 Bis mis- 
 tion apos- 
 tolic. 
 
 OUR poet of grace and sentiment left us in the af- 
 ter-glow of an almost ideal career. He had lived 
 at the right time, and with the gift of years ; and he 
 died before the years came for him to say, I have no 
 pleasure in them. Not all the daughters of music 
 were brought low. He scarcely could have realized 
 that people were calling his work elementary, that 
 men whose originality had isolated them, like Emer- 
 son and Browning, — and even metrical experts, the 
 inventors of new modes, — were gaining favor with a 
 public which had somewhat outgrown him ; that he 
 was to be slighted for the very qualities which had 
 made him beloved and famous, or that other quali- 
 ties, too long needed, were to be overvalued as if 
 partly for the need's sake. 
 
 But they are wrong who make light of Longfellow's 
 service as an American poet. His admirers may form 
 no longer a critical majority, yet he surely helped to 
 quicken the New World sense of beauty, and to lead 
 a movement which precedes the rise of a national 
 school. I think that the poet himself, reading his 
 own sweet songs, felt the apostolic nature of his mis- 
 sion, — that it was religious, in the etymological sense 
 of the word, the binding back of America to the Old 
 World taste and imagination. Our true rise of Poe- 
 
CHARM OF HIS EARLY WORK. 
 
 i8i 
 
 try may be dated from Longfellow's method of excit- 
 ing an interest in it, as an expression of beauty and 
 feeling, at a time when his countrymen were ready 
 for something more various and human than the cur- 
 rent meditations on nature. It was inevitable that 
 he should first set his face toward a light beyond the 
 sea, and I have said that his youthful legend aptly 
 was Outre Mer. An escape was in order from the as- 
 ceticism which two centuries had both modified and 
 confirmed. How could this be effected ? Not at once 
 by the absolute presentation of beauty. A Keats, 
 pledged to this alone, could not have propitiated the 
 ancestral spirit. Puritanism was opposed to beauty 
 as a strange god, and to sentiment as an idle thing. 
 Longfellow so adapted the beauty and sentiment of 
 other lands to the convictions of his people, as to 
 beguile their reason through the finer senses, and 
 speedily to satisfy them that loveliness and righteous- 
 ness may go together. His poems, like pictures seen 
 on household walls, were a protest against barrenness 
 and the symptoms of a new taste. 
 
 They made their way more readily, also, by their 
 response to the inherited Anglo - Saxon instincts of 
 his own region. His early predilections, strengthened 
 during a stay in Germany, were chiefly for the poe- 
 try and romance of that land. He read his heart in 
 its songs, which he so loved to translate for us. TA 
 Thew generation may be at a loss to conceive the 
 ^effect of Longfellow's work when it first began to ap- 
 pear. I may convey something of this by what is at 
 once a memory and an illustration. Take the case of 
 a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a de- 
 caying Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of 
 the old Congregational type. The interior — plain, col- 
 orless, rigid with dull white pews and dismal galleries 
 
 Effect cf 
 his early 
 works. 
 
 A cJiarjn 
 recalled 
 aTid illuS' 
 trated. 
 
l82 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 fjis genius 
 Wit crea- 
 iivCj but 
 the fas' 
 Urer of 
 taste and 
 ideality. 
 
 — increased the spiritual starvation of a young na- 
 ture unconsciously longing for color and variety. 
 Many a child like this one, on a first holiday visit 
 to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, the roofs 
 and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a 
 sense of something rich and strange ; and many, now 
 no longer children, can remember that the impres- 
 sion upon entrance was such as the stateliest cathe- 
 dral now could not renew. The columns and tinted 
 walls, the ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of 
 gules and azure and gold, — the service, moreover, 
 with its chant and organ-roll, — all this enraptured and 
 possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded 
 them, that of nature's picturesqueness, — which even 
 Calvinism endured without compunction, — was added 
 a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty and sanctity of hu- 
 man art. A similar delight awaited the first readers of 
 Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and 
 romancer indeed, who had journeyed far and returned 
 with gifts for all at home, and who promised often and 
 again to 
 
 " sing a more wonderful song 
 
 Or tell a more marvellous tale." 
 
 And thus it chanced that, well as he afterward sang 
 of his own sea and shore, he now is said to have 
 been the least national of our poets. His verse, it is 
 true, was like a pulsatory cord, sustaining our new- 
 born ideality with nourishment from the mother-land, 
 until it grew to vigor of its own. Yet he was more 
 widely read than his associates, and seemed to for- 
 eigners the incumbent American laureate. His native 
 themes, like some of Tennyson's, were chosen with 
 deliberation and as if for their availability. But from 
 the first he was a poet of sentiment, and equally a 
 craftsman of unerring taste. He always gave of his 
 
THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 
 
 183 
 
 best ; neither toil nor trouble could dismay him until 
 art had done its perfect work. It was a kind of gen- 
 ius, — his sure perception of the fit and attractive. 
 Love flows to one whose work is lovely. Besides, he 
 was a devotee to one calling, — not a critic, journal- 
 ist, lecturer, or man of affairs, — and even his prose 
 romances were akin to poems. A long and spotless 
 life was pledged to song, and verily he had his re- 
 ward. Successors may find a weakness in his work, 
 but who can rival him in bearing and reputation ? 
 His worldly wisdom was of the gospel kind, so gently 
 tempered as to breed no evil. His life and works 
 together were an edifice fairly built, — the House Beau- 
 tiful, whose air is peace, where repose and calm are 
 ministrant, and where the raven's croak, symbol of 
 the unrest of a more perturbed genius, is never heard. 
 Thus the clerkly singer fulfilled his office, — which 
 was not in the least creative, — and had the tributes 
 he most desired : love and honor during his life-time, 
 and the assurance that no song of his took flight but 
 to rest again and again " in the. heart of a friend." 
 
 II. 
 
 Poets, like the cicalas, have occasion to envy those 
 who compass their song and sustenance together. 
 Few can pledge with Longfellow their lives, or even 
 frequent hours, to the labor they delight in. There 
 was, in fact, an " opening," — a need for just the ser- 
 vice he could render. The circumstances of his birth 
 and training were propitious and worked to one end. 
 Neither he nor Hawthorne was the mere offspring of 
 an environment. There was nothing special in the 
 little down-east school of Bowdoin, sixty years ago, to 
 breed the leaders of our imaginative prose and verse. 
 
 A n auspi- 
 cious time. 
 
1 84 
 
 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Henry 
 
 Wads- 
 worth 
 Longfel- 
 low : born 
 in Port- 
 land, Me., 
 Feb. 27, 
 1807. 
 
 " Coplas 
 iU Man- 
 -igue," 
 833- 
 
 But the time was ripe ; there was an unspoken de- 
 mand for richer life and thought, to which such na- 
 tures, and the intellects of Channing and Emerson, 
 were sure to respond. And the concurrence certainly 
 was special : that Longfellow, descended from Pilgrim 
 and Puritan stock, the child of a cultured household, 
 should be born not only with a poet's voice and ear, 
 but with an aptitude for letters amounting to a sixth 
 sense, — a bookishness assimilative as that of Hunt 
 or Lamb ; that he should be reared in a typical East- 
 ern town, open alike to polite influences and to the 
 freshness and beauty of the northern sea ; that such 
 a youth, buoyant and manly, but averse to the coarser 
 sports, gentle, pure, — one who in France would have 
 become at first an abbe, — should in New England 
 be made a college professor at nineteen, and commis- 
 sioned to visit Europe and complete his studies ; that 
 ten years later, having ended the pleasant drudgery 
 of his apprenticeship, he should find himself settled 
 for life at Harvard, the centre of learning, and under 
 few obligations that did not assist, rather than im- 
 pede, his chosen ministry of song. Here he was to 
 have health, friendship, ease, the opportunity for travel, 
 abundant and equal work and fame, with scarcely an 
 abrupt turn, or flurry, or drought or storm, to the very 
 end. Even his duties served in the direction of a 
 literary bent, confirming his mastery of languages 
 whose poetry and romance were his treasure-house. 
 He wrote his text-books at an age when most poets 
 go a-gypsying. When twenty-six, he made his trans- 
 lation of the " Coplas de Manrique," — a rendering 
 so grave and sonorous that, if now first printed, it 
 would be caught up like FitzGerald's " Rubaiyit of 
 Omar," instead of going to the paper mill. It indi- 
 cated, more than his original work of this period, that 
 
PROSE ROMANCES. 
 
 185 
 
 a true poetic method was forming in a country where 
 Berkeley's muse thus far had made no course of em- 
 pire. A few essays, always on literature or the lan- 
 guages, complete the round of his miscellanies, the 
 last being contributed to a review in 1840. After 
 that time he gave up all critical writing whatsoever. 
 
 Outre-Mer, a young poet's sketch-book, reports his 
 first transition from cloister life to travel and expe- 
 rience. It is a journey of sentiment, if not a senti- 
 mental journey, and made in the blithesome spirit of 
 a troubadour. All the world was Arcady, — a land 
 of beauty and romance ; and these he found, caring 
 for nothing else, in sunny nooks of France, Italy, and 
 Spain, as deftly as the botanist picks out his ferns 
 and forest flowers. Our poet's herbarium had a gift 
 to keep its blossoms unfaded. His road-glasses illu- 
 minate the wayside : our modern travellers use stronger 
 lenses, and see things through and through, but with 
 the old illusions we have lost the best of all things 
 — zest. Hyperion showed what changes four years 
 can bring about while still the man is young: it is 
 the thoughtful, and somewhat too fond, fantasy of 
 the same pilgrim after more knowledge of the verities 
 of life. The atmosphere of this book is that of Swit- 
 zerland and Germany ; but its shadows came from the 
 maker's heart. He had been bereaved. The opening 
 phrase is grief, a poet's grief, that consoles itself with 
 imagery : " The setting of a great hope is like the 
 setting of the sun. . . . We look forward into the 
 coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. 
 Then stars arise, and the night is holy." This pre- 
 cise, epicurean touch, the application of art to feeling, 
 was new in our authorship. Void of real anguish or 
 passion, it still suggested an ideal, — a purpose be- 
 yond mere book-craft. The sketches, diversified with 
 
 Works in 
 prose : 
 " Outre- 
 Mer," 
 1835- 
 
 " ffyperu 
 on" 1839. 
 
t86 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Infiuence 
 7/ Richier 
 and Heine. 
 
 "The 
 Scroll of 
 ''outh." 
 
 not too frequent musing, the wedding of sound to 
 sense, the daintiness of words, the feeble plot, all bear 
 witness that " Hyperion " is the work of an idyllist. 
 The vague manner, with its impression of rest sought 
 in restlessness, and even the broken story, were bor- 
 rowed, doubtless, from " Titan." The book naturally 
 became the companion of all romantic pilgrims of the 
 Rhine, for the true German spirit is here ; its senti- 
 ment and fancy alike are seized by a master of the 
 picturesque. He "knew the beauteous river all by 
 heart, — every rock and ruin, every echo, every le- 
 gend. The ancient castles, . . . they were all his ; 
 for his thoughts dwelt in them, and the wind told him 
 tales." With Jean Paul we have Heine, also, who 
 might have conceived the grotesque episode of Frau 
 Kranich's " tea " in Ems. The romance and spoon- 
 ing of " Hyperion," and its moral conclusions, are 
 food for adolescents ; but it is easier to laugh at 
 youth than to possess it. And this is Longfellow's 
 youth throughout, — the frankest of confessions. Paul 
 Flemming "buried himself in books; in old dusty 
 books." Read the list of them, from the Nibelun- 
 genlied down, and see the diet that he garnished with 
 grapes and Liebfrauenmilch and love-making and 
 moonlight dreams. " How beautiful it is to love 1 " 
 Ah ! how happy to be young, and in love ; to have 
 known sorrow, and to use it as a foil ; to visit and 
 read the great world, yet not to be corrupted by it, 
 still to keep a pure heart that has no taste for reck- 
 lessness and vice ; through all to recall one lesson : 
 " Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not 
 back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. 
 Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, 
 and with a manly heart." 
 
 The chief import of the poet's romances was their 
 
A BORN ROMANTICIST. 
 
 187 
 
 bearing upon his own purpose. He fixed his rules of 
 life by writing them down. His second maxim is 
 found in Kavanagh, a tale with less freshness than 
 " Hyperion," but fashioned with the hand of greater 
 mastery, that of a writer in his prime. Its person- 
 ages are more distinctly drawn, and it was his brief 
 and nearest approach to a novel. We have a tran- 
 script of New England village life, an atmosphere of 
 breeding and refinement, and some pertinent criticism 
 on literary and social topics. As before, the gist of 
 the tale is in a text, placed, with due regard to con- 
 vention, at the beginning : — 
 
 " The flighty purpose never is o'ertook 
 « Unless the deed go with it." 
 
 This bit of wisdom had been deeply considered by the 
 author. By way of strengthening himself against a 
 dreamer's temptation to be derelict, he worked it, one 
 might say, into this " sampler " of a tale. Those who 
 are fond of citing the formula, that genius is only a 
 talent for persistent work, have reason to place our 
 poet well in the van of their examples. Yet I fancy 
 that only men of talent will heartily subscribe to this 
 definition. Be this as it may, Longfellow's prose tales 
 show us his equipment, and give the clew to his well- 
 adjusted life. It was plain, also, that he was a bom 
 romanticist, in full sympathy with the German school. 
 We shall see that, as a poet, he followed a romantic 
 method, to the disapproval of those who feel that 
 nothing in the New World should be done as it has 
 been done elsewhere. It is difficult, however, to ex- 
 plain why even things at home should not be treated 
 according to the genius of the designer. After strange 
 experiments, we just now are discovering that the 
 colonial architecture, so much like that of Cromwell's 
 
 Xhe poeVs 
 rules of 
 h/e. 
 
 " Kava- 
 1849. 
 
 Romantif 
 tendency. 
 
i88 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Poetical 
 works. 
 
 \J 
 
 •' Voices 
 rfilie 
 Night," 
 1839- 
 
 Foreign 
 influences. 
 
 England, is of all our styles the best adapted to the 
 Atlantic States ; and it still becomes us to be modest 
 in defining the types that American art and poetry 
 finally will assume. The critical question, I take it, 
 is not what fashion should be outlawed, but whether 
 the thing done is good of its kind. 
 
 Nothing afterward tempted Longfellow from poetic 
 composition, except the illustrations of the Poetry oj 
 Europe, many of which were his own translations, and, 
 late in life, the diversion of editing Poems of Places, 
 and the heroic labor of his complete version of " The 
 Divine Comedy," a work to which I shall refer again. 
 
 III. 
 
 Longfellow's juvenile poems have been collected 
 recently. Those printed, before his graduation, in 
 " The Literary Gazette," resemble the verse of Bryant 
 and Percival, the former of whom he looked upon as 
 his master. Tracings qfj^browsjng ^ in the usual pas- 
 ture grounds are strangely absent : I sometimes won- 
 der if he had an early taste for the Elizabethan poets, 
 or, indeed, for any English worthy, since no modern 
 author has shown fewer signs of this in youth. The 
 Voices of the Night, his own first collection, was post- 
 poned until after a long experience of translation and 
 prose work. It appeared in his thirty-third year, and 
 met with instant favor. Only nine new pieces were 
 in the book ; these, with the translations following, 
 have characteristics that his verse continued to dis- 
 play. The Prelude recalls that of Heine's third edi- 
 tion of the " Reisebilder" {Das ist "Ser alte Mdrchen- 
 wald), then just published. Later pieces show that 
 Longfellow caught the manner of this poet, whose 
 principles he severely condemned. The German's 
 
EARLY LYRICS AND BALLADS. 
 
 189 
 
 rhythm and reverie were repeated in "The Day is 
 Done," "The Bridge," "Twilight," etc., but not his 
 passion and scorn. The influence of Uhland is equally 
 manifest elsewhere. Prototypes of Longfellow's rna- 
 turer work are found in " The Reaper," " The Psalm 
 of Life," and "The Beleaguered City." "The Mid- 
 night Mass for the Dying Year," against which Poe 
 brought a mincing charge of plagiarism, is as strong 
 and conjuring as anything its author lived to write. 
 The_Iranslations deserved high praise. The stately 
 " Coplas " re-appears. Various renderings from Ger- 
 man lyric poets, such as " The Happiest Land," " Be- 
 ware," and " Into the Silent Land," were new origi- 
 nals, examples of a talent peculiarly his own. GLven 
 a Jaskjwhich be liked, — with a pattern supplied by 
 another, — and few could equal him. He made his 
 copies in various measures and from many tongues. 
 An essay in hexameter, the version of Tegndr's " Chil- 
 dren of the Lord's Supper," preceded his original 
 poems in that form. Even after completing his 
 " Dante," he loved to toy with such work. I have 
 heard him say that he longed to make an English 
 translation of Homer, upon the method which Voss 
 had used to such advantage. 
 
 His volume of 1841, Ballads and Other Poems, may 
 be likened to Tennyson's volume of the ensuing 
 year, in that it confirmed its author's standing and 
 indicated the full extent of his genius as a poet. It 
 was choice in its way, suggesting taste rather than 
 fertility ; choicely presented, also, for with it came the 
 fashion, new to this country, of printing verse at- 
 tractively and in a shape that seeks the hand. The 
 poet's matter, if often gleaned from foreign litera- 
 tures, was novel to his readers, and his style distinct 
 from that of any English contemporary. The book 
 
 " Ballads 
 and Other 
 PoeTns^'^ 
 1841. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " ; 
 
 160. 
 
 The poet's 
 gualUy 
 now ap- 
 parefU 
 
I go 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 hyrical 
 hotnilus. 
 
 Sentimtnt. 
 
 Pktur- 
 Ugveness. 
 
 contains examples of all the classes into which his 
 poems seem to divide themselves, and may be ex- 
 amined with its successors. One sees, forthwith, that 
 Longfellow's impulse was to make a poem, above all, 
 interesting. He was no word-monger, HQ^ winder of 
 coil upon coil about a subtle theme. He changed his 
 topics, for some topic he must have, and one that 
 suited him. A -cheerful acceptance of the lessons of 
 life was the moral, siigge_sted iw many lyrics, which 
 commended him to all virtuous, home-keeping folk, 
 but in the end poorly served him with the critics. 
 He gained a foothold by his least poetic work, — verse 
 whose easy lessons are adjusted to common needs j 
 bf the "Psalm of Life," " Excelsior," "Prometheus," 
 and "The Ladder of St. Augustine," — little sermons 
 in rhyme that are sure to catch the ear and to be- 
 come hackneyed as a sidewalk song. He often 
 taught, by choice, the primary class, and the upper 
 form is slow to forget it. Next above these pretty 
 homilies are his poems of sentiment and twilight 
 brooding. " The Reaper and the Flowers," " Foot- 
 steps of Angels," " Maidenhood," " Resignation," and 
 " Haunted Houses '' came home to pensive and gen- 
 tle natures. Lowell has written a few kindred pieces, 
 such as " The Changeling " and " The First Snow- 
 fall." A , still , higher „class,„ testing Longfellow's eye 
 for the suggestive side of a theme and his art to 
 make the most of it, includes " The Fire of Drift- 
 Wood," "The Lighthouse," "Sand of the Desert," 
 "The Jewish Cemetery," and "The Arsenal." In 
 poems of this sort he was a skilled designer, yet they 
 were something more than aft for art's sake. Owing 
 to the tenderness seldom absent from his work, he 
 often has been called a poet of the Affections. It 
 must be owned~tFat he was a poet of the Tastes as 
 
QUALITY OF HIS GENIUS. 
 
 191 
 
 well. He combined beauty with feeling in lyrical 
 trifles which rival those of Tennyson and other mas- 
 ters of technique, and was almost our earliest maker 
 of verse that might be termed exquisite. " The Bells 
 of Lynn" and "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," 
 show that the hand which polished "Curfew" and 
 " The Arrow and the Song " was sensitive to the 
 last. 
 
 Among obvious tests of a poet are his voice, facil- 
 ity, and general aim. Longfellow's verse was refined 
 ^and pleasing; his purpose, evidently not that of a 
 doctrinaire. Tjie.^aotirslavery poems did not come, 
 like Whittier's, from a fiery heart, or rival Lowell's in 
 humor and disdain. They simply manifest his recog- 
 nition and, actistictreatment of an existing, evil. The 
 ballad of " The Quadroon Girl " is a poem, not a 
 prophecy, with a pathos beautified by certain "values," 
 as a painter might term them, — the tropic shore, the 
 lagoon, the island planter's daughter and slave. Of 
 the higher tests of poetic genius, — spontaneity, sweep, 
 intellect, imaginative power, — what examples has he 
 left us ? At times the highest of all, imagination, in 
 passages where he foregoes the conceits and fancies 
 that so possessed him. We have it in the " Midnight 
 Mass " ; in " Sir Humphrey Gilbert " ; in " The Span- 
 ish Jew's Tale," when 
 
 " straight into the city of the Lord 
 
 The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel's sword, 
 And through the streets there swept a sudden breath 
 Of something there unknown, which men call death." 
 
 At limes also we have what is of almost equal worth, 
 imaginative treatment. This is felt in the effect of 
 his~veiy'"^st lyrlS^ a series of ballads, with "The 
 Skjleton in Armor " at their front both in date and in 
 merit. This vigorous poem opens with a rare abrupt- 
 
 Taste. 
 
 Not a 
 
 poleinic 
 
 reformer. 
 
 Tests of 
 gemus. 
 
 iTKagin- 
 ative 
 Ballads. 
 " Tht 
 Skeleton 
 in A r- 
 txor," i^ 
 
192 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Vccasumal 
 
 ness. The author, full of the Norseland, was inspirited 
 by his "novel theme, and threw off a ringing carol of 
 the sea-rover's training, love, adventure. The ca- 
 dences and imagery belong together, and the meas- 
 ure, that of Drayton's " Agincourt," is better than any 
 new one for its purpose. Even the poet's conceits are 
 braver than their wont : — 
 
 " Then from those cavernous eyes 
 Pale flashes seemed to rise, 
 As when the northern skies 
 
 Gleam in December ; 
 And, like the water's flow 
 Under December's snow, 
 Came a dull voice of woe 
 
 From the heart's chamber." 
 
 Elsewhere he is as resonant as the bard of England's 
 " King Harry " : — 
 
 '• And as to catch the gale 
 Round veered the flapping sail, 
 Death ! was the helmsman's hail, 
 
 Death without quarter ! 
 Midships with iron keel 
 Struck we her ribs of steel ; 
 Down her black hulk did reel 
 
 Through the black water ! " 
 
 To old-fashioned people this heroic ballad, written 
 over forty years ago, is worth a year's product of what 
 I may term Kensington-stitch verse. 4:fewothers, 
 mostly of the sea, count high in any estimate of Long- 
 fellow. "The Wreck of the Hesperus," though not 
 without blemishes, " Sir Humphrey Gilbert," " Victor 
 Galbraith," and " The Cumberland " are treated, I 
 think, imaginatively. Boker's noble stanzas on the 
 sinkinglSrihe Cumberland follow more closely the old 
 ballad style, but Longfellow plainly found a style of 
 his own. His " occasional " poems were equally f& 
 
ARTISTIC GRACE. 
 
 193 
 
 licitous : witness the touchingj sympathetic imagery of 
 "The Two^Angels," the joyous grace of the chanson 
 for Agassiz's birthday. " Hawthorne," " Bayard Tay- 
 lor," and " Killed at the Ford " are examples of the 
 fitness with whi_ch__his emotion and poetic quality cor- 
 responded, ea.ch-to- each. But neiJ±Ler_war nor grief 
 ever too much disturbed the artist soul. Tragedy 
 wetit no deeper with, him than its pathos; it was an- 
 other element of the beautiful. Death was a luminous 
 transition. " The Warden of the Cinque Ports " is all 
 melody and association. He made a scenic threnody, 
 knowing the laureate would supply an intellectual 
 characterization of the Iron Duke. His fancy dwells 
 upon the ancient and high-sounding title, the mist and 
 sunrise of the Channel, and the rolling salute from all 
 those rampart guns, that yet could not arouse the old 
 Field-Marshal from his slumber. Tennyson fills his 
 grander strophes with the sturdy valor and wisdom of 
 the last great Englishman, but within our own poet's 
 bounds the result is just as undeniably a poem. 
 
 Longfellow, employing regular forms of verse, was 
 flexible where many are awkward, — at ease in his fine 
 clothes. "Rain in Summer," "To a Child," and a 
 few longer poems yet to be examined, such as " The 
 Building of the Ship," are written with a free hand. 
 In hU l atter p eriod he often used an anapestic move- 
 ment, first discpy„^rajDle in .".Ihe™^5ga Qf_King Olaf " 
 and "Enceladus," afterward in " Belisarius," "The 
 Chamber over the Gate," and " Helen of Tyre." The 
 im^Bssionconveyed is that we listen to one whose 
 day for elaborate song is past, but whose voice still 
 warbles in the fresh break of spring or the melting 
 t\vilight of thankfulness and rest. With age, his nat- 
 ural tenderness grew upon him, as men'^s traits will for 
 
 "The Children's Hour" is one of the 
 
 13 
 
 good and bad. 
 
 A meiri' 
 caX expert 
 
194 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 •* My Lost 
 Youth." 
 
 inimitable fireside songs that made this " old mous- 
 tache " the children's poet. Another delightful lyric, 
 " My Lost Youth," was the utterance of a man who 
 in middle age looked in his own heart to write, and 
 found it warm and true. To comprehend its- charm 
 and sincerity, one, perchance, must also have loitered 
 in youth along the piers, sending his hopes far across 
 the whispering ocean to the untried world j must him- 
 self remember 
 
 " the black wharves and the slips, 
 
 And the sea-tides tossing free ; 
 And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
 And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 
 And the magic of the sea." 
 
 Some breezy dome of trees, with sounds and shadows 
 like those of Deering's woods, must still haunt his 
 memory, if he would recall 
 
 "The song and the silence in the heart, 
 That in part are prophecies, and in part 
 Are longings wild and vain ; 
 And the voice of that fitful song 
 Sings on, and is never still : 
 ' A boy's will is the wind's will, 
 And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' " 
 
 Of all these poems, the swallow-flights of many sea- 
 sons, not one falls short of a certain standard of grace 
 and correttness ; and the same may be said of the 
 author's more pretentious works, to which we now 
 come. Meanwhile it is to be noted that he was the 
 first American to compose sustained narrative-poems 
 that gained and kept a place in literature. In fact, 
 since the Georgian period, there has been no other 
 poet of our tongue, save Tennyson, whose longer pro- 
 ductions have been greeted by the public with the 
 interest bestowed upon the successive works of nov- 
 elists in the front rank. 
 
'Evangeline: 
 
 195 
 
 IV. 
 
 "JExAKGELtNE," the first of these tales in verse, 
 was writte n — as I have said of " In Memoriam," 
 that very different production — when its author had 
 reached the age of forty, with his powers in full matu- 
 rity, and it remains his typical poem. Like " Hermann 
 and Dorothea," it is composed in hexameter, as befits 
 a bucolic love story. Longfellow's choice of this meas- 
 ure, in defiance of a noble army of censors, proves 
 that he had, much as he shrank from discussion, the 
 full courage of his convictions upon a point in literary 
 art. He liuedfor poetry ; his tastes were definite, and 
 he felt himself justified in respecting them. 
 
 Within a recent period several noteworthy exten- 
 sions have been made to the technical range of Eng- 
 lish verse. Among these are : the use by Tennyson of 
 the stanzaic form of " In Memoriam " ; the example 
 of a long poem in unrhymed trochaics, by Longfellow ; 
 Swinburtie's forcible handling of anapestic measures; 
 more recently, the revival of elegant romance forms, 
 by the new English school. Preceding these in date 
 we have Longfellow's success in familiarizing the 
 " English, hexameter," the measure of " Evangeline " 
 and " Miles. Standish." The popularity of those idyls 
 assuredly proved that the common folk, in spite of 
 critics, do not find the verse a stumbling-block. They 
 read it, when gracefully written, without suspecting that 
 it is not a musical and natural English form. The 
 question of hexameter has been argued to little pur- 
 pose, in consequence of a mist which has hid the true 
 issue from the perception of both parties to the dis- 
 pute. The verse usually is examined, by its friends 
 and opponents, from the scholar's point of view. 
 To Mr. Swinburne, hexameters are " ugly bastards of 
 
 Sttstained 
 narrative 
 poems. 
 
 " EvangC' 
 
 line," 
 
 1847. 
 
 The ques- 
 tion of 
 " English 
 Hexatne- 
 ier" 
 verse. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 p. 251. 
 
 Wrongly 
 argued, 
 from the 
 scholar"*! 
 point of 
 view. 
 
196 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Kingsley*s 
 "Andro- 
 meda." 
 
 A wrong 
 fremise. 
 
 verse '' ; even those of Mr. Arnold have " no metrical 
 feet at all," but sound like " anapests broken up and 
 driven wrong " ; dough's are admirable " studies in 
 graduated prose " ; Hawtrey's " faultless, English, hex- 
 ametrical," but only " a well-played stroke," not con- 
 tinuable ; Kingsley's " Andromeda," the " one good 
 poem extant in that pernicious metre,'' and even 
 Kingsley's feet are but "loose, rhyraeless anapests." 
 Now " Andromeda," a delicious poem for poets, never 
 will commend its measure to the multitude, since it 
 never will reach them. But if such lines as these, — 
 
 " Far through the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens 
 of Nereus, 
 Coral and sea-fan and tangle, the blooms and the palms of 
 the ocean," 
 
 are essentially anapestic, it is because one chooses to 
 read them so ; and any dactylic verse of Hompr may 
 be transposed in the same way by reading it accentu- 
 ally and ignoring the first and last syllables. When 
 Mr. Swinburne adds, " Such as pass elsewhere for 
 English hexameter, I do hope, are impossible to Eton," 
 he strikes the key-note of the misunderstanding. The 
 same premise is always implied, to wit : that classical 
 analogies should govern our opinion of this measure. 
 Unfortunately, I say, even the arguments of its de- 
 fenders are based on the notion that the modern 
 verse may approximate to the antique, in which effort, 
 of course, it always must fail. Ppe, in his turn, op- 
 posed Longfellow's hexameters because they were not 
 classical ; yet he unconsciously paid tribute to them as 
 an English form of verse, when he said that their ad- 
 mirers were " deceived by the facility with which some 
 of these verses may be read ! " Lord Derby antici- 
 pated Mr. Swinburne's "pernicious metre," in denouno- 
 
'ENGLISH HEXAMETER' VERSE. 
 
 197 
 
 ing " that pestilent heresy of the so-called English 
 hexameter," which '' can only be pressed into the ser- 
 vice by a violation of every rule of prosody." Whether 
 or not the noble translator, deprived of rules of pros- 
 ody, would have found it hard to write verse at all, 
 it is plain that here again crops out the fallacy of the 
 discussion. Fixed rules of quantitative or classical 
 verse must be put out of mind. Tlje-question ought 
 to^be^imply: Is the verse,, in six feet, -of "Evange- 
 line " or " Andromeda " a good and readable meas- 
 ure for an English poem ? 
 
 Bryant, a good writer of blank verse, disliked a 
 measure which he found unsuited to his slow and dig- 
 nified movement. Professor Lewis took the ground of 
 Mr. Bryant, whose Homer he so much praised. Mr. 
 Lang is on the same side, and has said that not even 
 Professor Arnold can alter his opinion. Yet the late 
 Professor Hadley, an almost matchless scholar, advo- 
 cated this verse for Homeric translation. Messrs. 
 Lowell, Higginson, and Stoddard are among its friends. 
 Matthew Arnold, in the delightful papers " On Trans- 
 lating Homer," has made his strongest plea for the 
 English hexameter by unconsciously granting that its 
 close approximation to the antique type must be the 
 result of adroit labor, not of unstudied expression. 
 Such a result justly might be deemed an artifice, dis- 
 tinct from natural English verse. And Mr. Arnold, 
 in view of the reception awarded " Evangeline," also 
 sees that the dislike of our present English hexameter 
 is " rather among_the„prQtessiQiial— critics. _than the 
 general public." A liking for it, on the part of many 
 poets, is evident from their successive experiments. 
 Longfellow's foreign studies influenced his own deci- 
 sion in its favor ; since then we have had Kingsley's 
 " Andromeda," Clough's " Bothie," Howells's " Clem- 
 
 The real 
 point at 
 issue. 
 
 Views of 
 other 
 friends 
 and oppo- 
 nents. 
 
 Arnold 
 "On 
 Trans- 
 lating 
 Horner.^ 
 
 Recent 
 poems in 
 hexante' 
 ter. 
 
1 98 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Accent 
 find guati' 
 iity. 
 
 Ultimate 
 character- 
 istics. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets''': 
 
 ent," Taylor's rhythmic " Pastorals," and, more re- 
 cently, Mr. Munby's idyl of " Dorothy " in the elegaic 
 measure, and its Hellenic counter-type, the " Delphic 
 Days " of Mr. Snider. But while there are both faith 
 and practice in favor of the hexametric verse, it is still 
 in a stage of growth. Mr. Arnold a second time reaches 
 the mark when he implies that its capabilities are not 
 yet evident ; that, " even now, if a version of the Iliad 
 in English hexameter were made by a poet who, like 
 Mr. Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which 
 renders him popular, — something attractive in his tal- 
 ent which communicates itself to.his_yerses, — it would ^ 
 have a great success among the general public." He 
 expected yet to see an improved type of this verse, 
 which should excel Voss's by as much as Shakespeare's 
 blank verse excels that of Schiller. This may or may 
 not be ; but the capabilities of the measure will not 
 be understood until some fine poet — combining the 
 simplicity of Longfellow and the vigor of Clough, and 
 free from the sing-song of the one and the roughness 
 of the other — shall make it the vehicle of passion, 
 incident, imagination. To bring out its full rhythm, 
 while depending chiefly on accent, — the natural basis 
 of English verse, — the ear will pay regard to such 
 effects of quantity as the language proffers. Purely 
 quantitative English verse, at any length, is out of the 
 equation. To the samples of it often printed by ama- 
 teurs in " Blackwood " and elsewhere, Canning's out- 
 burst, " Dactylics call'st thou them ? God help thee, 
 silly one ! " may be justly applied, but not to the hex- 
 ameter of Kingsley and Bayard Taylor. Call the new 
 measure what you will — something else, if possible, 
 than the term applied to the verse of Homer and Lu- 
 cretius, for it assuredly is not composed of quantita- 
 tive dactyls and spondees. But it will have six feet, 
 
A POPULAR TEST AND VERDICT. 
 
 199 
 
 and natural breaks and caesuras, and will be more or 
 less dactylic ; it may also have anapestic variations, 
 and trochees quite as often as spondees. To sum up 
 all, its music, sweep, and inspiriting effect will depend 
 entirely upon the genius of the poet who writes it. 
 
 The use of this measure for translation from the 
 Greek and Latin poets I have discussed in the chap- 
 ter on Bryant. Longfellow could not be the supreme 
 translator of Homer ; but if there was nothing of the 
 Grecian in him, there was much of the Latinist, and 
 with Virgil's polished muse he might have been quite 
 at ease. Meanwhile, the popularity of our new hex- 
 ameter with simple readers who know little of the 
 Homeric roll, the Sicilian psithurisma, or Virgil's liq- 
 uid flow, has been demonstrated against all theorists 
 by the record of " Evangeline." The poet's friends 
 told him he must take a familiar metre, that hexame- 
 ters "would never do." He found, as reported by 
 David Macrae, that his "thoughts would run in hex- 
 ameter," and declared that the measure would " take 
 root in English soil." "It is a measure," he said, 
 "that suits all themes. It can fly low like a swallow, 
 and at any moment dart skyward. . . . What fine 
 hexameters we have in the Bible : Husbands, love your 
 wives, and be not bitter against them ; and this line, 
 God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound 
 of a trumpet. Nothing could be grander than that ! " 
 Over^ctyliCj_atid_therefore monotonous, as Longfel- 
 low's hexameters pften^ are, they have the merit of 
 being smooth to read, without analysis, like any other 
 English verse. This primary, easy lilt was needed for 
 an introduction, until, stage by stage, the popular ear 
 should be wonted to more varied forms, and the 
 scholar brought to realize that here is a true and 
 idiomatic English verse, however distinct from that 
 which he learned in the classes. 
 
 91. 
 
 Popular 
 success of 
 Longfel- 
 low'' s ex~ 
 periment. 
 
200 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 " Evan- 
 geline " 
 th£ fieyaier 
 of A tneri- 
 can idyls. 
 
 Notwithstanding its primitive and loose construc- 
 tion, the verse of " Evangeline " is at times vigorously 
 wrought and sonorous : — 
 
 " Wild through the dark colonnades and corridors leafy the blast 
 
 rang, 
 Breaking the seal of silence, and giving tongues to the forest 
 Soundless above them the banners of moss just stirred to the 
 
 music. 
 Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance, 
 Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches." 
 
 And with the measure that came to him, the poet 
 had chanced upon an idyllic story, seemingly made 
 for its use, and wholly after his liking. >y_beauti£ul, 
 pathetic tradition of American history, remote enough 
 to gather a poetic halo, and yet fresh with sweet hu- 
 manities; tinged with provincial color wh^ch he knew 
 and loved, and in its course taking on the changing 
 atmospheres of his own land; pastoral at first, then 
 broken into action, and afterward the record of shift- 
 ing scenes that made life a pilgrimage and dream. 
 There are. few .dramatic episodes ; there is but_ane 
 figure whom we follow, — that one the most touching 
 of all, the betrothed Evangeline searching for her 
 lover, through weary years and over half an unknown 
 world. There are chance_4jictures_of .Acadian-fields, 
 New World rivers, prairies, bayous, forests, by moon- 
 light and starlight and midday; glimpses, too, of pic- 
 turesque figures, artisans and farmers, soldiery,- trap- 
 pers, boatmen, emigrants and priests. But the poem 
 already is a little classic, and will remain one, just as 
 surely as "The Vicar of Wakefield," "The Deserted 
 Village," or any other sweet and pious idyl of our 
 English tongue ; yet we find its counterpart more 
 nearly, I think, in some faultless miniature of the 
 purest French school. Evangeline, as she 
 
'HIAWATHA. 
 
 20t 
 
 " Sat by some lonely grave, and thought that perchance in its 
 bosom 
 He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him," 
 
 though the subject of artists, needs no other painter 
 than her poet, through whose verse the music of her 
 name and the legend of her wanderings will be long 
 perpetuated. There are flaws and petty fancies and 
 homely passages in "Evangeline"; but this one poem, 
 thus far the 'flower of American idyls, known in all 
 lands, I will not approach in a critical spirit. There 
 are rooms in every house where one treads with soft- 
 ened footfall. Accept it as the poet left it, the mark 
 of our advance at that time in, the art of song, — his 
 own favorite, of which he justly might be fond, since 
 his people loved it with him, and him always for its 
 sake. 
 
 The advantage of a new field, to which later au- 
 thors, like Harte and Cable, are somewhat indebted, 
 was of full service to our poet, not only on his pro- 
 vincial excursions, but also in the one successful at- 
 tempt that has been made to treat in numbers the 
 customs and legends of our Indian tribes. This gain 
 was strengthened by the novelty of the rhynieless tro- 
 c]iaic_dim_etex— used, -for- Hiawatha, a measure^then 
 practically unknown to English verse, He probably 
 would not have ventured to compose his Algic Edda 
 in this monotonous time-beat, had he not made sure 
 of its effect in older literatures, and mainly, as was 
 noted at the time, injhe ^miiish epic of "Kalevala." 
 The result, on the whole, justified his course. " Hia- 
 watha. "__is„ a forest-poem ; it is fragrant with the woods, 
 fresh with the sky and waters of the breezy rfbrth. 
 The Indian traditions, like those of Finland, are the 
 ,myths.5i„ an untutored_ra,ce ; they would seen?) puerile 
 and affected in any but the most primitive/of chant- 
 
 Song of 
 tha," iSss 
 
 Its meas- 
 ure. 
 
202 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 First suc- 
 cessful 
 treattnent 
 of the In- 
 dian le- 
 gends. 
 
 ing measures. As it is, one feels that the nicest skill 
 was required to protect the verse from gathering an 
 effect of burlesque or commonplace ; yet this it never 
 does. The fable is not of a stimulating kind. Grown- 
 up readers, I suspect, seldom go through it consecu- 
 tively. To read here and there and at odd times, it 
 is in every way pleasurable. It was, in a sense, the 
 poet's most ^ejiuine addition toour native literature. 
 Previous endeavors to make imaginative verse from 
 aboriginal material had signally failed : witness the 
 ludicrous heroics of the Knickerbocker poets, whose 
 conventional ideals were utterly discarded by Long- 
 fellow. He alone had the gift to blend the kindred 
 myths of Indian fancy in mellow and artistic simplio. 
 ity; to cull from Schoolcraft what was really essential, 
 and make it more charming for us than a sheer in- 
 vention possibly could be. He made the field his 
 own, with little room for after-comers^ " Hiawatha " 
 is the one poem that beguiles the rea3er to see the 
 birch and ash, the heron and eagle and deer, as they 
 seem to the red man himself, and to join for the mo- 
 ment in his simple creed and wonderment.^] Such is 
 the half-dramatic merit of the work, andTtr-Was only 
 by a true exercise of the imagination that a poet, 
 himself no familiar of the wild-wood life, could sit in 
 his study and utilize the books relating to it : an 
 equally true exercise, I think, though upon a less ma- 
 jestic basis, with that of the poet who mastered the 
 Arthurian legends of his own historic race and island, 
 and wrote the "Idylls of the King." /Longfellow's 
 use of the Indian dialect and names is delightful. 
 These cantos remind us that poetry is the natural 
 speech of primitive races ; the " song " of Hiawath^ 
 has the epic quality that pertains to early ballads, 
 the highest enjoyment of which belongs to later ages 
 
' COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH.' 
 
 203 
 
 and to the creature that Whitman terms the civilizee. 
 He alone can relish to the full the illusions which 
 the poet has recaptured for his episode of " The 
 Building of the Canoe," the death of Minnehaha, and 
 Hiawatha's mystical farewell. 
 
 When a companion-piece to " Evangeline " appeared, 
 every one made haste to acquaint himself with the 
 love experience of the demure Priscilla, loyal John 
 Alden, and blufiL_Cagtain__Miles. Even now, if we 
 had some young Tennysons and Longfellows, poetic 
 ideals might not wholly give way to the novelist's pho- 
 tographs of every-day life. The author's tact guided 
 him to the prettiest tradition of Pilgrim times. We 
 have a romantic picture of the Plymouth ^settlement,^ 
 with' its^far:a^way_roujid of human Hfe and action, 
 through which the tide of love went flowing then as 
 now. The bucolic wedding-scene at the close is a 
 fine subject for the pastoral canvas. (JThe Courtship 
 of Miles Standish was an advance upon " Evangeline," 
 so far as concerns structure and the distinct charac- 
 terization of personages.^ A merit of the tale is the 
 frolicsome humor here and there, lighting up the gloom 
 that blends with our conception of the Pilgrim inclos- 
 ure, and we see that comic and poetic elements are 
 not at odds in the scheme of a bright imagination. 
 TJie ver se, though stronger, is more_lahored.th_an that 
 of "Evangeline"; some of the lines are prosaic, al- 
 most inadmissible. There are worse, however, in the 
 poet's last example of hexameter, the Quaker story of 
 " Elizabeth," — which was written rather to fill out the 
 " Tales of a Wayside Inn " than from any special in- 
 spiration. Nor does the Pl3miouth idyl show much 
 sympathy on the part of the author with the ancestral 
 environment, but chiefly a cavalier perception of what 
 romance and grace there might have been in the good 
 old colony time. 
 
 ''The 
 Courtship 
 of Miles 
 Siandishi 
 1858. 
 
204 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 LoHgfel- 
 low's dra- 
 viatic 
 foetns. 
 
 "The 
 Spanish 
 Student," 
 1843. 
 
 Variaits 
 weak 
 
 and/aidty 
 dramas. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets": 
 feS. 189, 
 5901 ■t'3 i 
 
 His works in dramatic form plainly represent the 
 craving of a versatile poet to win laurels in every 
 province of his art. But to compose a living drama 
 requires just that special faculty, if not the highest, 
 which is denied to nine out of ten. Longfellow, per- 
 chance, might have made himself either a dramatist 
 or a novelist, if he had gone into training as dog. 
 gedly as others, born essayists or poets, who have 
 gained the secret of novel-writing through practice, 
 aided by popular encouragement. He made a fair 
 beginning as a romancer with " Hyperion," and even 
 as a dramatist by the clever play of The Spanish Stu- 
 dent, — equipped with the properties of a country and 
 literature so well understood by him. As a drama, 
 that remains his best achievement. When the desire 
 to better it possessed him, the outcome was a motley 
 series of writings in the form under review: one, a 
 frigid contribution to the pseudo-antique verse at which 
 all college-bred poets feel competent to try their hands. 
 Nothing with the true Grecian flavor could come out 
 of his Italian and Gothic tendencies. Pandora, be- 
 sides reminding us of Taylor's version of the Second 
 Part of Faust, is in every way a forced effort, and, 
 like "Judas Maccabaeus," would go a-begging if the 
 work of a new man. The T4ilQgy_of Christus, as a 
 whole, is a disjointed failure. Parts Jirst and Third. 
 "The Divine Tragedy," and "The New England Trag- 
 edies," exhibit the skill to choose imposing subjects 
 and build a framework, but Uttle of the power re- 
 quired for their treatment. Wg_Jiajfe_the form,, the 
 personages, and situations, rarely the action and noble 
 fire. The author's shortcomings are even more con- 
 spicuous than Tennyson's, and by as much as his in- 
 tellectual power was the less absolute. His theory 
 that the Scriptural language should be reproduced 
 
' THE GOLDEN LEGEND? 
 
 205 
 
 grew out of the fact that he could invent no other, 
 and resulted in a barren paraphrase of what is fine 
 in its own place. /^_What sublime themes ! — the life 
 and passion of Christ, the Golden Legend of Chris- 
 tendom, the tragedy of Puritan superstition, — and 
 how tamely the first and last of these are handled ! 
 Their consolidation was manifestly an after-thought, 
 to give a semblance of strength to the whole. / Where 
 we have the poet's own style, as in the soliloquies of 
 Mary, Simon, Helen, it is a subjective utterance of 
 the Cambridge scholar at his desk. The Interludes 
 are put in to brace the effect, like the sham but- 
 tresses of a faulty building. He should not have pre- 
 empted the sable field of the Quaker and witch per- 
 secutions, unless he felt in his utmost fibre the nerve 
 to occupy it. The temptation was strong ; the result, 
 contrasted with Hawthorne's prose treatment of kin- 
 dred subjects, is deplorable. 
 
 The Golden Legend, however, should be judged by 
 itself, and is an enchanting romance of the Middle 
 Age cast in the dramatic mould. Brought out years 
 before the " Tragedies," it finally was merged in the 
 " Christus " by way of toning up the whole, the poet 
 well knowing that this was his choicest distillation of 
 Gothic mysticism and its legendary. It is composite 
 rather than inventive ; the correspondences between 
 this work and Goethe's masterpiece, not to speak of 
 productions earlier than either, are interesting. There 
 is decided originality in its general effect, and in the 
 taste wherewith the author, like a modern maker of 
 stained glass, arranged the prismatic materials which 
 he knew precisely where to collect. The^roJogue, not 
 wholly a new conception, is nonethe less imaginative : 
 a scene^o£_night and storm, with Lucifer and the Pow- 
 ers of the Air vainly assaulting the Strasburg Cross, 
 
 and see 
 " Becket " 
 in index 
 to this 
 volume. 
 
 "The 
 
 Golden 
 
 Legend," 
 
 185 1. 
 
 DeligMfti 
 re-use of 
 Gothic 
 material. 
 
2o6 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 The poet's 
 freest and 
 vtost af- 
 •^uerU 
 work. 
 
 baffled by the voices of the Bells, which repeat the sa- 
 cred words graven on their sides. The Legend is a 
 striking instance of an effort by which mediaeval rituals, 
 chants, and wonder-tales are boldly seized and molten 
 to an alloy, whose color and tensile qualities are due to 
 the solvent of the alchemist. Here and there are un- 
 mistakable lustres of the poet's own vein. This would 
 be recognized at sight : — 
 
 " His gracious presence upon earth 
 Was as a fire upon a hearth ; 
 As pleasant songs, at morning sung, 
 The words that dropped from his sweet tongue 
 Strengthened our hearts." 
 
 And this, also, is after his best fashion : — 
 
 " I have my trials. Time has laid his hand 
 Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, 
 But as a harper lays his open palm 
 Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations." 
 
 The humor of Lucifer's soliloquies, in the Church 
 and elsewhere, is characteristic of both Goethe and 
 Longfellow, and therefore German with a difference. 
 But all phases of our poet's verse and fancy are to be 
 observed in this brilliant conglomerate. And what 
 rare materials are brought together ! Here are revived 
 the oft-told gest of Brother Felix, Walter the Minne- 
 singer, Lucifer and the Black Paternoster, the monk- 
 ish chants and anthems, the Miracle Play, the disputes 
 at the School of Palermo. The richest passages are 
 those contrasting the Cellar and Refectory scenes with 
 the prayer-like labor of Brother Pacificus illuminating 
 the Gospel in the Scriptorium above. These, with 
 many beautiful counterparts, lighting page after page, 
 move one to accord with those who regard "The 
 Golden Legend " as a piece in which the poet's ver- 
 satile genius is seen at its best. Though not the work 
 
FREE-HAND IDYLS. 
 
 207 
 
 of a natural dramatist, it is vastly superior to the pro- 
 saic fabrics which are attached to it, and which fail to 
 grow upon the reader in spite of this forced associa- 
 tion. 
 
 A posthumous drama, Michael Angela, while having 
 the dignity that becomes its theme, does not change 
 our view of the author's limitations. It contains ele- 
 vated passages, mostly the soliloquies of the great art- 
 ist, of whom in his old age it may be termed a sympa- 
 thetic study, and is worth pursuing, even for something 
 more than the perfect sonnet which forms the Dedica- 
 tion. 
 
 Were I to select one from the poet's long succession 
 of books to fitly illustrate his traits, I might name the 
 little volume of 1849, with its two divisions, "By the 
 Seaside" and " By the Fireside." The^_£Mildi}ig-of the 
 Ship is the best example of his fr ee-h and metrical 
 ■ musical, wholesome, and suggestive of an 
 
 style, • 
 
 agination that takes heat f romats. own action. 
 
 im- 
 This 
 
 celebration of a manly and poetic form of handicraft is 
 simply cast, yet full of energy and spirit. At the close, 
 a sunburst of patriotism, the superb apostrophe to the 
 Union, outvies that ode of Horace on which it was 
 modelled. In conception^and structure the poem, while 
 thoroughly national, is akin to -Schiller's "X.ay,pf the. 
 Bell." I think that the minor lyrics in this volume, 
 from " Chrysaor " to " Caspar Becerra," warrant my 
 liking for it, and are peculiarly representative. The 
 author long afterward supplied companion-pieces. The 
 Hanging of the Crane and Keramos, to his idyl of the 
 ship-yard. His reputation now made the production of 
 each of these a literary event ; just as any late and 
 brief work of a favorite composer sends a murmur of 
 interest through the musical world. Such afterpieces 
 earn for artists, in the ripeness of their fame, a more 
 
 " Michael 
 Angela" 
 1882. 
 
 A repre- 
 sentative 
 volume : 
 
 " ne 
 
 Seaside 
 and the 
 Fireside^ 
 1849. 
 
 Free-hand 
 idyls. 
 
2o8 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 " Tales 
 of a Way- 
 side Inn,^^ 
 1863-1874. 
 
 Longfel- 
 low and 
 Morris. 
 Cp. " Kir- 
 iorian 
 Poets"; 
 ("A 372- 
 378- 
 
 sudden reward than greater efforts which preceded 
 them. All things come around at last, and often come 
 too late. But Longfellow again and again received his 
 crown of praise ; and this the more frequently in return 
 for service in which he was easily first, — the art which 
 gained for an old-time minstrel a willing largess, that 
 of the raconteur, the teller of bewitching tales. His 
 station as a poet was not advanced by the different in- 
 stalments of the Tales of a Wayside -Inn, but it was 
 much to have the delight of giving delight, as often as 
 each appeared, to a host of unseen readers. And so in 
 the end they formed his most extended work : a series 
 of short stories, mostly gathered from older literatures, 
 translated into his varying and crystalline verse,^ and 
 linked together, like the tales of Boccaccio and Chau- 
 cer, by a running commentary of the poet's own. The 
 selections are good of themselves, and the conceit of 
 the gathering of the poet's friends at the Sudbury 
 Inn brought them near to the interest of his audi- 
 ence. Nothing could be better than the prelude. A 
 transfiguring^porjraiture from life is that of the musi- 
 cian, Ole Bull. The tales here told in song for the 
 first time, all of them colonial, are but four in num- 
 ber, — few indeed, among so many gleaned from the 
 Decameron, the Gesta Romanorum, "the chronicles of 
 Charlemagne," and " the stories that recorded are by 
 Pierre Alphonse." Here is the semblance of a mas- 
 ter effort, but in fact a succession of minor ones; we 
 perceive that no great outlay of imaginative force was 
 required for this kind of work. With Longfellow's 
 lyrical facility_pi putting a story into rippling verse, 
 almost as lightly as another would tell it in prose, 
 we find ourselves assured of as many poems as he 
 had themes. Le5&.^subtle and refined than Morris, he 
 was a better raconteur. This was due to a moderi) 
 
'DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY: 
 
 2og 
 
 and natural style, the sweet variety of his measures, 
 and to his ease in dialogue. He intersperses many 
 realistic passages, and by other ways avoids the mo- 
 notony of the " idle singer of an empty day." As for 
 poetic atmospliere and all the essentials of a select 
 work of beauty, the " Tales " cannot enter into com- 
 parison with " The Earthly Paradise." Longfellow's 
 
 frequent^ gayety and constant sense of the humani- 
 ties make him a true story-teller for the multitude ; 
 not, like Morris, an exquisite, dreamy singer .for com- 
 jjanions of his own guild. 
 
 His version of The-Hivme. Comedy, is one of the 
 most signal results of American labor in the depart- 
 ment of translation. There was nothing in the work 
 of his predecessors to prevent the task from being 
 not only a matter of attraction, but a duty; no one, 
 on the score of talent or acquirements, was better 
 fitted to renew an attempt which from its conditions 
 never can be perfectly successful. His life-long study 
 of Dante's text had brought to thisjiatur;il_translator 
 that knovdedge of it which was more than half the 
 achievement. The theory of his version was the mod- 
 ern one (which it helped to confirm), — that of re- 
 cent and noted English translations, and of Taylor's 
 "Faust," — to wit, a literal and lineal rendering. Un- 
 like Taylor, Longfellow had but one measure to re- 
 produce, and he discarded the rhymes altogether, while 
 striving to convey the rhythm and deeper music of 
 the_sublime-Original. It was fitting that the neigh- 
 borhood of Cambridge, whose poets and scholars were 
 for the most part sympathetic lovers of Dante, should 
 furnish a new translation of the Commedia, and that 
 Longfellow — less brilliant than Lowell, whether as a 
 poet or a student, but his superior in patient industry 
 and evenness of taste — should be the one to make 
 14 
 
 Transla- 
 tion: 
 " Daniels 
 Divine 
 Comedy" 
 1865-1867. 
 
 Theory oj 
 the work. 
 
2IO 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Competi- 
 iors in ike 
 field. 
 
 Merits of 
 Long-fel- 
 low's ver- 
 
 it. We are told that his work received, from time to 
 time, the criticism of a pleiad of his friends. Cer- 
 tainly it was brought to birth with heralding by Nor- 
 ton, — the classical translator of " Vita Nuova," — 
 Howells, Greene, and others of the group. As for 
 the discussions which ensued upon its merits, my im- 
 pression is that points were well taken on both sides. 
 Various other translations of Dante were appearing 
 about this time — the six-hundredth anniversary of 
 the Tuscan's birth: in Great Britain, those of Day- 
 man, Ford, and Rossetti ; in America, Dr. Parsons's 
 " Inferno " was before the public, — seventeen cantos 
 in the rhymed pentameter quatrain, not so literal as 
 Longfellow's, but the noble performance that one might 
 expect from the author of the " Lines on a Bust of 
 Dante." The best of the English triad was that of 
 Rossetti. It bears the stamp of a master-hand, yet 
 has so many blemishes, and is here and there so awk- 
 ward, as to be on the whole less satisfactory than 
 Longfellow's, to which it is kindred in principle and 
 method. 
 
 The reader of Longfellow's pages is secure of a 
 faithful reproduction of the original order and mean- 
 ing and of Dante's manner — so far as the latter de- 
 pends on linear arrangement. All these are of the 
 highest value, if the vital and pervading style of the 
 lofty Florentine can likewise be transferred. The 
 ideal translator will reproduce all these — the sense, 
 the metrical arrangement, the grandeur of tone. Un- 
 til his arrival, if one of these must be sacrificed, it 
 cannot be the first, and it should be, I think, the sec- 
 ond rather than the third. One would prefer a prose 
 rendering of the same rank with Mr. Lang's " Ho- 
 mer" and " Theocritus '' to a feebly correct transcrip- 
 tion in English verse. Longfellow certainly aimed to 
 
SPIRIT OF THE TRANSLATION. 
 
 211 
 
 meet all the foregoing requirements, and in his case 
 a complete failure was scarcely possible, even with 
 respect to the third. But his gifts as a translator 
 ilever were more conspicuous than when, in youth, he 
 paraphrased and almost recreated so many lyrics from 
 the German and other tongues. Ag£lying_a..Jit£raL 
 method to the JZomm^dia^ his_genius^ is^ less evident 
 than his talent and conscientious sdf-restraint. What 
 he did was to translate the whole work, line for line, 
 almost as literally as a class recitation, and this, bar- 
 ring a few archaisms, with much simplicity and smooth- 
 ness. Except in the more abstruse cantos, the ap- 
 pearance of ease is so marked that one gives credit 
 to the story thaf the poet, with his facility and mas- 
 tery of the text, accomplished his task in a few years 
 by writing a stated number of verses each morning, 
 while waiting for his coffee to boil. If this were the 
 fact, it would not do to estimate the feat by it. Where 
 a man's genius lies, there he works with ease, and 
 often undervalues the result; elsewhere, he "labors." 
 There is nothing laborgd^ia.X.ang£ellcog's Jxanslation ; 
 the fault is of another kind : ^e loje^ amid all its 
 simplicity, the "grand manner," as Mr. Arnold would 
 call it, of the divine master. A neophyte misses what 
 he expected to realize of the unflinching strength and 
 terror of the Inferno, the palpitating splendor of the 
 Paradiso. The three divisions seem levelled, so to 
 speak, to the grade of the Purgatorio, midway be- 
 tween the zenith and nadir of Dante's song. This 
 shortcoming is to be felt, rather than proved, and 
 tells in favor of Parsons's translation, and of others 
 greatly inferior to this as a whole. Even Gary's old- 
 fashioned paraphrase, full of Miltonic inversions and 
 epithets, and thoroughly open to Bentley's stricture 
 on Pope's "Homer," has exalted passages that jus- 
 
 Special 
 character* 
 istics and 
 defects. 
 
212 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Faulty use 
 ef deriva- 
 tives. 
 
 tify its survival to our day. Longfellow's genuine 
 scholarship led him to pursue his method, once de- 
 termined on, without the slightest protrusion of skill 
 and learning. Grace is added by the frequent use 
 of feminine endings, — a habit natural to Longfellow, 
 and increasing the likeness of his own to the original 
 verse. But his rendition of many Italian words by 
 English derivatives, which often have quite lost the 
 etymological meaning, is an error made in the inter- 
 est of extreme fidelity and really telling against it. 
 A kindred one is the use of derivatives in which the 
 primitive meaning is not lost, but which do not trans- 
 late the text to Enj;lish ears so effectively as their 
 Saxon synonyms. For instance, most of the transla- 
 tors — Wright, Cayley, Ford, Rossetti, etc. — have 
 made havoc with the inscription over the gate of 
 hell : — 
 
 " Per rae si va nella cittk dolente ; 
 
 Per me si va nell' etemo dolore ; 
 
 Per me si va tra la perduta gente." 
 
 Longfellow's rendering is superior to all the rest : — 
 
 " Through me the way is to the city dolent ; 
 Through me the way is to eternal dole ; 
 Through me the way among the people lost." 
 
 Yet here is a forced translation of the word " dolente " 
 by a derivative which, to English readers, is not an 
 equivalent. Besides, a more effective expression of 
 anguish can be gained by the use of a Saxon word. 
 One step further would have made Mr. Longfellow's 
 rendering perfect : he might have escaped an inver- 
 sion, and have matched the verbal repetition in the 
 first two lines, after this wise : — 
 
 " Through me the way is to the woful city ; 
 Through me the way is to eternal woe." 
 
MASTERLY SONNETS. 
 
 213 
 
 Reading the whole work, and accepting the late Mr. 
 Greene's opinion that the characteristics of Dante are 
 Variety and Power, I think that the evenness of Long- 
 fellow's method robs us of the former ; and as for the 
 latter, it is the one thing which the lay reader of this 
 translation, unrivalled as it is in many respects, does 
 not adequately feel. 
 
 The reflex influence of this effort was apparent in 
 the elevated nature of his later poems. It is true 
 that he occasionally used his new diction in a prosaic 
 or weary manner. Of this, such a line as " The spir- 
 itual world preponderates," from the sonnet to Whit- 
 tier, is an extreme instance. Otherwise, a firmer poetic 
 quality was observable after this date. The sonnets 
 whiqli. he now wrote, few as they are, entitle him to • a 
 place in the most select circle of modern poets. They 
 rank with the best written in our century. Where, in 
 fact, throughout the whole galaxy of English sonnets, 
 is there a group surpassing the six which accom- 
 panied the Dante volumes? Biythmic, perfect in 
 structure, and full of beauty,- they have captured the 
 spirit of the Divine Song. A series written in the 
 poet's old age, his tributes to the memory of com- 
 rades gone before, has a pathetic charm. Still later 
 was composed the sonnet " ^J ature," which must be 
 accounted one of the choicest in any language upon 
 the theme to which its title is but a pass-word: — 
 
 " As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, 
 
 Leads by the hand her little child to bed, 
 Half willing, half reluctant to be led 
 
 And leave his broken playthings on the floor, 
 
 Still gazing at them through the open door, 
 Nor wholly reassured and comforted 
 By promises of others in their stead, 
 
 Which, though more splendid, may not please him more ; 
 
 So Nature deals with us, and takes away 
 
 Later 
 work. 
 
 Sonnets of 
 
 rare 
 
 beauty. 
 
214 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 " Ultima 
 
 TkuU," 
 
 1880. 
 
 Longfel- 
 lov^s 
 
 habits and 
 manner- 
 ism. 
 
 Formal 
 imagery. 
 
 Our playthings one by one, and by the hand 
 Leads us to rest so gently, that we go 
 Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, 
 Being too full of sleep to understand 
 How far the unknown transcends the what we know.'' 
 
 This is, however, singularly like the translation, by 
 Leigh Hunt, of Filicaja's sonnet on Providence, quoted 
 by Longfellow himself in the notes to the Paradiso. 
 With lessening use, the poet's touch lost little of its 
 delicacy and poise. The few pieces brought together 
 in Ultima Thule indicate that his ruling sense of art 
 was clear as ever ; nor was it finally dulled, like Em- 
 erson's bright intelligence, by a veil of darkness slowly 
 drawn. He^eased from service almost without fore- 
 warning, and because his work was done. 
 
 V. 
 
 Few poets have been more restricted to fixed habits 
 of composition. His mode was perfectly obvious. and 
 unchanged, save by greater refinement, during fifty 
 years. Everyrtiing^ suggested an image, except when 
 his imagery suggested the, thought of which he made 
 it seem a reflection. He tells us that 
 
 " Bent like a laboring oar that toils in the surf of the ocean, 
 Bent, but not broker, by age was the form of the notary public " ; 
 
 and we feel that the image really grew out of a poet's 
 conception of his personage. But again, looking upon 
 " drifting currents of the river," or finding the day 
 " cold and dark and dreary," or listening to the bel- 
 fry-chimes, he hunts about for some emotion or phase 
 of life which these things aptly illustrate. This pro- 
 cess not seldom becomes a vice of style. He con- 
 stantly applied his imagery in a formal way, — the very 
 ut . . . ita of the Latins, the as ... so oi the eigh- 
 
HIS BOOKISH TENDENCY. 
 
 215 
 
 teenth century. But whether his metaphors came of 
 themselves, or with prayer and fasting, they always 
 came, and often were novel and poetic. A more try- 
 ing habit was that inbred, as it seems, with the New 
 England poets, most of whom have preached too much 
 in verse. He tacked a didactic moral, like a corollary 
 of Euclid, on many a lovely poem. No one better 
 knew that " nothin g is p oetry which rniild as ^well 
 have been expressed in prose," but th^ habit formed 
 in youth seemed, beyond Jiis control. Still, it was 
 through this habit that Jie _b£came the most popular of 
 University poets, and as amoralist no one could make 
 commonplace more attractive. , Lastly, the_booki§li 
 flavor of his work is at once its strength and weakness : 
 the former, because the very life of his genius depended 
 on it ; the latter, because poetry that is over-literary 
 is so much the less creative^ and is otherwise open 
 to the objections brought against literary art. Brown- 
 ing's fondness for black-letter is redeemed by dramatic 
 vigor. In reading Longfellow,_we see Jhatlhe world 
 of books was to him the real world. From first to last, 
 if he had been banished from his library, his imagina- 
 tion would have been blind and deaf and silent. It 
 is true that he fed upon the choicest yield of litera- 
 ture ; his gathered honey was of the thyme and clover, 
 not the rude buckwheat. Take, for instance, the 
 " Morituri Salutamus," read before his surviving class- 
 mates on the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation. 
 Was there ever anything more beautiful, in view of the 
 occasion ? Is not the title itself a stroke of genius ? 
 But the title also defines the method of the poem : 
 there are more than twenty learned references in this 
 piece of less than three hundred lines, including one 
 entire tale from the " Gesta Romanorum." He had, 
 we see, this way of working, and for once it resulted 
 TO a poem that is the model of its kind. 
 
 'ing. 
 
 Excessive 
 
 literary 
 
 flavor. 
 
 " Mori- 
 turi Sahtf 
 tamiis^ 
 1875- 
 
2l6 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 A poet of 
 *he study 
 atidalcavt, 
 
 As for Nature, he usually saw it as polarized by re- 
 flection from the mirror Art. Whether in or out of 
 his study, he ha d no t JEmerson's interpretative eye, and 
 his report of. landscape and the country life was less 
 genuine than Lowell's or Whittier's, not to mention 
 the younger poets. He rarely ventured beyond the 
 simple outlook from his~mansTon door. The effect of 
 the rain, the mist, the night-fall, upon his owa spirit, 
 is what he gives us, in the manner of some landscape 
 of the French subjective school. A starry event, the 
 occultation of Orion, at once becomes a glorious im- 
 age of the triumph of Love over Force. In " Evan- 
 geline '' there are refined pictures of scenery that was 
 familiar to him, with just as pleasing descriptions of 
 that which he knew only through his books. He 
 painted the landscape of half Europe in the same 
 way, always a cosmopolitan, never the genius of the 
 place. The flower-de-luce, with its heraldic associa- 
 tions, is the emblem after which he names a volume. 
 But with respect to still life and common life, the true 
 genre touch of " The Old Clock " and " The Village 
 Blacksmith" grows firmer in "Miles Standish," where 
 he draws so well the Plymouth interiors, the Puritan 
 maiden at her wheel, the elders, and men-at-arms. 
 And look ! how he describes what of all is nearest 
 his heart, an olden volume : — 
 
 " Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ains- 
 worth, 
 
 Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together, 
 
 Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the walls of a church- 
 yard, 
 
 Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses. 
 
 Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan 
 anthem." 
 
 I more than half recant the statement that Long. 
 
OUR- POET OF THE SEA. 
 
 217 
 
 fellow was not a poet of Nature, bethinking myself 
 how justly others have maintained that he was by em- 
 inence our poet of the Sea. He clung to the coast : 
 looking inland, he cared most for the tide-meadows of 
 his neighborhood ; looking oceanward, his fancy throve 
 upon the omens, the mysteries, the perpetual fascina- 
 tions of " sea from shore." He loved his mighty rock- 
 girt bay, the lights and beacons, the mist and fog-bells, 
 th e sle et^ and, surge, of winter, the__CQastwise_ vessels ; 
 and its memories were the drift-wood with which he 
 kindled " thoughts that burned and glowed within." 
 His imagination goes out to " the ocean old," the 
 " gray old sea " of storms and calms ; to its winged 
 frequenters, the ancient galleons, the fleets of conquest 
 and embassy and traffic. The names of sunny isles 
 and far-off lands were music to him. If by chance 
 our fireside magician drowned his books deeper than 
 did ever plummet sound, and sang from a poet's heart 
 alone, it was when he returned again and again to 
 capture and repeat for us the haunting " secret of the 
 sea." 
 
 Reviewing our survey of his work, I observe that 
 each of his best known efforts has led to the mention 
 of prose or verse by some other hand which it re- 
 sembles. In view of the possible inference, we new 
 may ask. Was Longfellow, then, with his great reputa- 
 tion and indisputable hold upon our aiiections, not an 
 original poet ? It must be acknowledged, at the outset, 
 that few_gpets__of_his__standing have profited more 
 openly by examples, thatsuitedlheir taste and purpose. 
 The evidence of this is seen not in merely three or 
 four, but in a great number of his productions, — in 
 his briefest lyrics, in his elaborate narrative poems. 
 Lik e greater b -axds-beforeJiim. JbLe-wa.s .a good borrower. 
 Dependence on his equipment led to unconscious as- 
 
 Yet one 
 who 
 
 caught the 
 secret of 
 the Sea. 
 
 Question 
 of his 
 origi- 
 nality. 
 
 A persist- 
 ent bor- 
 rower^ but 
 
2l8 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 With a 
 distin':tive 
 
 similation of its treasures. But originality is of more 
 than one kind. As we say of some people that they 
 have a genius for friendship, so his sympathy with the 
 beautiful, wherever he found it, was unique and tan- 
 tamount to a special inspiration. The proof of his 
 originality, however, even where he was least inventive, 
 hardly requires this paradox : it did not consist in 
 word or motive, but in the distinctive tone of the 
 singer, the sentiment of voice which made his per- 
 formances in a sense new songs ; in an air, a suffused 
 quality, which rendered every phrase unmistakable. If 
 he borrowed freely, he was freely drawn upon by others 
 in their turn. Scores of followers have caught a man- 
 ner that shows to poor advantage when transferred ; 
 but his position for years, at the head of even a senti- 
 mental school, indicated that Longfellow was not with- 
 out a genius of his own. 
 
 Apart from certain exceptions already noted, his 
 bent was cosmopolitan. He had the Anglo-Saxon 
 longing of the pine for the palm, a love for the softer 
 winds and skies, the pliant languages, of Italy and 
 Spain. Besides the example of his works, we have his 
 written theory of what our literature should be. His 
 Mr. Churchill, in "Kavanagh," declares that in litera- 
 ture " Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, 
 
 All that is best in the great 
 
 His cosmo- 
 tsmt 
 
 And ideal 
 vf a na- 
 tional lit- 
 trature. 
 See pp. s- 
 lo, 96, 97. 
 
 but universality is better, 
 poets of all countries is .not what is national in them, 
 but what is universal. Their roots are in their native 
 soil ; but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air 
 that speaks the same language unto all men. ... I 
 prefer what is natural. Mere nationality is often ridicu- 
 lous." And again, " Our literature is not an imitation, 
 but a continuation of the English." He insists upon 
 originality, but " without spasms and convulsions." 
 ... "A national literature is not the growth of a day 
 
VIEWS ON NATIONALITY. 
 
 219 
 
 Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to 
 it. . . . As for having it so savage and wild as you 
 want it, . . . all literature, as well as all art, is the 
 result of culture and intellectual refinement. ... As 
 the blood of all nations is mingling with our own, so 
 will their thoughts and feelings finally mingle in our 
 literature. We shall draw from the Germans tender- 
 ness, from the Spanish passion, from the French vi- 
 vacity, to mingle more and more with our English 
 solid sense. And this will give us universality, so 
 much to be desired." With regard to all this, it may 
 be said that Longfellow's service, important as it was 
 in his time, is not that required of his successors. 
 The greatest poets have been those who conveyed the 
 spirit of their respective nationalities. That poetry 
 is truest which is universal in its passion and thought, 
 but national in motive and in all properties of the 
 craft. The final outcome of American ideality will 
 depend on conditions which our best thinkers are in- 
 vestigating, and which give rise to conflicting theories. 
 Herbert Spencer's recent utterance is somewhat in ac- 
 cordance with Longfellow's views : " Because of its 
 size, and the heterogeneity of its components, the Amer- 
 ican nation will be a long time in evolving its ultimate 
 form, but its ultimate form will be high." And again : 
 " From biological truths it is to be inferred that the 
 eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan 
 race forming the population will produce a finer type 
 of man than has hitherto existed." This agreeable 
 prediction may seem too optimistic ; but the future 
 type of poetry certainly will represent the future type 
 of man. Without debating the question whether we 
 now are forming loam for a distinct growth, or whether 
 our literature is to be a " continuation " merely, we 
 may be sure that both here and in foreign lands new 
 
 " Herbert 
 
 Spencer on 
 
 tht A tner- 
 
 icans.^^ 
 
 New 
 
 York, 
 
 1882. 
 
220 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 hongfel- 
 low a pio- 
 lieer of 
 taste^ 
 
 In what 
 sense a. 
 ''^ poet of 
 the middle 
 classes. ^^ 
 
 Tettnyson, 
 
 types of genius will appear, we know not how or why, 
 and add new species to the world's flora symbolica of 
 art and song. Longfellow, if not a prophet, was a 
 pioneer, — -by choice an apostle of the best traditional 
 culture. His verse is not of a kind to make its ad- 
 mirers indifferent to any other, — an effect, whether 
 for good or ill, sometimes produced by Browning's, 
 Emerson's, and Whitman's, — but that which, however 
 elementary, promotes a taste for higher ideals. It is 
 due to such as he that we have passed the age of 
 nursing, and are now less satisfied with what is not 
 primarily our own. That the best equipped section 
 of the country should produce him was in the order 
 of events : other things being equal, that region is 
 most American which has been so the longest, and 
 the frontier steadily grows to resemble it. 
 
 In England, Longfellow has been styled the poet 
 of the middle classes. Those classes include, how- 
 ever, the majority of intelligent readers, and Tenny- 
 son had an equal share of their favor. The English 
 middle classes furnish an analogue to the one great 
 class of American readers, among whom our poet's 
 success was so evident. This was because he used 
 his culture not to veil the word, but to make it clear. 
 He drew upon it for the people in a manner which 
 they could relish and comprehend. Would not any 
 poet whose work might lack the subtlety that com- 
 mends itself to professional readers be relegated by 
 University critics to the middle-class wards ? Caste 
 and literary priesthood have something to do with this. 
 Were it not for " Lucretius " and " In Memoriam," 
 the author of " The May Queen " and " Locksley Hall " 
 and " Enoch Arden " would be in the same category ; 
 as it is, he scarcely escapes it in the judgment of both 
 the psychologic and neo-Romantic schools. Yet the 
 
UNIMPASSIONED SONG. 
 
 221 
 
 poetry of analytics has not outlasted, in the past, that 
 which came without gloss or obscurity, and whose 
 melody and meaning appealed to one and all. That 
 a poet's verse should require a commentary in its own 
 day is not, all things considered, the best omen for 
 its hold upon the future. But the point taken with 
 respect to Longfellow is not unjust. So far as com- 
 fort, virtue, domestic tenderness, and freedom from 
 extremes of passion and incident are characteristics 
 of the middle classes, he has been their minstrel. 
 And it is true that a cold, or even temperate quality 
 is deadening to the higher forms of art. The crea- 
 tive soul abhors ennui ; it glows in dramatic self-aban- 
 donment. Poets " of passion and of pain " concen- 
 trate their lives in some burning focus whose dazzling 
 heat devours them ; they suffer, but mount on their own 
 flame. Without passion and its expiations, without 
 the mad waste of life, and even crime and terror, where 
 are our noble tragedies, our high dramatic themes? 
 The compensation of man's anguish is that it lifts him 
 beyond the ordinary. Superlative joy and woe alike 
 were foreign to the verse of Longfellow. It came nei- 
 ther from the heights nor out of the depths, but along 
 the even tenor of a fortunate life. I do not mean 
 that he was exempt from mortal ills ; he had his dark 
 experiences, but at the mature age that has learned 
 " what life and death is," and of them he gave little 
 sign. If sorrow and rapture are from within, rather 
 than from without, it may be that our benignant poet, 
 alike through circumstance and temperament, was 
 spared the full extremity of discipline signified in the 
 translation from Goethe : — 
 
 " Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, 
 
 Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours 
 Weeping upon his bed has sate, 
 He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers." 
 
 Poets and 
 iheir scho- 
 liasts. 
 
 Lott^el- 
 IffuPs etkici, 
 and do- 
 tnesticity. 
 
 Wanting 
 in ecstasv 
 and dra- 
 matic in- 
 sight. 
 
222 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOIV. 
 
 Foriuite^s 
 favorite. 
 
 A symptb- 
 tketic 
 voice, nfi' 
 perturbed 
 bv human 
 passion 
 and con- 
 flict. 
 
 Not his the agony and bloody sweat. We may con- 
 jecture that, aside from one or two fierce episodes, he 
 was less tried in the furnace than poets are wont to 
 be. From the first he had what he desired, — con- 
 genial work and associations, advancement, the love 
 of women and friends, appreciative criticism, the pure 
 wheat and sweet waters of life in plenitude. He had 
 lovely things about hira, and gratified his artist na- 
 ture to the full, while so many makers of the beautiful 
 are condemned to Vulcan's cavern of toil and smoke. 
 He had the best, as by right ; and in truth the world, 
 if it but knew it, can afford to keep a poet or an artist 
 in some luxury, like a flower for its perfume, a hound 
 for beauty, a bird for song. If Longfellow's regard 
 fell upon ugliness and misery, it certainly did not lin- 
 ger there. " The cry of the human " did not haunt 
 his ear. When he avails himself of a piteous situa- 
 tion, he does so as tranquilly as the nuns who broi- 
 der on tapestry the torments of the doomed in hell. 
 He wrote few love poems, none full of longing, or 
 " wild with all regret " ; but this might come from the 
 absolute content of his soul, — he had gained the 
 woman whom he idolized, and songs of passion are 
 the cry of unfulfilled desire. His song flows on an 
 equal course, from sunny fountain-head to darkling 
 sea ; and even upon that sea he finds repose, for it;-' 
 billows rock to sleep, and no cradle is more peace- 
 ful than the grave. Thus fair, gentle, fortunate, — 
 could such a poet answer to the deepest needs of 
 men 'i Allowing for the factor of imagination, we still 
 see that Longfellow shrank from efforts that would 
 react too keenly upon his sensibilities. He touched 
 the average heart by the sympathetic quality of a voice 
 adjusted to the natural scale. People above or apart 
 from the average — sufferers, aspirants, questioners — 
 
A LOVABLE MAN AND ARTIST. 
 
 223 
 
 are irked by his acceptance of life as it is and his 
 enjoyable relations to it. There is something exas- 
 perating to serious minds in his placid waiver of things 
 grievous or distasteful. They ask what cause he has 
 advanced, how has he enlarged the province of thought, 
 what conflict has he sung? Where are his rapture, 
 his longing, his infinitudes .'' They see his fellow-poet, 
 less prosperous and accomplished, who defied obloquy, 
 and rose to passion in denouncing wrong, — a man 
 of peace, yet valiant as Great-Heart in behalf of free- 
 dom and the rights of man. They recall another, who 
 sought out the inmost laws of spiritual life. But why 
 expect a poet to be other than he is ? Recognize the 
 instinct that defined his range, and value the range 
 at its worth. Longfellow spoke according to his voice 
 and vision. The attempt to do otherwise ends all. 
 A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus 
 become his best encourager. 
 
 So far as good fortune may be supplemented by 
 human wisdom, Longfellow was a man after the 
 preacher's own heart. His was one of those happy 
 natures which, as Thackeray says, are softened by 
 prosperity and kindness. He was saved the torment 
 that the envious feel : — 
 
 "He did not find his sleep less sweet 
 For music in some neighboring street ; 
 Nor rustling hear in every breeze 
 The laurels of Miltiades." 
 
 We have seen his tact in the choice and use of 
 things pertaining to his work, his carefully restrained 
 decoration, his knowledge of limitations, which pre- 
 vented him, except in the dramatic experiments, from 
 groping for impracticable means and results. The 
 forms which he introduced or revived were as suc- 
 cessful as Tennyson's] in fact, his product represents 
 
 ThefoePs 
 sweet and 
 wholesome 
 
 Artistic 
 tact. 
 
2 24 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 SHpple- 
 mettiitlff 
 inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 Final 
 estimate. 
 
 H. W. L. 
 
 died at 
 Cam- 
 bridge^ 
 Mass,^ 
 Mar. 24, 
 1882. 
 
 the full advance of American taste and feeling, dur- 
 ing the period covered by it, though not our most sig- 
 nificant thought. He was a lyrical artist, whose taste 
 outranked his inspiration ; and assuredly, if he had 
 been a Minister of the Fine Arts, he never would 
 have abolished an ficole at the dictation of the " im- 
 pressionists," nor have adopted as a motto the phrase 
 " Beware of the Beautiful." We have noted his in- 
 dustry and the self-control with which he devoted his 
 life to poetry alone. Yet the report of his library talk 
 shows that his brain was alert upon many topics ; that 
 in private, at least, he did not reserve his talents for 
 his publisher, — an economy which a French critic 
 declares to be " a bad sign, and the proof that one 
 makes a trade of literature, and that one does not 
 really have the impressions he assumes to have in his 
 books." His verse is peculiarly open to the test of 
 Milton's requirement, that poetry should be simple, 
 sensuous, passionate. Simple, even elementary, it 
 manifestly is, despite the learning which he put to 
 use. It is sensuous in much that charms the ear and 
 eye, and in little else ; for the extreme of sensuousness 
 is deeply felt, and feeling results in passion, and pas- 
 sionate the verse of Longfellow was not, nor ever 
 could be. His song was a household service, the 
 ritual of our feastings and mournings ; and often it 
 rehearsed for us the tales of many lands, or, best of 
 all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired 
 minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and sing- 
 ing in the twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. 
 There he lingers late ; the curfew bell has tolled and 
 the darkness closes round, till at last that tender voice 
 is silent, and he softly moves unto his rest. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 UPON the roll of American authors a few names 
 are written apart from the many. With each of 
 these is associated some accident of condition, some 
 memory of original or eccentric genius, through which 
 it arrests attention and claims our special wonder. 
 The light of none among these few has been more fer- 
 vid and recurrent than that of Edgar Allan Poe. But, 
 as I in turn pronounce his name, and in my turn 
 would estimate the man and his writings, I am at 
 once confronted by the question. Is this poet, as now 
 remembered, as now portrayed to us, the real Poe 
 who lived and sang and suffered, and who died but 
 little more than a quarter-century ago ? 
 
 The great heart of the world throbs warmly over 
 the struggles of our kind ; the imagination of the 
 world dwells upon and enlarges the glory and the 
 shame of human action in the past. Year after year, 
 the heart-beats are more warm, the conception grows 
 more distinct with light and shade. The person that 
 was is made the framework of an image to which the 
 tender, the romantic, the thoughtful, the simple, and 
 the wise add each his own folly or wisdom, his own 
 joy and sorrow and uttermost yearning. Thus, not 
 only true heroes and poets, but many who have been 
 conspicuous through force of circumstances, become 
 
 DistinC' 
 tive repu- 
 tations. 
 
 The witch- 
 ery of 
 Time. 
 
226 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 A twofold 
 idtal. 
 
 Postulates. 
 
 idealized as time goes by. The critic's first labor 
 often is the task of distinguishing between men, as 
 history and their works display them, and the ideals 
 which one and another have conspired to urge upon 
 his acceptance. 
 
 The difficulty is increased when, as in the case of 
 Poe, a twofold ideal exists, of whose opposite sides 
 many that have written upon him seem to observe 
 but one. In the opinion of some people, even now, 
 his life was not only pitiful, but odious, and his writ- 
 ings are false and insincere. They speak of his mor- 
 bid genius, his unjust criticisms, his weakness and in- 
 gratitude, and scarcely can endure the mention of his 
 name. Others recount his history as that of a sensi- 
 tive, gifted being, most sorely beset and environed, 
 who was tried beyond his strength and prematurely 
 yielded, but still uttered not a few undying strains. 
 As a new generation has arisen, and those of his own 
 who knew him are passing away, the latter class of 
 his reviewers seems to outnumber the former. A cho- 
 rus of indiscriminate praise has grown so loud as 
 really to be an ill omen for his fame ; yet, on the 
 whole, the wisest modern estimate of his character and 
 writings has not lessened the interest long ago felt 
 in them at home and abroad. 
 
 It seems to me that two things at least are certain. 
 First, and although his life has been the subject' of 
 the research which is awarded only to strange and 
 suggestive careers, he was, after all, a man of like 
 passions with ourselves, — one who, if weaker in his 
 weaknesses than many, and stronger in his strength, 
 may not have been so bad, nor yet so good, as one 
 and another have painted him. Thousands have gone 
 as far toward both extremes, and the world never has 
 heard of them. Only the gift of genius has made the 
 
HIS GENIUS AND BEARING. 
 
 227 
 
 temperament of Poe a common theme. And thus, I 
 also think, we are sure, in once more calling up his 
 shade, that we invoke the manes of a poet. Of his 
 right to this much-abused title there can be little dis- 
 pute, nor of the claim that, whatever he lacked in 
 compass, he was unique among his fellows, — so dif- 
 ferent from any other writer that America has pro- 
 duced as really to stand alone. He must have had 
 genius to furnish even the basis for an ideal which 
 excites this persistent interest. Yes, we are on firm 
 ground with relation to his genuineness as a poet. 
 But his narrowness of range, and the slender body 
 of his poetic remains, of themselves should make 
 writers hesitate to pronounce him our greatest one 
 His verse is as conspicuous for what it shows he 
 could not do as for that which he did. He is another 
 of those poets, outside the New England school, of 
 whom each has made his mark in a separate way, — 
 among them all, none more decisively than Poe. So 
 far as the judgment of a few rare spirits in foreign 
 lands may be counted the verdict of " posterity," an 
 estimate o,. him s not to be lightly and flippantly 
 made. Nor is it long since a group of his contem- 
 poraries and successors, in his own country, spoke of 
 him as a poet whose works are a lasting monument, 
 and of his " imperishable '' fame. 
 
 After every allowance, it seems difficult for one not 
 utterly jaded to read his poetry and tales without 
 yielding to their original and haunting spell. Even 
 as we drive out of mind the popular conceptions of 
 his nature, and look only at the portraits of him in 
 the flesh, we needs must pause and contemplate, 
 thoughtfully and with renewed feeling, one of the 
 marked ideal faces that seem — like those of Byron, 
 De Musset, Heine — to fulfil all the traditions of 
 
 Unique 
 quality of 
 Foe's gen^ 
 ius. 
 
 PersoTtal 
 aspect. 
 
228 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Hatpin's 
 likeness of 
 Poe^ in tke 
 complete 
 A tnerican 
 edition. 
 
 Later 
 portraits. 
 
 Eepro- 
 duced 
 in the 
 
 genius, of picturesqueness, of literary and romantic 
 effect. 
 
 Halpin's engraving of Poe, in which the draughts- 
 man was no servile copyist, but strove to express the 
 sitter at his best, makes it possible to recall the poet 
 delineated by those who knew and admired him in 
 his nobler seasons. We see one they describe as 
 slight but erect of figure, athletic and well moulded, 
 of middle height, but so proportioned as to seem 
 every inch a man ; his head finely modelled, with a 
 forehead and temples large and not unlike those of 
 Bonaparte ; his hands fair as a woman's, — in all, a 
 graceful, well-dressed gentleman, — one, even in the 
 garb of poverty, " with gentleman written all uver 
 him." We see the handsome, intellectual face, the 
 dark and clustering hair, the clear and sad gray-violet 
 eyes, — large, lustrous, glowing with expression, — the 
 mouth, whose smile at least was sweet and winning. 
 We imagine the soft, musical voice (a delicate thing 
 in man or woman), the easy, quiet movement, the 
 bearing that no failure could humble. And this man 
 had not only the gift of beauty, but the passionate 
 love of beauty, — either of which may be as great a 
 blessing or peril as can befall a human being stretched 
 upon the rack of this tough world. 
 
 But look at some daguerreotype taken shortly be- 
 fore his death, and it is like an inauspicious mirror, 
 that shows all too clearly the ravage made by a vexed 
 spirit within, and loses the qualities which only a liv- 
 ing artist could feel and capture. Here is the dra- 
 matic, defiant bearing, but with it the bitterness of 
 scorn. The disdain of an habitual sneer has found 
 an abode on the mouth, yet scarcely can hide the 
 tremor of irresolution. In Bendann's likeness, indu- 
 bitably faithful, we find those hardened lines of the 
 
A TWOFOLD NATURE. 
 
 229 
 
 chin and neck that are often visible in men who have 
 gambled heavily, which Poe did not in his mature 
 years, or who have lived loosely and slept ill. The 
 face tells of battling, of conquering external enemies, 
 of many a defeat when the man was at war with his 
 meaner self. 
 
 Among the pen-portraits of Poe, at his best and 
 his worst, none seem more striking in their juxtaposi- 
 tion, none less affected by friendship or hatred, than 
 those left to us by C. F. Briggs, the poet's early asso- 
 ciate. These were made biit a short time before the 
 writer's death, — after the lapse of years had softened 
 the prejudices of a man prejudiced indeed, yet of a 
 kindly heart, and had rendered the critical habit of 
 the journalist almost a rule of action. 
 
 If these external aspects were the signs of charac- 
 ter within, we can understand why those who saw 
 them should have believed of Poe — and in a differ- 
 ent sense than of Hawthorne — that 
 
 "Two natures in him strove 
 Like day with night, his sunshine and his gloom.'' 
 
 The recorded facts of his life serve to enhance this 
 feeling. My object here is not biography, yet let us 
 note the brief annals of a wayward, time-tossed critic, 
 romancer, poet. Their purport and outline, seen 
 through a cloud of obscurities, and the veil thrown 
 over them by his own love of mystery and retreat, — 
 made out from the various narratives of those who 
 have contended in zeal to discover the minute affairs 
 • of this uncommon man, — the substance of them all, 
 I say, may readily enough be told. 
 
 " Memo- 
 rial Vol- 
 ume.,''^ 
 Bali., 1S77. 
 
 Reprinted 
 in the New 
 York " In- 
 depe7i- 
 denl," 
 June 34, 
 
230 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Edgar A l- 
 lan Foe : 
 born in 
 Boston^ 
 January 
 19, 1809. 
 
 ffts child- 
 hood. 
 
 II. 
 
 The law of chance, that has so much to do with 
 the composition of a man, that makes no two alike, 
 yet adjusts the most of us to a common average, 
 brings about exceptional unions like the one from 
 which the poet sprang. A well-born, dissolute Mary- 
 land boy, with a passion for the stage, marries an 
 actress and adopts her profession, — taking up a life 
 that was strolling, precarious, half - despised in the 
 pioneer times. Three children were the fruit of this 
 love-match. The second, Edgar, was born in Boston, 
 January 19, 1809. From his father he inherited Ital- 
 ian, French, and Irish blood; the Celtic pride of dis- 
 position and certain weaknesses that were his bane. 
 His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, an actress of some tal- 
 ent, was as purely English as her name. Two years 
 after his birth, the hapless parents, wearied and des- 
 titute, died at Richmond, both in the same week. 
 The orphans "found kind friends,'' and were adopted 
 — the oldest, William, by his grandfather Poe, of Bal- 
 timore ; Edgar and Rosalie by citizens of Richmond. 
 Edgar gained a protector in Mr. Allan, an English- 
 born and wealthy merchant, who was married, but 
 without a child. The boy's beauty and precocity won 
 the heart of this gentleman, who gave him his name, 
 and lavished upon him, in true Southern style, all 
 that perilous endearment which befits the son and 
 heir of a generous house. Servants, horses, dogs, the 
 finest clothes, a purse well filled, all these were at his 
 disposal from the outset. Great pains were taken 
 with his education, the one element of moral disci- 
 pline seemingly excepted. When eight years old he 
 went with Mr. Allan to England, and was at the 
 school in Stoke-Newington, to which it is thought his 
 
FIRST BOOK OF POEMS. 
 
 231 
 
 memory went back in after years, when he wrote the 
 tale of "WiUiam Wilson." At ten we find him at 
 school in Richmond, proficient in classical studies 
 but shirking his mathematics, already writing verse, — 
 instinctively 
 
 "Seeking with hand and heart 
 The teacher whom he learned to love 
 
 Before he knew 't was Art." 
 
 His grace and strength, his free, romantic, and ardent 
 bearing, made him friends among old and young, and 
 at this time he certainly was capable of the most 
 passionate loyalty to those he loved. Traditions of 
 all this — of his dreamy, fitful temperament, of his 
 early sorrows and his midnight mournings over the 
 grave of an affectionate woman who had been his 
 paragon — are carefully preserved. He was a school- 
 boy, here and there, until 1826, when he passed a 
 winter at the University of Virginia. He ended his 
 brief course in the school of ancient and modern lan- 
 guages with a successful examination, but after much 
 dissipation and gambling which deeply involved him 
 in debt. His thoughtlessness and practical ingrati- 
 tude justly incensed an unwise but hitherto devoted 
 guardian. A rupture followed between the two, Mr. 
 Allan finally refusing to countenance Edgar's extrav- 
 agances ; and the young man betook himself to Bos- 
 ton, where, after a few months, he succeeded in find- 
 ing a printer for his first little book, a revised collec- 
 tion of juvenile poems. But he was soon reduced to 
 straits, and driven to enlistment, under a partly ficti- 
 tious name, as a soldier; in which capacity, first a 
 private and then by promotion a sergeant-major, he 
 served his country for almost two years. In ■'829 he 
 was touched by news of the death of Mrs. Allan, 
 who had always given him a sympathetic mother's 
 
 Training. 
 
 College 
 life. 
 
 *' Tamer- 
 lane and 
 Other 
 PoemSf^ 
 Boston, 
 1827. Re- 
 printed, 
 with 
 changes 
 and omis- 
 sions, 
 Baltimore, 
 
 Enlistment 
 in the 
 army- 
 
232 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 " Edgar 
 Allan 
 Poe." By 
 O. E. 
 Wood- 
 ierry : 
 Bostoft, 
 1885. 
 
 West 
 Paint 
 
 Subscrip- 
 tion edition 
 of his 
 foems : 
 Nenu 
 York, 
 183 1. 
 
 love. He obtained a furlough, and effected a recon- 
 ciliation with the widower in his hour of loneliness 
 and sorrow. Poe's later and trustworthy biographer 
 has spared no pains to give the true details of the 
 youth's enlistment, service, and final discharge through 
 the influence of his early protector. 
 
 About this time he visited his aunt, Mrs. Maria 
 Clemm, of Baltimore. Her daughter Virginia was 
 then six years old, and Poe interested himself in the 
 sweet and gentle child, who loved him from the first, 
 and made his will her law through girlhood and their 
 subsequent wedded life. 
 
 Poe now was asked to choose a profession ; he 
 selected that of arms, and his benefactor secured his 
 admission to West Point. Here we find him in 1830, 
 and find little good of him. Though now a man 
 grown, he was unable to endure discipline. After a 
 first success, he tired of the place and brought about 
 his own expulsion and disgrace, to his patron's deep, 
 and this time lasting, resentment. But here he also 
 arranged for the issue, by subscription, of another 
 edition of his poems, which was delivered to his class- 
 mates after his departure from the academy. 
 
 A new personage now comes upon the scene. Mr. 
 Allan, naturally desiring affection from some quarter, 
 married again, and after a time heirs were born to the 
 estate which Poe, had he been less reckless, might 
 have inherited. The poet, returning in disgrace to 
 Richmond, found no intercessor in the home of his 
 youth. This change, and his manner of life thus far, 
 render it needless to look for other causes of the 
 final rupture between himself and his guardian. It 
 was the just avenge of fate for his persistent folly, and 
 a defeat was inevitable in his contest (if there was a 
 contest) with a lady who, by every law of right, was 
 
LIFE AND LITERARY CAREER. 
 
 233 
 
 stronger than he. Poe went out into the world with 
 full permission to have the one treasure he had 
 seemed to value — his own way. Like a multitude of 
 American youths, often the sons or grandsons of suc- 
 cessful men, he found himself of age, without the 
 means proportionate to the education, habits, and 
 needs of a gentleman, and literally, in the place of an 
 unfailing income, without a cent. Better off than 
 many who have erred less, he had one strong ally — 
 his pen. With this he was henceforth to earn his 
 own bed and board, and lead the arduous life of a 
 working man of letters. 
 
 For the struggle now begun his resources of tact, 
 good sense, self-poise, were as deficient as his intel- 
 lectual equipment was great. Soon after the loss of a 
 home-right, which he forfeited more recklessly than 
 Esau, his professional career may be said to have be- 
 gun. It extended, with brief but frequent intermis- 
 sions, from 1832 to 1849, the year of his untimely 
 death. Its first noteworthy event was the celebrated 
 introduction to Kennedy, Latrobe, and Miller, through 
 his success in winning a literary prize with " A MS. 
 Found in a Bottle." This brought him friends, work, 
 and local reputation, — in all, a fair and well-earned 
 start. 
 
 Seventeen years, thenceforward, of working life, in 
 which no other American writer was more active and 
 prominent. I have considered elsewhere the influence 
 of journalism upon authorship. It enabled Poe to 
 live. On the other hand, while he rarely made his 
 lighter work commonplace, it limited the importance 
 of his highest efforts, gave a paragraphic air to his 
 criticisms, and left some of his most suggestive writ- 
 ings mere fragments of what they should be. He 
 discovered the pretentious mediocrity of a host of 
 
 His one 
 ally. 
 
 A good 
 start. 
 
 Sumtttafy 
 
 of his 
 career. 
 
 See Chap. 
 A7., and 
 cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 81, 83. 
 
234 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Head and 
 heart. 
 
 " The Imp 
 a/ th£ Per- 
 verse.'^'' 
 
 Precari- 
 ous life of 
 A nterican 
 authors at 
 that time. 
 
 scribblers, and when unbiased by personal feeling, 
 and especially when doing imaginative work, was one 
 of the few clear-headed writers of his day. He knew 
 what he desired to produce, and how to produce it. 
 We say of a man that his head may be wrong, but his 
 heart is all right. There were times enough when the 
 reverse of this was true of Poe. I do not say there 
 were not other times when his heart was as sound as 
 his perceptions. What, after all, is the record of his 
 years of work, and what is the significance of that 
 record ? We must consider the man in his environ- 
 ment, and the transient, uncertain character of the 
 markets to which he brought his wares. His labors, 
 then, were continually impeded, broken, changed ; first, 
 by the most trying and uncontrollable nature that ever 
 poet possessed, that ever possessed a poet; by an 
 unquiet, capricious temper, a childish enslavement to 
 his own " Imp of the Perverse,'' a scornful pettiness 
 that made him "hard to help," that drove him to 
 quarrel with his patient, generous friends, and to wage 
 ignoble conflict with enemies of his own making ; by 
 physical and moral lapses, partly the result of inher- 
 ited taint, in which he resorted, more or less fre- 
 quently, and usually at critical moments, — seasons 
 when he needed all his resources, all his courage and 
 manhood, — to stimulants which he knew would mad- 
 den and besot him more than other men. None the 
 less his genius was apparent, his power felt, his labor 
 in demand wherever the means existed to pay for it. 
 But here, again, his life was made precarious and 
 shifting by the speculative, ill-requited nature of lit- 
 erary enterprises at that time. From various causes, 
 therefore, his record — no matter how it is attacked 
 or defended — is one of irregularity, of broken and 
 renewed engagements. From 1832 to 1835 Poe had 
 
THIS WORKING-DAY WORLD.' 
 
 235 
 
 but himself to support, and a careless young fellow 
 always gets on so long as he is young, with one suc- 
 cess and the chance of a future. The next year his 
 private marriage to his sweet cousin Virginia, still 
 almost a child, was reaffirmed in public, and the two 
 set up their home together. The time had come when 
 Poe, with his sense of the fitness of things, could see 
 that Bohemianism, the charm of youth, is a frame 
 that poorly suits the portrait of a mature and able- 
 handed man. So we are not surprised to find him 
 engaged, for honest wages, upon " The Southern Liter- 
 ary Messenger." That his skilful touch and fantastic 
 genius, whether devoted to realistic or psychological 
 invention, were now at full command, is shown by his 
 "Hans Pfaall," and by his first striking contribution 
 to the " Messenger,'' the spectral and characteristic 
 tale of " Berenice." In short, he did uncommon work, 
 for that time, upon the famous Southern magazine, 
 both as tale- writer and as critic, and increased its 
 reputation and income. Yet he felt, with all the mor- 
 bid sensitiveness of one spoilt by luxury and arro- 
 gance in youth, the difference between his present 
 work- a- day life and the independence, the social 
 standing, which if again at his command would ena- 
 ble him to indulge his finer tastes and finish at ease 
 the work best suited to his powers. From this time 
 he was subject to moods of brooding and despair, of 
 crying out upon fate, that were his pest and his ulti- 
 mate destruction. And so we again are not surprised 
 to find this good beginning no true omen of the fif- 
 teen years to come ; and that these years are counted 
 by flittings here and there between points that offered 
 employment; by new engagements taken up before 
 he was off with the old ; by legends of his bearing 
 and entanglements in the social world he entered ; by 
 
 with Vir- 
 ^nia 
 Clemmt 
 1835- 
 
 yournaU 
 ism. 
 
 Mental 
 suffering. 
 
 Wander- 
 ings. 
 
236 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Mis/or 
 tunes. 
 
 Deaihj in 
 Baltimore^ 
 October 7, 
 1849. 
 
 alternate successes and disgraces, in Richmond, Phil- 
 adelphia, Boston, New York ; by friendships and fall- 
 ings out with many of the editors who employed him, 
 — the product, after all, with which we are chiefly 
 concerned being his always distinctive writings for the 
 "Quarterly," "The Gentleman's Magazine," "Gra- 
 ham's," "Godey's," "The Mirror," "The American 
 Review," and various other fosterers and distributers 
 of such literature as the current taste might demand. 
 We begin to understand his spasmodic, versatile indus- 
 try, his balks and breaks, his frequent poverty, de- 
 spondency, self-abandonment and almost to wonder 
 that the sensitive feminine spirit — worshipping beauty 
 and abhorrent of ugliness and pain, combating with 
 pride, with inherited disease of appetite — did not 
 sooner yield, was not utterly overcome almost at the 
 outset of these experiences. So have I wondered at 
 seeing a delicate forest-bird, leagues from the shore, 
 keep itself on the v/ing above relentless waters into 
 which it was sure lo fall at last.^ Poe had his good 
 genius and his bad. Near the close of the struggle 
 he made a brave effort, and never was so earnest and 
 resolved, so much his own master, as just before the 
 end. But a man is no stronger than his weakest part, 
 and with the snapping of that his chance is over. At 
 the moment when the poet, rallying from the desola- 
 tion caused by the loss of his wife, found new hope 
 
 1 Finely paraphrased, since the original appearance of this 
 chapter, by my friend, Mr. Winter : — 
 
 " Far from the blooming field and fragrant wood 
 The shining songster of the summer sky, 
 O'er ocean's black and frightful solitude, 
 
 Driven on broken wing, must sink and die " : 
 
 Poem read at the Dedication of the Actors' IVTottunient 
 to Poe^ May 4, 1885, 
 
FOLLOWING THE MARKET. 
 
 237 
 
 and purpose, and was on his way to marry a woman 
 who possibly might have saved him, the tragedy of 
 his life began again. Its final scene was as swift, 
 irreparable, black with terror, as that of any drama 
 ever written. His death was gloom. Men saw him 
 no more ; but the shadow of a veiled old woman, 
 mourning for him, hovered here and there. After 
 many years a laurelled tomb was placed above his 
 ashes, and there remain to American literature the 
 relics, so unequal in value, of the most isolated and 
 exceptional of all its poets and pioneers. 
 
 Poe's misfortunes were less than those of some who 
 have conquered misfortune. Others have been cast- 
 aways in infancy and friendless in manhood, and have 
 found no protectors such as came at his need. Still 
 others have struggled and suffered, and have declined 
 to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. They have 
 sought consolation in their work, and from their bit- 
 ter experiences have gathered strength and glory. 
 The essential part of an artist's life is that of his in- 
 spired moments. There were occasions when Poe was 
 the master, when his criticism was true, when he com- 
 posed such tales as " Ligeia," " The Fall of the House 
 of Usher," poems like " The Raven," " The Bells," 
 "The City in the Sea." It must be acknowledged, 
 moreover — and professional writers know what this 
 implies — that Poe, in his wanderings, after all, fol- 
 lowed his market. It gradually drifted to the North, 
 until New York afforded the surest recompense to 
 authors not snugly housed in the leafy coverts of New 
 England. Nor did he ever resort to any mercantile 
 employment for a livelihood. As we look around and 
 see how authors accept this or that method of support, 
 there seems to be something chivalrous in the attitude 
 of one who never earned a dollar except by his pen. 
 
 Mrs. 
 
 Maria 
 
 Cletnm. 
 
 The liter- 
 ary mar- 
 ket. 
 Seept 
 25, 38. 
 
 22- 
 
238 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 A genuine 
 man of 
 letters. 
 
 Interest 
 excitedby 
 Poe^s life 
 and works. 
 
 " Tales of 
 
 tlie Gro- 
 tesque and 
 Ara- 
 uesque,''^ 
 1^40. 
 
 From first to last he was simply a poet and man of 
 letters, who rightly might claim to be judged by the 
 literary product of his life. The life itself differed 
 from that of any modern poet of equal genius, and 
 partly because none other has found himself, in a new 
 country, among such elements. Too much has been 
 written about the man, too little of his times. 
 
 His story has had a fascination for those who con- 
 sider the infirmity of genius its natural outward sign. 
 The peculiarity of his actions was their leaning toward 
 what is called the melodramatic ; of his work, that it 
 aimed above the level of its time. What has been 
 written of the former — of little value as compared 
 with the analysis derivable from his literary remains — 
 was for a long time the output of those who, if unable 
 to produce a stanza which he would have acknowl- 
 edged, at least felt within themselves the possibilities 
 of his errant career. Yet, as I observe the marvels of 
 his handicraft, I seem unjust to these enthusiasts. It 
 was the kind which most impresses the imagination of 
 youth, and youth is a period at which the critical de- 
 velopment of many biographers seems to be arrested. 
 And who would not recall the zest with which he read, 
 in school-boy days, and by the stolen candle, a legend 
 so fearful in its beauty and so beautiful in its fear as 
 " The Masque of the Red Death," for example, found 
 in some stray number of a magazine, and making the 
 printed trash that convoyed it seem so vapid and 
 drear ? Not long after, we had the collected series. 
 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. With what ea- 
 gerness we caught them from hand to hand until many 
 of us knew them almost by heart. In the East, at that 
 time, Hawthorne was shyly putting out his " Mosses " 
 and " Twice Told Tales," and it was not an unfruitful 
 period that fostered, among its brood of chattering and 
 
HIS LYRICAL REMAINS. 
 
 239 
 
 aimless sentimentalists, two such spirits at once, each 
 original in his kind. To-day we have a more con- 
 summate, realistic art. But where, now, the creative 
 ardor, the power to touch the stops, if need be, of 
 tragedy and superstition and remorse ! Our taste is 
 more refined, our faculties are under control ; to pro- 
 duce the greatest art they must, at times, compel the 
 artist. " Poetry," said Poe, " has been with me a 
 ■passion, not a purpose," — a remarkable sentence to 
 be found in a boyish preface, and I believe that he 
 wrote the truth. But here, again, he displays an op- 
 posite failing. If poetry had been with him no less a 
 passion, and equally a purpose, we now should have 
 had something more to represent his rhythmical genius 
 than the few brief, occasional lyrics which are all that 
 his thirty years of life as a poet — the life of his early 
 choice — have left to us. 
 
 III. 
 
 In estimating him as a poet, the dates of these lyrics 
 are of minor consequence. They make but a thin 
 volume, smaller than one which might hold the verse 
 of Collins or Gray. Their range is narrower still. It 
 is a curious fact that Poe struck, in youth, the key- 
 notes of a few themes, and that some of his best pieces, 
 as we now have them, are but variations upon their 
 earlier treatment. 
 
 His first collection was made in his eighteenth year, 
 revised in his twentieth, and again reprinted, with 
 changes and omissions, just after he left West Point. 
 The form of the longer poems is copied from Byron 
 and Moore, while the spirit of the whole series vaguely 
 reminds us of Shelley in his obscurer lyrical mood. 
 Poe's originality can be found in them, but they would 
 
 Poetry a 
 
 passion 
 viith khtu 
 
 Lyrical 
 remains. 
 
 Early 
 books of 
 verse .* 
 printed^ 
 respective' 
 ly, in 1R27, 
 1S29, ajid 
 1831. 
 
240 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Germs of 
 
 his later 
 foetns. 
 
 His use of 
 
 poesy. 
 
 Precocity. 
 
 be valueless except for his after career. They have 
 unusual significance as the shapeless germs of much 
 that was to grow into form and beauty. Crude and 
 wandering pieces, entitled " Fairy Land " and " Irene," 
 
 " To ," " A Psean," etc., were the originals of 
 
 " The Sleeper," " A Dream within a Dream," and 
 " Lenore " ; while " The Doomed City " and " The 
 Valley Nis " reappear as " The City in the Sea " 
 and "The Valley of Unrest." Others were less thor- 
 oughly rewritten. Possibly he thus remodelled his 
 juvenile verse to show that, however inchoate, it 
 contained something worth a master's handling. Mr. 
 Stoddard thinks, and not without reason, that he found 
 it an easy way of making salable "copy." The poet 
 himself intimates that circumstances beyond his con- 
 trol restricted his lyrical product. I scarcely remember 
 another instance where a writer has so hoarded his 
 early songs, and am in doubt whether to commend or 
 deprecate their reproduction. It does not betoken 
 affluence, but it was honest in Poe that he would not 
 write in cold blood for the mere sake of composing. 
 This he undoubtedly had the skill to do, and would 
 have done, if his sole object had been creation of the 
 beautiful, or art for art's sake. He used his lyrical gift 
 mostly to express veritable feelings and moods — I 
 might almost say a single feeling or mood — to which 
 he could not otherwise give utterance, resorting to mel- 
 ody when prose was insufficient. Herein he was true 
 to the cardinal, antique conception of poesy, and in 
 keeping it distinct from his main literary work he con- 
 firmed his own avowal that it was to him a passion, 
 and neither a purpose nor a pursuit. 
 
 A few poems, just as they stood in his early vol- 
 umes, are admirable in thought or finish. One is the 
 sonnet, "To Science,'' which is striking, not as a son- 
 
'THE RA VEN AND OTHER POEMS.' 
 
 241 
 
 net, but for its premonition of attitudes whicti poetry 
 and science have now more clearly assumed. Another 
 is the exquisite lyric, " To Helen," which every critic 
 longs to cite. Its confusion of imagery is wholly for- 
 gotten in the delight afforded by melody, lyrical per- 
 fection, sweet and classic grace. I do not understand 
 why he omitted this charming trifle from the juvenile 
 poems which he added to the collection of 1845. Al- 
 though it first appeared in his edition of 183 1, he 
 claimed to have written it when, fourteen, and nothing 
 more fresh and delicate came from his pen in maturer 
 years. 
 
 The instant success of " The Raven " — and this 
 was within a few years of his death — first made him 
 popular as a poet, and resulted in a new collection of 
 his verses. The lyrics which it contained, and a few 
 written afterward, — " Ulalume," "The Bells," "For 
 Annie," etc., — now comprise the whole of his poetry 
 as retained in the standard editions. The most glaring 
 faults of " Al Aaraaf " and " Tamerlane " have been 
 selected by eulogists for special praise. Turning from 
 this practice-work to the poems which made his rep- 
 utation, we come at once to the most widely known 
 of all. 
 
 Poe could not have written " The Raven " in youth. 
 It exhibits a method so positive as almost to compel us 
 to accept, against the denial of his associates, his own 
 account of its building. The maker does keep a firm 
 hand on it throughout, and for once seems to set 
 his purpose above his passion. This appears in the 
 gravely quaint diction, and in the contrast between 
 the reality of every-day manners and the profounder 
 reality of a spiritual shadow upon the human heart. 
 The grimness of fate is suggested by phrases which it 
 requires a masterly hand to subdue to the meaning of 
 16 
 
 "The 
 Raven and 
 Other 
 Poems," 
 1845. 
 
 "The 
 Raven." 
 
242 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Jfothis 
 subtlest 
 poem. 
 
 " The City 
 in tfu 
 Sea." 
 
 the poem. " ' Sir,' said I, ' or madam,' " " this un- 
 gainly fowl,'' and the like, sustain the air of grotesque- 
 ness, and become a foil to the pathos, an approach 
 to the tragical climax, of this unique production. Only 
 genius can deal so closely with the grotesque, and 
 make it add to the solemn beauty of structure an effect 
 like that of the gargoyles seen by moonlight on the 
 fagade of Notre Dame. 
 
 In no other lyric is Poe so self-possessed. No other 
 is so determinate in its repetends and alliterations. 
 Hence I am far from deeming it his most poetical poem. 
 Its artificial qualities are those which catch the fancy 
 of the general reader ; and it is of all his ballads, if not 
 the most imaginative, the most peculiar. His more 
 ethereal productions seem to me those in which there 
 is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity, — in which 
 he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences 
 most musical, most melancholy, come from him una- 
 wares. Literal criticisms of " The Raven " are of small 
 account. If the shadow of the bird could not fall upon 
 the mourner, the shadows of its evil presence could 
 brood upon his soul ; the seraphim whose footfalls 
 tinkle upon the tufted floor may be regarded as sera- 
 phim of the Orient, their anklets hung with celestial 
 bells. At all events, Poe's raven is the very genius of 
 the Night's Plutonian shore, different from other ra- 
 vens, entirely his own, and none other can take its 
 place. It is an emblem of the Irreparable, the guar- 
 dian of pitiless memories, whose burden ever recalls to 
 us the days that are no more. 
 
 As a new creation, then, " The Raven " is entitled 
 to a place in literature, and keeps it. But how much 
 more imaginative is such a poem as " The City in tne 
 Sea " ! As a picture, this reminds us of Turner, and, 
 again, of that sublime madman, John Martin. Here 
 
MYSTIC MELODY. 
 
 243 
 
 is a strange city where Death has raised a throne. 
 Its 
 
 " shrines and palaces and towers 
 
 (Time-eaten towers that tremble not !) 
 
 Resemble nothing that is ours. 
 
 Around, by lifting winds forgot, 
 
 Resignedly beneath the sky 
 
 The melancholy waters lie." 
 
 This mystical town is aglow with light, not from 
 heaven, but from out the lurid sea, — light which 
 streams up the turrets and pinnacles and domes, — 
 
 "Up many and many a marvellous shrine. 
 Whose wreathed friezes intertwine 
 The viol, the violet, and the vine. 
 
 While, from a proud tower in the town. 
 Death looks gigantically down." 
 
 The sea about is hideously serene, but at last there 
 is a movement ; the towers seem slightly to sink ; the 
 dull tide has a redder glow, — 
 
 " And when, amid no earthly moans, 
 
 Down, down that town shall settle hence, 
 Hell, rising from ^ thousand thrones, 
 Shall do it reverence.'' 
 
 This poem, notwithstanding its sombreness and ter- 
 ror, depends upon effects which made Poe the fore- 
 runner of our chief experts in form and sound, and 
 both the language and the conception are suggestive 
 in a high degree. 
 
 " The Sleeper '' is even more poetic. It distills, 
 like drops from the opiate vapor of the swooning 
 moonlit night, all the melody, the fantasy, the exalta- 
 tion, that befit the vision of a beautiful woman lying 
 in her shroud, silent in her length of tress, waiting 
 to exchange her death chamber 
 
 "The 
 
244 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 " The 
 Bells.' 
 
 "for one more holy, 
 This bed, for one more melancholy." 
 
 Poe's ideality cannot be gainsaid, but it aided him 
 with few, very few, images, and those seemed to 
 haunt his brain perpetually. Such an image is that 
 of the beings who lend their menace to the tone of 
 the funeral bells : — 
 
 •■ And the people, — ah, the people, — 
 They that dwell up in the steeple 
 
 All alone, 
 And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, 
 
 In that muffled monotone, 
 Feel a glory in so rolling 
 
 On the human heart a stone, — 
 They are neither man nor woman. 
 They are neither brute nor human, 
 They are Ghouls." 
 
 In the same remarkable fantasia the bells themselves 
 become human, and it is a master-stroke that makes 
 us hear them shriek out of tune, 
 
 " In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire," 
 
 and forces us to the very madness with which they 
 are 
 
 "Leaping higher, higher, higher. 
 With a desperate desire. 
 And a resolute endeavor 
 Now — now to sit, or never. 
 By the side of the pale-faced moon.'' 
 
 Clearly this extravagance was suggested by the pic- 
 ture and the rhyme. But it so carries us with it 
 that we think not of its meaning ; we share in the 
 delirium of the bells, and nothing can be too ex- 
 treme for the abandon to which we yield ourselves, 
 led by the faith and frenzy of the poet. 
 
 The hinting, intermittent qualities of a few lyrics 
 
THE REFRAIN AND RE PE TEND. 
 
 245 
 
 remind us of Shelley and Coleridge, with whom Poe 
 always was in sympathy. The conception of " The 
 Raven " was new, but in method it bears a likeness 
 to " Lady Geraldine's Courtship," so closely, in fact, 
 that the rhythm of the one probably was suggested 
 by that of the. other. In motive they are so different 
 that neither Poe nor Mrs. Browning could feel ag- 
 grieved. After an examination of dates, and of other 
 matters relating to the genesis of each poem, I have 
 satisfied myself, against much reasoning to the con- 
 trary, that Poe derived his use of the refrain and 
 repetend, here and elsewhere, from the English sibyl, 
 by whom they were employed to the verge of man- 
 nerism in her earliest lyrics. 
 
 "The Conqueror Worm" expresses in a single 
 moan the hopelessness of the poet's vigils among the 
 tombs, where he demanded of silence and the night 
 some tidings of the dead. All he knew was that 
 
 "No voice from that sublimer world hath ever 
 To sage or poet these responses given." 
 
 The most he dared to ask for "The Sleeper" was 
 oblivion j that her sleep might be as deep as it was 
 lasting. We lay the dead " in the cold ground " or in 
 the warm, flower-springing bosom of dear Earth, as 
 best may fit the hearts of those who mourn them. 
 But the tomb, the end of mortality, is voiceless still. 
 If you would find the beginning of immortality, seek 
 some other oracle. " The Conqueror Worm " is the 
 most despairing of lyrics, yet quite essential to the 
 mystical purpose of the tale " Ligeia." But to brood 
 upon men as mimes, ironically cast " in the form of 
 God on high," — mere puppets, where 
 
 " the play is the tragedy, ' Man,' 
 And its hero the Conqueror Worm," 
 
 Use of the 
 refrain 
 and repe- 
 tend-i by 
 Mrs. 
 
 Browning 
 and by 
 Poe. Cp. 
 " Victori- 
 an Poets "; 
 p. 145. 
 
 queror 
 Worm." 
 
246 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Requiems. 
 
 Art's 
 strong^ 
 compul- 
 sion. 
 
 — that way madness lies, indeed. In the lyric, " For 
 Annie," death is a trance ; the soul lingers, calm and 
 at rest, for the fever, called living, is conquered. 
 Human love remains, and its last kiss is still a balm. 
 Something may be hereafter, — but what, who knows ? 
 For repose, and for delicate and unstudied melody, it 
 is one of Poe's truest poems, and his tenderest. Dur- 
 ing the brief period in which he survived his wife, he 
 seemed to have a vision of rest in death, and not of 
 horror. Two lyrics, widely different, and one of them 
 of a most singular nature, are thought to be requiems 
 for his lost companion. It is from no baseness, but 
 from a divine instinct, that genuine artists are com- 
 pelled to go on with their work and to make their 
 own misery, no less than their joy, promote its uses. 
 Their most sacred experiences become, not of their 
 volition, its themes and illustrations. Every man as 
 an individual is secondary to what he is as a worker 
 for the progress of his kind and the glory of the gift 
 allotted to him. 
 
 Therefore, whether Poe adored his wife or not, her 
 image became the ideal of these poems. I shall add 
 little here to all that has been written of " Ulalume. ' 
 It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, 
 so vague and yet so full of meaning, that of itself it 
 might establish a new method. To me it seems an 
 improvisation, such as a violinist might play upon the 
 instrument which had become his one thing of worth 
 after the death of a companion had left him alone 
 with his own soul. Poe remodelled and made the 
 most of his first broken draft, and had the grace not 
 to analyze the process. I have accepted his analysis 
 of " The Raven " as more than half true. Poets know 
 'that an entire poem often is suggested by one of its 
 lines, even by a refrain or a bit of rhythm. From this 
 
HIS HIGHER POETIC RANGE. 
 
 247 
 
 it builds itself. The last or any other stanza may be 
 written first ; and what at first is without form is not 
 void, — for ultimately it will be perfected into shape 
 and meaning. If " Ulalume " may be termed a re- 
 quiem, " Annabel Lee " is a tuneful dirge, — the sim- 
 plest of Poe's melodies, and the most likely to please 
 the common ear. It is said to have been his last 
 lyric, and was written, I think, with more spontaneity 
 than others. The theme is carried along skilfully, 
 the movement hastened and heightened to the end 
 and there dwelt upon, as often in a piece of music. 
 Before considering the poet's method of song, I will 
 mention the two poems which seem to me to repre- 
 sent his highest range, and sufficient in themselves to 
 preserve the memory of a lyrist. 
 
 We overlook the allegory of " The Haunted Pal- 
 ace," until it has been read more than once ; we 
 think of the sound, the phantasmagoric picture, the 
 beauty, the lurid close. The magic muse of Cole- 
 ridge, in "Kubla Khan," or elsewhere, hardly went 
 beyond such lines as these : — 
 
 "Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 
 
 On its roof did float and flow, 
 (This — all this — was in the olden 
 
 Time long ago ; ) 
 And every gentle air that dallied, 
 
 In that sweet day, 
 Along the ramparts, plumed and pallid, 
 
 A winged odor went away." 
 
 The conception of a " Lost Mind " never has been so 
 imaginatively treated, whether by poet or by painter. 
 Questioning Poe's own mental state, look at this poem 
 and see how sane, as an artist, he was that made it. 
 "Do you act best when you forget yourself in the 
 part ? " " No, for then I forget to perfect the part." 
 
 ''^ Amtahel 
 Lee." 
 
 Poe^s 
 highest 
 lyrical 
 range. 
 
 " The 
 
 Haunted 
 
 Palace." 
 
248 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 "Isra/a:' 
 
 A n exqui- 
 sUe hut lim- 
 ited fac- 
 ulty. 
 
 Even more striking is the song of " Israfel," whose 
 heart-strings are a lute. Of all these lyrics is not 
 this the most lyrical, — not only charged with music, 
 but with light ? For once, and in his freest hour of 
 youth, Poe got above the sepulchres and mists, even 
 beyond the pale-faced moon, and visited the empyrean. 
 There is joy in this carol, and the radiance of the 
 skies, and ecstatic possession of the gift of song : — 
 
 " If I could dwell 
 Where Israfel 
 
 Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
 He might not sing so wildly well 
 
 A mortal melody, 
 While a bolder note than this might swell 
 
 From my lyre within the sky ! " 
 
 All this, with the rapturous harmony of the first and 
 third stanzas, is awakened in the poet's soul by a 
 line from a discourse on the Koran, and the result is 
 even finer than the theme. If I had any claim to 
 make up a " Parnassus," not perhaps of the most 
 famous English lyrics, but of those which appeal 
 strongly to my own poetic sense, and could select 
 but one of Poe's, I confess that I should choose 
 " Israfel," for pure music, for exaltation, and for its 
 original, satisfying quality of rhythmic art. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Few and brief are these reliquim which determine 
 his fame as a poet. What do they tell us of his 
 lyrical genius and method ? Clearlj' enough, that he 
 possessed an exquisite faculty, which he exercised 
 within definite bounds. It may be that within those 
 bounds he would have done more if events had not 
 hindered him, as he declared, " from making any se- 
 
'RHYTHMICAL CREATION OF BEAUTY.' 
 
 249 
 
 nous effort" in the field of his choice. In boyhood 
 he had decided views as to the province of song, and 
 he never afterward changed them. The preface to 
 his West Point edition, rambling and conceited as it 
 is, — affording such a contrast to the proud humility 
 of Keats's preface to " Endymion," — gives us the 
 gist of his creed, and shows that the instinct of the 
 young poet was scarcely less delicate than that of his 
 nobler kinsman. Poe thought the object of poetry 
 was pleasure, not truth; the pleasure must not be 
 definite, but subtile, and therefore poetry is opposed 
 to romance ; music is an essential, " since the compre- 
 hension of sweet sound is our most indefinite concep- 
 tion." Metaphysics in verse he hated, pronouncing 
 the Lake theory a new form of didacticism that had 
 injured even the tuneful Coleridge. For a neophyte 
 this was not bad, and after certain reservations few 
 will disagree with him. Eighteen years later, in his 
 charming lecture, " The Poetic Principle," he offered 
 simply an extension of these ideas, with reasons why 
 a long poem " cannot exist." One is tempted to re- 
 join that the standard of length in a poem, as in a 
 piece of music, is relative, depending upon the power 
 of the maker and the recipient to prolong their ex- 
 alted moods. We might, also, quote Landor's " Pen- 
 tameron," concerning the greatness of a poet, or even 
 Beecher's saying that " pint measures are soon filled." 
 The lecture justly denounces the " heresy of the didac- 
 tic," and then declares poetry to be the child of Taste, 
 — devoted solely to the Rhythmical Creation of 
 Beauty, as it is in music that the soul most nearly 
 attains the supernal end for which it struggles. In 
 fine, Poe, with " the mad pride of intellectuality,'' re- 
 fused to look beyond the scope of his own gift, and 
 would restrict the poet to one method and even to a 
 
 Poe^s 
 theory of 
 poetry. 
 
 0>. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets" : 
 A 127- 
 
 "The 
 Poetic 
 Principle* 
 1845. 
 
 The 
 
 Rhythmi- 
 cal Crea- 
 tion 0/ 
 Beauty. 
 
250 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 A melo- 
 dist. 
 
 The re- 
 frain and 
 repetend. 
 
 single theme. In his ex post facto analysis of " The 
 Raven " he conceives the highest tone of beauty to 
 be sa,dness, caused by the pathos of existence and our 
 inability to grasp the unknown. Of all beauty that 
 of a beautiful woman is the supremest, her death is 
 the saddest loss — and therefore " the most poetical 
 topic in the world." He would treat this musically 
 by application of the refrain, increasing the sorrowful 
 loveliness of his poem by contrast of something home- 
 ly, fantastic, or quaint. 
 
 Poe's own range was quite within his theory. His 
 juvenile versions of what afterward became poems were 
 so very "indefinite" as to express almost nothing; 
 they resembled those marvellous stanzas of Dr. Chiv- 
 ers, that sound magnificently, — I have heard Bayard 
 Taylor and Swinburne rehearse them with shouts of 
 delight — and that have no meaning at all. Poe could 
 not remain a Chivers, but sound always was his forte. 
 We rarely find his highest imagination in his verse, or 
 the creation of poetic phrases such as came to the lips 
 of Keats without a summons. He lacked the dramatic 
 power of combination, and produced no symphony in 
 rhythm, — was strictly a melodist, who achieved won- 
 ders in a single strain. Neither Mrs. Browning nor any 
 other poet had " applied " the refrain in Poe's fashion, 
 nor so effectively. In " The Bells " its use is limited 
 almost to one word, the only English word, perhaps, 
 that could be repeated incessantly as the burden of 
 such a poem. In " The Raven," " Lenore," and else- 
 where, he employed the repetend also, and with still 
 more novel results : — 
 
 "An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, 
 A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young." 
 
 "Our talk had been serious and sober, 
 
A POET OF ONE MOOD. 
 
 251 
 
 But our thoughts they were palsied and sere, 
 Our memories were treacherous and sere." 
 
 One thing profitably may be noted by latter-day 
 poets. Poe used none but elementary English meas- 
 ures, relying upon his music and atmosphere for their 
 effect. This is true of those which seem most intri- 
 cate, as in "The Bells " and " Ulalume." " Lenore " 
 and " For Annie " are the simplest of ballad forms. 
 I have a fancy that our Southern poet's ear caught 
 the music of " Annabel Lee " and " Eulalie," if not 
 their special quality, from the plaintive, melodious 
 negro songs utilized by those early writers of " min- 
 strelsy'' who have been denominated the only com- 
 posers of a genuine American school. This sugges- 
 tion may be scouted, but an expert might suspect the 
 one to be a patrician refinement upon the melody, 
 feeling, and humble charm of the other. 
 
 Poe was not a single-poem poet, but the poet of a 
 single mood. His materials were seemingly a small 
 stock in trade, chiefly of Angels and Demons, with an 
 attendance of Dreams, Echoes, Ghouls, Gnomes and 
 Mimes, ready at hand. He selected or coined, for use 
 and re-use, a number of what have been called " beau- 
 tiful words," — " albatross," " halcyon," " scintillant," 
 "Ligeia," "Weir," "Yaanek," " Auber," "D'Elormie," 
 and the like. Everything was subordinate to sound. 
 But his poetry, as it places us under the spell of the 
 senses, enables us to enter, through their reaction upon 
 the spirit, his indefinable mood ; nor should we forget 
 that Coleridge owes his specific rank as a poet, not 
 to his philosophic verse, but to melodious fragments, 
 and greatly to the rhythm of "The Ancient Mariner" 
 and of " Christabel." Poe's melodies lure us to the 
 point where we seem to hear angelic lutes and cith- 
 erns, or elfin instruments that make music in " the 
 
 Use of 
 simple bal- 
 lad/orms. 
 
 Effects of 
 sound- 
 
252 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Poe most 
 eminent 
 as a ro- 
 mancer. 
 
 Revolt 
 against the 
 cotnmon- 
 jilace. 
 
 land east of the sun and west of the moon." The 
 enchantment may not be that of Israfel, nor of the 
 harper who exorcised the evil genius of Saul, but it is 
 at least that of some plumed being of the middle air, 
 of a charmer charming so sweetly that his numbers 
 are the burden of mystic dreams. 
 
 If Poe's standing depended chiefly upon these few 
 poems, notable as they are, his name would be re- 
 called less frequently. His intellectual strength and 
 rarest imagination are to be found in his Tales. To 
 them, and to literary criticism, his main labors were 
 devoted. 
 
 The limits of this chapter constrain me to say less 
 than I have in mind concerning his prose writings. 
 As with his poems, so with the "Tales," — their dates 
 are of little importance. His irregular life forced him 
 to alternate good work with bad, and some of his best 
 stories were written early. He was an apostle of the 
 art that refuses to take its color from a given time or 
 country, and of the revolt against commonplace, and 
 his inventions partook of the romantic and the won- 
 derful. He added to a Greek perception of form the 
 Oriental passion for decoration. All the materials of 
 the wizard's craft were at his command. He was not 
 a pupil of Beckford, Godwin, Maturin, Hoffman, or 
 Fouqu6 ; and yet if these writers were to be grouped 
 we should think also of Poe, and give him no second 
 place among them. " The young fellow is highly imag- 
 inative, and a little given to the terrific," said Ken- 
 nedy, in his honest way. Poe could not have written 
 a novel, as we term it, as well as the feeblest of Har- 
 per's or Roberts's yearlings. He vibrated between two 
 
INTELLECTUAL DEXTERITY. 
 
 253 
 
 points, the realistic and the mystic, and -made no at- 
 tempt to combine people or situations in ordinary life, 
 though he knew how to lead up to a dramatic tableau 
 or crisis. His studies of character were not made 
 from observation, but from acquaintance with himself ; 
 and this subjectivity, or egoism, crippled his inven- 
 tion and made his " Tales " little better than prose 
 poems. He could imagine a series of adventures — 
 the experience of a single narrator — like " Arthur 
 Gordon Pym," and might have been, not Le Sage nor 
 De Foe, but an eminent raconteur in his own field. 
 His strength is unquestionable in those clever pieces 
 of ratiocination, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 
 " The Mystery of Marie Rog6t," " The Purloined Let- 
 ter"; in some of a more fantastic type, "The Gold 
 Bug " and " Hans Pfaall" ; and especially in those with 
 elements of terror and morbid psychology added, such 
 as "The Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Black 
 Cat," "The Tell-tale Heart," and the mesmeric 
 sketches. When composing these he delighted in the 
 exercise of his dexterous intellect, like a workman 
 testing his skill. No poet is of a low grade who pos- 
 sesses, besides an ear for rhythm, the resources of 
 a brain so fine and active. Technical gifts being 
 equal, the more intellectual of two poets is the greater. 
 "Best bard, because the wisest." 
 
 His artistic contempt for metaphysics is seen even 
 in those tales which appear most transcendental. 
 They are charged with a feeling that in the realms 
 of psychology we are dealing with something ethereal, 
 wljich is none the less substance if we might but cap- 
 ture it. They are his resolute attempts to find a clew 
 to the invisible world. Were he living now, how much 
 he would make of our discoveries in light and sound, 
 of the correlation of forces ! He strove by a kind of 
 
 Realism 
 and tnysti' 
 cism. 
 
 Psycho- 
 logic anafi 
 ysis. 
 
 Coniempt 
 for tnetor 
 physics. 
 
254 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Master^ 
 pieces. 
 
 Poe and 
 
 Haw- 
 
 ikoTTte. 
 
 divination to put his hand upon the links of mind 
 and matter, and reach the hiding-places of the soul. 
 It galled him that anything should lie outside the do- 
 main of human intelligence. His imperious intellect 
 rebelled against the bounds that shut us in, and found 
 passionate expression in works of which " Ligeia," 
 "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William 
 Wilson " are the best types. The tales in which lyrics 
 are introduced are full of complex beauty, the choicest 
 products of his genius. They are the offspring of 
 yearnings that lifted him so far above himself as to 
 make us forget his failings and think of him only as 
 a creative artist, a man of noble gifts. 
 
 In these short, purely ideal efforts — finished as an 
 artist finishes a portrait, or a poet his poem — Poe had 
 few equals in recent times. That he lacked sustained 
 power of invention is proved, not by his failure to com- 
 plete an extended work, but by his under-estimation of 
 its value. Such a man measures everything by his per- 
 sonal ability, and finds plausible grounds for the re- 
 sulting standard. Hawthorne had the growing power 
 and the staying power that gave us " The Scarlet 
 Letter " and " The House of the Seven Gables." Poe 
 and Hawthorne were the last of the romancers. Each 
 was a master in his way, and that of Poe was the 
 more obvious and material. He was expert in much 
 that concerns the structure of works, and the model- 
 ling touches of the poet left beauty-marks upon his 
 prose. Yet in spiritual meaning his tales were less 
 poetic than those of Hawthorne. He relied upon his 
 externals, making the utmost of their gorgeousness of 
 color, their splendor and gloom of light and shade. 
 Hawthorne found the secret meaning of common things, 
 and knew how to capture, from the plainest aspects of 
 life, an essence of evasive beauty which the senses of 
 
COMPARED WITH HA WTHORNE. 
 
 255 
 
 Poe often were unable to perceive. It was Hawthorne 
 who heard the melodies too fine for mortal ear. Haw- 
 thorne was wholly masculine, with the great tenderness 
 and gentleness which belong to virile souls. Poe had, 
 with the delicacy, the sophistry and weakness of a 
 'nature more or less effeminate. He opposed to Haw- 
 thorne the fire, the richness, the instability of the trop- 
 ics, as against the abiding strength and passion of the 
 North. His own conceptions astonished him, and he 
 often presents himself " with hair on end, at his own 
 wonders." Of these two artists and seers, the New 
 Englander had the profounder insight ; the South- 
 erner's magic was that of the necromancer who re- 
 sorts to spells and devices, and, when some apparition 
 by chance responds to his incantations, is bewildered 
 by the phantom himself has raised. 
 
 Poe failed to see that the Puritanism by which Haw- 
 thorne's strength was tempered was also the source 
 from which it sprang ; and in his general criticism did 
 not pay full tribute to a genius he must have felt. In 
 some of his sketches, such as " The Man of the 
 Crowd," he used Hawthorne's method, and with infe- 
 rior results. His reviews of other authors and his 
 occasional literary notes have been so carefully pre- 
 served as to show his nature by a mental and moral 
 photograph. His Marginalia, scrappy and written for 
 effect, are the notes of a thinking man of letters. The 
 criticisms raised a hubbub in their day, and made Poe 
 the bogy of his generation — the unruly censor whom 
 weaklings not only had cause to fear, but often re- 
 garded with a sense of cruel injustice. I acknowledge 
 their frequent dishonesty, vulgarity, prejudice, but do 
 not, therefore, hold them to be worthless. Even a 
 scourge, a pestilence, has its uses ; before it the puny 
 and frail go down, the fittest survive. And so it was in 
 
 "Margi- 
 nalia.^'' 
 
256 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 " The Lit- 
 erati" 
 1846. 
 
 Cf.pfi. 
 42-44- 
 
 Satire. 
 
 Poe's foray. Better that a time of unproductiveness 
 should follow such a thinning out than that false and 
 feeble things should continue. I suspect that 27ii 
 Literati made room for a new movement, sure though 
 long delayed, in American authorship. Mr. Higgin- 
 son, however, is entirely right when he intimates that 
 Margaret Fuller, by her independent reviews in " The 
 Tribune," sustained her full and early part in the 
 chase against " such small deer." The shafts of Dian 
 were more surely sped, and much less vindictively, than 
 the spear of her brother-huntsman. Poe's sketches are 
 a prose Dunciad, waspish and unfair, yet not without 
 touches of magnanimity. He had small respect for the 
 feeling that it is well for a critic to discover beauties, 
 since any one can point out faults. When, as in the 
 cases of Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Taylor, and others, 
 he pronounced favorably upon the talents of a claim- 
 ant, and was uninfluenced by personal motives, his 
 judgments not seldom have been justified by the after- 
 career. Besides, what a cartoon he drew of the writers 
 of his time, — the corrective of Griswold's optimistic 
 delineations ! In the description of a man's personal 
 appearance he had the art of placing the subject before 
 us with a single touch. His tender mercies were cruel j 
 he never forgot to prod the one sore spot of the author 
 he most approved, — was especially intolerant of his 
 own faults in others, and naturally detected these at 
 once. When meting out punishment to a pretentious 
 writer, he revelled in his task, and often made short 
 work, as if the pleasure was too great to be endurable. 
 The keenness of his satire, just or unjust, is mitigated 
 by its obvious ferocity : one instinctively takes part 
 with the victim. Nothing in journalistic criticism, even 
 at that time, was more scathing and ludicrous than his 
 conceit of a popular bookwright in the act of confabu- 
 
GENERAL TRAITS AND EQUIPMENT. 
 
 257 
 
 lation with the Universe. But he marred the work by 
 coarseness, telling one man that he was by no means a 
 fool, although he did write " De Vere," and heading a 
 paper on the gentlest and most forbearing of poets — 
 "Mr. Longfellow and other Plagiarists." In short, he 
 constantly dulled the edge and temper of his rapier, 
 and resorted to the broad-axe, using the latter even in 
 his deprecation of its use by Kit North. Perhaps it 
 was needed in those salad days by offenders who could 
 be put down in no other wise ; but I hold it a sign of 
 progress that criticism by force of arms would now be 
 less effective. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Some analysis of Poe's general equipment will not 
 be out of place. Only in the most perfect tales can 
 his English style be called excellent, however signifi- 
 cant his thought. His mannerisms — constant employ- 
 ment of the dash for suggestiveness, and a habit of 
 italicizing to make a point or strengthen an illusion — 
 are wearisome, and betray a lack of confidence in his 
 skill to use plain methods. While asserting the power 
 of words to convey absolutely any idea of the human 
 mind, he relied on sound, quaintness, surprise, and 
 other artificial aids. His prose is inferior to Haw- 
 thorne's ; but sometimes he excels Hawthorne in qual- 
 ities of form and proportion which are specially at 
 the service of authors who are also poets. The abrupt 
 beginnings of his stories often are artistic : — 
 
 "We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. 
 For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted 
 to speak." (" Descent into the Maelstrom.") 
 
 " The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best 
 I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed re- 
 venge." (" The Cask of Amontillado.") 
 17 
 
 Broad- 
 axe criti- 
 cism.. 
 
 Foe's 
 equipment 
 aTid 
 genius. 
 
258 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 ■' The 
 Fall of the 
 House of 
 Usher." 
 
 Poe^s im- 
 agination. 
 
 Thefan- 
 
 iastic. 
 
 Deficient 
 in humor. 
 
 His endings were equally good, when he had a clear 
 knowledge of his own purpose, and some of his con- 
 ceptions terminate at a dramatic crisis. The tone, 
 also, of his masterpieces is well sustained through- 
 out. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the ap- 
 proach to the fated spot, the air, the landscape, the 
 tarn, the mansion itself, are a perfect study, equal to 
 the ride of Childe Roland, — and here Poe excels 
 Browning : we not only come with him to the dark 
 tower, but we enter and partake its mystery, and alone 
 know the secret of its accursed fate. The poet's ana- 
 lytic faculty has been compared to that of Balzac, but 
 a parallel goes no farther than the material side. In 
 condensation he surpassed either Balzac or Haw- 
 thorne. 
 
 His imagination was not of the highest order, for 
 he never dared to trust to it implicitly ; certainly not 
 in his poetry, since he could do nothing with a meas- 
 ure like blank verse, which is barren in the hands of a 
 mere songster, but the glory of English metrical forms 
 when employed by one commanding the strength of 
 diction, the beauty and grandeur of thought, and all 
 the resources of a strongly imaginative poet. Nei- 
 ther in verse nor in prose did he cut loose from his 
 minor devices, and for results of sublimity and awe he 
 always depends upon that which is grotesque or out 
 of nature. Beauty of the fantastic or grotesque is not 
 the highest beauty. Art, like nature, must be fantas- 
 tic, not in her frequent, but in her exceptional moods. 
 The rarest ideal dwells in a realm beyond that which 
 fascinates us by its strangeness or terror, and the vo- 
 taries of the latter have masters above them as high 
 as Raphael is above Dord. 
 
 In genuine humor Poe seemed utterly wanting. He 
 also had little of the mother-wit that comes in flashes 
 
COMMAND OF THE GROTESQUE. 
 
 259 
 
 and at once ; but his powers of irony and satire were 
 so great as to make his frequent lapses into invective 
 the more humiliating. The command of humor has 
 distinguished men whose genius was both high and 
 broad. If inessential to exalted poetic work, its ab- 
 sence is hurtful to the critical and polemic essay. Poe 
 knew this as well as any 3ne, but a measureless self 
 esteem would not acknowledge the flaw in his armor. 
 Hence efforts which involved the delusion that humor 
 may corne by works and not by inborn gift. Humor 
 is congenital and rare, the fruit of natural mellowness, 
 of sensitiveness to the light and hurnane phases of life. 
 It is, moreover, set in action by an unselfish heart. 
 Such is the mirth of Thackeray, of Cervantes and Mo- 
 lifere, and of the one master of English song. Poe's 
 consciousness of his defect, and his refusal to believe 
 it incurable, are manifest in trashy sketches for which 
 he had a market, and which are humorous only to one 
 who sees the ludicrous side of their failure. He ana- 
 lyzed mirth as the product of incongruity, and went 
 to work upon a theory to produce it. The result is 
 seen not only in the extravaganzas to which I refer, 
 — and it is a pity that these should have been hunted 
 up so laboriously, — but in the use of what he thought 
 was humor to barb his criticisms, and as a contrast 
 to the exciting passages of his analytical tales. One 
 of his sketches, " The Due de I'Omelette," after the 
 lighter French manner, has grace and jaunty persiflage, 
 but most of his whimsical " pot-boilers " are deplor- 
 ably absurd. There is something akin to humor in the 
 sub-handling of his favorite themes, — such as the awe 
 and mystery of death, the terrors of pestilence, insan- 
 ity, or remorse. The grotesque and nether side of 
 these matters presents itself to him, and then his irony, 
 with its repulsive fancies, is as near humor as he ever 
 
 Quality of 
 the great 
 humorists. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 th 73, 77- 
 
 The gra 
 tesqtie. 
 
26o 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Character 
 of his 
 
 sc/wiar- 
 ship. 
 
 Aj^ecia~ 
 tion of 
 learning. 
 
 A good 
 
 referetwe- 
 
 knowledge. 
 
 approaches. That is to say, it is grave-yard humor, 
 the kind which sends a chill down our backs, and 
 implies a contempt for our bodies and souls, for the 
 perils, helplessness, and meanness of the stricken hu- 
 man race. 
 
 Poe is sometimes called a man of extraordinary 
 learning. Upon a first acquaintance, one might re- 
 ceive the impression that his scholarship was not only 
 varied, but thorough. A study of his works has satis- 
 fied me that he possessed literary resources and knew 
 how to make the most of them. In this he resembled 
 Bulwer, and, with far less abundant materials than the 
 latter required, employed them as speciously. He 
 easily threw a glamour of erudition about his work, 
 by the use of phrases from old authors he had read, 
 or among whose treatises he had foraged with special 
 design. It was his knack to cull sentences which, 
 taken by themselves, produce a weird or impressive 
 effect, and to reframe them skilfully. This plan was 
 clever, and resulted in something that could best be 
 muttered " darkly, at dead of night " ; but it partook 
 of trickery, even in its art. He had little exact schol- 
 arship, nor needed it, dealing, as he did, not with the 
 processes of learning, but with results that could sub- 
 serve the play of 'his imagination. Shakespeare's 
 anachronisms and illusions were made as he required 
 them, and with a fine disdain. Poe resorted to them 
 of malice aforethought, and under pretence of correct- 
 ness. Still, the work of a romancer and poet is not 
 that of a book-worm. What he needs is a good ref- 
 erence-knowledge, and this Poe had. His irregular 
 school-boy training was not likely to give him the 
 scholastic habit, nor would his impatient manhood 
 otherwise have confirmed it. I am sure that we may 
 consider that portion of his youth to have been of 
 
ROMANTIC MATERIALS. 
 
 261 
 
 most worth which was devoted, as in the case of many 
 a born writer, to the unconscious education obtained 
 from the reading, for the mere love of it, of all books 
 to which he had access. This training served him 
 well. It enabled him to give his romance an alchemic 
 air, by citation from writers like Chapman, Thomas 
 More, Bishop King, etc., and from Latin and French 
 authors in profusion. His French tendencies were 
 natural, and he learned enough of the language to 
 read much of its current literature and get hold of 
 modes unknown to many of his fellow-writers. I have 
 said that his stock in trade was narrow, but for the 
 adroit display of it examine any of his tales and 
 sketches, — for example, " Berenice," or " The Assig- 
 nation." 
 
 In knowledge of what may be called the properties 
 of his romance, he was more honestly grounded. He 
 had the good fortune to utilize the Southern life and 
 scenery which he knew in youth. It chanced, also, 
 that during some years of his boyhood — that forma- 
 tive period whose impressions are indelible — he lived 
 in a characteristic part of England. He had seen 
 with his own eyes castles, abbeys, the hangings and 
 tapestries and other by-gone trappings of ancient 
 rooms, and remembered effects of decoration and color 
 which always came to his aid. These he used as if 
 he were born to them ; never, certainly, with the sur- 
 prise at their richness which vulgarizes Disraeli's " Lo- 
 thair." In some way, known to genius, he also caught 
 the romance of France, of Italy, of the Orient, and 
 one tale or another is transfused with their atmos- 
 phere ; while the central figure, however disguised, is 
 always the image of the romancer himself. His equip- 
 ment, on the whole, was not a pedant's, much less that 
 of a searcher after truth ; it was that of a poet and 
 
 His ma- 
 terials. 
 
262 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 ^'Eureka : 
 a Prose 
 Poetn,''^ 
 
 A lay- 
 tnafi's im- 
 aginative 
 veTiiure. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 0. 19, 20. 
 
 Poetic in- 
 ductioTt. 
 
 a literary workman. Yet he had the hunger which 
 animates the imaginative student, and, had he been 
 led to devote himself to science, would have contrib- 
 uted to the sum of knowledge. In writing Eureka he 
 was unquestionably sincere, and forgot himself more 
 nearly than in any other act of his professional life. 
 But here his inexact learning betrayed him. What 
 was begun in conviction — a swift generalization from 
 scientific theories of the universe — grew to be so far 
 beyond the data at his command, or so inconsistent 
 with them, that he finally saw he had written little 
 else than a prose poem, and desired that it should be 
 so regarded. Of all sciences, astronomy appeals most 
 to the imagination. What is rational in " Eureka " 
 mostly is a re-statement of accepted theories : other- 
 wise the treatise is vague and nebulous, — a light 
 dimmed by its own vapor. The work is curiously sat- 
 urated with our modern Pantheism ; and although in 
 many portions it shows the author's weariness, yet it 
 was a notable production for a layman venturing within 
 the precincts of the savant. The poetic instinct hits 
 upon truths which the science of the future confirms ; 
 but as often, perhaps, it glorifies some error sprung 
 from a too ardent generalization. Poe's inexactness 
 was shown in frequent slips, — sometimes made un- 
 consciously, sometimes in reliance upon the dulness 
 of his rivals to save him from detection. He was on 
 the alert for other people's errors ; for his own facts, 
 were he now alive, he could not call so lightly upon 
 his imagination. Even our younger authors, here and 
 abroad, now are so well equipped that their learning 
 seems to handicap their winged steeds. Poe had, 
 above all, the gift of poetic induction. He would have 
 divined the nature of an unknown world from a speci- 
 men of its flora, a fragment of its art. He felt himself 
 
A FOE TO DIDACTICISM. 
 
 263 
 
 something more than a bookman. He was a creator 
 of the beautiful, and hence the conscious struggle of 
 his spirit for the sustenance it craved. Even when he 
 was most in error, he labored as an artist, and it is 
 idle criticism that judges him upon any other ground. 
 Accept him, then, whether as poet or romancer, as 
 a pioneer of the art feeling in American literature. 
 So far as he was devoted to art for art's sake, it was 
 for her sake as the exponent of beauty. No man 
 ever lived in whom the passion for loveliness more 
 plainly governed the emotions and convictions. His 
 service of the beautiful was idolatry, and he would 
 have kneeled with Heine at the feet of Our Lady of 
 Milo, and believed that she yearned to help him. 
 This consecration to absolute beauty made him abhor 
 the mixture of sentimentalism, metaphysics, and mor- 
 als, in its presentation. It was a foregone conclusion 
 that neither Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, nor Haw- 
 thorne should wholly satisfy him. The question of 
 " moral " tendency concerned him not in the least. 
 He did not feel with Keats that " Beauty is truth, 
 truth beauty,'' and that a divine perfection may be 
 reached by either road. This deficiency narrowed his 
 range both as a poet and as a critic. His sense of 
 justice was a sense of the fitness of things, and — 
 strange to say — when he put it aside he forgot that 
 he was doing an unseemly thing. Otherwise, he rep- 
 resents, or was one of the first to lead, a rebellion 
 against formalism, commonplace, the spirit of the 
 bourgeois. In this movement Whitman is his coun- 
 tertype at the pole opposite from that of art ; and 
 hence they justly are picked out from the rest of us 
 and associated in foreign minds. Taste was Poe's 
 supreme faculty. Beauty, to him, was a definite and 
 logical reality, and he would have scouted V^ron's 
 
 Poe^s ab- 
 solute love 
 of beauty. 
 
 His potest 
 agaiTtst di- 
 dacticism. 
 
 Taste. 
 
264 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Uolation. 
 
 Decorative 
 feeling. 
 
 A tragedy. 
 
 A singular 
 and pa^ 
 thetic 
 career. 
 
 claim that it has no fixed objective laws, and exists 
 only in the nature of the observer. Although the 
 brakes of art were on his imagination, his taste was 
 not wholly pure ; he vacillated between the classic 
 forms and those allied with color, splendor, Oriental 
 decoration ; between his love for the antique and hi^ 
 impressions of the mystical and grotesque. But he 
 was almost without confraternity. An artist in an 
 unartistic period, he had to grope his way, to con- 
 tend with stupidity and coarseness. Again, his imag- 
 ination, gloating upon the possibilities of taste, vio- 
 lated its simplicity. Poe longed for the lamp of 
 Aladdin, for the riches of the Gnomes. Had un- 
 bounded wealth been his, he would have outvied 
 Beckford, Landor, Dumas, in barbaric extravagance 
 of architecture. His efforts to apply the laws of the 
 beautiful to imaginary decoration, architecture, land- 
 scape, are very fascinating as seen in "The Philoso- 
 phy of Furniture," "Landscape Gardening," and "Lan- 
 der's Cottage." " The Domain of Arnheim " is a 
 marvellous dream of an earthly paradise, and the 
 close is a piece of word-painting as effective as the 
 language contains. Regarding this sensitive artist, 
 this original poet, it seems indeed a tragedy that a 
 man so ideal in either realm, so unfit for contact 
 with ugliness, dulness, brutality, should have come to 
 eat husks with the swine, to be misused by their hu- 
 man counterparts, and to die the death of a drunk- 
 ard, in the refuge which society offers to the most 
 forlorn and hopeless of its castaways. 
 
 VIL 
 
 Seeking our illustrations of the poetic life, we find 
 no career of more touching and peculiar interest than 
 
HIS LITERARY EXECUTOR. 
 
 265 
 
 that of Poe. It is said tliat disaster followed him 
 even after death, in the vicious memoir which Gris- 
 wold prefixed to his collected works ; and doubtless 
 the poet should have had for his biographer a man 
 of kind and healthy discernment, like Kennedy, his 
 townsman and generous friend. Yet Poe showed tact 
 in choosing Griswold, and builded better than he 
 knew. He could select no more indefatigable book- 
 wright to bring together his scattered writings, and 
 he counted upon Death's paying all debts. In this 
 Poe was mistaken. For once Griswold wrote as he 
 thought and felt, and his memoir, however spiteful 
 and unchivalrous, was more sincere than many of the 
 sycophantic sketches in the bulky volumes of his 
 "Poets and Poetry." Malice made him eloquent, and 
 an off-hand obituary notice of the poet was the most 
 nervous piece of work that ever came from his pen. 
 It was heartless, and, in some respects, inaccurate. 
 It brought so much wrath upon him that he became 
 vindictive, and followed it up with a memoir, which, 
 as an exhibition of the ignoble nature of its author, 
 scarcely has a parallel. Did this in the end affect 
 Poe's fame injuriously? Far otherwise; it moved a 
 host of writers, beginning with Willis and Graham, 
 to recall his habit of life, and reveal the good side 
 of it. Some have gone as far in eulogy as Griswold 
 went toward the opposite extreme. It seemed a cruel 
 irony of fate that Poe's own biographer should plant 
 thorns upon his grave, but he also planted laurels. 
 He paid an unstinted tribute to the poet's genius, 
 and this was the only concession which Poe himself 
 would care to demand. With sterner irony, Time 
 brings in his revenges ! In a familiar edition of the 
 poet's works, for which Griswold laid the ground- 
 work, the memoir by Ingram is devoted largely to 
 
 Griswold's 
 memoir. 
 
 Effect 
 upon Foe's 
 fame. 
 
266 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Foe's 
 
 habits and 
 tetnperor- 
 merti. 
 
 Love of 
 the ideal a 
 restraint 
 ■upon sen- 
 suality. 
 
 Chastity of 
 Foe's tvrii- 
 
 tKffS. 
 
 correcting the errors of the Doctor's long-since ex- 
 cluded sketch, and to exposing every act of malice 
 against Poe which Griswold committed, either before 
 or after his foeman's death. 
 
 After years of censure and defence, and in the light 
 of his own writings, the poet's character is not " be- 
 yond all conjecture." Here was a man of letters who 
 fulfilled the traditions of a past century in this western 
 world and modern time ; one over-possessed and ham- 
 pered by the very temperament that made him a poet 
 — and this, too, when he thought himself deliberate 
 and calculating. His head was superbly developed, 
 his brain-power too great for its resources of supply 
 and control. The testimony of some who knew his 
 home-life is that he was tender and lovable. Graham 
 and Willis aver that he was patient and regular in 
 work, and scrupulous to return a just amount of labor 
 for value received. But many who knew and be- 
 friended him have spoken, more in sorrow than in 
 anger, of his treachery and thanklessness, of his in- 
 justice to himself, and of the degrading excesses 
 which plunged him into depths from which it grew 
 more and more difficult to lift him. 
 
 Nevertheless, Poe was not a man of immoral habits. 
 I assert that scholars, writers, and artists, in spite of 
 a tradition to the contrary, are less given, as a class, 
 to forbidden pleasures than business-men and idle men 
 of the world. Study and a love of the ideal protect 
 them against the sensuality by which too many dull 
 the zest of their appetites. Poe was no exception to 
 the rule. He was not a libertine. Woman was to 
 him the impersonation of celestial beauty, her influence 
 soothed and elevated him, and in her presence he was 
 gentle, winning, and subdued. There is not an un- 
 chaste suggestion in the whole course of his writings, 
 
HEREDITY AND CIRCUMSTANCE. 
 
 267 
 
 — a remarkable fact, in view of his acquaintance with 
 the various schools of French literature. His works 
 are almost too spiritual. Not of the earth, earthy, 
 their personages meet with the rapture and co-absorp- 
 tion of disembodied souls. His verse and prose ex- 
 press devotion to Beauty in her most ethereal guise, 
 and he justly might cry out with Shelley : — 
 
 " I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
 To thee and thine ; have I not kept the vow ? " 
 
 Nor was he undevotional. His sense of the sublime 
 and mystical filled him with thoughts of other worlds 
 and existences than ours ; if there is pride, there is 
 reverence, in his bold imaginings. He felt a spark of 
 the divine fire within him, and the pride of his intel- 
 lectual disdain was, like the Titan's, a not inglorious 
 sin. Finally, Poe was not an habitual drunkard. He 
 had woful fits of drunkenness, varying in frequency, 
 and sometimes of degradation ; for a single glass made 
 him the easy prey of any coarse and pitiless hands 
 into which he might fall. He was a man inebriate 
 when sober, his brain surging with emotion, and a 
 stimulant that only served to steady common men 
 bewildered him. As with women, the least contami- 
 nation was to him debasement. His mature years 
 were a battle with inherited taint, and there were long 
 periods in which he was the victor. This taint had 
 been increased by drugging in infancy, and by the 
 convivial usages of his guardian's household. Bear- 
 ing in mind, also, the lack of self-control inherent in 
 Celtic and Southern natures, I think he made a plucky 
 fight. The duty of self-support was not one to which 
 he had been trained, and was more than he could bear. 
 Imagine Shelley, who made his paper boats of bank- 
 notes, Byron and Landor, who had their old estates. 
 
 Not a 
 scoffer nor 
 an habit- 
 ual drunk- 
 ard. 
 
 His hered- 
 itary taint. 
 
268 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Effects of 
 poverty, 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " ; 
 
 His sensi- 
 live iem- 
 ^erameni. 
 
 forced to write by the column for their weekly board. 
 " Poverty has this disease : through want it teaches a 
 man evil." More, it limits the range of his possibili- 
 ties. Doudan has said, with truth and feeling, that 
 he who is without security for the morrow can neither 
 meditate upon nor accomplish a lasting work. The 
 delicate fancies of certain writers are not always at 
 quick command, and the public is loath to wait and 
 pay for quality. Poe, more than once, fell into dis- 
 grace by not being able to meet his literary engage- 
 ments on time. His most absurd and outrageous 
 articles, such as the one put forth after his Boston 
 lecture, were the bluster of a man who strove to hide 
 a sense of humiliation and failure. Doubtless, he se- 
 cretly invoked the gods in his own behalf. He knew,' 
 like Che'nier going to his death, that it was a pity — 
 he was worth saving. Generous efforts, in truth, were 
 made to save him, by strong and tender friends, but 
 these were quite in vain. He carried a death-warrant 
 within him. Well might he feel that a spell was on 
 him, and in one tale and another try to make the 
 world — which he affected to despise — comprehend 
 its fatality, and bespeak the sympathetic verdict of 
 the future upon his defeat and doom. 
 
 It is just that well-balanced persons should rebuke 
 the failings of genius. But let such an one imagine 
 himself with a painfully sensitive organization, — " all 
 touch, all eye, all ear " ; with appetites almost resist- 
 less ; with a frame in which health and success breed 
 a dangerous rapture, disease and sorrow a fatal de- 
 spair. Surmount all this with a powerful intelligence 
 that does not so much rule the structure as it menaces 
 it, and threatens to shake it asunder. Let him con- 
 ceive himself as adrift, from the first, among adverse 
 surroundings, now combating his environment, now 
 
HIS UNMORALITY. 
 
 269 
 
 struggling to adjust himself to it. He, too, might 
 find his judgment a broken reed ; his passions might 
 get the upper hand ; his perplexities bring him to 
 shamelessness and ruin. It was thus the poet's curse 
 came upon him, and the wings of his Psyche were 
 sorrowfully trailed in the dust. I have said to friends 
 as they sneered at the ill-managed life of one whose 
 special genius perhaps could not exist but in union 
 with certain infirmities, that instead of recounting 
 these, and deriding them, they should hedge him round 
 with their protection. We can find more than one 
 man of sense among a thousand, but how rarely a 
 poet with such a gift ! When he has gone his music 
 will linger, and be precious to those who never have 
 heard, like ourselves, the sweet bells jangled. 
 
 Making every allowance, Poe was terribly blam- 
 able. We all are misunderstood, and all condemned 
 to toil. The sprites have their task-work, and can- 
 not always be dancing in the moonlight. At times, 
 we are told, they have to consort with what is ugly, 
 and even' take on its guise. Unhappily, Poe was the 
 reverse of one who " fortune's buffets and rewards 
 has ta'en with equal thanks." He stood good for- 
 tune more poorly than bad ; any emotion would upset 
 him, and his worst falls were after successes, or with 
 success just in sight. His devotion to beauty was 
 eagerly selfish. He had a heart, and in youth was 
 loyal to those he loved. In this respect he differed 
 from the hero of "A Strange Story," born without 
 affection or soul. But his dream was that of " The 
 Palace of Art " — a lordly pleasure-house, where taste 
 and love should have their fill, regardless of the outer 
 world. It has been well said, that if not immoral, 
 he was unmoral. With him an end justified the means, 
 and he had no conception of the law and limitations 
 
 The price- 
 less rarity 
 of genius^ 
 
 Lack of 
 self-petse. 
 
 Not im- 
 moral^ but 
 u?imoral. 
 
270 
 
 - EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Is genius 
 the product 
 0/ neurotic 
 disorder ? 
 
 of liberty, no practical sense of right or wrong. At 
 the most, he ignored such matters as things irrelevant. 
 Now it is not essential that one should have a creed ; 
 he may relegate theologies to the regions of the un- 
 knowable ; but he must be just in order to fear not, 
 and humane that he may be loved ; he must be faith- 
 ful to some moral standard of his own, otherwise his 
 house, however beautiful and lordly, is founded in the 
 sand. 
 
 The question always will recur, whether, if Poe had 
 been able to govern his life aright, he would not also 
 have been conventional and tame, and so much the 
 less a poet. Were it not for his excesses and neurotic 
 crises, should we have had the peculiar quality of his 
 art and the works it has left us ? I cannot here dis- 
 cuss the theory that his genius was a frenzy, and that 
 poetry is the product of abnormal nerve-vibrations. 
 The claim, after all, is a scientific statement of the 
 belief that great wits are sure to madness near allied. 
 An examination of it involves the whole ground of 
 fate, free will, and moral responsibility. I think that 
 Poe was bounden for his acts. He never failed to 
 resent infringements upon his own manor; and, how- 
 ever poor his self-control, it was not often with him 
 that the chord of self passed trembling out of sight. 
 Possibly his most exquisite, as they were his most 
 poetic, moments, were at those times when he seemed 
 very wretched, and avowed himself oppressed by a 
 sense of doom. He loved his share of pain, and was 
 an instance of the fact that man is the one being that 
 takes keen delight in the tragedy of its own existence, 
 and for whom 
 
 "Joy is deepest when it springs from woe." 
 
 Wandering among the graves of those he had cher. 
 
FAl^AL LACK OF WILL. 
 
 271 
 
 ished, invoking the spectral midnight skies, believing 
 himself. the Orestes of his race — in all this he was 
 fulfilling his nature, deriving the supremest sensations, 
 feeding on the plants of night from which such as he 
 obtain their sustenance or go famished. They who 
 do not perceive this never will comprehend the mys- 
 teries of art and song, of the heart from whose re- 
 cesses these must be evoked. They err who com- 
 miserate Poe for such experiences. My own pity for 
 him is of another kind ; it is that which we ever must 
 feel for one in whom the rarest possibilities were 
 blighted by an inherent lack of will. In his sensi- 
 tiveness to impressions like the foregoing, he had at 
 once the mood and material for far greater results 
 than he achieved. A violin cracks none the sooner 
 for being played in a minor key. His instrument 
 broke for want of a firm and even hand to use it — 
 a virile, devoted master to prolong the strain. 
 
 Poe's demand for his present wish was always 
 strong, yet it was the caprice of a child, and not the 
 determination that stays and conquers. He was no 
 more of an egoist than was Goethe ; but self-absorp- 
 tion is the edged tool that maims a wavering hand. 
 His will, in the primary sense, was weak from the be- 
 ginning. It became more and more reduced by those 
 habits which, of all the defences of a noble mind, 
 attack this stronghold first. It was not able to pre- 
 serve for him the sanity of true genius, and his prod- 
 uct, therefore, was so much the less complete. 
 
 " O well for him whose will is strong ! 
 He suffers, but he will not suffer long." 
 
 Poe suffered, in bitter truth, and the end came not 
 through triumph, but in death. His fame is not what 
 it might have been, we say ; yet it is greater than he 
 
 Secret of 
 Poe's dis- 
 asters. 
 
 No real 
 strength oj 
 •will. 
 
272 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 Patne 
 waits on 
 wortk and 
 work. 
 
 — dying with a sense of incompleteness — probably 
 expected it to be, and more than he could have asked. 
 In spite, then, of the most reckless career, the work a 
 man really accomplishes — both for what it is in it- 
 self and for what it reveals of the author's gift — in 
 the end will be valued exactly at its worth. Does the 
 poet, the artist, demand some promise that it also may 
 be made to tell during our working life, and even that 
 life be lengthened till the world shall learn to honor 
 it? Let him recall the grave, exalted words which 
 Poe took at hazard for his " Ligeia," and stayed not 
 to dwell upon their spiritual meaning : " Man doth 
 not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, 
 save only through the weakness of his own feeble 
 wUl." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 I. 
 
 A DISCUSSION of any art or artist readily enough 
 might begin with a chapter on Fashion. Of this 
 I ask no livelier illustration than the experience of a 
 poet whose time-honored method is just now fresh in 
 favor, as if he were at matins instead of even-song. 
 It is somewhat strange that the Greeks — at least 
 those late Athenians who spent their time in nothing 
 else but either to tell or to hear some new thing — 
 should have left vacant the seat in their hemicycle to 
 which their gay inheritors have directed that puissant 
 goddess, La Mode. The dullest know that to her are 
 sacred, as the school-books say, not only dress and 
 manners, but styles of furniture, decoration, and all 
 that caters to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. 
 But the adept perceive that fashion often decides our 
 taste in literature, our bent of study, and even of re- 
 ligious thought ; how much it has to do with the spirit, 
 no less than the outcome, of human effort. Progress 
 comes by experiment, and this from ennui — ennui 
 that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to 
 change in the arts of expression ; that cries out to the 
 imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof 
 we term necessity the mother. The best of modes is 
 not above challenge. No stroke can always hold the 
 trophy. Pretty much the same instinct that makes a 
 i8 
 
 Fashion^ 
 or Vogtte^ 
 in -A rt. 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " ; 
 p. 150. 
 
274 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Revival of 
 vld time 
 modes. 
 
 woman accept the later, perhaps the uglier, style of 
 dress, secures a trial, even a vogue, to some new 
 method in art or letters. Few demur longer than 
 Taglioni's sister, who stared at a bonnet, the last new 
 thing from Paris, then laughed outright and said, 
 " How very ridiculous you look, my dear. . . . Can 
 you get me one like it ? " In fact, we must have dis- 
 covery, and that by licensing the fashions of successive 
 times, most of them defective, many retrogressive, a 
 few on the path to higher use and beauty. These 
 few may return again and again ; they go out of sight, 
 but on an elliptic orbit. Contemporary judgment is 
 least of all judicial. The young forestall novelty it- 
 self. The old mistrust or look backward with a sense 
 of loss. It is hard for either to apply tests that are 
 above each fashion, yet derived from all. I suppose 
 that in vicious, and in barren, periods of our English 
 song, men's faculties were much the same as ever; 
 that a sense of beauty was on the alert. There is an 
 exhortation to critical humility when some despised 
 style of a past century suddenly appears fit and at- 
 tractive ; when, from caprice or wholesome instinct, 
 we pick up the round-bowed spectacles of our for- 
 bears and see things as they saw them. Their art, 
 dress, accent, quaintly rebuke us ; their dainty spirit 
 lives again, and we adopt, as lightly as we formerly 
 contemned, a fashion which we avow that at last we 
 rightly interpret. 
 
 It is wholly natural, then, that a poet like Dr. 
 Holmes should have been in vogue and out of vogue ; 
 one who easily can afford to regard either position 
 with tranquillity, but at times, it may be, and solely 
 as to his metrical theories, thought somewhat too an- 
 tiquated by wits of the new dispensation. At this 
 moment, — the favorite both of Time, to whom thanks 
 
A POET OF THE OLD SCHOOL. 
 
 275 
 
 for touching him so gently, and of a tide that again 
 bears him forward, — he is warmly appreciated by 
 verse-makers of the latest mode. As a scientific hom- 
 ilist, his popular gauge has been less subject to fluc- 
 tuations. Science has but one fashion — to lose noth- 
 ing once gained ; and Holmes's pluck and foresight 
 kept him ahead till his neighbors caught up and jus- 
 tified him. His verse, however, puts us on terms with 
 a man of certain tastes and breeding ; it is the result 
 of qualities which may or may not be fashionable at 
 a given date. Just now they connect him with the 
 army of occupation, — a veteran, it is true, but, despite 
 his ribbons and crosses, assuredly not " retired." 
 
 The distinction between his poetry and that of the 
 new makers of society-verse is that his is a survival, 
 theirs the attempted revival, of something that has 
 gone before. He wears the seal of " that past Geor- 
 gian day " by direct inheritance, not from the old 
 time in England, but from that time in England's let- 
 tered colonies, whose inner sections still preserve the 
 hereditary language and customs as they are scarcely 
 to be found elsewhere. His work is as emblematic of 
 the past as are the stairways and hand-carvings in 
 various houses of Cambridge, Portsmouth, and Nor- 
 wich. Some of our modern verse is a symptom of 
 the present renaissance, — which itself delights in 
 going beyond its models. More spindles, more arti- 
 fice, more furbelows and elaborate graces. Its origi- 
 nals were an imitation, as we find them in the villas 
 of Pope and Walpole, in Hogarth's toilet-party, in ar- 
 chitecture, gardening, costume, furniture, manners. 
 Here were negro pages, gewgaws, silks and porcelain 
 from China (as now from Japan) — a mixture of Brit- 
 ish, Gallic, and Oriental fashions and decorations. 
 Now we are working in much the same spirit, and 
 
 Holnus's 
 Ttteihod a 
 survival^ 
 and not a 
 renais- 
 sance. 
 
 The 7ievj 
 
 vague. 
 
2/6 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Holmes^ 
 the leader 
 of his 
 class. 
 
 Always a 
 
 University 
 
 paet. 
 
 even more resolutely, with novelties added from re- 
 gions then unfamiliar, but reviving in both life and 
 literature the manner of that day. A new liking for 
 the Georgian heroics and octosyllabics is queerly 
 blended with our practice in the latest French forms, 
 — themselves a revival of a far more ancient min- 
 strelsy. Such things when first produced, the genuine 
 expression of their time, may yield a less conscious 
 pleasure, but are of more worth ; they have the savor 
 of honest purpose, which their imitation lacks. Among 
 living old-style poets. Dr. Holmes, the least complex 
 and various, seems most nearly to the manner born ; 
 his work, as I say, being a survival, and not an ex- 
 periment. It is freshened, however, by the animation 
 which, haplessly for compilers of provincial literature, 
 was wanting in the good Old Colony days. The 
 maker wears the ancestral garb, and is a poet in 
 spite of it. His verses have the courtesy and wit, 
 without the pedagogy, of the knee-buckle time, and a 
 flavor that is really their own. There are other 
 eighteenth-century survivors, whose sponsors are for- 
 mality and dulness ; but Holmes has the modern 
 vivacity, and adjusts without effort even the most 
 hackneyed measures to a new occasion. Throughout 
 the changes of fifty years he has practised the method 
 familiar to his youth, thinking it fit and natural, and 
 one to which he would do well to cling. The con- 
 servative persistency of his muse is as notable in mat- 
 ter as in manner. On the whole, so far as we can 
 classify him, he is at the head of his class, and in 
 other respects a class by himself. 
 
 Though the most direct and obvious of the Cam- 
 bridge group, the least given to subtilties, he is our 
 typical university poet ; the minstrel of the college that 
 bred him, and within whose liberties he has taught^ 
 
THE HARVARD WIT AND LAUREATE. 
 
 277 
 
 jested, sung, and toasted, from boyhood to what in 
 common folk would be old age. Alma Mater has 
 been more to him than to Lowell or Longfellow, — 
 has occupied a surprising portion of his range ; if we 
 go back to Frere and Canning, even to Gray, for 
 his like, there is no real prototype, and yet, as a uni- 
 versity poet, he curiously illustrates his own theories 
 of natural descent. Behind him figure many Harvard 
 rhymesters, — scholars and divines, who, like the War- 
 tons at Oxford, wrote verse whether poets or not, Eng- 
 lish and Latin nulla discrimine, and few indeed were 
 our early verse-makers that were not college men. 
 Holmes would be Holmes, if Norton and Urian 
 Oakes, — to say nothing of their Tenth Muse, Mistress 
 Bradstreet, whose Augustan features, if some Smybert 
 only had preserved them for us, assuredly should dis- 
 tinguish the entrance to the Harvard Annex, — if these 
 worthies, even if Byles and Green, had not flourished 
 before him ; but he is the lawful heir to their fervor, 
 wit, and authority, and not until he came into his estate 
 could Harvard boast a natural songster as her laureate. 
 Two centuries of acclimation, and some experience of 
 liberty, probably were needed to germinate the fancy 
 that riots in his measures. Before his day, moreover, 
 the sons of the Puritans hardly were ripe for the doc- 
 trine that there is a time to laugh, that humor is quite 
 as helpful a constituent of life as gravity or gloom. 
 Provincial-wise, they at first had to receive this in its 
 cruder form, and relished heartily the broad fun of 
 Holmes's youthful verse. Their mirth - maker soon 
 perceived that both fun and feeling are heightened 
 when combined. As a wit, no writer of English, unless 
 it be Lowell, at this day vies with him. As a humorist, 
 the poet of " The Last Leaf " was among the first to 
 teach his countrymen that pathos is an equal part of 
 
 Dispersef 
 of the an' 
 cestral 
 gloom. 
 
278 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Oliver 
 Wendell 
 Holmes : 
 iortt in 
 Cam- 
 bridge, 
 Mass., 
 Aug.iq, 
 1809. 
 
 At Har- 
 vard, 
 1825-29. 
 
 Light of 
 heart, and 
 full 0/ 
 health and 
 vst. 
 
 true humor ; that sorrow is lightened by jest, and jest 
 redeemed from coarseness by emotion, under most con- 
 ditions of this our evanescent human life. 
 
 II. 
 
 What one does easily is apt to be his forte, though 
 years may pass before he finds this out. Holmes's 
 early pieces, mostly college-verse, were better of their 
 kind than those of a better kind written in youth by 
 some of his contemporaries. The humbler the type, 
 the sooner the development. The young poet had 
 the aid of a suitable habitat ; life at Harvard was 
 the precise thing to bring out his talent. There was 
 nothing of the hermit-thrush in him ; his temper was 
 not of the withdrawing and reflective kind, nor mood- 
 ily introspective, — it throve on fellowship, and he 
 looked to his mates for an audience as readily as they 
 to him for a toast-master. He seems to have escaped 
 the poetic measles altogether ; if not, he hid his dis- 
 order with rare good sense, for his verse nowhere 
 shows that he felt himself " among men, but not of 
 them " ; on the contrary, he fairly might plume himself 
 on reversing the Childe's boast, and declare " I have 
 loved the world, and the world me." The thing we 
 first note is his elastic, buoyant nature, displayed from 
 youth to age with cheery frankness, — so that we in- 
 stinctively search through his Dutch and Puritan an- 
 cestries to see where came in the strain that made this 
 Yankee Frenchman of so likable a type. Health be- 
 gets relish, and Holmes has never lacked for zest, — 
 zest that gives one the sensations best worth living for, 
 if happiness be the true aim of life. He relished from 
 the first, as keenly as an . actor or orator or a clever 
 woman, appreciation within sight and sound. There is 
 
MEDICAL MEN OF LETTERS. 
 
 279 
 
 an unwritten Plaudite at the end of every poem, al- 
 most of every stanza. He has taken his reward as he 
 went along, even before printing his songs ; and if he 
 should fail of the birds in the bush, certainly has held 
 to every one in hand. It is given to few to capture 
 both the present and the future, — to Holmes, perhaps, 
 more nearly than to most of his craft, yet he would 
 be the last to doubt that he stands on lower ground 
 than those to whom poetry, for its own sake, has been 
 a passion and belief. In his early work the mirth so 
 often outweighed the sentiment as to lessen the prom- 
 ise and the self-prediction of his being a poet indeed. 
 Some of one's heart-blood must spill for this, and, 
 while many of his youthful stanzas are serious and 
 eloquent, those which approach the feeling of true 
 poetry are in celebration of companionship and good 
 cheer, so that he seems like a down East Omar or 
 Hafiz, exemplifying what our gracious Emerson was 
 wont to preach, that there is honest wisdom in song 
 and joy. 
 
 If the Rev. Abiel Holmes had serious thoughts of 
 finding his boy so animated by the father's " Life of Dr. 
 Stiles " as to be set upon entering the ministry, they 
 must have faded out as he read the graceless rhymes, 
 the comic and satiric verse, which the vivacious youth 
 furnished to " The Collegian." His metrical escapades 
 also boded ill, as in Lowell's case, for a long allegiance 
 to the law, — which, it seems, he read after graduation. 
 No one can long remain a good lawyer and a fertile 
 man of letters. The medical profession, however, has 
 teemed with poets and scholars ; for its practice makes 
 literary effort a delightful change, an avocation, rather 
 than a fatiguing addition to scriptural labor for daily 
 bread. Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, for instance, fifty 
 years ago in New York, was almost the prototype, 
 
 "Tht Cot- 
 1830. 
 
 Medical 
 men of 
 letters. 
 
28o 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Qualities 
 
 of 
 
 Holtnes^s 
 
 early 
 
 verse. 
 
 Rhetoric. 
 
 mutatis mutandis, of our Autocrat, by virtue of his wit, 
 learning, literary work, and civic and social impor- 
 tance. Holmes is a shining instance of one who has 
 done solid work as a teacher and practitioner, in spite 
 of his success in literature. As a versifier, he started 
 with the advantage of hitting the public by buffo- 
 pieces, and with the disadvantage of being expected 
 to make his after-hits in the same manner, — to write 
 for popular amusement in the major rather than the 
 minor key. His verses, with the measured drum-beat 
 of their natural rhythm, were easily understood j he 
 bothered his audience with no accidental effects, no 
 philandering after the finer lyrical distinctions. It is 
 not hard to surmise what "standard " poets had been 
 found on his father's book-shelves. Eloquence was a 
 feature of his lyrics, — such as broke out in the line, 
 " Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! " and the simple 
 force of " Old Ironsides " is indeed worth noting as it 
 culminates in the last stanza. The making of verse 
 that is seized upon by school-day spokesmen barely 
 outlived the influence of Croly, of Drake and Halleck, 
 of Pierpont with his " Stand ! the ground 's your own, 
 my braves ! ". and Holmes himself would scarcely write 
 in this way now. Yet one who sees, looming up by 
 the Portsmouth docks, a fine old hulk to which these 
 lines secured half a century of preservation will find 
 them coming again to mind. " The Meeting of the 
 Dryads," another early poem, is marked by so much 
 grace that it seems as if the youth who wrote its qua- 
 trains might in time have added a companion-piece to 
 " The Talking Oak." The things which he turned off 
 with purely comic aim were neatly finished, and the 
 merriment of a new writer, who dared not be " as 
 funny '' as he could, did quite as much for him as his 
 poems of a higher class. The fashion of the latter, 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS. 
 
 281 
 
 however, we see returning again. There is the pathetic 
 silhouette of the old man, who so 
 
 "shakes his feeble head. 
 That it seems as if he said, 
 ' They are gone.' " 
 
 This equals the best recent knee-buckle verse, and 
 excels most of it in simplicity. It taught a lesson to 
 Locker and Saxe, and more than one among younger 
 favorites look up to Holmes affectionately, conscious 
 that the author of " The Last Leaf," " My Aunt," 
 " The Dilemma," and of later trifles still more refined, 
 like " Dorothy Q.," is the Nestor of their light-armed 
 holiday encampment. 
 
 A poet so full of zest is wont to live his life, rather 
 than to scorn delights in service of the thankless 
 muse. Dr. Holmes's easy-going method, and a sensi- 
 ble estimate of his own powers, have defined the limits 
 of his zeal. His poetry was and is, like his humor, the 
 overflow of a nervous, original, decidedly intellectual 
 nature ; of sparkling life, no less, in which he gath- 
 ered the full worth of heyday experiences. See that 
 glirnpse of Paris, a student's pencilled sketch, with 
 Clemence tripping down the Rue de Seine. It is but a 
 bit, yet through its atmosphere we make out a poet who 
 cared as much for the sweets of the poetic life as for 
 the work that was its product. He had through it all 
 a Puritan sense of duty, and the worldly wisdom that 
 goes with a due perception of values, and he never lost 
 sight of his practical career. His profession, after all, 
 was what he took most seriously. Accepting, then, 
 with hearty thanks, his care-dispelling rhyme and rea- 
 son, pleased often by the fancies which he tenders in 
 lieu of imagination and power, — we go through the 
 collection of his verse, and see that it has amounted 
 to a great deal in the course of a bustling fifty years. 
 
 Knee- 
 
 Inicklii 
 verse. 
 
 Personal 
 
 character* 
 
 isiics. 
 
282 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 A natural 
 songster 
 ■zndbal- 
 ^£tdist. 
 
 These numerous pieces divide themselves, as to torm, 
 into two classes, — lyrics and poetic essays in solid 
 couplet-verse ; as to purpose, into the lighter songs that 
 may be sung, and the nobler numbers, part lyrical, part 
 the poems, both gay and sober, delivered at frequent 
 intervals during his pleasant career. He is a song- 
 writer of the natural kind, through his taste for the 
 open vowel-sounds, and for measures that set them- 
 selves to tune. Lyrics of high grade, whose verbal 
 and rhythmical design is of itself sufficient for the 
 spiritual ear, are not those which are best adapted to 
 the musician's needs. Some of Holmes's ballads are 
 still better than his songs. Lines in "The Pilgrim's 
 Vision " have a native flavor : — 
 
 " Come hither, God-be-Glorjfied, 
 
 And sit upon my knee ; 
 Behold the dream unfolding 
 
 Whereof I spake to thee. 
 By the winter's hearth in Leyden, 
 
 And on the stormy sea." 
 
 Even his ballads are raciest when brimmed with 
 the element that most attracts their author, that of 
 festive good-fellowship. He gives us a brave picture 
 of Miles Standish, the little captain, stirring a posset 
 with his sword : — 
 
 " He poured the fiery Hollands in, — the man that never 
 
 feared, — 
 He took a long and solemn draught, and wiped his yellow 
 
 beard ; 
 And one by one the musketeers — the men that fought and 
 
 prayed — 
 All drank as 't were their mother's milk, and not a man 
 
 afraid." 
 
 Yet if the poet's artistic conscience had been sterner, 
 the last two stanzas of this ballad " On Lending a 
 
RHYMED ADDRESSES. 
 
 283 
 
 Punch-bowl " would not have been spared to weaken 
 its proper close. 
 
 In his favorite department Holmes always has been 
 an easy winner, gaining in quality as fast as the stand- 
 ard of such work has advanced. In fact, he has ad- 
 vanced the standard by his own growth in brain- 
 power and wisdom. There was a time when half 
 our public men wrote poems for recitation, — when 
 every set oration was paired with a platform-poem. 
 The Phi Beta Kappa Society was answerable for many 
 labored pentameters of Everett, Winthrop, Sprague, 
 and other versifiers, born or made, — equally so the 
 numberless corporations of the federative Saxon race 
 in our aspiring municipalities. Of all these orators 
 in rhyme. Holmes, by natural selection, survives to 
 our day, — and how aptly he flourishes withal ! From 
 his start as class-poet, and his step to the front with 
 Poetry, a Metrical Essay, the intervals have not been 
 long between his rhymed addresses of the standard 
 platform length : at first named, like the books of 
 Herodotus, after the Muses, — Urania, Terpsichore, 
 and so on, — a practice shrewdly abandoned, see- 
 ing that the Graces, the Fates, and all the daugh- 
 ters of Nereus hardly would suffice to christen the 
 long succession of the Doctor's metrical disquisitions, 
 greater or less, that ceases not even with our day. 
 In the years that followed his graduation, while prac- 
 tising in Boston and afterward a lecturer at Dartmouth, 
 he was summoned, nothing loath, whenever a dinner- 
 song or witty ballad was needed at home, and calls 
 from transpontine and barbaric regions came fast 
 upon him as his popularity grew. Here are some 
 forty printed poems, which cheered that lucky class 
 of '29, and how many others went before and after 
 them we know not. Among college-poets the para- 
 
 His 
 
 rhymed 
 A ddresses. 
 
 " Poetry : 
 a Metrical 
 Essay," 
 1S36. 
 
 " PoetKS oj 
 the Class 
 ofig," 
 1851-81. 
 
284 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Boston^ 
 and its 
 poet. 
 
 Society 
 Verse. 
 See Chap. 
 
 JCII.^ and 
 cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets": 
 fW. 272, 
 273- 
 
 gon, — and surely this the ideal civic bard, who a* 
 the outset boasted of his town, 
 
 " Her threefold hill shall be 
 The home of art, the nurse of liberty," 
 
 and who has celebrated her every effort, in peace or 
 war, to make good the boast. He is an essential part 
 of Boston, like the crier who becomes so identified 
 with a court that it seems as if Justice must change 
 her quarters when he is gone. The Boston of Holmes, 
 distinct as his own personality, certainly must go with 
 him. Much will become new, when old things pass 
 away with the generation of a wit who made a jest 
 that his State House was the hub of the solar system, 
 and in his heart believed it. The time is ended when 
 we can be so local ; this civic faith was born before 
 the age of steam, and cannot outlast, save as a tradi- 
 tion, the advent of electric motors and octuple-sheets. 
 Towns must lose their individuality, even as men, — 
 who yearly differ less from one another. Yet the 
 provincialism of Boston has been its charm, and its 
 citizens, striving to be cosmopolitan, in time may re- 
 pent the effacement of their birth-mark. 
 
 I have referred to the standing of Dr. Holmes as 
 a life-long expert in the art of writing those -natty 
 lyrics, satires, and jeux iTesprit, which it has become 
 the usage to designate as society-verse. Ten years 
 ago, when discussing this "patrician" industry, I 
 scarcely foresaw how actively it soon would be pur- 
 sued. Its minor devotees certainly have a place in 
 the Parnassian court ; but, if content with this petted 
 service, must rank among the squires and pages, and 
 not as lords of high degree. To indulge in a conceit, 
 — and no change of metaphor is too fanciful with re. 
 spect to the poetry of conceits and graces, — much 
 
SOCIETY- VERSE. 
 
 285 
 
 of our modish verse is only the soufflee and syllabub 
 of a banquet from which strength-giving meats and 
 blooded wine are absent Taken as the verse which 
 a drawling society affects to patronize, it figures even 
 with the olives and radishes scattered along the meal, 
 wherefrom arrogance and beauty languidly pick trifles 
 while their thoughts are on something else, — or with 
 the comfits at the end, lipped and fingered by sated 
 guests, or taken home as a souvenir and for the 
 nursery. And yet society-verse, meaning that which 
 catches the secret of that day or this, may be — as 
 poets old and new have shown us — picturesque, even 
 dramatic, and rise to a high degree of humor and of 
 sage or tender thought. The consecutive poems of 
 one whose fancy plays about life as he sees it may 
 be a feast complete and epicurean, having solid dishes 
 and fantastic, all justly savored, cooked with discre- 
 tion, flanked with honest wine, and whose cates and 
 dainties, even, are not designed to cloy. Taken as a 
 whole, Holmes's poetry has regaled us somewhat after 
 this fashion. His pieces light and wise — " Content- 
 ment," the " Epilogue to the Breakfast-table Series," 
 "At the Pantomime," "A Familiar Letter," etc. — 
 are always enjoyable. One or two are exquisite in 
 treatment of the past. "Dorothy Q.," that sprightly 
 capture of a portrait's maiden soul, has given, like 
 "The Last Leaf," lessons to admiring pupils of our 
 time. For sheer humor, " The One-hoss Shay " and 
 " Parson Turell's Legacy " are memorable, — extrav- 
 agances, but full of character, almost as purely Yan- 
 kee as "Tam O'Shanter" is purely Scotch. In va- 
 rious whimsicalities. Holmes sets the key for Harte 
 and others to follow. "The First Fan," read at a 
 bric-&,-brac festival in 1877, proves him an adept in 
 the latest mode. There is also a conceit of showing 
 
 Holmes thi 
 true Am- 
 jihUryon. 
 
286 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 His most 
 poetns. 
 
 Cf. " El- 
 egy on a 
 SMI— 
 The Nau- 
 tilus": 
 Duyck, 
 ^'•Cyc.Am. 
 Lit." /., 
 537- 
 
 the youngsters a trick or two, in the story " How the 
 Old Horse Won the Bet," told to the class of '7 1 by 
 the minstrel of the class of '29, and pointed with the 
 moral that " A horse can trot, for all he 's old." 
 
 Good and bright as these things are, some of his 
 graver work excels them. Where most in earnest he 
 is most imaginative ; this, of course, is where he is 
 most interested, and this again, in moods the results 
 of his scientific bent and experience. Here he shows 
 himself akin to those who have both lightness and 
 strength. Thackeray's reverential mood, that was so 
 beautiful, is matched by the feeling which Holmes, 
 having the familiarity with nature that breeds contempt 
 in grosser men, exhibits in his thoughts upon " The 
 Living Temple." The stanzas thus named, in meas- 
 ure and reverent effect, are not unworthy to be read 
 with Addison's lofty paraphrase of the Nineteenth 
 Psalm. Humility in presence of recognized law is 
 the spirit of the flings at cant and half-truth in his 
 rhymed essays. There are charity and tenderness in 
 "The Voiceless," "Avis," "Iris," and "The Silent Mel- 
 ody." Another little poem, "Under the Violets," re- 
 veals the lover of Collins. But " The Living Temple " 
 and " The Chambered Nautilus " doubtless show us 
 their writer's finest qualities, and are not soon to be 
 forgotten. There is a group of his "Vignettes,'' in 
 recollection of Wordsworth, Moore, Keats, and Shelley, 
 whose cadence is due to that gift of sympathetic vi- 
 bration which poets seem to possess. These pieces 
 are as good as any to furnish examples of the sudden 
 fancies peculiar to Holmes's genius, whose glint, if not 
 imagination, is like that of the sparks struck off fronj 
 it. One from the stanzas on Wordsworth : — 
 
 "This is my bark, — a pigmy's ship; 
 Beneath a child it rolls ; 
 
SPARKLING 'OCCASIONAL' PIECES. 
 
 287 
 
 Fear not, — one body makes it dip, 
 But not a, thousand souls." 
 
 And this from the Shelley poem, which has an elo- 
 quent movement throughout : — 
 
 " But Love still prayed, with agonizing wail, 
 
 ' One, one last look, ye heaving waters, yield ! ' 
 Till Ocean, clashing in his jointed mail. 
 
 Raised the pale burden on his level shield." 
 
 The things which, after all, sharply distinguish 
 Holmes from other poets, and constitute the bulk of 
 his work, are the lyrics and metrical essays composed 
 for special audiences or occasions. Starting without 
 much creative ambition, and as a bard of mirth and 
 sentiment, it is plain that he was subject to faults 
 which an 6asy standard entails. His aptitude for 
 writing, with entire correctness, in familiar measures, 
 has been such that nothing but an equal mental apt- 
 ness could make up for the frequent padding, the in- 
 evitably thin passages, of his longer efforts, and for 
 the conceits to which, like Moore and Hood, he has 
 been tempted to sacrifice the spirit of many a grace- 
 ful poem. To this day there is no telling whither a 
 fancy, once caught and mounted, will bear this lively 
 rider. Poetry at times has seemed his diversion, 
 rather than a high endeavor ; yet perhaps this very 
 seeming is essential to the frolic and careless temper 
 of society-verse. The charm that is instant, the tri- 
 umph of the passing hour, — these are captured by 
 song that often is transitory as the night which listens 
 to it. In Holmes we have an attractive voice devoted 
 to a secondary order of expression. Yet many of his 
 notes survive, and are worthy of a rehearing. A true 
 faculty is requisite to insure this result, and it is but 
 just to say that with his own growth his brilliant oc- 
 casional pieces strengthened in thought, wit, and feeling. 
 
 Faults and 
 merits oj 
 ike '^occa' 
 sionaV 
 verse. 
 
288 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Eighteenth 
 Centvry 
 style and 
 thought. 
 
 With respect to his style, there is no one more free 
 from structural whims and vagaries. He has an ear 
 for the " classical " forms of English verse, the aca- 
 demic measures which still bid fair to hold their own 
 — those confirmed by Pope and Goldsmith, and here 
 in vogue long after German dreams, Italian languors, 
 and the French rataplan had their effect upon the 
 poets of our motherland across the sea. His way of 
 thought, like his style, is straightforward and senten- 
 tious ; both are the reverse of what is called transcen- 
 dental. When he has sustained work to do, and 
 braces himself for a great occasion, nothing will suit 
 but the rhymed pentameter ; his heaviest roadster, six- 
 teen hands high, for a long journey. It has served 
 him well, is his by use and possession, and he stur- 
 dily will trust it to the end : — 
 
 " Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong 
 The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song; 
 Full well I know the strong heroic line 
 Has lost its fashion since I made it mine; 
 But there are tricks old singers will not learn, 
 And this grave measure still must serve my turn. 
 
 Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride 
 
 The straight-backed measure with its stately stride; 
 
 It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope; 
 
 It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope ; 
 
 In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain; 
 
 Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain; 
 
 I smile to listen while the critic's scorn 
 
 Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn ; 
 
 Bid each new rhymer try his dainty skill 
 
 And mould his frozen phrases as he will ; 
 
 We thank the artist fo? his neat device, — 
 
 The shape is pleasing, though the stuff is ice." 
 
 He compares it, as contrasted with later modes, to 
 
HIS FAVORITE MEASURE. 
 
 289 
 
 " the slashed doublet of the cavalier," — the costume 
 that would be chosen by Velasquez or Van Dyke. 
 Now, the heroic measure is stately, but if picturesque- 
 ness is to be the test, few will back his opinion that 
 in this measure, as written by Pope's adherents, " Un- 
 fading still the better type endures." In the course 
 of English song, the rhymed pentameter has included 
 more distinct styles than even blank-verse, and quite 
 as plainly takes on the stamp of its moulder. For the 
 man, after all, makes or mars it; it lends itself with 
 fatal readiness to merely didactic uses, and hence has 
 been the patient slave of dullards. As written by 
 Chaucer, it was picturesque, full of music and color, 
 — the interfluent, luxurious pentameter couplet, re- 
 vived by Hunt and Keats, and variously utilized for 
 metrical narrative by successive nineteenth-century 
 poets. Still, the " straight-backed," heroic measure 
 of Queen Anne's time, say what we will, must be a 
 natural and generic English form, that could so main- 
 tain itself to our own day. Recall Pope's measure in 
 " The Dunciad,'' and again, in " The Rape of the 
 Lock," — that elegant mock-epic which yet stands at 
 the head of all poetry k-la-mode. How it delights a 
 class that still read Byron and Campbell and Scott, 
 the learned body of jurists and other professional 
 men, sensible and humane, who care little for the 
 poetry of beauty alone. I observe that lawyers, vet- 
 eran judges, merry and discreet, enjoy the verse of 
 Holmes. It was asked concerning Landor, " Shall 
 not the -wise have their poets as well as the witless ?" 
 and shall we begrudge the wigged and gowned their 
 rations of wit and epigram and lettered jest ? Not 
 the form, but the informing spirit, is the essential 
 thing, and this many, who are on the watch for Amer- 
 ican originality, fail to comprehend. An apt taster 
 19 
 
 The 
 rhy»ted 
 
 pentame' 
 ter. 
 
 Seef. 89. 
 
 Senten- 
 tiffusness. 
 
ago 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Master of 
 his own 
 field. 
 
 A distinc- 
 tive gift. 
 
 knows which wine has the novel flavor, though the 
 vintages look alike to the eyes. 
 
 The mechanism of Holmes's briefer occasional 
 poems is fully as trite and simple. Whether this 
 may be from choice or limitation, he has accumu- 
 lated a unique series of pieces, vivacious as those of 
 Tom Moore, but with the brain of New England in 
 them, and notions and instances without end. How 
 sure their author's sense of the fitness of things, his 
 gift of adaptability to the occasion, — to how many 
 occasions, and what different things ! He outrivals 
 Kossuth, the adroit orator who landed in a new world, 
 master of its language, and had forensic arguments 
 for the bar, grace and poetry for women, statistics for 
 merchants, and an assortment of local allusions for 
 the respective towns and villages in which he pleaded 
 his cause. A phantasmagory of the songs, odes, and 
 rhymed addresses, of so many years ; collegiate and 
 civic glories ; tributes to princes, embassies, generals, 
 heroes ; welcomes to novelists and poets ; eulogies of 
 the dead ; verse inaugural and dedicatory ; stanzas 
 read at literary breakfasts, New England dinners, 
 municipal and bucolic feasts ; odes natal, nuptial, and 
 mortuary ; metrical delectations offered to his brothers 
 of the medical craft — to which he is so loyal — brist- 
 ling with scorn of quackery and challenge to oppos- 
 ing systems, — not only equal to all occasions, but 
 growing better with their increase. The half of his 
 early collections is made up from efforts of this sort, 
 and they constitute four fifths of his verse during 
 the last thirty years. Now, what has carried Holmes 
 so bravely through all this, if not a kind of special 
 masterhood, an individuality, humor, touch, that we 
 shall not see again ? Thus we come, in fine, to be 
 sensible of the distinctive gift of this poet. The 
 
PROSE WRITINGS. 
 
 291 
 
 achievement for which he must be noted is, that in a 
 field the most arduous and least attractive he should 
 bear himself with such zest and fitness as to be num- 
 bered among poets, and should do honor to an office 
 which they chiefly dread or mistrust, and which is little 
 calculated to excite their inspiration. 
 
 III. 
 
 Having in mind the case of our Autocrat, one is 
 moved to traverse the ancient maxim, and exclaim, 
 " Count no man unhappy till his dying day." There 
 are few instances where a writer, suddenly, and after 
 the age when fame is won " or never," compels the 
 public to readjust its estimate of his powers. Holmes 
 was not idle as a rhymester from 1836 to 1857 ; but 
 his chief labor was given to medical practice and in- 
 struction, and it was fair to suppose that his literary 
 capacity had been gauged. Possibly his near friends 
 had no just idea of his versatile talent until he put 
 forth the most taking serial in prose that ever estab- 
 lished the prestige of a new magazine. At forty-eight 
 he began a new career, as if it were granted him to 
 live life over, with the wisdom of middle-age in his 
 favor at the start. Coming, in a sense, like an author's 
 first book. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table natu- 
 rally was twice as clever as any " first book " of the 
 period. It appears that this work was planned in his 
 youth ; but we owe to his maturity the experience, 
 drollery, proverbial humor, and suggestion that flow 
 at ease through its pages. Little is too high or too 
 low for the comment of this down-East philosopher. 
 A kind of attenuated Franklin, he views things and 
 folks with the less robustness, but with keener dis- 
 tinction and insight. His pertinent maxims are so 
 
 His works 
 in prose. 
 
 '■'■The Alt- 
 tocrat of 
 th^ Breah- 
 fast- Ta- 
 ble," 1858. 
 
292 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 The "Au- 
 lacrat " 
 Series, 
 
 frequent that it seems, as was said of Emerson, as if 
 he had jotted them down from time to time and here 
 first brought them to application ; they are apothegms 
 of common life and action, often of mental experience, 
 strung together by a device so original as to make 
 the work quite a novelty in literature. The Autocrat 
 holds an intellectual tourney at a boarding-house table ; 
 there jousts against .humbug and stupidity, gives light 
 touches of knowledge, sentiment, illustration, coins 
 here and there a phrase destined to be long current, 
 nor forgets the poetic duty of providing a little idyl 
 of human love and interest. Here, also, we find his 
 best lyrical pieces, — on the side of beauty, " The 
 Chambered Nautilus " and " The Living Temple " ; 
 on that of mirth, " The One-Hoss Shay " and its com- 
 panion-piece. How alert his fancy! A tree blows 
 down in his woods ; he counts the rings — there are 
 hundreds of them. " This is Shakespeare's. The 
 tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born, 
 ten inches when he died. A little less than ten inches 
 when Milton was born ; seventeen when he died. . . . 
 Here is the span of Napoleon's career. ... I have 
 seen many wooden preachers, never one like this." 
 Again, of letters from callow aspirants : " I have two 
 letters on file ; one is a pattern of adulation, the other 
 of impertinence. My reply to the first, containing the 
 best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous lan- 
 guage, had brought out the second. There was some 
 sport in this, but Dullness is not commonly a game 
 fish, and only sulks after he is struck." In fine, the 
 Autocrat, if not profound, is always acute, — the live- 
 liest of monologists, and altogether too game to be 
 taken at a disadvantage within his own territory. 
 
 Two later books, completing the Autocrat series, 
 follow in a similar vein, their scene the same board- 
 
THE 'AUTOCRAT' SERIES. 
 
 293 
 
 ing-house, their slight plots varied by new personages 
 and by-play, the conductor of the Yankee symposia 
 the same Autocrat, through the aid of a Professor and 
 a Poet successively. The best comment on these 
 works is made by their sagacious author, who likens 
 them to the wine of grapes that are squeezed in the 
 press after the first juice that runs of itself from the 
 heart of the fruit has been drawn off. In this lies a 
 recognition of the effect of a market that comes to an 
 author somewhat late in his life. It is too much to 
 expect that one who makes a wonderfully fresh start 
 at fifty should run better and better, as if in the pro- 
 gressive and not the decadent course of life, which 
 latter our author himself reckons from a much earlier 
 stage. And a paying American market for purely lit- 
 erary work began with the foundation of the " Atlan- 
 tic." Poe's will had been too weak to- wait for it ; 
 Hawthorne had striven for years ; others had struggled 
 and gone down. A lucrative demand for Holmes's 
 prose was too grateful not to be utilized ; besides, 
 the income of the magazine required his efforts. I 
 have laid stress upon the need of a market to promote 
 literary activity, but it is worth while to note how far, 
 at certain times and in special cases, too ready a sale 
 tends to lower the grade of ideal work. This may 
 even now be observed. On the one hand, new writers 
 certainly are brought out by the competition between 
 our thriving publishers of books and periodicals ; on 
 the other, those who prove themselves capable, and are 
 found available by the caterers, are drawn into a sys- 
 tem of over-methodical production at stated intervals. 
 The stint is furnished regularly; each year or half- 
 year the new novel is thrown off. cleverly adapted to 
 the popular taste. Ideal effort is deadened j the nat- 
 ural bent of a poetic mind is subordinated to labor 
 
 Dangers 
 of a sure 
 market. 
 
294 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 " T/k Pro- 
 fessor at 
 the Breah- 
 yiist-Ta- 
 *&," 1839. 
 
 " The Poet 
 at the 
 Breakfast- 
 Tahle," 
 >873. 
 
 " Elsie 
 
 Venner,^^ 
 
 1861. 
 
 " The 
 Guardian 
 Angel," 
 1867. 
 
 that is best paid. The hope, patience, aspiration that 
 should produce a masterpiece are cast aside. If there 
 be a general advance it is monotonous, and at the 
 expense of individual genius. My deduction is that 
 matter supplied regularly for a persistent market, 
 though of a high order of journey-work, is not im- 
 properly designated by that name. 
 
 Tke Professor is written somewhat in the manner 
 of Sterne, yet without much artifice. The story of 
 Iris is an interwoven thread of gold. The poems in 
 this book are inferior to those of the Autocrat, but 
 its author here and there shows a gift of drawing 
 real characters ; the episode of the Little Gentleman 
 is itself a poem, — its close very touching, though im- 
 itated from the death-scene in Tristram Shandy. 7%i? 
 Poet at the Breakfast-Table, written some years after, is 
 of a more serious cast than its predecessors, chiefly 
 devoted to Holmes's peculiar mental speculations and 
 his fluent gossip on books and learning. He makes 
 his rare old pundit a liberal thinker, clearly of the 
 notion that a high scholarship leads to broader views. 
 I do not think he would banish Greek from a college 
 curriculum ; but if he should, the Old Master would 
 cry out upon him. Between the second and third 
 works of this series, his two novels had appeared, — 
 curious examples of what a clever observer can do 
 by way of fiction in the afternoon of life. As con- 
 ceptions, these were definite and original, as much so 
 as Hawthorne's ; but that great romancer would have 
 presented in a far more dramatic and imaginative 
 fashion an Elsie Venner, tainted with the ophidian 
 madness that so vexed her human soul, — a Myrtle 
 Hazard, inheriting the trace of Indian savagery at 
 war with her higher organization. The somewhat 
 crude handling of these tales betrays the fact that 
 
AN INDEPENDENT THINKER. 
 
 295 
 
 the author was not trained by practice in the nove- 
 list's art. But they have the merit of coming down 
 to fact with an exhibition of common, often vulgar, 
 every-day life in the country towns of Massachusetts. 
 This, and realistic drawings of sundry provincial types, 
 Holmes produces in a manner directly on the way to 
 the subsequent evolution of more finished works, like 
 Howells's '"A Modern Instance" and "The Undis- 
 covered Country." Meanwhile he verifies his birth- 
 right by adapting these narratives to the debate on 
 inherited tendency, limited responsibility, and freedom 
 of the will. On the whole, the novels and the Auto- 
 crat volumes were indigenous works, in plot and style 
 behind the deft creations of our day, but with their 
 writer's acumen everywhere conspicuous. If their sci- 
 ence and suggestion now seem trite, it must be 
 owned that the case was opposite when they were 
 written, and that ideas now familiar were set afloat in 
 this way. Little of our recent literature is so fresh, 
 relatively to our period, as these books were in con- 
 sideration of their own. As Holmes's humor had re- 
 laxed the grimness of a Puritan constituency, so his 
 prose satire did much to liberalize their clerical sys- 
 tem. This was not without some wrath and objurga- 
 tion on the part of the more rigid clergy and laity 
 alike, and at times worked to the disadvantage of the 
 satirist and his publishers. The situation now seems 
 far away and amusing: equally so, the queer audac- 
 ity of his off-hand pronunciamentos upon the gravest 
 themes. He was responsible, I fear, for a very airy 
 settlement of distracting social problems, to his own 
 satisfaction and thaf of a generation of half-informed 
 readers; forgetting ready sanction to his postulate of 
 a Brahmin caste, and leading many a Gifted Hopkins 
 to set up for its representative. Yet his dialogues 
 
 Realistic 
 prototypes. 
 
 A shaking 
 of the dry 
 hones. 
 
296 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Holmes's 
 Viter work. 
 
 Address 
 on Etner- 
 son {Mass. 
 HUt. 
 Soc), 1882. 
 
 and stories are in every way the expression of a stim- 
 ulating personage, their author, — a frank display of 
 the Autocrat himself. If one would learn how to be 
 his own Boswell, these five books are naive examples 
 of a successful American method. 
 
 Holmes's mental fibre, sturdier with use, shows to 
 advantage in a few poems, speeches, and prose essays 
 of his later years. These illustrate the benefits to an 
 author of having, in Quaker diction, a concern upon 
 him; each, like the speech "On the Inevitable Crisis," 
 is the outflow of personal conviction, or, like " Ho- 
 meopathy vs. Allopathy," "The Physiology of Versifi- 
 cation," etc., the discussion of a topic in which he 
 takes a special interest. Jonathan Edwards he had 
 epitomized in verse : — 
 
 "the salamander of divines. 
 
 A deep, strong nature, pure and undefiled ; 
 
 Faith, strong as his who stabbed his sleeping child." 
 
 The notable prose essay on Edwards excites a wish 
 that he oftener had found occasion to indulge his 
 talent for analytic characterization. He has few su- 
 periors in discernment of a man's individuality, how- 
 ever distinct that individuality may be from his own. 
 Emerson, for example, was a thinker and poet whose 
 chartered disciples scarcely would have selected 
 Holmes as likely to proffer a sympathetic or even ob- 
 jective transcript of him. Yet, when the time came, 
 Holmes was equal to the effort. He presented with 
 singular clearness, and with an epigrammatic genius 
 at white heat, if not the esoteric view of the Concord 
 Plotinus, at least what could enable an audience to 
 get at the mould of that serene teacher and make 
 some fortunate surmise of the spirit that ennobled it. 
 I do not recall a more faithful and graphic outside 
 portrait. True, it was done by an artist who applies 
 
PIQUANT ORIGINALITY. 
 
 297 
 
 the actual eye, used for corporal vision, to the elusive 
 side of things, and who thinks little too immaterial 
 for the test of reason and science, — who looks, we 
 might say, at unexplored tracts by sunlight rather 
 than starlight. But it sets Emerson before us in both 
 his noonday and sundown moods ; in his character as 
 a town-dweller, and also as when "he looked upon 
 this earth very much as a visitor from another planet 
 would look on it." With no waste words, the poet's 
 walk, talk, bearing, and intellect are illustrated by a 
 series of images,. and in a style so vehicular as to de- 
 serve unusual praise. Before the appearance of Dr. 
 Holmes's full treatise on the theme, I read this Bos- 
 ton address and suspected that in understanding of 
 the Emersonian cult he was not behind its votaries. 
 His acceptance of it may be another thing, depend- 
 ing, like his religion, upon the cast of his own na- 
 ture. 
 
 Many were surprised to find Mr. Arnold rating 
 Emerson, as a writer, below Montaigne. The latter, 
 however rare and various, depended largely in his 
 essays on citations from the ancients, — in fact, from 
 writers of every grade and period ; while of Emerson's 
 infrequent borrowing it may be said that his para- 
 phrase often is worth more than the original, and 
 that otherwise each of his fruitful sentences contains 
 some epigram, or striking thought, illuminated by a 
 flash of insight and power. Holmes, among our 
 poets, is another original writer, but his prose is a 
 setting for brilliants of a different kind; his shrewd 
 sayings are bright with native metaphor ; he is a 
 proverb-maker, some of whose words are not without 
 wings. When he ranges along the line of his tastes 
 and studies, we find him honestly bred. Plato and 
 the Stagirite, the Elzevir classics, the English essay- 
 
 as an 
 epzgraW' 
 matist ani. 
 proverb' 
 maker. 
 
298 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 A believ- 
 er in the 
 Reign of 
 Law. 
 
 Conserva- 
 iistn. 
 
 \jiyalty. 
 
 ists, the fathers of the healing art, must be in sight 
 on his shelves, even though 
 
 " the damp offspring of the modern press 
 Flaunts on his table with its pictured dress." 
 
 But his proper study is man, the regard of people 
 and movements close at hand. Somewhat distrustful 
 of the " inner light,'' lie stands squarely upon obser- 
 vation, experience, induction ; yet at times is so vol- 
 atile a theorist that one asks how much of his saying 
 is conviction, and how much mirth or whim. His 
 profession has put him on the alert for natural ten- 
 dency, in the belief that fortune goes by inheritance. 
 Crime and virtue are physically foreordained. He 
 takes unkindly to sentimental attempts at reform. 
 His temper and training so largely affect his writings 
 that the latter scarcely can be criticised from the 
 merely literary point of view. Holmes's conservatism, 
 then, goes well enough with a poet of the old regime, 
 and with the maker of light satires and well-bred 
 verse. In these the utterance of a radical would be 
 as out of keeping as Brown of Osawatomie in a 
 court-suit. There is no call for diatribes on his lack 
 of sympathy with the Abolitionists, with the transcen- 
 dentalists, with new schools of medicine and art. 
 What has this to do with the service of our gallant . 
 and amiable chanteur ? He sticks to his own like the 
 wearer of " The Entailed Hat." Innovation savors 
 ill to his nostril ; yet we feel that if brought face to 
 face with a case of wrong or suffering, his action 
 would be prompted by a warm heart and as swift as 
 any enthusiast could desire. When the Civil War 
 broke out, this conservative poet, who had taken little 
 part in the agitation that preceded it, shared in every 
 way the spirit and duties of the time. None of oui 
 
ANCESTRAL FEELING. 
 
 299 
 
 poets wrote more stirring war lyrics during the con- 
 flict, none has been more national so far as loyalty, 
 in the Websterian sense, to our country and her em- 
 blems is concerned. He always has displayed the 
 simple instinctive patriotism of the American minute- 
 man. He may or may not side with his neighbors, 
 but he is for the nation ; purely republican, if scarcely 
 democratic. His pride is not of English, but of long 
 American descent. The roundheads of the old coun- 
 try were the cavaliers of the new, — a band of unti- 
 tled worthies moving off to found clans of their own. 
 " Other things being equal," the doctor does prefer 
 " a man of family." He goes " for the man with a 
 gallery of family portraits against the one with a 
 twenty-five cent daguerreotype," unless he finds "that 
 the latter is the better of the two." Better, he thinks, 
 accept asphyxia than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty 
 years to begin with, and then passes down the line 
 of descent. Even our " chryso-aristocracy " he thinks 
 is bettered by the process which secures to those 
 " who can afford the extreme luxury of beauty " the 
 finest specimens of " the young females of each suc- 
 cessive season." Thus far our sacerdotal celebrant 
 of genealogies and family-trees. It is likely that he 
 takes more interest than his compeers in the Proc. 
 Mass. Hist. Soc. But he represents his section within 
 these limits as strictly as the poet of the library, the 
 poet of the new and radical upper class, the fervent 
 poet of liberty and exaltation, — or even as Emerson, 
 that provincial citizen of the world at large. Our 
 Eastern group of poets is unique ; we shall have no 
 other of one caste and section so distinct in its sep- 
 arate personages. The Puritan strain in Holmes's 
 blood was kept pure in the secluded province of 
 Connecticut, where the stern Calvinism of the migra- 
 
 A true 
 
 New-Eng 
 
 lander. 
 
300 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Pr. Coles. 
 
 Holmes^s 
 personal 
 chartn and 
 magnet • 
 ism. 
 
 tipn yet holds sway. Another beloved physician, Dr. 
 Abraham Coles, — our best translator of the Latin 
 Hymns, and the author of " The Microcosm," " The 
 Evangel," and other poems and paraphrases in the 
 same last-century verse that we have been consider- 
 ing, — also is but a strayed inheritor, as his the- 
 ology and pentameters unite in showing, of the colo- 
 nial type. Dr. Holmes stands for the ancestral feeling 
 as squarely as he refutes the old belief ; and it is 
 well enough that such a poet should be the minstrel 
 of established feasts, and loyal to his class, rather 
 than the avatar of new classes and conditions. He 
 is of Cambridge and Beacon Hill, and in point of 
 style, usage, social life, will maintain his ground with 
 rhyme and banter, — small swords allowed the Ru- 
 perts of to-day. Otherwise he gives his judgment 
 free scope, and no superstition trammels the logic of 
 his inquisitive mind. It has required some indepen- 
 dence for a man of letters, the friend of Lowell and 
 Emerson, to be a Tory, and for a trimontane poet to 
 be a progressive and speculative thinker. 
 
 There is an unconscious sense of the artistic in the 
 self-differentiation of social life. It organizes a stage 
 performance ; each one makes himself auxiliary to the 
 whole by some dramatic instinct that loyally accepts 
 the part allotted. Holmes has filled that of hereditary 
 chamberlain, the staff never leaving his hand, and has 
 performed its functions with uncommon ardor and 
 distinction. It would not be strange if those who 
 often have seen at their ceremonies this " fellow of 
 infinite jest, of most excellent fancy," appreciate less 
 than others the strength of his ripest years. The 
 younger men who gathered to pay him their tributes 
 on his seventieth birthday felt that if he did not sing 
 at his own f^te his thought might well be : — 
 
^THE LAST reader: 
 
 301 
 
 — " You are kind ; may your tribe be increased, 
 But at this I can give you such odds if I will ! " 
 
 He did sing, and the mingled gayety and tender- 
 ness of the song made it, as was fitting, one of his 
 sweetest. The occasion itself mellowed his voice, and 
 a mere fancy has not often played more lightly around 
 the edge of feeling than when he said : — 
 
 "As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying 
 
 From some far orb I track our watery sphere, 
 
 Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying, 
 
 The silvered globule seems a glistening tear." 
 
 Six more years have been added to the youth of 
 his old age, and in them, if not so prolific as once, he 
 has given us some of his neatest work in verse and 
 prose. These efforts have not died with the occasions 
 that called them out. Their beauty, it is' true, took 
 on increase by the manner in which the author suited 
 his action to his word. The youth, who has heard 
 this last of the recitationists deliver one of his poems, 
 will recall in future years the fire and spirit of a vet- 
 eran whose heart was in his work, who reads a stanza 
 with the poetic inflection that no elocutionist can 
 equal, who with it gives you so much of himself — the 
 sparkling eye, the twinkling by-play of the mouth, the 
 nervous frame on tip-toe in chase of imagery unleashed 
 and coursing. Such a poet lifts the glow and fancy 
 of the moment into the region of art, but of the art 
 which must be enacted to bring out its full effect, 
 and in which no actor save the artist himself can 
 satisfactorily essay the single role. 
 
 His gift I 
 delivery* 
 
302 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 Final im- 
 pressions 
 of his 
 verse and 
 prose. 
 
 IV. 
 
 If the question is asked, Would the verse of Doc- 
 tor Holmes be held in so much favor if he had not 
 confirmed his reputation by prose replete with poetic 
 humor and analogy ? the fairest answer may be in the 
 negative. Together, his writings surely owe their 
 main success to an approximate exhibition of the au- 
 thor himself. Where the man is even more lively 
 than his work, the public takes kindly to the one and 
 the other. The jester is privileged though in the court 
 of art and letters ; yet if one could apply to Holmes 
 — the jester, homilist, and man of feeling — his own 
 process, we should have analysis indeed. Were the 
 theme assigned to himself, we should have an inimi- 
 tably honest setting forth of his merits and foibles, 
 from this keen anatomist of mind and body, this smile- 
 begetter, this purveyor to so many feasts. As a New 
 Englander he long ago was awarded the highest sec- 
 tional praise, — that of being, among all his tribe, the 
 cutest. His cleverness and versatility bewilder out- 
 side judges. Is he a genius? By all means. And 
 in what degree ? His prose, for the most part, is pe- 
 culiarly original. His serious poetry scarcely has been 
 the serious work of his life ; but in his specialty, verse 
 suited to the frolic or pathos of occasions, he has 
 given us much of the best delivered in his own time, 
 and has excelled all others in delivery. Both his 
 strength and weakness lie in his genial temper and 
 his brisk, speculative habit of mind. For, though al- 
 most the only modern poet who has infused enough 
 spirit into table and rostrum verse to make it wortK 
 recording, his poetry has appealed to the present rathei 
 than the future ; and, again, he has too curious and 
 analytic a brain for purely artistic work. Of Holmes 
 
POET OF MANNERS AND THE TIME. 
 
 303 
 
 as a satirist, which it is not unusual to call him, I 
 hav.e said but little. His metrical satires are of the 
 amiable sort that debars him from kinsmanship with 
 the Juvenals of old, or the Popes and Churchills of 
 more recent times. There is more real satire in one 
 of Hosea Biglow's lyrics than in all our laughing phi- 
 losopher's irony, rhymed and unrhymed. Yet he is 
 a keen observer of the follies and chances which sa- 
 tire makes its food. Give him personages, reminis- 
 cences, manners, to touch upon, and he is quite at 
 home. He may not reproduce these imaginatively, in 
 their stronger combinations ; but the Autocrat makes 
 no unseemly boast when he says : " It was in talking 
 of Life that we came together. I thought I knew 
 something about that, that I could speak or write 
 about it to some purpose." Let us consider, then, 
 that if Holmes had died young, we should have missed 
 a choice example of the New England fibre which 
 strengthens while it lasts ; that' he has lived to round 
 a personality that will be traditional for at least the 
 time granted to one or two less characteristic worthies 
 of revolutionary days ; that a few of his lyrics already 
 belong to our select anthology, and one or two of his 
 books must be counted as striking factors in what 
 twentieth-century chroniclers will term (and here is 
 matter for reflection) the development of early Amer- 
 ican literature. 
 
 His harp 
 
 " the harp 
 of Life." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 A typical 
 vtan of 
 Utters. 
 
 I 
 
 Represent- 
 ing J alsOf 
 A fnerican 
 
 N a liberal sense, and somewhat as Emerson stands 
 for American thought, the poet Lowell has become 
 our representative man of letters. Not as our most 
 laborious scholar, though of a rich scholarship, and 
 soundly versed in branches which he has chosen to 
 follow. Not as an indomitable writer, yet, when he 
 writes, from whom else are we as sure to receive what 
 is brilliant and original ? Nor yet chiefly as a poet, 
 in spite of the ideality, the feeling, the purpose, and 
 the wit that belong to his verse and that first brought 
 him into reputation. But, whatsoever the conjunction 
 that has enabled Mr. Lowell to reach and maintain 
 his typical position, we feel that he holds it, and, on 
 the whole, ought to hold it. His acquirements and 
 versatile writings, the conditions of his life, his inter- 
 national honors, the mould of the man, his speech, 
 bearing, and the spirit of his whole work, have given 
 him a peculiar distinction, and this largely without his 
 thought or seeking. Such a nimbus does not form 
 around one who summons it : it glows and gathers 
 almost without his knowledge, — and not at once, but, 
 like the expression of a noble face, after long expe- 
 rience and service. 
 
 I have spoken of one poet as excelling others in 
 the adroitness of a man of the world. Lowell's qual- 
 
REPUBLICAN CULTURE. 
 
 305 
 
 ities secure him honor and allies without the need 
 of adroitness. He is regarded not only as a man of 
 letters, but as a fine exemplar of culture, and of a 
 culture so generous as to be thought supra- American 
 by those observers who, while pronouncing him a citi- 
 zen of the world, are careful to exclude this country 
 from his range. Professor Dowden, for instance, says : 
 " Taken as a whole, the works of Lowell do not mir- 
 ror the life, the thoughts, and passions of the nation. 
 They are works, as it were, of an English poet who 
 has become a naturalized citizen of the United States ; 
 who admires the institutions and has faith in the ideas 
 of America, but who cannot throw off his allegiance 
 to the old country and its authorities." But here is 
 a manifest assumption. Doubtless, Lowell's mirror 
 does not reflect Dr. Dowden's conception of the life, 
 the thoughts, and passions of this nation, but that 
 conception, formed at such a distance, might be re- 
 vised upon a close approach. In the poet's writings 
 we find the life and passion of New England, to a 
 verity, and the best thought of our people at large. 
 For, when I say that he is a type of American culture, 
 I mean of republican culture, and nothing more or less. 
 Those who hold to the republican idea believe that 
 its value is to be found in its levelling tendency ; by 
 which I do not mean a general reduction to the low- 
 est caste, but the gradual elevation of a multitude 
 to the standard which individuals have reached, — 
 among them so many of the writing craft, from Frank- 
 lin's generation to our own. In this respect I do not, 
 of course, mention Lowell's position as distinctive, — 
 the names of other scholars and writers instantly come 
 to mind, — nor have our men of culture been confined 
 to any guild or profession. Marshall and Story, 
 Pinkney, Wirt, Winthrop, Sumner and Bayard, jurists, 
 
 culture at 
 its best. 
 
 Dawdett's 
 " Studies 
 in Liter tZ' 
 ture," 
 p. 472. 
 
 The Re- 
 publican 
 idea. viz. 
 
 To ad- 
 vance the 
 general 
 grade of 
 Culture^ 
 equally 
 with that 
 of mat e- 
 rial wel- 
 fare. 
 
3o6 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 LoivelPs 
 special 
 quality 
 and stand- 
 ins- 
 
 Catholic^ 
 
 orators, and statesmen, — soldiers, merchants, artisans, 
 Americans of every class, — have shown that culture 
 is a plant that thrives in a republic no less than under 
 royal care. Their number is increasing ; the average 
 grade is advanced. If this were not so, republican- 
 ism would be a failure : in this matter it is on trial no 
 less than in its ability to promote the establishment 
 of first-class museums, libraries, academies, even with- 
 out governmental aid. 
 
 We count Lowell, among others, as a specimen not 
 of foreign, but of home, culture, and especially of our 
 Eastern type. His life shows what the New England 
 training, not always so fortunate, can do for a man 
 of genius. And thus, even aside from his writings, 
 he is a person of note. The tributes frequently paid 
 him would of themselves keep his name before us. 
 Many of his sayings, like those of Emerson, are a 
 portion of our usual discourse and reference, and the 
 people have taken some of his lyrics faithfully to heart. 
 He has written one work that has become a classic. 
 Whether as a poet and critic, or as a man of affairs, 
 of rare breeding and the healthiest moral tone, Lowell 
 is one of whom it may be affirmed, in the words ap- 
 plied to another, that a thing derives more weight 
 from the fact that he has said it. Are we conscious, 
 then, of having in view a man better than his best 
 writings ? But this may be said of many authors, and 
 there must be, at all events, a live personality behind 
 good work. 
 
 Lowell's sense of this, and of the strength and ful- 
 I ness of existence, keep him void of conceit. He often 
 has seemed impatient of his art, half-ready to cry out 
 upon it, lest it lead him from green fields and forests, 
 from the delight of life itself. He is not swift to 
 magnify his office above the heroic action of other mea 
 
HIS BREEDING. 
 
 307 
 
 This catholicity is rare among poets and artists, whose 
 dearest failing is a lack of concern for people or 
 things not associated with their own pursuits. On the 
 other hand, poetry is the choicest expression of hu- 
 man life, and the poet who does not revere his art 
 and believe in its sovereignty is not born to wear the 
 purple. Lowell, in fortunate seasons, goes back from 
 life to song with new vigor and wisdom, and with a 
 loyalty strengthened by experiences. After all, the 
 man dies, while his imaginative works may survive 
 even the record of his name. Therefore the work is 
 the essential thing ; and Lowell's work, above all, is 
 so imbued with his individuality, that none can over- 
 look the relations of the one to the other, or fail, in 
 comprehending his poetry, to enter into the make and 
 spirit of the poet himself. 
 
 IL 
 
 Mr. Underwood has given some account of Low- 
 ell's ancestry, ind of the conditions which led to the 
 birth and breeding of a poet. We have a picture of 
 the Cambridge manor, Elmwood, — a home not want- 
 ing in the relics of an old - time family, — portraits, 
 books, and things of art. Lowell's father, and his 
 father's father, were clergymen, well-read, bearing hon- 
 ored names ; his mother, a gifted woman, the mistress 
 of various languages, and loving the old English songs 
 and ballads, — no wonder that three of her children 
 came to be authors, and this one, the youns'est, a fa- 
 mous citizen and poet. It is not hard to fill in these 
 outlines with something of the circumstance that, as I 
 pointed out in the case of Mrs. Browning, fore-ordains 
 the training of a genius ; that supplies, I repeat, the 
 means of its self-training, since the imagination de- 
 
 Musti 
 RegitiOt 
 
 Javtes 
 Russell 
 Lowell: 
 born in 
 Cam- 
 bridge, 
 Mass., 
 Feb. 22, 
 1S19. 
 
 CA " Vic 
 iorian 
 Poets " .• 
 p. 118. 
 
3o8 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Entered 
 Harvard 
 m 1834. 
 
 Bent. 
 
 Surround- 
 ings. 
 
 Old Style 
 vs. New. 
 
 rives its sustenance like a plant, selecting and assim- 
 ilating for itself. All it needs is food, atmosphere, a 
 place to grow. In these Lowell was exceptionally 
 favored, under the influence of local and family tra- 
 ditions, the home-culture, the method of his father, and 
 the taste of the mother from whom he inherited his 
 bent toward letters and song. 
 
 His college course made little change in this way of 
 growth. He might fail of advantages to be gained 
 from drill and drudgery; but was sure to extend his 
 reading in the direction of his natural tastes, until ac- 
 quainted with many literatures. His subsequent study 
 of the law probably added the logical discipline that 
 enables one to formulate ideas. But any voice that 
 would restrict him to his profession must have fallen 
 "vainlier than the hen's to her false chickens in the 
 pool." Instinct, judgment, everything, pointed to let- 
 ters as his calling. The period of his start, and his 
 father's literary tastes, are indicated by his avowal that 
 he was brought up " in the old superstition " that Pope 
 " was the greatest poet that ever lived.'" This would 
 account for his escape to the school of beauty and 
 romance ; just as the repression of a clerical sur- 
 rounding may have had much to do with his early 
 liberalism in politics and theology. 
 
 It seems that the light-hearted Cambridge student 
 was eager for all books except those of the curricu- 
 lum, and troubled himself little as to mathematics and 
 other prosaic branches. This was quite in accordance 
 with precedent, teste Landor or Shelley, yet I doubt 
 not that he was more than once sorry for it in after 
 years. One may assume, however, that he passed for 
 what he was, or promised to be, with the Faculty, 
 and became something of an oracle among his mates 
 There was more eagerness then, at Harvard, than now; 
 
'A YEAR'S life: 
 
 309 
 
 the young fellows were not ashamed to wear their 
 hearts upon their sleeves. The gospel of indififerent- 
 ism had not been preached. The words " clever " and 
 " well-equipped " now seem to express our highest 
 good ; we avoid sentimentalism, but nourish less that 
 genius which thrives in youth upon hopefully garnished 
 food. 
 
 Lowell wrote the' Class Poem, and took leave to 
 print it, being under discipline at the time appointed 
 for its delivery. Mr. Sanborn neatly points out that 
 it abounded in conventional satire of the new-fangled 
 reformers whom the poet was soon to join. As a law 
 graduate, he shortly clouded his professional chances 
 by writing for the Boston " Miscellany," and issuing a 
 little book of verse. A writer's first venture is apt to 
 be a novel or poem. Should he grow in station, it be- 
 comes rare, or valued for its indications. The thin, 
 pretty volume, A Year's Life, does show traits of its 
 author's after-work, but not so distinctly as many books 
 of the kind. Three years later he termed its con- 
 tents, — 
 
 " the firstlings of my muse, 
 Poor windfalls of unripe experience." 
 
 But three years are a long time in the twenties. There 
 are a few ideal passages in this book, and some that 
 suggest his forming tendencies. It was inscribed to 
 "Una," whom he aptly might have called Egeria, for 
 she was already both the inspirer and the sharer of his 
 best imaginings. A few well-chosen pieces are re- 
 tained in the opening division of Mr. Lowell's stand- 
 ard collection. Of these, " Threnodia " is a good 
 specimen of his early manner. The simple and natural 
 lines " With a Pressed Flower " are in contrast with 
 vaguer portions of the first book, and have a charac- 
 teristic thought ir/ the closing stanza, where he says 
 of flowers, that ' 
 
 " A Poem 
 recited at 
 Cam- 
 
 "^ Year'i 
 Life," 
 
 Maria 
 White. 
 
3IO 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Early 
 range and 
 teyidencies. 
 
 Pioneer " : 
 ed. by 
 Lowell 
 iind Roh- 
 trt Carter. 
 
 " Nature, ever kind to love, 
 Hath granted them the same sweet tongue, 
 Whether with German skies above, 
 Or here our granite roclcs among." 
 
 The cullings from "A Year's Life," with various 
 and riper odes, lyrics, and sonnets, malce up the " Early 
 Poems " of his latest edition, showing his range at 
 the date of their production. 
 
 Some of the longer pieces lack compactness, and 
 betray an imagination still somewhat nebulous. " The 
 Sirens," " Irene'," " My Love," " Rosaline," are like 
 the first poems of Tennyson, then a risen star. There 
 is a trace of Shelley in the lines "To Perdita, Sing- 
 ing," and " The Moon." " Allegra " is sweet, direct, 
 original. The sonnets upon reading Wordsworth, a 
 sonnet to Spenser (in " A Year's Life "), and one to 
 Keats, afford hints of the poet's healthy tastes. Those 
 to Phillips and Giddings prove that he was no laggard 
 in the unpopular antislavery movement. As to other 
 reforms, it is plain that he began to have convictions, 
 — or, at least, to have a conviction that he had con- 
 victions. "The Heritage" and "A Rich Man's Son" 
 were taken up by the press, and are still found in our 
 school-readers. Lowell's voice was for independence, 
 human rights, the dignity of labor. Some of the love- 
 poetry is exquisite. Its serenity declares that no other 
 word than happiness is needed for the history of the 
 time between the dates of his first and second books. 
 To be sure, he set himself to edit T'Ae Pioneer, the 
 conditions being so adverse that poets and essayists 
 who now should make the fortune of a magazine could 
 not prolong its short existence. But we think of Low- 
 ell as enjoying to the full those three zestful years, — 
 a briefless barrister, perhaps, yet guarded by the Muse, 
 and having the refined companior ship of the girl 
 
MATURER VERSE. 
 
 311 
 
 <vhose love he sought and won. In the year of his 
 marriage to Maria White, he published a second vol- 
 ume, whose contents, with other verse composed be- 
 fore " Sir Launfal," exhibit his poetic genius in its 
 fresh maturity. 
 
 The "Legend of Brittany," an artistic and legen- 
 dary poem, was, for that time, quite a significant pro- 
 duction, so much so that Poe said it was " the noblest 
 poem yet written by an American." It commended 
 itself to him because, unlike some of Lowell's verse, 
 it was designed for poetry and nothing else — it is not 
 in the least didactic. And that Poe' said this, and 
 meant it, shows how few were the longer poems of 
 merit we then had produced. The Legend is a sweet, 
 flowing tale, in the ottava rima, after the mode of 
 Keats and up to the standard of Leigh Hunt. It 
 needs dramatic force in the climax, but is simple and 
 delicately finished. A still better piece of art-work is 
 " Rhoecus," that Greek legend of the wood-nymph and 
 the bee. The poet by chance subjected himself, and 
 not discreditably, to the test of a comparison with the 
 most bewitching of Landor's Hellenics, " The Hama- 
 dryad." Much might be said, in view of these two 
 idyls, upon the antique and modern handlings of a 
 theme. Landor worked as a Grecian might, giving 
 the tale in chiselled verse, with no curious regard 
 for its teachings. Its beauty is enough for him, 
 and there it stands — a Periclean vase. His instinct 
 became a conscious method. In a letter to Forster 
 he begs him to amend the poem by striking out a 
 bit of " reflection " which a true hamadryad should 
 " cut across " : — 
 
 " Why should the beautiful 
 (And thou ait beautiful) disturb the source 
 Whence springs all beauty ? " 
 
 " Poems," 
 1844. 
 
 " A Le- 
 gend of 
 BrUianyJ" 
 
 " Rhxcus^ 
 compared 
 ■with Lfittf 
 dor's " The 
 Hama- 
 dryad.^^ 
 
312 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Tfte aft- 
 tique and 
 modern 
 fitrposes 
 cotttrasted. 
 
 The poet 
 obeys a 
 "call:' 
 
 His ear- 
 nestness 
 sincere. 
 
 Mr. Lowell's " Rhcecus " is an example of the mod- 
 ern feeling. Passages such as that beginning : — 
 
 "A youth named Rhcecus, wandering in the wood," 
 are simple and lovely ; the scene where Rhcecus, play- 
 ing dice, rudely treats the winged messenger, is a pic- 
 ture equalling the best of Lander's. But the story 
 itself is preceded by a moralizing commentary, and 
 other glosses of the same kind are here and there. 
 The whole is treated as an allegory conveying a les- 
 son. The wood-nymph herself draws one, tenderly 
 and sadly, at the close : — 
 
 "'Alas!' the voice returned, ''tis thou art blind. 
 Not I unmerciful. I can forgive. 
 But have no skill to heal thy spirit's eyes ; 
 Only the soul hath power o'er itself.' " 
 
 This method confuses the beauty of the poem, 
 though distinct enough in purpose, and characteristic 
 of the New England school. 
 
 The poet, in truth, felt himself called upon for secu- 
 lar work. With all his love of beauty, he had a greater 
 dread of dilettanteism. The air was full of " progress," 
 and he made a general assay of the new thoughts and 
 enthusiasms. Reform-verse came naturally from the 
 young idealist portrayed by his friend Page. The 
 broad collar and high - parted, flowing hair set off a 
 handsome, eager face, with the look of Keats and the 
 resolve of a Brook-Farmer. But he was wholly him- 
 self, incapable of the affectation which — in a time 
 when poetry is not the first choice of readers — mar- 
 kets its wares by posing for the jest and zest of fash- 
 ion, and brings into contempt the grand old name of 
 poet among those who • know poetry only as a name. 
 Affectation and self-seeking in art, as elsewhere, are 
 detestable. All the genius of Byron, in a romantic 
 period, could not atone for his trace of the former. 
 
PROGRESSIVE TENDENCIES. 
 
 313 
 
 It makes no difference whether the affectation be one 
 of virility or of refinement ; the self-seeking is apt to 
 be that of the author or artist who devotes one day in 
 the month to work, and all the rest to advertising it. 
 You may see his outward type in the water- fiy Osric, 
 of whom Hamlet says that " 'tis a vice to know him." 
 Such creatures and their habits are the breed of special 
 times — men with some bit of talent, gaining their 
 paltry ends, and sure to be duly classified at last. And 
 so Osric, as Hamlet disdainfully perceives, with " many 
 more of the same breed that the drossy age dotes on," 
 has "only got the tune of the time ... a kind 
 of yesty collection, which carries them through and 
 through the most fond and winnowed opinions." But 
 Lowell, I say, was himself alone, wearing his Arcadian 
 garb, yet hasting to throw aside his crook at the 
 sound of the trumpet. His " progressive " verse often 
 was fuller of opinion than beauty, of eloquence than 
 passion. Some of it is in a measure which reformers 
 have seemed to hit upon by an exasperating instinct 
 — the much-abused verse shown' at its best in " Locks- 
 ley Hall." With the typical radical, it is enough to 
 make a thing wrong that it is accepted by a majority. 
 Lowell found himself with the minority, but the minor- 
 ity then chanced to be the party of a future, and, in 
 essentials, wholly right. If Whittier and himself, like 
 the Lake Poets before them, became didactic through 
 moral earnestness, it none the less aided to inspire 
 them. Their verse advanced a great cause, and, as 
 years went by, grew in quality — perhaps as surely as 
 that of poets who, in youth, reject all but artistic con- 
 siderations. 
 
 Before Lowell's thought and imagination had gained 
 their richness, he had to contend with a disproportion- 
 ate flow of language, if using forms that did not of 
 
 Affecta- 
 tion th£ 
 bane of 
 art. 
 
 Lowell's 
 reform- 
 verse. 
 
 "Poena," 
 
 184S ; and 
 ''^Poetical 
 Works,^^ 
 2 v., 1850. 
 
314 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Diffuse- 
 
 Frequent 
 strength of 
 thought 
 and tnan- 
 ner. 
 
 Eccentrici- 
 iies of 
 ttyle. 
 
 themselves restrict it. " Prometheus," " Columbus," 
 " A Glance Behind the Curtain," are studies upon 
 massive themes, weakened because their matter is not 
 compactly moulded. Yet the poet had a terse art of 
 saying things, as when he made Cromwell assert that 
 
 "New times demand new measures and new men"; 
 and himself said : — 
 
 " They are slaves who dare not be 
 In the right with two or three," 
 
 or, similarly, declared for 
 
 " One £aith against a whole earth's unbelief, 
 One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 
 
 His manner often was fine : — 
 
 " All other glories are as falling stars, 
 But universal Nature watches theirs. 
 Such strength is won by love of human kind." 
 
 " The moon will come and go 
 With her monotonous vicissitude." 
 
 " The melancholy wash of endless waves." 
 
 His analytic turn early cropped out in the " Studies 
 for Two Heads," which is all Lowell — as one now 
 would say. The poem " To the Past " is written with 
 more circumstance than Bryant's, but the latter is the 
 more imaginative. To indicate, finally, the chief res- 
 ervation of Mr. Lowell's admirers, I must own that 
 these poems often are marked with technical blem- 
 ishes, from which even his later verse is not exempt. 
 In trying both to express his conviction and to find a 
 method of his own, he betrayed an irregular ear, and 
 a voice rare in quality, but not wholly to be relied 
 upon. He had a way, moreover, of " dropping " like 
 his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages 
 with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses 
 
A NATrVE BUT CAPRICIOUS SONGSTER. 
 
 315 
 
 which as a critic he would not overlook in another. 
 To all this add a knack of coining uncouth words for 
 special tints of meaning, when there are good enough 
 counters in the language for any poet's need. Space 
 can be more agreeably used than by citing examples 
 of these failings, which a reader soon discovers for 
 himself. They have perplexed the poet's friends and 
 teased his reviewers. Although such defects some- 
 times bring a man's work nearer to us, the question is 
 as to their influence upon its permanent value. Verse 
 may be faultily faultless, or may go to the other ex- 
 treme. We are indebted, as usual, to Lowell himself 
 for our critical test. Writing of Wordsworth, he says 
 that " the work must surpass the material," and refers 
 to " that shaping imagination which is the highest 
 criterion of a poet." 
 
 It is a labor that physics pain to recall the verse 
 by which he gained that hold upon his countrymen 
 which strengthens through lengthening years. The 
 public was right in its liking for " The Changeling," 
 " She Came and Went," " The First Snow-Fall," than 
 which there are few more touching lyrics' of the afEec- 
 tions. " The Shepherd of Admetus " and " An Inci- 
 dent in a Railway Car" are on themes which moved 
 the poet to harmonize his taste and thought. When 
 called upon, as he supposed, to make a choice between 
 Taste and his conception of Duty, Taste sometimes 
 went to the wall. Doubtless, he grew to see that the 
 line of Beauty does not always follow Duty's follower, 
 and that the surrender of the former itself may be in 
 the nature of a crime. His sense never was more 
 subtle, his taste never more delightful, than in the 
 recent and flawless stanzas on the " Phoebe." The 
 public keeps in store for him the adage of the wilful 
 songster. That he " can " sing was discovered at the 
 
 Lyrical 
 beauty. 
 
3i6 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 LmveWs 
 theory of 
 wng. 
 
 outset, 
 point : - 
 
 It also 
 one : — 
 
 One such piece as " Hebe " decided that 
 
 " I saw the twinkle of white feet, 
 I saw the flash of robes descending; ; 
 
 Before her ran an influence fleet 
 That bowed my heart like barley bending." 
 
 included his theory of song, and a sound 
 
 " Coy Hebe flies from those that woo. 
 And shuns the hands would seize upon her ; 
 
 Follow thy life, and she will sue 
 To pour for thee the cup of honor." 
 
 To this lesson of his own experience he recurs again 
 and again : — 
 
 " Whither ? Albeit I follow fast. 
 In all life's circuit I but find. 
 Not where thou art, but where thou wast, 
 Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind ! 
 
 All of thee but thyself I grasp ; 
 
 I seem to fold thy luring shape. 
 And vague air to my bosom clasp. 
 
 Thou lithe, perpetual Escape ! " 
 
 Like other poets of quality, Lowell has found the 
 Muse, between her inspirations, a coquette and evader. 
 He forms his rule accordingly : — 
 
 " Now, I 've a notion, if a poet 
 Beat up for themes, his verse will show it ; 
 I wait for subjects that hunt me, 
 By day or night won't let me be, 
 And hang about me like a curse. 
 Till they have made me into verse." 
 
 From a poet who does this, we shall get flavor, and, 
 in any event, the best of himself. Lowell's career, 
 telling equally of use and song, has proved the wis- 
 dom of his admonitions : — 
 
POET OF THE OPEN AIR. 
 
 317 
 
 " Harass her not ; thy heat and stir 
 But greater coyness breed in her ; 
 
 The Muse is womanish, nor deigns 
 Her love to him that pules and plains; 
 
 The epic of a man rehearse, 
 Be something better than thy verse; 
 Make thyself rich, and then the Muse 
 Shall court thy precious interviews, 
 Shall take thy head upon her knee, 
 And such enchantment lilt to thee. 
 That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow 
 From farthest stars to grass-blades low." 
 
 To which one may add, without malice, that Mr. Low- 
 ell can give the Muse lessons in the art of flirting; 
 knowing from long practice that, when she once has 
 yielded her heart, she forgives even the infidelities of 
 a favored lover. 
 
 There is a beautiful feeling in his poems of nature. 
 Wordsworth has dwelt upon the contrast between the 
 youthful regard for nature, — the feeling of a healthy 
 and impassioned child, — and that of the philosopher 
 who finds in her a sense "of something far more 
 deeply interfused." The latter is a gift that makes us 
 grave. It led Bryant to worship and invocation ; and 
 now, in the new light of science, we seek for, rather 
 than feel, the soul of things. The charm of Lowell's 
 outdoor verse lies in its spontaneity ; he loves nature 
 with a child-like joy, her boon companion, finding even 
 in her illusions welcome and relief, — just as one gives 
 himself up to a story or a play, and will not be a 
 doubter. Here he never ages, and he beguiles you 
 and me to share his joy. It does me good to see a 
 poet who knows a bird or flower as one friend knows 
 another, yet loves it for itself alone. He sings among 
 the woods, as Boone hunted, refusing to be edified, 
 
 A horn 
 poet of 
 naiurtn 
 
3i8 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 fits pas- 
 toral 
 tastes. 
 
 and with no wish for improvements. This one section 
 he reserves for life itself : — 
 
 ■■ Away, my poets, whose sweet spell 
 Can make a garden of a cell ! 
 I need ye not, for I to-day 
 Will make one long sweet verse of play." 
 
 His manhood shall not make him lose his boyhood ; 
 the whiff of the woods, the brook's voice, the spangle 
 of spring-flowers, — these never fail to stir the old- 
 time thrill ; our hearts leap with his, and for once for- 
 get to ask the reason why. 
 
 Outside the " Pictures from Appledore " there is 
 little of the ocean in his verse : the sea-breeze brings 
 fewer messages to him than to Longfellow and Whit- 
 tier. His sense of inland nature is all the more alert, 
 — for hira the sweet security of meadow-paths and 
 orchard-closes. He has the pioneer heart, to which a 
 homestead farm is dear and familiar, and native woods 
 and waters are an intoxication. The American, im- 
 pressed at first by the oaks and reaches of an Old- 
 World park, soon wearies of them, and takes like a 
 partridge to the bush. What Lowell loves most in 
 nature are the trees and their winged habitants, and 
 the flowers that grow untended. " The Indian Sum- 
 mer Reverie " is an early and delightful avowal of his 
 pastoral tastes. His favorite birds and trees, the 
 meadows, river, and marshes, all are there, put in 
 with strokes no modern descriptive poet has excelled. 
 Browning's capture of the thrush's song is rivalled by 
 such a touch as this : — 
 
 " Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, 
 Remembei'ing duty, in mid-quaver stops 
 
 Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, 
 And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops." 
 
 The poems " To a Pine-Tree " and " The Birch- 
 
' VISION OF SIR LA UNFAU 
 
 319 
 
 Tree," with their suggestive measures, are companion- 
 pieces that will last. The poet shares the stormy reign 
 of the monarch of Katahdin ; yet loves the whisper of 
 the birch in the vale : — 
 
 " Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers ; 
 Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping ; 
 Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, 
 And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping 
 Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping." 
 
 Of Lowell's earlier pieces, the one which shows the 
 finest sense of the poetry of Nature is that addressed 
 " To the Dandelion." The opening phrase ranks with 
 the selectest of Wordsworth and Keats, to whom imag- 
 inative diction came intuitively, — 
 
 " Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, 
 Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold," 
 
 and both thought and language are felicitous through- 
 out : — 
 
 " Thou art my tropics and mine Italy ; 
 To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime ; 
 
 The eyes- thou givest me 
 Are in the heart, and heed not space or time : 
 Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee 
 !^eels a more summer-like warm ravishment 
 In the white lily's breezy tent. 
 His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first 
 From the dark green thy yellow circles burst." 
 
 This poem contains many of its author's peculiar beau- 
 ties and none of his faults ; it was the outcome of the 
 mood that can summon a rare spirit of art to express 
 the gladdest thought and most elusive feeling. 
 
 I think, also, that The Vision of Sir Launfal owed 
 its success quite as much to a presentation of nature 
 as to its misty legend. It really is a landscape-poem, 
 of which the lovely passage, " And what is so rare as 
 a day in June ? " and the wintry prelude to Part Sec- 
 
 Poem "Ti 
 ike Dande' 
 lion:'' 
 
 "The 
 Vision of 
 Sir Lavn 
 /at," 1S4& 
 
320 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Estimate 
 of his 
 work thus 
 far. 
 
 A new 
 field. 
 
 ond, are the specific features. Like the Legend of 
 Brittany, it was a return to poetry as poetry, and a sign 
 that the author was groping for a theme equal to his 
 reserved strength. The Vinland fragment hints at 
 a wider range of experiment. Thus far, in fact, no 
 positively new notes. Lowell had shown his art and 
 insight, a brave purpose, absolute sympathy with na- 
 ture. The ferment of his youth had worked itself 
 clear. " Occasional " pieces, the stanzas to Kossuth, 
 the poem on the English graves at Concord, came 
 from definite convictions and a strong hand. He was 
 a man, well girded, who had not found his best oc 
 casion ; who needed the pressure of imminent events 
 to bring out his resources and make his work endur- 
 ing. The question, " How can I make a real addition 
 to literature ? " often must have come to one so pen- 
 etrative. Possibly he was hampered, also, by his own 
 culture. The Dervish's ointment may be too freely 
 applied to the eyes ; too close a knowledge of the ver- 
 ities may check ideal effort, — too just a balance of 
 faculties produces indecision. Practical success in art 
 must come from every-day ambition and experiment. 
 But creative results are apt to follow upon the gift 
 to look at things from without. If Lowell had not 
 utilized his surroundings, he was none the less aware 
 of them. The solution of his problem came when 
 least expected, and as a confirmation of his theory of 
 the Unsought. The clew was not in ancestral or Ar- 
 thurian legends, but in his own time and at his door- 
 stone. It was woven of the homeliest, the most un- 
 gainly, material. It led to something so fresh and 
 unique that its value, like that of other positively new 
 work, at first hardly could have been manifest, even to 
 the poet himself. 
 
' THE BIGLOW PAPERS: 
 
 321 
 
 III. 
 
 The Biglow Papers ended all question of Lowell's 
 originality. They are a master-work, in which his ripe 
 genius fastened the spirit of its region and period. 
 Their strength lies in qualities which, as here combined, 
 were no man's save his own. They declare the faith of 
 a sincere and intelligent party with respect to war, — a 
 sentiment called out by the invasion of Mexico, unjust 
 in itself, but now seen to be a historical factor in the 
 world's progress. This was a minority faith, held in 
 vulgar contempt, and there was boldness in declaring 
 it. Again, the "Biglow Papers" were the first, and 
 are the best, metrical presentation of Yankee character 
 in its thought, dialect, manners, and singular mixture 
 of coarseness and shrewdness with the fundamental 
 sense of beauty and right. Never sprang the flower 
 of art from a more unpromising soil ; yet these are 
 eclogues as true as those of Theocritus or Burns. 
 Finally, they are not merely objective studies, but 
 charged with the poet's own passion, and bearing the 
 marks of a scholar's hand. 
 
 The work plainly shows its manner of growth. The 
 first lyric struck the vein, the poet's mind took fire by 
 its own friction, and one effort inspired another. The 
 "Papers" made an immediate "hit"; the public in- 
 stinctively passed a judgment upon them, in which crit- 
 ics were able to concur after the poet had made an 
 opus of the collected series. Here was now seen that 
 maturity of genius, of which Humor is a flower revealing 
 the sound kind man within the poet. Such a work ie, 
 also, an illustration and defence of the tenure of Wit 
 in the field of art. Verse made only as satire belongs 
 to a lower order. Of such there are various didac- 
 21 
 
 "The 
 Biglow 
 Papers^* 
 1846-48. 
 
 Wit and 
 Humor. 
 Their ten- 
 ure in art. 
 See pp. 259, 
 277, and 
 cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets": 
 PP- 73, 77> 
 352- 
 
322 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 A broadly 
 
 origiTuU 
 
 work. 
 
 Realism, 
 
 tic specimens. But Wit has an imaginative side, and 
 Humor springs like Iris — all smiles and tears. The 
 wit of poets often has been the faculty that ripened 
 last, the overflow of their strength and experience. In 
 the " Biglow Papers," wit and humor are united as in 
 a composition of high grade. The jesting is far re- 
 moved from that clownish gabble which, if it still in^ 
 creases, will shortly add another to the list of offences 
 that make killing no murder. 
 
 Lowell was under thirty at this time, and fairly may 
 be reckoned among poets who have done great work 
 in youth. His leap from provincialism is seen in the 
 accessory divisions of his completed satire. The " No- 
 tices of an Independent Press " are a polygonal mirror 
 in which journalism saw all its sins reflected, and 
 wherewith he scanned not others' follies only, but his 
 own, mocking our spread-eagleism, anglophobia, and 
 the weaker phases of movements in which he himself 
 had joined. He burlesqued in mock Latin the vener- 
 able pomp of college-catalogues and down-East gene- 
 alogies. Then followed a clever analysis of the Yankee 
 dialect, extended and made authoritative in a prefix to 
 his second series. In the very first contribution of Mr. 
 Biglow, the native Yankee is immortally portrayed. 
 The ludicrous realism of the transcript is without 
 parallel : — 
 
 "Jest go home an' ask our Nancy 
 
 Wether I 'd be sech a goose 
 Ez to jine ye, — guess you 'd fancy 
 
 The etamal bung wuz loose ! 
 She wants me fer home consumption, 
 
 Let alone the hay 's to mow, — 
 E£ you 're arter folks o' gumption, 
 
 You 've a darned long row to hoe." 
 
 How the poet must have enjoyed that stanza ! Whaf 
 rollicking delight ! But he quickly recalls the inboni 
 
'THE COURTIN',' ETC. 
 
 323 
 
 pride and patriotism, the sacred wrath, of the true 
 New England, and cries out from a wounded spirit : — 
 
 "Massachusetts, God forgive her, 
 She 's a-kneelin' with the rest, 
 She thet ough' to ha' clung terever 
 In her grand old eagle-nest ! " 
 
 His rejection of the popular ideal of M^ebster, his 
 branding ridicule of Robinson, Cashing, and their like, 
 and his scorn of trimmers, vitalized the " Biglow Pa- 
 pers '' and make their hits proverbial. The first se- 
 ries was a protest not only against the slave-holders' 
 invasion of Mexico, but against war itself. Fifteen 
 years later a greater war arose, a mortal struggle to 
 repress the wrong that caused the first. To such a 
 conflict even Lowell could not say nay ; his kinsmen 
 freely gave their blood, and bereavement after bereave- 
 ment came fast upon him. In the second series of 
 the " Biglow Papers " the humor is more grim, the 
 general feeling more intense. Still they are not Tyr- 
 tsean strains, but chiefly called out by political epi- 
 sodes, — like the Mason and Slidell affair, — and 
 constantly the poet seeks a relief from the tension of 
 the hour. One feels this in reading the dialogue 
 between the Bridge and the Monument at Concord 
 suggested by Burns's "Twa Briggs," the return to 
 " Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," or, most of all, " The 
 Courtin'." This bucolic idyl is without a counterpart ; 
 no richer juice can be pressed from the wild-grape of 
 the Yankee soil. It is a most artistic idealization of 
 the theme and method essayed years before by a New 
 Hampshire poet and wit, Fessenden, in " The Country 
 Lovers." Of the Biglow epistles, the tenth has the 
 most pathetic undertone. It was composed, seemingly 
 at a heat, in answer to a request for — 
 
 Biglow 
 
 Second 
 Series^ 
 1862-66. 
 
 "The 
 Courtiii! 
 
324 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Out of 
 iht abun- 
 dance of 
 the heart." 
 
 "sunthin' light an' cute, 
 Rattlin' an' shrewd an' kin' o' jingleish." 
 
 Mr. Biglow justifies the tone of his new series by 
 avowing the immeasurable anguish and perplexity of 
 the time : — 
 
 " Where 's Peace ? I start, some clear-blown night, 
 When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number. 
 An', creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white, 
 Walk the col' starlight into summer." 
 
 His heart is full with its own sorrows ; he half-despises 
 himself " for rhymin'," when his young kinsmen have 
 fallen in the fray: — 
 
 " Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 
 Did n't I love to see 'em growin'. 
 Three likely lads ez wal could be, 
 
 Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin' ? 
 
 'T ain't right to hev the young go fust, 
 
 All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces, 
 Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust 
 
 To try an' make b'lieve fill their places ! " 
 
 He longs for Peace, but invokes her to come, — 
 
 "not like a mourner, bowed 
 
 For honor lost and dear ones wasted, 
 But proud, to meet a people proud, 
 
 With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted ! 
 Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt, 
 
 An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter ! 
 Longin' fer you, our sperits wilt 
 
 Like shipwrecked men's on raf s for water." 
 
 These final lyrics, less varied and sparkling than their 
 predecessors, are, in not infrequent passages, more 
 poetical. The author's statement of the causes and 
 method of his work is more suggestive than Poe's 
 whimsical analysis of " The Raven," and not open to 
 the suspicion of being written for effect. 
 
'A FABLE FOR CRITICS: 
 
 325 
 
 The " Biglow Papers," as we now have them, form 
 a strongly proportioned work, und are a positive ad- 
 dition to the serio-comic literature of the world. They 
 are almost apart from criticism ; there is no prototype 
 by which to test them. Lowell has been compared to 
 Butler, but " Hudibras," whether as poetry or histor- 
 ical satire, is vastly below the master-work of the New 
 England idyllist. The titles of a few great books, 
 each of which has no fellow, come to mind as we think 
 of its possible rank and duration, and I observe that 
 Mr. Sanborn does not fear to mention the highest. 
 It is a point in favor of transatlantic judgment that 
 the " Biglow Papers " first gave Lowell the standing, 
 with those who make opinion in England, which his 
 choicest poems of art and nature had failed to pro- 
 cure for him. From that time their interest in him- 
 self and his work has been apparent. Their univer- 
 sity degrees, their estimates of his genius and his 
 character, declare him to be one whom the mother- 
 land delights to honor, and have made more distinct 
 the position which, as I have said, he holds among 
 our men of letters. 
 
 His literary satire, A Fable for Critics, was a good- 
 natured tilt at the bards of Griswold's Parnassus, — 
 a piece of uneven merit, but far from being open to 
 the charge — that of malevolence — which Poe brought 
 against it. The estimate of Poe is not unfair, and 
 other sketches — such as those of Bryant, Hawthorne, 
 Whittier, and Dwight — are deftly made. Nor could 
 one put a surer finger upon Lowell's short-comings 
 than his own in the lines upon himself. The allegory 
 of the fable is trite. Its sections are loosely united, 
 the language and rhythm are at hap-hazard, and, on 
 the whole, it is a rather careless production, however 
 true to the time and tribe it celebrates. 
 
 A unique 
 addition to 
 liieratitre. 
 
 A Fable 
 for Crii- 
 
326 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 LowelPs 
 ^ose writ' 
 ings. 
 
 " Conver- 
 sations on 
 Some of 
 the Old 
 Poets,''' 
 1844. 
 
 Ed. the 
 ^Atlantic 
 Monthly," 
 1857-62. 
 
 Ed. , with 
 C. E. Nor- 
 ton, of the 
 " No. A m. 
 Review,^'' 
 1863-72. 
 
 IV. 
 
 A POET of intellectual scope will not content him- 
 self with verse, as the sole outlet of his thought and 
 feeling. Lowell's essays display his genius in free 
 activity, and have added greatly, and justly, to his 
 authority and standing. One could not select better 
 illustrations of the union of the critical and artistic 
 faculties, or of the distinctions and analogies between 
 the verse and prose of a poet. 
 
 It is to be noted that Lowell's political and moral 
 convictions appear chiefly in his verse. His prose 
 appertains to literature, and, with the exception of 
 some graceful sketch-work, bits of travel and reminis- 
 cence, has been restricted to criticism. His earliest 
 prose volume was of this kind, in the form of Conver- 
 sations, on the old poets and dramatists. These are 
 the ardent generalizations of a young poet, apprecia- 
 tive rather than searching. They are superseded by 
 his maturer survey of their field, but had a stimulat- 
 ing influence in their time. Many who were students 
 then remember the glow which they felt when Lowell's 
 early lectures and essays directed them to a sense of 
 what is best in English song. Young enthusiasts, at 
 Cambridge, found him an ideal teacher and professor 
 of belles-lettres. As years went on, his critical pen 
 was rarely idle. A good fate determined that he 
 should be subjected to the demands of journalistic 
 routine — that he should carry the " Atlantic Monthly " 
 to a sure foot-hold, advancing the standard of our mag- 
 azine literature ; and that he should afterward hold 
 for nine years an editorship of the " North American 
 Review." Such responsibilities overcome a writer's 
 vis inertim. He naturally becomes his own best con- 
 
SKETCHES AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 327 
 
 tributor, and it was, in a measure, to the spur of his 
 engagements that we owe a notable series of literary 
 essays, many of which first appeared in the review I 
 have named. Publishers have not found his study a 
 reservoir into which they might insert their taps at 
 pleasure. But one must spend time in gathering 
 knowledge to give it out richly, and few comprehend 
 what goes to a page of Lowell's manuscript. The page 
 itself, were it a letter or press-report, could be written 
 in a quarter-hour ; but suppose it represents, as in one 
 of his greater essays, the result of prolonged studies 
 — the reading, indexing, formulating works in various 
 languages, upon his shelves or in the Harvard library ? 
 Of all this he gives the ultimate quintessence, a dis- 
 tillation fragrant with his own genius. Who can eS' 
 timate the toil of such work ? What can adequately 
 pay for it? There are two guerdons that raise the 
 spirit to scorn delights and live laborious days : Mil- 
 ton sings of one — but the surer is the " exceeding 
 great reward " of the work itself. 
 
 Lowell's important reviews and studies, selected with 
 excellent discretion, are contained in My Study Win- 
 dows, and in the first and second series of Among My 
 Books. These, with the Fireside Travels, make up the 
 collection, in four volumes, of his prose works. His 
 style is marked by individuality. Underwood suggests 
 that " the distinctive prose of a poet is necessarily quite 
 removed from general apprehension." The word "dis- 
 tinctive " seems the one qualification that justifies the 
 remark. And how is a poet's prose distinctive ? Not 
 in rhythmic undulations, if he be a true poet and artist. 
 Such a writer does not lend the semblance of verse 
 to his prose. To do this, he must produce something 
 inferior to either. Few metrical cadences in the prose 
 of Milton, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Byron, Landor, or 
 
 " Fireside 
 Travels" 
 1864. 
 
 "^ tnong 
 My Books? 
 1870. 
 
 ''My Study 
 Windows? 
 1871. 
 
 "A mon^ 
 MyBooks? 
 Second Se- 
 ries^ 1876. 
 
 The prose 
 of poets. 
 Cp. 
 
 "Victo- 
 rian Po- 
 ets: "p. 37. 
 
32J 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Individu- 
 ality of 
 LowelVs 
 frose. 
 
 The stric- 
 tures upon 
 it. 
 
 Bryant. Its strength and beauty are of another kind. 
 Many of Dickens's passages, we know, can be assorted 
 into lengths of semi-metrical verse ; but Dickens, when 
 he tried to make poems, had no great success. Thack- 
 eray, whose prose is prose, was, within his range, a 
 charming poet. Longfellow's " Hyperion " is excep= 
 tional — written as a "prose-poem" by a young artist 
 fresh from the sentiment of German mystics and ro- 
 mances. As for Carlyle, he was a poet, as Lowell 
 says, "without the gift of song." He invented a 
 special kind of prose as his form of poetic expression. 
 I infer that a poet's prose is not removed from general 
 apprehension by its technique ; all things considered, I 
 expect to find it as clear and unadulterate as that of 
 any layman — not more illogical, not more dependent 
 on the reader's intuition to fill out its lapses. A poet's 
 instinct is constructive, little given to omissions in 
 prose syntax. If his prose is hard to understand, it 
 may be that he is a learned thinker, whose thoughts 
 and references do not come at once within popular 
 apprehension. 
 
 It is because a poet is more original, not more er- 
 ratic, than many laymen, that his prose often is so 
 individual. Lowell's is clear enough to those familiar 
 with the choicest literature. In critical exploits that 
 bring out his resources, he is not a writer for dullards, 
 and to read him enjoyably is a point in ■ evidence of 
 a liberal education. His manner, in fact, is Protean, 
 adjusted to his topic, and has a flexibility that well 
 expresses his racy wit and freshness : combined with 
 this, peculiarities that irritate the most catholic minds. 
 Outspoken reviewers have subjected it to minute anal- 
 ysis, and declared their sense of its shortcomings. 
 Their statement that it is not creative, but critical, is 
 jtrue in the ordinary meaning; yet I doubt if "crea- 
 
HIS PROSE STYLE. 
 
 329 
 
 tive " criticism and that which is truly critical differ 
 like the experimental and analytic chemistries. Cer- 
 tainly Lowell is a most suggestive essayist. He sets 
 us a-thinking, and, after a stretch of comment, halts 
 in by-paths, or enlivens us with his sudden wit. He 
 has the intellect, held to be a mark of greatness, that 
 " puts in motion the intellect of others.'' But he is 
 charged with querulousness, inconsistency of judgment, 
 contempt for unity, and with the habit of becoming 
 entangled in expression. Attention is directed to the 
 conceits, the whimsical diction and recondite instances, 
 to be found in these essays. Verse, not prose, is de- 
 clared by a few to be his proper vehicle. The indict- 
 ment has some foundation, but to what extent does 
 it affect his general merits ? Things bad in themselves 
 are often part of an author's essential quality. It 
 seems to me that there is a close analogy between the 
 styles of Lowell's verse and prose, distinct as the two 
 forms are, — an analogy to be observed, if I had space 
 to point it out, in the verse and prose of other poets, 
 and inevitable from an author's habits of mind. I 
 cannot better state the matter than by saying that the 
 beauties and faults of the one are those of the other ; 
 both are open to the criticisms already made, and to 
 which I may refer again ; but each is sustained by a 
 spirit which makes the reader forgive and forget. Un- 
 der the drift and stubble that fioat on the surface is 
 the strong, deep current which bears them along, or 
 throws them to the side and keeps a central channel 
 clear. 
 
 Lowell's lighter touches have the grace that is al- 
 ways modern. The " Fireside Travels " make his cen- 
 sors withhold their arrows of the chase, pleased with 
 the landscape and the guide. However exquisite the 
 art of our latest sketch-writers, who is better company 
 
 How far 
 justifiable. 
 
 Sketch- 
 work. 
 
330 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Greater 
 
 Essays. 
 
 His style. 
 
 than Lowell in Old-World loiterings or more deft in 
 wood-cnaft and garden-craft at home ? His other 
 prose volumes have sturdier characteristics. Here are 
 the companion-pieces on Lessing and Rousseau ; the 
 series — a labor of years — upon the great English 
 masters, from Chaucer to Keats and Carlyle ; the 
 elaborate study of Dante ; the off-hand portraits of 
 Josiah Quincy, Lincoln, Thoreau ; no common sub- 
 jects these, — who grapples them must do his best, or 
 suffer a fall. Other essays, too, that are not soon 
 forgotten : " Witchcraft in New England," the famous 
 treatise " On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," 
 and two papers — " My Garden Acquaintance," and 
 " A Good Word for Winter," — outdoor studies that 
 would have delighted the man of Selborne. The style 
 of the critical prose certainly is not modelled upon 
 Addison and his school ; it is scarcely what Lowell 
 himself describes as " that exquisite something called 
 Style, which makes itself felt by the skill with which 
 it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense 
 of indefinable completeness." To some it may seem 
 a stumbling-block ; but to most, I fancy,, it is the self- 
 expression of a versatile, learned, original man. When 
 over-freighted with words from other languages, new 
 and old, the polyglotism implies so close a familiarity 
 with many literatures that he cannot avoid drawing 
 on them for his purpose. A pedant quotes for the 
 sake of a display of learning ; Lowell, because he has 
 mastered everything connected with his theme. His 
 style, as I have hinted, sometimes is quaintly in- 
 fluenced by his topic and its associations. " Witch- 
 craft " revives here and there the manner of more 
 than one seventeenth-century homilist. The English 
 proper of this curious and learned essay, with all its 
 auroral qualities, is less simple and strong than that 
 
THE SCHOLAR. 
 
 l->^ 
 
 of the critic's noble discourse of Dryden, wfiose very 
 Latinism seems to befit the spirit of its hero. It 
 should be noted that Lowell's polysyllables — and 
 few writers have more — do not weigh down the page ; 
 they are accelerative, galloping, even charging, in leap 
 on leap, from section to section. His word-coining is 
 less venial, for he does not lack taste, and at times 
 exercise's it rigidly. But his humor, learning, and ca- 
 price audaciously put it by, with a " Go thy way till 
 I need thee ! " His comments on Spenser's innova- 
 tions should be self-applied, and especially the words 
 culled from Bellay, who bids his poet " Fear not to 
 innovate somewhat . . . with modesty, however, with 
 analogy, and judgment of ear." His linguistic ar- 
 senal serves him well : nor does he fail of fine exor- 
 diums and perorations, and sentences whose " beauty 
 and majesty," as he says of Spenser's, he refuses to 
 endanger by " experiments of this kind.'' But we 
 should miss something if we held him to his own for- 
 mula of the best writing, that in which the " compo- 
 nent parts " of English " are most exquisitely propor- 
 tioned one to the other.'' 
 
 Authors who do lay-work for a living, and pursue 
 their art in hours which are the breathing-time of 
 other men, are permitted few of the common pleas- 
 ures for which they needs must crave. Their manu- 
 scripts are written in their blood, and the ink grows 
 pale apace. Even the delight of reading, that at 
 once stimulates and draws upon the brain, is forbid- 
 den to one who is harnessed in the van of a profes- 
 sional career. But Lowell, I suspect, has been shy of 
 any harness from which he could not bolt at will. 
 His book-feeding has been unstinted, omnivorous : he 
 was born among books, reared upoiv them, and has 
 taken from them that which enriches him yet leaves 
 
 Ca^kea 
 
 Thorough 
 
 equip- 
 ment. 
 
332 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Lowell 
 9.nd Foe. 
 
 Theory of 
 transla- 
 tion. See 
 f. 209. 
 
 foint and 
 visdonu 
 
 them none the poorer. Of all writing-men, he who 
 can read without stint is to be envied. Take the 
 essay on Chaucer ; it is the result of perfect equip- 
 ment for a literary task. It is a spring-time brew of 
 philological comment and poetic induction : it reeks 
 with fact, flavored by originality. Here is a rare elu- 
 cidation of both the letter and the spirit of Chaucer's 
 song ; no mere scholar could so illumine the process, 
 and no poet who was not a scholar would venture 
 upon it. Lowell is the contratype of Poe, who made a 
 flourish of scholarship, and was sure of little for which 
 he did not cram. Poe's humor, moreover, was a heavy 
 lance, awkwardly and maliciously couched ; Lowell 
 holds his weapon with grace and courtesy, and has a 
 sword of wit in reserve, should affairs grow serious. 
 His faculty of scholarly assimilation and reproduction 
 resembles Montaigne's. What he thoroughly enjoys 
 is work like his review of the " Library of Old Au- 
 thors." This paper opens with a talk upon books, 
 pleasant as Lamb's gossip and with latter-day thought 
 and criticism beneath the winning style ; then follow 
 swift but searching etymological tests of early authors 
 and modern editors, from which the latter come out 
 with some loss of lustre. Lowell's idea of translation 
 is free reproduction by a man of genius. He values 
 Chapman, and declares that Keats, of all men, was 
 the one to have translated Homer. One would like 
 to see a translation from his own hand, say of Aris- 
 tophanes : should the text halt, the commentary alone 
 would repay us, and the freest versions by Lowell 
 might be something " more original than his originals." 
 His wit inclines him to condense professional truths 
 in expressions that stick in the memory. The mono- 
 graph on Spenser sparkles with clever, pointed say- 
 ings : " Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred 
 
POINTED SAVINGS. 
 
 333 
 
 and fifty years ere England had secreted choice ma- 
 terial enough for the making of another great poet." 
 Of ancient poetasters, it cannot be said " that their 
 works have perished because they were written in an 
 obsolete dialect ; for it is the poem that keeps the 
 language alive, and not the language that buoys up 
 the poem." . . . "The complaints one sometimes 
 hears of the neglect of our older literature are the 
 regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One 
 does not need to advertise the squirrels " (this sen- 
 tence is like Landor) " where the nut-trees are, nor 
 could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend 
 their teeth on a hollow nut." ..." Any verse that 
 makes you and me foreigners is not only not great 
 poetry, but no poetry at all." Speaking of Dunbar's 
 works, "Whoso is national enough to like thistles 
 may browse there to his heart's content. I am in- 
 clined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied 
 myself by a good deal of dogged reading that every 
 generation is sure of its own share of bores without 
 borrowing from the past.'' And in " Witchcraft " he 
 says that Sidney " seems to have divined the fact that 
 there is but one kind of English that is always appro- 
 priate and never obsolete, namely, the very best." 
 With all this point and wisdom, he often cannot 
 refrain from unleashing conceits that fly without 
 " stamping " their imagery. In a single page he com- 
 pares Chaucer's style to a river and a precious vin- 
 tage, and contrasts it with the froth of champagne and 
 the folly of Milo. In relation to Shakespeare's birtlv,> 
 we have astrology, vinous processes, and alembic pro- 
 jection, following upon one another as illustrations of 
 the coming nativity. Afterward, while censuring lan- 
 guage that is " literary, so that there is a gap be- 
 tween the speech of books and that of life," LoweH 
 
 A bundant 
 conceits. 
 
334 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Imagery* 
 
 A sure and 
 indepen- 
 dent critic. 
 
 tells us that '' a mind in itself essentially original be- 
 comes in the use of such a medium of utterance un- 
 consciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not 
 solar, in expression and even in thought ! " Passages 
 of this sort not unnaturally move other critics, in 
 their turn, to fling a de te fabula at the writer. An 
 author, in truth, " should consider how largely the art 
 of writing consists in knowing what to leave in the 
 inkstand." But Mr. Lowell is not unconscious of 
 these things : he toys with licenses, as if to prove 
 that, next to Chapman, "he has the longest wind 
 . . . without being long-winded," of all authors. Nor 
 have we any writer whose imagery is oftener strong 
 and exquisite : as in the description of a snowy winter 
 landscape, or at the close of his " Milton," or where, 
 in " Spenser," he glorifies the handiwork of " the witch, 
 Imagination." 
 
 Lowell's scrutiny is sure, and his tests are apt and 
 instant. He is a detective to be dreaded by preten- 
 ders. He wastes no reverence upon traditional errors, 
 but no man is more impatient of sham-reform, less 
 afraid of odta, whether theological, scientific, or ses- 
 thetic. As a comparative critic, there are few so well 
 served by memory and reading. In the essay on 
 Milton he treats with novel discrimination the respec- 
 tive modes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Tasso. Writ' 
 ing of Wordsworth, Swinburne, and others, he uses 
 the comparative method to good purpose. No one is 
 a better judge of what is original. Most things have 
 been said more than once, and he knows by whom. 
 His standard is the manner of saying. " In the par- 
 liament of the present," he declares, " every man rep- 
 resents a constituency of the past " ; and again, 
 " Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having 
 no future " ; and " It is the man behind the words 
 
AS A CRITIC. 
 
 335 
 
 that gives them value." He names Chaucer, Shake- 
 speare, Dryden, in evidence of the truth that " It is 
 not the finding of a thing, but the making something 
 of it after it is found, that is of consequence." In his 
 paper on Wordsworth, he draws a distinction between 
 originality and eccentricity which, I fear, will not soon 
 become obsolete for want of cases in illustration. 
 Striking points are frequent in his critical prose. It 
 is Lowell who says, of Shakespeare, that the manner 
 of a first-class poet is incommunicable, and therefore 
 he never can found a school. His essay on Carlyle, 
 undertaken at a time when few ventured to dispute 
 the old Norseman's autocracy, is, on the whole, as 
 just as it is independent ; that on Lincoln could only 
 have been written by one whose convictions rendered 
 him prophetic, Lowell's analogical gift is seen in his 
 comparison of Lincoln to Henry IV. — made before 
 the President's assassination had completed the par- 
 allel. His declaration, in " Spenser," of the qualities 
 of voice that " define a man as a poet," is not to be 
 gainsaid, and he also gives us a clever test of the 
 worth of allegory, — it must be that which the reader 
 " helps to make out of his own experience." It is 
 true that his verdicts are not always such as we agree 
 with, nor do they always agree among themselves. 
 Being a poet, he is prone to express his immediate 
 feeling without submitting it to the principles that, in 
 fact, govern his final judgment. This imparts life to 
 a writer, but subjects him to the charge of incdnsis- 
 tency, especially if it is not his habit to revise past 
 work. Lowell scarcely does justice to Wordsworth's 
 ■inagination, though keenly alive to the bard's pueril- 
 ities and want of humor. His essay on Dryden, as a 
 presentation of the man and poet, is the best of its 
 length, and contains some of the writer's finest apo- 
 
 Impulsa 
 
336 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 structural 
 
 turn. 
 
 thegms ; that on Pope is inferior, — the critic being 
 so out of personal liking for the figure-head of his 
 youth as to treat him not without fairness and dis- 
 crimination, but, I think, inadequately. He possibly 
 overrates Clough, as a signal representative of modern 
 feeling, yet may be forgiven for this, as he knew and 
 loved him, and was joined with him in the freema- 
 sonry of comrades and poets. He has touched very 
 lightly, once and again, on Emerson, but with precision 
 and truth. His analysis of Thoreau is sharply criti- 
 cised as being narrow, but it did expose the defective 
 side of a unique character, and, all things considered, 
 is the subtlest of his minor reviews. 
 
 Lowell rightly holds the highest imagination to be, 
 not so much that which "gathers into the intense 
 focus of passionate phrase," as " the faculty that 
 shapes and gives unity of design and balanced grav- 
 itation of parts." His work, as we have seen, at 
 times displays the former kind, rather than the latter. 
 It is in dwelling on special traits, with praise or cen- 
 sure, that he seems discursive. Thus, while his 
 "Shakespeare Once More" includes a masterly expo- 
 sition of the dramatist's style, it is fragmentary — 
 even more than need be — in the special touches that 
 follow. Other papers fall short in construction; they 
 are not sustained upon the scales indicated at com- 
 mencement. This lack of balance, I am sure, is due 
 quite as much to circumstances as to the critic's tem- 
 perament, and largely to the limits of the periodicals 
 for which he has written. His mind seizes upon a 
 great theme, in mass and in detail, and he begins as 
 if to cover it thoroughly. " Lessing " opens with a 
 broad view of the German intellect and literature ; 
 " Chaucer " with a survey of the Troubadour period ; 
 and the analogous introductions to Spenser, Dryden, 
 
LITERARY WEALTH AND FREEDOM. 
 
 337 
 
 Pope, are of the utmost value. But to complete an 
 essay upon this plan a book must be written. We 
 are none the less grateful for Lowell's noble vesti- 
 bules, even though we find them too large for the 
 structures. Surplusage is a royal fault. We see that 
 he can be an artist at will, though constantly setting 
 the law of his nature above all laws. Some of the 
 greater essays are both various and complete. That 
 upon Dante is a superb example ; one need not be a 
 Dantean scholar to comprehend the scope and strength 
 of this prolonged, cumulative, coherent analysis of the 
 Florentine's career — fortified by citations, and en- 
 riched with a knowledge of Italian history, literature, 
 atmosphere, at the close of the thirteenth century, 
 such as few living men possess. 
 
 Have I not indicated that the unfailing value of 
 Lowell's prose work consists in freedom and variety 
 that are the true reflex of the man himself ? His 
 resources make him prodigal, and he has the brave 
 impatience of a skilled performer who trusts his ear 
 and is none too careful of the written score. We 
 seem to have his first notes, and find them better 
 than the revised drafts of other men. It is a fellow- 
 feeling which leads him to say of Dryden, that "one 
 of the charms of his best writing is that everything 
 seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in 
 the best mood of his talk." This transfer of his own 
 ne.ture is delightful. He will be free, and his cen- 
 sors should rate his freedom at its worth, and not 
 hold him too rigidly to conventionalities which he 
 understands, yet chooses to forego. Even the ar- 
 rangement of his essays seems to be a chance one, 
 but there is an art in the chance. He has given us 
 a series of literary monographs in which Americans 
 may take just pride, for his genius has imparted new 
 
 I 
 
 Copious' 
 
 ness. 
 
 Essential 
 
 value of 
 his prose 
 work. 
 
338 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Under 
 the Wa- 
 loivs^ aTtd 
 ciher 
 Poetns^''* 
 
 light and freshness to the greatest themes. To these 
 he might add equally notable studies of Cervantes, 
 Molifere, and Goethe. No living man could venture 
 with less presumption to summon up once more the 
 spirits of those masters. But already the wealth of 
 his critical product is surprising. I think that a se- 
 lection of apothegms and maxims could be made 
 from it, which, for original thoughts and wise teach- 
 ing of the author's art, would be worth more to the 
 literary neophyte, and afford more satisfaction to vet- 
 eran readers, than a digest of the English prose of 
 any other writer since Landor in his prime. 
 
 V. 
 
 Lowell's prose diversions, so wide in range, could 
 not have been made without some lapse of fealty to 
 the muse of song. When, in 1868, the volume Under 
 the Willows appeared, a note stated that the poems 
 mostly had been written at intervals during many 
 years. There is, none the less, an air of afternoon 
 about them. They are the songs of a man who in 
 truth has gelebt und geliebet — to revive the motto of 
 his juvenile book — and who has lived to love again. 
 Their thought is subtler, their subjectivity that of one 
 who reads the hearts of others in his own. The 
 title -piece is a most refreshing stretch of pastoral 
 verse. Here and elsewhere his sympathy with birds 
 and trees continues, and much resembles Landor's : — 
 
 "But I in June am midway to believe 
 A tree among my far progenitors, 
 
 And I liave many a life-long leafy friend, 
 Never estranged nor careful of my soul. 
 That knows I hate the axe." 
 
LATER POEMS. 
 
 339 
 
 The close recalls the feeling of the "Thalysia" of 
 Theocritus, yet escapes the parallel displayed in cer- 
 tain idyls of Tennyson. The opening gives us a 
 finer rhapsody of June, though less apt to catch the 
 popular ear, than the one in " Sir Launfal." No 
 common musician can touch so variously a well-worn 
 theme. 
 
 I do not read these later poems without reihem- 
 bering the moods to which Arthur Clough was sub- 
 ject, and which also affect the verse of another with 
 whom his too brief life was associated. "Auf Wie- 
 dersehen " and its " Palinode " — delicate, brooding, 
 dithyrambic — might seem the work of either Clough 
 or Matthew Arnold, and "A Mood" and "The Foun- 
 tain of Youth " are quite in sympathy with that of 
 the last-named poet. Arnold, like Lowell, delights 
 in " accidentals " and in haunting measures, often ad- 
 mirably rendered. But I think few of his lines are 
 both so suggestive and so vibratory as these from 
 Lowell's exquisite fantasy, " In the Twilight " : — 
 
 " Sometimes a breath floats by me, 
 An odor from Dreamland sent, 
 That makes the ghost seem nigh me 
 Of a splendor that came and went, 
 Of a life lived somewhere, I know not 
 
 In what diviner sphere. 
 Of memories that stay not and go not, 
 Like music once heard by an ear 
 That cannot forget or reclaim it, — 
 A something so shy, it would shame it 
 
 To make it a show, 
 A something too vague, could I name it, 
 
 For others to know, 
 As if I had lived it or dreamed it, 
 As if I had acted or schemed It, 
 Long agol 
 
 Lowell, 
 
 CloTigh, 
 and Mat- 
 ike'W Ar 
 nold. Cp^ 
 "Victo- 
 ritzji Po- 
 ets " : pp. 
 243, 244, 
 andpp, 
 95-99- 
 
340 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Lowell 
 tind Ar- 
 iiold. 
 
 " And yet, could I live it over, 
 This life that stirs in my brain, 
 Could I be both maiden and lover, 
 Moon and tide, bee and clover. 
 
 As I seem to have been, once again, 
 Could I but speak and show it, 
 
 This pleasure, more sharp than pain. 
 That baffles and lures hie so. 
 The world should not lack a poet, 
 Such as it had 
 In the ages glad 
 
 Long ago ! " 
 
 Between verse like this, and that of Mr. Hosea Big- 
 low, each definite in flavor, the range is phenomenal. 
 To extend a comparison made for the sole purpose 
 of illustrating Lowell's bent, I will say that in a for- 
 mer review I extolled the beauty of Arnold's objec~ 
 tive verse — a kind to which his early preface would 
 restrict the modern poet. But with reference to his 
 occasional hardness of touch, and to the mental con- 
 flicts revealed by Clough and himself, I scarcely did 
 full justice to a suggestive class of his poems, in a 
 form peculiarly his own, — poems which grow upon 
 the reader and stand the test of years, — and of 
 these I will name, as good examples, " The Buried 
 Life " and " A Summer Night." Lowell and Arnold, 
 poets nearly equal in years, both scholars, both orig- 
 inal thinkers, occupy representative positions, — the 
 one in the Old England and the other in the New, — 
 which are singularly correspondent. Two things, how- 
 ever, are to be noted. The American has the freer 
 hand and wider range as a poet. Humor, dialect- 
 verse, and familiar epistles come from him as nat- 
 urally as his stateliest odes. Again, while both poets 
 feel the perplexities of the time, Arnold's difficulties 
 are the more restrictive of his poetic glow ; with him 
 
LOWELL ANV ARNOLD. 
 
 341 
 
 the impediments are spiritual, with Lowell they are 
 material and to be overcome. Mr. Lowell at times 
 has found himself restricted by our local conditions 
 set forth in my early chapters. Like Mr. Arnold, he 
 also feels the questioning spirit of our age of unrest ; 
 but his nature is too various and healthy to be de- 
 pressed by it. The cloud rests more durably on Ar- 
 nold. Lowell always has one refuge, — to which, also, 
 the poet of the Highland " Bothie " did not resort in 
 vain. Give him a touch of Mother Earth, a breath 
 of free air, one flash of sunshine, and he is no longer 
 a book-man and a brooder ; his blood runs riot with 
 the Spring ; this inborn, poetic elasticity is the best 
 gift of the gods. Faith and joy are the ascensive 
 forces of song. Lowell trusts in Nature and she 
 gladdens him. How free and unjaded the spirit of 
 "Al Fresco," and of the sprayey " Pictures from Ap- 
 pledore!" At times he places you 
 
 " So nigh to the . . . heart of God, 
 You almost seem to feel it beat 
 Down from the sunshine and up from the sod." 
 
 Men are no less near to him. Like Thoreau, — who 
 knew the world, having " travelled " many years in 
 Concord, — he believes that 
 
 " Whatever moulds of various brain 
 E'er shaped the world to weal or woe, 
 Whatever empires wax and wane, 
 To him that hath iiot eyes in vain 
 Our village-microcosm can show." 
 
 His rustics act and speak for themselves. Some of 
 his lyrics are as dramatic, in their way, as those of 
 Browning, — a poet whose erratic temper, also, is not 
 unlike his own. 
 
 It is worth the consideration of those who deplore 
 the effect of " over-culture " upon our poets, that the 
 
 In 
 sympathy 
 
 ■with 
 Nature^ 
 
342 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 The qttes- 
 tion of cul- 
 ture. Cp. 
 " Victo- 
 rian 
 Poets": 
 f. 120. 
 
 ■' T>U! Ca- 
 ihedraJ," 
 1870. 
 
 verse of Lowell and Emerson seems the product of 
 their instant moods. The highest culture has learned 
 to unlearn, and Lowell, when he wrote " A Winter 
 Hymn to my Fire," had surely reached its freehold. 
 A masterly, unstinted improvisation — the freshness 
 of youth, with the off-hand ease of an accomplished 
 workman — the mellow thought and rich imagination 
 of a poet in his prime. Lowell's culture has not bred 
 in him an undue respect for polish, and for estab- 
 lished ways and forms. Precisely the opposite. Much 
 learning and a fertile mind incline him to express mi- 
 nute shades of his fancy by a most iconoclastic use of 
 words and prefixes. This trait lessened the dignity 
 of his blank-verse poem. The Cathedral, admired for its 
 noble passages and justly censured for things that jat 
 and seem out of place. It is not so much a stately 
 pile, conforming to itself, that has risen " like an ex- 
 halation," as a structure builded part by part, and at 
 different periods of grandeur or grotesqueness. Con- 
 trast the imposing finale — the dome of the edifice — 
 with the whimsical by-play of the tourists airing their 
 French. A sensitive reader, himself a poet and critic, 
 not long ago said to me that he never could wholly 
 forgive Mr. Lowell for using the word "undispriva- 
 cied " in this elevated poem. But I do not know in 
 what other production the changeful thoughts of a 
 mind swiftly considering the most complex modern 
 problems, are caught so naturally, and as if on the 
 instant by some psychographic process. " A Fa- 
 miliar Epistle," without the extreme finish of Dobson's 
 work, adds no less to the raciness of Swift or Gay 
 a poet's blood and fire. It has been said that Low- 
 ell's verse and prose are marked by a manner, rather 
 than by style, in the modern sense, — which latter I 
 take to be an airy, elusive perfection of language 
 
'COMMEMORATION ODE: 
 
 343 
 
 and S5aitax, that of itself wins the reader, and upon 
 which writers of a new school have built up reputa- 
 tions. The thought, the purpose, — these are the 
 main ends with Lowell, though prose or metre suffer 
 for it, and there is no doubt that his manner ex- 
 actly repeats his habit of mind ; and so in this case, 
 as ever, the style is again the man. My own ex- 
 planation of things which annoy us in his loftier 
 pieces is that his every-day genius is that of wit 
 and humor. His familiar and satiric writings are 
 consistent works of art. It is upon his serious and 
 exalted moods that these things seem to intrude, like 
 the whisperings of the Black Man in the ears of a 
 Puritan at prayers. 
 
 Where he has bravely exorcised his annoyer is in 
 the lyric efforts that hold a poet responsible, not only 
 to himself, but also to the needs of great occasions. 
 In these there is nothing erratic or perverse. The 
 handiwork is unequal, but not seldom the vigorous 
 intellect and throbbing heart of the man lift him to 
 the airiest heights of a nation's song. I refer, of 
 course, to his odes, delivered since the close of our 
 civil war. 
 
 Of these the first, and strongest, is the Ode Rented 
 at the Harvard Commemoration. The poet was fresh 
 from the woes and exaltations of the war. He had 
 an occasion that comes but once in a lifetime. The 
 day, the place, the memories of inexorable events, 
 his heart wrung with its own losses and sharing the 
 proud grief of his Alma Mater, — these all united 
 to call forth Mr. Lowell's highest poweis. Another 
 poet would have composed a less unequal ode ; no 
 American could have glorified it with braver pas- 
 sages, with whiter heat, with language and imagerj'i 
 so befitting impassioned thought. Tried by the rule^^ 
 
 Rationale 
 of LoweWs 
 manver. 
 
 Tie"Cov 
 tneTnora- 
 tim Ode," 
 
344 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 '^ Three 
 Memorial 
 
 S87S, 1876. 
 
 that a true poet is at his best with the greatest theme, 
 Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is no 
 smooth-cut block from Pentelicus, but a mass of 
 rugged quartz, beautified with prismatic crystals, and 
 deep-veined here and there with virgin gold. The 
 early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt line, 
 " Weak - winged is song," are scarcely firm and in- 
 cisive. Lowell had to work up to his theme. In the 
 third division, " Many loved Truth, and lavished life's 
 best oil," he struck upon a new and musical intona- 
 tion of the tenderest thoughts. The quaver of this 
 melodious interlude carries the ode along, until the 
 great strophe is reached, — 
 
 " Such was he, our Martyr-Chief," 
 
 in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death 
 had but just closed the national tragedy, is delineated 
 in a manner that gives this poet a preeminence, among 
 those who capture likeness in enduring verse, that we 
 award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon 
 the canvas. " One of Plutarch's men " is before us, 
 face to face : an historic character whom Lowell fully 
 comprehended, and to whose height he reached in this 
 great strophe. Scarcely less fine is his tearful, yet 
 transfiguring, Avete to the sacred dead of the Com- 
 memoration. The weaker divisions of the produc- 
 tion furnish a background to these passages, and at 
 the close the poet rises with the invocation, — 
 
 " Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! " 
 
 — a Strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly 
 sets his mouth to the trumpet, the blast is that of 
 Roncesvalles. Three other heroic odes were com- 
 posed, it is just to repeat, " after he had precluded 
 himself," by the Harvard poem, "from many of the 
 
' THREE MEMORIAL POEMS.' 
 
 345 
 
 natural outlets of thought and feeling." That upon 
 Washington, delivered "Under the Old Elm," is the 
 longest and most imposing. Despite its form, it is 
 too long for an ode, and Mr. Lowell has more fitly 
 entitled it a poem. The characterization of Wash- 
 ington is less bold and sympathetic than that of Lin- 
 coln. Better the superb tribute to the Mother of 
 Presidents, — 
 
 "Virginia gave us this imperial man,'' 
 
 which ends the poem with forty unbroken lines that 
 again bring us to the height of Lowell's power. The 
 closing strophes of the Centennial Ode — " Flawless 
 his hand," and "They steered by stars the elder 
 shipmen knew " — are quite as notable. Underwood 
 has called the three odes an Alpine group, — yet 
 each in its length and unevenness brings to mind a 
 Rocky Mountain chain, in which snow-clad, sunlit 
 peaks arise, connected by vaguely outlined ridges of 
 the Sierra. 
 
 In a passage of the last-named ode there is food 
 for thought between the lines : — 
 
 " Poets, as their heads grow gray. 
 Look from too far behind the eyes. 
 Too long-experienced to be wise 
 In guileless youth's diviner way; 
 Life sings not now, but prophesies." 
 
 But the second-sight of age has been always, I have 
 said, a portion of Lowell's strength and disability. 
 One thing, perhaps, is needed to make his career 
 ideal : some adequate theme, and mode of treatment, 
 for a work of pure poetry, that shall be, through its 
 imaginative beauty, the rival and complement of his 
 serio-comic masterpiece. " Fitz-Adam's Story," a por- 
 tion of the long-projected " Nooning," indicates one 
 
 "Tht Un. 
 finished 
 Window.'* 
 
346 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Recapitu- 
 lation. 
 
 direction in which he has felt his way ; but he has 
 not followed up the clew with the unhasting, unresting 
 purpose that distinguished Longfellow. Even now, and 
 after his more heroic flights, it might be a diversion 
 to his later years, and certainly would revive an in- 
 terest in American verse, if he would go back and 
 complete "The Nooning," making it, as he can, the 
 most charming of New England's idyllic poems. 
 
 VI, 
 
 Lowell, then, is. a poet who seems to represent 
 New England more variously than either of his com- 
 rades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her loyalty 
 and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his 
 training, and he, in turn, has read her heart, honor- 
 ing her as a mother before the world, and seeing 
 beauty in her common garb and speech. To him, 
 the Eastern States are what the fathers, as he has 
 said, desired to found, — no New Jerusalem, . but a 
 new England, and, if it might be, a better one. His 
 poetry has the strength, the tenderness, and the de- 
 fects of the down-East temper. His doctrines and 
 reflections, in the midst of an ethereal distillation, at 
 times act like the single drop of prose which, as he 
 reports a saying of Landor to Wordsworth, precipi- 
 tates the whole. But again he is all poet, and the 
 blithest, most unstudied songster on the old Bay 
 Shore. He is, just as truly, an American of the Amer- 
 icans, alive to the idea and movement of the whole 
 country, singularly independent in his tests of its men 
 and products — from whatever section, or in however 
 unpromising form, they chance to appear. Many have 
 found him the surest to detect and welcome, at the 
 
HIS GENIUS AND RECORD. 
 
 347 
 
 rime when welcome was needed and lesser men held 
 back, what there might be in them of worth. He is 
 an artist who recognizes things outside of art, and 
 would not rate the knack of writing lines to a lady's 
 girdle above all other wonders of the age. In default 
 of the motive for a sustained and purely ideal work, 
 he has awaited the visits of the Muse, and acted on 
 the moment at her bidding ; none of our poets, in- 
 deed, has so thrown the responsibility on a monitor 
 whom no industry can placate, who is deaf to en- 
 treaty, but gives without stint at her own will. He 
 will sing when she bids him, or not at all. But this 
 is in the nature of genius, and thus brings me to a 
 conclusion. The world readily perceives the genius 
 that is set off by an eccentric or turbid life. Taking 
 advantage of this, false Amphitryons often vaunt them- 
 selves for a while. But let a true poet be born to 
 culture and position, and have a share of things which 
 constitute good fortune, and his rarer gift has no ro- 
 mantic aid to bring it into notice : its recognition 
 comes solely through its product, and not fully until 
 " after some time be past." And if Lowell be not, 
 first of all, an original genius, I know not where to 
 look for one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is 
 brighter, more persuasive, more equal to the occasion 
 and himself, — less open to Doudan's stricture upon 
 writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the 
 betterment of their printed works ? Lowell's treasury 
 can stand the drafts of both speech and composition. 
 Judged by his works, as a poet in the end must be, he 
 is one who might gain by revision and compression. 
 But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of 
 his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of 
 a poet who is our most brilliant and learned critic, and 
 who has given us our best native idyl, our best and 
 
 A poet of 
 
 original 
 
 genitis. 
 
348 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 most complete work in dialectic verse, and the noblest 
 heroic ode that America has produced, — each and all 
 ranking with the first of their kinds in English literar 
 ture of the modern time. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 OF things counted dear to a minstrel's heart, and 
 which can make him patiently endure the com- 
 mon ills of life, this poet has secured a bounteous 
 share. No one more conspicuously shines by differ- 
 ence. Others are more widely read, but who else has 
 been so widely talked of, and who has held even a 
 few readers with so absolute a sway ? Whatever we 
 may think of his chantings, the time has gone by 
 when it was possible to ignore him; whatever his 
 ground may be, he has set his feet squarely and 
 audaciously upon it, and is no light weight. En- 
 deavor, then, to judge him on his merits, for he will 
 and must be judged. He stands in the roadway, with 
 his Salut au Monde : — 
 
 "Toward all 
 I raise high the perpendicular hand, — I make the signal, 
 To remain after me in sight forever, 
 For all the haunts and homes of men." 
 
 There are not wanting those who return his saluta- 
 tion. He is in very good society, and has been so for 
 a long while. At the outset he was favored with the 
 hand of Emerson, and, once acknowledged at court, 
 allies quickly flocked around him. No writer holds, 
 in some respects, a more enviable place than burly 
 Walt Whitman. As for public opinion of the profes ■ 
 
 Walter 
 
 IVhittnatt 
 
 born in 
 
 West 
 
 HOb, 
 
 Lang 
 
 Island^ 
 
 May 31, 
 
 1S19. 
 
 A chal- 
 lengtr. 
 
350 
 
 WALT IVHITMAJV. 
 
 Publicity 
 ^t hotne 
 
 abroad* 
 
 ItKidentrd 
 successes- 
 
 A difficult 
 poet to esti- 
 mate. 
 
 The debate 
 concerning 
 kim. 
 
 sional kind, no American poet, save Longfellow, has 
 attracted so much notice as he in England, France, 
 Germany, and I know not what other lands. Personal 
 items of his doings, sayings, and appearance constantly 
 have found their way to the public. In a collection 
 of sketches, articles, debates, which have appeared 
 during the last fifteen years, relating to American 
 poets, the Whitman and Poe packages, before the 
 deaths of Emerson and Longfellow, were each much 
 larger than all the rest combined. Curiously enough, 
 three fourths of the articles upon Whitman are written 
 by friends who assert that he is neglected by the 
 press. Not only in that publicity which is akin to 
 fame, and stimulating to the poet, has he been thus 
 fortunate , but also in the faculty of exciting and sus- 
 taining a discussion in which he has been forced to 
 take little part himself; in an aptitude for making 
 disciples of men able to gain the general ear, and 
 vying with one another to stay up his hands ; in his 
 unencumbered, easy way of life ; finally, in a bodily 
 and mental equipment, and a tact or artistic instinct 
 to make the most of it, that have established a vigor- 
 ous ideal of himself as a bard and seer. These inci- 
 dental successes, which of course do not confirm nor 
 conflict with an estimate of his genius, are brought to 
 mind as the features of a singular career. 
 
 Such a poet must find a place in any review of 
 the course of American song. Otherwise, however 
 observant of his work from the beginning, I well 
 might hesitate to express my own judgment of thoughts 
 and modes which, like questions in philology or med- 
 icine, seem to provoke contention in which men act 
 very much like children and little to the advantage of 
 all concerned. The disputants who arise when an 
 innovator comes along never were divided mora 
 
A FAIR MODE OF CRITICISM. 
 
 351 
 
 sharply, — not even in that classico-romantic conflict 
 which would have made the fortune of a lesser poet 
 than the author of " Hernani." Perhaps it would be 
 found, upon examination, that the class which declines 
 to regard Whitman as a hero and poet has been con- 
 tent with saying very little about him. If his disciples 
 are in a minority, it is they who chiefly have written 
 the contents of the package mentioned, who never 
 lose a point, who have filled the air with his name. 
 Our acceptance of their estimate almost has seemed 
 the condition of their intellectual respect. At times 
 we are constrained to infer that this poet is to be 
 canonized, not criticised, — that he, they and others 
 may say to Emerson, Lowell, Tennyson, "Thou ailest 
 here, and here " ; but woe unto them that lay hands 
 on the Ark of the Covenant. Two points belong to 
 my own mode of inquiry : How far does the effort of a 
 workman relate to what is fine and enduring .? and, 
 how far does he succeed in his _effort ? Nor can I 
 pay Mr. Whitman any worthier tribute than to ex- 
 amine fairly his credentials, and to test his work by 
 the canons, so far as we discover them, that underlie 
 the best results of every progressive art. I recall his 
 own comment on Emerson : " As I understand him, 
 the truest honor you can pay him is to try his own 
 rules." If his poetry is founded in the simplicity and 
 universality which are claimed for it, and which dis- 
 tinguish great works, the average man, who reads 
 Shakespeare and the English Bible, ought to catch 
 glimpses of its scope and meaning, and therefore I 
 am guilty of no strange temerity in forming some 
 opinion of these matters. 
 
 On the other hand, if there be any so impatient 
 of his assumptions, or so tired of the manifestoes of 
 his friends, as to refuse him the consideration they 
 
 Points and 
 tnetkod of 
 inquiry. 
 
 Fair play 
 
352 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 A roman- 
 tic andsig- 
 nificant 
 bearing. 
 
 The . 
 personal 
 
 would extend to any man alive, against such also I 
 would protest, and deem them neither just nor wise. 
 Their course would give weight to the charge that in 
 America Whitman has been subjected to a kind of 
 outlawry. And those most doubtful of his methods, 
 beliefs, inspiration, should understand that here is an 
 uncommon and striking figure, which they will do 
 well to observe ; one whose words have taken hold 
 in various quarters, and whose works should be stud- 
 ied as a whole before they are condemned. Not only 
 a poet, but a personage, of a bearing conformed to 
 his ideal. Whether this bearing comes by nature 
 only, or through skilful intent, its possessor certainly 
 carries it bravely, and, as the phrase is, fills the bill, 
 — a task in which some who have tried to emulate 
 him have disastrously failed. Not only a poet and 
 personage, but one whose views and declarations are 
 also worth attention. True, our iiiain lDu^siness_is_ not 
 so much to tesLJhe, soundness of his Jhefliies_ as to 
 ask how poetically, he .iiaa_ announced them. We are 
 examining the poets, not the sages and heroes, except 
 in so far as wisdom and heroism must belong to 
 poetry. But Whitman is the most subjective poet on 
 record. The many who look upon art solely as a 
 means of expression justly will not be content unless 
 the man is included in the problem. I, who believe 
 that he who uses song as his means of expression is 
 on one side an artist, wish to consider him both as 
 an artist and a man. 
 
 Questions involving the nature of verse, of ex- 
 pression, of the poetic life, cannot be adequately dis- 
 cussed in a single chapter; but a paragraph, at least, 
 may be devoted to each point, and should be given 
 its full weight of meaning. It is the fashion for 
 many who reject Whitman's canticles to say: "His 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS SONG. 
 
 353 
 
 poetry is good for nothing ; but we like him as a 
 man," etc. To me, it seems that his song is more 
 noteworthy than his life, in spite of his services in 
 the hospitals during our civil war. His life, at its 
 best periods, was an emblem of the nobleness of a 
 multitude of his country-men and country-women ; at 
 other times, doubtless, and as his poem of " Brook- 
 lyn Ferry " permits us to surmise, it has been no more 
 self-forgetting than the lives of countless obscure toil- 
 ers who do their best from day to day. If, then, I 
 do not think his heroism so important as his art, nor 
 admire him chiefly as an annunciator, but as a poet, 
 it is because I know more than one village where 
 each workman is a philosopher in his way, and some- 
 thing of a priest, and because poets are rarer among 
 us than preachers and heroes, — and I wish to take 
 him at his rarest. That there may be no doubt, from 
 page to page (amid the seeming inconsistencies that 
 must characterize a study of Whitman), as to my 
 conclusion on this point, I may as well say now that 
 both instinct and judgment, with our Greek choruses 
 in mind, and Pindar, and the Hebrew bards, long 
 since led rne to number him among the foremost tync 
 and idyllic poets. If any fail to perceive what 1 mean 
 by this, let him take a single poem, composed in 
 Whitman's finer mood, — "Out of the Cradle End- 
 lessly Rocking," — and read it with some care. Had 
 he not chanted like this, the exorbitant world would 
 hear little of his philosophy and consecration, and 
 care for them still less. Yet it is no less plain to 
 me, reading long and often his early volume, — " start- 
 ing from Paumanok " with this full-throated poet, 
 — that many years ago he formed an inspired and 
 inspiring conception of the spirit and destiny of his 
 own land, his own people, and of the future of a 
 23 
 
 Whii- 
 maiCs life 
 not so ex~ 
 ceptional 
 as his 
 works. 
 
 Without 
 douht a 
 poet of 
 lyric and 
 idyllic 
 genivS' 
 
354 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 *^Ltaves of 
 Grass ''^ 
 Brooklyi 
 N.Y., 
 "855- 
 
 Reviewed 
 
 in " Pui- 
 
 Itam's 
 
 Monthly 
 
 Maga~ 
 
 tine.''* 
 
 world guided by the example of our continental De- 
 mocracy ; and that, — whatever his personal ambi- 
 tion, motive, strength, or weakness, — he bravely and 
 with true genius set forth this conception by methods 
 as bold and free as that which they expressed. 
 What that conception was is to be discovered most 
 readily in the poems which embody it, and not in one 
 but in the mass of them from that day to this. He 
 singularly fails to convey it with justice to himself in 
 the rhetorical preface to the second volume of his 
 Centennial edition. 
 
 II. 
 
 The first edition of Leaves of Grass, now so val- 
 ued by collectors, is a long, thin volume, curious to 
 behold, with wide pages that give the author's pecul- 
 iar lines their full effect. Here was a man with meas- 
 ureless " bounce " and ambition, but with a coequal 
 range of demands for his country, and professedly 
 for all mankind. At that time the sale of most books 
 of poetry or abstract thought was small enough ; 
 critical authorities were few, and of little weight. 
 " Putnam's Monthly " certainly had influence, and 
 was the periodical to which our favorite writers con- 
 tributed some of their choicest work. Its reviewer 
 gave the strange book the best reception possible, 
 by filling three columns with extracts from its pages. 
 He could not have selected any passages more orig- 
 inal than those beginning with the lines, " I play not 
 a march for victors only," and "A child said. What 
 is the grass ? " — than the death-scene of the mashed 
 fireman, for whose sake is the pervading hush among 
 the kneeling crowd, — the ringing story of the old- 
 fashioned frigate and the little captain who won by 
 
^LEAVES OF grass: 
 
 355 
 
 the light of the moon and stars, — the proud humil- 
 ity, the righteous irony and wrath of " A Slave at 
 Auction'' and "A Woman at Auction," — the He- 
 braic picture of the Quakeress with face clearer and 
 more beautiful than the sky, "the justified mother 
 of men." These, and a few masterly bits of descrip- 
 tion and apostrophe, were given in a manner just to 
 the poet, while rude and coarser parts, that might 
 displease even a progressive reader, were kindly over- 
 looked. The study of Emerson and Carlyle had bred 
 a tolerance of whatever was true to nature and op- 
 posed to sham. " Leaves of Grass " was a legitimate 
 offspring of the new movement. Howsoever differing 
 from the latter, or going beyond it, the book would 
 not have found life had not the Concord school al- 
 ready made for it an atmosphere. Whitman ^ a m an 
 of the people — agg]ied_the down-East philosoghy to 
 the daily walks of life, and sang the blare and brawn 
 that he found in the streets about him. In his open- 
 ing lines : — 
 
 "I celebrate myself; 
 And what I assume you shall assume ; 
 For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
 
 " I loafe and invite my soul ; 
 I lean and loafe at my ease 
 summer grass," 
 
 observing a spear of 
 
 hg simply took Al cott and Emerson at their word. 
 His radical demonstration, extended"TrnateF~years 
 even to rebuke of their own failure to go farther, 
 brought them, perchance, like Frankenstein, to re- 
 gard with little complacence the strides of their prod- 
 igy. The difference between Emerson and Whitman 
 illustrated that between certain modes of advanced 
 thought in Massachusetts and New York. If the 
 
 The trajt- 
 scendentai 
 movement 
 
 Massachzf 
 setts vs. 
 NewYorh 
 
356 
 
 IV ALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Class 
 feeling. 
 
 philosophy of the former professed to include the peo- 
 ple, in its genesis and application it often was some, 
 what provincial and aristocratic ; the other also was 
 theoretically broad, professing to include the schol- 
 arly and refined, but in spirit was no less provincial, 
 — suspicious of all save the masses. A true univer- 
 salism yet may come from them both. It was in no 
 unfriendly humor, but with perfect justice, that the 
 " Putnam " critic declared the new poems to be a 
 " mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York 
 rowdyism," which here were " seen to combine in har- 
 mony." For their author prophesied in New York 
 with a selfhood that observed but kept aloof from 
 the West side ; insensibly the East-sider was set above 
 the man of training or affairs whose teams he drove, 
 whose fires he subdued, whose boats he piloted, and 
 whose manhood perchance was as sturdy and virile 
 as his own. Hence, there was a just reason in the 
 pleasantry of the reviewer, who, after acknowledging 
 that the poet was '' one of the roughs," said : " That 
 he is a kosmos is a piece of news we were hardly 
 prepared for. Precisely what a kosmos is, we trust 
 Mr. Whitman will take an early occasion to inform 
 the impatient world." Nothing worse than this sally 
 befell our poet in the leading magazine, and it was 
 added that there were to be found " an original per- 
 ception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic di- 
 rectness in the new poet, which belong to no other 
 adept of the transcendental school." Here, at all 
 evfents, the book was not treated after any Philistine 
 mode,. 
 
 Doubtless many young readers of those quotations 
 felt as if they came with a fresh breeze from old 
 Paumanok and the outer bay. I remember my own 
 impression that here, whether his forms were old ox 
 
 First w«- 
 ^essions 
 of this 
 poetry. 
 
FIIiST IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 357 
 
 new, was a real poet, one who stirred my pulses ; 
 and of whom — in spite of his conceit, familiarity, as- 
 sumption that few could understand him and that all 
 needed his ministrations — I wished 'o know more. 
 I would not surrender that first impression of his 
 genius for any later critical feeling. Nor since that 
 lime, having closely read him, have I found reason 
 to disavow it. And I could sympathize with him, now 
 that his old age really is at hand, in the serene ap- 
 proval of his own work, read twenty years afterward, 
 under some ominous conjunction of Saturn and 
 Mars : — 
 
 " After an interval, reading, here in the midnight, 
 
 With the great stars looking on — all the stars of Orion look- 
 ing. 
 
 And the silent Pleiades — and the duo looking of Saturn and 
 ruddy Mars ; 
 
 Pondering, reading my own songs, after a long interval (sorrow 
 and death familiar now), 
 
 Ere closing the book, what pride ! what joy ! to find them 
 
 Standing so well the test of death and night. 
 
 And the duo of Saturn and Mars ! " 
 
 The picture of Whitman in trousers and open 
 shirt, with slouched hat, hand in pocket, and a defi- 
 ant cast of manner, resolute as it was, had an air 
 not wholly of one who protests against authority, but 
 rather of him who opposes the gonfalon of a " rough " 
 conventionalism to the conventionalism of culture. 
 Not that of the man "too proud to care from 
 whence " he came, but of one very proud of whence 
 he came and what he wore. Seeing him now, with 
 his gracious and silvery beard, it seems hardly possi- 
 ble that the early portrait was at any time his own. 
 But it has become historical, and properly is retained 
 in later editions. 
 
 The " Leaves of Grass " contained the gist of his 
 
 The paces 
 likeness 
 and atti- 
 ivde. 
 
358 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 A-nalysU 
 of the 
 
 ^^Leave^ of 
 Grass.''^ 
 
 Bewilder' 
 tnent of the 
 vritks. 
 
 opinions, and some of its episodes equal in beauty 
 anything he has ever written. He was in his thirty- 
 sixth year, — close upon the age at which more than 
 one famous poet has ended his mission. His book 
 was eminently one with a purpose, or purposes, to 
 which he has been consistent. First, and chiefly, to 
 assert the " Religion of Humanity," — the mystery 
 and development of man, of woman ; the sufficiency 
 of the general plan ; the inherent and equal nobility 
 of our organs, instincts, desires ; the absolute equality 
 of men, irrespective of birth and training. Secondly, 
 to predict a superb illustration of this development, 
 in " These States,'' the great republic of the present, 
 the pure democracy of the future. Thirdly, to por- 
 tray an archetypal microcosm, a man embracing in 
 his passionate and ideal sympathy all the joys, sor- 
 rows, appetites, virtues, sins, of all men, women, and 
 children, — himself being, doing, and suffering with 
 them, — and that man Walt Whitman. Finally, and 
 to lay the groundwork for a new era in literature (in 
 his view the most essential stimulant of progress), the 
 " Leaves " were written in contempt of established 
 measures, formal rhymes, stock imagery and diction, 
 — and in a most irregular kind of dithyramb, which 
 left the hack reviewer sorely in doubt whether it was 
 verse broken off at hap-hazard, or prose run mad. 
 Whatever motives led to these results, we must ad- 
 mire the courage of a poet who thus burned his ships 
 behind him, and plunged into a wilderness thence- 
 forth all his own. Various passages of the book were 
 resolutely coarse in their naturalism, and were thought 
 by some, who perhaps knew little of the author, to 
 reveal his tendencies. It seemed as if certain pas- 
 sions appeared to him more natural, certain sins more 
 venial, than others, and that these were those which 
 
HIS PERSONAL CAREER. 
 
 359 
 
 he felt to be most obstreperous in his own system, 
 ■ — that his creed was adjusted to his personal apti- 
 tudes. But many also found in him strength, color, 
 love, and knowledge of nature, and a capacity for 
 lyrical outbursts, — the utterance of a genuine poet. 
 Such was the " Leaves of Grass," although the book 
 is hard to formulate in few and scientific terms ; such, 
 at least, it was, so far as I understand its higher 
 meaning. 
 
 If the successive editions of " Leaves of Grass " 
 had the quiet sale accorded to books of verse, the 
 work did not lack admirers among radicals on the 
 lookout for something new. Emerson, with one of 
 his cheery impulses, wrote a glowing welcome, which 
 soon was given to the public, and directed all eyes 
 to the rising bard. No poet, as a person, ever came 
 more speedily within range of view. His age, origin, 
 and habits were made known ; he himself, in fastidi- 
 ously studied and picturesque costume, was to be ob- 
 served strolling up Broadway, crossing the ferries, 
 mounting the omnibuses, wherever he could see and 
 be seen, make studies and be studied. It was learned 
 that he had been by turns printer, school-master, 
 builder, editor ; had written articles and poems of a 
 harmless, customary nature, — until, finding that he 
 could not express himself to any purpose in that wise, 
 he underwent conviction, experienced a change of 
 thought and style, and professed a new departure in 
 verse, dress, and way of life. Henceforward he oc- 
 cupied himself with loafing, thinking, writing, and 
 making disciples and "camerados." Among the young 
 wits and writers who enjoyed his fellowship, his slow, 
 large mould and rathe-grizzled hair procured for him 
 the hearty title of " Old Walt." In the second year 
 of the war his blood grew warm, and he went to 
 
 IVhit- 
 ntafi's hafh 
 iis^ haunts^ 
 and con- 
 spicuous 
 daily 
 walk. 
 
 Expe- 
 riences 
 during the 
 War. 
 
36o 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 A fortu- 
 nate perse- 
 cution. 
 
 '■'■The Good 
 Gray Poet. 
 A Vindi- 
 cation.'''' 
 NewYork^ 
 1866. 
 
 Disciples 
 and 
 
 friends in 
 Europe 
 and A mer- 
 ica. 
 
 Washington, whither all roads then led. His heart 
 yearned toward the soldiery, and in the hospitals and 
 camps he became the tenderest of nurses and the al- 
 moner of funds supplied to him by generous hands. 
 After three years of this service, and after a sickness 
 brought on by its exertions, he was given a place in 
 the Interior Department. Then came that senseless 
 act of a benighted official, who dismissed him for the 
 immorality of the " Leaves of Grass." To Whitman 
 it was a piece of good luck. It brought to a climax 
 the discussion of his merits and demerits. It called 
 out from the fervent and learned pen of William D. 
 O'Connor a surging, characteristic vindication, " The 
 Good Gray Poet," in which the offending Secretary 
 was consigned to ignominy, and by which the poet's 
 talents, services, and appearance were so fastened 
 upon public attention that he took his place as a 
 hoar and reverend minstrel. He then, with Lowell, 
 Parsons, Holland, Brownell, and Mrs. Howe, had 
 reached the patriarchal age of forty - six. Another 
 Cabinet officer, a man of taste and feeling, gave him 
 a new position — which he held for nine years, and 
 until somewhat disabled by a paralytic affliction. 
 Meanwhile, influential writers, on both sides of the 
 ocean, skilful in polemic criticism, had avowed alle- 
 giance to himself and his works. In England, W. M. 
 Rossetti edited a selection of his poems, and Swin- 
 burne, Dowden, Clifford, Symonds, Buchanan, Clive, 
 have joined in recognizing them. In America, — be- 
 sides O'Connor, — Linton, Conway, Sanborn, Charles 
 Whiting, the Swintons, Benton, Marvin, the sure-eyed 
 and poetic Burroughs, and others, in turn have guarded 
 his rights or ministered to him, some of them with a 
 loyalty unprecedented in our literary annals. Like 
 Fourier, he may be said to have his propagandists in 
 
THE POET AND HIS COUNTRYMEN. 
 
 361 
 
 many lands. Making allowance for the tendency to 
 invest with our own attributes some object of hero- 
 worship, a man must be of unusual stuff to breed 
 this enthusiasm ; and under any privations the life 
 is a success which has created and sustained such an 
 ideal. 
 
 The appearance of Whitman's " Centennial edition," 
 and his needs at the time, gave occasion for an out- 
 cry concerning American neglect and persecution of 
 the poet, and for a debate in which both London and 
 New York took part. But little evidence was found 
 of unfriendliness to him among the magazine-editors, 
 to whom our writers offer their wares. Several of 
 them averred that they would rather accept than de- 
 cline his contributions ; they had declined them only 
 when unsuited to their necessities. What magazine- 
 writer has a smoother experience ? In a democracy 
 the right most freely allotted is that of every man to 
 secure his own income. Nor am I aware that, with 
 two exceptions, any American has been able to de- 
 rive a substantial revenue from poetry alone. A man 
 ahead of his time, or different from his time, usually 
 gathers little of this world's goods. Whitman's fel- 
 low-countrymen regard him kindly and with pride. 
 An English poet declared that it was not America, 
 but the literary class in America, that " persecuted " 
 him. Who constituted such a class I know not, since 
 at present it would be hard to find an American au- 
 thor or editor who does not keep a warm place in 
 his heart for the sage of Camden and hold his gen- 
 ius in honor. What opposition the poet really incurred 
 
 has done him no harm.__The" outcry " le'S^'to" plain- 
 speaking, and the press j;ave the fullest hearing to 
 Whitman's friends. It was of benefit, in showing that 
 our writers were misunderstood, in stimulating his 
 
 charges of 
 iteglect 
 andunfair 
 treatment. 
 
362 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 "Leaves of 
 Grass." 
 " Tvjo Riv- 
 ulets." 2 
 vols. A u- 
 tkor's Cen- 
 tennial 
 Edition. 
 Camden^ 
 .v./., 1876. 
 
 Portraits 
 and char- 
 acteristics. 
 
 Order of 
 contents. 
 
 " Drum- 
 Tafs." 
 
 '•■TwoRiv 
 ulets." 
 
 friends to new offices in his behalf, and especially in 
 promoting the sale of the unique Centennial Edition 
 (or " Author's ") of his collected poems. Never was 
 a collection more aptly named. The two volumes 
 bear the material as well as the spiritual impress of 
 their author. Of the many portraits for which he has 
 sat, they give, besides the earliest, a bold and recent 
 photograph, and the striking wood-cut by his friend 
 Linton — that master of the engraver's craft. Here 
 and there are interpolated later poems, printed on 
 slips, and pasted in by the poet's own hand. It is 
 Whitman, His Book. The edition has an indescrib- 
 able air ; one who owns it feels that he has a portion 
 of the author's self. 
 
 The collection embraces the revised series of 
 " Leaves of Grass," preceded by " Inscriptions," and 
 divided by a group of poems, " Children of Adam," 
 on the sexual conditions of life ; by another group, 
 " Calamus," on the love of comrades, and by certain 
 pieces, of which " Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " is a good 
 specimen, in which the aspect and occupations of the 
 people at large, the glory of the American race, and 
 of the dwellers in Mannahatta, are specifically chanted 
 by this bard of New York. Then follow the " Drum- 
 Taps," so full of lyrical fervor that Whitman may be 
 called a chief singer of that great conflict to which 
 the burning songs of other poets had been an over- 
 ture. There also are " Marches Now the War is 
 Over,'' with a few pieces that celebrate the republi- 
 can uprisings in Europe, and the first volume closes 
 with " Songs of Parting." The second, after a gen- 
 eral preface, opens with " Two Rivulets,'' parallel 
 streams ot prose and verse, followed b" a prose essay 
 of a Carlylese type, possibly suggested by Carlyle's 
 strictures on America. Much of all this portion, prose 
 
AS A WRITER OF PROSE 
 
 363 
 
 and verse, is the least satisfactory of Wliitman's writ- 
 ings, although greatly in earnest and of most import 
 to the author. "The Centennial Songs" (1876) and 
 the poems of 1872 (including that fine burst, " The 
 Mystic Trumpeter") come next. Reverting to his 
 prose "Rivulet" and the " Democratic Vistas," I do 
 not find, — in these contradictory views of the present, 
 notices of weak joints in our armor, and dreams of 
 the future, — much that has not been considered by 
 many who have helped to guide our republic thus far, 
 much that has not occurred to the poet's fellow- 
 thinkers, or is not, at least, within their power to 
 understand and amend. Neither are they expressed 
 in that terse and sufficient language common to rare 
 minds, — nor in a way at all comparable to the writ- 
 er's surer way of expressing himself in his chosen 
 verse. Well-written articles like his recantation of 
 Emerson lead one to suspect that his every-day prose 
 is distorted intentionally, otherwise I should say that, 
 if he is a poet of high rank, he is an exception to the 
 conceit that the truest poets write also the most gen- 
 uine and noble prose ; for certainly his usual style is 
 no nearer that of healthy, self -sustained English than 
 his verse is to ordinary rhythm. A poet's genius may 
 reconcile us to that which Cosmo Monkhouse terms 
 poetry in solution, but prose in dissolution is unde- 
 sirable. A continuous passage of good prose, not 
 broken up with dashes and parentheses, and other 
 elements of weakness, nor marred by incoherent and 
 spasmodic expressions, is hard to find in his " Rivu- 
 lets " and " Vistas." Both his prose and verse have 
 one fault in common, that he underrates the intelli- 
 gence of readers. This is visible in constant repeti- 
 tion of his thoughts, often in forms that grow weaker, 
 and in his intimation that we are even unwilling to 
 
 ^^Demo- 
 cratic Vis- 
 tas^'' etc. 
 
 Defects of 
 Whit- 
 man's 
 prose> 
 
 / 
 
364 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 ^^Memo- 
 randa 
 during the 
 War." 
 
 Poems c 
 Death. 
 
 Lincoln's 
 
 "Burial 
 
 Hymn." 
 
 comprehend ideas which are familiar to all radical 
 thinkers in modern times. 
 
 More impressive in their vivid realism, and as evi- 
 dence not to be gainsaid of Whitman's personal qual- 
 ities, are the " Memoranda during the War," homely 
 and fragmentary records of his labors among the sol- 
 diers. Three years and more were covered by these 
 acts of devotion, and it is well they should be com- 
 memorated. Their records constitute a picture of his 
 life at its highest moment, and are interludes between 
 his poems of life and those upon death. The latter, 
 under the title, " Passage to India," express the ma- 
 turest yearning of his soul. Chastened by illness and 
 wise through experience, the singer whose pulses have 
 beaten with life's full tide now muses upon Death, — 
 the universal blessing. With lofty faith and imagining 
 he confronts the unknown. To one so watchful of 
 his own individuality, any creed that involves a merger 
 of it is monstrous and impossible. He bids his soul 
 voyage through death's portals, sure to find 
 
 "The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted." 
 
 He is at the farthest remove from our modish 
 Buddhism, nor can any Nirvina satisfy his demands. 
 In this section his song is on a high key, and less 
 reduced than elsewhere by untimely commonplace. 
 Here are the pieces inspired by the tragic death of 
 Lincoln. The burial hymn, " When Lilacs last," etc., 
 is entitled to the repute in which it is affectionately 
 held. The theme is handled in an indirect, melo- 
 dious, pathetic manner, and I think this poem and 
 Lowell's " Commemoration Ode," each in its own 
 way, the mest notable elegies resulting from the war 
 and its episodes. Whitman's is exquisitely idyllic, 
 Lowell's the more heroic and intellectual. Even the 
 "Genius of These States" might stoop for an instant 
 
-NOBLE numbers: 
 
 365 
 
 to hear the Cambridge scholar, and I can yield the 
 " Burial Hymn " no truer homage than to associate it 
 with his Ode. 
 
 A " Poem of Joys " makes an artistic contrast with 
 these death-carols, and a group of " Sea-shore Mem- 
 ories,'' with their types and music of the infinite, add 
 to the climacteric effect of this division. Unable here 
 to cite passages from Whitman, I can at least direct 
 the reader how to get at his real capabilities. For his 
 original mood, and something of his color, imagina- 
 tion, hold upon nature, lyric power, turn then to the 
 broad harmonies of the " Sea-shore Memories " ; to 
 " Lincoln's Burial Hymn," and the shorter poems 
 beyond it ; to " The Mystic Trumpeter," and " The 
 Wound-Dresser " ; and then, after reading the sixth 
 section of the poem, "Walt Whitman," 
 
 " A child said, ' What is the grass ? ' " 
 
 find the two hundred and sixth paragraph, 
 
 "I understand the large hearts of heroes," 
 
 and read to the end of the frigate-fight. These pas- 
 sages are a fair introduction to the poet, and you will 
 go with him farther, until checked by some repulsive 
 exhibition, or wearied by pages cheap in wisdom and 
 invective or — intolerably dull. Often where he utters 
 truths, it is with an effort to give offence, or with ex- 
 pressions of contempt for their recipient that well 
 might make even the truth offensive. A man does not 
 care to be driven with blows and hard names, even to 
 a feast, nor to have the host brag too much of the 
 entertainment. 
 
 Sugges- 
 iiotis to th* 
 reader. 
 
366 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Wkit- 
 
 man's 
 
 physical 
 
 and sextial 
 
 tketnes attd 
 
 illustra- 
 
 iiofis. 
 
 III. 
 
 Here we may as well consider a trait of Whitman's 
 early work that most of all has brought it under cen- 
 sure. I refer to the blunt and open manner in which 
 the consummate processes of nature, the acts of pro- 
 creation and reproduction, with all that appertain to 
 them, are made the theme or illustration of various 
 poems, notably of those with the title " Children of 
 Adam." Landor says of a poet that, " on the remark 
 of a learned man that irregularity is no indication of 
 genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a 
 sudden he cried out in the Hay market, ' There is no 
 God.' It was then rumored more generally and more 
 gravely that he had something in him. . . . ' Say what 
 you will,' once whispered a friend of mine, ' there are 
 things in him strong as poison, and original as sin.' " 
 But those who looked upon Whitman's sexuality as a 
 shrewd advertisement justly might be advised to let 
 him reap the full benefit of it, since, if he had no 
 more sincere basis, it would receive the earlier judg- 
 ment — and ere long be " outlawed of art." This has 
 not been its fate, and therefore it must have had 
 something of conviction to sustain it. Nevertheless, 
 it made the public distrustful of this poet, and did 
 much to confine his volumes to the libraries of the 
 select few. Prurient modesty often is a sign that 
 people are conscious of personal defects ; but Whit- 
 man's physical excursions are of a kind which even 
 Thoreau, refreshed as he was by the new poet, found 
 it hard to keep pace with. The fault was not that 
 he discussed matters which others timidly evade, but 
 that he did not do it in a clean way, — that he was 
 too anatomical and malodorous withal ; furthermore, 
 that in this department he showed a morbid interest, 
 
'CHILDREN OF ADAM,' ETC. 
 
 367 
 
 and applied its imagery to other departments, as if 
 with a special purpose to lug it in. His pictures 
 sometimes were so realistic, his speech so free, as to 
 excite the hue and cry of i ndecent exposur e ; the dis- 
 play of things natu ral, indeed, bijt which we thinlT it 
 
 unnatural to ejL'LiML.£IL.lJ?£,.l?iS.!lHM> °'^ ^" ^^ read- 
 ing-room and parlor. 
 
 On the poet's side it is urged that the ground of 
 this exposure was, that thus only could his reform be 
 consistent ; that it was necessary to celebrate the body 
 with special unction, since, with respect to the phys 
 ical basis of life, our social weakness and hypocrisy 
 are most extreme. Not only should the generative 
 functions be proclaimed, but, also, — to show that 
 " there is in nature nothing mean or base," — the side 
 of our life which is hidden, because it is of the earth, 
 earthy, should be plainly recognized in these poems ; 
 and " thus, out of rankness and coarseness, a new vi- 
 rility be bred, an impotent and squeamish race at last 
 be made whole. 
 
 Entering upon this field of dispute, what I have to 
 say — in declaring that Whitman mistakes the aim of 
 the radical artist or poet — is perhaps different from 
 the criticism to which he has been subjected. Let us 
 test him solely by his own rules. Doing this, we pre- 
 suppose his honesty of purpose, otherwise his objec- 
 tionable phrases and imagery would be outlawed, not 
 only of art but of criticism. Assume, then, first, that 
 they were composed as a fearless avowal of the in- 
 stincts and conditions which pertain to him in common 
 with the race which he typifies ; secondly, that he 
 deems such a presentation essential to his revolt 
 against the artifice of current life and sentiment, and 
 makes it in loyal reliance upon the excellence, the truth, 
 of nature. To judge him in conformity with these 
 
 Alleged iTt- 
 decefxy. 
 
 The Pad's 
 defence : 
 "a sane 
 sensual- 
 ity." 
 
 How to test 
 this mat~ 
 ter. 
 
368 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Genius is 
 tonsisUni. 
 
 Wherein 
 Ikis poet 
 miscon- 
 ceives the 
 instinct 
 and meth- 
 od of Na- 
 ture. 
 
 •^Affaire 
 CUmen- 
 eeau.^^ 
 Paris. 
 
 ideas lessens our estimate of his genius. Genius is 
 greatly consistent when most audacious. Its instinct 
 will not violate nature's logic, even by chance, and it is 
 something like obtuseness that does so upon a theory. 
 In Mr. Whitman's sight, that alone is to be con- 
 demned which is against nature, yet, in his mode of 
 allegiance, he violates her canons. For, if there is 
 nothing in her which is mean or base, there is much 
 that is ugly and disagreeable. If not so in itself (and 
 on the question of absolute beauty I accept his own 
 ruling, "that whatever tastes sweet to the most per- 
 fect person, that is finally right "), if not ugly in itself, 
 it seems so to the conscious spirit of our intelligence. 
 Even Mother Earth takes note of this, and resolves, 
 or disguises and beautifies, what is repulsive upon her 
 surface. It is well said that an artist shows inferiority 
 by placing either the true, the beautiful, or the good, 
 above its associates. Nature is strong and rank,* but 
 not externally so. She, too, has her sweet and sacred 
 sophistries, and the delight of Art is to heighten her 
 beguilement, and, far from making her ranker than 
 she is, to portray what she might be in ideal combi- 
 nations. Nature, I say, covers her slime, her muck, 
 her ruins, with garments that to us are beautiful. She 
 conceals the skeleton, the frame-work, the intestinal 
 thick of life, and makes fair the outside of things. 
 Her servitors swiftly hide or transform the ferment- 
 ing, the excrementitious, and the higher animals pos- 
 sess her instinct. Whitman fails to perceive that she 
 respects certain decencies, that what we call decency 
 is grounded in her law. An artist should not elect 
 to paint the part of her to which Churchill rashly 
 avowed that Hogarth's pencil was devoted. There is 
 a book — the Affaire Clkmenceau — in which a French- 
 man's regard for the lamp of beauty, and his indif 
 
HIS MISCOACEPTION OF NA TURE. 
 
 369 
 
 ference to that of goodness, are curiously illustrated. 
 But Dumas points out, in the rebuke given by a sculp- 
 tor to a pupil who mistakenly elevates the arm of his 
 first model, a beautiful girl, that the Underside of 
 things should be avoided in art, — since Nature, not 
 meaning it to be shown, often deprives it of beauty. 
 Finally, Whitman ^ sins against h is mistress in ques- 
 tio ning the instinct we derive from her,^one~which 
 of all is most elevating to poetry, and which is the 
 basis of sensations that lead childhood on, that fill 
 youth with rapture, impress with longing all human 
 kind, and make up, impalpable as they are, half the 
 preciousness of life. JHe draws away the final veil. 
 It is not squeamishness that leaves something to the 
 imagination, that hints at guerdons still unknown. 
 Thg._l.aw. of _ sugggstipn, of half-concealment, deter- 
 mines the choicest effects, and is the surest road to 
 truth. Grecian as Whitman may be, the Greeks bet- 
 ter understood this matter, as scores of illustrations, 
 like that of the attitude of the Hermaphroditus in the 
 Louvre, show. A poet v iolates Nature's charm of feel- 
 ing in robbing love, and even jntfigue,"of their eso- 
 teric_3u^^! No human appelites need be pruriently 
 ignored, but coarsely analyzed they fall below hu- 
 manity. He even takes away the sweetness and pleas- 
 antness of stolen waters and secret bread. Furto 
 cuncta magis bella. The mock-modesty and effemi- 
 nacy of our falser tendencies in art should be chas 
 tised. but he misses the true corrective. Delicacy is 
 not impotence, nor rankness the sure mark of virility. 
 The model workman is both fine and strong. Where 
 Whitman sees nothing but the law of procreation, 
 poetry dwells upon the union of souls, devotion unto 
 death, joys greater for their privacy, things of more 
 worth because whispered between the twilights. It 
 24 
 
 The law of 
 Reserve, 
 in Nature 
 and A rt. 
 
 The an- 
 
 tigue/eel' 
 
 ing. 
 
 Delicacy 
 not incon- 
 sistent ijuith 
 strength. 
 
370 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 spiritual- 
 ity essen- 
 tial. 
 
 An infer- 
 ence and a 
 suggestion. 
 
 "tValt 
 
 IVhU- 
 
 man^s 
 
 Poems.'''' 
 
 Selected 
 
 is absolutely true that the design of sexuality is the 
 propagation of species. But the delight of lovers who 
 now inherit the earth is no less a natural right, and 
 those children often are the finest that were begot 
 without thought of offspring. There are other lights 
 in which a dear one may be regarded than as the 
 future mother of men, and these — with their present 
 hour of joy — are unjustly subordinated in the "Leaves 
 of Grass." Marked as the failure of this pseudo-nat- 
 uralism has been hitherto, even thus will it continue, 
 — so long as savages have instincts of modesty, — so 
 long as we dream of and draw the forms and faces, 
 not the internal substance and mechanism, of those we 
 hold most dear, — so long as the ivy trails over the 
 ruin, the southern jessamine covers the blasted pine, 
 the moss hides the festering swamp, — so long as our 
 spirits seek the spirit of all things ; and thus long 
 shall art and poesy, while calling every truth of science 
 to their aid, rely on something else than the processes 
 of science for the attainment of their exquisite results. 
 From the tenor of Mr. Whitman's later works, I 
 sometimes have thought him half-inclined to see in 
 what respect his effort toward a perfect naturalism was 
 misdirected. In any case, there would be no inconsis- 
 tency in a fu rther modificat ion of his early p ieces, — ' 
 in the rejection of certain passages and words, which, 
 by the law of strangeness, are more conspicuous than 
 ten times their amount of common phraseology, and 
 grow upon the reader until they seem to pervade the 
 whole volume. The examples of Lucretius, Rabelais, 
 and other masters, who wrote in other ages and con- 
 ditions, and for their own purposes, have little anal- 
 ogy. It well may be that our poet at first had more 
 claim to a wide reading in England than here, since 
 his English editor, without asking consent, omitted 
 
METHOD OF HIS VERSE. 
 
 IT^ 
 
 entirely every poem " which could with tolerable fair- 
 ness be deemed oifensive." Without going so far, and 
 with no falseness to himself, Whitman might re-edit 
 his editions in such wise that they would not be 
 counted wholly among those books which are meat 
 for strong men, but would have a chance among those 
 greater books that are the treasures of the simple and 
 the learned, the young and the old. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The entire body of his work has a sign-metrical by 
 which it is recognized — a peculiar and uncompro- 
 mising style, conveyed in a still more peculiar un- 
 rhymed verse, irregular, yet capable of impressive 
 rhythmical and lyrical effects. 
 
 The faults of his method, glaring enough in ruder 
 passages, are quite his own ; its merits often are 
 no less so, but in his chosen form there is little orig- 
 inal and new. It is an old fashion, always selected 
 for dithyrambic oracular outpourings, — that of the 
 Hebrew lyrists and prophets, and their inspired Eng- 
 lish translators, — of the Gaelic minstrels, — of various 
 Oriental and Shemitic peoples, — of many barbarous 
 dark-skinned tribes, — and in recent times put to use 
 by Blake, in the " Prophetic Visions," and by other 
 and weaker men. There are symptoms in Whitman's 
 earlier poems, and definite proof in the later, that his 
 studies have included Blake, — between whose traits 
 and his own there is a superficial, not a genuine, like- 
 ness. Not as an invention, then, but as a striking and 
 persistent renaissance, the form that has become his 
 trade-mark, and his extreme claims for it, should have 
 fair consideration. An honest effort to enlarge the 
 poet's equipment, too long unaided, by something rich 
 
 and edited 
 by U^. M. 
 Rossettij 
 London. 
 
 This foeVs 
 lyricaland 
 rhythmical 
 Tnethod. 
 
 Not a new 
 invention. 
 
 WiUiam 
 Blake. 
 
 It de- 
 tnands a 
 fair exane 
 {nation. 
 
372 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 ^' What is 
 Art?" 
 S. G. IV. 
 BenjamtH. 
 Boston ; 
 1877. 
 
 Outcry 
 affainst 
 wonted 
 (ortns. 
 
 The ques- 
 tion of 
 Technique, 
 
 and strange, deserves praise, even though a failure ; 
 for there are failures worthier than triumphs. Our 
 chanter can bear with dignity the provincial laughter 
 of those to whom all is distasteful that is uncommon, 
 and regard it as no unfavorable omen. From us the 
 very strangeness of his chant shall gain for it a wel- 
 come, and the chance to benefit us as it may. Thereby 
 we may escape the error pointed out by Mr. Benja- 
 min, who says that people, in approaching a work, in- 
 stead of learning from it, try to estimate it from their 
 preconceived notions. Hence, original artists at first 
 endure neglect, because they express their own dis- 
 coveries in nature of what others have not yet seen, 
 — a truth well to bear in mind whenever a singer ar- 
 rives with a new method. 
 
 Probably the method under review has had a can- 
 did hearing in more quarters than the author himself 
 is aware of. If some men of independent thought and 
 feeling have failed to accept his claims and his esti- 
 ma.te of the claims of others, it possibly has not been 
 through exclusiveness or malice, but upon their own 
 impression of what has value in song. 
 
 Whitman never has swerved from his primal indict- 
 ment of the wonted forms, rhymed and unrhymed, 
 dependent upon accentual, balanced, and stanzaic 
 effects of sound and shape, — and until recently has 
 expressed his disdain not only of our poets who care 
 for them, but of form itself. So far as this cry was 
 raised against the technique of poetry, I think not 
 merely that it is absurd, but that when he first made 
 it he had not clearly thought out his own problem. 
 Technique, of some kind, is an essential, though it is 
 equally true that it cannot atone for poverty of thought 
 and imagination. I hope to show that he never was 
 more mistaken than when he supposed he was throw 
 
POETIC FORIHS. 
 
 ni 
 
 ing off form and technique. But first it may be said 
 that no " form " ever has sprung to life, and been 
 handed from poet to poet, that was not engendered by 
 instinct and natural law, and that will not be accepted 
 in a sound generalization. Whitman avers that the 
 time has come to break down the barriers between 
 prose and verse, and that only thus can the Amer- 
 ican bard utter anything commensurate with the lib- 
 erty and splendor of his themes. Now, the mark of 
 a poet is that he is at ease everywhere, — that noth- 
 ing can hamper his gifts, his exultant freedom. He 
 is a master of expression. There are certain points 
 
 — note this — where expression takes on rhythm, and 
 certain other points where it ceases to be rhythmical, 
 
 — places where prose becomes poetical, and where 
 verse grows prosaic ; and throughout Whitman's pro- 
 ductions these points are more frequent and unmis- 
 takable than in the work of any other writer of our 
 time. However bald or formal a poet's own method, 
 it is useless for him to decry forms that recognize 
 the pulses of time and accent, and the linked sweet- 
 ness of harmonic sound. Some may be tinkling, oth- 
 ers majestic, but each is suited to its purpose, and 
 has a spell to charm alike the philosopher and the 
 child that knows not why. The human sense ac- 
 knowledges them ; they are the earliest utterance of 
 divers peoples, and in their later excellence still hold 
 their sway. Goethe discussed all this with Ecker- 
 mann, and rightly said there were "great and myste- 
 rious agencies " in the various poetic forms. He 
 even added that if a sort of poetic prose should be 
 introduced, it would only show that the distinction 
 between prose and poetry had been lost sight of com- 
 pletely. Rhyme, the most conventional feature of 
 ballad verse, has its due place, and will keep it; it 
 
 Uttbound- 
 ed liberty 
 of the Poet 
 
 Time, 
 
 Accent, 
 
 Rhythm. 
 
 Goethe'i 
 view. 
 
 Rhyme* 
 
374 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 whitman 
 vpOH Eng- 
 tish blank 
 verse. 
 
 Glory of 
 
 this su- 
 preme 
 
 Cp. " Vk- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 ^p. i6(>- 
 
 ^2. 
 
 is an artifice, but a natural artifice, and pleases ac- 
 cordingly. Milton gave reasons for discarding it when 
 he perfected an unrhymed measure for the stateliest 
 English poem ; but what an instrument rhyme was in 
 his hands that made the sonnets and minor poems 1 
 How it has sustained the whole carnival of our heroic 
 and lyric song, from the sweet pipings of Lodge and 
 Chapman and Shakespeare, to the undertones of 
 Swinburne and Poe ! There are endless combinations 
 yet in the gamut. The report is that Whitman's prej- 
 udice is specially strong against our noblest unrhymed 
 form, "blank-verse." Its variety and freedom, within 
 a range of accents, breaks, caesural efliects, — its roll- 
 ing organ-harmonies, — he appreciates not at all. 
 Rhythmical as his own verse often can be, our future 
 poets scarcely will discard blank-verse in its behalf 
 — not if they shall recall " The Tempest," " Hail, 
 Holy Light," "Tintern Abbey," "Hyperion," the " Hel- 
 lenics," "Ulysses," and " Thanatopsis." Mr. Parke 
 Godwin, in a private letter, terms it "the grandest 
 and most flexible of English measures," and adds, 
 with quick enthusiasm : " Oh, what a glory there is 
 in it, when we think of what Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Wordsworth, and Landor made of it, to say nothing 
 of Tennyson and Bryant ! " I doubt not that new 
 handlings of this measure will produce new results, 
 unsurpassed in any tongue. It is quite as fit as Mr. 
 Whitman's own, if he knows the use of it, for "the 
 expression of American democracy and manhood." 
 Seeing how dull and prolix he often becomes, it may 
 be that even for him his measure has been too facile, 
 and that the curb of a more regular unrhymed form 
 would have spared us many tedious curvetings and 
 grewsome downfalls. 
 
 Strenuous as he may be in his belief that the old 
 
HIS THEORY AND ITS ORIGIN. 
 
 375 
 
 methods will be useless to poets of the future, I am 
 sure that he has learned the value of technique through 
 his long practice. He well knows that whatever claims 
 to be the poetry of the future speedily will be for- 
 gotten in the past, unless consonant with the laws of 
 expression in the language to which it belongs ; that 
 verse composed upon a theory, if too artificial in its 
 contempt of art, may be taken up for a while, but, 
 as a false fashion, anon will pass away. Not that 
 his verse is of this class ; but it justly has been de- 
 clared that, in writing with a purpose to introduce a 
 new mode or revolutionize thought, and not because 
 an irresistible impulse seizes him, a poet is so much 
 the less a poet. Our question, then, involves the spon- 
 taneity of his work, and the results attained by hira. 
 
 His present theory, like most theories which have 
 reason, seems to be derived from experience : he has 
 learned to discern the good and bad in his work, 
 and has arrived at a rationale of it. He sees that 
 he has been feeling after the irregular, various har- 
 monies of nature, the anthem of the winds, the roll 
 of the surges, the countless laughter of the ocean 
 waves. He tries to catch this " under-melody and 
 rhythm." Here is an artistic motive, distinguishing 
 his chainless dithyrambs from ordinary verse, somewhat 
 as the new German music is distinguished from folk- 
 melody, and from the products of a preceding, espe- 
 cially the Italian, school. Here is not only reason, 
 but a theoretical advance to a grade of art demand- 
 ing extreme resources, because it affords the widest 
 range of combination and effect. 
 
 But this comprehension of his own aim is an after- 
 thought, the result of long groping. The genesis of 
 the early " Leaves " was in motives less artistic and 
 penetrating. Finding that he could not think and 
 
 IVhit- 
 man^s rem 
 soruible 
 statement 
 ofkis own 
 endeavor. 
 
 Its true 
 origin. 
 
376 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Quality 
 vf his eye 
 and ear. 
 
 The 
 
 results 
 
 ittained. 
 
 work to advantage in the current mode, he concluded 
 that the mode itself was at fault ; especially, that the 
 poet of a young, gigantic nation, the prophet of a 
 new era, should have a new vehicle of song. With-' 
 out looking farther, he spewed out the old forms, and 
 avowed his distaste for poets who still employ them. 
 His off-hand course does not bring us to the conclu- 
 sion of the whole matter. So far as the crudeness of 
 the juventus mundi is revived by him, it must be tem- 
 poral and passing, like the work of some painters, 
 who, for the sake of startling effects, use ephemeral 
 pigments. A poet does not, perforce, restore the lost 
 foundations of his art by copying the manner natural 
 to an aboriginal time and people. He is merely ex- 
 changing masters, and certainly is not founding a new 
 school. Only as he discovers the inherent tendencies 
 of song does he belong to the future. Still, it is 
 plain that Whitman found a style suited to his pur- 
 poses, and was fortunate both as a poet and a diplo- 
 matist. He was sure to attract notice, and to seem 
 original, by so pronounced a method. Quoth the 
 monk to Gargantua, " A mass, a matin, or vesper, 
 well rung, is half said." It was suited to him as a 
 poet, because he has that somewhat wandering sense 
 of form, and of melody, which often makes one's con- 
 ceptions seem the more glorious to himself, as if in« 
 vested with a halo or blended with concurrent sound, 
 and prevents him from lessening or enlarging them 
 by the decisive master-hand, or at once perfecting 
 them by sure control. 
 
 A man who finds that his gloves cripple him does 
 right in drawing them off. At first. Whitman cer- 
 tainly meant to escape all technique. But genius, in 
 spite of itself, makes works that stand the test of sci- 
 entific laws. And thus he now sees that he was grop 
 
ADAPTABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 377 
 
 ing toward a broader technique. Unrhymed verse, 
 the easiest to write, is the hardest to excel in, and no 
 measure for a bardling. And Whitman never more 
 nearly displayed the feeling of a true artist than when 
 he expressed a doubt as to his present handling of 
 his own verse, but hoped that, in breaking loose from 
 transmarine forms, he had sounded, at least, the key 
 for a new paean. I have referred to his gradual ad- 
 vances in the finish of his song. Whether he has re- 
 vived a form which others will carry to a still higher 
 excellence is doubtful. Blank-verse, limitless in its 
 capacities, forces a poet to stand without disguise, 
 and reveals all his defects. Whitman's verse, it is 
 true, does not subject him to so severe a test. He 
 can so twist and turn himself, and run and jump, 
 that we are puzzled to inspect him at all, or make 
 out his contour. Yet the few who have ventured to 
 follow him have produced little that has not seemed 
 like parody, or unpleasantly grotesque. It may be 
 that his mode is suited to himself alone, and not to 
 the future poets of These States, — that the next orig- 
 inal genius will have to sing " as Martin Luther sang," 
 and the glorious army of poetic worthies. I suspect 
 that the old forms, in endless combinations, will re- 
 turn as long as new poets arise with the old abiding 
 sense of time and sound. 
 
 The greatest poet is many-sided, and will hold him- 
 self slavishly to no one thing for the sake of differ- 
 ence. He is a poet, too, in spite of measure and 
 material, while, as to manner, the style is the man. 
 Genius does not need a special language ; it newly 
 uses whatever tongue it finds. Thought, fire, passion, 
 will overtop everything, — will show, like the limbs of 
 Teverino, through the clothes of a prince or a beggar. 
 A. cheap and common instrument, odious in foolish 
 
 Adapta- 
 bility q/ 
 true 
 genius. 
 
378 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 The style 
 is the man. 
 
 A signifi- 
 cant/act. 
 
 Copious 
 and 
 
 original 
 diction. 
 
 Effective 
 attes and 
 fpitkets. 
 
 hands, becomes the slave of music under the touch 
 of a master. I attach less importance, therefore, to 
 Whitman's experiment in verse than he and his crit- 
 ics have, and inquire of his mannerism simply how 
 far it represents the man. To show how little there 
 is in itself, we only have to think of Tupper ; to see 
 how rich it may be, when the utterance of genius, 
 listen to Whitman's teacher, William Blake. It does 
 not prove much, but still is interesting, to note that 
 the pieces whose quality never fails with any class 
 of hearers, — of which " My Captain " is an example, 
 — are those in which our poet has approached most 
 nearly, and in a lyrical, melodious manner, to the or- 
 dinary forms. 
 
 He is far more original in his style proper than 
 in his metrical inventions. His diction, on its good 
 behavior, is copious and strong, full of surprises, util- 
 izing the brave, homely words of the people, and as- 
 signing new duties to common verbs and nouns. He 
 has a use of his own for Spanish and French catch- 
 words, picked up, it may be, on his trip to Louisiana 
 or in Mexican war times. Among all this is much 
 slang that now has lived its life, and is not understood 
 by a new generation with a slang of its own. This 
 does not offend so much as the mouthing verbiage, 
 the " ostent evanescent " phrases, wherein he seems 
 profoundest to himself, and really is at his worst. The 
 titles of his books and poems are varied and sonorous. 
 Those of the latter often are taken from the opening 
 lines, and are key-notes. What can be fresher than 
 " Leaves of Grass " and " Calamus " ? What richer 
 than " The Mystic Trumpeter," " O Star of France ! " 
 " Proud Music of the Storm " ; or simpler than " Drum- 
 Taps," "The Wound-Dresser," "The Ox-Tamer"; 
 or more characteristic than " Give me the Splendid 
 
AS A POET OF NATURE. 
 
 379 
 
 Silent Sun," " Mannahatta," " As a Strong Bird on 
 Pinions Free," " Joy, Shipmate, Joy " ? Some are 
 obscure and grandiose — " Eidolons," " Chanting the 
 Square Deific," but usually his titles arrest the eye 
 and haunt the ear ; it is an artist that invents them, 
 and the best pieces have the finest names. His ep- 
 ithets, also, are racier than those of other poets ; 
 there is something of the Greek in Whitman, and his 
 lovers call him Homeric, but to me he shall be our old 
 American Hesiod, teaching us works and days. 
 
 V. 
 
 His surest hold, then, is as an American poet, 
 gifted with language, feeling, imagination, and inspired 
 by a determined purpose. Some estimate, as I have 
 said, may be made of his excellence and short-com- 
 ings, without waiting for that national absorption 
 which he himself declares to be the test. 
 
 As an assimilating poet of nature he has positive 
 genius, and seems to me to present his strongest 
 claims. Who else, in fact, has so true a hand or eye 
 for the details, the sweep and color, of American 
 landscape ? Like others, he confronts those superb 
 physical aspects of the New World which have con- 
 trolled our poetry and painting, and deferred the 
 . growth of a figure-school, but in this struggle with 
 Nature he is not overcome ; if not the master, he is 
 the joyous brother-in-arms. He has heard the mes- 
 sage of the pushing, wind-swept sea, along Paumanok's 
 shore ; he knows the yellow, waning moon and the 
 rising stars, — the sunset, with its cloud-bar of gold 
 above the horizon, — the birds that sing by night or 
 day, bush and brier, and every shining or swooning 
 flower, the peaks, the prairie, the mighty, conscious 
 
 General 
 
 estimate 
 of his mer' 
 its atid de- 
 fects. 
 
 A verita- 
 ble foet^f 
 nature 
 
38o 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 The 
 
 human 
 
 fUtneni 
 
 often 
 
 fresent. 
 
 His intag- 
 Vtatiofu 
 
 river, the dear common grass that children fetch with 
 full hands. Little escapes him, not even " the mossy 
 scabs of the worm fence, and heap'd stones, mullein 
 and poke-weed " ; but his details are massed, blended, 
 — the wind saturates and the light of the American 
 skies transfigures them. Not that to me, recalling the 
 penetrative glance of Emerson, the wood and way-side 
 craft that Lowell carried lightly as a sprig of fir, and 
 recalling other things of others, does Whitman seem 
 our " only " poet of nature ; but that here he is on his 
 own ground, and with no man his leader. 
 
 Furthermore, his intimacy with Nature is always 
 subjective, — she furnishes the background for his 
 self-portraiture and his images of men. None so apt 
 as he to observe the panorama of life, to see the 
 human figure, — the hay-maker, wagoner, boatman, 
 soldier, woman and babe and maiden, and brown, lusty 
 boy, — to hear not only " the bravuras of birds, bustle 
 of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks 
 cooking my meals," but also " the sound I love, the 
 sound of the human voice." His town and country 
 scenes, in peace or in war, are idyllic. From utter 
 want of sympathy, he can only name and designate 
 anything above the g^enre — he does not depict it. A 
 single sketch, done in some original way, often makes 
 a poem ; such is that reminiscence (in rhyme) of the 
 old Southern negress, " Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," 
 and such the touching conceit of Old Ireland — no 
 fair and green-robed Hibernia of the harp, but an 
 ancient, sorrowful mother, white-haired, lean and tat- 
 tered, seated on the ground, mourning for her children. 
 He tells her that they are not dead, but risen again, 
 with rosy and new blood, in another country. This is 
 admirable, I say, and the true way to escape tra- 
 dition ; this is imaginative, — and there is imagina- 
 
IMAGINATION. 
 
 381 
 
 tion, too, in his apostrophe to " The Man-o£- War- 
 Bird " (carried beyond discretion by this highest mood, 
 he finds it hard to avoid blank-verse) : — 
 
 "Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
 Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions ! 
 
 Thou, born to match the gale (thou art all wings) ! 
 
 To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane ; 
 
 Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails. 
 
 Days, even weeks, untired and onward, through spaces — 
 
 realms gyrating. 
 At dark that look'st on Senegal, at mom, America ; 
 That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud ! 
 In these — in thy experiences — hadst thou my soul. 
 What joys ! What joys were thine ! " 
 
 Imagination is the essential thing ; without it poetry 
 is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Whitman 
 shows it in his sudden and novel imagery, and in the 
 subjective rapture of verse like this, but quite as often 
 his vision is crowded and inconsistent. An editor 
 writes to me : " In so far as imagination is thinking 
 through types (eidullia), Whitman has no equal," add- 
 ing that he does not use the term as if applied to 
 Coleridge, but as limited to the use of types, and that 
 " in this sense it is really more applicable to a master 
 of science than to a poet. In the poet the type is 
 lodged in his own heart, and when the occasion comes 
 ... he is mastered by it, and he must sing. In 
 Whitman the type is not so much in his heart as in 
 his thought. . . . While he is moved by thought, often 
 grand and elementary, he does not give the intellec- 
 tual satisfaction warranted by the thought, but a mov- 
 ing panorama of objects. He not only puts aside 
 his ' singing-robes,' but his ' thinking-cap,' and resorts 
 to the stereopticon. "' How acute, how true ! There 
 is, however, a peculiar quality in these long catalogues 
 
 H. M. Al- 
 den's anal- 
 ysis of this 
 quality. 
 
 Caia^ 
 loffues" in 
 
;82 
 
 IV ALT WHITMAN. 
 
 WhU- 
 mati's 
 verse. 
 
 Their 
 Cleaning. 
 
 Pathos 
 and ten- 
 derness. 
 
 Relations 
 of Poetry 
 and Set- 
 ance. Cfi. 
 
 of types, — such as those in the " Song of the Broad- 
 Axe " and " Salut au Monde," or, more poetically 
 treated, in " Longings for Home.'' The poet appeals 
 to our synthetic vision. Look through a window j 
 you see not only the framed landscape, but each tree 
 and stone and living thing. His page must be seized 
 with the eye, as a journalist reads a column at a 
 glance, until successive " types " and pages blend in 
 the mind like the diverse colors of a swift-turning 
 wheel. Whitman's most inartistic fault is that he 
 overdoes this method, as if usually unable to com- 
 pose in any other way. 
 
 The tenderness of a strong and robust nature is a 
 winning feature of his song. There is no love-mak- 
 ing, no yearning for some idol of the heart. In the 
 lack of so refining a contrast to his realism, we have 
 gentle thoughts of children, images of grand old men, 
 and of women clothed with sanctity and years. This 
 tenderness, a kind of natural piety, marks also his 
 poems relating to the oppressed, the suffering, the 
 wounded and dying soldiers. It is the soul of the 
 pathetic, melodious threne for Lincoln, and of the epi- 
 logue — "My Captain!" These pieces remind us 
 that he has gained command of his own music, and 
 in the matter of tone has displayed strength from the 
 first. In revising his early poems he has improved 
 their effect as a whole. It must be owned that his 
 wheat often is more welcome for the chaff in which it 
 is scattered ; there is none of the persistent luxury 
 which compels much of Swinburne's unstinted wealth 
 to go unreckoned. Finally, let us note that Whitman, 
 long ago, was not unread in the few great books of 
 the world, nor inapt to digest their wisdom. He was 
 among the first to perceive the grandeur of the scien- 
 tific truths which are to give impulse to a new and 
 
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 
 
 383 
 
 loftier poetic imagination. Those are significant pas- 
 sages in the poem "Walt Whitman," written by one 
 who had read the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, and be- 
 ginning, "Long I was hugg'd close — long and long." 
 The " Leaves of Grass,'' in thought and method, 
 avowedly are a protest against a hackney breed of 
 singers, singing the same old song. More poets than 
 one are born in each generation, yet Whitman has 
 derided his compeers and scouted the sincerity of 
 their passion. In two things he fairly did take the 
 initiative, and might, like a wise advocate, rest his 
 case upon them. He essayed, without reserve or 
 sophistry, the full presentment of the natural man. 
 He devoted his song to the future of his own country, 
 accepting and outvying the loudest peak-and-prairie 
 brag, and pledging These States to work out a per- 
 fect democracy and the salvation of the world. Strik- 
 ing words and venturesome deeds, for which he must 
 have full credit. But in our studies of the ideal and 
 its votaries, the failings of the latter cannot be lightly 
 passed over. There is an inconsistency, despite the 
 gloss, between his fearful arraignment, going beyond' 
 Carlyle's, of the outgrowth of our democracy, thus 
 far, and his promise for the future. In his prose, he 
 sees neither physical nor moral health among us : all 
 is disease, impotency, fraud, decline. In his verse, 
 the average American is lauded as no type ever was 
 before. These matters renew questions which, to say 
 the least, are still open. Are the lines of caste less 
 sharply divided every year, or are the high growing 
 higher, and the low lower, under our democracy? 
 Is not the social law of more import than the form of 
 government, and has not the quality of race much to 
 do with both? Does Americanism in speech and lit- 
 erature depend upon the form and letter, or upon the 
 
 "Victo- 
 rian 
 Poets ^^ : 
 pp. 7-21, 
 170, 193, 
 343- 
 
 Protest 
 against 
 conven- 
 tionatistn. 
 
 Realism^ 
 and De- 
 tnocracy : 
 the cardi- 
 Tial priitcv 
 pies of 
 Whit- 
 matCs 
 song. 
 
 His incom.. 
 plete judg~ 
 ment of 
 Democ- 
 racy in 
 America. 
 
 Seepp 
 4-1 1. 
 
384 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Narrow- 
 ness his 
 7?iain de- 
 fect. 
 
 Class/eeU 
 vtg. 
 
 spirit? Can the spirit of literature do much more 
 than express the national spirit as far as it has gone, 
 and has it not, in fact, varied with the atmosphere ? 
 Is a nation changed by literature, or the latter by the 
 former, in times when journalism so swiftly represents 
 the thought and fashion of each day ? As to distinc- 
 tions in form and spirit between the Old-World litera- 
 ture and our own, I have always looked for these to 
 enlarge with time. But with the recent increase of 
 travel and communication, each side of the Atlantic 
 now mpre than ever seems to affect the other. Our 
 " native flavor " still is distinct in proportion to the 
 youth of a section, and inversely to the development. 
 It is an intellectual narrowness that fails to meditate 
 upon these things. 
 
 Thus we come to a defect in Whitman's theories, 
 reasoning, and general attitude. He professes univer- 
 sality, absolute sympathy, breadth in morals, thought, 
 workmanship, — exemption from prejudice and for- 
 malism. Under all the high poetic excellences which 
 I carefully have pointed out, I half suspect that his 
 faults lie in the region where, to use his own word, 
 he is most complacent : in brief, that a certain nar- 
 rowness holds him within well-defined bounds. In 
 many ways he does not conform to his creed. Others 
 have faith in the future of America, with her arts and 
 letters, yet hesitate to lay down rules for her adop- 
 tion. These must come of themselves, or not at all. 
 Again, in this poet's specification of the objects of his 
 sympathy, the members of every class, the lofty and 
 the lowly, are duly named ; yet there always is an im- 
 plication that the employer is inferior to the employed, 
 — that the man of training, the " civilizee," is less 
 manly than the rough, the pioneer. He suspects 
 those who, by chance or ability, rise above the crowd. 
 
HIS SPECIAL CONSTITUENCY. 
 
 385 
 
 What attention he does pay them is felt to be in the 
 nature of patronage, and insufferable. Other things 
 being equal, a scholar is as good as an ignoramus, a 
 rich man as a poor man, a civilizee as a boor. Great 
 champions of democracy — poets like Byron, Shelley, 
 Landor, Swinburne, Hugo — often have come from 
 the ranks of long descent. It would be easy to cite 
 verses from Whitman that apparently refute this state- 
 ment of his feeling, but the spirit of his whole work 
 confirms it. Meanwhile, though various editions of 
 his poems have found a sale, he is little read by our 
 common people, who know him so well, and of whose 
 democracy he is the self-avowed herald. In number- 
 less homes of working-men — and all Americans are 
 workers — the books of other poets are treasured. 
 Some mental grip and culture are required, of course, 
 to get hold of the poetry of the future. But Whit- 
 tier, in this land, is a truer type of the people's poet, 
 — the word " people " here meaning a vast body of 
 freemen, having a common-school education, homes, 
 an honest living, and a general comprehension far 
 above that of the masses in Europe. These folk 
 have an instinct that Whittier, for example, has seized 
 his day with as much alertness and self-devotion as 
 this other bard of Quaker lineage, and has sung songs 
 "fit for the New World" as he found it. Whitman 
 is more truly the voice and product of the culture of 
 which he bids us beware. At least, he utters the cry 
 of culture for escape from over-culture, from the weari- 
 ness, the finical precision, of its own satiety. His 
 warmest admirers are of several classes : those who 
 have carried the art of verse to super-refined limits, 
 and seeing nothing farther in that direction, break up 
 the mould for a change ,• those radical enthusiasts 
 who, like myself, are interested in whatever hopes to 
 25 
 
 Not the 
 people's 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 IVkitman 
 a product 
 of the 
 times^ and 
 afavorite 
 •with 
 special 
 classes. 
 
386 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Thecharm 
 o/Thoreau 
 and Brir- 
 roughs. 
 
 Whit, 
 man's ex- 
 cessive/or' 
 THalism. 
 
 Art vs. 
 A rtifice. 
 
 bring us more speedily to tiie golden year ; lastly, 
 those who, radically inclined, do not think closely, 
 and make no distinction between his strength and 
 weakness. Thus he is, in a sense, the poet of the 
 over-refined and the doctrinaires. Such men, too, as 
 Thoreau and Burroughs have a welcome that scarcely 
 would have been given them in an earlier time. From 
 the discord and artifice of our social life we go with 
 them to the woods, learn to name the birds, note the 
 beauty of form and flower, and love these healthy 
 comrades who know each spring that bubbles beneath 
 the lichened crag and trailing hemlock. Theocritus 
 learns his notes upon the mountain, but sings in 
 courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. Whitman, through 
 propagandists who care for his teachings from meta- 
 physical and personal causes, and compose their own 
 ideals of the man, may yet reach the people, in spite 
 of the fact that lasting works usually have pleased all 
 classes in their own time. 
 
 Reflecting upon his metrical theory, we also find 
 narrowness instead of breadth. I have shown that 
 the bent of a liberal artist may lead him to adopt a 
 special form, but not to reject all others ; he will see 
 the uses of each, demanding only that it shall be good 
 in its kind. Swinburne, with his cordial liking for 
 Whitman, is too acute to overlook his formalism. 
 Some of his eulogists, those whom I greatly respect, 
 fail in their special analysis. One of them rightly 
 says that Shakespeare's sonnets are artificial, and that 
 three lines which he selects from " Measure for Meas- 
 ure " are of a higher grade of verse. But these are 
 the reverse of " unmeasured " lines, — they are in 
 Shakespeare's free and artistic, yet most measured, 
 vein. Here comes in the distinction between art and 
 artifice ; the blank-verse is conceived in the broad 
 
EXCESSIVE FORMALISM. 
 
 387 
 
 spirit of the former, the finish and pedantry of the 
 sonnet make it an artificial form. A master enjoys 
 the task of making its artifice artistic, but does not 
 employ it exclusively. Whitman's irregular, manner- 
 istic chant is at the other extreme of artificiality, and 
 equally monotonous. A poet can use it with feeling 
 and majesty ; but to use it invariably, to laud it as the 
 one mode of future expression, to decry all others, is 
 formalism of a pronounced kind. I have intimated 
 that Whitman has carefully studied and improved it. 
 Burroughs does him injustice in admitting that he is 
 not a poet and artist in the current acceptation of 
 those terms, and another writer simply is just in de- 
 claring that when he undertakes to give us poetry he 
 can do it. True, the long prose sentences thrown 
 within his ruder pieces resemble nothing so much as 
 the comic recitativos in the Luffo-songs of the con- 
 cert-cellars. This is not art, nor wisdom, but sensa- 
 tionalism. There is narrowness in his failure to recast 
 and modify these and other depressing portions of 
 various poems, and it is sheer Philistinism for one to 
 coddle all the weaknesses of his experimental period, 
 because they have been a product of himself. 
 
 One effect of the constant reading of his poetry is 
 that, like the use of certain refections, it mars our 
 taste for the proper enjoyment of other kinds. Not, 
 of course, because it is wholly superior, since the 
 most subtile landscape by Corot or Rousseau might 
 be utterly put to nought by a melodramatic neighbor, 
 full of positive color and extravagance. Nor is it 
 always, either, to our bard's advantage that he should 
 be read with other poets. Consider Wordsworth's 
 exquisite lyric upon the education which Nature gives 
 the child whom to herself she takes, and of whom 
 she declares : — 
 
 09ie effect 
 of reading 
 his verse. 
 
 Compara- 
 tive crit- 
 icism. 
 
388 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 The 
 
 charge of 
 affecta- 
 tion. 
 
 Pretetv- 
 
 "The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place, 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face." 
 
 It happens that Whitman has a poem on the same 
 theme, describing the process of growth by sympathy 
 and absorption, which thus begins and ends : — 
 
 " There was a child went forth every day ; 
 
 And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became ; 
 
 And that object became part of him for the day, or a cer- 
 tain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cy- 
 cles of years. 
 
 The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt- 
 marsh and shore-mud ; 
 
 These became part of that child who went forth every day, 
 and who now goes, and will always go forth every day." 
 
 Plainly there are some comparative advantages in 
 Wordsworth's treatment of this idea. It would be just 
 as easy to reverse this showing by quoting other pas- 
 sages from each poet : the purpose of my digression 
 is to declare that by means of comparative criticism 
 any poet may be judged unfairly, and "without regard 
 to his general claims. 
 
 So far as Whitman's formalism is natural to him, 
 no matter how eccentric, we must bear with it ; when- 
 ever it partakes of affectation, it is not to be desired. 
 The charge of attitudinizing, so often brought against 
 his writings and personal career, may be the result of 
 a popular impression that the border-line is indistinct 
 between his self-assertion as a type of Man and the 
 ordinary self-esteem and self-advancement displayed 
 by men of common mould. Pretensions have this 
 advantage, that they, challenge analysis, and make a 
 
SELF-ASSERTION. 
 
 389 
 
 I'ast noise even as we are forced to examine them. 
 In the early preface to the " Leaves " tliere is a pas- 
 sage modelled, in my opinion, upon the style of Emer- 
 son, concerning simplicity, — with which I heartily 
 agree, having constantly insisted upon the test of sim- 
 plicity in my discussion of the poets. Yet this qual- 
 ity is the last to be discerned in many portions of 
 the " Leaves of Grass." In its stead we often find 
 boldness, and the " pride that apes humility," — until 
 the reader is tempted to quote from the " Poet of 
 Feudalism " those words of Cornwall upon the rough- 
 ness which brought good Kent to the stocks. Our 
 bard's self-assertion, when the expression of his real 
 manhood, is bracing, is an element of poetic strength. 
 When it even seems to be " posing," it is a weak- 
 ness, or a shrewdness, and 't is a weakness in a poet 
 to be unduly shrewd. Of course a distinction must 
 be carefully made between the fine extravagance of 
 genius, the joy in its own conceptions, and self-con- 
 scious vanity or affectation, — between, also, occasional 
 weaknesses of the great, of men like Browning, and 
 like the greatest of recent masters, Hugo, and the af- 
 flatus of small men, who only thus far succeed in 
 copying them. And it would be unjust to reckon 
 Whitman among the latter class. 
 
 It may be that his strictures upon the poets of his 
 own land at one time made them hesitate to venture 
 upon the first advances in brotherhood, or to intrude 
 on him with their recognition of his birthright. As 
 late as his Centennial edition, his opinion of their 
 uselessness was expressed in withering terms. He 
 declared that he could not except " a single writer " 
 from his indictment of the " genteel " producers of 
 " pistareen, paste-pot work," and inveighed against 
 the " copious dribble, either of our little or well-known 
 
 Frequent 
 want of 
 irite sitK" 
 plicity. 
 
 WhU- 
 vian's crit- 
 icism of 
 oth^r poets* 
 E.g. 
 ^^Demo- 
 cratic 
 Vistas," 
 {Cextl. 
 Ed.),^. 
 32, S4i 58. 
 
390 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 An egoist 
 by fuUure^ 
 and on 
 ^incipU. 
 
 rhymesters.'' It is Just to add that recently, if the 
 reports of interlocutors are trustworthy, he has ex- 
 cepted " Bryant, Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow — 
 these only and proportionately in the order given " 
 — from his former criticism, and has stated that his 
 general attitude is eminently respectful. If it were 
 not, there would be no inconsistency, in view of his 
 purpose and convictions, nor any reason for complaint. 
 There was no consistency, however, in complaints that 
 arose in various quarters, to some of which I have 
 before referred, concerning a lack of recognition and 
 encouragement from his fellow-craftsmen. There is 
 ample ground for his scorn of the time-serving, un- 
 substantial quality of much of our literature. But I 
 should not be writing this volume, did I not well 
 know that there are other poets than himself who 
 hear the roll of the ages, who look before and after, 
 above and below. The culture which he deprecates 
 may have done them an ill turn in lessening their 
 worldly tact. I am aware that Whitman's poems are 
 the drama of his own life and passions. His sub- 
 jectivity is so great that he not only absorbs all 
 others into himself, but insists upon being absorbed by 
 whomsoever he addresses. In his conception of the 
 world's equality, the singer himself appears as the one 
 Messianic personage, the answerer and sustainer, the 
 universal solvent, — in all these respects holding even 
 " Him that was crucified " to be not one whit his su- 
 perior. It is his kiss, his consolation, that all must 
 receive, — whoever you are, these are given especially 
 to you. But men are egotists, and not all tolerant 
 of one man's selfhood ; they do not always deem the 
 affinities elective. Whitman's personality is too strong 
 and individual to be universal, and even to him it is 
 not given to be all things to all men. 
 
THE ALPENGLOW. 
 
 39 i 
 
 VI. 
 
 But there is that in venerableness which compels 
 veneration, and it is an instinct of human nature to 
 seek the blessing and revere the wisdom of the poet 
 or peasant transfigured by hoary hairs : — 
 
 " Old age superbly rising ! O welcome, ineffable girace of dying 
 days ! " 
 
 I was one of a small but sympathetic audience 
 gathered in New York to hear Mr. Whitman, at the 
 cordial request of authors, journalists, and artists, 
 deliver a lecture upon Abraham Lincoln. As he 
 entered, haltingly, and took the seat placed for him, 
 his appearance satisfied the eye. His manly figure, 
 clothed in a drab suit that loosely and well became 
 him, his head crowned with flowing silvery hair, his 
 bearded, ruddy and wholesome face, upon which sat a 
 look of friendliness, the wise benignity that comes 
 with ripened years, all these gave him the aspect of 
 a poet and sage. His reminiscences of the martyr 
 President were slight, but he had read the hero's 
 heart, had sung his dirge, and no theme could have 
 been dea,rer to him or more fitly chosen. The lec- 
 ture was written in panoramic, somewhat disjointed, 
 prose, but its brokenness was the counterpart of his 
 vocal manner, with its frequent pauses, interphrases, 
 illustrations. His delivery was persuasive, natural, by 
 turns tender and strong, and he held uS with him 
 from the outset. Something of Lincoln himself seemed 
 to pass into this man who had loved and studied 
 him. A patriot of the honest school spoke to us, 
 yet with a new voice — a man who took the future 
 into his patriotism, and the world no less than his 
 own land. 
 
 and lov- 
 able old 
 age. 
 
 Lecture 
 upon Lin- 
 coln : Neiji 
 York, 187&, 
 
392 
 
 IV ALT WHITMAN. 
 
 fi rhapso- 
 iist. 
 
 Nummary, 
 
 I wished that the youths of America could hear him, 
 and that he might go through the land, reading as he 
 did that night, from town to town. I saw that he was 
 by nature a rhapsodist, like them of old, and should 
 be, more than other poets, a reciter of the verse that 
 so aptly reflects himself. He had the round forehead 
 and head which often mark the orator, rather than 
 the logician. He surely feels with Ben Jonson, as 
 to a language, that " the writing of it is but an acci- 
 dent,'' and this is a good thing to feel and know. 
 His view of the dramatic value of Lincoln's death to 
 the future artist and poet was significant. It was the 
 culminating act of the civil war, he said : " Ring down 
 the curtain, with its muses of History and Tragedy 
 on either side." Elsewhere his claim to be an Amer- 
 ican of the Americans was strengthened by a pecul- 
 iarly national mistake, that of confounding quantity 
 with quality, of setting mere size and vastness above 
 dramatic essence. When the brief discourse was 
 ended, he was induced to read the shorter dirge, " O 
 Captain ! My Captain ! " It is, of his poems, among 
 those nearest to a wonted lyrical form, as if the gen- 
 uine sorrow of his theme had given him new pinions. 
 He read it simply and well, and as I listened to its 
 strange, pathetic melodies, my eyes filled with tears, 
 and I felt that here, indeed, was a minstrel of whom 
 it would be said, if he could reach the ears of the 
 multitude and stand in their presence, that not only 
 the cultured, but " the common people heard him 
 gladly." 
 
 Although no order of talent or temperament, in 
 this age, can wholly defy classification, there never- 
 theless is a limbo of poets, artists, thinkers, men of 
 genius, some of whose creations are so expressive, and 
 
PARADOXICAL GENIUS. 
 
 393 
 
 others so feeble and ill-conceived, that any discussion 
 of their quality must consist alternately of praise and 
 adverse criticism. Reviewing what has been written, 
 I see that the career and output of the poet under 
 notice are provocative of each in some extreme, and 
 unite to render him a striking figure in that disputed 
 estate. 
 
 Walt Whitman, then, has seemed to me a man who 
 should think well of Nature, since he has received 
 much at her hands ; and well of Fortune, since his 
 birth, training, localities, have individualized the char- 
 acter of his natural gifts ; and well of Humanity, for 
 his good works to men have come back to him in the 
 devotion of the most loyal and efficient band of adher- 
 ents that ever buoyed the purpose and advanced the 
 interests of a reformer or poet. He has lived his life, 
 and warmed both hands before its fire, and in middle- 
 age honored it with widely praised and not ignoble 
 deeds. Experience and years have brought his virile, 
 too lusty nature to a wiser harmony and repose. He 
 has combined a sincere enthusiasm with the tact of a 
 man of the world, and, with undoubted love for his 
 kind, never has lost sight of his own aim and reputa- 
 tion. No follower, no critic, could measure him with 
 a higher estimate than that which from the first he 
 has set upon himself. As a poet, a word-builder, he 
 is equipped with touch, voice, vision, zest, — all trained 
 and freshened, in boyhood and manhood, by genuine 
 intercourse with Nature in her broadest and minutest 
 forms. From her, indeed, he is true-born, — no bas- 
 tard child nor impostor. He is at home with certain 
 classes of men ; but here his limitations begin, for he 
 is not great enough, unconscious enough, to do more 
 than assume to include all classes in his sympathy 
 and brotherhood. The merits of his verse are lyrical 
 
 WhU- 
 wattes 
 
 went. 
 
394 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 His gen- 
 ius and 
 limita- 
 tions. 
 
 His future 
 reputa- 
 tion. 
 
 passion and frequent originality, — a copious, native, 
 surprising range of diction, — strong feeling, softened 
 by consummate tenderness and pity, — a method low- 
 ered by hoarseness, coarseness, and much that is very 
 pointless and dull, yet at its best charged with melody 
 and meaning, or so near perfection that we are irked 
 to have him miss the one touch needful, — a skill that 
 often is art, but very seldom mastery. As a man of 
 convictions, he has reflected upon the idea of a true 
 democracy, and sought to represent it by a true Amer- 
 icanism ; yet, in searching for it and for the archetypal 
 manhood chiefly in his own personality, it is not 
 strange that he has frequently gratified his self-con- 
 sciousness, while failing to present to others a satis- 
 factory and well-proportioned type of either. His dis- 
 position and manner of growth always have led him 
 to overrate the significance of his views, and inclined 
 him to narrow theories of art, life and song. He 
 utters a sensible protest against the imitativeness and 
 complacency that are the bane of literature, yet is 
 more formal than others in his non-conformity, and 
 haughtier in his plainness than many in their pride- 
 Finally, and in no invidious sense, it is true that he 
 is the poet of a refined period, impossible in any otherj 
 and appeals most to those who long for a reaction, a 
 new beginning; not a poet of the people, but emi- 
 nently one who might be, could he in these days avail 
 himself of their hearing as of their sight. Is he, 
 therefore, not to be read in the future ? Of our living 
 poets, I should think him most sure of an intermittent 
 remembrance hereafter, if not of a general reading. 
 Of all, he is the one most sure — waiving the question 
 of his popular fame — to be now and then examined ; 
 for, in any event, his verse will be revived from time 
 to time by dilettants on the hunt for curious treasures 
 
HIS PLA CE IN LITER A TURE. 
 
 395 
 
 in the literature of the past, by men who will reprint 
 and elucidate him, to join their names with his, or to 
 do for this singer what their prototypes in our day 
 have done for Frangois Villon, for the author of " Jo- 
 seph and his Brethren,'' and for William Blake. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Taylor's 
 career to 
 be noted in 
 illustra- 
 tion of 
 recent 
 conditions. 
 
 The ques- 
 tion of suc- 
 cess. 
 
 THIS poet, the last and youngest of those here 
 made the subjects of distinct review, is no longer 
 a living comrade. The consecrating hand that re- 
 moved him enables us to free our judgment from 
 bias of rivalry or affection. 
 
 " Far off is he, above desire and fear ; 
 No more submitted to the change and chance 
 Of the unsteady planets." 
 
 He was taken in his prime, with work spread out be- 
 fore him, yet not until after years of unceasing pro- 
 duction. We find ourselves observing one whose 
 ideal was higher than anything which his writings, 
 abundant as they are, express for us, and one who 
 none the less has claims to be estimated in some de- 
 gree by that ideal. His life was noteworthy ; it was 
 a display of heroic industry, zest, ambition, the brav- 
 est self-reliance, — and from slight beginnings he 
 achieved much. But he was one whose success must 
 be gauged from within. What was his dream ? Did 
 he realize it ? If not, what hindered him ? These 
 questions must be asked ; and, in trying to answer 
 them, we see the peculiar advantages which the ca- 
 reer of Taylor proffers for an understanding of the 
 literary movement, the social and working life, in 
 which he was involved. Not that he was our most 
 famous singer, nor one whose score was completed, — 
 
AUTHORSHIP IN NEV/ YORK. 
 
 .397 
 
 but what American poet ever touched life and let- 
 ters more variously? He let nothing go by him, he 
 essayed everything, and he furnishes examples of 
 what to do — and what to avoid. Moreover, his 
 story enables us to study American authorship under 
 somewhat different conditions from those which have 
 affected the Cambridge group, and with it a period 
 whose bisecting line is indicated by the date of the 
 beginning of our civil war. 
 
 The task laid upon the pioneers of letters in New 
 York has been sufficiently hard, — always the need 
 of devotion, toil, patient laying of foundations on 
 which others shall build. Inherited names and re- 
 sources, and the advantage of university life, have fa- 
 vored the growth of the New England school. Poets 
 who have strayed into New York — and here they 
 are more seldom born than imported — have carried 
 the harp with one hand and some instrument of labor 
 with the other, and have sung their songs in such 
 noonings as they could obtain. Almost without ex- 
 ception they have been thrown upon journalism for 
 a support, and have experienced whatever good and 
 evil that profession brings to the sesthetic sense of 
 its practitioner. Bayard Taylor was not only a sturdy 
 and courageous example of a poet born out of New 
 England, but must be studied with the period already 
 named. Younger than our chief poets still living, he 
 stood with a few companions who found their music 
 broken in upon by the tumult of a national war. 
 Thus, we are to consider the writings of one who 
 dates half-way between the elder and the rising gen- 
 erations; who was not of Cambridge, nor of Concord, 
 but from the Middle States •, and in whose works, al- 
 though the product of a life of action, we always find 
 the influences of the study and the hearth. 
 
 New York 
 Seep. 53. 
 
 Obiter 
 cantata. 
 
 The Civil 
 War. 
 
398 
 
 B A YARD TAYLOR. 
 
 A versa- 
 tile au- 
 thor. 
 
 Born in 
 
 KenTiett 
 
 Square^ 
 
 Penn., 
 
 Jan. II, 
 
 1825. 
 
 Early li/e 
 ntui long- 
 ings. 
 
 I. 
 
 Taylor was the most versatile of authors. This 
 was the result of constitutional tendency, increased 
 by the exigencies of American life and his own life 
 in particular. He was one, I think, whose natural 
 gift could as well be understood through his personal 
 qualities as from his works. His presence and story 
 were so unreservedly before us as to afiford para- 
 digms of the birth and breeding of a poet. A critic 
 takes kindly to verse which has a man behind it. He 
 strives to put himself in harmony with the singer's 
 youth, manhood, and intellectual prime, — to measure 
 his ideals no less than his performances, — to feel his 
 aids and restrictions, — to breathe, as it were, the 
 very breath of his inspiration. It is worth while to 
 bear in mind the region from which this poet came, 
 and the kinship that exists between the fields, the 
 trees, the air, and all living and sentient things be- 
 longing to a given spot of earth. The happy pas- 
 toral county of a central State produced Bayard Tay- 
 lor from its oldest and purest Quaker stock. Here 
 lie the broad undulating meadows and woodlands of 
 a section wholly characteristic of the temperate zone. 
 Here nature has no extremes of grandeur or pictu- 
 resqueness, nor any gloomy aspects, but is simple, at- 
 tractive, strong; here it blends, as in English rural 
 landscape, all attributes in just proportion. The sons 
 of such a soil are rounded and even in their make, 
 sound of brawn and brain, open to many phases of 
 life, — not likely, once having touched the outer world, 
 to content themselves with one experience or one 
 purpose. 
 
 Young Bayard throve upon the nourishment which 
 Nature offered him. His sensibilities were those of 
 
EARLY EXPERIENCES. 
 
 399 
 
 her poets and artists. The trees, the flowers, the 
 grasses, he knew them all ; he was no sportsman, but 
 "named all the birds without a gun." His farming 
 duties often were forgotten in rovings and reveries, 
 and moods uncomprehended either by himself or by 
 those about him. Then the eager devouring of books, 
 old-fashioned novels, history, travels ; above all, of the 
 poetry within his reach. His youth was that of the 
 traditional American boy, and here, as always, the 
 story of Rasselas repeats itself. The fairest native 
 valley palls upon the lad who as yet has nothing by 
 which to measure its worth. Tranquillity for the old ; 
 for the young, a longing for a new and larger range. 
 But time rights all things : as no town-bred person 
 ever really knows the country, so no country-lad in 
 older years forgets the secrets Nature taught his child- 
 hood. Taylor had through life the frank and some- 
 what homely simplicity of the yeoman, cosmopolite as 
 he was. In time he learned how glad his youth had 
 been, and again and again returned to the fields of 
 Kennett. But the boy's impatience of his confines 
 was early shown. After the schooling at a country 
 academy, where he studied well, came the revolt from 
 farm-life and the alternative selection of a trade. Of 
 course he chose to be a printer, and at the age of sev- 
 enteen became an apprentice in West Chester. Al- 
 ready he had found his gift of making verses, and 
 now took fire with the thought of being a poet. The 
 publication of his juvenile pieces grew out of his de- 
 sire to see the world. 
 
 A thin little book, now so hard to find, entitled 
 Ximena, was dedicated to Griswold, in gratitude for 
 "kind encouragement" shown the author. It shows 
 the course of his early readings . Byron, Scott, Moore, 
 Mrs. Hemans, Bryant, are echoed here and there. A 
 
 . . . and 
 Other Po- 
 ems" 1S44 
 
400 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Sonorous 
 quality. 
 
 ^' Trav- 
 els ^^tjrom 
 ■' Views 
 Afoot," 
 1846, to 
 ''Ei^ypt 
 njtd Ice- 
 land," 
 1874. 
 ^Eleven 
 vols,) 
 
 "RoaTnin^ 
 with a 
 hungry 
 ieart." 
 
 blank-verse poem is inscribed to Whittier, whose name 
 was a household word in the Quaker home. Though 
 this book contained no new note, it did show the am- 
 bition and facile gift of the writer. One quality is 
 apparent which afterward marked his verse, — a pe- 
 culiar sonorousness, especially in the use of resonant 
 proper nouns, the names of historic persons and places. 
 " Ximena " was printed at a venture, for the purpose 
 of increasing the savings with which to undertake a 
 tramp over Europe, at that time an almost fanciful 
 design. From the proceeds he was enabled to see 
 those patrons in Philadelphia who advanced him, on 
 the pledge of his future labors, the little sum which 
 encouraged him to set out upon his travels. After 
 reaching New York he hastened to the Tribune office, at 
 that time the Mecca of rustic enthusiasts, few of whom 
 placed too modest a valuation upon their own powers. 
 However, it was no common youth, this stripling of 
 nineteen, who won the interest of Horace Greeley, and 
 already had found practical friends in Willis, Griswold, 
 Godwin, and the kindly editor of " Graham's Maga- 
 zine." 
 
 Here I may as well consider the sentiment of the 
 journeys which employed so large a portion of his 
 life, and the quality of their record. The latter be- 
 gan in 1846 with the famous Views Afoot, and ended 
 with Egypt and Iceland in the Year i8j4^ a date only 
 five years previous to the sudden close of his career. 
 
 The gist of the matter is that Taylor was a poet 
 upon his travels. A national instinct was expressed 
 in the going out of this wiry, erect, impetuous young 
 man, "to see the world." The same desire that brings 
 a Western youth to the Atlantic shore has sent our 
 coast-born lads on strange voyages to many lands. 
 Grant White averred that while the air of England was 
 
THE 'TRAVELS? 
 
 401 
 
 yet new to him, he felt that it was something he was 
 " born to breathe." For us the old strangeness and 
 distance no more yield the charm which belonged to 
 the pages of Irving and Willis and Mitchell. 
 
 But in Taylor's case no home-ambition could restrain 
 ,his desire for travel. He went abroad that he might 
 see and learn and grow. His journals were under- 
 taken chiefly to give him the means of adventure. 
 He made no scientific pretensions. He was some- 
 thing of a botanist, a natural geographer, could see the 
 form beneath the color, and had enough of general 
 knowledge to make his narrative rich and intelligible. 
 Before all, he sought the delight of the eye, and that 
 series of sensations which Pater declares to be the 
 sum of life. He had a poet's sense of the best every- 
 where, and a poet's sympathy with any land to which 
 he came. Hence we journey with him, and enjoy his 
 own emotions ; we experience his passion to reach the 
 summits, the ultimate deserts, the extreme capes. 
 Such is the spirit of his Travels. We read much in 
 them of scenery and external things ; he reserved for 
 his private letters what he had to say of the men and 
 women whose friendship he gained. His perceptions 
 enabled him, though going rapidly over many regions, 
 to get the special quality of each. In all these books 
 there is the essential truth of the poet ; if they are a 
 reporter's letters, they are those of a poet acting as 
 reporter. He wrote of what he saw, and saw with 
 faithful eyes. 
 
 Viewing them in this light, I have little to add in 
 respect to their literary merits. The style is that of 
 true prose ; no sing-song and sentimentalism ; a clear 
 and wholesome medium of expression. Its two ex- 
 tremes, of compact polish and unstudied freshness, are 
 to be found, the. one in that collection of sketches 
 26 
 
 His aim 
 and eguiP' 
 tnent- 
 
 Prose 
 
 style. 
 
402 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 '■The Tri- 
 
 "Rkymes 
 of Trav- 
 €1, Bal- 
 lads, etc.,' 
 1848. 
 
 See " The 
 Literati." 
 
 A portrait 
 iy Read. 
 
 which was ahnost his last, the " By-Ways of Europe,'' 
 and the other in the romantic "Views Afoot" — the 
 story of his first tour, whose publication made him 
 widely known, and invested him with a friendly inter- 
 est. His connections were influential. Greeley and 
 Dana, editors of the journal to whose staff he was 
 attached, which had an immense inland circulation, 
 and with whose radical tenets he was in sympathy, 
 took pleasure in advancing his reputation. 
 
 Early success, and the attention of the public, — 
 great things for any author, — are still not without 
 peril to the faculty divine of the poet. Taylor had 
 kept up the habit of putting his impressions into verse. 
 Two years after his return, he printed the Rhymes of 
 Travel. The preface stated that this was the first 
 venture to which he had " intrusted a hope of success, 
 for the sake of Poetry alone." Among the best- 
 remembered lyrics is " A Bacchic Ode." A few 
 Western ballads gave freshness to the book. It was 
 approved by Poe, who found imaginative eloquence in 
 Taylor's style, but on the whole these Rhymes do not 
 seem to me remarkable even as a poet's first offering. 
 Bayard was now twenty-four years old, and surely, 
 recalling the work of Bryant, and Keats, and Shelley, 
 at or before the same age, could not be thought a 
 precocious singer. There was little then in American 
 life to stimulate precocity in song. Besides, his nature 
 was so ardent that slight and common sensations in- 
 toxicated him, and he estimated their effect, and his 
 power to transmit it to others, beyond the true value. 
 
 Nothing so quaintly indicates the place he now held, 
 and the conception formed of him by his provincial 
 readers, as the sentimental portrait by Buchanan Read 
 which served as a frontispiece to the " Rhymes of 
 Travel." The steel engraving gives us Taylor as he 
 
ARCADIA. 
 
 403 
 
 pauses in the act of climbing the Alps. A slender 
 youth, in face and form resembling Shelley, and 
 equipped like one of Bunyan's Pilgrims, with a palm- 
 er's hat, blouse and belt, and a shepherd's crook in 
 his hand for an alpenstock ; lofty peaks in the back- 
 ground ; all deliciously operatic and impossible. Such 
 was the popular notion of Taylor, and it often brought 
 out a merry laugh from him and his friends in later 
 years. But those were simple, fortunate times for the 
 young minstrel, who took his success modestly and 
 gladly, nor forgot his work withal; and he now en- 
 joyed a season as poetic as ever afterward came to 
 him. Indeed, he now was in circumstances more fa- 
 vorable than in later years for the cultivation of his 
 art. He had secured the means of support, and 
 formed associations which gave him the fellowship and 
 rivalry of comrades in taste and ambition. He got 
 hold of what he needed, art-life, and embraced it with 
 a zest. Through his established success he could aid 
 and encourage his friends, and they in turn did good 
 to his hand and training. Sooth to say, he prized 
 his Arcadian life far more than his sudden honors; it 
 always was first in his affections. He loved his brother 
 bards with the full strength of his large mould, gave 
 them freely of his praise, and frankly welcomed their 
 appreciation in return. 
 
 A newspaper mission to the new Eldorado gave him 
 some picturesque themes. In that pioneer time the 
 scenes and groups upon the Pacific coast had not the 
 aspect which Bret Harte has caught and used so well. 
 But there was a fresh atmosphere in the pictures of 
 Taylor's " Califomian Ballads," and a ring in their 
 tone. Stoddard and himself had met shortly before 
 this journey. They were within a year of each other 
 in age, and their friendship, when Taylor settled down 
 
 "Excei- 
 iiort" 
 
 Tht "m 
 soTtancy 
 0/ our 
 
 Califor- 
 nian bal- 
 lads^ of 
 1849. 
 
 Taylor 
 and Stod- 
 dard. 
 
404 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Baker. 
 
 "A Book 
 of Ro- 
 mances^ 
 Lyrics, 
 and 
 
 1851. 
 
 "Hylas." 
 
 See fi. 311. 
 
 again to city journalism, became close and stimula- 
 tive. The aspirations of the two poets were the same. 
 They held counsel together in their sky-chambers, 
 and wrote and studied in concert. Their books were 
 dedicated to each other. Soon Boker, of Philadel- 
 phia, a year or two their senior, — born to what Gris- 
 wold termed " a life of opulent leisure," but always 
 the ally of his brother-poets, — became the third in a 
 chivalrous trio. His " Calaynos " had given him rep- 
 utation as a dramatic poet. A life-long friendship was 
 established among the three. All this seems the mem- 
 ory of salad-days, but it is from such enthusiasms that 
 new poetic fashions grow. Ten years more, and 
 younger poets were added to the group, — O'Brien, 
 Aldrich, and others, — among whom Taylor was a 
 central figure, holding the friendship of all. 
 
 Meanwhile these Arcadian influences had told upon 
 his genius. He brought out in Boston, under the 
 classic auspices of the Ticknor house, a volume which 
 gave the first measure of his lyrical powers. A Book 
 of Romances contained pieces that rank among the 
 best he wrote. Here was the style, quite matured, 
 which seems most genuinely his own. The chief value 
 of the collection was in miscellaneous pieces that have 
 the quality which makes good art always fresh to us. 
 These rank with the best American verse written up 
 to that time. Nor do I know one of our elder or 
 younger poets who might not be glad to have com- 
 posed such an idyl as " Hylas," with its strong blank- 
 verse made soft and liquid by feminine endings, the 
 Dorian grace infused with just enough sentiment to 
 make it effective in modern times. It is worthy of a 
 place in Lander's " Hellenics," and in my own mind 
 always is associated with " The Hamadryad." None of 
 Taylor's later classical pieces is quite so good as this, 
 
■A BOOK OF romances: 
 
 405 
 
 There also are two charming oriental stories, in blank- 
 verse, — a measure which he managed well, — " Ku- 
 bleh," and "The Soldier and the Pard." "Ariel," 
 " Sorrowful Music," and the " Ode to Shelley," re- 
 mind us too much of that poet, from whose influence 
 Taylor never quite freed himself, nor desired to free 
 himself, until his dying day. These are fine poems, 
 and so are others notably his own — "Sicilian Wine," 
 " Taurus," " Serapion," and " The Metempsychosis of 
 the Pine." The last-named lyric may be taken as a 
 specimen of his characteristic mode. 
 
 I have said that this volume contained the first 
 fruits of an interval when the poet felt most keenly 
 the compensations of art-life. And so it did ; for it 
 was by work like this that he was able to pass be- 
 neath and out from the shadow of a sombre cloud. 
 The painful romance of his youth; the lingering ill- 
 ness of the girl to whom he was betrothed, the mar- 
 riage only a month before she died, — all this broke 
 in upon precious days, and effected more than a tem- 
 porary change. It was Taylor's nature not to take 
 lightly such a loss, nor to hold loosely so tender a 
 memory. His grief was foretokened in the Decem- 
 ber lyric, " Moan, ye wild winds, around the pane ! " 
 It was the motive of a succession of memorial pieces, 
 expressing moods of sorrow, that ended only years 
 afterward, with the " vision " of " The Poet's Jour- 
 nal." But now it wore him down, sent him again on 
 his wanderings, and determined that his life should 
 become one of restless, varying action. 
 
 His most extended journey began in 1851, shortly 
 after the appearance of the " Romances." He trav- 
 elled in Spain, Egypt, the Orient, etc., until 1854, 
 and during this time not only wrote the letters which 
 made three volumes of prose, but also continued to 
 
 Injluence 
 of Shelley. 
 
 Mary Ag- 
 new : died, 
 Dec, 1850. 
 
 See " Life 
 and Let- 
 ters of 
 Bayard 
 Taylor. 
 Edited by 
 Marie 
 HaJisen- 
 Taylor 
 and Hor- 
 ace E. 
 Scitdder^^ 
 
4o6 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 ^^PoetHS of 
 the Ori- 
 ent-^' 1S54, 
 
 His best 
 
 lyrical 
 
 work. 
 
 ft western 
 A^tic. 
 
 exercise his poetic skill. The main result was the 
 Poems of the Orient. 
 
 This volume contains the best work of his purely 
 lyrical period, and may justly be characterized as 
 vivid, spontaneous, harmonious in tone and artistic 
 in execution. Of all the regions which Taylor now 
 had traversed, the Orient seemed most nearly to 
 touch his own nature. His adaptability to the life 
 and sentiment of any land was surprising; he was 
 our typical example of the only being that can ac- 
 commodate itself to all extremes of climate and cus- 
 tom. But he seemed to have been born for the Ori- 
 ent, and if his Songs do not set forth the East as 
 orientals know it, they do set forth Taylor in the 
 East : — 
 
 "The Poet knew the Land of the East, — 
 His soul was native there." 
 
 It needed not Hicks's picture of the bronzed travel- 
 ler, in his turban and Asiatic costume, smoking, cross- 
 legged, upon a roof-top of Damascus, to show how 
 much of a Syrian he then was. Others saw it in 
 those down-drooping eyelids which made his profile 
 like Tennyson's ; in his aquiline nose, with the ex- 
 pressive tremor of the nostrils as he spoke ; in his 
 thinly tufted chin, his close-curling hair ; his love of 
 spices, music, coffee, colors, and perfumes ; his sen- 
 sitiveness to out-door influences, to the freshness of 
 the morning, the bath, the elemental touch of air 
 and water and the life-giving sun. It is to be found 
 in the " Poems of the Orient," where we have these 
 traits reflected in diverse lyrics that make a fascinat- 
 ing whole. In them he seemed to give full vent to 
 his flood of song. Whether from regard to the crit- 
 icism that charged him with rhetoric and exuberance, 
 
'POEMS OF THE ORIENT! 
 
 407 
 
 or from the languor of work and travel, in after life 
 his poetry often was more restrained, less fervid and 
 exhilarating. 
 
 The tone of the Eastern poems is by turns glowing 
 and languorous, and usually rich in color and sound. 
 The poet's intellect keeps him above the race he cel- 
 ebrates. A western Epicurean, he gets the best out 
 of the East, — its finest passion and wisdom and its 
 changeless soul. A sonnet interprets Nubia, the land 
 of dreams and sleep : — 
 
 " Hush ! for she does but sleep ; she is not dead : 
 Action and Toil have made the world their own, 
 But she hath built an altar to Repose." 
 
 The varying skies of Egypt, the Desert, the Syrian 
 Coast, of Damascus, of Persia, free these poems from 
 the honeyed monotony of Moore's orientalism, and 
 the bookishness of Southey's. In manner, however, 
 they sometimes remind us of Byron and of Hunt, and 
 even of Tennyson, whose melodies have haunted so 
 many singers, and whose " Maud " appeared in the 
 same year with the lyrics before us. Here are some 
 oriental tales in rhymed pentameter, and one in octo- 
 syllabic verse. " The Temptation of Hassan Ben 
 Khaled " is the longest and best, the model of a nar- 
 rative poem. William Morris has done nothing better 
 of the kind. One wishes that Taylor had paid more 
 attention to narrative poetry, availing himself, like 
 Morris, of legends ready to his hand. He told a story 
 in verse so easily and delightfully that he always un- 
 derrated both the art and the poets who have excelled 
 in it. " Amran's Wooing " is another good story — a 
 tale of the Desert. Here also are songs, that will last 
 as long as anything the poet wrote : — 
 
 " Daughter of Egypt, veil thine eyes ! " 
 
 Narrative 
 verse. 
 
 Two noia/ 
 hie songs. 
 
4o8 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 '^ Poems of 
 Home and 
 Travel," 
 1855- 
 
 •' Put- 
 nam^ s 
 Monthly,'''' 
 ttc. 
 
 and the favorite "Bedouin Song": — 
 
 " From the Desert I come to thee 
 On a stallion shod with fire ; 
 And the winds are left behind 
 
 In the speed of my desire. 
 Under thy window I stand, 
 
 And the midnight hears my cry ; 
 I love thee, I love but thee. 
 
 With a love that shall not die — 
 Till the sun grows cold, 
 And ike stars are old. 
 And the leaves of the Judgment Book 
 unfold I" 
 
 There is a reminiscence of Shelley in one stanza ; but 
 this song has its own character. There is a faultless 
 idyl in quatrains, celebrating the Hindoo legend of the 
 coming of Camadeva, that aifords a fine instance of 3 
 quality which marks the " Poems of the Orient," that 
 of restraint — the reserved strength which will not give 
 one stroke too much. At last the poet folds his tent 
 and unwinds the turban from his brow : — 
 
 " The sun has ceased to shine ; the palms that bent. 
 Inebriate with light, have disappeared ; 
 And naught is left me of the Orient 
 But the tanned bosom and the unshorn beard." 
 
 These lyrics are free from moralizing and show little 
 of the influence of Longfellow, which at that time was 
 so visible in American verse ; they are poetry uttered 
 for poetry's sake, and with the voice that sings inde- 
 pendently. 
 
 A revised edition was issued of Taylor's earlier 
 poems, including also maturer pieces written for the 
 magazines. Stoddard, Taylor, and others, were now 
 engaged with the elder poets in supplying the verse 
 which made attractive the first series of " Putnam's 
 Monthly Magazine." This periodical was fortunate, 
 
A DIVIDED AMBITION. 
 
 409 
 
 like a successor, "The Atlantic Monthly," in its choir 
 of songsters. Nor was it wanting in prose-poems, 
 such as the delicate and haunting stories by the author 
 of "Lotus-Eating" and "Nile Notes of a Howadji." 
 These books and Taylor's oriental poems were the 
 complements of one another, and equally refreshing to 
 the stay-at-home public that welcomed them. , 
 
 The poet-traveller was now in his thirtieth year. 
 Assuming that his work now showed the quality of 
 his developed gift, we may examine its value. If he 
 never had done anything more, if his summons had 
 come at this time, — there would have been, even as 
 now, few whose taking-off would be so deplored, 
 around whose memory would gather a more regretful 
 interest. We should speak of the promise of a career, 
 and say, " Had he but lived ! " He did live, and for 
 years was a working man of letters, and must be 
 judged by his product to the end. His life was con- 
 secrated to poetry, yet not devoted to it. How much 
 this means ! Possibly he gained all the laurels he had 
 a right to expect, under the conditions in which he 
 acquiesced. To look further involved the surrender 
 of immediate honors, of rare experience, of growth 
 in various directions. It would have been strange in- 
 deed if, at his age, he had not accepted "the goods 
 the gods provide," — trusting, through strength and 
 future occasion, to make even his half service of the 
 muse as effective as the entire fealty of others who 
 have won the crown. 
 
 Taylor had the elements of prolonged growth. Being 
 what he was at thirty, the undisturbed practice of his 
 art, a devotion like that of Tennyson's or Longfellow's, 
 should have given him indisputable poetic fame. He 
 would have refined that subtler sense which, as no 
 one knows more surely than the present writer, is so 
 
 Curiis's 
 ideal writ- 
 ings. 
 
 Charac- 
 teristics. 
 
 A divided 
 ambition. 
 
4IO 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 CapabUi- 
 ties. 
 
 rersoTia '. 
 traits. 
 
 elusive, so often dulled or stunted by the force, the 
 outcry, the perturbing conflicts of the social, the trad- 
 ing, the professional, or even the patriotic and politi- 
 cal, world of action and toil. Still, this poet's capa- 
 bilities, aside from his gift of song, were unique, and 
 pressed for employment. His memory was prodigioufc. 
 Nothing that he learned was forgotten, and he learned 
 without effort. After a single reading he knew a poem 
 by heart, and could repeat whole pages of his favorite 
 authors ; and there was little that he did not read or 
 see. His perception of externals was alert and true ; 
 but he did not so readily catch by intuition the thoughts 
 and feelings of those about him. He had a fine sense 
 of form and color, drew and painted creditably, and 
 seemed a natural artist. His linguistic powers were 
 well known. He taught himself something of the 
 classical texts, and was more infused with the antique 
 sentiment than many a learned Theban. He quickly 
 caught the pass-words and phrases of any language, 
 Shemitic or Aryan, wherever he journeyed. German 
 he mastered, wrote in, thought in ; it became so much 
 like a native tongue with him as to refute the theory 
 that one gains of a new language only so much as he 
 loses of his own. His personal traits were no less 
 admirable. To think of him is to recall a person 
 larger in make and magnanimity than the common 
 sort; a man of buoyancy, hopefulness, sweetness of 
 temper, — loyal, shrinking from contention, yet ready 
 to do battle for a principle or in the just cause of a 
 friend ; stainless in morals, and of an honesty so nat- 
 ural that he could not be surprised into an untruth 
 or the commission of a mean act. His open delight 
 over any work of his own that pleased him was the 
 reverse of egotism, yet often misunderstood by those 
 who slightly knew him. He was without jealousy, 
 
HIS POETIC STYLE. 
 
 411 
 
 though sometimes ruffled by the prosperity of quacks 
 and pretenders. Yet his personal ambition and aspira- 
 tion were very great, only equalled by his industry 
 and scrupulous fulfilment of any task he undertook. 
 In social life he was generous and unrestrained, full 
 of the knightly, mirth-loving, romantic spirit; a poet 
 who kept his heart green to the last, even when disease 
 was upon him, and the plethoric habit of his middle 
 life. These dulled his eye, but never broke his spirit 
 nor turned his thoughts to gall. 
 
 As a poet, I say, the qualities of his mature style 
 were now fairly displayed. From the beginning, 
 rhythm, the surreusis of liquid measures, had much 
 to do with his sense of the beautiful in verse, and 
 reacted upon his imagination. He revelled in the ef- 
 fect of the broad English vowels, the "hollow ae's 
 and oe's," and in the consonantal vigor of our lan- 
 guage. He enjoyed reading aloud the poetry of Bar- 
 ley, of Byron and Shelley, and read his own with 
 such melody and resonance that one who listened to 
 its chanting sound was no more able than himself to 
 tell whether it was of his poorest or his best. Its 
 dominant quality, therefore, was often that of elo- 
 quence, as in the verse of Croly and Campbell. Poe 
 quoted from one of his early pieces, to show that 
 eloquence and imagination may go together. I have 
 said that Bryant was " elemental " in his communion 
 with sea and forest and the misty mountain winds. 
 Taylor, as to the general range of his poetry, was 
 ethnical and secular. Nations, races, eras, the past 
 and future of mankind, were the objects of his re- 
 gard ; he got his material, his imaginative pictures, 
 from their aspect, and his most elevated verse relates 
 to their historic and prophetic phases. His art-method 
 was simple and direct, obvious rather than suggestive, 
 
 style as a 
 poeU 
 
 An ethni- 
 cal range. 
 
412 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Over- 
 facility, 
 
 Involved 
 expres- 
 sion. 
 
 His Penn- 
 
 sylvanian 
 idyls. 
 
 'The 
 
 Quaker 
 
 Widow; 
 
 etc. 
 
 and he generally composed in a major key. Some of 
 his measures are fresh with the breeze and spray. 
 In other moods he would write a ballad, or a tender 
 lyric like "The Song of the Camp." He had the 
 spontaneity of a born singer ; but with it a facility 
 that was dangerous indeed. His first draft was apt 
 to be his best if not his only one. He had few af- 
 fectations ; his instinct being against obscurity and 
 oddness of expression. He made his verse, as far as 
 might be, the clear vehicle of his feeling. Of late 
 years, in the desire to convey his deeper, more intel- 
 lectual thought and conviction, he frequently became 
 involved, and a metaphysical vagueness was apparent 
 even in his lyrics. At such times critics thought his 
 efforts strained, and his friends declared that he was 
 not working in his best vein. 
 
 II. 
 
 Much of Taylor's poetry does not bear its maker's 
 hand-mark so distinctly as that of Longfellow or 
 Whittier is wont to do. His subjects and modes of 
 treatment are varied, and the former may be assorted 
 in groups, — the classical pieces, the dithjn-ambic lyr- 
 ics, the poems of travel, and those of hearth and 
 home. In any mood he was apt to reach a certain 
 standard of merit ; he rarely failed. But there was 
 one field — though he scarcely seemed to realize its 
 value — so much his own as to breed for him a num- 
 ber of rough imitators. From it he made such stud 
 ies, of the rural scenes and characters he best knew, 
 as "John Reid," "The Old Pennsylvania Farmer," 
 and that lovely ballad, unexcelled in truth and ten- 
 derness of feeling — " The Quaker Widow." The 
 poet more rarely gave voice to the extremes of pas- 
 
CONDITIONS AFFECTING HIS WORK. 
 
 413 
 
 sion. Even his noon-day health and manliness some- 
 times blunted his delicacy of touch. And yet, when 
 he felt with his whole heart, he could be not only 
 refined but highly imaginative, as in " Euphorion," — 
 a poem addressed to friends who ha<i lost a dreamy 
 and' beautiful child : — 
 
 "For, through the crystal of your tears, 
 His love and beauty fairer shine ; 
 The shadows of advancing years 
 
 Draw back, and leave him all divine. 
 
 " And Death, that took him, cannot claim 
 
 The smallest vesture of his birth, — 
 - The little life, a dancing flame 
 
 That hovered o'er the hills of earth, — 
 
 " The finer soul, that unto ours 
 A subtle perfume seemed to be, 
 Like incense blown from April flowers 
 Beside the scarred and stormy tree, — 
 
 "The wondering eyes, that ever saw 
 
 Some fleeting mystery in the air. 
 
 And felt the stars of evening draw 
 
 His heart to silence, childhood's prayer ! " 
 
 These stanzas are at the highest reach, I think, of 
 Taylor's lyrical genius. The man who could write 
 them, and who composed the Bedouin Song and the 
 Pennsylvanian idyls, was a poet whose fame should 
 be dear to his countrymen. But he did much more. 
 Of what kind, and under what conditions ? Here 
 comes in the lesson of his life as a poet, and it is 
 chiefly as a poet that we are considering him. 
 
 Authors are pretty sure to give us something of 
 value when they render the feeling of localities to 
 which they belong. A sympathetic poet is in danger 
 of lessening his birthright through much knowledge 
 of the world at large. Taylor was patriotic, always 
 
 ^'■Eupho- 
 rion.'''' 
 
 Remarks 
 on the life 
 o/tkispoei 
 
414 
 
 BAVARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Pums and 
 Whittier. 
 
 Taylor's 
 more va- 
 ried expe- 
 riences. 
 
 American ; yet I think his lyrical mark would have 
 been still higher had his relations been confined, if 
 not to the section that gave him birth, at most to his 
 oyin land and people. His native qualities were not 
 unlike those of Burns and Whittier ; these three poets 
 were more similar, as they came from the mould, 
 than any others whom I call to mind. Burns was a 
 healthy country lad, full of the prodigal force of na- 
 ture, blown on by her breezes, nurtured by her soil, 
 thrilled by emotions as he felt the rich sap of youth 
 coursing through his veins. His influences were those 
 of his own people. His first efforts imitated the 
 plodding of the "Caledonian Bards." When some- 
 what matured, he awoke to the beauty of the true 
 Scottish minstrelsy, and adapted his own song to it. 
 Suppose that opportunities for travel, wider culture, 
 varied reading, the mastery of languages, had been 
 given him. One nail drives out another. He might 
 have been hampered with his acquisitions ; his muse 
 would have subdued her strength in diverse strains ; 
 he no longer would have been the fine, untrammelled 
 specialist, — and might have wholly lost his native 
 wood-notes wild. Whittier owes his fame to his se- 
 clusion — voluntary or involuntary — and to his pres- 
 entation of the themes and feeling nearest the heart 
 of New England. His work is thus a specific addi- 
 tion to American song. His early pieces, like those 
 of Burns, were artificial. It was not until after growth 
 and fervid conviction that his lips were really touched 
 with fire. 
 
 It was Taylor's good fortune, as a man who would 
 live his life, — his ill fortune, it may be, as a poet, — 
 to obtain the multiform experience for which his 
 youth had longed. We admire his pluck and advent- 
 ure, but lament what was lost to poetry. At times 
 
LIFE AND ART. 
 
 415 
 
 His own 
 theory of 
 life and 
 art. 
 
 when his fine spirit, bound within a home range, 
 would have made the most of its surroundings, he 
 was able to gratify without stint his love of travel 
 and observation. His poetic gift was always by him ; 
 but surely he lost much in exchange for what he 
 gained. One can readily conceive the lyrical genius 
 of Whittier as subject to be diffused or perplexed 
 under similar conditions. The question lies between 
 personal attainment and the extreme utilization of an 
 artist's special gift. Taylor chose the former. He 
 said, " If I have any ambition, it is to enjoy as large 
 a store of experience as this earth can furnish." In 
 a letter which I received from him he wrote : "If I 
 were to write about myself for six hours, it would all 
 come to this : that life is, for me, the establishing of 
 my own Entelecheia, — the making of all that is pos- 
 sible out of such powers as I may have, without vio- 
 lently forcing or distorting them." Circumstances 
 aided him in his choice. As a youth, he thought 
 little of the effect upon his poetic career^ or possibly 
 thought he was promoting it. Later on, however 
 "rich and ample" his life, he felt a sense of uneasi- 
 ness. He cared most of all, in his heart of hearts, 
 to be a poet, and saw that, while going afar to invoke 
 the Muse, he had given her the less chance to seek 
 him. Choose between the ideal and the actual — 
 such is the alternative of art. Few can eat their cake 
 and have it, too. Delight of life and action has 
 turned aside many a swift runner, as I have shown 
 in reference to Domett and Home. Again, whatever 
 may be said of the benefits and disadvantages of cult- 
 ure, it often has been a practical injury to the poet 
 — since no one is sure of life's full limit — to set 
 before him too high and broad an ideal. It may not 
 always be best to aim at the sun. We ask of a man 
 
 An alter* 
 native. 
 
4i6 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 His envi- 
 ronment. 
 
 Art and 
 Utters in 
 the New 
 World 
 metropo- 
 lis. 
 
 the one thing he can do better than other men, and 
 often, as in the legend of Caspar Becerra, " that is 
 best which lieth nearest." Then there are hindrances 
 born of success itself, and to these Taylor was pecu- 
 liarly subjected. 
 
 He became involved with the literary life of New 
 York, and at a trying time. It was just early enough 
 for him to receive a good word from Poe, and late 
 enough for him to witness the rout of the " literati." 
 Even a sham literary feeling may be better than no 
 feeling at all. Has New York gained since then as 
 a literary centre ? Yes, and no. It is now the base 
 from which our authors draw their supplies. The 
 great journals, the profitable magazines, the largest 
 publishing houses, with few exceptions, are located 
 there. It is the chief centre of distribution, and will 
 so remain until some future period shall number as 
 many great centres of distribution as there may be 
 characteristic sections. But the atmosphere, — the 
 public feeling which alone can foster rising art and 
 make its workmen glad and creative, — this gathers 
 more slowly. Authors are tolerated, respected, valued 
 as accessories ; but not always understood, nor often 
 intrusted with the care of important movements. New 
 York has a sufficiency of writers and of literary ele- 
 ments for the needs of many smaller cities ; but the 
 former do not feel themselves sustained by that sym- 
 pathetic interest which, for example, encourages the 
 music of Naples, the art of Paris or Rome. New 
 York is great in material progress, generous in chari- 
 ties ; but still too practical to do much more than to 
 affect an aesthetic sentiment. Her wealthy classes are 
 groping toward the comprehension of what is beauti- 
 ful. They have schools of design, and are surpassing 
 not only the troglodytes, but our more immediate an> 
 
NEWSPAPER WORK, ETC. 
 
 417 
 
 cestors, in mural decoration. What is intellectually 
 fine we have yet to pursue with any general ardor. 
 The city took a pride in Bryant as a man and as a 
 picturesque figure on state occasions ; but how many 
 of his townsmen had read the most of his poems, 
 or cared to read them? Herein is no reason for 
 complaint ; all is as it should be. If individuals are 
 not coddled in New York, they at least have an equal 
 chance, and there are not lacking assurances of fu- 
 ture development. 
 
 Thus Taylor's lot was cast in a somewhat uncon- 
 genial city, and he often found himself praised and 
 courted where he needed the stimulus of intelligent 
 sympathy. He took to journalism, and it was his 
 mainstay through life. During the last thirty years, 
 journalism has absorbed much of our best talent, and 
 well it might, for it demands the best. No severer 
 test can be applied to a writer than that of his ability 
 to furnish leading articles regularly. More than one, 
 who has succeeded easily as a bookwright or essayist, 
 has found his equipment and his power of composition 
 inadequate to the off-hand production of compact, pol- 
 ished, well-informed leaders, such as are needed for 
 the editorial pages of great newspapers. Journalism 
 is an art ; but under our system it brings little be- 
 yond his weekly stipend to the sub-journalist. The 
 stipend is sure, and that means a great deal to one 
 who lives by his pen. Newspapers thus far have sup- 
 plied the readiest market to a writer, and the maga- 
 zines next to them. The task of daily writing for the 
 press, while a good staff, is a poor crutch ; it diffuses 
 the heat of authorship, checks idealism, retards the 
 construction of masterpieces. Besides, it brings an 
 author into attrition with members of the craft who 
 possibly know him so familiarly as to underrate him. 
 27 
 
 Journal- 
 istn vs. 
 ideality. 
 
 See pp. 
 7S-.08, 
 and cp. 
 " Victorian 
 Poets "': 
 pp, 81,82. 
 
4i8 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Lecturing. 
 
 ^^Cedar- 
 croft." 
 
 " LUtk 
 foxes," 
 
 Qnesiityn 
 of Amer- 
 ican over- 
 work. 
 
 He is subjected to local jealousies, to the over-praise 
 of the newspaper which befriends him, and sometimes 
 to the unjust or ungenerous treatment of rival sheets. 
 All this may be thought an evil peculiar to New York, 
 and one which we shall outgrow. But the same phe- 
 nomena are visible in the matured capitals of England 
 and France, and must be accepted as part of a jour- 
 nalist's warfare and surroundings. 
 
 Newspaper-work, then, to which Taylor owed so 
 much of his current reputation, also restricted his ad- 
 vance as a creative author. He felt constrained to 
 hold, by this and by lecturing, the popularity he had 
 gained, and likewise to obtain the means of carrying 
 out his scheme of life. As a man of note, his home- 
 pride grew upon him. He chose to realize a dream of 
 possessing a sightly house and broad acres in Kennett, 
 — a manor-home where he could place his parents, 
 and find a retreat in times of rest. All this he did, 
 in his early prime ; such a man can have anything for 
 which he will pay the price. Its cost to him, no doubt, 
 was a lessening of his quality as a poet. A pressure 
 of social and professional duties — meetings, speeches, 
 correspondence — bore upon him severely. Under it 
 he made a good fight ; hopeful, generous, considerate, 
 trying to do something in a field where the laborers 
 were too few. But men do not escape from tasks they 
 once assume, and he had undertaken to earn a large 
 income and survey the world, on the one hand, and 
 to hold the Muse by her pinions on the other. His 
 poetry had to be composed " between spells " and on 
 the wing ; more than all, the versatile habit of his life 
 became a second nature to him. 
 
 There is much unfairness, however, in the blame to 
 which public men in this country are subjected for 
 their overwork. This is rather a matter of necessity 
 
' THE POET'S journal: 
 
 419 
 
 than of choice. People in the old world largely in- 
 herit their means and methods from their forbears ; 
 new men, even there, often have the habit of over- 
 work fixed upon them by the time their footholds are 
 secured. But the statesmen and thinkers of Europe 
 start with assured incomes more commonly than do 
 our own, and are not forced to earn their bread as 
 they go along. Our Eastern Brahmins, however, have 
 had for the most part resources which they have en- 
 larged by the help of such gentle, scholarly pursuits 
 as the service of a university affords. They have 
 shown themselves quite willing to indulge a spirit of 
 restfulness and calm. So long as Americans who do 
 not inherit estates have the Anglo-Saxon pride and 
 domestic tenderness, they will be tempted to do work 
 elsewhere than in a garret, and rarely be able to drive 
 from their minds the thought of its effect upon an 
 income-paying constituency. 
 
 III. 
 
 Taylor married in Germany, and his choice was 
 fortunate. She whose hand he gained was by her 
 talents and acquirements in every sense his compan- 
 ion, — in full sympathy with his purposes, for happy 
 years the wise and tender guardian of his household, 
 as she is now the faithful treasurer of his memory 
 and fame. Her translations made his works known 
 to her countrymen ; she confirmed his taste for the 
 thought and letters of her Fatherland, and was his 
 constant aid in the study of them. 
 
 TTie Foefs journal was an expression of the happi- 
 ness for which its author had now exchanged the tri- 
 als of the past. Its chief interest is found in a rev- 
 elation of the author's heart. The prelude, to the 
 
 Married io 
 Marie 
 Hansen^ of 
 Gotha : 
 1857. 
 
 "The Po- 
 eVs Jour- 
 nal,''^ i86a 
 
420 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Middle 
 life. 
 
 Taj/lar's 
 Nffaels. 
 
 mistress of Cedarcroft, is not excelled by anything 
 which follows. Years afterward, he made a still more 
 earnest avowal of his wedded content : — 
 
 " With thee was the ceasing of sorrow. 
 Hope from thy lips I have drawn, and subtler strength from 
 
 thy spirit, 
 Sharer o£ dream and of deed, inflexible conscience of Beauty ! 
 Though as i Grace thou art dear, as a guardian Muse thou art 
 
 earnest, 
 Walking with purer feet the paths of song that I venture. 
 Side by side, unwearied, in cheerful encouraging silence. 
 Not thy constant woman's heart alone I have wedded ; 
 One are we made in patience and faith and high aspiration." 
 
 The poet's life of travel, writing, lecturing, means- 
 providing, now went forward busily. Duties and hon- 
 ors grew upon him. His interest in the civil war gave 
 birth to some vigorous popular ballads. We need not 
 follow his public career, nor his periodical returns to 
 the shade of his own chestnuts and tulip-trees. His 
 friend Aldrich compares Taylor's life to a drama, of 
 which the intervals were filled with the music of his 
 poetic work at home. Four fifths of this he was to 
 enact, and we thought to see his mind's " noblest off- 
 spring " with the last ; but the curtain fell abruptly, 
 and the putting out of the lights ended a performance 
 that steadily had grown in worth. What there was 
 of it was marked by rare experiences. Among his 
 friends, he counted the wise and gifted of many lands. 
 He had their respect and confidence ; and his corre- 
 spondence with them was most extensive. His pri- 
 vate letters were delightful, and a sheet covered with 
 his beautiful handwriting and flowing thoughts was a 
 thing to prize and store away. 
 
 Partly with the thought to try his hand — like 
 Goethe, whom he seemed to have taken as a master 
 — at every kind of work, and partly as a form of 
 
NOVELS AND CRITICAL WRITINGS. 
 
 421 
 
 literature suited to the times, he essayed novel-writ- 
 ing. His novels sold well, and appeared to hit the 
 popular taste. They mostly were realistic transcripts 
 of what he had seen, and contained his own views 
 of what was, and what was lacking, in American life 
 at that time. The plot of Hannah Thurston is noth- 
 ing ; the tale was written to illustrate types of char- 
 acter and phases of society, — especially to show up 
 the mock-reforms of the day. The heroine is a 
 Quakeress, as good and original a creation as is to 
 be found in the whole course of these novels. The 
 hero, like most of their heroes, is something of a 
 muff. Taylor's second novel, yohn Godfrey's Fortune, 
 has commonplace and unattractive New York scenes, 
 but these are truthful records of the side of life with 
 which the author first became acquainted in the 
 growing city. The Story of Kennett is the cleverest 
 and most artistic of the series ; a romance of the 
 old-fashioned kind, and a true idyl of Pennsylvanian 
 country-life in the early prime. Meantime, the au- 
 thor's short stories, contributed to magazines, were 
 always fresh and good, as indeed were all his mis- 
 cellaneous essays. The amount he threw off was re- 
 markable. He wrote prefaces, edited books of travel 
 and biography, did everything a man of letters could 
 do, with cheerfulness and facility. His prose was 
 simple, clear, good English, if not great. Upon the 
 whole, his literary criticisms seemed to me the ripeist 
 and most valuable portion of his prose labor. In 
 them he was compact, learned, writing to the point, 
 and his opinions were just and good with regard to 
 both the spirit and technique of a work. In later 
 years, his reviews were So catholic, sound of canon 
 and exact in detail, as to be models ; and it became 
 Evident that he could have been a notable critic, had 
 
 Xkurs- 
 ton," 1863. 
 
 ''•jfohn 
 Godfrey's 
 Fortune t^ 
 18&4. 
 
 '■'■The Sto- 
 ry 0/ Ken- 
 nett." j866. 
 
 " Joseph 
 and His 
 Friend," 
 1870. 
 
 Shorter 
 Tales, Fs^ 
 
 See "Crii 
 teal Fs~ 
 says," 
 1880. 
 
422 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 See ''''Stud- 
 ies in Ger- 
 man Lit- 
 sraturey^ 
 1879- 
 
 "Faust : 
 Trans- 
 Ifitedj 
 in th£ 
 Original 
 Metres." 
 Parts I. 
 tnd II. , 
 1870-71. 
 
 he devoted himself to criticism alone. He had abun- 
 dant humor, and this, with his judicial faculty, and 
 his talent for parody and burlesque, found play in 
 the serio-comic papers which were collected a few 
 years before his death, in a volume called The Echo 
 Club. 
 
 Few men, not excepting Lewes and Carlyle, have 
 been so well informed as Taylor with respect to 
 German literature. His lectures upon that subject 
 were prepared originally as a university course. For 
 years he was a student of Goethe and Schiller and 
 their times, and it was the dream of his life to write 
 their biography. To this end he made extended re- 
 searches in Germany, and collected material under 
 auspicious conditions. Had he lived to complete 
 such a work, it would have been a masterpiece. In 
 the midst of his labors, he was enabled to make a 
 complete English translation of " Faust," in the orig- 
 inal metres, and to supervise its publication. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The surprising rapidity with which the two parts 
 of Faust were brought out, the original commentary 
 and notes, the avowal that the editor had read all 
 the translations and commentaries made in any lan- 
 guage, were phenomena of that kind which some- 
 times led people to distrust the thoroughness of Tay- 
 lor's work. The scholarly character of this perform- 
 ance is now well established. That to which more 
 than one of his predecessors had given a lifetime, 
 he apparently completed in three years. He had 
 borne it in mind, however, for two decades, and it 
 was his habit to think upon a task until able to 
 execute it at a dash and with great perfection. 
 
TRANSLATION OF 'FAUST.' 
 
 423 
 
 The result was an advance upon any previous 
 rendering of the entire work. The preface demon- 
 strates that poetry sometimes absolutely requires a 
 retention of the original metres for its translation. 
 Illustrations of this are found in Freiligrath's perfect 
 transcript of Scott's " Come as the wind comes," 
 and in Strodtmann's fine " Es fallt der Strahl auf 
 Burg und Thai," — the "Bugle-Song" of Tennyson. 
 To me these seem extreme cases : in others the re- 
 sult might be otherwise. A translator must choose 
 the best method for the work in hand. It is doubt- 
 ful whether the test would apply equally well to 
 each of several poets who differ among themselves 
 as widely as Homer, Theocritus, and Pindar. 
 
 The characteristics of Taylor's " Faust " are sym- 
 pathetic quality, rapid poetic handling, absolute fidel- 
 ity to the text. Now and then his realistic version 
 of the first part has an unusual or quaint effect, 
 detracting from its imaginative design. Hence some 
 of the best portions are those not in rhyme, such 
 as the Cathedral scene, where Margaret is harassed 
 by the Evil Spirit : — 
 
 " How otherwise was it, Margaret, 
 When thou, still innocent — " 
 
 which is reproduced with thrilling power. The reg- 
 ular verse also is well rendered, Goethe's " Dedica- 
 tion " never having been so well given by any other 
 translator. Its firm, sonorous stanzas are in harmony 
 Krith Taylor's own manner and poetic feeling : — 
 
 " Again ye come, ye hovering Forms ! I find ye, 
 As early to my clouded sight ye shone ! 
 Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye ? 
 Still o'er my heart is that illusion thrown ? 
 Ye crowd more near! Then, be the reign assigned ye, 
 And sway me from your misty, sViadowy zone ! 
 
 l^ke most 
 poetic and 
 scholarly 
 version. 
 
 Its tnetkod. 
 
 The "-Dei 
 ication." 
 
424 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Handling 
 a/the Sec- 
 ond Pari. 
 
 Shelley. 
 
 My bosom thrills, with youthful passion shaken, 
 From magic airs that round your march awaken. 
 
 " And grasps me now a long-unwonted yearning 
 For that serene and solemn Spirit-Land : 
 My song, to faint ^Eolian murmurs turning, 
 Sways like a harp-string by the breezes fanned. 
 I thrill and tremble ; tear on tear is burning, 
 And the stern heart is tenderly unmanned. 
 What I possess, I see far distant lying. 
 And what I lost grows real and undying." 
 
 To the mystical and much disputed Second Part 
 the lineal method of translation is specially adapted, 
 and serves to preserve the fantastic nature of the 
 original. Taylor had the gift and knowledge which 
 enabled him to succeed where others had failed. 
 He felt his ability, and perhaps too readily estimated 
 the greatness of this part by the difficulties he mas- 
 tered. The best poet, other things being equal, is 
 the best translator. Opinions may differ as to the 
 merits of his handling of the First Part of " Faust," 
 but with respect to that of the Second there is lit- 
 tle question. It is unlikely that any great English 
 poet soon will undertake to excel it. Carlyle could 
 have made the venture, for he was essentially a 
 poet, despite his outcry against verse. Shelley, had 
 he essayed a complete version and made his studies 
 accordingly, might have left us the ideal translation 
 — for he was the ideal translator. His paraphrase 
 of the " Hymn to Mercury " is, as Emerson would 
 say, more original than the original. His overture 
 of " Faust " is in some way more grand and raptur- 
 ous than Taylor's. His " Walpurgis Night " is full 
 of enchantment — too soon the waving ended of that 
 magic wand. 
 
 Taylor's notes and commentary are the best we 
 
'LARS: 
 
 425 
 
 have, learned and intelligible, equally marked by po 
 etic feeling and good sense. His critical views of 
 the Second Part should be more authoritative than 
 those of others less conversant with the subject and 
 less truly poets. He approves of Lewes's state- 
 ment : " I have little sympathy with that philosophy 
 of art which consists in translating Art into Philos- 
 ophy, and I trouble myself very little with ' consid- 
 erations on the Idea.' " In disputed passages, he 
 seeks for light from his 'master's other writings, 
 rather than from German and English commenta- 
 tors. The result of this course is excellent, and I 
 do not believe that any other translator has so 
 nearly reproduced both the text and spirit of Goe- 
 the's life-long work. 
 
 V. 
 
 An art-poem, The Picture of St. John, was published 
 by Taylor some years after the appearance of " The 
 Poet's Journal." His talent for drawing has been 
 mentioned ; he was exceedingly fond of art, and not a 
 few of its votaries were his attached friends. The 
 new poem was dedicated to this gentle brotherhood. 
 Its theme may be termed the development of an ar- 
 tist's powers through experience of the joy and suffer- 
 ing of life. The tale is Italian, as regards both feeling 
 and incident ; and the scene is laid in Italy and the 
 Alps. There are four books, of stanzas which seem a 
 variation upon the ottava rima. The poet spent much 
 time upon this work, and it has many graceful pas- 
 sages. But as a fresh and original conception and a 
 charming piece of workmanship, I prefer Lars, the 
 only sustained poem in narrative form which he sub- 
 sequently composed. It is finely conceived, and exe- 
 cuted in a style worthy of the conception — which 
 
 Notes on 
 Faust. 
 
 "Tkt Pic- 
 ture of St, 
 John," 
 1866. 
 
 ^^Lars: a 
 
 Pastoral 
 
 o/Nor. 
 
 way" 
 
 >873- 
 
426 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 " Home 
 
 Pastorals^ 
 
 Ballads, 
 
 and 
 
 Lyrics, ^^ 
 
 1875- 
 
 could not always be said of Taylor's works. In 
 " Lars " he took a subject quite within his powers, 
 and realized his ideal. The scenes change from the 
 Norwegian coast to the Quaker borders of the Dela- 
 ware, and the author thoroughly understood the land- 
 scape, manners, and sentiment of the two regions. 
 The atmosphere is, by turns, fragrant with the balsam 
 of Norseland firs, and thymy with the smell of new- 
 mown fields across the western sea. A contrast is 
 drawn between the half-savage habit of the Norse-folk 
 and the placid religious quality of our pastoral mid- 
 land settlements. The combat with knives between 
 the rival Norsemen, Lars and Per, is a virile piece of 
 work. Less Tennyaonian and even more poetic are 
 the idyls of Norwegian cottage life, which precede this 
 scene. This blank - verse poem is a delightful pro- 
 duction ; we have no idyl of similar length, except 
 " Evangeline," that equals it in finish and interest. 
 
 A subsequent collection of miscellaneous pieces — 
 the Home Pastorals, to some of which I have referred 
 — was made by the poet. Four contemplative poems 
 of the seasons, as observed from the porches of Cedar- 
 croft, are excellent of their kind, and have been under- 
 valued ; they are in English hexameter verse, for 
 which Taylor had a good ear, and only narrative 
 pieces in that measure obtain a popular reading. To 
 me they seem wise, beautiful, true to nature ; resem- 
 bling in ease and freshness Clough's " Bothie," and 
 very faithful to the scenery and sentiments of the 
 Pennsylvanian border. This book also contains some 
 of the poet's best ballads ; but has other lyrics quite 
 uneven in merit. It is notable for three of the odes 
 (exhibiting his taste for sweeping Pindaric measures) 
 which he recited upon various public occasions in his 
 later years. 
 
'THE NATIONAL ODE.' 
 
 427 
 
 The Goethe ode and the one delivered at Gettys- 
 burg are manly and heroic poems. The Shakespeare 
 ode is less successful. In a crowning lyrical effort, he 
 had as wide an audience as poet could desire. He 
 was addressing not only the assemblage in Indepen- 
 dence Square, on the 4th of July, 1876, but millions of 
 his countrymen, — in truth, the reading world. It was 
 a fine occasion, and all his ambition was aroused. 
 What poet ever had a more historic opportunity? 
 Should the verse of all his contemporaries be forgot- 
 ten, the first Centennial Ode will be revived and re- 
 examined. 
 
 The National Ode was not unworthy of the occasion, 
 from a conventional point of view. It was sonorous, 
 patriotic, mindful of our traditions, full of dignity and 
 rhetorical power. As such it was received. But it 
 was not the one new, bold, original production, which 
 appeals alike to the wise and the unlearned, rouses 
 the imagination, imprints itself upon the memory of 
 all who read it, and becomes a lasting portion of 
 national literature. Marvell's ode " " On the Return 
 of the Lord Protector " and Lowell's " Commemora- 
 tion Ode " are poems of this kind ; in sooth, Taylor's 
 effort, coming after the latter, demanded all his cour- 
 age. I remember urging him to adopt some regular 
 stanzaic form, however complicated, or else to write 
 his poem in blank-verse or rhymed-heroic, — either of 
 these measures being more likely than the irregular 
 Pindaric to touch and hold the popular heart. It 
 seemed to me that the -simplest vehicle would best 
 convey, on such an occasion, the noblest thought. His 
 adverse decision was guided partly by precedent, more 
 by his instinctive sense of an ability to compose and 
 recite musically his Pindaric verse. He did deliver 
 his ode with superb effect, and felt the occasion in 
 
 ''The No. 
 iioTial 
 Odd," 
 1876. 
 
428 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Dratnaiic 
 IVritings. 
 
 '•'The 
 Prophet : 
 a Trage- 
 dy," 1874- 
 
 The dra- 
 ma, fio- 
 itry's 
 
 every fibre of his mould. Americans refer without 
 distrust to this poem, but few recall its phrases ; and 
 it must be acknowledged that even of Lowell's elab- 
 orate odes only one has really succeeded in fastening 
 itself upon the public mind. 
 
 VI. 
 
 One more division of Taylor's manifold productions 
 remains for consideration, — to wit, his dramatic works. 
 Of these, two are philosophical studies cast in dramatic 
 form ; the intervening one, however, is a five-act play, 
 the interest being human rather than speculative. 
 
 The Prophet has certain claims to attention. This 
 work, a closet-drama perhaps as easily adapted for the 
 stage as one or two of Browning's, was an attempt to 
 treat dramatically a modern and peculiar American 
 theme, and to make what could be made of it. Hints 
 are taken from the early history of Mormonism, but 
 the central figure, instead of being a vulgar impostor 
 like Joseph Smith, is a simple and pious young farmer, 
 such a man as the author's own county might have 
 produced ; intelligent withal, but the victim of the re- 
 ligious ecstasy that comes to one without knowledge 
 of books and the world. The devices of shrewder 
 comrades and the jealousy of women unite to deceive 
 him, and to persuade him, by signs and miracles, of 
 jhis prophetic mission. The incidents follow naturally ; 
 the scenes being laid first in New England, then in 
 the far West, whither the Prophet and his followers 
 have gone to found a sacred city. Internal plots and 
 external foes bring about a catastrophe, ending with 
 the death of the hero of the play. 
 
 The highest form of poetry is the drama, for it in- 
 cludes all other forms, and should combine them in 
 
DRAMATIC WORKS. 
 
 429 
 
 their greatest excellence. At its best it is the supreme 
 flower of the literature of any nation, and demands a 
 poet's rarest and most comprehensive genius. It 
 scarcely proffers a method which he can fully master, 
 late in life, after years of lyrical or idyllic minstrelsy. 
 The dramatic instinct must be born in him : again, his 
 formative period must find him in a region where a 
 dramatic tendency already fills the air. Otherwise his 
 work as a playwright, like that of Tennyson or Long- 
 fellow, must be accomplished by an artificial effort, 
 and will lack the touch that makes the whole world 
 kin. Even Browning, with his immense dramatic re- 
 sources, early found a greater hindrance than his own 
 subjectivity in the non-sympathetic spirit of his people 
 and time. " The Prophet " failed, in view of its au- 
 thor's theme and purpose, not solely from his lack of 
 early dramatic practice, but from causes which hardly 
 could be overcome. Such a plot might be treated 
 idealistically, by giving the widest range to imagina- 
 tion, fearing no extravagance, creating one's own facts 
 and atmosphere, and the result might be a great dra- 
 matic poem if not an acting drama; or it might be 
 treated realistically, — the course which Taylor natu- 
 rally pursued. To insure success by the latter mode, 
 the time and events of a drama must be poetic in 
 themselves. In this story of our own time, there is, 
 perforce, a lack of the illusive and entrancing atmos- 
 phere of the far-away past. That which is too modern 
 and familiar seems commonplace. The time may 
 come when as much shall be made of the Mormon 
 episode as of the traditions of the Druses or of John 
 of Leyden ; at present it furnishes a store of clap-trap 
 to melodramatic playwrights who derive from it sub- 
 stantial gains. Taylor drew his personages with skill, 
 but their unheroic character was against the passion of 
 
 highest 
 fornu 
 
 Modes of 
 treatment. 
 
430 
 
 BAYAUD TAYLOR. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 f- S3- 
 
 "TIU 
 Masque of 
 the Gods," 
 1872. 
 
 A poet 0/ 
 
 noble 
 
 idtals. 
 
 the play. The work illustrates the importance of cer- 
 tain canons. First, nobility of theme has much to do 
 with the value of art; secondly, reaUsm is not the 
 chief end in matters of design. There is truth — and 
 truth ; the truth of what is or has been, and the truth 
 of what may be. 
 
 The lack of interest felt in " The Prophet " deterred 
 its author from further experiments of th^ kind. His 
 other dramas are purely ideal. The Masque of the 
 Gods presents that side of his nature which was most 
 exalted and aspiring. His religious temper, it has 
 been seen, was bred under other influences than those 
 which restrict the faith of many poets. He was a be- 
 liever in direct inspiration, but a questioner of revela- 
 tion. The creed of the Progressive Quakers was lib- 
 eral and humane, and the boy grew up to regard men 
 of all races as his brethren, and every form of worship 
 as acceptable to an Unknown God whom he himself 
 addressed in the spirit of Pope's " Universal Prayer." 
 This sense was strengthened by his travels and studies, 
 and his religion became broader than any man's the- 
 ology. " The Masque of the Gods " — a title with a 
 tinge of quaintness below the dignity of the subject — 
 is a drama of three dialogues, managed in a severe 
 and classical fashion. It approaches as near to the 
 highest grade as intellect, eloquence, and fervent glow, 
 
 — it was written in four days, " almost at white heat," 
 
 — can lift such a poem. What it lacks is the uncon- 
 scious flight into that empyrean where the wings move 
 without sound and touches of flame hover at the tips 
 of the pinions. The conception is vast, daring, — far 
 more imaginative than its working out. 
 
 This drama, which Taylor rated high among his 
 productions, and which is in every sense an expression 
 of his devotion to the nobler forms of song, renders 
 
'PRINCE DEUKALION.' 
 
 431 
 
 it possible for one to assert that a writer may be judged 
 somewhat by his ideals, and that, so far as this mode 
 of judgment is concerned, its author held a significant 
 place in the group of American poets. It was the 
 precursor — the overture, we may say — to the work 
 that was his swan-song, the larger drama which he 
 lived to complete, and of which a fair broad copy 
 reached him but a day before the lyre dropped from his 
 hand forever. " Of his last work," wrote his bereaved 
 wife, — " sein Schwanen Gesang, as I call it, — as I 
 would call it in my mind involuntarily, long before I 
 knew he was deadly ill, he only saw one copy, and 
 that of the English edition." 
 
 A strange interest belongs to the drama of Prince 
 Deukalion. The poet deferred his serious work upon 
 the life of Goethe, that he might be sure of complet- 
 ing this one poem which he strove to make his best. 
 Attention may be directed to the artistic skill with 
 which it is composed, to the sounding qualities of the 
 main body of its verse, and to the varying interludes 
 marked by the author's lyrical felicities in their ma- 
 tures! range. Even here his expression retains a man- 
 nerism which grew out of the limited vocabulary pre- 
 vailing when he learned his art in youth. Certain 
 words and effects are of too frequent recurrence ; but, 
 allowing for all this, " Prince Deukalion " will bear 
 examination for its excess of rhythmical beauty. 
 America has produced few poems so admirable for 
 richness and variety of measures. 
 
 The subject is one that lay near Taylor's heart, 
 and to him was the most elevating of poetic themes 
 — to wit, the progress of mankind, from the ignominy 
 and suffering belonging to the youth of the world, to 
 the golden age of the future. The thought and treat- 
 ment of the drama are entirely characteristic of the 
 
 His swaup 
 song. 
 
 "Prince 
 
 Deuka~ 
 
 lion: a. 
 
 Lyrical 
 
 Drcima^' 
 
 1878. 
 
 Rhytk- 
 
 vtical 
 
 beauty 
 
 A charac 
 
 teristic 
 
 theme. 
 
*32 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 jOfinuai. 
 
 author. The early portion is unquestionably fine. Pas- 
 sages in the middle and latter sections show a falling 
 off, due, it may be, to the languor of illness and to the 
 pressure of the instinct which made the poet hasten 
 to the completion of his task, but at the close he again 
 rose to a noble height. It is easy to select an ex- 
 ample of the vigorous handling of the structural verse. 
 His Poet declares : — 
 
 " I am a voice, and cannot more be still 
 Than some high tree that takes the whirlwind's stress 
 Upon the summit of a lonely hill. 
 Be thou a wooing breeze, my song is fair; 
 Be thou a storm, it pierces far and shrill. 
 And grows the spirit of the starless air: 
 Such voices were, and such must ever be, 
 Omnipotent as love, unforced as prayer, 
 And poured round Life as round its isles the sea ! " 
 
 In the fourth act, the words of Agathon are an 
 expression of the sentiment and hopeful philosophy 
 which animated Taylor's whole career : — 
 
 "But I accept — even all this conscious life 
 Gives in its fullest measure — gladness, health, 
 Clean appetite, and wholeness of my claim 
 To knowledge, beauty, aspiration, power ! 
 Joy follows action, here ; and action bliss. 
 Hereafter ! " 
 
 But at last, and even here, it seemed as if — to 
 change the line of John Webster — the years of this 
 loyal and eager poet had felicities too many. His 
 rest was not to be that upon which he counted. Had 
 he drawn his own horoscope it could not have ap- 
 peared more perfect. He went again to the land of 
 his earliest pilgrimage, encouraged with honors and 
 affection, and with the best opportunities for the pro- 
 duction of a work to which his own choice and the 
 desire of the entire republic of letters strongly im- 
 
THOUGHTS ON HIS CAREER. 
 
 433 
 
 pelled him. Hereafter, he was to have calm and lei- 
 sure. But within the year his soul was required of him, 
 and one more broken shaft was added to the endless 
 colonnade by which we testify to the incompleteness 
 of this our earthly life, and express the pity of it. 
 
 Shortly after Taylor's death, a fellow-writer, who 
 knew him well, spoke to me of his literary career. 
 "A man so aspiring and sagacious," this critic said, 
 " could be satisfied with nothing less than the highest 
 achievement, the soundest professional judgment in 
 his favor." Recognizing the point thus made, I would 
 not accept it as a test of his genius. It seemed to 
 me that it was his fortune, however wide his popular 
 reputation, to be underestimated by his professional 
 compeers. His gift was genuine and inherent, but it 
 became too much diffused ; he strove to survey too 
 large a precinct, and it was surprising how far, in more 
 than one direction, he made his lines extend. With 
 all his facility and purpose, he found himself in a too 
 arduous struggle between the duty of the hour and 
 the still higher work fashioned after " the pattern 
 which was shewed him in the Mount.'' He set him- 
 self to carry out an almost impossible plan of life. 
 His manliness in this and other respects we all con- 
 cede. During his experience of a time and region 
 which made Poe a weakling, — almost an Ishmaelite, 
 — with what pluck and heartiness Taylor faced the 
 situation, until it seemed as if the very god of strength 
 took pleasure in befriending him! After all, he had 
 some right to count upon length of years, and to shape 
 his plan accordingly. He grew in taste and judgment 
 as he grew older, and even his devotion of so much 
 time to hack-work was not without its requitals. He 
 led a singularly happy life throughout, and the cloud 
 28 
 
 Died in 
 Berlin^ 
 Germany^ 
 Dec. 19, 
 1878. 
 
 Final COH^ 
 
 sidera- 
 
 iions. 
 
434 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 foretokening its close was but of brief duration. He 
 was fond of festivals, of joy ; he had honor, love, and 
 loyal " troops of friends." More was given to him 
 than was taken away, and his memory is something to 
 dwell upon with pleasure, not with pain. The volumes 
 of his song are left to us, the bequest of that which 
 he thought the choicest product of his years. No one 
 who would acquaint himself with American poetry can 
 overlook Bayard Taylor's share of it. Those who 
 would understand its growth, or predict its future, 
 must bear in mind the generation for which he wrote 
 and the story of his efforts and environment. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 IN writing upon the leaders of American song, I 
 have sought to make our various studies as com- 
 prehensive as possible within due bounds. That they 
 might be both critical and sympathetic, and afford 
 new illustrations of the poetic principle and the tem- 
 perament of poets, it has been my effort to approach 
 the subject of each from his own ground, — to com- 
 prehend his motive and judge him at his best ; at 
 the same time, to see where he has failed of that 
 standard and of the true spirit of ideal expression. 
 Such an effort requires to be taken as a whole. Iso- 
 lated phrases, and even sections, may be misconstrued 
 as unfair stricture or, on the other hand, as if biased 
 by personal considerations. Yet, in the course of 
 each study, I have tried to draw a just portrait, and 
 so to analyze the work of its original as to obtain at 
 least an approximately correct resultant. 
 
 For this final chapter, — relating to various persons 
 and questions of the time, and necessarily less cohe- 
 sive and animate than those which it supplements, — 
 I would ask that its parts be weighed together, if at 
 all. It has a distinct purpose, — to glance at the ex- 
 isting condition of our poetry, and to speculate con- 
 cerning the near future. Not to prophesy — we 
 scarcely can forecast next month's weather from the 
 numberless shifting currents of to-day. Yet one may 
 
 RetrospeC' 
 tme. 
 
 Design of 
 this chap- 
 ter. 
 
436 
 
 A CRY OF FOREBODING. 
 
 Cp. " Vic- 
 torian Po- 
 ets " -■ 
 
 Recent 
 forebod- 
 ings. 
 
 hopefully surmise, for example, that a dull spell will 
 not last beyond all reason and experience. The past 
 teaches us what signs indicate the change, — where 
 blue sky will first appear, — and that, if the wind 
 " backs," or proves fickle, a brightening will be tem- 
 porary and delusive. In the mood of a cautious 
 weather-sage, then, let us examine the late reports 
 from the signal-stations that together show the prob- 
 abilities. In reviewing the poetry of England, the 
 general drift was indicated more plainly by the choir 
 at large than by the solos of a few striking and in- 
 dependent voices. 
 
 I. 
 
 When some of our elder poets, their careers felic- 
 itously rounded, were taken from us, there soon arose 
 a cry of foreboding. Who, it was asked, are to oc- 
 cupy the places of Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson ? 
 What younger men can equal the work executed by 
 those pioneers when the latter were of corresponding 
 age ? A period of decline has been predicted. It 
 may be noted, as we seek to determine whether the 
 prediction is well based, that a similar cry is heard 
 from across the sea. The work of Tennyson and the 
 Brownings, in their prime, is contrasted with that of 
 their juniors, and critics are not boastful as to the 
 promise of another saengerfest. I venture to recall 
 that ten years ago I saw the beginning of a poetic 
 dusk, and expressed a belief in its temporary contin- 
 uance. It is now generally perceived and lamented ; 
 nevertheless it seems to me that it is near an end, 
 and that we may begin to look for a new day. If 
 this is to differ from the last, — if we who enjoyed 
 the old fashion shall find it hard to accustom our- 
 selves to the new, — the young will speedily interpret 
 
DISTRACTING INFLUENCES. 
 
 437 
 
 it for us. Their estimate of relative values will have 
 its own gauge. 
 
 The rise of Poetry in America, its first noteworthy 
 and somewhat original endeavor, was dearly marked, 
 and in the main coincident with that of the Victorian 
 School abroad. Before long, our poetry took its place 
 with standard literature ; its authors won the interest, 
 even the affection, of an attentive public. The close 
 of the term involved may not have been so clear to 
 us. Literary periods shift with mingled sounds, like 
 those of bands following one another at intervals in 
 a procession. But, as in the case of the parallel term 
 abroad, it was defined sufficiently for us now to look 
 back and recognize it. The influences to which was 
 due a diversion of interest, and which brought poetic 
 aims and methods into doubt, may be briefly recapit- 
 ulated. They include all that we have seen prevail- 
 ing throughout Christendom and resulting from its 
 accelerated evolution of knowledge and energy: the 
 radical change in the course of imagination, enforced 
 by the advance of science, — the disturbance of tra- 
 dition and convictions, — the leap from romance to 
 realism. We must allow, too, for the diversion of 
 genius to material conquests, adventure, the creation 
 of fortunes ; and for the growth of journalism, and of 
 prose fiction answering to the demands of the time. 
 All the resulting influences are fully as dynamic here 
 as in the Old World, and some of them far more so. 
 But other factors, peculiar to this country, must not 
 be overlooked. The civil war was a general absorb- 
 ent at the crisis when a second group of poets began 
 to form. Their generation pledged itself to the most 
 heroic struggle of the century The conflict not only 
 checked the rise of a new school but was followed 
 by a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo 
 
 Duration 
 and close 
 of our fir A 
 poetic 
 ternu 
 
 Recapitu- 
 lation of 
 distracting 
 infiuences, 
 Qi. "Vic- 
 torian PO" 
 ets " : 
 H> 7-29- 
 
 Seejip. 17, 
 26, 27. 
 
 The War 
 
438 
 
 THE PUBLIC APPETITE. 
 
 Preemfi- 
 tum. 
 
 A nenapvh' 
 He taste. 
 
 See^. 54- 
 
 58- 
 
 fi brief 
 mrvey 
 
 seemed trivial to those who had listened to the shout 
 of Mars. A manly reaction from the taste for rhet- 
 oric and sentiment which existed before the war de- 
 generated into the indifferentism lately affected by 
 our clever youths. Those whose lyrical instinct sur- 
 vived through all conditions, and still impelled them 
 to sing, found themselves subject to a novel disad- 
 vantage. The favorite senior bards were still in voice ; 
 their very longevity, fitting and beautiful as it was, re- 
 strained the zeal and postponed the opportunities of 
 pupils who held them in honor. Our common and 
 becoming reverence prevented both the younger writ- 
 ers and the people from suspecting that these veter- 
 ans were running in grooves and supplying little new ; 
 finally, when this was realized, and there was a more 
 open field, it became evident that the public was sa- 
 tiated with verse and craved a change, not merely of 
 poets, but to some new form of imaginative literature. 
 Original genius will find an outlet through all hin- 
 drances ; be the air as it may, its flight will be the 
 eagle's ; but it will be apt, at such a time, to take 
 some other direction than that of its predecessors. 
 All in all, the subsequent incitement to lyrical effort 
 was not so effective, nor was the opening so clear, as 
 in the period that favored the rise of Longfellow and 
 his compeers. 
 
 In the course of these studies I have referred at 
 some length to a few poets next succeeding those 
 veterans, — some who now, but for the regard shown 
 them by younger contestants, would scarcely realize 
 how surely they are becoming veterans themselves. 
 Thus age succeeds to age, and still Poesy, — 
 
 "blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, 
 . . . leads generations on." 
 
 It only remains for us to take an outlook, and make 
 
PRELIMINARY SURVEY. 
 
 439 
 
 note of what poetic activity is discoverable at the 
 present time. Witla respect to my near associates, 
 and to the increasing circle of fresh recruits, whose 
 chances are all before them, I repeat my statement 
 that it would be out of taste and purpose for me to 
 assume the functions of a critical censor or appraiser. 
 The situation can be studied, and some conjecture 
 made of the future, upon a rapid (and in the main 
 uncritical) summary of what a representative number 
 of these have done and are doing, and I do not 
 think our conclusions can be so well reached in any 
 other way. 
 
 II. 
 
 Whittier and Holmes, the two oldest survivors of 
 their group, find their audience still extending with 
 the rapid spread of culture in this land. Their eyes 
 are scarcely dimmed, and their natural strength serves 
 them for periodic flights of song. Lowell's apparent 
 retirement in favor of younger writers, though doubt- 
 less only temporary, is the one courtesy they desire 
 him to forego. From Whitman, more picturesque than 
 ever, we have now and then some passing, half-broken, 
 yet harmonic strain, striving to capture the substance 
 of things seen and unseen. I have written already of 
 Taylor, Stoddard, Boker, Trowbridge, and their com- 
 rades, with whom our poetry began to show less of 
 the ethical and polemic fervor that brought their pred- 
 ecessors into repute. No new cause required the 
 lifting up of hands, and they meditated the muse 
 from simple love of beauty and song. Stoddard, al- 
 though a hard-worked man of letters, has been true 
 to his early vows, and adds to our songs of summer 
 in the autumn of his life. Occasionally also he writes, 
 with his old flnish and tranquil power, one of those 
 
 ncyw req- 
 uisite. 
 
 Its char- 
 acter. 
 
 Emeriii. 
 
 Next in 
 age. See 
 Chap. II., 
 etc. 
 
 Stoddard. 
 
440 
 
 WINTER. — A LDRICH. 
 
 A younffer 
 
 Waiiam 
 
 iV inter : 
 1835- 
 
 Thomas 
 Bailey 
 Aldrich: 
 1836- 
 
 Beauty of 
 Vis verse 
 %nd pro9e. 
 
 sustained and characteristic blank -verse poems in 
 which his faculty is at its highest. Of poets a decade 
 younger, Hayne, Aldrich, Winter, Piatt, Howells, and 
 a few others, still remain. It was their lot to begin 
 at just the time when the country had forsworn peace 
 and its pipings ; but they none the less took heart, 
 and did good service in keeping our minstrel line un- 
 broken through good and evil days alike. 
 
 Winter's extreme poetic temperament, and his loy- 
 alty to an ideal, have made his frequent sketches of 
 travel very charming, and have imparted to his dra- 
 matic criticisms the grace and proportion for which 
 they are distinguished. The melody, ease, and sin- 
 cere feeling of his personal tributes and occasional 
 pieces for delivery render them quite unique. The 
 poem read at the dedication of the monument to Poe 
 is an elevated production. His best lyrics have caught 
 the spirit of the early English muse. 
 
 To Aldrich, now in his sunny prime, — the most 
 pointed and exquisite of our lyrical craftsmen, — justly 
 is awarded a place at the head of the younger art- 
 school. He is a poet of inborn taste, a votary of the 
 beautiful, and many of his delicately conceived pieces, 
 that are unexcelled by modern work, were composed 
 in a ruder time, and thus a forecast of the present 
 technical advance. They illustrate the American in- 
 stinct which unites a Saxon honesty of feeling to that 
 artistic subtilty in which the French surpass the world. 
 Though successful in a few poems of a more heroic 
 cast, his essential skill and genius are found in briefer 
 lyrics comparable to faultless specimens of the an- 
 tique graver's art. Such pieces as the " Palabras 
 Carinosas " and the lines " On an Intaglio Head o* 
 Minerva" have a high-bred quality that still keeps 
 them at the head of our vers de socikti ; nor is theit 
 
FA WCETT. — GILDER. — DE KA V. 
 
 441 
 
 author dependent for his effect on novel and elabo- 
 rate forms. Apparently spontaneous, they are per- 
 fected with the touch of a Gautier. His quatrains 
 and trifles expressive of fleeting moods rank with the 
 best of our time. Aldrich's restraint in verse is a 
 notable contrast to the sudden wit and fancy of his 
 speech ; as a writer, he never has stood in need of 
 the injunction, — 
 
 "O Poet, then forbear 
 
 The loosely sandalled verse, 
 Choose rather thou to wear 
 The buskin straight and terse." 
 
 His shorter tales and sketches are finished like so 
 many poems in prose, sparklingly original, and de- 
 lightful for the airy by-play, the refined nuances, of 
 a captivating literary style. 
 
 Fawcett's verse displays tendencies which class him 
 with the art-school, and an inclination to profit by 
 the Gallic taste and motive. The poems in his two 
 volumes are selected, I presume, from a copious store, 
 as he has been from youth a prolific writer. In 
 Fantasy and Passion were many cabinet pictures in 
 rhyme, drawn with fastidious care, and an occasional 
 lyric, like " The Meeting,'' upon a weird theme and 
 suggestively wrought. The leading pieces in Song 
 and Story have fewer mannerisms, — a less fanciful, 
 a freer and more imaginative, treatment. Mr. Taw- 
 cett's versatility leads him to essay almost every form 
 of inventive, satirical, and critical literature, and as 
 a playwright he has made not the least successful 
 of his ventures. Two of our prominent New York 
 authors seem, aside from their professional work as 
 journalists, to have devoted themselves without re- 
 serve to poetry. Their characteristics are very dis- 
 
 Edgar 
 Fawcett t 
 1847- 
 
 GUder and 
 de Kay, 
 
442 
 
 LYRIC, IDYLLIC, DESCRIPTIVE, 
 
 Richard 
 
 Watson 
 Gilder : 
 1844- 
 
 Charles 
 
 de Kay : 
 1849- 
 
 George 
 
 Arnold t 
 1834-65. 
 
 John 
 Ayl-mere 
 Dorgan : 
 ^836-67. 
 
 George 
 Parsons 
 
 Latkrop : 
 1851- 
 
 Hjaltnar 
 Hjorth 
 Boyesen : 
 1848- 
 
 similar. Gilder, whose vein is so unlike that of Mr. 
 Aldrich, vies with him in artistic conscientiousness. 
 There is no slovenly work in The New Day and The 
 Poet and his Master; each is a cluster of flawless 
 poems, — the earlier verse marked by the mystical 
 beauty, intense emotion, and psychological distinc- 
 tions, of the select illuminati. He appears to have 
 studied closely, besides the most ideal English verse, 
 the Italian sonnets and canzoni which ever deeply 
 impress a poet of exquisite feeling. An individual 
 tone dominates his maturer lyrical efforts ; his aim 
 is choice and high, as should be that of one who 
 decides upon the claims of others, and at his age 
 there are fine things left for him to do. Charles de 
 Kay is also conspicuous for height of aim, and cer- 
 tainly for a most resolute purpose. In these days 
 it is bracing to see a man of his ability in earnest 
 as a poet. It would be premature to judge of the 
 strange, affluent, and broadly handled Visions, Nim- 
 rod and Esther, at this near view, or until completed 
 by the final section of their trilogy. Hesperus and 
 the Poems of Bamaval show his impassioned and more 
 subjective moods, and his resources for a prodigal 
 display of varied, uneven, but often strongly effective 
 lyrical work. 
 
 The deaths of Arnold and Dorgan, at ages when 
 practice-work ended and individual traits began to 
 appear, stilled two voices of no little promise. Among 
 our Northern poets there are some whose verse is 
 the expression of their choicest impulses rather than 
 the most substantial portion of their literary outcome. 
 Lathrop's too infrequent lyrics give token of sensi- 
 tive feeling and a beautiful poetic vein. Professor 
 Boyesen's verse, like his prose, belongs so thoroughly 
 to his adopted language, and is so fresh and classic 
 
AND MEDITATIVE VERSE. 
 
 443 
 
 that we scarcely think of him as a Norwegian. The 
 Oriental songs of Edward King are healthy and vir- 
 ile, and add variety to our recent product. Sill, 
 Benton, Dr. Powers, Weir Mitchell, Professor Beers, 
 Riordan, S. H. Thayer, W. S. Shurtleff, McKay, Co- 
 nant. Abbey, Dufiield, Blood, Proudfit, Butterworth, 
 Saltus, Tilton, the late Robert Weeks, among our 
 writers of lyrical verse, represent widely different 
 grades of motive and execution. Of the late Henry 
 Work, that instinctive composer of songs (and their 
 music) for the people, I have spoken elsewhere. Rob- 
 ert Grant has a frolic talent for satire, and some- 
 thing like that masterhood of current styles for which 
 we still read Frere and Aytoun. Houghton's St. 
 Olaf's Kirk is a good romantic poem, in the Ten- 
 nysonian manner, finished with much care. Maurice 
 Thompson's Sofigs of Fair Weather are well named; 
 in breezy, out-of-door feeling he is a kinsman of 
 Walter Mitchell, who wrote " Tacking Ship off Shore." 
 It is chiefly through a close observation of nature 
 that the influence of the elder poets, especially of 
 Emerson, is prolonged by the new choir. Monte Rosa, 
 Nichols's long descriptive poem, is a not unworthy 
 counterpart to The Brook — for which the late Dr. 
 Wright is held in recollection. The transcendental 
 instinct, that follows upon Nature's elusive and spir- 
 itual trails, survives in the thoughtful lines of her 
 born communicant, John Albee, whose individuality is 
 none the less apparent. Cheney's lyrics of nature and 
 emotion have kindred yet distinct traits. "The Mod- 
 ern Job," by Peterson, is an eccentric, but original 
 and suggestive work, and there are striking passages 
 in his minor poems. McKnight's volume of sonnets 
 on " Life and Faith " is fraught with poetic- medita- 
 tion. Montgomery and " Paul Hermes," the former 
 
 Edward 
 
 King 
 
 1848- 
 
 (See In- 
 dex.) 
 
 Robert 
 Grant : 
 1852- 
 George 
 
 Wash- 
 ington 
 Wright 
 Hough- 
 iojt- : 1 S50- 
 
 James 
 Maurice 
 Thomp- 
 son : 1844' 
 Walter 
 Mitchell : 
 1826- 
 Siarr 
 Hoyt 
 Nichols : 
 ■834- 
 
 Wright : 
 see p. 52. 
 
 John Al- 
 bee: 1833- 
 
 John 
 Vance 
 Cheney : 
 1848- 
 
 Henry 
 Peterson: 
 
 George 
 Mc- 
 
 Knight •• 
 1840- 
 
444 
 
 FEMALE POETS 
 
 George 
 Edgar 
 MoHt- 
 ^oitiery : 
 1856- 
 
 William 
 
 Rascoe 
 
 Thayer. 
 
 (''Paul 
 
 Hermes''''^. 
 
 1859- 
 
 yohn 
 Boyle 
 O'Reilly: 
 1844- 
 
 Robert 
 Divyer 
 jfoyce : 
 .813-83. 
 
 Maurice 
 Francis 
 Egan : 
 1852- 
 
 {See In- 
 dex.) 
 
 Female 
 poets: see 
 p. 50. 
 
 Their rel- 
 ative ex. 
 cellcnce. 
 
 avowedly, are inspired by the marvels of the new 
 learning, and find no surer tonic for the imagination 
 than modern scientific discovery. Emerson's song 
 was a verification of Wordsworth's faith in the iden- 
 tity of philosopher and poet. Our future imagery 
 will shape itself unconsciously, without much need of 
 a poet's wilful effort, and will be his adjunct and ve- 
 hicle rather than the object of his aim. Montgom- 
 ery's command of rhythm is finely evident, and the 
 young author of Hermes seems to have good service 
 within his power. 
 
 Boyle O'Reilly attests his Irish blood by the verve 
 and readiness of his ballads. He may be more justly 
 claimed as an American than the late Dr. Joyce, 
 whose Deirdrl fulfilled the promise of a bard who in 
 youth wrote the " Ballads of Irish Chivalry.'' Among 
 other and recent Celtic minstrels of this greater Ire- 
 land, besides Maurice Egan, a sweet and true poet, 
 have been the gallant O'Brien and Halpine, John 
 Savage, McDermott, — and Father Ryan, whose emo- 
 tional strains reach a larger audience than that which 
 more studied verse is wont to gain. 
 
 A Scotch critic, whose resources as our literary 
 historian are confined mostly to periods before the 
 civil war, repeats an old fling at " the plague of Amer- 
 ican poetesses.'' This vieux garfon of letters, if ac- 
 quainted with their work, might beseech us, like Bene- 
 dick, not to flout at him for what he had said against 
 them. Our daughters of song outnumber those in 
 England, and some of them, like some of their breth- 
 ren, have thin voices ; but it is just as true that 
 much genuine poetry is composed by others, and that, 
 while we have none whose notes equal those of at 
 least one Englishwoman, in average merit they are 
 not behind their fair rivals. Their lyrics, sonnets, 
 
A MARKED ADVANCE. 
 
 445 
 
 ballads, are feminine and spontaneous, and often 
 highly artistic. To be sure, our aspirants of either 
 sex are attempting few works of invention ; where all 
 are sonneteering, it is not strange that women should 
 hold their own. Yet their advance in discipline and 
 range is apparent also in novels and other prose- 
 work ; they know more than of old, their thought is 
 deeper, their feeling more healthy. The morale of 
 their verse is always elevating; in other respects it 
 fluently adapts itself to the conventions of the day. 
 
 Among these sweet-voiced singers, to some of whom 
 I have alluded heretofore. Miss Larcom, with her or- 
 chard notes, well retains her popularity. Mrs. Cooke 
 and Mrs. Stoddard are too seldom heard, — each so 
 original, so true in verse and prose to characteristic 
 types. The former's poetry always has been admired 
 for motive and execution ; Mrs. Stoddard's, though 
 less in amount, has the condensed power and vivid 
 coloring that render it difficult to mistake the source 
 of anything from her hand. The verse of the brill- 
 iant and devoted '' H. H." (the sense of whose loss 
 is fresh upon us) is more carefully finished, though 
 perhaps it sings the less for its union of intellectu- 
 ality with a subtile feeling whose intenseness is real- 
 ized only by degrees. Her pieces, mostly in a single 
 key, and that grave and earnest, have won the just 
 encomiums of select critics, but certainly lack the vari- 
 ety of mood which betokens an inborn and always 
 dominant poetic faculty. Mrs. Spofford's various lyrics 
 are rich in cadence ; she has a fine choice of measures, 
 and always interests us both with her theme and its 
 treatment. Her passion is genuine, and unusual re- 
 sources of diction, color, effect, are brought to play 
 in her poems. Mrs. Fields, the most objective of 
 these writers, veils her personality, except as it be- 
 
 An ad- 
 vance 
 noted. 
 
 Litcy Lar< 
 com. 
 
 Rose Ter- 
 ry Cooke. 
 
 F.lizabetk 
 Drew 
 Barstow 
 Stoddard. 
 
 Helen Mar 
 ria FLske 
 yackson. 
 
 Harriet 
 Elizabeth 
 Prescott 
 Spofford. 
 
 Annie 
 
 Adams 
 
 Fields. 
 
446 
 
 FEMALE POETS. 
 
 comes revealed by a free rhythmical method, and an 
 obvious inclination toward the classical and antique. 
 The zest, the enchanting glamour, of Northern coast- 
 life are known to Celia Thaxter, our daughter of the 
 isles. Her sprayey stanzas give us the dip of the sea- 
 bird's wing, the foam and tangle of ocean, varied in- 
 terpretations of clambering sunrise mists and even- 
 ing's fiery cloud above the main. Mrs. Allen, Mrs. 
 Mapes Dodge, Mrs. Moulton, Nora Perry, Miss Cool- 
 brith and Miss Shinn of California, are natural sing- 
 ers, in their several degrees. The stanzas of Mrs. 
 Moulton and Mrs. Dodge are marked by charming 
 fancy, and always tender and sweet. Miss Perry is 
 an instinctive melodist, with a sure ear for the tell- 
 ing, original refrains that heighten the effect of such 
 lyrics as " Cressid " and " Riding Down." 
 
 Our best-known Western poetess, Mrs. Piatt, though 
 often obscure, has traits resembling those of Miss 
 Rossetti, — a vivid consciousness of the mystery of 
 life and death, a conjuring indirectness of style, and 
 a gift, which she shares with Mrs. Dodge, of seeing 
 into the hearts of children. She will not, however, be 
 rightly measured by one who reads the wrong volume 
 of her poems, or the wrong poem. Miss Phelps's 
 deeply religious nature, warring with its own doubts, 
 leads her on adventurous paths. That she is essen- 
 tially a poet was evident from her prose, long before 
 she made a collection of verse. She is the modern 
 vine from a Puritan stock, subject to inherited ten- 
 dencies, but yielding blossoms of feminine grace and 
 aspiration. The names of the late Mrs. Hudson, of 
 Mrs. Bradley, " Marian Douglas," Mrs. Sangster, Miss 
 Bushnell, Miss Woolsey, Mrs. Searing, Miss Bates, 
 Mrs. Smith, Miss Bloede, Miss de Vere, Ella Dietz, 
 Miss Proctor, Mrs. Rollins, Miss Osgood, and Miss 
 
 Celia 
 
 Leighion 
 
 Tkaxter. 
 
 Mrs. 
 Moulton, 
 Mrs, 
 Dodge, 
 Miss Per- 
 ry, and 
 others. 
 {See In- 
 dex.) 
 
 Sarah 
 Morgan 
 Bryan 
 Piatt: 
 
 Elizabeth 
 
 Stuart 
 
 Phelps. 
 
 [See In- 
 iex.) 
 
THEIR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 447 
 
 Cone, may be cited in a list of those whose songs are 
 pleasantly familiar. Miss Lazarus, to whose transla- 
 tions of Heine I have referred elsewhere, is on her 
 own ground in rendering tlie Hebrew poets of old 
 Spain ; her minor pieces are written with a firm hand, 
 and her tragedy. The Dance of Death, is a work of 
 much power. " Owen Innsley " has gained the favor 
 of those who care for poetry of an artistic type, and 
 Miss Thomas, that delightful confidante, yet betrayer, 
 of the secrets of the nymphs and muses, has given 
 us a volume of great beauty. The Songs and Lyrics 
 of Miss Hutchinson, and even more her later pieces, 
 striking for their melody, imagination, and unique 
 sense of design, assure us that if she allots to poetry 
 the devotion that has enriched her work in other 
 fields, its very greenest wreath is at her command. 
 There are still younger voices that give us fresh 
 music — like Miss Guiney's, or, like those of the Good- 
 ale sisters, artless ditties of the woods and fields, and 
 from which maturer notes are not unlikely to be 
 heard. 
 
 In the South, we have Mrs. Preston's works, of an 
 ambitious cast and strengthened by dramatic pur- 
 pose and expression. Like Mrs. Webster in England, 
 she may be called a pupil of Browning. Local color, 
 and much suggestion of the far Southern atmosphere 
 and sentiment, are found in the volumes of Mrs. 
 Townsend, of Louisiana. 
 
 These poets mostly sing for expression's sake, and 
 therefore without affectation. They often excel the 
 sterner sex in perception of the finer details of life 
 and nature. The critic would be a renegade who, 
 after paying his tribute to feminine genius in England, 
 should not recognize with satisfaction what has been 
 achieved by his own countrywomen. They have their 
 
 Emma 
 Lazarus, 
 
 Lucy 
 
 White 
 
 jfennisoit. 
 
 Edith Ma- 
 tilda 
 Thonuis, 
 
 Ellen 
 
 Machay 
 
 Hutchin- 
 
 Margaret 
 
 Junkin 
 
 Preston. 
 
 Mary A sh- 
 ley Towrin 
 send. 
 C-'JCarif- 
 
 /a.") 
 
448 
 
 RECENT PHASES. 
 
 Arcadian 
 diversiotis. 
 
 "With 
 pipe and 
 flute." 
 
 (See In- 
 dex.) 
 
 H. C. Btm- 
 *er. 
 
 shortcomings, not the least' of which in some of them 
 is that even perfection which is in itself a fault ; but 
 a general advance is just as evident in their poetry 
 as in the prose fiction for which they now are held in 
 honor throughout the English-speaking world. 
 
 A phase of our verse, illustrating its present station, 
 reflects the new London vogue, and has been men- 
 tioned in comparison with Dr. Holmes's lighter vein. 
 I refer to the plenitude of metrical trifles, society- 
 verse, belles choses in the French forms that are so 
 taking. Various new-comers make their entrance ac- 
 cordingly ; scarcely one but turns you off his rondeau 
 or ballade, and very cleverly withal. Blithe measures 
 written gracefully, like those of Sherman, Minturn 
 Peck, etc., are more agreeable than the prentice-'work 
 of sentimentalists. A sprightly Mercutio is better 
 company than your juvenile Harold or Werter. They 
 serve very well, moreover, for the travesties and " sat- 
 ire harming not " of the boulevard press. Our young 
 collegians, of whom Loring, who died in his adven- 
 turous youth, was the precursor, are apt at such 
 devices. It is curious to receive rhymes of the same 
 kind from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, 
 England. Mr. Scollard's are just as well turned as 
 Mr. Ropes's, and are not without signs of good omen. 
 The line of advance has been exemplified by a poet 
 who began in this way, the author of Airs from Ar- 
 cady. Bunner's verse, whether of the gayer kind, or 
 rising to the merit of his more ideal lyrics and son- 
 nets, is a hopeful inscription at the parting of the 
 ways. It already commends itself to those who look 
 for feeling under grace, and shows that he now can 
 make his standing with the muse depend upon the 
 constancy of his devotion. 
 
 Before discussing further the latest tendencies, le| 
 
THE SOUTH. 
 
 449 
 
 us see what is doing in those precincts to which we 
 naturally turn for literature of a specific flavor. The The Smth. 
 South, once so ambitious, has been very barren of 
 poetry during the last thirty years, either mindful of 
 Poe's conviction that there was no equal chance for 
 her native writers, or feeling that they were too remote 
 from the world to keep up with its progressive changes. 
 I think that standard literature, including poetry, is 
 read with more interest in the South than here, and 
 oratory there is still more than a tradition. But the 
 South has been unfortunate in the loss of promising 
 writers. One such was Timrod, whose handiwork was 
 skilful and often imaginative and strong. Timrod's 
 " Cotton Boll " was a forerunner of the method of a 
 still finer poet than he, whose career was equally pa- 
 thetic. The name of Sidney Lanier brings him clearly 
 to recollection — as I saw him more than once in the 
 study of our lamented Deukalion; the host so buoyant 
 and sympathetic ; the Southerner nervous and eager, 
 with dark hair and silken beard, features delicately 
 moulded, pallid complexion, hands of the slender, 
 white, artistic type. The final collection of his writ- 
 ings, with an adequate and feeling memoir by Dr. 
 Ward, confirms me in an already expressed belief that 
 Lanier's difficulties were explained by the very traits 
 which made his genius unique. His musical faculty 
 was compulsive ; it inclined him to override Lessing's 
 law of the distinctions of art, and to essay in language 
 feats that only the gamut can render possible. For 
 all this, one now sees clearly that he was a poet, and 
 bent upon no middle flight. He magnified his office, 
 and took a prophetic view of its restored supremacy. 
 The juvenile pieces here first brought together, al- 
 though his biographer apologizes for them, have little 
 in common with ordinary verse of the time. "Nir- 
 29 
 
 Henry 
 
 Timrod I 
 1829-67. 
 
 Sidney 
 Lanier : 
 1842-81. 
 
 I/is col' 
 
 lected 
 
 '^ Poems," 
 
 Lessing's 
 
 " Laoc- 
 
 Lanier^s 
 early and 
 sponta- 
 neous vein* 
 
450 
 
 SIDNEY LANIER. 
 
 vtaturer 
 work : Us 
 theory. 
 
 Symphonic 
 
 toittposir 
 
 tions. 
 
 Their 
 merit and 
 iheir 
 failing. 
 
 vina,'' " Resurrection," and the songs for " The 
 Jacquerie," are such as herald a new voice ; and later 
 efforts of the kind also show his gift unadulterated by 
 meditations on rhythmical structure. Among these are 
 the " Song of the Chattahoochee," almost as haunting 
 as " Ulalume," "The Revenge of Hamish,'' — than 
 which there are few stronger ballads, — " The Mocking 
 Bird," "Tampa Robins," "The Stirrup-Cup," "The 
 Bee," and "The Ship of Earth." But turn to the 
 productions which he deemed far more significant, in 
 view of their composition upon a new and symphonic 
 method. In time he doubtless might have wrought 
 out something to which these would seem but pre- 
 liminary experiments. The Centennial cantata was 
 written to be sung, and when rendered accordingly 
 no longer appeared grotesque. We may surmise that 
 the adaptation not of melody alone, but also of har- 
 mony and counterpointj to the uses of the poet, was 
 Lanier's ultimate design. Nor is it safe to gainsay 
 the belief that he would have accomplished this more 
 nearly, but for his early death and the hindrances of 
 sickness and embarrassment that long preceded it. 
 Compositions suggestive and reverberant as " Sun- 
 rise " and "The Marshes of Glynn" go far toward 
 vindicating his method. Yet even in these there is a 
 surplusage, and an occasional failure to make not 
 only outlines but impressions decidedly clear. "The 
 Symphony," " Corn," and other over-praised ventures 
 on the same plan, seem to me nebulous, and often 
 mere recitative. The danger of too curious specula- 
 tion is suggested by the strained effect of several 
 ambitious failures, contrasted with the beauty of his 
 unstudied work. An old foe, didacticism, creeps in 
 by stealth when work upon a theoretical system is 
 attempted. Let critics deduce what laws they may; 
 
PROMISE OF THE SOUTH AND WEST. 
 
 451 
 
 it is not for the poet deliberately to set about illus- 
 trating them. The formulas devised by Poe and others 
 often are found to suit, designedly or not, their inven- 
 tor's personal capabilities. Lanier's movement to en- 
 large the scope of verse was directly in the line of 
 his own endowment ; he has left hints for successors 
 who may avoid his chief mistake — that of wandering 
 along in improvisation like some facile, dreamy master 
 of the key-board. That remarkable piece of analysis. 
 The Science of English Verse, serves little purpose ex- 
 cept, like Coleridge's metaphysics, to give us further 
 respect for its author's intellectual powers. 
 
 Hayne's vitality, courage, and native lyrical impulse 
 have kept him in voice, and his people regard him 
 with a tenderness which, if a commensurate largesse 
 were added, should make him feel less solitary among 
 his pines. Various Southern poets, — Cooke, Randall, 
 Burns Wilson of Kentucky, Boner, and others, open 
 vistas of the life and spirit of their region. Town- 
 send's ballads, in their sturdy, careless way, speak for 
 the poetic side of a peculiarly American writer, true 
 to memories of a boyhood on the " Eastern Shore." 
 His tales, and the strongly dramatic fiction of Cable, 
 Miss Murfree, Page, Johnston, etc., more clearly be- 
 token the revived imagination of a glowing clime. 
 The great heart of the generous and lonely South, too 
 long restrained, — of the South once so prodigal of 
 romance, eloquence, gallant aspiration, — once more 
 has found expression. It enables us to know it, hav- 
 ing begun at last to comprehend its true self. 
 
 That the public is always on the alert for what is 
 both good and novel was illustrated by Bret Harte's 
 leap into favor with his portraitures of a new and 
 scenic world. His prose idyls of the camp and coast, 
 even more than his ballads, were the vouchers of a 
 
 ''The 
 Science of 
 English 
 Verse," 
 1880. 
 
 Paul 
 HaTtiilton 
 Hayne : 
 1831- 
 
 James 
 Ryder 
 Randall: 
 1839- 
 
 George 
 Alfred 
 Town- 
 send: 
 1S41- 
 
 Promise of 
 the South. 
 
 The Pa- 
 cific Slope, 
 
 Francis 
 Bret 
 Harie * 
 1837- 
 
452 
 
 HARTE. — MILLER. 
 
 Cincinna- 
 ius Hiner 
 
 Miller : 
 1841- 
 
 pOKt ; familiar as the verse at once became, it is fai 
 less creative than the stories. The serious portion of 
 it, excepting a few dialect pieces, — " Jim," " In the 
 Tunnel," etc., — is much like the verse of Longfellow, 
 Whittier, and Taylor ; the humorous poems, though 
 never wanting in some touch of nature, are apt to be 
 what we do not recognize as American. But of either 
 class it may be said that it is, like the rhyming of his 
 master, Thackeray, the overflow of a rare genius, 
 whose work must be counted among the treasures of 
 the language. Mr. Harte may be termed the founder, 
 and thus far has been the most brilliant exemplar, of 
 our transcontinental school. Joaquin Miller is, first 
 of all, a poet, if one may judge from the relative 
 merits of his verse and prose, — the latter of which 
 does not show his spirit and invention at their best. 
 The Songs of the Sierras, as a first book, was no 
 ordinary production. Its metrical romances, notwith- 
 standing obvious crudities and affectations, gave a 
 pleasurable thrill to the reader. Here was something 
 like the Byronic imagination, set aglow by the free- 
 dom and splendor of the Western ranges, or by turns 
 creating with at least a sensuous vraisemblance an ideal 
 of the tropics which so many Northern minstrels have 
 dreamed of and sung. Miller still has years before 
 him, and often lyrics from his pen suggest that, if he 
 would add a reasonable modicum of purpose to his 
 sense of the beautiful, the world would profit by the 
 result. Among other poets of the Pacific Slope, War- 
 ren Stoddard and Phelps seem more indifferent to 
 local flavor, and refine their work in the usual manner 
 of the Eastern school. 
 
 Surveying the broad central region of tilth and 
 traffic between the Mississippi River and the Appa 
 lachian Range, — the most fertile land on earth, and 
 
 Charles 
 Warren 
 Stoddard : 
 1840- 
 
 Charles 
 Henry 
 Phelps : 
 ■853- 
 
PIA TT. — HA Y. 
 
 453 
 
 tenanted by a people whose average culture exceeds 
 that of any race numerically equal, — we find it sensi- 
 tive to music and art, but not yet fruitful of that 
 poesy which, as Sidney declared, alone can outvie 
 nature, and " make the too-much-loved earth more 
 lovely." The Ohio valley lost two poets, — one in 
 battle, the other after he had lived to write our most 
 effective ballad of the war, — Lytle and Forceythe 
 Willson, each of whom had unquestionable lyrical 
 talent. John Piatt, the laureate of prairie and home- 
 stead life, has won a just reputation for his reflective 
 and idyllic verse. He has a Wordsworthian sympathy 
 with nature, and knowledge of its forms, and a sincere 
 purpose. He transmits with much simplicity the air 
 and bloom of the prairie, the fire-light in the settler's 
 home, and the human endeavor of the great inland 
 States he knows so well. Will Carleton struck a nat- 
 ural vein by instinct, in his farm-ballads, and has been 
 rewarded for the tenacity with which he has pursued 
 it. Others, like Venable and Harney, find their way 
 to the households of a rural constituency ; they have 
 the merit of presenting that to which they are wonted 
 — they know whereof they affirm. 
 
 John Hay, whose writings are at once fine and 
 strong, has been so engrossed by a rare experience 
 of " cities, . . . councils, governments," as scarcely to 
 have done full justice to his sterling gifts. With his 
 taste, mental vigor, and mastery of style, he. may well 
 be taken to task for neglecting a faculty exception- 
 ally his own. The uncompromising dialect-pieces, 
 which made a hit as easily as they were thrown off, 
 are the mere excess of his pathos and humor. Such 
 poetry as the blank-verse impromptu on Liberty shows 
 the higher worth of a man who should rise above 
 indifference, and the hindrance of his mood, and in 
 
 The 
 
 Inland 
 
 States. 
 
 Lyth and 
 Willson. 
 (See 
 Index.) 
 
 John 
 yatnes 
 Piatt: 
 1835- 
 
 IVilliam 
 
 Carleton " 
 
 184s- 
 
 William 
 
 Henry 
 
 Venable : 
 
 1836- 
 
 IVilliam 
 Wallace 
 Harney : 
 1831- 
 
 John 
 Hay: 
 1838- 
 
454 
 
 ID YLS. — DRAMA S. — TRA NSLA TIONS. 
 
 ^Scholar 
 Gypsies.^'' 
 
 Denton 
 yacgues 
 Snider : 
 1841- 
 
 H^iUiam 
 
 Leigkton: 
 
 1833- 
 
 tymiam 
 Young ; 
 1847- 
 
 Recent 
 
 transla^ 
 
 tors. 
 
 Seep. 55. 
 
 \See 
 Index.) 
 
 these spiritless times take up the lyre again, nor fit- 
 fully touch the strings. 
 
 In places remote from the literary market, we often 
 discover signs of hopeful energy. The best models 
 are read by isolated poets, whose seclusion the ca- 
 pricious standards of the town oracles fail to influ- 
 ence. Snider's Delphic Days, for example, a charm- 
 ing idyl in the elegiac distich, was printed in St. 
 Louis, through a singular coincidence, at the same 
 date with Munby's " Dorothy " in England, — the 
 two being the only prolonged specimens of this meas- 
 ure, if I mistake not, which our language affords. 
 Agamemnon's Daughter, by the same hand, is another 
 contrast to the bounds of every-day song. Leigh- 
 ton's legendary dramas. The Sons of Godwin and At 
 the Court of King Edwin, are crieditable to our liter- 
 ature. Their romantic themes, by inheritance and 
 the liberties of art, plainly are within the usufruct of 
 an American poet. A drama of like cast, and suc- 
 cessfully adapted to the stage, is Pendragon, the work 
 of an Illinoisian, William Young. 
 
 The department of translation, which (as well as 
 that of devotional verse) has been noted in a former 
 chapter, is at present somewhat neglected, though 
 there are minor contributions by Lea, F. Peterson, 
 Mrs. Conant, and others. Perhaps the most suggestive 
 of the late efforts in this field are Miss Preston's 
 charming translations from the Provengal and her 
 version of the Georgics. Rowland's ^neid is rude 
 and elegant by turns, but of interest to those who 
 believe with me that the English accentuate hexam- 
 eter is on the whole our best instrument for literal 
 and lineal rendering of the classical measure. The 
 translation of Virgil's complete works, by Wilstach, 
 is more elaborate. It is written in flexible blank- 
 
DIALECT VERSE, ETC. 
 
 455 
 
 verse, and garnished with copious notes and a review 
 of former English versions. This student, who does 
 not lack temerity, is translating "The Divine Comedy," 
 upon a metrical system hitherto un essayed. 
 
 Few dialects of our tongue, except those of Scot- 
 land, Lancashire, and Dorset, have been more clev- 
 erly handled for metrical effect than those peculiar 
 to the United States. The Atlantic varieties have 
 been used to good purpose, as we have seen, from 
 the time of Fessenden's " Country Lovers " to that 
 wherein are recorded the exploits of Hans Breit- 
 mann. Harte's and Hay's successes in a correspond- 
 ing line increased the popular regard for their bet- 
 ter work. Riley's Hoosier lyrics often are more terse 
 and pointed than the numerous ballads of Carleton. 
 Some of the most attractive and piquant of Ameri- 
 can folk-songs are in the dialect of our African 
 population, North and South. Stephen Foster, the 
 pioneer of " minstrel " song-writers, whose touching or 
 humorous ditties were wedded to genuine melody, de- 
 serves remembrance. A group, with the author of 
 " Uncle Remus " included, has diligently cultivated 
 the art of writing plantation - verse. Mrs. Preston, 
 Sidney and Clifford Lanier, the late Mrs. McDow- 
 ell and Irwin Russell, Miss McLean, Macon, and 
 many others, have contributed to this quaint jmthol- 
 ogy, which — at its extremes of humor, as in 
 " Reb'rend Quacko Strong," or of melody and devo- 
 tional pathos, as in " De Sheepfol' " — certainly is 
 an original outgrowth of the cisatlantic muse. 
 
 IIL 
 
 Such is a fairly representative list of those to 
 whom our recent poetry owes its being. A protest! 
 
 Dialect- 
 verse. 
 
 Seep. 59, 
 and cp. 
 " Victo- 
 rian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 278, 
 279. 
 
 yames 
 Whitcoml 
 Riley : 
 1854- 
 
 Seep. 49. 
 
 Piax- 
 iation 
 lyrics. 
 
 Joel 
 
 Chandler 
 Harris : 
 1848- 
 
 Irwin 
 Russell: 
 I853-79- 
 {And see 
 Index.) 
 
 The fore- 
 going a 
 
456 
 
 IMPRESSIONS LEFT BY THIS SURVEY. 
 
 represen- 
 tative list. 
 
 Ct. "Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 290, 
 291. 
 
 Traits, as 
 compared 
 ivith those 
 0/ ike gen- 
 eral choir 
 abroad. 
 
 Question 
 as to the 
 relative 
 importance 
 0/ ottr lat- 
 ter-day 
 song, 
 
 against so free a range of selection may be entered 
 by some, who fail to consider that for each name 
 here found a score of others could be cited. Doubt- 
 less many of the latter have equal claims to notice, 
 this summary having been made with no design of 
 completeness, but as a sufficient basis for remarks 
 on the weakness, quite as much as on the strength, 
 of our present movement, and on the chances of the 
 near future. 
 
 At the outset it can be honestly asserted, in be- 
 half of the writers named, that as a whole they do 
 not show less favorably than the corresponding mod- 
 ern choir of Great Britain. It would be difficult to 
 assort them in groups such as we have observed 
 abroad ; apart from local differences of style they 
 bear an almost monotonous relationship to one an- 
 other. This common likeness, however, is an illusive 
 something which renders their productions American. 
 If their verse presents few absolutely novel types, it 
 is more charged with national sentiment than that of 
 the late English poets. It pays little regard to 
 pseudo - classicism, middle -age restorations, and to 
 themes borrowed from other lands and languages. 
 It is sincere and impulsive, and has a New World 
 mode of looking at things and considering them. 
 Finally, the work of the most expert among these 
 writers, both sexes included, is often as interesting 
 for technical merit as that of their distant compeers, 
 although it may be that we have fewer in number 
 who reach a faultless standard. 
 
 Granting or claiming thus much, a reviewer must 
 put the question directly to his conscience — How 
 does the most of this recent verse impress you ? 
 Upon the foregoing summary, what can one honestly 
 declare of its force and significance ? Its achieve- 
 
AN INTERREGNUM. 
 
 457 
 
 ments have been noted ; the side on which it is triv- 
 ial or deficient must be as plainly shown, lest the 
 narrator be forced hereafter to regret that he with- 
 held his convictions. Nor is it easy to gloss over 
 the dynamic insufficiency of our present metrical lit- 
 erature. The belief scarcely can be resisted that 
 there is, if not a decadence, at least a poetic inter- 
 regnum, as compared with the past and measuring 
 our advance in sundry fields of activity. As I have 
 said, the first influence is ended ; there is a pause 
 before the start and triumph of another. This may 
 be frankly acknowledged ; in fact, the situation is 
 merely correlative with that observed, ten years ago, 
 in our look across the sea. It is none the less one 
 on which neither our poets nor their countrymen 
 have much reason to plume themselves. If our poe- 
 try, since the time of Longfellow, has not kept pace 
 with our general movement, this of itself implies an 
 interregnum. I suspect that it is of less relative im- 
 portance than if it had held the point already gained. 
 Its new leaders, at all events, are not invested with 
 the authority of those to whom these essays chiefly 
 have been devoted. Their volumes scarcely receive 
 the welcome — nor have they the bearing and import 
 as an indispensable part of literature — that apper- 
 tained to the poems of " The Seaside and the Fire- 
 side," " Evangeline," the " Voices of Freedom," 
 " Snow- Bound,". "The Biglow Papers," "Under the 
 Willows," "Poems of the Orient," and the "Poems" 
 of the Concord sage. To the careful eye they seem 
 less suggestive of changes and results than were 
 " The Raven and other Poems," " Songs of Sum- 
 mer," and " Leaves of Grass." They do not, like 
 some of the books here named, supply either lay or 
 professional classes with the most essential portion 
 
 Measured 
 tythat 
 which iMie 
 have been 
 consider- 
 ing. 
 
458 
 
 DEFICIENT PURPOSE AND IDEALITY. 
 
 Our fnod- 
 tra poets, 
 
 Onefeat- 
 vre. 
 
 Spirit of 
 ike np.w 
 vkool. 
 
 of their reading. We see that this is partly due to 
 conditions which it is just as well should obtain for 
 a season, and which the poets are not able to avert. 
 Before recurring to this difficulty, let us see how far 
 they are their own bafflers and justly to be held re- 
 sponsible. 
 
 Some of them have given such evidence of the 
 faculty divine as to be sure of enrolment in the Par- 
 nassian registry. Others have composed charming 
 bits of verse, — pledges, as yet unfulfilled, of some- 
 thing larger and more creative. We do not ask for 
 masterpieces, but how few the recent poems which 
 approach in breadth and interest those of the vet- 
 eran school ! Do our poets really trust their call- 
 ing, in defiance of temporal conditions, however dis- 
 couraging ? Do they not share in a measure the 
 sentiment which regards ideality as an amiable weak- 
 ness, the relic of a Quixotic period, and thus feel 
 half-ashamed of their birthright ? Few of them, at 
 the best, cultivate the latter seriously, as their avowed 
 means of expression ; and of these few the majority 
 perhaps are women. There are some who will be 
 ungracious enough to say that a time when religion 
 and poesy are sustained by the graceful, devoted, 
 but distinctly minor services of women, is not one 
 of supremacy for either the pulpit or the lyre. Those 
 who demur to this, and who refer to the authors of 
 the " Sonnets from the Portuguese " and " Romola,'' 
 will be told that Mrs. Browning and George Eliot 
 were > forerunners, not exemplars, of a golden era 
 when it shall be no longer true. 
 
 Even if our poets are doing the best within their 
 power, their misconception of relative values is much 
 the same as that recently noted of the minor English 
 school. To our predecessors the spirit of a work was 
 
O VER-REFINEMENT. 
 
 459 
 
 all in all ; the form was often marred by careless exe- 
 cution. It took years of Keats, Tennyson, and the 
 study of their masters, to rectify this, and then the 
 drift set quite too far in an opposite direction ; until 
 at last a Neo-Romantic group wreaked its thoughts 
 upon details of sound and color, placed decoration 
 above construction, the form of verse above its motive, 
 — thus missing the impulsive cadence, the more ethe- 
 real structure, to which the evasive spirit of poetry 
 mysteriously inclines. Heine's assertion, that a poet 
 must have natural tones in his lyrics and characters 
 m his narrative or dramatic efforts, was sustained by 
 the impotency of our own verse-makers before the 
 time of Whittier and Longfellow. With them and 
 their comrades American poetry took on at least the 
 merit of being natural, and gained a foothold ; but 
 this merit is less apparent in our later verse, whose 
 forms, though neatly mastered, breed a temper as ar- 
 tificial as their own. In brief, our lyrics of the past 
 had the virtue of simplicity, but were less noteworthy 
 for imagination ; those which have succeeded them 
 fail equally in poetry's highest attribute, and their 
 interest is due less to simplicity than to art — the art 
 which, being a substitute for imaginative vitality, runs 
 into artifices and mere technique. Over-refinement, 
 through a strict interpretation of that excellent canon, 
 " Art for Art's sake," is a vice of the period. Art is a 
 language, and a seemingly careless workman may be 
 a truer artist than his painstaking fellow. When one 
 has little to say, his technics are a kind of pedantry, 
 while a faulty poem or picture may be great because a 
 great thought or character is in it. The best workman 
 is he who adapts means to the noblest end, and we 
 tire of those who, with no message to deliver, elaborate 
 their style. The oldest races have discovered that no 
 
 Cp. "Vic- 
 
 ttyrian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 284-6, 
 
 Simplicity 
 and arti- 
 fice. 
 
 A ri wins 
 by expres- 
 sion. Cp« 
 •■'■Victo- 
 rian 
 Poets " : 
 p. 288. 
 
460 
 
 ABUNDANT MINOR VERSE. 
 
 Passing 
 vegtus. 
 
 "The ac- 
 complish- 
 ment of 
 verst.''^ 
 
 Half- 
 
 tfforts. 
 
 labor is artistic, unless strictly to the purpose ; a few 
 sure lines, and the result may be attained. We see, 
 however, that technical experts, though devoid of 
 imagination, often have a sudden following among 
 new men. This is because their skill is addressed to 
 the profession rather than to the public, and also 
 because the young recognize the dexterity which they 
 must acquire, while the creative genius of true masters 
 as yet escapes them. Hence the instant vogue of 
 novel forms, requiring adroitness for their perfection, 
 and so elegant as to conciliate even those they do 
 not capture. When real additions to our English 
 method, they will bear use and reproduction. But, 
 after a few men of exquisite talents have employed 
 them to advantage, the public grows weary of modes 
 so peculiar that we are compelled to dwell upon the 
 form and not the thought. 
 
 Thus we have in view, if not precisely a mob of 
 gentlemen who write with ease, an increased number 
 of those writing with the profusion of ease and the 
 pain of curious labor, and often at a loss of individual 
 distinction. Lyrics, sonnets, canzonets, are produced 
 on every hand. The average is so good that, despite 
 the beauty of an occasional piece, few can be said to 
 stand out boldly from the rest. Considering the ac- 
 cumulated wealth of English poetry, it is questionable 
 whether more sonnets, etc., are a real addition to it, 
 and if a place worth having can be earned by polish- 
 ing the countless facets of gems dependent on the 
 fanciful analysis of love and other emotions. Again, 
 some of our poets, like certain painters, avoid con- 
 tinued effort, and satisfy themselves with sketch-work 
 — a facile way of keeping up expectation. Having 
 mastered one's vocation, why not practice it with a 
 determined hand ? Too much assurance was the fault 
 
DIVISION OF EFFORT. 
 
 461 
 
 of our earlier period, but the ambition that went with 
 it stimulated a few to real achievements. It is hard 
 to account for our easy modern contentment. In older 
 countries the mines have been so well worked that 
 there is an excuse for resorting to the " tailings," but 
 here there should be the broadest encouragement for 
 prospectors. No doubt our reaction from the old- 
 fashioned conceit has its effect on able men, and 
 makes them cleave to ground of which they have no 
 fear. Too much credit is awarded now to the knowl- 
 edge of one's limitations. A poet, most of all, should 
 not believe in limitations ; by ignoring them, a few 
 will reach the heights. But our aspirants seem to 
 feel that nothing better can be done than to amuse 
 readers who consider poetry a diversion, and they 
 either fear to put their fate to the touch " to gain or 
 lose it all," or utterly fail to realize the chance at 
 this moment existing. And so, if poetry has lost its 
 hold, it is in some degree because no brilliant leader 
 compels attention to it, devoting himself to the hazard 
 of arduous and bravely ventured song. 
 
 The time, then, is not one of transition, save in the 
 sense that all periods are transitional. It is inter- 
 calar}', yet as well defined as the middle ring of Sat- 
 urn, gaining its light and substance from a multitude 
 of little quantities, — notable, in fact, for the profusion 
 and excellence of its minor verse. And here it must 
 be borne in mind that not a few of our idealists are 
 directing their main efforts to prose composition. For 
 example, one of the finest elegiac poems of recent 
 years, The North Shore Watch, is privately printed by 
 Mr. Woodberry, who thus far has permitted the ordi- 
 nary reader to know him only as a biographer and 
 critical essayist. Among the chief Victorian writers, 
 we found but two or three that might be classified as 
 
 heart fail 
 thee, clinih 
 not at all. " 
 
 Profusion 
 of minor 
 
 verse. 
 
 Ideality 
 diverted 
 to prose 
 composi- 
 tion. 
 
 ''The 
 North 
 Shore 
 Watch. ^^ 
 
 George 
 Edward 
 Wood- 
 berry : 
 1855- 
 
462 
 
 POET-NO VELISTS 
 
 Novelist- 
 poets, etc. 
 See f. 75, 
 atid cp, 
 "Victo- 
 rian 
 Poets": 
 fp. 8i, 82, 
 2S'-3- 
 
 WiUiam 
 Peizn 
 UtywelUX 
 1837- 
 
 novelist-poets. Hood was almost the only journalist- 
 poet of note, a true vocalist, jaded by hackwork. 
 Nowadays, the conditions are reversed ; the rhythmic 
 art is more frequently an avocation. Among our nov- 
 elists, however, Aldrich always seems the poet, — an 
 author with whom song has the precedence. His 
 tales are the prose of a poetic artist, and owe to this 
 fact their airy charm. Howells furnishes an instance 
 of the apt recognition of existing tendencies. The 
 wisdom he has displayed " in his generation " goes 
 far to justify the diversion we are observing. His 
 early verse, issued conjointly with that of his friend 
 Piatt, bore unusual marks of promise, nor has he 
 quite broken with the muse or ceased to hold her 
 image in his heart. Otherwise his bent, like Mr. 
 James's, was that of a critic, scholar, analyst ; and the 
 determined evolution of a masterly novel-writer, from 
 a youth of the qualifications involved, might serve as 
 a text for homilies on the power of the human will. 
 His pen being his fortune, his chosen profession that 
 of a man of letters, he manfully trained himself to 
 the production of literature that he foresaw would be 
 welcome and remunerative ; this, in a series of works, 
 — at first descriptive, then inventive, — constantly ad- 
 vancing in perception, in management of incident and 
 character, until he now stands where we find him, in 
 the front rank of those who impress observers with a 
 sense of our literary progress. His poetic gift serves 
 him well in translation, in dramatic adaptation, and 
 with respect to the feeling and artistic effect of his 
 tenderest episodes. Waiving discussion of Mr. How- 
 ells's method as a novelist, who can question that 
 he has judged wisely, and has done far better for the 
 public than if he had pursued the art that was his 
 early choice? 
 
ADVANCE IN PROSE FICTION. 
 
 463 
 
 By such examples more light is cast upon the re- 
 duced importance of our song -makers, and ground 
 discovered for a belief that this is transitory and that 
 a fresh departure will anon be made. Fancy and im- 
 agination are still rife, but their energy finds vent in 
 new directions. Accomplished Craftsmen, some of 
 whom thirty years ago might have been numbered 
 among the poets, now supply the public with its im- 
 aginative rations in the guise of prose fiction and ro- 
 mance. Through instinct or judgment, they have 
 occupied the gap in our literature. The time has 
 been opportune ; famous innings were made by the 
 elder minstrels ; our school of fiction had been repre- 
 sented only by a few rare and exceptional names. 
 So keen has been the new impulse, that the young 
 neophyte of to-day, instead of shaping his vague con- 
 ceptions into rhythm and imitating the poets within 
 his knowledge, longs to emulate the foremost novel- 
 ists. In the flush of our latest conquest, the rank 
 and file naturally overrate the relative worth of prose 
 fiction, which, at its best, — as will appear on a brief 
 consideration of the world's literary masterpieces, — 
 is not a more vital and enduring creation than the 
 poet's song. Yet the movement has resulted in a de- 
 cided gain to the prestige of our national authorship. 
 With a staff of novelists and romancers well equipped 
 in both invention and style, — Howells, Aldrich, Jul- 
 ian Hawthorne, Eggleston, Cable, James, Harte, Craw- 
 ford, Bishop, Stockton, Lathrop, Kip, Mrs. Stoddard, 
 Miss Jewett, Miss Woolson, Miss Murfree, Miss 
 Howard, Mrs. Foote, and others who also are ade- 
 quate to cope with the transatlantic experts, — in 
 view of the results already obtained from the field in 
 which these popular authors are so active, none can 
 assume that the diversion of creative energy thus ex- 
 
 New out- 
 lets of 
 itnagina- 
 iive ener- 
 gy- 
 
 The pre- 
 vailing 
 impulse. 
 
 Compere 
 sation. 
 
 {See 
 Index.) 
 
464 
 
 A LIFE-SCHOOL BETOKENED. 
 
 What 
 iheer f 
 
 A lesson 
 from the 
 
 Need of a 
 
 Ufe- 
 
 School. 
 
 An oppor- 
 iune time. 
 
 emplified has not brought with it a measurable com- 
 pensation. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Both exterior and subjective conditions having thus 
 determined the present office of the imagination, the 
 breathing-spell of poetry is not without promise of a 
 stronger utterance than ever when its voice shall be 
 renewed. We shall have more poets yet, and some 
 of those who have been named will contribute, I 
 doubt not, to the hastening of that renewal. They 
 can derive from our fiction itself a shrewd lesson for 
 their guidance. Their predecessors fully met the need 
 for idyllic verse, relating to home, patriotism, religion, 
 and the workaday life of an orderly people. They 
 did not scrutinize, and vividly present, the coils of in- 
 dividual being. Our people have outgrown their ju- 
 venescence, tested their manhood, and now demand a 
 lustier regimen. They crave the sensations of mature 
 and cosmopolitan experience, and are bent upon what 
 we are told is the proper study of mankind. The 
 rise of our novelists was the answer to this craving; 
 they depict Life as it is, though rarely as yet in its 
 intenser phases. Those who, besides meeting Mr. 
 James's requirement that " the mind of the producer 
 shall be displayed," do reflect life in something more 
 than a commonplace aspect are the chroniclers, chiefly, 
 of provincial episodes, confined to sections so narrow 
 that it is scarcely needful to linger in them through- 
 out the narrative of a sustained work. Their welcome 
 is partly due to the fact that their studies are bolder 
 and more dramatic than those of the restrained East- 
 ern school. The muster-roll of the latter has in- 
 creased somewhat more rapidly than its market. We 
 have seen poetry out of demand; the same thing be- 
 
POETS AND THE PUBLIC. 
 
 465 
 
 gins to be observed of prose fiction. Renewed atten- 
 tion is given to history, memoirs, travels ; but many 
 signs declare that there never was a time when a live 
 and glowing poet would have a better chance than 
 now. In the multitude of ambitious novelists, distinc- 
 tion is less easily gained. Only the poet can excite 
 the subtlest thrills, the most abiding sensations. The 
 promise of his return lies in the truth that our spirit- 
 ual nature does abhor a vacuum, — the need insures 
 the supply. Though our public has resorted to prose 
 literature for its wants, it now and then still reads a 
 poem with avidity. The sudden popularity of Ar- 
 nold's "Light of Asia" — the work of a scholar and 
 enthusiast rather than of a strongly original hand — 
 was of real significance. That production gave a 
 sensuous and legendary idealization of the religious 
 feeling of an impressible body of readers ; it appealed 
 to an existing sentiment; it focalized the rays in 
 which the faiths of the East and the West are blend- 
 ing throughout the modern world. In short, it was 
 most timely, and it was both attractive and dimen- 
 sional. If, then, the people care little for current 
 poetry, is it not because that poetry cares little for 
 the people and fails to assume its vantage-ground ? 
 Busying itself with intricacies of form and sound and 
 imagery, it scarcely deigns to reach the general heart. 
 Your skill is admirable, say the people, and of inter- 
 est to your own guild, but we ask that it shall be 
 used to some purpose. Convey to us the intellect 
 and passion wherewith poets are thought to be en- 
 dowed, the gloom and glory of human life, the na- 
 tional aspiration, the pride of the past and vision of 
 the future. 
 
 Rhythmical productions will be acceptable that com- 
 pare with those of the past, as vigorous figure-paint- 
 30 
 
 The Poets 
 and iJie 
 puhlic. 
 
 The for- 
 nter -must 
 respond to 
 
466 
 
 GROWING DRAMATIC SPIRIT. 
 
 the itew 
 
 dramatic 
 
 iiuitinct. 
 
 Cp. "Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 »>-344- 
 
 ProTnise of 
 a dramatic 
 fftovement. 
 
 ings with the canvases of our elder artists. Even in 
 landscape we have reached the stage where human 
 feeling, and that American, pervades the most favored 
 work. Nor will it be enough to depict life in aggre- 
 gated and general types. Whitman has achieved this, 
 conveying a national spirit in his symphonic echoes 
 of the murmuring towns and forests and ocean-waves. 
 He gives us life and movement, but the specific char- 
 acter, the personal movement, seldom animate his 
 pages. Individuals, men and women, various and 
 real, must be set before us in being and action, — ■ 
 above all, in that mutual play upon one another's 
 destinies which results from what we term the dra- 
 matic purport of life. Thus rising above mere intro- 
 spection and analysis, poetry must be not so much a 
 criticism as the objective portrayal and illumination 
 of life itself — and that not only along the unevent- 
 ful, quiescent flow of rural existence, but upon the 
 tides of circumstance where men are striving for in- 
 tense sensations and continuous development. 
 
 In other words, the time has come for poetry, in 
 any form, that shall be essentially dramatic. This 
 kind has rounded each recurring cycle in other liter- 
 atures than our own. It is a symptom of maturity, 
 and we, in our turn, approach the age when life at- 
 tains fire and color and is full of experiences that 
 give tone to art. I think that our future efforts will 
 result in dramatic verse, and even in actual dramas 
 for both the closet and the stage. I am aware that 
 this belief has been entertained before, and prema- 
 turely ; it was as strong in the time of Tyler and 
 Dunlap and Payne, nor would our own experiments 
 be much more significant than theirs, were it not for 
 the recent and encouraging efforts of our younger 
 authors, several of whom are among the poets already 
 
THE STAGE. 
 
 467. 
 
 named. Playwrights still feel compelled to offer ru- 
 dimentary work to their audiences. The primary and 
 denominative element of the actor's art, that of ac- 
 tion, with every aid of scenic effect, just now is all 
 in all. The text is but an adjunct to the pantomime. 
 Realism, also, is as conspicuous in our theatres as in 
 the latest French and English novels. It was desir- 
 able to get beyond stale and absurd conventionality, 
 yet certain conventions are indispensable to artj there 
 is nothing ideal in a slavish, mechanical reproduction 
 of speech and manners. Unduly favored as the text 
 once may have been, we now err as plainly in the 
 opposite way. A poet turns playwright, and there 
 begins the inevitable conflict with the stage itself. 
 He yields to the conviction of actor and manager 
 that the text will never regain the critical interest of 
 audiences. I make bold to think otherwise ; to hold 
 that belief is to overlook the recorded equipoise of 
 text and action at every epoch when the theatre has 
 been preeminent. The sentiment of the hour may be 
 against the production of what are termed literary 
 plays ; yet nothing, after all, is surer to draw than 
 some familiar tragedy or comedy of the great dra- 
 matic poets. In Italy, France, Germany, it is the 
 same. The people want amusement, and in all times 
 they prefer the best offered ; when there were none 
 but poetic dramas, they sustained them, and intelli- 
 gently traversed the rendering of dialogue and phrase. 
 On the other hand, wretched mounting and acting 
 will make the finest text wearisome. The whole dis- 
 pute turns largely upon circumstance and fashion. 
 Notwithstanding Tennyson's undramatic cast of gen- 
 ius, he has succeeded — but only, as' was predicted 
 long ago, after successive trials and by a tour de force 
 — in producing an excellent drama. "Becket,'' with 
 
 Text and 
 action. 
 
 Cp. "Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " ; 
 p. 265. 
 
 The Stage 
 
 0>. "Vic- 
 torian 
 Poets " : 
 pp. 191, 
 413. 
 "Becket.'' 
 
468 
 
 POET-PLA YWRIGHTS. 
 
 ^'■Frances- 
 ca da Ri- 
 jninV 
 
 Audience 
 and play- 
 
 UJfects of 
 iown-life. 
 
 respect to action, plot, and language, is greatly supe- 
 rior to many plays of the Knowles and Talfourd pe- 
 riod, which still hold the stage ; and yet the public, 
 and various theatrical critics, will have none of it. 
 The time has been simply unpropitious. Boker's 
 " Francesca da Rimini " waited twenty-five years for 
 an actor and a manager fully to utilize its possibili- 
 ties. 
 
 We see that for the development of an ideal drama 
 the public taste and sentiment must rise accordingly. 
 The stage reflects these ; but it also can anticipate 
 and help to form them, through works of genius which 
 the people in the end will appreciate. The ambitious 
 playwright, on his part, must realize that his faculty 
 is the greater when adaptable and inventive. Writer, 
 actor, theatre and public, must unite to give effect to 
 any drama. Brander Matthews says that " for a poetic 
 play to have a success, it must be the work of 'one 
 who is both poet and playwright ; who is, in fact, 
 playwright first and poet after," — and cites the ex- 
 amples of Molifere and Shakespeare and Hugo, and 
 of lesser men. Playwrights not familiar with the 
 stage from youth have succeeded only after failures. 
 Our dramatists are likely to spring from those who, 
 if not used to theatrical " business " and people, are 
 thoroughly acquainted with town life. We know the 
 retardant effect of society upon artists of exalted sen- 
 sibility. Liszt's rival declares that social distractions 
 have prevented the Abbe' from being a great composer ; 
 that Bach's seclusion and Beethoven's deafness pro- 
 tected them from outside voices and made them hear 
 the voice of God within. Yet the dramatist, whose 
 theme is human action, must have observed that ac- 
 tion under the excitements and among the contrasted 
 types of civic life. The increase of our cities itself 
 
THEME AND ATMOSPHERE. 
 
 469 
 
 betokens a change from idyllic to dramatic methods 
 in literary art. 
 
 But I have allowed my faith in the need of such 
 a change to lead me into surmises concerning the rise 
 of the stage-drama in America. The latter certainly 
 would give a rapid impulse to the former. As it is, 
 a young playwright like Carleton finds it prudent to 
 adapt his labors to the immediate requirements of the 
 stage, after testing his literary faculty by the composi- 
 tion of a metrical drama, Memnon, a work indebted 
 to Elizabethan models in its rhetoric and emblazonry, 
 and not devoid of fine diction and poetic glow. 
 Among the numerous plays offered to the managers, 
 there probably are some of an elevated class that 
 would be available under conditions which I think will 
 not be long delayed. Meanwhile, under existing con- 
 ditions, our few playwrights who combine tact with 
 refinement, — and Bronson Howard should have the 
 credit due to a pioneer who still works among the 
 foremost, — probably have done the best that could 
 be done, with a sense of what is now practicable, and 
 a hopeful willingness to prepare the way for their 
 successors, poetic or otherwise, in the early future. 
 Time is all that is needed to give us the heroic tem- 
 per and coadequate themes. Of the two, tradition 
 is less essential to romance and the drama than a 
 favoring atmosphere. The wreath must be held out 
 by a public that delights in the Pythian games, and 
 won by contestants worthy to receive it. 
 
 V. 
 
 There are questions that come home to one who 
 would aid in speeding the return of " the Muse, dis- 
 gusted at " the " age and clime." Can I, he asks, be 
 
 Henry 
 Guy 
 
 Carleton : 
 iSss- 
 
 »tf«," 1884* 
 
 Pioneer 
 efforts. 
 
 The poefs 
 facidty 
 coTnpulsivl 
 and last- 
 ing. 
 
470 
 
 THE POET'S CREDENTIALS. 
 
 favoring 
 Utuiitiotul 
 
 reckoned with the promoters of her new reign ? Yes, 
 it will be answered, if your effort is in earnest and if 
 you are in truth a poet. To doubt of this is almost 
 the doubt's own confirmation. That writer to whom 
 rhythmic phrases come as the natural utterance of his 
 extremest hope, regret, devotion, is a poet of some de- 
 gree. At the rarest crises he finds that, without and 
 even beyond his will, life and death and all things 
 dear and sacred are made auxiliary to the compulsive 
 purpose of his art ; just as in the passion for science, 
 as if to verify the terrible irony of Balzac and Words- 
 worth, the alchemist will analyze his wife's tears, the 
 Linnaean will botanize even upon his mother's grave : — 
 
 *' Alas, and hast thou then so soon forgot 
 The bond that with thy gift of song did go — 
 Severe as fate, fixed and unchangeable? 
 Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot ! " 
 
 If, when his brain is in working humor, its chambers 
 filled with imaged pageantry, the same form of utter- 
 ance becomes his ready servant, then he is a poet 
 indeed. But if he has a dexterous metrical faculty, 
 and hunts for theme and motive, — or if his verse 
 does not say what otherwise cannot be said at all, — 
 then he is a mere artisan in words, and less than 
 those whose thought and feeling are too deep for 
 speech. The true poet is haunted by his gift, even 
 in hours of drudgery and enforced prosaic life. He 
 cannot escape it. After spells of dejection and wea- 
 riness, when it has seemed to leave for ever, it always, 
 always, returns again — perishable only with himself. 
 Again he will ask. What are my opportunities? 
 What is the final appraisement of the time and situa- 
 tion ? We have noted those latter-day conditions that 
 vex the poet's mind. Yet art is the precious outcome 
 of all conditions ; there are none that may not be 
 
HIS OPPORTUNITY. 
 
 471 
 
 transmuted in its crucible. Science, whose iconoclasm 
 had to be considered, first of all, in our study of the 
 Victorian period, has forced us to adjust ourselves to 
 its dispensation. A scientific conflict with tradition 
 always has been in progress, though never so deter- 
 minedly as now. But the poet and artist keep pace 
 with it, even forestall it, so that each new wonder 
 leads to greater things, and the so-called doom of art 
 is a victorious transition : — ; 
 
 " If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea." 
 
 As to material conditions, we find that the practical 
 eagerness of the age, and of our own people before 
 all, has so nearly satisfied its motive as to beget the 
 intellectual and sesthetic needs to which beauty is the 
 purveyor. As heretofore in Venice and other com- 
 monwealths, first nationality, then riches, then the rise 
 of poetry and the arts. — After materialism and the 
 scientific stress, the demands of journalism have been 
 the chief counter-sway to poetic activity. But our 
 journals are now the adjuvants of imaginative effort 
 in prose and verse ; the best of them are conducted 
 by writers who have the literary spirit, and who make 
 room for ideal literature, even if it does not swell 
 their lists so rapidly as that of another kind. The 
 poet can get a hearing; our Chattertons need not 
 starve in their garrets ; there never was a better mar- 
 ket for the wares of Apollo, — their tuneful venders 
 need not hope for wealth, but if one cannot make his 
 genius something more than its own exceeding great 
 reward, it is because he mistakes the period or scorns 
 to address himself fitly to his readers. Finally, criti- 
 cism is at once more catholic and more discriminating 
 than of old. Can it make a poet, or teach him his 
 mission ? Hardly ; but it can spur him to his best. 
 
 . / 
 
 InteUecir 
 ual. 
 
 Material, 
 aTid 
 
 Liierary^ 
 
472 
 
 SURSUM CORD A. 
 
 Require- 
 ments. 
 
 Poetry 
 tot merely 
 an art., hut 
 an inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 R. S. 
 
 Storrs : at 
 Union Col- 
 lege, 1883. 
 
 and point out the heresies from which he must free 
 himself or address the oracle in vain. 
 
 Such being our opportunities, we have seen that 
 the personal requirements are coequal, and their sum- 
 ming-up may well be the conclusion of the whole 
 matter. Warmth, action, genuine human interest, 
 must vivify the minstrel's art ; the world will receive 
 him if he in truth comes into his own. Taste and 
 adroitness can no long^ win by novelty. Natural 
 emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music ; 
 the same faults are engendered by over-study of ei- 
 ther art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible 
 impulse, in both the poet and the composer. The 
 decorative vogue has reached its lowest grade — that 
 of assumption for burlesque and persiflage ; just as 
 Pre-Raphaelitism, at first a reform in art, extended 
 to poetry, to architecture, to wall-decoration, to stage- 
 setting, finally to the dress of moonstruck blue-stock- 
 ings and literary dandies. What has been gained in 
 new design will survive. But henceforth the sense 
 of beauty must have something " far more deeply in- 
 terfused " : the ideal, which, though not made with 
 hands of artificers, is eternal on the earth as in the 
 heavens, because it is inherent in the soul. There is 
 also one prerequisite, upon which stress was laid by 
 Dr. Storrs in his application to modern art of 
 Goethe's reservation as to the worth of certain engrav- 
 ings : " Still, something is wanting in all these pic- 
 tures — the Manly. . . . The pictures lack a certain 
 urgent power," etc. Culture, I have said, will make 
 a poet draw ahead of his unstudious fellows, but the 
 resolve born of conviction is needed to sustain the 
 advance. The lecturer rightly declared that only 
 "courageous work will suit America, whose race is 
 essentially courageous and stoical." Our key-note 
 
OUR NOVITIATE ENDED. 
 
 473 
 
 assuredly should be that of freshness and joy ; the 
 sadness of declining races, only, has the beauty of 
 natural pathos. There is no cause for morbidly in- 
 trospective verse — no need, I hope, for dilettante- 
 ism — in this brave country of ours for centuries to 
 come. 
 
 I think, too, we may claim that there is no better 
 ideal of manhood than the American ideal, derived 
 from an aggregation of characteristic types. Our fu- 
 ture verse should be more native than that of the 
 past, in having a flavor more plainly distinct from 
 the motherland. Not that our former contingent 
 misrepresented the America of its time. Even Long- 
 fellow's work, with so much of imported theme and 
 treatment, conveyed a sentiment that came, say what 
 we will, from no foreign source. The reason that a 
 decidedly autochthonous kind was not then proffered, 
 unless by Whitman, was that a distinction between 
 the conditions of England and America was not more 
 strongly established. Since the war our novitiate has 
 ended. We welcome home-productions ; our servility 
 to foreign judgment has lessened, and we apply with 
 considerable self-poise our own standards of criti- 
 cism to things abroad. We have outlived the greed 
 of a childhood that depends on sustenance furnished 
 by its elders, and are far indeed from the senile at- 
 rophy which also must borrow to recruit its wasting 
 powers. Our debt to acute foreign critics is none 
 the less memorable. They, in truth, were the first to 
 counsel us that we should lean upon ourselves ; to 
 insist that we ought at least to escape Old World 
 limitations, — the first to recognize so heartily any- 
 thing purely American, even our sectional humor, as 
 to bring about our discovery that it was not neces- 
 sarily " a poor thing," although our " own." 
 
 Tkt 
 
 A merican 
 
 id£al. 
 
474 
 
 POINTS OF VANTAGE. 
 
 A national 
 type. See 
 fP- 7-9> 96, 
 97- 
 
 Its promo- 
 tion. 
 
 The copy- 
 right ques- 
 tion. See 
 tp. 23-25- 
 
 A merican 
 taste. 
 
 It is agreed that sectional types, which thus have 
 lent their raciness to various productions, are subsid- 
 iary to the formation of one that shall be national. 
 A character formed of mingling components must 
 undergo the phases of defective hybridity ; our own 
 is just beginning to assume a coherence that is the 
 promise of a similar adjustment in art. As local 
 types disappear there may be special losses, yet a 
 general gain. The lifting of the Japanese embargo 
 was harmful to the purity of the insular art, but 
 added something to the arts of the world at' large. 
 Even now our English cousins, seeking for what they 
 term Americanism in our literature, begin to find its 
 flavor stealthily added to their own. 
 
 Nothing will strengthen more rapidly the native 
 bias of our literature than its increase of dramatic 
 tone. Speech, action, and passion will be derived 
 from life as here seen, from factors near at hand 
 and stuff of which the writer himself is moulded. 
 Our playwrights are now encouraged by a copyright 
 royalty. All classes of literary workmen, however, 
 still endure the disadvantage of a market drugged 
 with stolen goods. Shameless as is our legal plun- 
 dering of foreign authors, our blood is most stirred 
 by the consequent injury to home literature, — by the 
 wrongs, the poverty, the discouragement to which the 
 foes of International Copyright subject our own writ- 
 ers. The nerve and vitality of the latter can have 
 no stronger demonstration than by the progress which 
 they make while loaded with an almost insufferable 
 burden. When this shall at last be lifted, their for- 
 ward movement may answer to the most sanguine 
 conjecture. Of two things they already are assured : 
 First, the perception, the inborn taste, of their coun- 
 trymen stands in need of less tutorage than that of 
 
THE NA TIONAL INHERITANCE. 
 
 475 
 
 transatlantic Saxon races. Our people have blun- 
 dered from isolation ; confront them with the models 
 of older lands, and they quickly learn to choose the 
 fit and beautiful, and the time is now reached when 
 the finest models are widely attainable. Secondly, 
 our inheritance is a language that is relatively the 
 greatest treasure-house of the world's literature : at 
 once the most laconic and the most copious of 
 tongues, — the sturdiest in- its foundations of emo- 
 tion and utility, the most varied by appropriation of 
 synonyms from all languages, new and old ; the 
 youngest and most occidental of the great modes of 
 speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with 
 no possible supplanter or successor except itself at 
 further stages of maturity ; finally, elastic and copi- 
 ous most of all in the land which adds to it new 
 idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated from the 
 dialects 9f many races that here contribute their dic- 
 tion to its own. A language whose glory is that 
 even corruptions serve to speed its growth, and whose 
 fine achievement long has been to make the neolo- 
 gism, even the solecism, of one generation the clas- 
 sicism of the next. This is the potent and sono- 
 rous instrument which our poet has at his command, 
 and the genius of his country, like Ariel, bids him 
 
 " — take 
 This slave o£ music, for my sake." 
 
 Our 
 
 English 
 
 tongue. 
 
 The twilight of the poets, succeeding to the 
 brightness of their first diurnal course, is a favora- 
 ble interval at which to review the careers of those 
 whose work therewith is ended. Although at such a 
 time public interest may set in other directions, I 
 
 Past, 
 Present, 
 atid 
 Future, 
 
476 
 
 CONJECTURE OF THE DAWN. 
 
 firVs 
 
 changeless 
 
 iiiv. 
 
 have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinat- 
 ing to the critical and poetic student. When the 
 lustre of a still more auspicious day shall yield in 
 its turn to the recurring dusk, a new chronicler will 
 have the range of noble imaginations to consider, 
 heightened in significance by comparison with the 
 field of these prior excursions. But, if I have not 
 wholly erred in respect to the lessons derivable from 
 the past, he will not go far beyond them. The can- 
 ons are not subject to change ; he, in turn, will de- 
 duce the same elements appertaining to the chief of 
 arts, and test his poets and their bequests by the 
 same unswerving laws. And concerning the dawn 
 which may soon break upon us unawares, as we 
 make conjecture of the future of American song, it 
 is difficult to keep the level of restraint — to avoid 
 " rising on the wings of prophecy." Who can doubt 
 that it will correspond to the future of the land it- 
 self, — of America now wholly free and interblend- 
 ing, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each 
 an emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus 
 of energetic life, ceaseless in action, radiant with the 
 glow of beauty and creative power. 
 
INDEX. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbey, Henry (1842- ), 443. 
 
 Accent, 373 ; and quantity, 198. 
 
 "Ad Vatem," 131. 
 
 Addison, 286. 
 
 Affaire CUmenceau, by Dumas, fits, 
 
 368. 
 Affectation, Poe's, 260 ; the bane of 
 
 poetry, 312; Byron's, 312; types of, 
 
 313 ; and see 388. 
 Affluence, Lowell's, 337. 
 Agamemnon^ s Daughter, Snider's, 454. 
 Ages, The, Bryant's, 73. 
 Airs from Arcady, Bunner's, 448. 
 Akenside, 67. 
 Albee, John, 443. 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 52, 355. 
 Alden, Henry Mills, on Whitman, 
 
 381. 
 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 440 ; beauty 
 
 of his verse and prose, ib. ; artistic 
 
 restraint, 441 ; as a novelist, 462 ; 
 
 and see 54, 404, 420, 442, 463. 
 Alger, William Rounseville (1823- ), 
 
 55- 
 
 Allan, John, foster-father of Poe, 
 230-232. 
 
 Allen, Elizabeth Ann Akers ( 1832- ), 
 SO, 446. 
 
 Allston, Washington, 37, 39, 46. 
 
 America, how far homogeneous, 8 ; 
 course of its intellect and action, 
 31 ; poetry, 45 ; milieu, 48. 
 
 America, Poetry of, its rise the sub- 
 ject of this work, 1,4; historic sig- 
 
 nificance, 2 ; conditions affecting it, 
 11-25; ''^ barren colonial period, 
 12-16; Revolutionary period, 16; 
 early Republican period, 16-25 > 
 first real school, 28-30 ; effect of 
 Civil War, 29 ; review of its evo- 
 lution from early times to the vigor 
 of the recent school, 31-61 ; long 
 subsidiary to other literature, 31 ; 
 sectional differentiation, 37 ; pseu- 
 do-American, 42, 43 ; School of Na- 
 ture, 45-47 ; national and domestic^ 
 48, 49 ; religious, 50 ; culture, phil- 
 osophic, artistic, etc., 51-59, — 
 Whitman decries same, 60 ; review 
 of existing conditions and specu- 
 lation as to future, 435-476 ; early 
 and later characteristics distin- 
 guished, 459 ; promise of the future, 
 476 ; and see Introduction. 
 Americanism, in what consisting, 5- 
 10 ; Grant White's statement, 5 ; 
 readily distinguished, 5-10 ; phys- 
 ical, 5 ; mental, etc., 6-8 ; incom- 
 pleteness, 7 ; composite, 7, 8 ; its 
 value, 8 ; foreign recognition, 8, 9 ; 
 sectional and local types, 9, 10 ; 
 the new Americanism, 10 ; emo- 
 tional traits, 29; pseudo-literary, 
 42, 43 ; Saxon quality of, 48 ; Bry- 
 ant's, 66 ; types of, 95, 99, 100 ; rec- 
 ognized traits, 96 ; question of a 
 " national " and " thoroughly Amer- 
 ican " poet, 96, 97 ; Whittier's, iii j 
 
48o 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Emerson's, 159 ; necessarj to a com- 
 prehension of that poet, 159 ; Whit- 
 man's, 166, 3S3, 354, 383. 384 ; Whit- 
 man on " These States," 358 ; Long- 
 fellow's share in, 180, 182, — his 
 American idyls, 195-203, etc., etc.; 
 not in the form, but the spirit, of 
 verse, 289 ; American fo'ndness for 
 wildwood scenes, 318 ; Lowell's, 
 346 ; American love of travel, 400 ; 
 of our miscellaneous verse, 456 ; 
 present growth of, 473 ; and see 
 220, also Nationality, etc. 
 
 American Homestead, see Domesticity. 
 
 American Literature, History of, Ty- 
 ler's, 32-34. 
 
 " American Review, The," 236. 
 
 Among my Books, Lowell's, 1st & 2d 
 series, 327. 
 
 Anapestic Verse, Swinburne's, 195 ; 
 and hexameter, 196. 
 
 Ancestral Feeling, Holmes's, 299. 
 
 "Ancient Mariner, The," Coleridge's, 
 118, 251. 
 
 Andromeda, Kingsley's, 196, 197. 
 
 " Annuals," " Souvenirs," etc., 42, 43. 
 
 Antique, the, Grecian disregard of 
 Landscape, 45, 46 ; Bryant's Ho- 
 meric quality, 84 ; not reproduced 
 in English hexameter verse, 196; 
 pseudo-classical verse, Longfellow's 
 " Pandora," 204 ; its method com- 
 pared with the modern, 311, 312; 
 esoteric feeling, 369. 
 
 Antislavery Conflict, Bryant's warfare 
 against slavery, 92 ; Whittier's part 
 in, 104-106, 124; poetry of, 112, — 
 Whittier's, t2i, 127, — Longfellow's, 
 121, 191 ; The Antislavery Declara- 
 tion, 130 ; Holmes's attitude, 298, 
 — Lowell's, 310 ; importance of, 100. 
 
 Apothegms, Holmes's, 292. 
 
 Aristophanes, 332. 
 
 Aristotle, 142. 
 
 Arnold, Edwin, 465. 
 
 Arnold, Elizabeth, mother of Poe, 230. 
 
 Arnold, George, 59, 442. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, on simplicity, 78; 
 on translating Homer, 89 ; on hex- 
 ameter verse, 197, 198 ; on transla- 
 tion, 211 ; on Emerson, 297, and 
 Lowell, 339-341 ; suggestive poems 
 of, 340 ; and see 170. 
 
 Arrian, 142. 
 
 Art, its order of development, 46; 
 " Art for Art's sake," 48, 240, 263, 
 459 ; national quality, 98 ; devotion 
 required, 105 ; its method, compared 
 with that of Philosophy, 134 ; Emer- 
 son's, 135, — his interpretation of, 
 148, — his theory of, 149; fitness of 
 things, 148, 149 ; sense of, in social 
 life, 300 ; compared with Science, 
 155; grades of perfection, 159; 
 Emerson's Essay on, 170, — his 
 chief canon, ib. ; the mirror of 
 Longfellow, 216 ; its votaries under 
 compulsion, 246 ; indecency out- 
 lawed, 366 ; must conform to Na- 
 ture's method, 369 ; Benjamin's 
 monograph on, 372 ; Art vs. Arti- 
 fice, 386; vs. Experience, 415 ; Tay- 
 lor's theory, 415; Lessing's law of 
 distinctions, 449 ; Lanier's theory of 
 composition, 450 ; Expression its 
 final purpose, 459; its so-called 
 " doom," 471 ; canons of, unaltera- 
 ble, 476. 
 
 Artificiality, in style, 158 ; Whitman's, 
 386, 387 ; of Tennyson's and Long- 
 fellow's dramas, 429. ^ 
 
 Art School of poets, 54-58. 
 
 Asceticism, conflict with, 51, — Long- 
 fellow's, 181 ; Holmes's protest 
 against, 277. 
 
 Aspiration, Taylor's noble ideals, 396, 
 430 ; tame ambition of recent poets, 
 461. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 481 
 
 " Atlantic Monthly,'' 91, 293 ; edited 
 by Lowell, 326 ; and see 409. 
 
 At the Court of King Edwin, Leigh- 
 ton's, 454. 
 
 Attractiveness, interesting quality of 
 Longfellow's verse, 198. 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 142. 
 
 Authorship, as a means of subsistence, 
 22, 23, .237 ; defrauded of Interna- 
 tional Copyright, 23, 21;; growing 
 prestige of American, 463. 
 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast - Table, 
 Holmes's, reviewed, 291, 292. 
 
 Aytoun, Prof., 443. 
 
 " Bacchus," Emerson's, 154. 
 
 Bach, 468. 
 
 Background, lack of, in new countries, 
 20 ; afforded by Scotland, 21, 22. 
 
 Bacon, 171. 
 
 Ballads and Balladists, Whittier our 
 foremost balladist, 11 2-1 14; Long- 
 fellow's spirited work, 192 ; 
 Holmes's, 282; Taylor's Califor- 
 nian Ballads, 403. 
 
 Ballads and Other Poems, Longfellow, 
 189-192. 
 
 Balzac, 470 ; and Poe, 258. 
 
 Barlow, Joel, 36. 
 
 Barton, Bernard, 113. 
 
 Bates, Charlotte Fiske (1838- ), 446. 
 
 Baudelaire, Charles, 65. 
 
 Bay Psalm Book, 33. 
 
 Beauty, and use, law of, 152 ; sense of, 
 in America quickened by Longfel- 
 low, 182 ; Longfellow's love of, 
 224 ; Poe's devotion to, 228, 263, 
 264, — his sense of, compared with 
 Keats's, 263 ; " The Rhythmical 
 Creation of," 249. 
 
 ' Becket," Tennyson's, 467. 
 
 Beckford, William, 252. 
 
 "Bedouin Song," Taylor, 408, 413. 
 
 Beecher, H. W., a saying of, 249. 
 
 3» 
 
 Beers, Henry Augustin (1847- ),443. 
 
 Beethoven, 468. 
 
 Behavior, Emerson's treatises on, 175, 
 
 "Bells, The," Poe's, 237, 244. 
 
 Benjamin, Park, 41. 
 
 Benjamin, S. G. W., on originality in 
 art, 372. 
 
 Benton, Joel (1832- ), 360, 443. 
 
 Bible, the, Longfellow on hexameters 
 in our version, 199; see also 371. 
 
 Bierstadt, Albert, 46. 
 
 Biglow Papers, The, Lowell's, 118, 
 303, 321-325 (2d series, 323), 457. 
 
 " Bion, Epitaph of," 176. 
 
 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 57. 
 
 Bishop, William Henry, 463. 
 
 Blake, William, studied by Whitman, 
 371, 378; and see 395. 
 
 Blank-verse, Stoddard's, 58 ; original 
 style of Bryant's, 71 ; Bryant's, 79- 
 81 ; the test of a vigorous poet, 79 ; 
 the American type, 79 ; its ineffi- 
 ciency for Homeric translation, 86- 
 91 ; Bryant's and Tennyson's, 86 ; 
 Prof. Lewis on, 90 ; Emerson's, 167; 
 Poe not a master of, 258 ; Lowell's, 
 342 ; Whitman's objection to, 374; 
 its nobility, 374 ; Parke Godwin on, 
 ib. ; Taylor's, 405 ; and see 377. 
 
 Bloede, Gertrude (" Stuart Sterne ") 
 (1845- ), 446. 
 
 Blood, Henry Ames (1838- ), 443. 
 
 Boccaccio, 114, 208. 
 
 Bohemianism, 235. 
 
 Boker, George Henry, his dramas and 
 lyrics, 57 ; friendship with Taylor 
 and Stoddard, 404 ; and see 54, 56. 
 192, 439. 468. 
 
 Boner, John Henry (1845- )>45i- 
 
 Bookishness, Longfellow's, 215; 
 Holmes's reading, 297 ; Southeys, 
 407. 
 
 Book of Romances, Taylor's, 404. 
 
 Boston, Holmes the laureate o^ 284, 
 
482 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 — poet of her upper class, 300 ; and 
 
 see New England. 
 Bosvvell, 296. 
 Botta, Anne Charlotte Lynch (18- ), 
 
 SO- 
 
 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 442. 
 
 Bradford, William, 34. 
 
 Bradley, Mary ( 1835- )> 44^- 
 
 Bradstreet, Anne, 33, 277. 
 
 " Brahma," Emerson's, 149. 
 
 Brainard, John Gardiner Calkins, 38, 
 104. 
 
 Breeding, Holmes on, 299. 
 
 Bridal of Pcnnacook, Whittier's, ni. 
 
 Briggs, Charles Frederick, his article 
 on Poe, 229. 
 
 British Poets, Victorian, lacking in 
 home-sentiment, 48 ; miscellaneous, 
 compared with American, 456 ; and 
 see 458, 459. 
 
 Brook. The, Wright's, 443. 
 
 Brooks, Charles Timothy, 55 
 
 Brooks, Maria Gowen, 43. 
 
 Brown, Charles Brockden, 40. 
 
 Brown, J. Appleton, 46. 
 
 Brownell, Henry Howard, 49, 360. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., akin to Whittier, 129; 
 and Poe's use of the repetend and 
 refrain, 245 ; and Poe, 250 ; and see 
 91, 112, 146, 150, 256, 307, 436, 444, 
 458. 
 
 Browning, Robert, disciples of, 168; 
 and Poe, 258; and see 56,91, 155. 
 180, 220, 341, 389, 429, 436, 447- 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen, his kinship 
 with our early landscape painters, 
 47, 68 ; a poet of liberty, 48 ; review 
 of his life and writings, 62-94 ; feel- 
 ing excited by his death, 62 ; his 
 birth, 62 ; honors, 63 ; type of citi- 
 zenship, 63 ; as man and poet, 63 ; 
 his republicanism, 64 ; mental and 
 moral traits, 64 ; worldly success, 
 64 ; how far conventional, 65 ; a pic- 
 
 turesque bard, 65; his long career, 
 its bearing on his work, 65, 66; 
 American quality, 66 ; Emerson on, 
 66; influenced by Wordsworth, 67; 
 as a poet of Nature, 67-69 ; excel- 
 ling in Tone and breadth of treat- 
 ment, 68 ; lack of scientific vision, 
 69; his limitations, 69-71; inflexi- 
 bility, 69 ; reticence, 70 ; lack of 
 passion, humor, individual manner, 
 70, 71; formal verse, 70; blank- 
 verse stj'le, 7 1 ; scant range of dic- 
 tion, 71, 76, 77 ; a child of our early 
 period, 72 ; The Embargo, 72 ; 
 " Thanatopsis " and other pieces, 
 72 ; effect upon Longfellow, etc., 
 72; The Ages, Poems, The Fountain, 
 etc., White-footed Deer, etc., 73 ; il- 
 lustrated editions, 73; English ap- 
 proval, 73 ; Thirty Poems, 73, 74 ; 
 his life and pursuits, 74 ; distaste for 
 the law, 74 ; absorption in journal- 
 ism, 75; prose writings, orations, 
 etc., 75-93 ; not devoted to song, 75 ; 
 sincerity, 76 ; effect of early studies 
 on his diction, 76 ; pure and simple 
 style, 77 ; compared to Webster, 77 ; 
 Everett's eulogy on, 78 ; his favorite 
 measures, 78-80; iambic-quatrains, 
 78. 79; "A Day Dream," 79; his 
 blank-verse, 79, 80, — in Thanatop- 
 sis, 80; blank-verse poems of nat- 
 ure, 80; blank- verse contemplative 
 poems, 80; fine lyrical pieces, 80, 
 81 ; " elemental " quality of his 
 song, 81 ; high imagination, 81 ; 
 various imaginative passages, 81. 
 82 ; master of the early American 
 School, 82 ; lack of variety, 83 ; his 
 fancy, 83 ; Homeric translations, 83- 
 91 ; merits of his Iliad and Odyssey, 
 84 ; his rendering compared with 
 Lord Derby's, etc., 84 ; idiomatic 
 style, 85, 86; Latinism, 85, gi; 
 
INDEX. 
 
 483 
 
 choice of measure, 87-91 ; transla- 
 tions from the Spanish, 91 ; a poet 
 of freedom and human rights, 91, 92 ; 
 his poem on " Slavery," 92 ; his 
 death, 93 ; Bryant on Whittier, 104 ; 
 on hexameter verse, 197; and see 
 37. 38, 40, 54. 55. 116, 188, 314, 317, 
 325-, 328. 374. 390. 399. 402, 4". 417. 
 436- 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 360. 
 
 Bucolic Verse — eclogues, Lowell's 
 " Biglow Papers," 321-325 ; and see 
 Biglow Papers, etc. 
 
 Buddhism, modern, 364 ; success of 
 " The Light of Asia," 465. 
 
 Building of the Ship, Longfellow's, 
 207. 
 
 Bunner, H. C. (18- ), merit of his 
 Airs from Arcady, 448. 
 
 Burlesque, Lowell's, in Biglow Papers, 
 322 ; and see Satire. 
 
 Burns, influence on Whittier, 102; and 
 see 103, 115, 116, 321, 323, 414. 
 
 Burroughs, John, on Whittier, 117; 
 on Whitman, 387 ; and see 153,360, 
 386. 
 
 Bushnell, Frances Louisa (18- ), 446. 
 
 Butcher, S. H., 89. 
 
 Butler, Samuel, 325. 
 
 Butler, William Allen, 59. 
 
 Butterworth, Hezekiah, 443. 
 
 Byles, Mather (1706-88), 34, 277. 
 
 Byron, as a poet of nature, 69 ; influ- 
 ence of, 452; and see 70, 146, 227, 
 239, 267, 289, 327,385, 399,407. 411- 
 
 Cable, George Washington, 98, 
 201, 451, 463 
 
 " Calaynos," Boker's, 404. 
 
 Cambridge, Mass., its colonial poets, 
 34; its poets, 51; Longfellow at 
 Harvard, 184 ; and Longfellow's 
 translation of Dante, 209 ; and see 
 276, 326. 
 
 Campbell, 289, 411. 
 
 Canning, on " dactylics," 198 ; see 277 
 
 Caprice, Lowell's, 331. 
 
 Carlelon, Henry Guy, 469. 
 
 Carleton, William, 453, 455. 
 
 Carlyle, influence on Whitman, 355; 
 
 and see 166, 328, 383, 422, 424. 
 Carter, Robert, 310. 
 Gary, Alice (1820-71), 50. 
 Gary, Phoebe (1824-71), 50. 
 Gary, Henry Francis, his translation 
 
 of Dante, 211. 
 "Cassandra Southwick," Whittier's, 
 
 107, 112. 
 Caste, and criticism, 220. 
 Cathedral, The, Lowell's, 342. 
 Catholicity, Lowell's, 306. 
 Gayley, translator of Dante, 212. 
 " Cedarcroft," Taylor's home, 418. 
 Centennial Cantata, Lanier's, 450. 
 Centennial Edition, Whitman's, 354, 
 
 362. 
 "Centennial Hymn," Whittier's, 125. 
 Century Club, the, 66. 
 Cervantes, 259, 338. 
 Chadwick, John White (1840- ), 50. 
 "Chambered Nautilus, The," 
 
 Holmes's, 286, 292. 
 Ghanning, Edward Tyrrel, 41, 138. 
 Channing, William EUery, D. D., 52, 
 
 122, 126, 138, 184. 
 Channing, William EUery (the poet), 
 
 Foe on, 168 ; and see 52. 
 Chapman, George, his " Iliads," 88, — 
 
 "Odysseys," 89; and see 332,334, 
 
 374- 
 Chasteness, of Foe's writings, 266. 
 Chaucer, his narrative verse, 289; 
 
 Lowell on, 332; and see 76, 114, 
 
 208. 
 Chaucerian Verse, 89. 
 Cheney, John Vance, 443. 
 Cheiiier, Andre, 268. 
 Child, Lydia Maria (1802-80), 41 
 
484 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 " Children o£ Adam " and other sex- 
 ual poems by Whitman, 366-371. 
 
 " Children of the Lord's Supper, 
 The," Longfellow's translation, 189. 
 
 Chivers, Dr., 250. 
 
 " Christabel," Coleridge's, 251. 
 
 Christus, Longfellow's, 204. 
 
 Chroniclers, the early, 34. 
 
 Church, Frederick E., 46. 
 
 Churchill, 303. 
 
 Citizenship, Bryant a type of Amer- 
 ican, 63. 
 
 "City in the Sea, The," Poe's, 237, 
 242. 
 
 Civil War, historic importance of, 
 100 ; Holmes's poems of. 298, — 
 Lowell's, 323-325 ; Whittier's part 
 in, 100 ; Whitman's poems of, 362 ; 
 and see 29, 95, 397, 437. 
 
 Class-feeling, Whitman's, 356, 384. 
 
 Classicism, pseudo, 456 ; and see T'he 
 Antique. 
 
 Class-poems, collegiate, — Emerson's, 
 138 ; Holmes's, 283 ; Lowell's, 309. 
 
 Clemm, Mrs. Maria, Poe's mother-in- 
 law, 232, 237. 
 
 Clemm, Virginia, wife of Poe, 232, 
 
 235- 
 
 Clififord, Prof. W. K., 360. 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, his hexameters, 
 196, 198 ; and see 336, 339. 
 
 Clymer, Ella Dietz (18- ), 446. 
 
 Cole, Thomas, 46, 68, 
 
 Coleridge, " Hymn in the Vale of 
 Chamouni," 80 ; and Poe, 247 ; mel- 
 ody of, 251; and see 40, in, 245, 
 
 249. 327, 381. 45I- 
 Coles, Abraham (1812- ), an eigh- 
 teenth-century poet, 300; and see 
 
 5°. 55- 
 " Collegian, The," 279. 
 Collins, " Dirge in Cymbeline," 79 • 
 
 and see 71, 114, 239. 
 
 olonialism, surviving traces of, 10 ; 
 
 restrictive force, 13-16; different 
 effects of, on poetry and painting, 
 14; pedantry, 15; imitativeness, 15; 
 Holmes's, 299 ; Dr. Coles an inher- 
 itor of, 300. 
 
 Colonial Period (1607-1705), Tyler's 
 Review of, 32 - 34 ; its Puritan 
 rhymesters, 33 ; aspect in Virginia, 
 34, — in the Middle Colonies, 34; 
 reflected in Holmes's work, 275. 
 
 Columbiady Tke^ Barlow's, 36. 
 
 Commemoration Ode, Lowell's, 343, 
 
 364, 427- 
 Commonplace, the, diffusion of, 18, 
 
 42, 43 ; Poe's revolt against, 252. 
 Composition, Emerson's method of, 
 
 1 60. 
 Compression, rhythmical, unique in 
 
 Emerson, 163. 
 Conant, Helen Stevens ( 1839- ), 454. 
 Conant, Samuel Stillman {1831- ), 
 
 443- 
 
 Conceits, abundant in Lowell, 333 ; 
 and see 314. 
 
 Concord, Emerson at, 138, 139; social 
 atmosphere of, 156; Whitman's re- 
 lations to, 355; and see 51, 52, 323, 
 
 341- 
 Conduct of Life, The, Emerson's, 171, 
 
 175- 
 
 Cone, Helen Gray (1859- ), 447. 
 
 Connecticut, poets of, 38. 
 
 " Conqueror Worm, The," Poe's, 245. 
 
 Conrad, Robert Taylor, 41, 57. 
 
 Conscientiousness, artistic, a requi- 
 site, 107, 109. 
 
 Conservatism, pronounced in Holmes, 
 276, 298. 
 
 Constitutional Period, 36. 
 
 Construction, Emerson's lack of, 159; 
 Lowell's early diffuseness, 314 ; of 
 more inliport than decoration, 459 ; 
 and see 336. 
 
 Conventionalism, Whitman's protest 
 
INDEX. 
 
 485 
 
 against, 56, 357, 383 ; Bryant's, 65 ; 
 
 its value, 78. 
 Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 
 
 Lowell's, 326. 
 Conviction, need of, 472. 
 Conway, Moncure Daniel, 360. 
 Cooke, John Esten (1830- ), 54, 
 
 451. 
 Cooke, Philip Pendleton, 38. 
 Cooke, Rose Terry (1827- ), 49, 50, 
 
 445- 
 Coolbrith, Ina Donna (i8- ), 446. 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 39, 40, 42, 
 
 73- 
 
 ■' Coplas de Manrique," Longfellow's, 
 184. 
 
 Copyright, International, 23-25, 474; 
 disastrous effect of its absence upon 
 English authors, 24, — upon Amer- 
 ican, 24, 25. 
 
 Cosmopolitan, or composite, poets, 52- 
 58 ; New York group, 53 ; South- 
 ern, 54; Longfellow, 218. 
 
 Cotton, John, 34. 
 
 "Cotter's Saturday Night, The," 
 Burns's, 117. 
 
 " Cotton Boll, The," Timrod's, 449. 
 
 Country Life; effect on poets, 115; 
 compared with civic life, 155. 
 
 "Country Lovers, The," Fessenden's, 
 
 323. 455- 
 
 " Courtin', The," Lowell's, 323. 
 
 Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 
 Longfellow's, 195, 2i6; reviewed, 
 203. 
 
 Cowper, 67, 71, 76, 84, 86. 
 
 Coxe, Arthur Cleveland, 50. 
 
 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 52 ; trans- 
 lation of The Aeneid, 55 ; Poe's 
 strictures on, 168. 
 
 Crawford, F. Marion, 463. 
 
 Criticism, an aid to development, 3 ; 
 long defective in America, 25 ; its 
 goal, 26, 223 ; Emerson his own 
 
 best censor, 169, 170; extremes of 
 praise and blame, 226 ; Poe as a 
 critic, 255-257 ; Miss Fuller's, 256 ; 
 by force of arms, 257 ; contempo- 
 rary judgment difficult, 274 ; Low- 
 ell's test of the poet, 315, — his 
 critical faculty and ways, 326, 334- 
 338, — strictures on his prose, 328, 
 329 ; " creative," 328 ; the debate 
 over Whitman, 350-352, 360; test 
 here applied to him, 351, 367 ; Put- 
 nam " on " Leaves of Grass,'' 354, 
 355 ; Alden on Whitman, 381 ; com- 
 parative, 388 ; Whitman's strictures 
 on modern poetry and poets, 389 ; 
 Taylor as a critic, 421 ; progress in, 
 471. 
 
 " Croakers, The,'' 39. 
 
 Croly, George, 280, 411. 
 
 Cross, Mrs. ("George Eliot"), 458. 
 
 Croswell, William (1804-51), 50. 
 
 Culfrit Fay, The, Drake's, 40. 
 
 Culture, American, 50, 51; as an aid 
 to genius, 109, 135 ; Lowell a type 
 of, 305, 342 ; other examples, 305 ; 
 in New England, 306; the burden 
 of " over-culture," 320, 341, 342. 
 
 Curtis, George William, 409. 
 
 Cynics, the, 143. 
 
 Dactylic Verse, Longfellow's, 199. 
 
 Dana, Charles Anderson, 402. 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry, on Bryant, 67 ; 
 
 and see 37, 39, 75. 
 Dance of Death, Tfu, Miss Lazarus's, 
 
 447- 
 
 Dante, American translations of, by 
 Parsons, Norton, and Longfellow, 
 55; Longfellow's, i88, 209-213, —• 
 its characteristics, 213; Lowell on 
 337 ; and see 455. 
 
 Darley, George, 411. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 153. 
 
 "Day Dream, A," Bryant's, 79. 
 
486 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Dayman, translator of Dante, 210. 
 
 " Death o£ Slavery, The," Bryant's, 92. 
 
 Decadence, Poetic, recent fears of, 
 436 ; interregnum noticeable, 457. 
 
 Decoration, avoided by Bryant, 77; 
 Kensington-stitch verse, 192 ; luxu- 
 riant and oriental in Poe, 264 ; dec- 
 orative spirit of the new school, 458, 
 459; art and artifice, 459, 460; its 
 lowest grade, 472 ; and see Society- 
 Verse and Introduction. 
 
 De Foe, 173. 
 
 Deirdri, Joyce's, 444. 
 
 De Kay, Charles, his Nimrod, Esther, 
 Hesperus^ etc., 442. 
 
 Delicacy, not inconsistent with virility 
 and strength, 369. 
 
 Delphic Days, Snider's, 198, 454. 
 
 Democracy, "of the future," Whit- 
 man's, 56 ; Whitman on, 383 ; poets 
 of, 385. 
 
 " Democratic Vistas," Whitman's, 363, 
 
 389- 
 
 De Musset, 146, 155, 227. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 53. 
 
 Derby, Edward, Lord, on hexameter, 
 196; and see 84, 91. 
 
 Derivatives, faulty use of, 212. 
 
 Descriptive Poetry, effect of our land- 
 scape upon our poets, 14, 28, 45-47 ; 
 not found in primitive races, 45, 46 ; 
 antique, 46 ; secondary to the emo- 
 tional and dramatic, 46 ; of Bryant 
 and his followers, 47, 68, 73, 80; 
 Whitman's, 60, 379, 380 ; Whittier's, 
 1 15 -120; penetrative subtlety of 
 Emerson's, 151,152; Longfellow's 
 artificiality, 216, — but a true poet 
 of the sea, 217 ; freshness and spon- 
 taneity of Lowell's, 317-319, 341 ; 
 and see 47, 173, 443. 
 
 l)e Senectute, 83. 
 
 "Deserted Village, The," Goldsmith's, 
 117. 
 
 Detail, in poetry and art, Bryant's lack 
 
 of, 68, 69. 
 De Vere, Mary Ainge {1839- ), 446. 
 Devotion to poetry, Longfellow's, 183 ; 
 question of, 409. 
 
 Dialect Verse, Hay's, 453 ; writers in 
 Eastern, JVIiddle, and Western dia- 
 lects, 455 ; plantation - verse, ib. ; 
 and see 5, 59. 
 
 Dickens, 328. 
 
 Diction, limited range of Bryant's, 71 ; 
 of early English poets, 76 ; of Pope, 
 Cowper, etc., 76 ; of Tennyson and 
 Swinburne, 76, 77 ; chiefly formed in 
 youth, 76 ; Saxon and Latin, 85, — 
 use of by Bryant, 85, 86; Emerson's 
 choice of words, 152; Longfellow's 
 later, 213 ; Lowell's peculiarities, 
 315; Whitman's original, 378, — 
 his faulty verbiage, ib. 
 
 Didacticism, our early verse-makers, 
 15 ; of the Lake School, 51 ; con- 
 flict with, by Poe, etc., 56, 249, 263 ; 
 not in Emerson's verse, 150 ; defini- 
 tion of, and why it repels us, 150; 
 and see 450. 
 
 Dietz, Ella, see Clymer, E. D. 
 
 Dilettanteism, 27. 
 
 Dinsmore, Robert (1757-1836), 116. 
 
 Disciples, Emerson's, 1 58 ; Whit- 
 man's, 360. 
 
 Disraeli, vulgarity of " Lothair," 261. 
 
 Divine Comedy, The, Longfellow's 
 translation, 188, — reviewed, 209- 
 213; various translations of, ib. ; 
 qualities essential to an ideal ver- 
 sion, 210, 213 ; and see Dante. 
 
 Divines, colonial, 34. 
 
 Doane, George Washington (1799- 
 
 1859). 5°- 
 Dobson, Austin, 342. 
 Dodge, Mary Mapes (1838- ), 446. 
 Domesticity, American homestead, 17, 
 
 102; home-life depicted by the East 
 
INDEX. 
 
 487 
 
 em poets, 49; Longfellow's, 221; 
 
 and see 123. 
 Domett, Alfred, 415. 
 Dore, Gustave, 258. 
 Dorgan, John Aylmere, 442. 
 " Dorothy," Munby's, 198, 454. 
 " Dorothy Q.," Holmes's, 285. 
 Dorr, Julia Caroline Ripley {1825- ), 
 
 SO. 
 Doudan, X., on poverty, 268 ; and see 
 
 347- 
 
 Dowden, Edward, on Emerson, 178 ; 
 on Lowell, 305 ; and see 360. 
 
 Drake, Joseph Rodman, influence on 
 Halleck, 40 ; and see 39, 75, 280. 
 
 Drama and Dramatists, Godfrey's work, 
 33 ; Tyler and Dunlap, 36 ; Gris- 
 wold on, 57 ; plays of Bird, Conrad, 
 Longfellow, Willis, Sargent, Math- 
 ews, and Boker, 57 ; merits and de- 
 fects of Longfellow's dramatic poe- 
 try, 204-207 ; rarity of the dramatic 
 gift, 204 ; Taylor's dramas, 428-432 ; 
 poetry's highest form, 428 ; requi- 
 sites for success in, 429 ; Fawcett, 
 441 ; dramas by Leighton, Young, 
 etc., 454 ; a symptom of national 
 maturity, 466 ; present need and 
 prospects of, 466-469 ; stage-plays, 
 past and present, 466-468 ; question 
 of text, action, and accessories, 467 ; 
 audience and playwright, 468 ; 
 town-life favorable to the dramatic 
 poet, 468 ; recent dramatists, 469. 
 
 Dramatic Quality, absent in our earlier 
 periods, 66 ; Emerson's lack of, 
 156, 157 ; Lowell's, 341 ; needed for 
 a revival of interest in poetry, 466. 
 
 Drayton, Michael, 192. 
 
 " Drum-Taps," Whitman's, 362. 
 
 Dryden, 89, 331,335. 
 
 Duffield, Samuel Willoughby (1843- ), 
 
 55. 443- 
 Dulness, Holmes on, 292. 
 
 " Dunciad, The," 289. 
 Dunlap, William, 36, 466. 
 Durand, A. B., 46, 68. 
 Duyckincks, The (Evert A. 
 
 George L.), 32, 41. 
 Dwight, Timothy, 36, 325. 
 
 and 
 
 Earnestness, 129 ; strength of Low- 
 ell's convictions, 312-314. 
 
 "Earthly Paradise, The," Morris's, 
 209. 
 
 Eastman, Charles Gamage, 49. 
 
 Eccentricity, n weakness of transcen- 
 dental poetry, 167-169. 
 
 Echo Club, The, Taylor's, 422. 
 
 Eclogues, 115. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 34, 130, 296. 
 
 Egan, Maurice Francis, 444. 
 
 Eggleston, Edward, 463. 
 
 Egoism, of the minor transcendental- 
 ists, 147; dangers of, 271 ; Whit- 
 man's, 390. 
 
 Eighteenth-Century Style, Bryant's, 
 70, 71 ; Holmes's a survival, not a 
 renaissance, 275, 276 ; modern i-la- 
 mode verse, 275 ; knee-buckle verse, 
 281 ; Dr. Coles, 300. 
 
 Elegiac Poetry, "The North Shore 
 Watch," 461. 
 
 " Elegy on a Shell," Dr. Mitchill's, 286. 
 
 Elemental quality, characteristic of 
 Bryant's verse, 81. 
 
 Elizabethan Period, and poets, influ- 
 ence of, 56, 469 ; the lyrists, 374 ; 
 and see 76, 188. 
 
 Ellsworth, Erastus Wolcott, 52. 
 
 Elsie Venner, Holmes's, 294. 
 
 Embargo, The, Bryant's, 72. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, his landscape, 
 47 ; master of the Concord group, 
 52 ; eulogy of Bryant, 66 ; review 
 of his life, philosophy, and works, 
 133-179 ; his indecision between the 
 methods of philosophy and art, 133, 
 
488 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 134; ideal prose and verse, 134; his 
 natural disciples, 134; felicity of 
 toucli, 135; a single purpose, 135; 
 essentially a poet, 136; office, 137; 
 tributes to his genius, 137 ; order of 
 intellect, 137 ; birth, ancestry, train- 
 ing, 138; early Unitarianism, 138; 
 retirement from the Church, 138; 
 after-life and career, 139 ; pupils 
 and associates, 139; Nature, 140; 
 personal traits and bearing, 140 ; 
 death, 141 ; his philosophy analyzed, 
 141-147 ; optim'ism, 141 ; freedom 
 from dogma, 142 ; an idealist and 
 eclectic, 142 ; morals, 142 ; sense of 
 real life, 142, 143 ; Plato his early 
 guide, 143 ; his likeness to Plotinus, 
 144 ; innate wisdom, 145 ; transcen- 
 dental method, 146 ; influence on pu- 
 pils, 147 ; a liberator, 147 ; considered 
 as a poet, 148-171 ; Poems, 1847, — 
 May-Day — Poems, 1876,148; view 
 of art, 148, 149 ; " Brahma" and the 
 universal Soul, 149; as a lyric poet, 
 150; Margaret Fuller's criticism on, 
 150, 160; not "didactic," 150; on 
 Nature's hidden trail, 151 ; " Wood- 
 notes," "Forerunners," 151, 152; 
 "The Problem," "May-Day," 152; 
 genius for diction and epithet, 152, 
 153 ; scientific intuition and pre- 
 science, 153-155; "The Sphinx," 
 153; a seer of evolution, 154; view 
 of Science and Art, 155; his lim- 
 itations, of range, passion, action, 
 155-157; love-poetry, 157; patriotic 
 verse, 157; a laj'er on of hands, 
 158 ; E. and Rossetti, 158 ; metrical 
 style, 158-161 ; best understood by 
 Americans, 159; his melody, 159; 
 deficient sense of proportion and 
 construction, 159; a nonconformist, 
 160; unique lyrics, 160; gift for 
 " saying things," 161 ; famous pas- 
 
 sages in his poems, 161-163 ; rhyth- 
 mical compression, 163 ; lyrical 
 freedom, 164, 165; imaginative ex- 
 pression, ib. ; " Threnody " and 
 "Merlin," 165; Emerson and Whit- 
 man, 166; his favorite poets and 
 measures, 166 ; Orientalism, 167 ; 
 blank-verse, ib. ; changes observable 
 in his style, 167-169 ; early blem- 
 ishes, ib. ; his own best censor, 169- 
 171 ; his artistic canons, 170; prose- 
 writings, 171-176 ; mutual likeness of 
 his prose and verse, 171 ; his essays 
 compared with those of Bacon, Car- 
 lyle, Landor, Montaigne, etc., 171, 
 172 ; prose-style, 172-174 ; apo- 
 thegms, 172 ; idiomatic English, 
 173 ; rhythm and imagery of his 
 prose, 173, 1 74 ; secular essays, on 
 the Conduct of Life, etc., 175 ; Par- 
 nassus, 175 ; summary of his traits, 
 176-179; compared with Longfel- 
 low, 177, 178 ; bis conception of the 
 future bard, 179 ; Holmes's por- 
 traiture of, 296 ; Arnold on, 297 ; 
 view of Whitman, 349, 359 ; influ- 
 ence on Whitman, 355, — on the 
 new choir, 443; and see 12, 44, 98, 
 106, no, 116, 118, 129, 130, 180, 
 216, 220, 223, 263, 279, 300, 304, 
 336. 342, 350. 351, 363, 380, 389, 
 390, 424, 436, 444, 457. 
 
 Emersonian School, 145-147, i68, 169. 
 
 England, Taine on, 48. 
 
 English, Thomas Dunn, 41. 
 
 English heroic verse, Holmes's mas- 
 tery of, 288-290, — his opinion of, 
 289 ; as written by Chaucer, Hunt, 
 Keats, Pope, and others, 289. 
 
 English Language, the, Bryant's use 
 of, 84 ; consonantal quality, 91 ; 
 Emerson's mastery of, 1 73 ; Lowell's 
 English, 330, 331 ; beauty, strength, 
 and copiousness, 475 ; and see 411. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 489 
 
 English Traits, Emerson's, 171, 175; 
 idiomatic English of, 173. 
 
 Ennui, a national characteristic, 9 ; 
 the nurse of invention, 273. 
 
 "Enoch Arden," Tennyson's, 117. 
 
 Entailed Hat, The, Townsend's, 298. 
 
 Environment, law of, 3 ; factors mod- 
 ifying it, 3 ; early American, ad- 
 verse to ideality, 75 ; Taylor's early, 
 398, — later, 416. 
 
 Epic quality, of " Hiawratha," 202. 
 
 Epictetus, 142. 
 
 Epicurus, 142. 
 
 Epigrams, Holmes's, 297 ; Lowell's 
 pointed sayings, 332, 333. 
 
 Epithets, Emerson the master of, 1 53, 
 164, 165 ; Whitman's, 379. 
 
 Equipment, Poe's, 260, 261 ; Taylor's, 
 410. 
 
 Essays, Lowell's, 330-338; and see 
 Emerson, R. W. 
 
 Essays (First and Second Series), Em- 
 erson's, 171. 
 
 Esther, de Kay's, 442. 
 
 Ethics, Longfellow's, 221. 
 
 " Euphorion," Taylor's, 413. 
 
 Eureka, Poe's, 262. 
 
 Evangel, The, Coles's, 300. 
 
 Evangeline, Longfellow's, scenic and 
 idyllic, 20 ; reviewed, 195 - 201 ; 
 choice, management, and success of 
 its measure, 195-199 ; Poe on, 196 ; 
 Arnold on, 197, 198 ; the flower of 
 American idyls, 200, 201 ; and see 
 
 . 90, 117, 2i6, 426, 457. 
 
 " Evening Revery, An," Bryant's, 93. 
 
 Everett, Edward, on Bryant's poetry, 
 78 ; and see 138, 283. 
 
 Evolution, 153, 154. 
 
 Expression, all modes free to the poet, 
 373 ; when involved, in Taylor, 412. 
 
 Extravagance, of genius, 389. 
 
 Fable for Critics, A, Lowell's, 325. 
 
 Facility, Taylor's, 412. 
 
 Faith, essential to high art, 128. 
 
 " Fall of the House of Usher, The," 
 Poe's, 237 ; compared to Brown- 
 ing's " Childe Roland," 258. 
 
 Fame, at its best, 137; Longfellow's, 
 208; Poe's, 225, 227; as affected 
 by biographers and critics, 265 ; 
 measured in the end by actual prod- 
 uct, 272 ; contemporary judgment 
 difficult, 274 ; fame, reputation, no- 
 toriety, etc.. Whitman's, 349, 350, 
 
 394- 
 
 Fancy, Bryant's, 83; Whittier's, 119; 
 Holmes's, 281. 
 
 Fantasy, Poe's use of the fantastic, 258. 
 
 Fantasy and Passion, Fawcett's, 441. 
 
 Fashion, in Art, 39 ; Whittier's style, 
 no ; its law, and effect on Art, 273 ; 
 Whitman's revival of the prophetic 
 dithyramb, 371 ; ephemeral vogue 
 of novel forms, 460 ; demand for 
 prose fiction, 463. 
 
 Faust, Taylor's Translation of, 422- 
 425 ; rapid execution, 422 ; its 
 method, 423 ; characteristics, 423 ; 
 the " Dedication," ib. ; notes, com- 
 mentary, etc., 424 ; and see 204. 
 
 Fawcett, Edgar, his Fantasy and Pas- 
 sion, Song and Story, etc., 441. 
 
 Felicitous passages, examples from 
 Emerson, 1.61-163. 
 
 Female Poets, American, early group, 
 50, — a Scotch critic on, 444, — their 
 relative position, 444, — compared 
 with British, 444, — general advance, 
 445, — enumeration of, 445-447, — 
 unaffected quality, 447 ; their rela- 
 tive excellence a feature, 458. 
 
 Fessenden, Thomas Green (1771 
 
 1837), 323. 455- 
 Fiction, Prose. See Novels and Alov- 
 
 elists. 
 Fields, Annie Adams ( 1834- 1,51,445 
 
490 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Fields, James Thomas, 59. 
 
 Filicaja, a sonnet by, 214. 
 
 Finch, Francis Miles ( 1827- ), 49. 
 
 Fireside Travels, Lowell's, 327, 329. 
 
 First Books, 291. 
 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 184. 
 
 Fletcher, Andrew, on national songs, 
 
 35- 
 
 Folk-lore, 102 ; meagreness of, in the 
 New World, 21. 
 
 Foote, Mary Hallock, 463. 
 
 Force, conservation of, 153. 
 
 Ford, translator of Dante, 210, 212. 
 
 Foreign Opinion, how far insincere, 8 ; 
 Dowden on Lowell, etc., 305 ; our 
 debt to foreign critics, 473. 
 
 Form, value of, in translation, 90 ; fa- 
 vorite measures of Emerson, 167; 
 poetic forms. Whitman's outcry 
 against those familiar, 372, — ra- 
 tionale of the latter, 373, — depen- 
 dent on time, accent, rhythm, etc., 
 and based in nature, 372, — Goe- 
 the on, 373, — Milton on rhyme, 
 374, — blank-verse, 374, — question 
 of their endurance, 377, — genius 
 master of all forms, 377 ; Poe's use 
 of simple ballad-forms, 251; all 
 forms included in the dramatic, 428 ; 
 and see French Forms. 
 
 Formalism, excessive in Whitman, 377, 
 386. 
 
 Foster, John, 311. 
 
 Foster, Stephen Collins (1826-64), 49, 
 
 455- 
 Fouqu^, 252. 
 Fourier, 360. 
 
 " Francesca da Rimini," Boker's, 468. 
 Franchise, of the poet, 155, 156. 
 Franklin, 305 ; Holmes compared to, 
 
 291. 
 " Freeman, The," 105. 
 Freiligrath, 423. 
 "French Forms,'' no, 276. 
 
 French quality and influence, 440, 441; 
 Poe affected by, 261. 
 
 Freneau, Philip, 35, 36. 
 
 Frere, John Hookham, 277, 443. 
 
 " Frontenac," Parkman's, 97. 
 
 Frothingham, Ellen (1835- ), 55. 
 
 Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 
 (1793-18701,50. 
 
 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 
 quoted, loi. 
 
 Fuller, Sarah Margaret, on Emerson, 
 150, 160, 164; her "Tribune" crit- 
 icisms, 256; and see 52, 139, 175. 
 
 "Future, Poetry of the," cannot now 
 be produced upon a theory, 375. 
 
 Future of American Poetry, the, 61, 476 
 
 Gallagher, William Davis, 49. 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, fellowship 
 with Whittier, etc., 103-106 ; Whit- 
 tier's poem on, 122; and see 130. 
 
 Gautier, 441. 
 
 Gay, 342. 
 
 Genius, its exceptional quality, 3 ; la- 
 tent, 15 ; need of excitants, 15 ; san- 
 ity of Bryant's, 64; aided by cul- 
 ture, 109, 306 ; Emerson on, 145 ; 
 influence of Nature on, 156; more 
 than a talent for work, 187; tests 
 of, 191; interest aroused by, 226; 
 priceless rarity of, 269 ; is it a neu- 
 rotic disorder, 270 ; quality of 
 Holmes's, 302 ; its self-culture, 307 ; 
 Lowell's many-sided and original, 
 347 ; is consistent, 368 ; adapts itj 
 self to all languages and forms, 377; 
 paradoxical, 392, 393 ; and see 433, 
 
 438- 
 Genre, lyrics and idyls, Longfellow's, 
 
 216 ; Whitman's work, 380. 
 " George Eliot." See Cross. 
 Georgian Period, 194, 275, 276. 
 German influence, on Longfellow, 187 
 
 on Taylor, 422. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 491 
 
 German Language, 91. 
 
 "Gesta Romanorum," 215, 
 
 Gifford, R. Swain, 46. 
 
 Gifford, Sanford R., 46. 
 
 Gilder, Richard Watson, The New 
 Day, 442 ; artistic purpose, ib. ; The 
 Poet and his Master, ib. ; quoted, 
 470. 
 
 Godfrey, Thomas, 33. 
 
 Godwin, Parke, on blank-verse, 374; 
 and see 400. 
 
 Godwin, William, 252. ^ 
 
 Goethe, and Longfellow, 206; quoted, 
 221 ; on the value of poetic forms, 
 373; and see 129, 147, 153, 155,338, 
 420, 422. 
 
 Golden Legend, Tlie, Longfellow's, re- 
 viewed, 205-207. 
 
 Goldsmith, 7'*t, 115, 120, 288, 327. 
 
 Goodale, Dora Read (i865- ), 447. 
 
 Goodale, Elaine (1863- ), 447. 
 
 Gookin, Daniel, 34. 
 
 Gothic Feeling. See Medicevalism. 
 
 Graham, George R., 265, 266, 400. 
 
 " Graham's Magazine," 236, 400. 
 
 Grant, Robert, 443. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, quoted, 65 ; and see 
 239, 277. 
 
 " Greece," Wordsworth's, quoted, 53. 
 
 Greek Bucolic Poets, 89. 
 
 Greek Language, of Homer, 85-91. 
 
 Greeley, Horace, on Whittier, 95 ; and 
 see 99, 400, 402. 
 
 Green, Joseph, (1706-80), 277. 
 
 Greene, G. W., 210, 213. 
 
 Greenfield Hill, Dwight's, 36. 
 
 Greenough, Sarah Dana Loring 
 (1827- ), 50. 
 
 Grimm, Hermann, on Emerson, 134. 
 
 Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 32 ; satirized 
 by Lowell, 43 ; his sketches of au- 
 thors, 256; his Memoir and Edition 
 of Poe, 265 ; and see 40, 41, 325, 399, 
 400. 
 
 Grote, 91. 
 
 Grotesque, the, Poe's passion for, 259. 
 Guardian Angel, The, Holmes's, 294. 
 Guiney, Louise Imogen ( 1 86 1- ) , 447. 
 
 Hadley, James, on Homeric transla- 
 tion, 89 ; on hexameter, 197. 
 
 Hafiz, 167, 279. 
 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, a natural lyrist, 
 40 ; and see 39, 75, 280. 
 
 Halpine, Charles Graham ("Miles 
 O'Reilly ") (1829-68), 59, 444. 
 
 " Hamadryad, The," Landor's, 311, 
 404. 
 
 Hanging of the Crane, Longfellow's, 
 207. 
 
 Hannah TTturston, Taylor's, 421. 
 
 "Hans Breitmann," Leland's ballads 
 
 of, 455- 
 
 Harmony, natural. Whitman on, 375 ; 
 and see Rhythm. 
 
 Harney, William Wallace, 453. 
 
 Harris, Joel Chandler, 455. 
 
 Harte, Francis Bret, poetry of, 451 ; 
 and see 159, 201, 285, 403, 455, 463. 
 
 Harvard University, its early and 
 modem sentiment, 308; Lowell's 
 ode, 343 ; and see 277, 278. 
 
 " Haunted Palace, The," Poe's, 247. 
 
 Hawthorne, treatment of colonial 
 themes, 205 ; compared with Poe, 
 254, — with Holmes, 294 ; and see 
 no, 183, 229, 238, 263, 325. 
 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 463. 
 
 Hawtrey, Dean, his hexameters, ig6; 
 and see 89. 
 
 Hay, John, poems of, and dialect-verse, 
 453 ; and see 455. 
 
 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 54, 440, 451. 
 
 Hazeltine, Mayo Williamson, cited, 65. 
 
 '■ Hebe," Lowell's, 316. 
 
 Hebraism, Whittier's, 130; Whit- 
 man's, 353, 371 ; Miss Lazarus's 
 poetry, 447. 
 
492 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Hedge, Frederic Henry (1805- ), 50. 
 
 Heine, translations of, by Leland, Laz- 
 arus, 55, 447 ; influence on Longfel- 
 low, 186, 188 ; and see 146, 227, 263, 
 
 459- 
 " Hellenics," Landor's, 404. 
 Hemans, Mrs., 43, 112, 399. 
 " Hermann and Dorothea," Goethe's, 
 
 117. 
 " Hermes, Paul." See Thayer, W. R. 
 Hermes, Thayer's, 444. 
 Heroism, a quality, not a sentiment, in 
 
 Americans, 2i. 
 Hesiod, 175, 379. 
 Hesperus, de Kay's, 442. 
 Hexameter, Greek, aristocratic quality, 
 
 87 ; splendor, 88 ; rhythmus of, 88- 
 
 90. 
 Hexameter, English, Longfellow's, 
 
 195-199 ; pleasing to popular ear, 
 
 195, 199 ; wrongly discussed from 
 the scholar's point of view, 195-197 ; 
 Swinburne on, 195, 196 ; Kingsley's, 
 
 196, 198; Poe's strictures, 196; 
 Lord Derby's, 196; discussed by 
 Lewis, Bryant, Lang, Hadley, Low- 
 ell, Higginson, Stoddard, etc., 197, 
 198 ; recent poems in, 197, 198 ; 
 accent and quantity, 198 ; Canning 
 on, 198 ; Taylor's, 198, 426 ; ultimate 
 characteristics, 198 ; Biblical hexam- 
 eters, 199; and see 89-91. 
 
 " H. H " See Helen M. F. Jackson. 
 
 Hiawaiha, Longfellow's, reviewed, 
 201-203 ; measure of, 201, 202 ; 
 modelled on " Kalevala," 201 ; suc- 
 cessful handling of the Indian tradi- 
 tions, 202 ; management of Indian 
 dialect and names, 202 ; and see 
 III. 
 
 Hicks, Thomas, his portrait of Taylor, 
 406. 
 
 Higginson, Francis, 34. 
 
 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, on 
 
 English hexameter, 197 ; on Poe 
 and Miss Fuller, 256 ; and see 52. 
 
 Hillard, George, 41. 
 
 Hillhouse, James Abraham, 38 
 
 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 41. 
 
 Hoffman, Ernst, 252. 
 
 Hogarth, 275. 
 
 Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 49, 360. 
 
 Holmes, Abie], 279. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Dean of our 
 "occasional" poets, 59; review of 
 his career and writings, 273-303 ; 
 effect of current taste on his popu- 
 larity, 274 ; a poet of the old school, 
 275; leader of his class, 276 ; vi- 
 vacity, 276 ; a University poet, 276, 
 277; disperser of Puritan gloom, 
 277; wit and humorist, 277; birth 
 and training, 278, 279 ; buoyant na- 
 ture, 278 ; " The Collegian," 279 ; 
 likeness to Dr. Mitchill, 279 ; early 
 verse, 280; "Old Ironsides," "The 
 Last Leaf," etc., 280, 281 ; personal 
 traits, 281 ; songs and ballads, 282, 
 283 ; rhymed Addresses, 283 ; Poe- 
 try, a Metrical Essay, etc., 283; 
 Class - Poems, 283 ; Boston's lau- 
 reate, 284 ; society-verse, 284, 285 ; 
 his most ideal poems, 286 ; traits of 
 his " occasional pieces," 287 ; eigh- 
 teenth-century style and thought, 
 288-290 ; use of the rhymed-pentam- 
 eter, 288, 289 ; his distinctive gift, 
 290 ; prose writings, 291-297 ; Auto- 
 crat of the Breakfast- Table, 291, 292 ; 
 the "Atlantic Monthly," 293 ; Pro- 
 fessor at the Breakfast-Table, and 
 Poet at the Breakfast- Table, 294 ; 
 his novels, Elsie Venner, etc., 294, 
 295 ; their realism, satire, etc., 295 ; 
 an independent thinker, 295 ; Mis- 
 cellaneous Essays, 296 ; portrayal 
 of Emerson, 296 ; epigrammatist and 
 proverb-maker, 297 ; his views, 298,' 
 
INDEX. 
 
 493 
 
 conservatism, loyalty, and ancestral 
 feeling, 298-300 ; personal magnet- 
 
 , ism, 300 ; seventieth birthday, 300 ; 
 charm of his recitations, 301 ; final 
 estimate of, 302, 303 ; and see 51, 
 lie, 112, 129, 439, 448. 
 
 Homer, qualities of text, 84-91 ; dic- 
 tion, 87 ; dactylic lines, 88 ; rhythm 
 and movement, 88-90 ; and see 175, 
 
 423- 
 
 Homeric translations, Bryant's, 83; 
 Derby's, Hunt's, etc., 84 ; Tenny- 
 son's, 85; by Chapman, Pope, 
 Hawtrey, Butcher and Lang, etc., 
 88, 89 ; opinions of Hadley and 
 Arnold, 89, — of Prof. Lewis, 90 ; 
 inefficacy of blank-verse, 86-91 ; fit- 
 ness of " English hexameter," 90, 
 91 ; Lord Derby's, 91 ; Voss's Iliad, 
 91 ; Longfellow on, 189 ; Longfellow 
 not fitted for, 199 ; and see 197, 332. 
 
 Home Pastorals, Taylor's, 426. 
 
 Home-School, American, question of 
 its existence, 4; characteristics, 4- 
 1 1 ; a growth, 6 ; foreign view of, 8, 
 9 ; local sub-divisions, 9 ; its first pe- 
 riod clearly defined, 11 ; advent of, 
 30; growth of, 31-61 ; earliest 
 promise, 37 ; mistaken efforts to- 
 ward, 42 ; final evolution, 44 ; should 
 be rightly estimated, 60 ; its first 
 course ended, 60 ; Whitman's denial 
 of, 60 ; Bryant its early master, 82. 
 
 Homilies in verse, Longfellow's, 190. 
 
 Homogeneity, American, 5-10, 96, 97, 
 
 474- 
 Hood, Thomas, loS, 287, 462. 
 Hooker, Thomas, 130. 
 Hopkinson, Joseph (1770-1842), his 
 
 " Hail Columbia," 36. 
 Home, R. H., 415. 
 Houghton, George Washington 
 
 Wright, 443. 
 Howard, Blanche Willis 463. 
 
 Howard, Bronson (1842- ), 469. 
 
 " Howard Glyndon." See Searing, 
 L. X. 
 
 Howe, Julia Ward, 49, 360. 
 
 Howells, Elizabeth Lloyd {18- ), 50. 
 
 Howells, William Dean, his "Clem- 
 ent," 197 ; compared with Holmes, 
 295 ; and see 210, 440, 462, 463. 
 
 Howland, George ( 1824- ), 55, 454. 
 
 Hoyt, Ralph, 41. 
 
 Hudibras, 35, 325. 
 
 Hudson, Mary Ann Clemmer (1839- 
 84), 50. 446. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, cited, 49, 67 ; " Con- 
 flicts " with Nature, etc., 67 ; and 
 see 3151, 385, 389, 468. 
 
 Humor, of "The Croakers," 40; ef 
 American poets, 59 ; absent from 
 Bryant's verse — characteristic of 
 his speech, 70; Poe deficient in, 
 258 ; characteristics of genuine, 259 ; 
 Poe's theory of, 259 ; " graveyard " 
 humor, 260 ; Holmes's, 277, 280 ; 
 its tenure in art, 321 ; Poe's and 
 Lowell's, 332. 
 
 Humorous Verse, Holmes's, 290; 
 Taylor's, 422 ; Harte's, 452 ; Hay's. 
 453 ; and see Burlesque and Parody 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 84, 89, 214, 289, 311, 407 
 
 Hutchinson, Ellen Mackay (18- ) 
 
 447- 
 " Hylas," Taylor's, 404. 
 Hymnology, see Religious Verse. 
 Hyperion, Longfellow's, reviewed, 185 
 
 186 ; and see 204. 
 
 Iambic-quatrain Verse, Bryant's, 
 
 78, 79- 
 
 "Ichabod," Whittier's, 122. 
 
 Ideal, The, love of, a restraint on sen- 
 suality 266 ; the American, 473 ; 
 and see Aspiration. 
 
 Ideality, how retarded, 11, 12, et seq. ; 
 ^ incomplete Republicanism opposed 
 
494 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 to it, i6, 17 ; of Emerson's prose 
 and verse, 134; Longfellow's, 182; 
 popularity dangerous to, 293 ; pres- 
 ent neglect of, 458 ; now diverted to 
 prose fiction, 461. 
 
 Idyllic Verse, " Evangeline " the type 
 and flower of our, 200 ; Longfellow's 
 free - hand idyls, 207 ; Whitman's, 
 380; Snider's Delphic Days, 454; 
 Munby's " Dorothy," ib. ; public 
 satiated with, 464 ; and see 117. 
 
 Jdyls of the King, Tennyson's, 202. 
 
 Imagery, Emerson's, 161 -163, 174; 
 Longfellow's use of metaphors, etc., 
 214. 
 
 Imagination, Stoddard's, 58; Bryant's 
 elemental type, 81, 82 ; Whittier's, 
 119; Longfellow's, 191 ; Poe's not of 
 the highest order, 258 j constructive, 
 336; Whitman's, exemplified, 380, 
 381 ; Alden on Whitman's, 381 ; 
 recent lack of, 459. 
 
 Impulse, 335. 
 
 Indecency, outlawed of Art, 366; 
 Whitman's alleged, 367 ; not a mark 
 of virility, 369 ; and see Realism. 
 
 Indian, American, cockney ideals of, 
 42 ; poetry of, Whittier, 1 1 1 ; Long- 
 fellow's " Hiawatha," 201 - 203 ; 
 Schoolcraft, 202 ; of the Knicker- 
 bocker poets, 202. 
 
 Indifferentism, recent, 309. 
 
 Individuality, Lowell's, 328, 337 ; 
 Whitman's, 362. 
 
 Induction, Poetic, 262. 
 
 Infertility, Bryant's, 70 ; of Poe's lyri- 
 cal genius, 240. 
 
 Inflexibility and stiffness, Bryant's, 69. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean, 112. 
 
 Ingram, John H., memoir of Poe, 265. 
 
 Inland States, poets and poetry of the, 
 
 452-454- 
 "In Memoriam," Tennyson's, 195; 
 stanzaic form of, ib. 
 
 Inness, George, 46, 68. 
 
 Inspiration, belief in, by Whittier and 
 
 Mrs. Browning, 129; Emerson's^ 
 
 176, 177 ; and see 472. 
 Intellectual Power, Emerson's, 176; 
 
 essential to a great poet, 253; qual- 
 ity of Poe's intellect, 254. 
 " In the Twilight," Lowell's, 339. 
 Invention, and tradition, 179; vs. 
 
 Taste, 239; limits of Poe's, 253. 
 " Inward Light," the, Whittier's, I27« 
 
 129. 
 Irish-American Poets, 444. 
 Irving, Washington, edits Bryant's 
 
 poems, 73 ; and see 39, 40, 401. 
 Isolation, " scholar-gypsies," 454. 
 " Israfel," Poe's, 248. 
 Italian Influence, 442. 
 
 Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske 
 ("H. H.") (1831-85), 445- 
 
 James, Henry, Jr., on the Emerson- 
 ians, 169; and see 156, 462, 463. 
 
 Jennison, Lucy White (" Owen Inns- 
 ley") (1850- ),447. 
 
 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 463. 
 
 John Godfrey's Fortune, Taylor's, 421. 
 
 Johnson, Capt. Edward, 34. 
 
 Johnson, Oliver, on Whittier, 131. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel (1822-82), 50. 
 
 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 451. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 167, 392. 
 
 Journalism, and ideality, 27, 29 ; Bry- 
 ant's case, 63, — effect of, on his 
 genius, 74, 75; Whittier's, 103-105, 
 108; effect of, on authorship, 233; 
 Taylor's case, 417 ; its aid to the 
 poet, 471; and see 326, 397, 437. 
 
 Journey-work, often harmful to geniuS) 
 294 ; and see Market, Literary. 
 
 Joyce, Robert Dwyer, 444. 
 
 Judd, Sylvester, 49. 
 
 Judson, Emily Chubbuck (i8i7-54(( 
 50- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 495 
 
 " Kalevala," the Finnish epic, 201. 
 Kavanagh, Longfellow's, its moral, 
 
 etc., 187 ; quoted, 218, 219. 
 Keats, on Beauty and Truth, 263 ; and 
 
 see 39, 76, 89, 249, 250, 286, 289, 
 
 311.312,319,332,402,459. 
 Kennedy, John Pendleton, on Poe, 
 
 252 ; and see 41, 265. 
 Kensett, J. F., 68. 
 Keramos, Longfellow's, 207. 
 Key, Francis Scott (1779-1843), "The 
 
 Star-Spangled Banner," 36. 
 Kimball, Harriet McEwen (1834- ), 
 
 SO- 
 
 King, Edward, 443. 
 
 King, Bishop Henry, 165. 
 
 Kingsley, his " Andromeda," 90 ; his 
 fine hexameter-verse, 196, 198. 
 
 Kinney, Elizabeth Clementine 
 (i8iOr ), 50. 
 
 Kip, Leonard, 463. 
 
 Knickerbocker Poets — pseudo - In- 
 dian Verse, 202 ; and see 39-43. 
 
 Knowles, Sheridan, 468. 
 
 Kossuth, 290. 
 
 "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," 
 Mrs. Browning's, and " The Raven," 
 245. 
 
 Lake School, the, 51, 249, 313. 
 
 Lamb, 43. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 36, 70, 83, 
 137. 167, 172, 249, 267, 289, 308, 311, 
 327, 338, 346, 366, 374. 385. 404- 
 
 Landon, Miss, 43. 
 
 Landscape, see Descriftive Poetry. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, on hexameter verse, 
 197 ; translations of Homer and 
 Theocritus, 210 ; and see 89. 
 
 Language, Poe on the power o£ 257. 
 
 Lanier, Clifford Anderson (1844- ), 
 
 455- 
 tanier, Sidney, notice of his poetry 
 
 and genius, 449-451 j early vein, 
 
 449; his theory, 450; symphonic 
 compositions, ib. ; Science of Eng- 
 lish Verse, 451 ; and see 54, 455. 
 
 " Laocobn," Lessing's, 449. 
 
 Larcom, Lucy (1826- ), 50, 445. 
 
 Lars, Taylor's narrative poem, 425. 
 
 " Last Leaf, The," Holmes's, 285. 
 
 Lathrop, George Parsons, 442, 463. 
 
 Latinism, Bryant's, 85, 91 ; Lowell's, 
 
 331- 
 
 Law, the, and Literature, 279. 
 
 Law, the Reign of, 298. 
 
 Lazarus, Emma {1849- )> transla- 
 tions, 447 ; The Dance of Death, ib. ; 
 and see 55. 
 
 Learning, affectation of, by Poe, 260 ; 
 Holmes on, 294; Lowell's, 331- 
 
 333- 
 Legend of Brittany, Lowell's, 311. 
 
 Leighton, William, his Dramas, 454. 
 
 Leland, Charles Godfrey, translations 
 of Heine, 55 ; and see 59, 455. 
 
 Length of a Poem, Poe's canon, 249. 
 
 Lessing, 336, 449. 
 
 Letters, Men of, — Lowell our repre- 
 sentative of, 304. 
 
 Letters and Social Aims, Emerson's, 
 172. 
 
 Lewes, George Henry, 422, 425. 
 
 Lewis, Charlton T., on blank-verse 
 and hexameter, 90; on hexameter, 
 197. 
 
 " Liberator, The," Garrison's, 103. 
 
 " Liberty," Hay's, 453. 
 
 Life-School; Whitman, 380; need 
 and promise of, in poetry, 464-467 ; 
 success of, in prose fiction, 464 ; and 
 see Dramaand Dramatists. 
 "Ligeia," Poe's, 237, 272. 
 
 Light of Asia, Arnold's, causes of its 
 
 success, 465 ; and see Buddhism. 
 Limitations, Bryant's, 66, 69-71 ; Em- 
 erson's, 155 ; over-respect for, 461. 
 Lincoln, Lowell's portrait of, 344; 
 
496 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Whitman's " Burial Hymn," 364, — 
 his lecture and poem on, 391, 392 ; 
 and see 335. 
 
 "Lines on a Great Man Fallen," 
 Lord's, 123. 
 
 Linton, William James, portrait of 
 Whitman, 362; and see 360. 
 
 Literary Centres, New England, 37 ; 
 New York, 39, 416. 
 
 " Literary Gazette, The," 188. 
 
 Literary Life, Poe's typical of his 
 period, 233-236, 238 ; restrictions 
 of, 331 ; Taylor's Arcadian days, 
 403 ; divided ambition, 409 ; and 
 see 281. 
 
 Literary Periods, their sequence, 437 ; 
 and see Elizabethan Period, etc., etc. 
 
 Literary Spirit, Longfellow's, 184. 
 
 Literary Verse, Longfellow's excess 
 of, 215, — Browning's, ib. 
 
 " Literati," the, characteristics of, 42 ; 
 Poe's criticisms examined, 256; and 
 see 416. 
 
 Literature, American, Taylor in con- 
 nection with recent movement, 396. 
 
 "Living Temple, The," Holmes's, 
 286, 292. 
 
 Liszt, effect of society on, 468. 
 
 Locke, 145. 
 
 Lodge, Thomas, 374. 
 
 Long, John Davis (1838- ), 55. 
 
 Longevity, effect of Bryant's, 65, 66, 
 72. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, cen- 
 tre of the Cambridge group, 51 ; 
 translation of Dante, 55 ; influenced 
 by Bryant, 72; rural verse, 115; 
 sense of his loss, 137; L. and Em- 
 erson, 177, 178 ; review of his 
 works and career, 180-224 ; for- 
 tunate in life and death, 180; his 
 mission apostolic, 180; fresh charm 
 of his early work, 181, 182; his 
 genius non-creative, but fostering. 
 
 182; a poet of Taste and Senti- 
 ment, 182, 183 ; birth, at an au- 
 spicious time, 183, 184 ; apprentice- 
 ship, 184 ; " Coplas de Manrique," 
 184; i^rose romances, etc., 185-188; 
 Outre-Mer, 185; Hyferion, 185, 186, 
 328 ; influenced by Richter and 
 Heine, 186; Kavanagh, 187 ; a ro- 
 manticist, 187 ; Poetry of Europe, 
 188 ; Poems of Places, 188 ; poetical 
 writings, 188-214; juvenile poems, 
 188 ; Voices of the Night, 188, 189 ; 
 early translations, 189 ; Ballads and 
 Other Poems, and later lyrical col- 
 lections, 189-194 ; his sentiment, 
 taste, and picturesqueness, 190 ; 
 anti-slavery poems, 191 ; imaginar 
 tion, 191 ; " Skeleton in Armor," 
 191, 192 ; " occasional poems," 192, 
 193 ; metrical expertness, 193 ; " My 
 Lost Youth," 194 ; narrative-pieces, 
 194; Evangeline, 195-201: his 
 choice, use, and defence, of " Eng- 
 lish hexameter" verse, 195-199; 
 criticised by Poe, 196 ; Arnold on, 
 198 ; remarks to Macrae, 199 ; Hia- 
 watha, 201-203 ! successful treat- 
 ment of the Indian legends, 202 ; 
 Courtship of Miles Standish, 203 ; 
 his dramatic works, 204-207 ; The 
 Spanish Student, 204 ; Pandora, 
 204 ; Christus, 204 ; his dramatic 
 shortcomings, and Tennyson's, 204 ; 
 The Golden Legend, 205-207 ; Gothic 
 sympathies, 205; Michael Angelo. 
 207 ; a representative volume, The 
 Seaside and the Fireside, 207 ; Hang- 
 ing of the Crane and Keramos, 207 ; 
 Tales of a Wayside Inn, 208, 209 ; 
 as a raconteur, compared with Mor- 
 ris, ib. ; translation of The Divini 
 Comedy, reviewed, 209-213, — 
 method employed, 209, — merits and 
 defects, 211-213; his masterly Son 
 
INDEX. 
 
 497 
 
 nets, 213; Ultima Thule, 214; his 
 habits, mannerism, moralizing, 
 bookishness, 214, 215; "Morituri 
 Salutamus," 215 ; a poet of the 
 study, 2i6, — yet also our poet of the 
 sea, 217 ; question of his originality, 
 217, 2i8; cosmopolitanism, 218; 
 idea of a national literature, 218, 
 219; a pioneer of taste, 220; in 
 what sense "a poet of the middle 
 classes," 220; ethics and domestic- 
 ity, 221 ; lack of passion and dra- 
 matic insight, 221-223; Fortune's 
 favorite, 222 ; a sympathetic voice, 
 222 ; a lovable character, 223 ; ar- 
 tistic tact, 223 ; final estimate of his 
 poetry, 224 ; his death, 224 ; Poe's 
 attack on, 257; and see 12, 43, 49, 
 70, 90, 96, 97, 106, 108, III, 114, 
 136, 152, 213, 277, 350, 390, 408, 409, 
 
 412, 436, 4S2. 457, 459, 473- 
 
 Longfellow, Samuel (1819- ), 50. 
 
 Lord, William Wilberforce, 41, 123. 
 
 Loring, Frederic Wadsworth (1849- 
 71), 448. 
 
 Love-poetry, Whittier lacking in, 121 ; 
 Emerson's, 157; Lowell's, 310. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, on the " Lit- 
 erati " and Griswold's flock, 42, 43 ; 
 his landscape, 47 ; satires, 59 ; on 
 Emerson, 136; on hexameter, 197; 
 review of his works and career, 304- 
 348 ; our representative man of let- 
 ters and culture, 304 ; Dr. Dowden 
 on, 305 ; special standing, 306 ; his 
 catholicity, 306 ; parentage and 
 breeding, 307 ; at Harvard, 308, 
 309 ; A Year's Life, 309 ; early 
 range and tendencies, 310 ; edits 
 The Pioneer, 310 ; marriage to Miss 
 White, 311 ; Poems, 311 ; "Legend 
 of Brittany" and "Rhcecus," 311, 
 312 ; progressive views and poetry, 
 312. 313; Po^ms (1848), etc., 313- 
 
 32 
 
 320 ; metrical style, 314 ; lyrical 
 beauty, 315 ; his theory of song, 316 ; 
 a poet of nature and the open air, 
 317; pastoral tastes, 318; "To the 
 Dandelion," 319 ; The Vision of Sir 
 Launfal, 319 r estimate of his work 
 thus far, 320; The Biglow Papers, 
 321-325, — their wit and humor, 
 321, — originality, 322, — second se- 
 ries of, 323, —pathos, 324, — unique- 
 ness, 325; "The Courtin'," 323; 
 A Faile for Critics, 325 ; his prose 
 writings, 326-338 ; Conversations, 
 326 ; edits the " Atlantic " and 
 " North American," 326 ; Fireside 
 Travels — Among My Books — My 
 Study Windows, — etc., 327 ; prose 
 style and quality, 327-330, the 
 strictures on, 328; his greater es- 
 says, 330 ; caprice, 331 ; reading 
 and equipment, 331 ; Lowell and 
 Poe, 332 ; theory of translation, 
 332 ; point and wisdom, 332-334 ; 
 critical faculty and essays, 334-338 ; 
 literary wealth and freedom, 337, 
 338 ; Under the Willows, and later 
 poems, 338-346; Lowell, Clough, 
 and Arnold, 339, 341 ; " In the Twi- 
 light," 339 ; his culture, 341 ; The 
 Cathedral, 342 ; his manner, 343 ; 
 Commemoration Ode, 343 ; Three 
 Memorial Poems, 344, 345 ; " The 
 Nooning," 345 ; his genius and bril- 
 liant record, 346-348 ; and see 12, 49, 
 51, 92. 97,98,106, no, 115, 129, 133, 
 190, 191, 209, 216, 277, 279, 300, 351, 
 
 360, 364, 380, 427, 439- 
 Lowell, Maria White (1821-53), 50, 
 
 309,311- 
 Lowell, Robert Traill Spence, 51. 
 Lucretius, 198, 370. 
 Lunt, George, 41. 
 Lyrical Poetry, its makers not affected 
 
 by certain restrictions, 18 j fresh? 
 
498 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ness and variety in America, i8 ; 
 Halleck's, 40 ; Boker's, 57 ; Stod- 
 dard's songs, etc., 58 ; Bryant's, 80, 
 83 ; Emerson's genius for, 1 50 ; lyr- 
 ical quality highest in Emerson, 
 164, 165 ; Longfellow's lyrical qual- 
 ity, 191, 192 ; Poe's unique lyrical 
 quality, 241-248; beauty of Low- 
 ell's, 315, 316, 339; Whitman's 
 genius for, 353 ; Winter's, 440 ; Al- 
 drich's, ib. 
 Lytle, William Haines (1826-63), 453- 
 
 Macaulay, 112. 
 
 Macdonough, Augustus Rodney, 55. 
 
 MacDowell, Katherine Sherwood 
 Bonner (1849-83), 455. 
 
 Mackay, Charles, iii. 
 
 Macon, John Alfred (1851- ), 455. 
 
 Macrae, David, Longfellow's remarks 
 to, 199. 
 
 Magazines, etc., " Southern Literary 
 Messenger," 235 ; " American Re- 
 view," etc., 236 ; " Graham's," 400 ; 
 "Pioneer," 310 ; "Putnam's 
 Monthly," 354, 355, ,408 ; " Atlantic 
 Monthly," gi, 293, 326, 409 ; " North 
 American Review," 60, 72, 90, 326. 
 
 Manliness, need of, in recent verse, 
 472. 
 
 Manner, vs. Style, Lowell's, 342, 343 ; 
 his strength of, 314. 
 
 Mannerism, its good side, 71 ; Long- 
 fellow's, 214; Poe's, 257; Whit- 
 man's, 378 ; no mark of genius, 378. 
 
 Margaret Smith's Journal, Whittier's, 
 no. 
 
 Marginalia, Poe's, 255. 
 
 " Maria del Occidente." See Brooks, 
 Maria G. 
 
 Marian Douglas." See Robinson, 
 Annie D. '* 
 
 Market, the Literary, need of, 22, 23 ; 
 growth, 29; in Philadelphia and 
 
 New York, 42, 44 ; fickle and shift- 
 ing character of, in Poe's time, 234, 
 237 ; dangers of too ready sale, 293 ; 
 hack-work often harmful to genius, 
 294 ; Whitman's relations to, 361 ; 
 Howells's perception of, 462; and 
 see 38. 
 
 Martin, Homer, 46. 
 
 Martin, John, 242. 
 
 Marvell, A., 167; his Ode, 427. 
 
 Masque of the Gods, The, Taylor's, 430. 
 
 " Masque of the Red Death," Poe's, 
 238. 
 
 Massachusetts vs. New York, 355. 
 
 Massey, Gerald, in. 
 
 Masterpieces, their need of adequate 
 theme and atmosphere, 19, 20 ; Poe's 
 best tales, 254; Lowell's " Biglow 
 Papers," 321 ; and see 294. 
 
 Materialism — material energy of 
 America, 17; benefits of, 471 ; and 
 see 54, 437. 
 
 Mather, Cotton, 34. 
 
 Mather, Increase, 34. 
 
 Mathews, Cornelius, 57. 
 
 Matthews, Brander, on play-writing, 
 468. 
 
 Maturin, C. R., 252. 
 
 May, Samuel J., 104. 
 
 "May-Day," Emerson's, 152. 
 
 McDermott, Hugh Farrar (1834- ), 
 444- 
 
 McEntee, Jervis, 46. 
 
 McFingal, Trumbull's, 35. 
 
 McKay, Jas. Thomson (1843- )> 443- 
 
 McKnight, George, 443. 
 
 McLean, Sarah Pratt (1855- )> 455- 
 
 McMaster, Guy Humphrey (1829- ) 
 49- 
 
 Mediaevalism, revival of mediaeval 
 forms, 195; Longfellow's, 205, 206; 
 and see 204. 
 
 Medicine, profession of, and litera' 
 ture, 279. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 499 
 
 Meditative Poetry, Bryant's, 47, 66, 80. 
 
 Melody, Emerson's, 178; Poe a mas- 
 ter of, 243-252, passim; essential 
 to poetry, 249 ; of negro song, 251. 
 
 Melville, Herman, 49. 
 
 Memnon, Carleton's, 469. 
 
 " Memoranda during the War," Whit- 
 man's, 364. 
 
 " Merlin," Emerson's, 165. 
 
 Metaphysics, hostile to inspiration 
 and art, 249; Poe's dislike of, 253. 
 
 Metre, Holmes's liking for classical 
 English forms, 288 ; measure of 
 "Locksley Hall," 313; Whitman's 
 lyrical and metrical method, exam- 
 ined, 371-378, — not original, 37 1, — 
 not to be rejected for its strangeness, 
 372, — its rejection of common 
 forms, 373, — conformed to a theory, 
 375) — Whitman's explanation of, 
 375, — how suited to his talent and 
 purpose, 376, — extreme formalism 
 of, 377 ; true genius at ease with any 
 and all forms, 377 ; Whitman's 
 measures most effective, when least 
 eccentric, 378 ; Taylor's retention 
 of original metres in translation, 423, 
 424 ; Pindaric verse, 427 ; the ele- 
 giac distich, 454 ; and see Form. 
 
 Michael Angela, Longfellow's, 207. 
 
 Microcosm, The, Coles's, 300. 
 
 Middle classes, relations of Longfel- 
 low and Tennyson to, 220. 
 
 Middle States, Poets and Poetry of, 
 
 37- 
 
 " Miles O'Reilly," see Halpine. 
 
 Miller, Cincinnatus Hiner (Joaquin), 
 pictures of nature, 47 ; poetry of, 452. 
 
 Millet, J. F., 115. 
 
 Milton, his poetic canon, 165, 224; 
 and see 70, 100, 167, 327. 
 
 Minor Verse, significant of the gen- 
 eral drift, 436; profusion of, 460. 
 
 "Mirror, The," 236. 
 
 Miscellanies, Emerson's, 171. 
 
 " Miscellany, The Boston," 309. 
 
 Mitchell, Donald G., 401. 
 
 Mitchell, S. Weir (1830- ), 443. 
 
 Mitchell, Walter (182&- ), 443. 
 
 Mitchill, Samuel Latham (1764-1831) 
 a prototype of Holmes, 279, 286. 
 
 "Modern Instance, A," Howells's, 
 295. 
 
 Modern Job, The, Peterson's, 443. 
 
 Modern Poets, Emerson on, 179. 
 
 Mogg Megone, Whittier's, in. 
 
 Moliere, 259, 338, 468. 
 
 Moller, cited by Emerson, 149. 
 
 Monkhouse, Cosmo, on Whitman, 363. 
 
 Montaigne, compared with Emerson, 
 297 ; and see 143, 145, 171, 332. 
 
 Monte Rosa, Nichols's, 443. 
 
 Montgomery, George Edgar, scien- 
 tific spirit, 444 ; rhythm, ib. 
 
 Montgomery, James, 39. 
 
 Moore, 40, 239, 286, 287, 290, 399, 407. 
 
 Moralism, Longfellow's habit of mor- 
 alizing, 190, 215; the New England 
 failing in art, 312; and see 408. 
 
 Morality, of American poets, 123; 
 necessity of some standard, 270. 
 
 " Morituri Salutamus," Longfellow's, 
 215. 
 
 Morris, George Pope, 41. 
 
 Morris, William, compared with 
 Longfellow, 208 ; and see 89, 407. 
 
 " Morte d'Arthur," Tennyson's, 86. 
 
 Moulton, Louise Chandler (1835- )> 
 446. 
 
 " MS. Found in a Bottle," Poe's, 233. 
 
 JMuhlenberg, William Augustus (1796- 
 1877), 50. 
 
 Munby, Arthur J., his "Dorothy," 
 198, 454. 
 
 Munford, William (1775-1825), 55. 
 
 Murfree, Mary Noailles, 451, 463. 
 
 Music, and Poetry, merits and defects 
 of Lanier's theory, 449, 450. 
 
500 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 " My Captain," Whitman's, 378, 392. 
 " My Lost Youth," Longfellow's, 194. 
 Mysticism, Poe's passion for, 253, 255, 
 
 258. 
 My Study Windows, Lowell's, 327. 
 
 Narrative Poetry, Longfellow's 
 success in, 194 ; his talent as a ra- 
 conteur, his Tales, etc., 208, — com- 
 pared with Morris's, 208, 209 ; Tay- 
 lor's, 407. 
 
 Narrowness, the main defect of Whit- 
 man, 384, 386. 
 
 Nationality, American, 96, 97, — Her- 
 bert Spencer on, 219; Longfellow's, 
 conception of a national literature, 
 218, 219; formation of the national 
 type, 474 ; and see 456. 
 
 National Ode, The, Taylor's Centen- 
 nial Poem, 427 ; its measure, etc., 
 427. 
 
 National Sentiment, 28, 29; patriot- 
 ism, 28, 29, 123, — expressed in 
 song, 36, — Holmes's, 299; in poe- 
 try and literature, 48, 49 j and emo- 
 tion, songs of, 49; nonrecognition 
 of, 60. 
 
 National Song, its relations to a na- 
 tion's spirit and history, i ; a 
 growth, not an artifice, 3 ; original 
 flavor required, 12; must reflect the 
 national life, 44 ; exemplified by our 
 poets, 48, 49 ; and see 36. 
 
 Naturalism. See Realism. 
 
 Naturalness, of American Female 
 Poets, 447. 
 
 Nature, Emerson's, 171. 
 
 Nature, poets of, are poets of free- 
 dom, 91 ; Whittier's youth with, 
 103; Emerson on Nature and the 
 Univers-l Soul, 148, 149 ; Whit- 
 man's view of, 368 ; her law of Re- 
 serve, 368, 369; Taylor's love of, 
 399- 
 
 " Nature," sonnet by Longfellow, 213, 
 
 " Nature and the Poets," Burroughs's, 
 117. 
 
 Neal, John, 41. 
 
 Negro minstrelsy, songs, ballads, etc, 
 251. 
 
 Neo-Platonism, 143. 
 
 Neo-Romanticism, 220, 459 ; English^ 
 10. 
 
 Neurotic disorder, effect on genius, 
 270. 
 
 New Day, The, Gilder's, 442. 
 
 New England, early regard for letters, 
 34; a mother to her poets, 53; 
 Whittier the poet of, 97-99, 106; 
 popular traits, 98; influence upon 
 the country at large, 98, 99 ; traits 
 of, 147 ; dislike of the unsavory and 
 unclean, 166; village-life in "Kav- 
 anagh," 187; every -day life por- 
 trayed by Holmes and Howells, 
 295 ; our Eastern poets, 299 ; 
 Holmes a type of its cleverness, 
 302 ; Lowell's rendering of, 305, 
 346, — his Yankee characters and 
 dialect, 321-325 ; effect of its train- 
 ing, 306; and see 130, 177. 
 
 New England School, 397 ; habit of 
 preaching, 215. 
 
 " New England Tragedies, T h e," 
 Longfellow's, 204. 
 
 Newton, 155. 
 
 New York, poets and poetry of, 39- 
 42 ; indifference, 53 ; as the literary 
 market, 237 ; authorship in, 397 ; 
 as a literary centre, 416. 
 
 Nichols, Starr Hoyt, 443. 
 
 Nitnrod, de Kay's, 442. 
 
 Nomenclature, use of Roman substi 
 tutes for Grecian names, 91 . 
 
 " Nooning, The," Lowell's projected 
 idyl, 345- 
 
 " North American Review, T h e," 
 Whitman's paper in, 60 ; edited by 
 
INDEX. 
 
 501 
 
 Lowell and Norton, 326; and see 
 72, go. 
 
 North and South, their spirits con- 
 trasted, 255. 
 
 North Shore Watch, The, Wood- 
 berry's, 461. 
 
 Norton, Andrews, 52. 
 
 Norton, Charles Eliot, 55, 210. 
 
 Norton, John, Elegy on Anne Brad- 
 street, 33 ; and see 277. 
 
 Novels and Novelists, Simms, 38; 
 pioneers in America, 40; novels, 
 Poe's incapacity for writing them, 
 252, — review of Holmes's, 294, 
 295, — Taylor's, 420, 421, — of our 
 female writers, 448 ; Holmes and 
 Howells, 29s; novelist-poets, 461- 
 463 ; diversion of ideality to prose 
 fiction, 461 - 463 ; Aldrich, 462 ; 
 Howells and his career, 462 ; re- 
 cent American experts, 463 ; lesson 
 to the poets, 464 ; present surplus- 
 age, 465. 
 
 Novelty, the revival of old modes, 276. 
 
 Oakes, Urian, Elegy on Shepard, 
 
 33 ; and see 34, 277. 
 Objective Poetry, 146. 
 Obscurity of Style, condemned by Poe, 
 
 i68 ; not conducive to lasting fame, 
 
 221. 
 O'Brien, Fitz - James (1828-62), 59, 
 
 404, 444. 
 "Occasional " Poetiy, Whittier's, 108, 
 
 122, 123; Longfellow's, 192, 193; 
 
 merits and faults of Holmes's, 287- 
 
 291. 
 O'Connor, William Douglas, "The 
 
 Good Gray Poet," 360. 
 O'Conor, Charles, 74. 
 Ode measures, no. 
 Ode on the Death of Nat. Bacon, 33. 
 Ode to W. H. Channing, Emerson's, 
 
 169. 
 
 .Odes, Lowell's, 343-346, 428; Tay- 
 lor's, 427. 
 
 O'Hara, Theodore (1820-67), 49- 
 
 " Old Ironsides," Holmes's, 280. 
 
 Omar, 279 ; Rubaiyat of, 184. 
 
 " One - hoss Shay, The," Holmes's, 
 285, 292. 
 
 Oppression, conflict with, 49. 
 
 Optimism, Emerson's, 141. 
 
 Oratory, in the South, 449. 
 
 O'Reilly, John Boyle, 444. 
 
 Orientalism, Emerson's, 167. 
 
 Originality, how manifest in national 
 song, 5 ; character of Bryant's, 67 ; 
 isolating effect of, 180 ; the question 
 of Longfellow's, 217, 218 ; a distinc- 
 tive air and tone, 218; Poe's, 239; 
 Emerson's, 297 ; Holmes's, 297 ; 
 Lowell's, 347 ; false, 366 ; misun- 
 derstood at first, 372. 
 
 Osgood, Frances Sargent (181 1-50), 
 
 50- 
 
 Osgood, Kate Putnam (1841- ), 446. 
 
 Ossoli, the Marchioness. See Fuller, 
 Sarah Margaret. 
 
 Otis, Calvin N., quoted, 19. 
 
 Outlook, the, survey of the poetic 
 field, with surmises as to the future, 
 435-476; alleged decadence, 436; 
 recent conditions, 437, 438; poets 
 of the middle and younger schools, 
 439-441 ; female poets, 444-448 ; 
 the South, 449-451 ; the Pacific 
 slope, 451, 452 ; the Inland States, 
 452-454; translations, dialect-verse, 
 etc., 454, 455 ; traits of the general 
 choir, as compared with those of 
 minor British poets, 456; relative 
 importance of our elder and younger 
 schools, 456-458 ; over-refinement, 
 459 ; passing vogues, 460 ; profuse 
 minor verse, 460 ; half-efforts, 461 ; 
 an intercalary period, 461 ; diver- 
 sion of ideality to prose fiction, etc. 
 
502 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 461-464 ; a Life-School needed, 464 ; 
 attitude and demands of the public, 
 465 ; promise of a dramatic move- 
 ment, 466 ; the stage, 467 j poet and 
 playwright, 468; present favoring 
 conditions, 470-472; present re- 
 quirements, 472; our novitiate 
 ended, 473 j points of vantage, 474, 
 475 ; conjecture of the future, 476. 
 
 " Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- 
 ing," Whitman's, 353. 
 
 Outre-Mer, Longfellow's early legend, 
 51, 181 ; reviewed, 185. 
 
 Over-refinement, Whitman's verse a 
 reaction from, 385. 
 
 Over-work, Taylor's, 418 ; question of 
 American, 418. 
 
 " Owen Innsley." See Jennison, L. W. 
 
 Pacific Coast, poets of, 451, 452. 
 Page, William, his portrait of Lowell, 
 
 312- 
 Page, Thomas Nelson, 451. 
 Paine, Robert Treat, Jr. (1773-1811), 
 
 35- 
 
 Painting, American, contrasted with 
 poetry, 4 ; its new-world beginning, 
 14; first distinctive school that of 
 landscape, 46, — analogy between 
 their work and Bryant's, 47 ; land- 
 scape, 68, 466. 
 
 Palmer, John Williamson (1825- ), 
 49. 
 
 Palmer, Ray (i8o8- ), 50. 
 
 Pandora, Longfellow's, 204. 
 
 Pantheism, modern, 262. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 130. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, on Whittier, 97. 
 
 Parnassus, Emerson's, 166, 175, 248. 
 
 Parsons, Thomas William, an exqui- 
 site lyrical poet,55 ; his translations 
 of Dante, 55, 210; " Lines on a Bust 
 of Dante," 55 ; a poet for poets, ib.; 
 and see 51, 54, 360. 
 
 Passion, wanting in Bryant, 70; 
 Whittier's, 121 ; rare in Emerson, 
 1 56, 1 57 ; its extremes avoided by 
 Longfellow, 221-223. 
 
 " Past, The," Bryant's, 82. 
 
 Pastoral Verse, Whittier on, 116. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 401. 
 
 Paulding, James Kirke, 40. 
 
 " Paul Hermes." See Thayer, W. S. 
 
 Payne, John Howard, 40, 466. 
 
 Peabody, William Bourne Oliver 
 (1 799-1847), 50. 
 
 Peck, Samuel Minturn (1854- ), 448. 
 
 Pedantry, colonial, 15, 35. 
 
 Pembroke, Earl of, 155. 
 
 Pendragon, Young's, 454. 
 
 Pennsylvanian Idyls, Taylor's, 412. 
 
 Pentameter Verse, rhymed, Bryant's, 
 72 ; and see English Heroic Verse. 
 
 Percival, James Gates, 38, 47, 188. 
 
 Period, our own, its intercalary na- 
 ture, 461 ; summary of present fa- 
 voring conditions, 470-472 ; present 
 requirements, 472-474. 
 
 Perry, Nora (18- ), 446. 
 
 Personality, marked, of Am. Poets, 
 128; Emerson's, 140, 141; Poe's, 
 as revealed by tradition and por- 
 traiture, 227-229; effective charm 
 of Holmes's, 300, 301 ; Lowell's, 
 306; essential to produce good 
 work, 306; Whitman's picturesque 
 bearing, 352, 357, 359, 390, 391; 
 Taylor's, 410. 
 
 Peterson, Frederick (1859- ), 454. 
 
 Peterson, Henry, 443. 
 
 Petofi, 105. 
 
 Phelps, Charles Henry, 452. 
 
 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1844- ) 
 446. 
 
 Phi Beta Kappa Society, 283. 
 
 Philanthropy, Whittier's, 129, 130. 
 
 Philistinism, metropolitan, 53, 54 
 Bryant's relations to, 65. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 503 
 
 Philosophy, the ideal, 133 ; method of, 
 opposed to that of poetry, 133; 
 Emerson's, 140, 143, 144; union 
 with poetry, 141 ; Emerson's, exam- 
 ined, 141-147 ; of the ancients, 142- 
 144; Plato, 143; Plotinus, 144; 
 transfigured in Emerson's poetry, 
 148-150. 
 
 Piatt, John James, his landscape, 47 ; 
 prairie and homestead idyls of, 453 ; 
 and see 440, 462. 
 
 Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan (1836- ), 
 446. 
 
 Picture of St. John, The, Taylor's, 425. 
 
 Picturesqueness, Longfellow's, 190. 
 
 Pierpont, John, 37, 280. 
 
 Pike, Albert, 38, 41. 
 
 Pindar, 353, 423. 
 
 Pindaric Verse, 427. 
 
 Pinkney, Edward Coate, 37. 
 
 " Pioneer, The," edited by Lowell and 
 Carter, 310. 
 
 Placidity, not a characteristic of the 
 greatest art, 221. 
 
 Plagiarism, question of Longfellow's, 
 189. 
 
 Plantation or Negro verse, 455. 
 
 Plato, Emerson on, 137, 142, 155. 
 
 Plays and Plajrwrights. See Drama 
 and Dramatists. 
 
 Plotinus, likeness of Emerson to, 144. 
 
 Plutarch, 143. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, on the sentimen- 
 talists, 43; on transcendental poe- 
 try, 168, 169; criticism of Longfel- 
 low, 189, — of his " Evangeline," 
 196 ; review of his life and works, 
 225 - 272 ; distinctive reputation, 
 225 ; ideals of him formed by Time, 
 225 ; opposite views of his charac- 
 ter, 226; a unique writer, 227-, per- 
 sonal aspect, 227 ; Halpin's engrav- 
 ing of, 228 ; later portraits, 228 ; 
 Briggs's pen-portrait of, 229 ; a com- 
 
 plex nature, 229; story of his life 
 and career, 230 - 237 ; parentage, 
 birth, and education, 230, 231 ; ser- 
 vice in the U. S. Army, 231 ; at 
 West Point, 232 ; rupture with his 
 protector, Mr. Allan, 232 ; prize- 
 story of " A MS. Found in a Bot- 
 tle," 233; perverse temperament, 
 234; precarious literary life, 234- 
 236; marriage, 235; on "The 
 Southern Literary Messenger,'' 235 ; 
 work, errors, and misfortunes, 235, 
 236; death, 236; dependence on 
 the literary market, 237 ; exclusively 
 a man of letters, 238 ; Tales of the 
 Grotesque and Arabesque, 238 ; re- 
 view of his poetry, 239-248 ; early 
 books of verse, 239 ; precocity, 240 ; 
 The Raven and Other Poems, 241- 
 248 ; " The Raven," 241, 242 ; " City 
 in the Sea," " The Sleeper," " The 
 Bells," etc., 242-246; "Ulalume," 
 246 ; " The Haunted Palace " and 
 " Israfel," 247, 248 ; limited range, 
 248, 250 ; his theory of Poetry, 249, 
 250; use of refrain and repetend, 
 250; sound and rhythm, 251; his 
 Tales, 252-254; revolt against the 
 commonplace, 252 ; qualities as a 
 romancer, 253; his prose master- 
 pieces, 254; compared with Haw- 
 thorne, 254; Marginalia, Z'^'^; The 
 Literati, 256 ; prose style and equip- 
 ment, 257-264; " Fall of the House 
 of Usher," 258; fantasy and gro- 
 tesqueness, 258, 259; lack of true 
 humor, ib. ; affectation of learning, 
 260; his materials, 261; Eureka, 
 262 ; absolute love of beauty, 263 ; 
 protest against didacticism, 263 ; 
 Griswold's memoir of, 265 ; moral 
 and physical traits, 266-272 ; chas- 
 tity of his writings, 266 ; not a scof- 
 fer nor an habitual drunkard, but 
 
504 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 with an inherited taint, 267 ; sensi- 
 tiveness, 268; unmorality, 269; 
 question of neurotic disorder, 270 ; 
 fatal laclc of will, 27 1 ; on Lowell, 
 311; his analysis of "The Raven," 
 324; on Taylor, 402; and see 12, 
 38, 41, 54, 56, 65, 129, 164, 325, 332, 
 
 350. 374, 411, 416, 433. 449. 45i- 
 
 Poems of Barnaval, de Kay's, 442. 
 
 Poems of Places, Longfellow's, 188. 
 
 Poems of the Orient, Taylor's, re- 
 viewed, 406-408, 457. 
 
 Poet, special distinction awarded him, 
 63 ; the supreme and typical, 177, 
 178; Emerson's conception of, 179; 
 tests of his genius, 470. 
 
 Poetse Emeriti, 439. 
 
 Poet and his Master, The, Gilder's, 442. 
 
 Poet at the Breakfast- Table, The, 
 Holmes's, 294. 
 
 Poet Militant, Whittier, 124. 
 
 Poetic Life, Poe as an exemplar, 264- 
 272; question of success, 396 ; Tay- 
 lor's Arcadian Days, 403, — ro- 
 mance of his youth, 405 ; lesson of 
 Taylor's, 413-419; his varied expe- 
 riences, 414; his own theory of, 
 415; question of choice and envi- 
 ronment, 415, 416; in New York, 
 416; influence of journalism on, 
 417 ; distracting forces, 418, 419. 
 
 " Poetic Principle, The," Poe's essay 
 on, 249. 
 
 Poetry : A Metrical Essay, Holmes's, 
 283. 
 
 Poetry, chief of the arts, i ; study of 
 its aim and province, 2 ; American 
 school of, 4-1 1 etseq. ; Scottish, 21, 
 22 J relations to criticism, 25 ; delay 
 of its rise in America, 26, — rea- 
 son, 27 ; final beginning of, 28-30 ; 
 relative order, epic, dramatic, reflec- 
 tive, descriptive, etc., 46; impor- 
 tance of tone in, 68, 69 ; simplicity 
 
 of the best, 78, 170; judged/^?- se, 
 105 ; duty of the poet as an artist, 
 107; faith essential to, 128; poetry 
 of humanity vs. that of the ideal, 
 129; method of, compared with that 
 of philosophy, 133, 134; technique, 
 135; poetry o£ thought, 135, 136; 
 the language of intellectual nobil- 
 ity, 136, 148; subjective and objec- 
 tive, 146; its credentials, 148; her- 
 esy of the didactic, 150; its pro- 
 phetic vision of scientific laws, 1 53- 
 155; not mere artisanship, 158; 
 crystalline expression, 161 -163; 
 rhythmical compression, 163 ; Mil- 
 ton's canon of, 165, 224; Emerson's 
 view in " Merlin," 165 ; law of good 
 taste, 166; transcendental method 
 in, i68, 169; "that which shapes 
 and elevates," 177 ; as a liberal art, 
 177 ; impetus to, from Longfellow, 
 — poetry of taste and the affections, 
 190; excessive literary flavor, Z15; 
 poetry of "passion and of pain," 221 ; 
 sympathetic, 222 ; haunting quality, 
 227 ; a passion, not a purpose with 
 Poe, 239, — his theory of, in " The 
 Poetic Principle," 249 ; relations of, 
 to neurotic disorder, 270 ; effect of 
 Fashion on, 273, 274; revivals and 
 survivals of old styles, 275, 276; 
 collegiate verse, 277 ; the fruit of 
 passion and experience, 279, 307 ; 
 knee-buckle and society-verse, 281 ; 
 "occasional," 281-291, passim; 
 songs, 282 ; for the wise and witless, 
 289 ; Holmes as a reciter of, 301 ; 
 antique and modern purposes con- 
 trasted, 311,312; progressive poe- 
 ti'y. 3'3 ! Lowell, on construction 
 of, 315, — his theory of, 316, — his 
 poetry of Nature, 317-319 ; serio- 
 comic verse, 321, 322 ; eclogues, 
 321; Lowell's satirical, 321-326,— 
 
INDEX. 
 
 505 
 
 his technical distinction of, from 
 prose, 327, 328, — his odes, 343- 
 345; must imitate the decency of 
 Nature, 367-370; Goethe on its dis- 
 tinction from prose, 373; of the fu- 
 ture, 375; of nature, 379, 380; the 
 genre, 380; imagination, its chief 
 requisite, 381 ; relations to science, 
 382; formalism, 386; Lanier's 
 theory of verse, 450; dangers of 
 theorizing, 450; its enduring qual- 
 ity, 463; must possess human and 
 dramatic interest, 464-466; prose- 
 romance not a lasting substitute, 
 465; not alone a criticism of life, 
 466 ; the poet's faculty compulsive, 
 470; conditions now favoring, 471- 
 473; effect of criticism, 471; not 
 only .an art, but an inspiration, 472 ; 
 our English tongue as its medium, 
 475; its canons unalterable, 476; 
 the future of American song, 476 ; 
 and see Bucolic Verse, Descriptive 
 Poetry, Drama, Idyllic Verse, Lffve- 
 Poetry, Narrative Poetry, Pastoral 
 Verse, Reform - Verse, Religious 
 Verse, Satire, Sentimental Verse, 
 Sonnets, etc. 
 Poets, American, their aids and hin- 
 drances, 4, 1 1 ; _ early restrictions, 
 — novelty of the situation, 13, — col- 
 onialism, 14, — conflict with Nature, 
 15, — pedantry of colonial verse- 
 makers, 15, — immature Republican- 
 ism, 16, 17, — materialism, 17, — 
 technical difficulties, 18, — lack of 
 home-themes, 19, 20, — disenchant- 
 ments, 21, — want of background, 21, 
 22, — inadequate support, 23, — de- 
 fective copyright, 23-25 ; landscape 
 of, 28 ; national feeling, 29 ; love of 
 freedom of, 29; means of support, 
 29; conviction, 29; reverence, 29; 
 ■ leading names from the settlement 
 
 to the Civil War, 31-61 ; colonial, 
 33-35; Revolutionary, 35; post-Rev- 
 olutionary, 36 ; earliest group of real 
 promise, 37 ; sectional traits, 37 ; 
 eastern, 37-39; southern, 38; in New 
 York, etc., 39-43. 53. 54; conces- 
 sions to the pioneers, 39 ; multiplica. 
 tion of versifiers in Poe's time, 42 ; 
 sentimentality, male and female, 43 ; 
 survival of the fittest, 44 ; descrip- 
 tive, 46, 47 ; true to the national sen- 
 timent, 48, 49 ; religious, 50 ; female, 
 50; university, 51; transcendental, 
 51, 52, 146, 147 ; composite and ar- 
 tistic, 52-58 ; as playwrights, 57 ; as 
 satirists, etc., 59 ; poets of freedom 
 and patriotism, 91 ; question of "the 
 best " among them, 95, — the " most 
 national," 96; purity of, 123, 124; 
 distinct as personages, 129; Whit- 
 man's strictures on, 389 ; recent and 
 younger, in the East, West, and 
 South, enumeration, 440-455; a 
 Scotchman on " American poet- 
 esses," 444, — their muster-roll and 
 traits, 444-448 ; compared with Brit- 
 ish contemporaries, 456 ; recent and 
 younger, halting purpose and ideal- 
 ity of, 458 ; decorative feeling, 459 ; 
 their present opportunity and re- 
 quirements, 471-475; and see In- 
 troduction. 
 
 " Poets and Poetry of America," and 
 Griswold's other works, 265. 
 
 " Poets and Poetry of Europe," Long- 
 fellow's, 188. 
 
 Poet's Journal, The, Taylor's, 405, 
 419. 
 
 Pope, 65, 67, 72, 76, 89, 275, 288, 303, 
 
 3o8. 336- 
 Popularity, Longfellow's, 222 ; of 
 
 Whitman and of Whittier compared, 
 
 385 ; and see Fame. 
 Porter, Noah, 176. 
 
5o6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Poverty, bearing on authorship, 267, 
 
 268. 
 Powers, Horatio Nelson (1826- ), 
 
 443- 
 Practice- Work, Poe's, 241. 
 " Prairies, The," Bryant's, 81. 
 Precocity, Bryant's, 72 ; Poe's, 240 ; 
 
 of Bryant, Keats and Shelley, 402. 
 Preston, Harriet Waters, (18- ), 
 
 translations from the Provenyal, 
 
 etc., 55, 454- 
 Preston, Margaret Junkin (1S3- ), 
 
 447- 
 Prince Detikalion, Taylor's swan-song, 
 
 431 ; rhythmical beauty, ib.; theme 
 
 and sentiment of, 431, 432. 
 " Princess, The," Tennyson's, 89. 
 Pro arts etfocis, 48, 130. 
 "Problem, The," Emerson's, 152. 
 Proctor, Edna Dean, (18- ), 446. 
 Professor at the Breakfast- Table, 
 
 Holmes's, 294. 
 Propagandism, of Whitman and his 
 
 disciples, 360, 386. 
 Prophet, The, Taylor's, 428 - 430 ; 
 
 modes of treating such a theme, 
 
 429. 
 
 Prophet Bard, the, 131. 
 
 Proportion, the sense of, deficient in 
 Emerson, 1 59 ; sense of, in Poe, 
 257 ; and see 336. 
 
 prose, Bryant's, 93; Whittier's, no; 
 Emerson's, 134, 136, 171 -176, — 
 its strength and importance, 171 ; 
 Bacon's, 171 ; Cariyle's, 171 ; Lan- 
 dor's, 172 ; purity of Emerson's 
 style, 173, — poetic quality of same, 
 173, 174; "prose poems," 174; 
 Longfellow's, 185; Poe's compared 
 with Hawthorne's, 257 ; Holmes's 
 works in, 291 ; of poets, compared 
 with their verse, 327, 328, 363 ; 
 Lowell's, 326-338, — individuality 
 of, 327, 328, — the strictures upon. 
 
 328, — style, 330, — conceits of, 330, 
 — point and wisdom, 332-334> — ' 
 lack of proportion, 336, — wealth 
 and freedom, 337 ; defects nf Whit- 
 man's, 363 ; Whitman on, as substi- 
 tute for verse, 373 ; Goethe on " po- 
 etic prose," 373 ; Taylor's, 401, 421 ; 
 and see 31. 
 
 Proudfit, David Law (1842- ), 443. 
 
 Provincialism, the charm of Boston, 
 284 ; of Concord and of " Manna- 
 hatta " compared, 356. 
 
 Pseudo-classicism, 456. 
 
 Pseudo-naturalism, of Whitman's sex- 
 ual poems, 370. 
 
 Public, cbanges in its taste, 438 ; our 
 poets and the, 465 ; and the play- 
 wright, 468. 
 
 Public Men, American jurists,, states- 
 men, etc., 305 ; m the Biglow Par 
 pers, 323. 
 
 Puritanism, and the Quakers, 99, loi ; 
 Whittier on, 125 ; cleanliness next 
 to godliness, 166 ; opposed to beauty 
 and sentiment, 181 ; Longfellow's 
 treatment of, 205 ; Poe's misunder- 
 standing of, 253 ; Holmes's conflict 
 with, 277, 295 ; and see 446. 
 
 Purity, Whittier's, 129. 
 
 "Putnam's Monthly," on Whitman, 
 354, 355- 
 
 Quakerism, Whittier's, loi, — his 
 Quaker ballads, 113; and see 99, 
 125, 126, 385, 398, 430. 
 
 "Quaker Poet, The," 113. See Whit- 
 tier. 
 
 " Quaker Widow, The," Taylor's, 412. 
 
 Quality vs. copiousness, 114 ; marked 
 in Lowell's verse, 316, 317. 
 
 Quantity, antique and modem, 197, 
 198. 
 
 Queen Anne's Period, its style in 
 vogue, 27 s; verse of, 289. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 507 
 
 Rabelais, 370. 
 
 Radicalism, 313. 
 
 " Rain-Dream, A," 82. 
 
 Randall, James Ryder, 49, 451. 
 
 Randolph, Anson Davis Fitz 
 
 (1820- ), so. 
 " Randolph of Roanoke," Whittier's, 
 
 109, 122. 
 Range, narrowness of Poe's, 239, 248, 
 
 251 ; Lowell's, 340. 
 " Rape of the Lock, The," 289. 
 Raphael, 258. 
 Ratiocination, Poe's experiments in, 
 
 253- 
 
 " Raven, The," Poe's, criticised, 241, 
 242 ; Poe's analysis of, 246, 250 ; 
 and see 237, 245, 324. 
 
 Raven and Other Poems, The, Poe's, 
 241-248, 457. 
 
 Read, Thomas Buchanan, 54, 56 ; his 
 portrait of Taylor, 402. 
 
 Reading, Lowell's wide, 331. 
 
 Realism, Poe's, 253 ; of Holmes's and 
 Howells's novels, 295; Whitman's 
 poems of sex, 358, -i- theory of Na- 
 ture and art, 367, — his poems on 
 the body and its functions, 366-370, 
 — as an advertisement, 366, — too 
 anatomical, 366, — his defence and 
 theory of, 367, 368, — to be tested 
 by his own rules, 367, — his mis- 
 conception' of Nature's method, 368, 
 369, — and see 383; ancient views 
 on, 369; in poetic drama, must not 
 be applied to a commonplace theme, 
 429; not the supreme end of art, 
 430 ; of modern drama, 467 ; and 
 see 322. 
 
 Recitation, poems for, 280, 283; 
 Holmes's gift for, 301. 
 
 Reform-Verse, want of artistic con- 
 scientiousness in, 109, Whittier's, 
 129; Longfellow's superficial, 191; 
 Lowell's, 310, 312, 313. 
 
 Refrain, use of, by Poe and Mrs. 
 Browning, 245 ; and see 250. 
 
 Reisebilder, Heine's, 188. 
 
 Religion of Humanity, 358. 
 
 Religious Verse, and its composers, 
 50; Whittier's, 123-128. 
 
 Renaissance, Whitman's method, 371 ; 
 revival of old modes, 274. 
 
 Repetend, use of, by Poe and Mrs. 
 Brovpning, 250. 
 
 Repose, marked in Bryant, 80. 
 
 Representative Men, Emerson's, 171. 
 
 Republicanism, on trial with respect 
 to art and letters, 10, 11, 306; its 
 early stages opposed to ideality, 16- 
 18 ; first-fruits of, 36 ; Bryant's char- 
 acter a type of, 64; its theory of 
 Culture, 305. 
 
 Reserve, law of, in Nature and Art, 
 
 369- 
 
 Restraint, 441. 
 
 Restrictions, of recent period summa- 
 rized, 457. 
 
 Revival, poetic, promise of early, 464 ; 
 symptoms and methods of, 464- 
 
 475- 
 
 Revolutionary Period, poetic sterility 
 of, i5; its poets, Trumbull, Freneau, 
 etc., 35, 36. 
 
 Rhapsodists, Emerson, 136 ; Whit- 
 man, 392. 
 
 Rhetoric, Holmes's lyrical, 280; elo- 
 quence of Taylor's verse, 411. 
 
 " Rhoecus," Lowell's, contrasted with 
 Landor's "Hamadryad," 311, 312. 
 
 Rhyme, how far an artifice, 373 ; 
 Goethe on, ib. ; Milton on, 374. 
 
 Rhymed Addresses, Holmes's, 283. 
 
 Rhymer of Travel, Taylor's, 402. 
 
 Rhythm, movement or rhythmus of 
 Homer's verse, 88, 89; of blank- 
 verse, 88-90, 374; of Emerson's 
 prose, 173, 174; of hexameter, 198; 
 feminine endings, Longfellow's use 
 
5o8 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 of, 212; Poe's effects of sound, 243, 
 245, 247, 249 ; of Holmes, 280 ; of 
 Whitman's verse, 371 ; its relations 
 to expression, 373 ; Whitman in 
 pursuit of the harmonies of Nature, 
 375; sonorousness of Taylor's, 400, 
 
 — beauty of, in Prince Deukalion, 
 431 ; Lanier's harmony and sym- 
 phony in verse, 450. 
 
 Richter, (Jean Paul), influence on 
 
 Longfellow, 186. 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 455. 
 Riordan, Roger (1847- ), 443. 
 Robinson, Annie Douglas (" Marian 
 
 Douglas ") (1842- ), 446. 
 Rollins, Alice Wellington (1847- ), 
 
 446. 
 Romanticism, Longfellow's, 185, 187; 
 
 Poe's characteristic trait, 252, — 
 
 materials of, at his command, 261 ; 
 
 and see Neo-Romanticism. 
 Ropes, Arthur Reed, 448. 
 Rossetti, Christina G., 446. 
 Rossetti, D. G., and Emerson, 158. 
 Rossetti, W. M., his translation of 
 
 Dante's Inferno, 210; edits English 
 
 Ed. of Whitman, 370; and see 360. 
 Rugby, village of, 10. 
 Russell, Irwin, 455. 
 Ryan, Abram J. (1840- ), 444. 
 
 Saadi, 157, 167. 
 
 Saltus, Francis Saltus (1849- )> 443- 
 
 Salut au Monde, Whitman's, 349. 
 
 Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin, 52, 360 ; 
 on Emerson, 136; on Lowell, 309, 
 325 ; on the " Biglow Papers," 325. 
 
 Sands, Robert Charles (1799-1832), 75. 
 
 Sandys, George, 33. 
 
 Sangster, Margaret Elizabeth 
 (1838- ),446. 
 
 Sargent, Epes, 57. 
 
 Satire, satirical verse, 59; Poe's, 256, 
 
 — his irony, etc., 259; Holmes's 
 
 prose, 295, — his metrical, compared 
 with that of other satirists, 303 ; its 
 grade in art, 321, 322; and see Big- 
 low Papers, Fable for Critics, etc. 
 
 Savage, John (1828- ), 444. 
 
 Savage, Minot Judson (1841- ), 50. 
 
 Saxe, John Godfrey, 59. 
 
 Saxon diction, 212. 
 
 Saxon race, traits of, 124. 
 
 " Scarlet Letter, The," Hawthorne's, d. 
 
 Schiller, 198, 422. 
 
 School-books, pieces found in, 280, 310. 
 
 Schoolcraft, H. R., Indian legendary, 
 202. 
 
 Science, effect of the new learning on 
 the poets, 27 ; Bryant's want of sci- 
 entific vision, 69; Emerson's pre- 
 vision of its discoveries, 153-iSSi 
 poetic illumination of, 154; con- 
 trasted with Art, 155; Poe's "Eu- 
 reka," 262 ; scientific prescience of 
 poets, 262 ; Holmes's poetry of, 
 286, — as a savant, 275; relations 
 to poetry, 444, — in Whitman's 
 verse, 382 ; arnd see 370, 437, 471. 
 
 Science of English Verse, The, La- 
 nier's, 451. 
 
 ScoUard, Clinton (i860- ), 448. 
 
 Scotland, abounding in distinctiTe 
 quality, 22. 
 
 Scott, 40, 70, III, 289, 399, 423. 
 
 Scudder, Horace E., 405. 
 
 Sea, the, Longfellow's poetry of, 217. 
 
 Searing, Laura Redden (" Howard 
 Glyndon") (1842- ), 446. 
 
 Sears, Edmund Hamilton (1810-76), 
 
 5°- 
 
 Seaside and the Fireside, The, Long- 
 fellow's, 207, 457. 
 
 Seclusion, effects of solitude on the 
 poet, 155; Poe without comrades, 
 264; beneficial effect in the cases 
 of Whittier and Burns, 414. 
 
 Sectionalism, local types, 474. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 509 
 
 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 40. 
 Self-assertion, Whitman's, 389. 
 Sensuousness, 224. 
 Sententiousness, poetic, Emerson's, 
 
 160-163 ; Lowell's, 314. 
 Sentiment, Longfellow the poet of, 
 
 180, 182, igo ; Lowell's, 190 ; 
 
 Holmes's, 287. 
 Sentimental Verse, in England and 
 
 America, 43. 
 Sevigne, Madame de, a saying of, 138. 
 Sewall, Harriet Winslow (1819- ), 
 
 SO. 
 Shakespeare, English quality of, 12 ; 
 
 play of "The Tempest," 34 ; Emer- 
 son on, 179; Osric and Hamlet, 
 
 313; and see 133, 146, 175, 259, 333, 
 
 335. 351. 374. 386, 468. 
 Shaw, John (1778-1809), 36. 
 Shelley, quoted, 174; influence on 
 
 Lowell, 310, — on Taylor, 405, 408 ; 
 
 as a translator, 424 ; and see 70, 76, 
 
 164, 239, 24s, 267, 286, 287, 308, 38s, 
 
 402,403, 411. 
 Sherman, Frank Dempster (i860- ), 
 
 448. 
 "Sherwood Bonner." See MacDova- 
 
 ell, Katherine S. B. 
 Shinn, Milicent Washburn (18- ), 
 
 446. 
 Shurtleff, William Steele (1830- ), 
 
 443- 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 453. 
 Sjgoumey, Lydia Howard Huntley, 
 
 43- 
 
 Sill, Edward Rowland (1843- ), 443. 
 
 Simms, William Gilmore, 38, 41. 
 
 Simplicity, Bryant's, 77; Emerson's 
 demand for, 170 ; Longfellow's, 198 ; 
 of Poe's forms, 251 ; true and false,' 
 389 ; and see 224, 459. 
 
 Sincerity, 108 ; Bryant's, 76. 
 
 ' Skeleton in Armor, The," Longfel- 
 low's, 191, 192. 
 
 Sketch-work, current half-efforts, 460. 
 
 " Skipper Ireson's Ride," Whittier's, 
 log, 114. 
 
 " Sleeper, The," Poe's, 243. 
 
 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes (1806- ), 50. 
 
 Smith, Capt. John, 34. 
 
 Smith, May Louise Riley (1842- ), 
 446. 
 
 Smybert, John, 277. 
 
 Snider, Denton Jacques, 198, 454. 
 
 Snow-B ound, Whittier's, 106; re- 
 viewed, 117-120; and see 126, 457. 
 
 Society and Solitude, Emerson's, 172. 
 
 Society-Verse, earlier examples, 59; 
 Holmes's, 284-286; recent increase, 
 284; relative status, 285; Aldrich's, 
 440 ; poets of the latest vogue, 448 ; 
 and see 287, also French Forms. 
 
 Song and Story, Fawcett's, 441. 
 
 " Song of Nature," Emerson's, 155. 
 
 " Song of the Camp," Taylor's, 412. 
 
 Songs and Lyrics, Miss Hutchinson's, 
 
 447- 
 Songs and Song- Writers, 49, 443; 
 
 Holmes, 282. 
 Songs, National, Fletcher of Sal- 
 
 toun's saying, 35. 
 Songs of Fair Weather, Thompson's, 
 
 443- 
 
 Songs of Labor, Whittier's, iii. 
 
 Songs of Summer, Stoddard's, 457. 
 
 Songs of the Sierras, Miller's, 452. 
 
 Sonnets, Whittier's, in; perfection 
 of Longfellow's, 213 ; and sonnet- 
 eering, 444, 460. 
 
 Sons of Godwin, The, Leighton's, 454. 
 
 Sophists, the, 143. 
 
 South, the, early neglect of literature, 
 34 ; poets and poetry of, 37 ; eigh- 
 teenth century taste, 37, 38 ; scanty 
 production, 38 ; female poets of, 
 447 ; traits of, 449 ; Timrod, La- 
 nier, and other poets, 449-451 ; re- 
 cent promise of, 451. 
 
 " Southern Literary Messenger, The," 
 
 235- 
 
5IO 
 
 IND'EX. 
 
 Southey, 43, 407. 
 
 Spanish Student, The, Longfellow's, 
 
 204. 
 Spenser, 76, 331, 335; Lowell on, 
 
 332, 333- 
 
 "Sphinx, The," Emerson's, 153, 168. 
 
 Spirituality, of Poe's verse, 267 ; es- 
 sential to a perfect naturalism, 370. 
 
 Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott 
 (1835- ), 445- 
 
 Spontaneity, Lowell's theory of song, 
 316, — his outdoor verse, 317 ; Low- 
 ell's, 337 ; of our female poets, 445 ; 
 and see 108, 242, 375. 
 
 Sprague, Charles, 37, 99, 283. 
 
 " Star-Spangled Banner, The," 36. 
 
 Sterne, 294. 
 
 Stockton, Frank R., 463. 
 
 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 452. 
 
 Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow 
 (1823- ), 50, 445, 463. 
 
 Stoddard, Richard Henry, artistic 
 range, 57 ; traits, 58 ; fine imagina- 
 tion, 58 ; blank-verse, 58 ; odes, 58 ; 
 The King's Bell, 58 ; on hexameter, 
 197 ; friendship with Taylor, 403 ; 
 and see 54, no, 408, 439. 
 
 St. Olaf's Kirk, Houghton's, 443. 
 
 Stoic Philosophy, 142. 
 
 Storrs, Richard S., quoted, 472. 
 
 Story, William Wetmore, 51, 54, 55, 
 56. 
 
 Story of Kennett, Taylor's, 421. 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 49. 
 
 Strachey, William, 34. 
 
 Street, Alfred Billings, 47. 
 
 Strodtmann, Adolf, 423. 
 
 " Stuart Sterne." See Bloede, Ger- 
 trude. 
 
 Style, Bryant's pure and simple, 71, 
 77 ; Whittier's metrical, no ; artless- 
 ness of Emerson's, 152; Emerson's 
 metrical, 158-171, — native and un- 
 studied, 1 59, — deficient in structure. 
 
 159, — unconventional, 159, 160, — 
 mode of composition, 160, — lack 
 of synthesis, 160, — rich in notable 
 passages, 160-163, — his rhythm 
 and compression, 163, — lyrical 
 quality, 164, 165, — mode of ex- 
 pression, ib., — influence of certain 
 models on, 166, 167, — escape from 
 early faults of, 167-169, — its chief 
 canon, 170; obscurity, 168, 221 ; sec- 
 ondary to thought, 172 ; self-forma- 
 tive, ib. ; apothegmatic bent of 
 Emerson's, 172, 173; Longfellow's 
 free-hand measures, 207 ; faults and 
 merits of Poe's, 257, — his use of 
 the dash and italics, 257 ; Holmes's, 
 of i8th Century, 288 ; Lowell's 
 prose, 330, 331 ; Whitman's prolix- 
 ity, 374, — effects of his method, 
 376; is the man, 378; Whitman's 
 fine diction, titles and epithets, 
 378; Taylor's poetic, 411. 
 
 Subjectivity, Poe's, 270, 271 ; Whit- 
 man's, 352 ; and see 146. 
 
 Success, worldly, prestige of in Bry- 
 ant's case, 64. 
 
 Supernaturalism of New England, 
 Whittier's, 103, 114. 
 
 Superstition and Servility, conflict 
 with, Emerson's, 136. 
 
 " Susan Coolidge." See Woolsey,S.C. 
 
 Swedenborg, 143, 179. 
 
 Swinburne, on Whitman, 386 ; and see 
 77, 91. 250, 334, 360, 374, 382, 385. , 
 
 Swift, 342. 
 
 Swinton, John, 360. 
 
 Swinton, William, 360. 
 
 Symonds, John Addington, 360. 
 
 Sympathetic Quality, notable in Long, 
 fellow, 222. 
 
 Symphonic quality, see Rhythm. 
 
 Tact, Longfellow's artistic, 223: 
 Whitman's, 350. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 511 
 
 Taine, H. A., theory of environment, 
 etc., 3-12 ; on England, 48. 
 
 Talent, and Genius, 187. 
 
 Tales of a Wiyside Inn, Longfellow's, 
 114, 203, 308, 209. 
 
 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 
 Poe's, 238. 
 
 Talfourd, 468. 
 
 Tasso, 334. 
 
 Taste, its bearing on the chasteness 
 of art, 166 ; Longfellow the apostle 
 of, 181-183, 190, 191 ; Longfellow 
 our pioneer of, 220 ; Poe on poetry 
 as the child of, 249; Lowell's, 315; 
 vs. Duty, 315; inborn with Amer- 
 icans, 474. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, his landscape, 47 ; 
 " Faust," 55, 90, 209 ; pastorals, 198 ; 
 review of his career and writings, 
 396-434; type of the modern and 
 New York author, 396, 397 ; versa- 
 tility, 398 ; birth and early life, 398, 
 399; his first book, Ximena, 399; 
 sonorous quality, 400 ; Travels, 
 400, 401 ; on " The Tribune," 402 ; 
 Rhymes of Travel, 402 ; Poe on, ib. ; 
 portrait by Read, ib. ; Arcadian 
 life, 403 ; Californian ballads, 403 ; 
 with Stoddard, Boker, etc.; 403, 404 ; 
 A Book of Romances, 404; " Hylas," 
 ib. ; influence of Shelley on, 405 ; 
 his first wife, Mary Agnew, 405 ; 
 " Life and Letters " of, 405 ; Poems 
 xf the Orient, 406-408; oriental 
 traits, 406; fine narrative pieces, 
 songs, etc., 407, 408 ; Poems of Home 
 and Travel, 408 ; "Putnam's 
 Monthly," ib. ; divided ambition, 
 409 ; capabilities, 410 ; personal 
 traits, ib. ; poetic style, 41 1 ; Penn- 
 sylvanian idyls, etc., 412 ; effect of 
 his career on his lyrical product, 
 413-415 ; theory of life and art, 415 ; 
 environment, 416-419 ; a journalist, 
 
 etc., in New York, 417 ; lecturing 
 and overwork, 418 ; marriage to 
 Marie Hansen, 419 ; The Poet'i 
 Journal, 419 ; his Novels, 421 ; as a 
 critic, ib. ; German " Studies," 422 ; 
 translation of Faust, 422-425; Pic- 
 ture of St. John and Lars, 425 ; 
 Home Pastorals, 426; Goethe and 
 Shakespeare Odes, 427 ; The Na- 
 tional Ode, ib. ; his dramatic works, 
 428-432 ; The Prophet, 428 ; Masque 
 of the Gods, 430 ; a. poet of noble 
 ideals, ib. ; Prince Deukalion, 431, 
 432 ; death, 433 ; thoughts on his 
 career, 433, 434 ; and see 49, 54, 56, 
 no, 113, 250, 256, 439, 449, 452. 
 
 Taylor, Mrs. Marie Hansen, 405, 419. 
 
 Technique, devotion of modern Eng- 
 lish poets to, 48 ; defects of Whit- 
 tier's verse, 107-109 ; reform-poets 
 lacking in, 109; Longfellow's, 193; 
 recent additions to technical range 
 of English verse, 195 ; Lowell's 
 merits and eccentricities in verse, 
 314.315. — in prose,328, 329; Whit- 
 man's lyrical method and rhythm, 
 358, — he rejects wonted forms, 372 ; 
 how far necessary, 372, 373 ; Whit- 
 man's intricate form, 377 ; Aldrich's, 
 441 ; perfect finish not desirable, 
 448 ; of our minor verse, 456 ; over- 
 elaboration, 459; youth attracted 
 
 by. 135. 460. 
 
 Tegner, 189. 
 
 Temperament, unrest of the poetic, 
 54; the poetic sensitiveness, 268; 
 study of Poe's, Chap. WX., passim ; 
 Taylor's oriental traits, 406. 
 
 Tennyson, his scientific vision, 69; his 
 blank-verse, 86, 87 ; Emerson on, 
 179 ; choice of themes, 182 ; and 
 Longfellow, 193; "In Memoriam," 
 195 ; as a dramatic poet, 204, 467 ; 
 influence on Lowell, 310; and see 
 
512 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 39, 48, 70, 76, 91, 108, 136, 152, 153, 
 194, 202, 256, 339, 351, 374, 406, 423, 
 
 436. 459- 
 
 * Tenth Muse.'' See Bradstreet, Anne. 
 
 Tent on the Beach, Whittier's, 114, 
 115. 
 
 Thackeray, 223, 286, 328, 452. 
 
 '' Thanatopsis," Bryant's, 72, 79, 80, 
 81, 85. 
 
 Thaxter, Celia Leighton (1835- ), her 
 landscape, 47 ; and see 446. 
 
 Thayer, Stephen Henry (1839- ), 
 443. 
 
 Thayer, William Roscoe ("Paul 
 Hermes "), 443. 
 
 Theatre, the. See Drama. 
 
 Theme, primitive absence of, 19 ; in- 
 vention of, avoided by great poets, 
 20 ; the poet's unbounded liberty of, 
 54, 454 ; choice of, by Longfelloyv 
 and Tennyson, 182 ; nobility requi- 
 site in, 430. 
 
 Theocritus, 8g, 210, 339, 386, 423. 
 
 Theories, Metrical, dangers of, 450. 
 
 Thirty Poems, Bryant's, 74. 
 
 Thomas, Edith Matilda (1854- ), 447. 
 
 Thompson, James Maurice, 443. 
 
 Thompson, John Randolph (1823-73), 
 
 54- 
 Thomson, 67. 
 Thoreau, Henry David, his landscape, 
 
 47 ; quoted, 68, 69 ; and see 52, n6, 
 
 336. 34i> 386. 
 Thought, represented by Emerson, 
 
 136, 176. 
 Three Memorial Poems, Lowell's 
 
 Odes, 344. 
 "Threnody," Emerson's, 154, 165. 
 Ticknor, Francis Orrery, 49. 
 Ticknor, George, 138. 
 Ticknor & Co., 404. 
 Tilton, Theodore (1835- ), 443. 
 Time, its effect on popular ideals, 
 
 225. 
 
 Time, Accent, etc., 373. 
 
 Timrod, Henry, 54, 449. 
 
 " Titan," Jean Paul's, 186. 
 
 Titles, Whitman's effective, 378. 
 
 Tone, a supreme quality, 68 ; Thoreau 
 on, 68, 69 ; of Poe's masterpieces, 
 258; of Taylor's oriental poems. 
 407. 
 
 Town-Life, good and bad effects oi, 
 468. 
 
 Townsend, George Alfred, 298, 451. 
 
 Townsend, Mary Ashley (" Xariffa ") 
 (18- ), 447. 
 
 "To the Dandelion," Lowell's, 319. 
 
 Tradition, and Invention, 179; con- 
 flict with, 56, 471 ; and see 469. 
 
 Transcendentalism, its poets, 51, 52; 
 Whittier's, 102, 125-128; Emer- 
 son's, 140; distinguished from in- 
 duction, 146; its strength and weak- 
 ness in art, 168, 169 ; Holmes averse 
 to, 288, 297 ; Whitman an off-shoot 
 of, 355; provincialism of, 356; and 
 see 443. 
 
 Transitional periods, 26. 
 
 Translations, etc., Bryant's Iliad and 
 Odyssey, 83 ; work suited to the af- 
 ternoon of life, 83 ; Bryant's, from 
 the Spanish, gi; Longfellow's 
 minor work, 189, — his Divine Com- 
 edy, its theory, merits, and de- 
 fects, 209-213; other translators of 
 Dante, 209, 210 ; the ideal standard, 
 210 ; faulty use of derivatives from 
 the Italian, 212; Lowell on, 332; 
 Taylor's Faust, in the original me- 
 tres, 422-425 ; recent, by Miss Pres- 
 ton, Howland, etc., 454; and see 
 55, also Dante and Homeric Trans, 
 lations. 
 
 Travels, Bryant's, 75; Taylor's, 400 
 402, — his books of, 400-402. 
 
 -'Tribune, The, N. Y.," 256, 400. 
 
 Trochaic Verse, Longfellow's, 195 
 
INDEX. 
 
 513 
 
 .lOchaic dimeter of "Hiawatha," 
 
 201, 202. 
 Trowbridge, John Townsend, 49, 439. 
 Trumbull, John, 35. 
 Truth, of Nature, its elusiveness, 151. 
 Tuckerman, Henry Theodore, 41. 
 Tupper, 378. 
 Turgenieff, 105, 124. 
 Turner, 242. 
 
 "Twilight of the Poets, The," 475. 
 " Two Rivulets," Whitman's, 362, 363. 
 Tyler, Moses Coit, his " Hist, of Am. 
 
 Lit.," 32-34. 
 Tyler, Royall, 36, 466. 
 Tyndall, 153. 
 
 " Ulalume," Foe's, 246. 
 
 Ultima Thule, Longfellow's, 214. 
 
 Under the Willows, Lowell's, 338, 457. 
 
 Underwood, Francis H., life of Low- 
 ell, 307. 
 
 " Undiscovered Country, The," How- 
 ells's, 295. 
 
 Unitarianism, Emerson's early, 138. 
 
 Unmorality, of French art, 124; Poe's 
 lack of moral sense, 269. 
 
 Universality, of expression, a trait of 
 genius, 377 ; deficient, in Whitman's 
 theory and practice, 384, 386. 
 
 "Universal Soul," the, 149, 153. 
 
 University-Group, the Cambridge, 50, 
 
 51- 
 
 University-Poets, Holmes the Har- 
 vard laureate, 276, 277, 283. 
 
 Unrest, of the poetic temperament, 
 
 54- 
 Utilitarianism, in America, 22-31 ; 
 metropolitan, 53, 54. 
 
 Vagueness, 450. 
 Venable, William Henry, 453. 
 Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 41, 75. 
 Versatility, Holmes's, 292 ; Taylor an 
 example of, 398; Fawcett's, 441. 
 
 33 
 
 Vers de Societe, see Society Verse. 
 
 Very, Jones, 52. 
 
 " Vicar of Wakefield, The," 200. 
 
 Victorian Poets, by the author of this 
 volume, references to, 2, 26, 27, 75, 
 88, go, 108, 189, 195, ig8, 204, 208, 
 233. 245. 249. 259. 262, 268, 273, 284, 
 307. 321, 327. 339. 342, 374, 383. 417. 
 430, 436, 437, 455, 456, 459, 462, 466, 
 467. 
 
 Victorian School, 437. 
 
 Views Afoot, Taylor's, 400. 
 
 " Vignettes," Holmes's, 286. 
 
 Villon, 395. 
 
 Virgil, translations, by Miss Preston, 
 Howland, Wilstach, etc., 454 ; and 
 see 89, 117, 175, 199. 
 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, Lowell's, 319. 
 
 Vita Nuova, 210. 
 
 Voices of the Night, Longfellow's, 73, 
 188, 189. 
 
 Voices of Freedom, Whittier's, 457. 
 
 Voss's Iliad, 91, 189, 198. 
 
 Wallace, William Ross, 41. 
 
 Ward, William Hayes, 449. 
 
 " Warden of the Cinque Ports," Long- 
 fellow's, compared with Tennyson's 
 " Ode," 193. 
 
 Ware, William, 41. 
 
 Warton, Thomas and Joseph, 277. 
 
 Washington, Lowell on, 345. 
 
 Wasson, David Atwood, 52. 
 
 Watteau, 115. 
 
 Watts, 71. 
 
 Webster, Augusta, 447. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, compared with Bry- 
 ant, 77 ; and see 299, 323. 
 
 Webster, John, 432. 
 
 Weeks, Robert Kelley (1840-76), 443. 
 
 Wells, Charles, author of "Joseph 
 and his Brethren," 395. 
 
 West, Benjamin, 46. 
 
 Whipple, Edwin Percy, cited, 31. 
 
5H 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 White, Richard Grant, his test of our 
 national literature, 5 ; on " The 
 Scarlet Letter," etc., 6; and see 
 400. 
 
 Whiting, Charles Goodrich, 360. 
 
 Whitman, Sarah Helen (1803-78), 50. 
 
 Whitman, Walter (" Walt "), his anti- 
 cipatory effort, 21 ; fresh portrayal 
 of outdoor nature, 47 ; iconoclasm, 
 59 ; recent views, ih. ; traits, 60 ; 
 strictures on American poetry, 60, 
 389, 390 ; influenced and encour- 
 aged by Emerson, 166 ; the latter's 
 qualification of early praise, ib. ; the 
 countertype of Poe, 263 ; review of 
 his life and works, 349-395 ; birth, 
 349; Salut au Monde, 349; publi- 
 city at home and abroad, 350 ; de- 
 bate concerning him, 350 - 353 ; 
 method of the present inquiry, 351 ; 
 his bearing, 352 ; life and song, 353 ; 
 a poet of lyric and idyllic genius, ib.; 
 leaves of Grass, reviewed, 354-365 ; 
 " Putnam's Monthly " on, 354 ; re- 
 lations to the Concord movement, 
 355 ; class feeling and provincial- 
 ism, 356 ; first impressions of, 357 ; 
 likeness and attitude, 357 ; analysis 
 of his theory and purpose, 358 ; Em- 
 erson on, 359 ; habits, haunts, etc., 
 359; "The Good Gray Poet," 360; 
 disciples in Europe and America, 
 360; treatment of, by his country- 
 men, 361 ; Centennial Edition, 362 ; 
 " Drum-Taps," " Two Rivulets," 
 etc., 362, 363 ; prose style, in " Dem- 
 ocratic Vistas," etc., 363 ; " Memo- 
 randa during the War," 364 ; poems 
 on Death, and Lincoln's "Burial 
 Hymn," 364; choice passages, 365; 
 his physical and sexual themes, 366 ; 
 "Children o* Adam," 366, 367; 
 alleged indecency, 367 ; his plea 
 in defence, 367; the true test of. 
 
 367 ; misconception of Nature's 
 law, 368-370; mistakes coarseness 
 for strength, 369 ; lack of spiritual- 
 ity) 37° i Rossetti's edition of, ib. ; 
 examination of his peculiar lyrical 
 method, 371-377 ; whence derived, 
 371 ; his protest against wonted 
 forms, 372 ; question of technique, 
 rhythm, accent, rhyme, etc., 373 ; 
 views on blank-verse, 374 ; his state- 
 ment of his theory, 375, — its true 
 origin, ib, ; results attained, 376 ; 
 fine diction, titles, epithets, 378 ; as 
 a poet of nature, 379 ; of humanity, 
 380 J his imagination, 380, 381 ; H. 
 M. Alden on, 381 ; his " Cata- 
 logues," ib. ; pathos and tenderness, 
 382 ; science, 382 ; protest against 
 conventionalism, 383 ; realism and 
 democracy, ib. ; incomplete view of 
 the latter, ib. ; narrowness, 384 ; not 
 read by the people, 385 ; poet of a 
 select and cultured class, 385 ; his 
 excessive formalism, 386, 387 ; 
 method compared with Words- 
 worth's, 387, 388 ; how far affected, 
 388, 389; his strictures on Amer- 
 ican poetry, 389, 390; egoism, 390; 
 benign and attractive old age, 391 ; 
 lecture on Lincoln, ib.; a rhapso- 
 dist, 392 ; summary of his traits and 
 abilities, 392-395; future place in 
 literature, 394; how far a figure- 
 painter, 466 ; and see 1 2, 96, 1 13, 
 
 "9. 153. 159. 220. 439. 473- 
 Whitney, Adeline Dutton Train 
 
 (1824- ), so. 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, his land- 
 scape, 47 ; the people's poet, 48 ; 
 more flexible than Bryant, 71 ; re- 
 view of his career and works, 95- 
 132 ; judgment of, by Greeley and 
 other typical Americans, 95 ; Eng. 
 lish verdict on, 96 ; how far 9 
 
INDEX. 
 
 515 
 
 national poet, 96, 97 ; Parkman's 
 " the Poet of New England," 97 ; 
 New England's bard, 97-99 ; a test 
 of this, 98 ; his constituency, 99, 
 100 ; poet of an historic time, 100 ; 
 birth and training, 101-104; an- 
 cestry, loi ; Quakerism, loi, 102; 
 early farm-life, 102 ; influenced by 
 Burns, 102, 103; first acquaintance 
 with Garrison, 103 ; entrance on 
 journalism, 103 ; Supernaturalism 
 of New England, 103, 114; edits 
 Brainard, IC4; devotes himself to 
 the anti-slavery cause, 104-106; 
 May and Bryant on, 104 ; Voices of 
 Freedom, 105; edits "The Free- 
 man," etc., 105 ; in the abolition 
 struggle, 106 i wins the popular 
 heart, 106 ; technical shortcomings, 
 107-109 ; hasty composition, news- 
 paper-rhymes, 108 ; a " reform-poet," 
 109; compared to Mrs. Browning, 
 109, 122; "Randolph of Roanoke," 
 etc., 109, 122; later artistic improve- 
 ment, 109; prose style, no; Mar- 
 garet Smith's Journal, no ; met- 
 rical style, 1 10 ; early volumes — 
 Mogg Megone, — Bridal of Pennor 
 cook, — Songs of Labor, ill; our 
 foremost balladist, 11 2-1 14; Qua- 
 ker ballads, 113 ; ballads of witch- 
 craft, etc., 113; "Skipper Ireson's 
 Ride," 114; Tent on the Beach, 114; 
 poet of rural life, 115-120; pastoral 
 spirit, 116; on Dinsmore, 116; 
 Snow-Bound, 1 17-120; his fancy 
 and imagination, 119; virginal 
 quality, 121 ; passionate anti-slavery 
 lyrics, 121 ; personal and memorial 
 poems, 122; "Ichabod," 122; reli- 
 gious exaltation, 123-128 ; militant 
 and ministrant, 124; his prayer and 
 praise, 125; transcendental spirit, 
 125, 126; scorn of bigotry, 127; 
 
 trust in the "inward light," 127, 
 128; a notable personage, 128; en- 
 dearing traits, purity, philanthropy, 
 earnestness, 129, 130 ; poet of the 
 altar and the hearth, 130 ; He- 
 braic fervor, 130 ; Oliver Johnson 
 on, 131 ; prophetic quality, 131 ; in 
 the Land of Beulah, 131 ; compared 
 with Taylor, 414; and see 12, 92, 
 191, 213, 216, 223, 313, 325, 385, 390, 
 400,412,439,452,459. 
 
 Whittredge, Worthington, 46. 
 
 Wigglesworth, Michael, 33. 
 
 Wilcox, Carlos, 47. 
 
 Wilde, Richard Henry, 37. 
 
 Will, Poe's lack of, 234, 269-272. 
 
 Williams, Roger, quoted, loi ; and 
 see 34. 
 
 " William Wilson," Poe's, 231. 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 41, 42, 75, 
 265, 266, 400, 401. 
 
 Willson, Byron Forceythe, 49, 453. 
 
 Wilson, John (" Christopher North "), 
 
 39. 257- 
 Wilson, Robert Burns (1850- ), 451. 
 Wilstach, John Augustine (1824- ), 
 
 55. 454- 
 
 Winslow, Edward, 34. 
 
 Winter, William, quoted, 236 ; his po- 
 etry and prose, 440. 
 
 Winthrop, John, 34. 
 .Winthrop, Robert Charles, 283. 
 
 Wit, Holmes's, 277 ; its tenure in art, 
 321; Lowell's, 332. 
 
 Wood, William, 34. 
 
 Woodberry, George Edward, 461. 
 
 "Woodnotes," 154, 164. 
 
 Woolsey, Sarah Channing (" Susan 
 Coolidge ") (18- ), 446. 
 
 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 463. 
 
 Wordsworth, Bryant's master, 66, 67, 
 72; quoted, &;, 76; Emerson on, 
 179; contrasted with Whitman, 387 ; 
 and see 39, 65, 70, 75, 134, 141, 149, 
 
5i6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 152. 173. 286, 315, 317, 319, 334, 335, 
 
 374. 444. 453. 47°. 
 Work, Henry Ciay (1832-84), 49, 443. 
 Wright, William Bull, 52, 443. 
 Wright, I. C, 212. 
 Wyant, A. H., 46. 
 
 " Xariffa." See Townsend, M. A. 
 
 Ximena, Taylor's, 399. 
 
 Year's Life, A, Lowell's, 309. 
 Young, William, 454. 
 Younger Poets, the, 61 ; and see Chap. 
 XII. 
 
 Zest, marked in Holmes, 278, 281. 
 
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