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AMERICAN 
 MEDITATIVE LYRICS 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE W. HUNT, Ph. D., Litt. D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH PROSE AND PROSE WRITERS," ETHICAL 
 
 STUDIES IN OLD ENGLISH AUTHORS, ETC. 
 
 Jllnstratcb 
 
 ft 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. B. TREAT, 5 Cooper Union 
 
 OFFICE OF THE TREASURY MAGAZINE 
 1896 
 
Copyright, 1896, by 
 E. B. Treat. 
 
TO 
 
 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Spiritual Element in Poetry 1 1 
 
 William Cullen Bryant 21 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 37 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 53 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe 69 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier 85 
 
 James Russell Lowell 103 
 
 Bayard Taylor 119 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes 135 
 
 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe 151 
 
 American Memorial Lyrics: Elegies 167 
 
 American Deyotional Lyrics: Hymns .... 183 
 
 Some Later Lyrists 197 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 As indicated by the title, it is the purpose of 
 this volume briefly to discuss American Lyrical 
 Verse, with exclusive reference to its meditative 
 quality as distinct from any other features it 
 may present in the line of a more objective 
 and secular type of poetry. Reference will be 
 made to representative poets only — to those 
 only whose work is specifically literary, and 
 mainly to authors whose poetic product has 
 already passed into literary history. No at- 
 tempt will be made fully to compass so wide 
 and fruitful a field, but only to give a view suf- 
 ficiently comprehensive to meet the demands 
 of intelligent readers, and stimulate their study 
 along similar lines. Naturally adapted as a topic 
 to the needs and tastes of the clergy and of 
 those who are specially inclined or committed 
 to the contemplative life, it is hoped that the 
 
treatise, in its simple method, may commend 
 itself to all those who are seeking in the poetry 
 that they read the spontaneous and serious ut- 
 terances of the human heart. 
 
 T. W. H. 
 
 Princeton, N. J., 
 March, 1896. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN 
 POETRY. 
 
 II 
 
CHAPTER FIRST. 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN 
 POETRY. 
 
 A QUESTION of interest emerges at the outset 
 as to the spiritual element in poetry : what it is 
 in its essential nature, to what degree it manifests 
 itself, what are the various forms of its manifes- 
 tation, and what the characteristics and salient 
 features which it gives to verse. It is to this 
 particular element in literature that Professor 
 Corson refers, as he writes, in his " Introduction 
 to Browning," of " the spiritual ebb and flow 
 of verse," emphasizing the fact that it appears 
 and recedes with something like the regularity 
 of the tides, sometimes, at the flood, and, some- 
 times, at the lowest ebb. Matthew Arnold ac- 
 knowledges the presence and potency of this 
 element, as he speaks of the Hebraic order of 
 British verse as contrasted with the Hellenic. 
 13 
 
1-i AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Modern critics speak of a school of English 
 poetry as the Oriental or scriptural, in the light 
 of this spiritual feature, " from which source 
 arises," says Devey , ' ' that earnestness of purpose, 
 that profound reflection and purity of feeling, 
 which make the higher order of English poets 
 stand out in advantageous contrast to the 
 heathen bards of antiquity." To the same effect, 
 a living American critic, Mabie, suggestively 
 writes: "The spiritual world is the background 
 of almost all modern poetry, from those early 
 songs of Longfellow, which have become the 
 familiar psalms of universal experience, to such 
 noble interpretations of human life from the 
 spiritual side as Tennyson's ' In Memoyiam,' ' 
 and, by way of special reference to our own 
 verse, he adds that this particular characteristic 
 has been illustrated, with one or two exceptions, 
 " in the entire company of American poets." 
 One of the marked exceptions to this principle, 
 the poet Whitman, confirms the correctness of 
 the statement by the severe character of the 
 criticism to which, by way of contrast, he has 
 voluntarily subjected himself. 
 
 Even though at times this unworldly feature 
 has taken an unattractive and extreme form, in 
 
SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN POETRY. 15 
 
 the phase of a Puritan order of piety and life, 
 its essential basis of spirituality has been present 
 to give solidity and tone to literary art. Be- 
 cause of the fact, moreover, that in the poetry 
 of Poe we have an expression of moral charac- 
 ter that is abnormal, this is not to lead us 
 to argue against the healthy presence of such 
 a quality. What, indeed, could more fully and 
 accurately portray the essential presence of 
 spiritual life, midway between the morbid verse 
 of Poe and the ultra-moralistic verse of Tupper, 
 than such sane and wholesome and meditative 
 lines as we find in the instructive pages of Bry- 
 ant and Emerson and Longfellow and Whit- 
 tier! Indeed, we go not beyond the truth of 
 the matter when we say that the primal func- 
 tion of verse, as distinct from prose, is to reveal 
 the supersensual to men. If Arnold is right in 
 saying that " the grand power of poetry is its 
 interpretative power," then we may add that its 
 main office as interpretative is to detect and dis- 
 close the spiritual element that there is in God 
 and nature and man and truth. It is its high 
 office to make the " vision divine " visible and 
 real to men, and so to minimize the distance be- 
 tween earth and heaven as to hallow the one by 
 
16 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 the other. Hence, poetry in its origin is more 
 divine than human, as the poets of old were poets 
 and priests in one, composing and singing what 
 they sang as the prophets of God for the holiest 
 ends. " All truth," says one, " that awakens 
 within us the feeling of the infinite is poetic." 
 Even Byron conceived of it " as the feeling of 
 past worlds and future," while, in the eye of 
 such a bard as Milton or Wordsworth or Mrs. 
 Browning or Mrs. Stowe, it never descended 
 below the level of a specifically spiritual art. If 
 this be so as to poetry in general, what may not 
 be said of the high spiritual purport of lyric 
 poetry — the utterance of the heart more than 
 of the head, the accepted medium, in all ages 
 and nations, for the revelation of the inner soul 
 of man, the literary Via Sacra, over whose high- 
 way there pass the purest spirits of the race with 
 their messages to men! In this view of it, the 
 meditative lyric at its best is -but another name 
 for the Christian idyl, such a collection as Mrs. 
 Stowe's " Religious Poems " representing it in 
 its normal function. In this view, indeed, Bry- 
 ant and Longfellow and Emerson, in their high 
 converse with truth and goodness as lyric poets, 
 stand so closely next t6 the specifically religious 
 
SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN POETRY. 17 
 
 lyrists of our literature, to Heber and Mont- 
 gomery and Toplady, as to make the distinction 
 almost invalid, and include our best reflective 
 poems within the sacred circle of English hym- 
 nology. How delicate the difference, after all, 
 as to their essential spirituality, between the 
 historic hymns of Hastings and Palmer and the 
 deeply religious verse of Lowell and Longfel- 
 low ; between " The Rock of Ages " and " The 
 Vision of Sir Launfal," or "The Cathedral"! 
 Nor need this spiritual principle be expressed 
 in any one way or method, but, just because it 
 is spiritual, it is as varied and as free as the moral 
 nature of man. In no sphere more than in this 
 does the personality of the poet reveal itself, it 
 lying within his own choice and the liberty of 
 his own literary instincts as to just how and how 
 fully he shall disclose this innermost quality of 
 himself and his work. Chaucer expressed it in 
 one form, in the life-like sketches of " The Can- 
 terbury Tales " ; Spenser, in another form, in his 
 great Protestant semi-epic ; Milton, in still an- 
 other; and Wordsworth, in still another. JjpIup i 
 Cowper wrote his "Task" and other secular 
 poems with as spiritual an intent as that with 
 which he wrote his hymns. The same intensity 
 
18 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 of moral earnestness and purpose characterizes 
 the most ordinary work of Mrs. Browning, while 
 the spiritual tone of Keats and Tennyson, though 
 just as really present, is uttered in a manner all 
 their own. So, in American verse, this difference 
 of manifestation is apparent, the meditative type 
 of Emerson being one thing and that of Bryant 
 another. So, do such poets as Lowell and Long- 
 fellow differ, as do Holmes and Whittier, Bayard 
 Taylor and Willis and Mrs. Stowe ; each of them, 
 however, in a true sense, recognizing the un- 
 worldly quality in verse and seeking to give it 
 some adequate embodiment. No attempts in 
 literature have been more unsuccessful than 
 those that have sometimes been made either to 
 ignore or to pervert this deep-seated instinct in 
 the nature of man, as the verse of Arnold and 
 Clough and Shelley and Wilde and Whitman 
 will attest. Sensuous verse or skeptical verse is 
 as untrue to the natural quality and aim of verse 
 as it is to the best natural instincts of man, and 
 only results in begetting in the souls of those 
 who subject themselves to it dissatisfaction with 
 themselves and the world. 
 
 A final word is in place to this effect : that 
 lyric verse, in its higher reflective and spiritual 
 
SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN POETRY. 19 
 
 forms, affords a study second to no other in all 
 that pertains to purity of soul and the quickening 
 of the inner and better life. Its special function 
 is to secure to the reader what Longinus has 
 called " elevation of thought and feeling," lifting 
 the whole being for the time outside of itself, 
 its trials and struggles and cares, into the upper 
 air of mental and moral peace. It is what a 
 modern writer has called " this interpenetration 
 of supernal radiance " that sets the soul free, 
 illumines all that is dark, eliminates all that is 
 low and belittling, and opens the way widely to 
 the clearer vision of God and truth. It is the 
 poetry of the affections, of the profoundest in- 
 stincts of men, of human hope and aspiration, 
 of those " breathings from the depths " of which 
 De Quincey writes, and what he himself so pas- 
 sionately and vainly struggled to embody in 
 human language. 
 
 " Epic verse reaches at times sublimer heights 
 of mental outlook, and dramatic verse, on its 
 tragic side, assays a bolder and more impressive 
 function ; but it is reserved for the lyric, in a 
 quieter and more conservative manner, to find 
 its way into the most interior recesses of the 
 heart and minister to our most urgent spiritual 
 
20 AM ERICA X MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 needs." To the clergy and the laity, to the special 
 student of literature, and to every lover of good 
 books, this spacious and inviting field is open. 
 It will be an auspicious day indeed for the mod- 
 ern world when such an order of literature as 
 this is appreciated at its full worth, and takes its 
 rightful place in every home and library as su- 
 perior to the lower and more transient literature 
 of the time. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 •2: 
 
^^^^^^^^<^^^r7 
 
 tjq4-i878. 
 
CHAPTER SECOND. 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 The critics are still busy in determining 
 which of all the historic and accepted divi- 
 sions of verse may be said to be the greatest : 
 whether it is the epic, as hitherto generally 
 held ; or the dramatic, as much of later literary 
 criticism holds; or the lyric, which has never 
 been more carefully and appreciatively studied 
 than it is now, and has never so stoutly contested 
 the claims of supremacy made by any other 
 poetic form. Be this as it may, this much can 
 safely be conceded, that, as lyric verse is the 
 oldest of all the forms, so it is the simplest, ten- 
 derest, and most impressive ; appealing, as it does, 
 to the deepest affections and sympathies of the 
 human heart, its joys and sorrows, its loves and 
 hates, its passions and aspirations, its hopes and 
 fears, so as to leave no part of the complex na- 
 25 
 
26 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 ture of man unvisited by its appeals. The rich 
 variety of its orders or classes is sufficient to re- 
 veal the spacious scope that it covers, and its 
 wondrous adaptability to all the phases of earthly 
 experience. In ode and sonnet, in pastoral and 
 elegy, in song and idyl, in one species or an- 
 other, it finds a fitting medium for its expres- 
 sion, and also finds a ready entrance into the 
 most guarded recesses of the spirit of man. 
 The epic may surpass it in majesty of movement 
 and a corresponding dignity and grandeur of 
 effect, and the dramatic may surpass it, on its 
 tragic side, in a sublime seriousness of manner, 
 or a bold and startling revelation of human sin 
 and struggle ; but neither of them is comparable 
 to it in that sweet and gracious influence it ex- 
 erts over all human faculties and feelings, in that 
 subdued and softening impressiveness of which 
 the restless spirit of humanity is, in such urgent 
 need. It is in this special province of lyric verse 
 that our American literature finds its most at- 
 tractive and fruitful field, so that it would be 
 difficult to collect a richer anthology of the 
 idyllic order than that given us in any well-se- 
 lected Lyrica Americana, while it is from this 
 side of verse, most of all, that the compass and 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 27 
 
 excellence of our poetic product are to be judged. 
 Beginning as far back as the days of Freneau 
 and Rodman Drake, it unfolds itself in the 
 pages of Poe and Halleck and Bryant and 
 Willis, on through the rich succession of our 
 leading lyrists in the persons of Emerson and 
 Longfellow, Whittier and Lowell, and the mod- 
 ern school of Lanier and Aldrich and Carleton 
 and Stedman, which later bards, it may be said 
 without hesitation, have been singing in as 
 strong and as sweet a key as did their great 
 historic forerunners in the golden age of our 
 native verse. Especially in the line of the de- 
 scriptive and delineative has this poetic work 
 been of pronounced excellence, whether as repre- 
 senting the world of physical phenomena, in all 
 its variety of light and shade, of valley, stream, 
 and mountain, or the vastly wider world of 
 mental and spiritual phenomena, in its endless 
 diversity of thought and character and life. 
 
 Of all the historic forms which such a deline- 
 ation of human experience has assumed in lyric 
 verse, none is more characteristically American 
 or more impressive in its effects than what we 
 have termed the meditative, known at times as 
 didactic or ethical verse, as seen in the poems 
 
28 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 of Wordsworth or Cowper. Its conspicuous 
 quality is its reflective tone and temper, that 
 quiet and pensive order of verse which arises 
 from the poet's undisturbed communings on 
 God and man and human life and destiny, and 
 appeals directly and profoundly to the most 
 intense experience of the reader. It would not 
 be amiss to call it subjective or introspective 
 verse, dealing with conscience and the moral 
 nature of man; and in this view of it, as spe- 
 cifically homiletic in its type, it comes with sin- 
 gular aptness and force to those engaged in the 
 study and diffusion of truth. We know of no 
 species of poetry more germane to devout and 
 thoughtful minds than this, surcharged, as it is, 
 with moral meaning, and evoking, as it is read, 
 all the deepest ethical impulses of the soul. 
 Passing over, not infrequently, from the region 
 of the merely meditative into the richer region 
 of the spiritual, it assumes the character of sa- 
 cred and devotional song, and lies closely next 
 to the specifically inspired verse of Scripture. 
 Much of the hymnology of the Christian 
 church is but a higher form of it, while, in its most 
 unspiritual expressions, it appeals directly to the 
 soul's purest sensibilities. How often might the 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 29 
 
 monotony of the sermon be relieved by an apt 
 quotation from the lyric lines of Longfellow or 
 Lowell! How often, indeed, might a biblical 
 teaching be enforced or a homiletic hint be fast- 
 ened by such a reference to the reflective Eng- 
 lish and American poets! Moreover, what a 
 gracious and chastening effect would an experi- 
 mental acquaintance with such poetry have on 
 the distinctly intellectual life of the preacher 
 and teacher of truth, as it exalts the spiritual 
 over the mental, the utterances of the heart 
 over the language of the schools, and, for the 
 time being, makes one forget that he is not so 
 much a sermonizer or a student as he is a man 
 among men, a lover of goodness and of beauty, 
 an interpreter of human experience to his fel- 
 low-men! Here and there, a line from so lov- 
 able and thoughtful a bard as Whittier would 
 so point a moral as to make its impression deep 
 and permanent. 
 
 With these thoughts in mind, we turn instinc- 
 tively to Bryant, our earliest notable poet in the 
 province of the meditative, and, in some re- 
 spects, not surpassed by any later name. What- 
 ever may be the classification of his poems on 
 
30 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 which different critics, from various points of 
 view, insist, this reflective feature is discernible. 
 Wittingly or unwittingly, he never allows us to 
 forget it; while, if we look carefully between 
 the lines, we find him saying that this is, after 
 all, the dominant purpose of his verse and of all 
 true verse. In what may be termed his Hebraic 
 poems, such as " Rizpah " and " The Song of 
 the Stars," this quality is controlling; so, in his 
 North American poems, as in " The Indian 
 Girl's Lament." Even in his national verse, 
 such as " Our Country's Call " and " The Death 
 of Lincoln," the tone is of this thoughtful order, 
 as, also, in his " Translations " from the various 
 European tongues there is the evident presence 
 of the meditative. No theme can be so secular 
 that he will not, ere he closes, remind us that it 
 has a moral purport, and should be so presented 
 and received. This is significantly shown in the 
 manner in which he develops subjects taken from 
 the external world of organic and inorganic na- 
 ture, so that it is scarcely too much to say that 
 these physical topics are as full of the higher 
 teaching and spirit as those that are distinctively 
 reflective. 
 
 How clearly this is seen in " Thanatopsis," 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 31 
 
 his first great poem — a poem in which the 
 earthly and the unearthly are so conjoined and 
 fused that no dividing line can be discerned ! 
 Our love of nature is to express itself in " com- 
 munion with her visible forms " ; the voice to 
 which we are summoned to listen is " a still 
 voice," and the natural world is used through- 
 out the poem but as a symbol by which the 
 great realities of the supernatural world are set 
 before us and impressed upon us. 
 
 From those poems of a general descriptive 
 character that have for their purpose the por- 
 trayal of natural life and scenery, and also in- 
 volve this meditative element, the discerning 
 reader can scarcely choose amiss. Thus, in 
 " Autumn Woods," he sings, after describing 
 the purely physical beauties of the trees : 
 
 11 Ah! 'twere a lot too blest 
 
 Forever in thy colored shades to stray ; 
 Amid the kisses of the soft southwest 
 
 To rove and dream for aye ; 
 And leave the vain low strife 
 
 That makes men mad — the tug for wealth and power, 
 The passions and the cares that wither life, 
 
 And waste its little hour." 
 
 So in "A Forest Hymn," with its rare combination 
 of epic majesty and lyric tenderness, as he sings : 
 
32 AMERICA X MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " Father, Thy hand 
 Hath reared these venerable columns, Thou 
 Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down 
 Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose 
 All these fair ranks of trees. . . . 
 My heart is awed within me when I think 
 Of the great miracle that still goes on 
 In silence round me — the perpetual work 
 Of Thy creation, finished, yet renewed 
 Forever. . . . 
 
 Be it ours to meditate 
 In these calm shades, Thy milder majesty. 
 And to the beautiful order of Thy works 
 Learn to conform the order of our lives." 
 
 Bryant seemed to be especially happy and 
 at home in the composition of these forest 
 hymns, in that they brought him face to face 
 with nature, stirred within him all the finer 
 feelings of the heart, and enabled him to wor- 
 ship God directly, without the intervention of 
 priest or ritual. He thoroughly believed that 
 "the groves were God's first temples." So, in 
 such nature-poems as "The Evening Wind," 
 " The Snow-shower," " The Song of the Sower," 
 " The Return of the Birds," and " June." We 
 have sometimes thought that we look in vain 
 in English and American lyrics for anything 
 richer in the line of reflective song than that 
 which we find in "June" as it opens. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 33 
 
 '' I gazed upon the glorious sky 
 
 And the green mountains round, 
 And thought that when I came to lie 
 
 At rest within the ground, 
 'Twere pleasant that in flowery June, 
 When brooks send up a cheerful tune, 
 
 And groves a joyous sound, 
 The sexton's hand, my grave to make, 
 The rich, green mountain-turf should break. 
 
 'And what if cheerful shouts at noon 
 
 Come, from the village sent, 
 Or song of maids, beneath the moon, 
 
 With fairy laughter blent? 
 And what if, in the evening light, 
 Betrothed lovers walk in sight 
 
 Of my low monument? 
 I would the lovely scene around 
 Might know no sadder sight nor sound. 
 
 " I know that I no more should see 
 
 The season's glorious show, 
 Nor would its brightness shine for me, 
 
 Nor its wild music flow ; 
 But if around my place of sleep 
 The friends I love should come to weep, 
 
 They might not haste to go. 
 Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom, 
 Should keep them lingering by my tomb." 
 
 All this is simply matchless as an expression 
 of idyllic tenderness, rich poetic melody, and 
 impressive ethical teaching, so that we wonder 
 
34 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 whether Bryant can be any more meditative and 
 suggestive when he leaves the province of ma- 
 terial nature for the distinctive province of 
 moral teaching, as seen in such poems as " The 
 Ages," " The Future Life," " An Evening Rev- 
 erie," and " The Flood of Years." Thus, in 
 " The Crowded Street," after describing the 
 restless movement to and fro that one can daily 
 see in a thronged thoroughfare, he closes with 
 the lines : 
 
 " Each where his tasks or pleasures call, 
 They pass and heed each other not. 
 There is who heeds, who holds them all, 
 In His large love and boundless thought. 
 
 " These struggling tides of life, that seem 
 In wayward, aimless course to tend, 
 Are eddies of the mighty stream, 
 That rolls to its appointed end." 
 
 Whatever the topic, method, meter, or spe- 
 cific purpose, Bryant thus insists that poetry fails 
 of its greatest mission if, with all its literary cor- 
 rectness and spirit, it does not succeed in en- 
 nobling the moral nature of man. How emi- 
 nently wholesome and tonic, therefore, is all this 
 verse, lifting the soul of the reader to the higher 
 levels, where the air is clearer and the outlook 
 
WILLIAM CULL EX BRYANT. 35 
 
 wider; repressing every unhallowed thought 
 and desire ; keeping him in line with all that is 
 best ; and especially needed in these latter days, 
 when poets and prose writers alike deem it far 
 too often a sign of literary weakness to exalt the 
 spiritual in art, and much prefer to cross the line 
 over into the region of the animal and fleshly ! 
 Bryant and Whitman ! What a contrast here 
 we have between the realism of the soul and the 
 realism of the senses ; between lyric piety and 
 lyric coarseness; between " Thanatopsis " and 
 " Leaves of Grass." 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
J<l«A~*yV< . ^—^ 
 
 «JJ^s~uJ> 
 
 TS07-18S2. 
 
CHAPTER THIRD. 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 If we were to judge from a poet's ancestry 
 and general antecedents what the character of 
 his poetry ought to be, we should certainly say 
 as to Longfellow that it should be eminently 
 thoughtful and instructive ; good poetry, in every 
 sense of the word ; the spontaneous expression 
 of a good man with but one governing purpose 
 in his verse — the doing good in the world in 
 which Providence had placed him. His sturdy 
 Puritan and Pilgrim lineage guaranteed this; 
 the old Yorkshire stock to which he belonged 
 in the line of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens 
 guaranteed it ; the mental and moral dower he 
 received through his father, Stephen, and his 
 mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, guaranteed it ; the 
 beautiful environment of his early days in the 
 old-fashioned ai\d cultured city of Portland, the 
 
 41 
 
4=2 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " dear old town " of his childhood, guaranteed 
 it ; while it may be said that there seemed to 
 be in his experience that combination of nature 
 and grace, of human and divine approval, of in- 
 herited blessing and acquired blessing, that set 
 all the currents of his being from the first stead- 
 ily toward what was best, and made it impos- 
 sible for him to be any other than he was — one 
 of the cleanest, sweetest characters and sons of 
 song that any literature possesses. That when 
 a mere lad in his teens such a poet as the de- 
 vout Cowper interested him, and such a prose 
 writer as the gentle Irving was a formative in- 
 fluence in his life, we are not at all surprised to 
 learn ; nor surprised further to learn that, though 
 a free-hearted, genuine New England boy, fond 
 of boyish sports and full of boyish ambitions, 
 he was also fond of turning aside, not infre- 
 quently, from the playground to the library, 
 from frolicking to musing, and early caught an 
 inspiring vision of the great future that was 
 awaiting him. It is thus that in his charming 
 reflective and retrospective poem, " My Lost 
 Youth," written in middle manhood, he recalls 
 those secret musings in which he indulged as a 
 child at school : 
 
HE A r R V 11 'A DS 1 1 r 0R 1 II L OA T GFEL LOW. 43 
 
 " I remember the gleams and glooms that dart 
 
 Across the school-boy's brain; 
 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.' " 
 
 It was in these " long, long thoughts" that 
 he indulged, half in boyish reverie and half in 
 serious purpose, wondering even then at these 
 " prophecies " of youth, these " longings " of 
 his soul for a something far beyond, into the 
 gradual revelation and realization of which a 
 gracious destiny was yet to lead him. All this 
 was singularly characteristic in its essential 
 gravity of manner and outlook, and naturally 
 deepened in its impressiveness in his college 
 days at Bowdoin, when he and Hawthorne, 
 that introspective boy, walked together through 
 the streets of quaint old Brunswick and out into 
 the open country, talking of college life and 
 youthful aspirations, and wondering what the 
 larger life of the great world without was to 
 bring them, and what, perchance, they in turn 
 were to bring to it. " If this institution," says 
 
44 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Hawthorne, in his novel " Fanshawe," '' did not 
 offer all the advantages of elder and prouder 
 seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to 
 its students by the inculcation of regular habits 
 and of a deep and awful sense of religion, which 
 seldom deserted them in life." It was this deep 
 religious sense that lay at the basis of Long- 
 fellow's nature and found a discreet expression 
 in all the phases of his later work. In such a 
 prose work as " Outre-Mer," light and descrip- 
 tive as it is, we are not surprised to note such 
 papers as " Pere La Chaise," " The Baptism of 
 Fire," and " The Devotional Poetry of Spain " ; 
 as in his romance " Hyperion," he writes of 
 " The Christ of Andernach," " Curfew Bells," 
 " Shadows on the Wall," and " The Footprints 
 of Angels." In the charming tale " Kavanagh " 
 there is a rich vein of suggestive teaching run- 
 ning through it all, as when he says of morality, 
 that " without religion it is only a kind of dead 
 reckoning — an endeavor to find our place on a 
 cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have 
 run, but without any observation of the heav- 
 enly bodies." 
 
 It is, however, when this sober-minded 
 author enters fairly on his great poetic career 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LOXGFELLOW. 45 
 
 that he may be said to find himself and find 
 his readers, as through the avenue of lyric and 
 descriptive verse he unbosoms his soul to us as 
 it meditates on God and man and human life 
 and destiny. There is a sense in which all his 
 lyric verse might fitly come under the title of 
 one of his earliest and most notable poems, 
 " A Psalm of Life," as it makes reality and 
 earnestness the great factors of character and 
 guiding principles of action. From his first col- 
 lection of poems, "The Voices of the Night," 
 in 1839, to his last collection, " In the Harbor," 
 in 1882, the year of his death, this meditative 
 feature is always present, and, often, prominent, 
 and ever seen connected with a genial, cheerful, 
 hopeful view of life and duty and human history. 
 Not the faintest trace do we find here of the 
 morbid and morose, as in the school of Arnold 
 and Clough and Swinburne and Poe ; nothing 
 of the pessimistic wail of the disappointed world- 
 ling, as in the school of Byron ; no unhallowed 
 commingling of the sensual and the supersen- 
 sual, as in the poetry of Shelley and Whitman ; 
 and no merely pedantic attempt, in his most 
 serious utterances, to lose the poet in the 
 preacher, or, at all hazards, to point a moral, 
 
46 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 after the manner of Martin Tupper, or that 
 of Pollock, in "The Course of Time." The 
 "Night Thoughts " of Edward Young may de- 
 serve the stinging sarcasm of Voltaire for their 
 enforced exhortations to duty, but not so " The 
 Voices of the Night " by Longfellow. Even 
 Bryant, in his best poetic work, failed, at times, in 
 this respect, where his more gifted contemporary 
 never failed, nor is there an author in American 
 letters, if, indeed, in British, who has written so 
 much and so ably within the sphere of purely 
 meditative verse, and so succeeded in keeping 
 wholly this side the line of the merely moralistic, 
 and within the safer and more attractive province 
 of poetry. All the more, however, has he suc- 
 ceeded in stamping upon our native verse a 
 meditative impress, from which it cannot and 
 would not divert itself in any later poetic era. 
 Whatever classification may be made of Long- 
 fellow's poems, as descriptive, dramatic, and 
 lyric, it is the lyric order that is the most com- 
 mon, most pronounced, most in keeping with the 
 poet's genius and taste, and most appreciated by 
 all those who have at heart the permanent suc- 
 cess of the author. Some of these lyrics take a 
 national form, as his tribute to " President Gar- 
 
ffEXKY WADSU'ORTII LOXGFELLOW. 47 
 
 field " ; some, the legendary form, as, " The 
 Burial of the Minnesink" \ some, the form of 
 the ballad and sonnet, as the lines to Dante 
 and Keats ; while by far the most frequent and 
 satisfactory expression of these idyllic verses is 
 in the line of the meditative and moral. Here 
 he was himself, thoroughly at home, and made 
 his readers at once at home with him. We may 
 thus turn over the leaves of his poetry almost at 
 random to find fitting illustration of the fertility 
 of his genius in the expression of human senti- 
 ment. Thus, in that beautiful lyric, " Footsteps 
 of Angels," beginning: 
 
 " When the hours of day are numbered, 
 And the voices of the night 
 Wake the better soul, that slumbered, 
 To a holy, calm delight ; " 
 
 and ending with equal tenderness : 
 
 " Oh, though oft depressed and lonely, 
 All my fears are laid aside 
 If I but remember only 
 
 Such as these have lived and died.'' 
 
 So, in such selections as " The Reaper and the 
 Flowers," " God's-Acre," "The Rainy Day," 
 " The Old Clock on the Stairs," " The Psalm of 
 
48 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Life," and "Resignation," with its familiar 
 opening : 
 
 " There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
 But one dead lamb is there ; 
 There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
 But has one vacant chair." 
 
 Even in his translations this governing pur- 
 pose is visible, as in " The Children of the Lord's 
 Supper" and "The Good Shepherd." So, outside 
 the province of the lyric proper, he is the same 
 contemplative bard, musing over the great prob- 
 lems of the soul of man, as in " Evangeline " and 
 " Hiawatha." In his dramatic trilogy " Chris- 
 tus," including " The Golden Legend," " The 
 Divine Tragedy," and " New England Trage- 
 dies," this profound passion of his heart is 
 everywhere apparent ; so that, after all, the lyric 
 governs the dramatic, and reveals the true direc- 
 tion of the poet's powers. His affectionate at- 
 titude toward children, and his lines written on 
 their behalf, serve but to indicate still more fully 
 this sensitive element in his nature and the " soul 
 of goodness " that was in him, so that he is 
 claimed by the young as by the old, evincing the 
 fact that he succeeded in impressing all classes 
 without passing to the extreme either of frivolity 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LOXG FELLOW. 49 
 
 or moroseness. It is not strange, indeed, that 
 the poet has somewhat suffered here at the hands 
 of the cynic and the ultra-critical, charged, as he 
 has been, with being moralistic and edifying to 
 a fault. It may be so, and yet who of us would 
 eliminate it from his verse, or modify in one iota 
 the primary purpose of his poetry ! Moreover, 
 so sweet and gracious was his personality that 
 what in others would have been resented by the 
 reader as " church-steeple " exhortation is re- 
 ceived at his hands with gratitude. With him, 
 as with Whittier, against whom the same accusa- 
 tion has been spoken, there was no sharp dis- 
 tinction between secular and sacred verse. All 
 verse was sacred, and the writing of it was ac- 
 cepted as a moral trust, so that " The Belfry at 
 Bruges," " Nuremburg," " The Building of the 
 Ship," and " Christmas Bells" were as instinct 
 with sacred purpose as were " The Two An- 
 gels " and " The Ladder of St. Augustine." To 
 think of Longfellow writing verse or prose as 
 Byron wrote it, or to write it for any other pur- 
 pose than thereby to do good and cheer the lives 
 of good men, is quite out of the question, even 
 if in so doing he, at times, provoked adverse criti- 
 cism, and, at times, sacrificed intellectual vigor to 
 
50 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 the sway of human sentiment. As he says in 
 " Kavanagh," " In character, in manner, in style, 
 in all things, the supreme excellence is simpli- 
 city ; " and he adds, " Many people judge of the 
 power of a book by the shock it gives their feel- 
 ings." How characteristically absent from the 
 verse before us is anything that would shock 
 the most delicate nature ! How true it is to all 
 the best and deepest instincts of the soul ; and 
 as the lines run on in their even, quiet way, what 
 hope and comfort they bring, what calm to 
 the troubled spirits, what encouragement to the 
 despondent, as the reader feels for the time that 
 he is communing with a friend rather than pe- 
 rusing the literary product of an author! Such 
 verse as this, we have said, is eminently adapted 
 to the clergy in their contemplative life and 
 spiritual work, and eminently adapted, we may 
 add, to what Mr. Bryce has called this " Age of 
 Discontent," this restless, overbusy, bustling, and 
 blustering age, looking on every hand for excit- 
 ing scenes and events, rating men and measures 
 according to the stir that they awaken, and pro- 
 testing in emphatic words against the dull com- 
 monplace of modern civilization. What, we may 
 seriously inquire, is to become of us, if these 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 51 
 
 newsmongers and curiosity-seekers are to have 
 their way and set the form of modern life! 
 What, especially, is to issue in literature, and, 
 most of all, in verse, if this din of the market- 
 place is to prevail, and the value of poetry be 
 based on its efficacy in ministering to this insatia- 
 ble spirit of unrest ! It w r as precisely against this 
 growing tendency that Emerson so courageously 
 spoke and wrote as he contended for the domi- 
 nance of " spiritual laws " in every sphere of 
 human effort. So did Longfellow live and write 
 " in the still air of delightful studies," and so does 
 the study of his verse soften and subdue our 
 peaceless spirits. 
 
 There is such a thing as restful reading, and 
 the poetry before us is a notable example, as is 
 all that verse which is prevailingly meditative. 
 Such an order of reading is more than restful. 
 It purifies as well as pacifies the mental and 
 moral nature, awakens within the soul all the 
 holier affections and impulses, brings it into sym- 
 pathetic relation with all that is best in life and 
 song, and for a while, at least, uplifts us 
 
 " Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, 
 Which men call Earth." 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 53 
 
jKyti/a£&> <£™^fe*~ 
 
 1803-1882. 
 
CHAPTER FOURTH. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson is.thought of, per- 
 haps, by the great majority of American readers 
 and literary students, as a writer whose work is 
 confined to the sphere of prose miscellany, the 
 author of profound papers on Plato and Shake- 
 speare, and such abstract topics as ability, origin- 
 ality, and greatness. His most important work, 
 it is true, is in prose, though no reader can be 
 said to know Emerson fully who is not familiar 
 with that limited but characteristic contribution 
 that he has made to the volume of our native 
 verse, such a contribution being especially inter- 
 esting in that his prose and verse were at length 
 so mutually interactive. In no particular was 
 this influence of the one upon the other more 
 marked than along those meditative lines that 
 we are now following. Critics have emphasized 
 57 
 
58 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 correctly the contemplative type of Emerson's 
 essays and of his prose style in general. The 
 themes that he treats are sufficient evidence of 
 this, as seen in " Spiritual Laws," " Character," 
 "Inspiration," "Religion," "Worship," and 
 " Immortality," while subjects the most secular 
 and practical are approached and discussed in 
 the same sobriety of spirit and with the same 
 high intent. His clerical ancestry back through 
 successive generations was a partial explanation 
 of this. His study of theology, his ordination to 
 the ministry, and his active experience in min- 
 isterial work, go far to explain it ; while, quite 
 apart from such antecedents and personal duties, 
 he was constitutionally and profoundly medita- 
 tive as a man and as an author, pre-inclined to 
 the subjective and cogitative. His philosophy 
 was introspective, his style and teaching were 
 introspective, so that when he sat down to the 
 composition of verse it would have been unnat- 
 ural for him to have written anything other than 
 reflective verse. 
 
 Critics have classified his poems as descrip- 
 tive, national, and autobiographic. The fact is 
 that, from first to last, they are meditative — sim- 
 ply the way in which the thoughtful Emerson 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 59 
 
 expressed his musings through the medium of 
 metrical language, whether the topic be in itself 
 reflective, as " The Problem " or " Destiny," or 
 whether in its character far removed from that, 
 as " My Garden " or " The Song of Nature." 
 
 The celebrated Greek critic, Longinus, sums 
 up all the essential elements of poetry and art 
 in the one word " sublimity," or, as he interprets 
 it etymologically, elevation of idea, feeling, and 
 expression. No one word could better set forth 
 the Emersonian spirit and purpose, insomuch 
 that all his mental and moral activities met and 
 were fused in this one generic principle. In the 
 best sense of the term, his poetry was dignified, 
 lifted high above all that was base and belittling, 
 and ever looking higher, if so be it might see the 
 face of God. It is in this sense that his phi- 
 losophy has been called transcendental. His 
 poetry was such, even to the extent of being 
 Platonic, and, at times, mystic. No man or au- 
 thor was to him representative or worth the at- 
 tention of the reader in whom this supernal qual- 
 ity was not more or less distinctive, as he saw 
 it in Goethe and Shakespeare and Plato. In 
 discussing what he calls " The Uses of ' Great 
 Men,' " he finds these " uses " beneficial to the 
 
60 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 race just to the degree in which they raise the 
 eyes of men from earth to heaven, and induce 
 a reverent contemplation of the truth. One of 
 the explanations of Emerson's occasional ob- 
 scurity both in prose and verse is found in the 
 fact that his thoughts were too elevated for 
 verbal embodiment, in accordance with Kant's 
 definition of sublimity, " the attempt to express 
 the infinite in the finite." His conception of the 
 nature and office of poetry was of this supersen- 
 sual, extramundane order. Thus, in his "Frag- 
 ments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift," he writes 
 to those who would attempt in verse to reach and 
 express the truth : 
 
 " Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift, 
 
 Sit still, and Truth is near ; 
 Suddenly it will uplift 
 
 Your eyelids to the sphere ; 
 Wait a little ; you shall see 
 
 The portraiture of things to be." 
 
 It was this uplifting of the eye, in truly Miltonic 
 manner, to the vision of the sphere, to the partial 
 view, at least, of the infinities and immensities, 
 on which he zealously insisted as essential to the 
 first idea of a poet's function, applying peculiarly 
 to the poet what he writes of every true inquirer : 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSOX. 61 
 
 " Around the man who seeks a noble end, 
 Not angels, but divinities, attend." 
 
 Herein is found one of the most potent reasons 
 for a knowledge of the poetry of Emerson on 
 the part of every high-minded man, and herein 
 one of its strongest claims upon the attention of 
 the clergy, in that the effect of it is spiritually 
 invigorating and exalting. No man can read 
 it intelligently and sympathetically and not be 
 made the purer and nobler thereby, and it is in 
 this spirit, primarily, that it is to be perused. If 
 we come to it as we come to the poetry of 
 Holmes or Lowell, or even as to that of the 
 gentle and gracious Whittier, we shall come 
 amiss. Even Bryant and Longfellow are medi- 
 tative in a different way. No poet is more unique 
 than Emerson in the specific tone and quality of 
 his contemplative verse, as no other poet can for 
 a moment be mistaken for him. We should as 
 little look in any other American bard for such 
 poems as " The Sphinx," " The World," " Soul," 
 " Sursum Corda," and " Brahma," as look in 
 Emerson for " Evangeline " or " Snow-bound." 
 On certain broad lines of poetic effort these vari- 
 ous poets meet and commune, but as each of 
 them may be said to have a sphere of his own, 
 
62 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Emerson, of all others, occupies some territory 
 absolutely alone, and will admit of no intruder, 
 and this exclusive area is especially that in which 
 poetic sublimity rises to its highest level. Hence, 
 we come amiss to such a poetic seer if we come 
 to be merely interested or entertained, or to find 
 the conditions of what is known as readable and 
 popular verse. Merely to be readable no poet 
 ever aimed less directly than Emerson. Great 
 ideas were latent within him, striving toward ex- 
 pression. Great ideals were before him, toward 
 the realization of which he was ever aiming, but 
 all without a thought of personal fame or of a 
 large literary constituency or even the progress 
 of letters, or of anything save the utterance of 
 truth for the truth's sake and the highest good 
 of man. A few citations from his verse will con- 
 firm these statements to every intelligent reader. 
 Thus in " Good-By " he writes : 
 
 " Good-by to Flattery's fawning face ; 
 To Grandeur, with his wise grimace ; 
 To upstart Wealth's averted eye; 
 To supple Office, low and high ; 
 To crowded halls, to court and street ; 
 To frozen hearts and hasting feet ; 
 To those who go and those who come ; 
 Good-by, proud world! I'm going home. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. G3 
 
 Oil, when I am safe in my sylvan home, 
 I tread on the pride of Greeee and Rome ; 
 And when I am stretched beneath the pines, 
 Where the evening star so holy shines, 
 I laugh at the lore and pride of man, 
 At the sophist schools and the learned clan ; 
 For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
 When man in the bush with God may meet." 
 
 There is in lines such as these an almost Mosaic 
 or Hebraic element, scorning all contact with 
 what is merely material and worldly, and mak- 
 ing communion with God and the good the one 
 central business of life. Wealth and station and 
 the best that earth can offer are as nothing in 
 comparison with love and adoration and worship 
 and the daily contemplation of the divine. So, 
 he writes in " Woodnotes " : 
 
 " Go where he will, the wise man is at home ; 
 His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome ; 
 Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, 
 By God's own light illumined and foreshowed." 
 
 This reads as if from Bryant's " Thanatopsis," 
 only possessing a deeper meaning and pulsating 
 with a more vigorous spiritual life. How much 
 like Bryant his love of solitude in the depths of 
 the forests and the hills, as he sings : 
 
64 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " Whoso walks in solitude 
 And inhabiteth the wood, 
 Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird 
 Before the money-loving herd, 
 Into that forester shall pass 
 From these companions, power and grace!" 
 
 It was the " money-loving herd " that he instinc- 
 tively shunned, protesting that life could not be 
 reduced to a commercial basis, and that it was 
 worth living only to the degree in which one 
 could rise above its lower levels to the vision and 
 love of the best. In his lines on " May-day," 
 "The Adirondack^, " "Nature," the theistic 
 verges closely on the pantheistic, as he sees 
 "the front of God" wherever he looks, and in- 
 sists that, if we but listen closely, we can hear 
 the voices of the spheres and stars : 
 
 " Over his head were the maple buds, 
 And over the tree was the moon, 
 And over the moon were the starry studs 
 That drop from the angels' shoon." 
 
 As he sings in his " Fragments on the Poet " : 
 
 " Let me go where'er I will, 
 I hear a sky-born music still." 
 
 No couplet could better express the essential 
 spirit of the personality and poetry of Emerson, 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. G5 
 
 with his heartand eareveropen to catch the sound 
 of that " sky-born music " that he loved to hear. 
 
 " It sounds from all things old, 
 
 It sounds from all things young, 
 From all that's fair, from all that's foul, 
 
 Peals out a cheerful song. 
 It is not only in the rose, 
 
 It is not only in the bird, 
 Not only where the rainbow glows, 
 
 Nor in the song of woman heard. 
 But in the darkest, meanest things 
 There alway, alway, something sings." 
 
 This " something" was the voice of God in the 
 world, the clear and unmistakable note from 
 Heaven, calling men aside from sin and care and 
 worldly ambitions to the meditation and worship 
 of God. No din of the market-place or crowded 
 street could be so loud as to prevent the hear- 
 ing of this clear call from above, and no science, 
 philosophy, literature, art, or life could be ac- 
 cepted that did not hear and heed this voice 
 from Heaven. Emerson called himself a Chris- 
 tian theist. His verse is thus Christianly theistic, 
 conceived and composed under the guidance of 
 those spiritual laws which he was so fond of 
 stating and impressing. Evincing something 
 of Shelley's supernaturalism, he carefully keeps 
 
66 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 this side the dangerous line which Shelley so 
 often crosses, in the safer and saner company of 
 Milton and Wordsworth and Bryant. If, indeed, 
 he ever errs, his error is itself pardonable, in that 
 we discern the overmastering purpose to exalt 
 the divine above the human, and vitally connect 
 poetry and all literature with the celestial verities. 
 One of Matthew Arnold's most famous papers is 
 on Emerson, in which he takes occasion, some- 
 what cynically, to depreciate his work and art. 
 How vastly superior, however, is the American 
 poet to the British in that profound spirituality 
 of manner and purpose of which we are speak- 
 ing, so that where the one keeps his eye clearly 
 on the wisdom and beneficence of God, the 
 other first doubts divine truth and then ques- 
 tions his own doubts, until poet and reader alike 
 are lost in an endless maze of vagaries! 
 
 So have Carlyle and Emerson been brought 
 into conspicuous relationship by that notable 
 correspondence between them which is one of 
 the treasures of modern literature, and yet, here 
 again, how serene and uplifting the moral influ- 
 ence of the Concord poet as compared with that 
 hesitating and skeptical attitude assumed by his 
 British contemporary whenever he attempts to 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. G7 
 
 deal with the fundamental problems of human 
 life ! He warned young men against the appar- 
 ently successful principles of Napoleon, because 
 he was "the man of the world." He defends 
 Swedenborg as he does simply from his passion- 
 ate love for the supernal in doctrine and life, 
 while, with all his admiration for Goethe, he 
 takes exception to him because " he has not as- 
 cended to the highest grounds from which gen- 
 ius has spoken, has not worshiped the highest 
 unity, and is incapable of a self-surrender to 
 the moral sentiment." In his pages on "The 
 Preacher " he laments that " the venerable and 
 beautiful traditions in which we were educated 
 are losing their hold on human belief," and 
 prophesies that " the next age will behold God 
 in the ethical laws." 
 
 Thus, in prose and verse alike, this New Eng- 
 land apostle of truth, as he conceived, wrote and 
 strove for the larger and better things, and aimed 
 to lift the world somewhat above itself to the 
 thought of God and goodness and purity and love. 
 
 Emerson was more than a merely meditative 
 poet. He was the real poet-preacher of his time, 
 " approbated," as he would say, to the ministry 
 of right and truth. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
- '-' - ■ " ', k'" 
 
 <$&**.°4% , 
 
 iSoQ-r$4Q. 
 
CHAPTER FIFTH. 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 As the recently issued " Letters of Matthew 
 Arnold " serve to call renewed attention to his in- 
 teresting life and work, so the latest and best 
 edition of Poe's works, by Stedman & Wood- 
 bery, invites us once again to examine the per- 
 sonality and literary product of this fascinating 
 author. Rarely does a name come before the 
 student of literature that elicits so much sympa- 
 thy and earnest inquiry, if so be something like 
 justice may be done him as a man and writer. 
 
 Though, as Whipple states it, " he was cursed 
 by an incurable perversity of character," the 
 more we reflect and investigate, the more in- 
 clined we are to attribute most of his errors to 
 this inherited curse, and, less and less, to mali- 
 cious purpose and preference. Mis nature was 
 complex and contradictory — a kind of battle- 
 73 
 
74 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 ground for discordant elements. So imperious, 
 at times, that he could say, " My whole nature 
 utterly revolts at the idea that there is any be- 
 ing in the universe superior to myself," he would, 
 at the next moment, evince a docility of spirit 
 and control of temper as attractive as it was sur- 
 prising. At times disingenuous, and brooking 
 no appeal from his decisions, he would, again, 
 be as tender as a woman in his considerate re- 
 gard for others. Hence, the different estimates 
 of which he has been the subject, and, he*nce, the 
 safety of the prophecy that, while critics judge 
 and readers read, Edgar Allan Poe's character 
 and writings will be, as Arnold would say, " in- 
 teresting." The constant demand, as the pub- 
 lishers tell us, for his prose and verse compels 
 the conviction that there is that in what he was 
 and what he wrote that appeals both to educated 
 and popular taste, and holds him safely in his 
 place as one of the few prominent names in 
 American letters. 
 
 Our present purpose has to do exclusively 
 with Poe as a poet, no special reference being 
 made either to his work as a writer of tales or 
 as a literary critic. 
 
 We are dealing, moreover, with lyric verse 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 75 
 
 only, and, within the lyric province itself, only 
 with that specific type that is meditative. Foe's 
 poetic product is by no means extensive. As 
 far as mere number of poems is concerned, they 
 are not more than half a hundred titles, while 
 the most of these are below the average length. 
 As far as poetic class or form is concerned, they 
 are practically confined to the kind we are dis- 
 cussing, — the lyric, — no epic being included, 
 and, with the exception of the unpublished 
 poem, M Scenes from Politian," no dramatic 
 verse, though in "The Raven" there is a 
 marked dramatic cast and effect. As a poet, 
 moreover, his fame may be said to rest upon 
 a very few productions, written in the closing 
 decade of his brief life of forty years, these 
 conspicuous examples being such, not simply be- 
 cause of what they are in themselves, but also 
 of that poetic " promise and potency " that they 
 are seen to contain. He was possessed of the 
 genuine poetic sense, " the sense of beaut}," 
 the sense of form, of ideal, of esthetic art. 
 
 Early in life he wrote : " I am a poet, if deep 
 worship of all beauty can make me one. I 
 would give the world to embody one half the 
 ideas afloat in my imagination." He went so 
 
70 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 far, indeed, as to exalt beauty above truth, as the 
 end of the poet's function, poetry having been 
 with him, as he says, " not a purpose, but a pas- 
 sion." His very definition of poetry as " the 
 rhythmical expression of beauty " includes this 
 principle as dominant. 
 
 We are dealing with American lyrics of the 
 meditative order, and it is scarcely too much to 
 say that, as Poe's poems are mainly lyrics, his 
 lyrics are mainly meditative, of that pensive and 
 radically ethical type rightly expected of a man 
 who spent his life in aiming to solve the problems 
 and perplexities of his being. Never did a man 
 start and prosecute these problems more pas- 
 sionately and persistently than Poe, and often 
 awakening our deepest sympathy and pity, as he 
 stands face to face with these problems, utterly 
 unable to solve them. In prose or verse, and 
 even in criticism, Poe was, out and out, a psychol- 
 ogist, a student and an interpreter of character, 
 peering deeper and deeper into the secret re- 
 cesses of the human heart. What writer has so 
 dissected motive and conduct as Poe has done 
 in his mystic and yet realistic tales, as in " Bere- 
 nice," "The Imp of the Perverse," and "Tell- 
 tale Heart," and other sketches! What a stu- 
 
EDGAR ALL AX POE. 77 
 
 dent he is of causes and effects, of the relation 
 of environment to character, of good and evil 
 tendencies, of heredity and destiny — in a word, 
 of man and of men ! 
 
 So when we speak of his verse as reflective, 
 we simply call attention to the fact that he is as 
 a poet what he is as a prose writer and a man — 
 a close and a discriminating observer of human 
 personality and history, a diagnostician in the 
 realm of mind. As a recent critic has expressed 
 it, " his poetry is a cry from the land of Poe." 
 It is, indeed, a " cry," taking, sometimes, the 
 strong, demonstrative form of unrepressed emo- 
 tion over lost opportunities and unrealized 
 ideals, and, at times, heard as a deep, suppressed 
 sobbing, as if his heart would break over his own 
 hapless state and that of those he loved as he 
 loved his own life. It is this " cry " that, as we 
 read, we hear and must hear, and which so often 
 rebukes all criticism, and summons us, despite 
 ourselves, to the poet's defense and positive 
 praise. It is this power of sympathy that has 
 turned the heads of the wisest among us, as 
 they assert that, " of all American writers, Poe 
 has made the deepest, and, in all probability, the 
 most lasting impression upon the world's imagi- 
 
78 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 nation;" "that he is the solitary fixed star in 
 our firmament," "the most distinct of American 
 geniuses." 
 
 With this meditative element in view, it is in- 
 teresting to turn to the poems of Poe, to note its 
 presence and impressiveness. The very titles 
 of many of the poems reveal it, such as " A 
 Dream," " Spirits of the Dead," " Alone," " The 
 Haunted Palace," " To One in Paradise," " The 
 Valley of Unrest," "The Sleeper," "Silence," 
 " A Dream within a Dream," and others ; while 
 poems such as " The Bells " and " Ulalume " and 
 " Eulalie " and " The Raven " give no indication 
 in their titles of the wealth of thoughtfulness 
 that is in them. 
 
 How touching his early poem, "Alone"! 
 
 " From childhood's hour I have not been 
 As others were ; I have not seen 
 As others saw ; I could not bring 
 My passions from a common spring ; 
 From the same source I have not taken 
 My sorrow ; I could not waken 
 My heart to joy at the same tone ; 
 And all I loved, I loved alone. 
 Then, in my childhood, in the dawn 
 Of a most stormy life, was drawn 
 From every depth of good and ill 
 The mystery which binds me still." 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 79 
 
 So, his early poem, " A Dream," written in the 
 
 same minor and reminiscent strain : 
 
 " In visions of the dark night 
 
 I have dreamed of joy departed ; 
 But a waking dream of life and light 
 Hath left me broken-hearted. 
 
 " That holy dream, that holy dream, 
 While all the world were chiding, 
 Hath cheered me as a lovely beam 
 A lonely spirit guiding." 
 
 His poems entitled " Dreamland " and " A 
 Dream within a Dream " strike the same con- 
 templative and semidespondent note, as if crav- 
 ing human sympathy in his loss of courage and 
 hope in the struggle of life. So, in " Lenore " 
 and " Silence " and " Ulalume " and " The 
 Haunted Palace," a similar sentiment prevails. 
 
 One of the most suggestive lyrics which Poe 
 has written of this pensive type is that entitled 
 " A Hymn," addressed as it is to the Virgin 
 Maty: 
 
 " At morn, at noon, at twilight dim, 
 Maria, thou hast heard my hymn! 
 In joy and woe, in good and ill, 
 Mother of God, be with me still! 
 When the hours flew brightly by, 
 And not a cloud obscured the sky, 
 
80 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 My soul, lest it should truant be, 
 Thy grace did guide to thine and thee. 
 Now, when storms of Fate o'ercast 
 Darkly my Present and my Past, 
 Let my Future radiant shine 
 With sweet hopes of thee and thine." 
 
 Even his beautifully rhythmic poem " The 
 Bells " has in it, with all its " merriment," this 
 essential element of pathos, and 
 
 " What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! 
 What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!" 
 
 How touching the tribute that he gives, in 
 his poem " To My Mother," to her who, as the 
 mother of Virginia, had been to him more than 
 his own mother, and done for him what no other 
 one could have done ! 
 
 One of his most significant meditative lyrics 
 is that on " The Colosseum," reminding us in 
 some of its lines of Byron's reflections on the 
 same inspiring theme : 
 
 " Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary 
 Of lofty contemplation left to Time 
 By buried centuries of pomp and power! 
 At length — at length — after so many days 
 Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst 
 (Thirst for the springs of love that in thee lie), 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. 81 
 
 I kneel, an altered and an humble man, 
 Amid thy shadows, and so drink within 
 My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!" 
 
 As to "The Raven," his greatest poem and 
 lyric, the reader need not be told that it is sur- 
 charged with subdued and passionate interest, a 
 " cry " out of the depth of his soul for his " lost 
 Lenore," the " cry " deepening in pathetic ten- 
 derness as 
 
 " The silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token." 
 
 Thus the poetry runs on in this suppressed 
 and affecting key, eliciting, as we read it, our 
 heart-felt pity for one who seemed forever to 
 utter unheeded cries for light and help, and 
 plunging from darkness, and deeper darkness, as 
 his pitiful life developed. It is this fact more 
 than any other that explains the statement of a 
 living critic : " What Poe actually accomplished 
 in poetry has been unsatisfactory to the academic 
 mind; to human nature it has been immensely 
 and persistently fascinating." It is this that 
 explains the apparent anomaly that, debauchee 
 that he was, " his teaching was neither the dis- 
 gusting sensualism of Byron nor the refined 
 licentiousness of Shelley ; it was a plea for 
 
82 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 beauty pure and simple." " He was never low 
 enough to praise the accuracy with which a 
 poet, a painter, or a novelist bombarded the 
 sanctity of marriage, or to excuse the subtlety 
 with which a so-called realist poisoned, in the 
 name of truth, the deepest fountains of char- 
 acter." All this is true, and forces us in the 
 name of Christian charity to put the best con- 
 struction on his character, and in the last analy- 
 sis to judge his verse somewhat independently 
 of his life. 
 
 Be this as it may, however, what profoundly 
 interests us as we read is this meditative attitude 
 of Poe, as, " deep into the darkness peering," he 
 seeks to know something of the divine and the 
 human ; of life and immortality and duty and 
 destiny, consulting every oracle and interpreting 
 every sign, if so be he may rise at once and for- 
 ever from what he calls " the Valley of Unrest " 
 to the upper land of clearer outlook and firmer 
 footing. In this respect, he is the Arthur Hugh 
 Clough of American verse, the seeker for cer- 
 tainty through doubt and fear, deeming it to be 
 his appointed lot 
 
 " To spend uncounted years of pain, 
 Again, again, and yet again, 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE. S3 
 
 In working out in heart and brain 
 The problem of our being here." 
 
 A word, in closing, to this effect should be 
 said : that, of all the meditative American lyrists 
 whose verse we are examining, Poe is the only- 
 one whose poetry has in it anything of the 
 abnormal and unhealthful, and must, therefore, 
 be read with the facts full in view. It is not 
 enough to say of him what we have said in the 
 line of exculpation and defense ; nor to say that, 
 " however lewd the man may have been, there 
 is no pandering to lewdness in his writings ;' 
 that, physiologically adegenerate, his degeneracy 
 never reached his understanding of the function 
 of art." These distinctions, if indeed valid, are 
 too close for comfort and moral safety, and we 
 need and demand as our highest models poets 
 and men who compel us less frequently to as- 
 sume the defensive and offer repeated apology. 
 
 Poe and Bryant, Poe and Emerson, Poe and 
 Longfellow, Poe and Whittier — what contrasts 
 are here, and all within the region of reflective 
 verse! How radically different their ethical 
 points of view, and with how different a spirit 
 do they face and aim to solve the pressing ques- 
 tions of life ! Meditative the verse is, and preg- 
 
84 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 nant with moral teaching, but with what differ- 
 ent feelings do we rise from the reading of the 
 respective moralists! 
 
 " And the fever called ' living' 
 Is conquered at last." 
 
 writes the disconsolate Poe in his beautiful lyric 
 ''For Annie." We must look in vain in the 
 poetry of any other representative American 
 poet for so hopeless a sentiment as that. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHETHER 
 
 85 
 
. ■I l l ■ !■'!■ I.lllll 
 
 i8oj-i8q2. 
 
CHAPTER SIXTH. 
 
 JOHN GREEXLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 Of all the poets of America, no one would be 
 more promptly and naturally selected as, by way 
 of distinction, a contemplative author, than Whit- 
 tier, the Quaker poet, the " prophet bard," the 
 " Hebrew poet of the nineteenth century." His 
 first published poem, " Sicilian Vespers," is 
 strikingly suggestive of that quiet, pensive 
 habit of mind which characterized him in ear- 
 lier and later life, and made it impossible for him 
 to be any other than serenely meditative on the 
 great questions of life and destiny that appealed 
 to his reverent mind. In Longfellow's beautiful 
 tribute to Whittier on his seventieth birthday, 
 in the poem entitled " The Three Silences of Mo- 
 linos," this dominant feature is worthily por- 
 trayed : 
 
 " Three Silences there are : the first of speech, 
 
 The second of desire, the third of thought ; 
 
 89 
 
90 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 These Silences, commingling each with each, 
 Made up the perfect Silence that he sought 
 And prayed for, and wherein at times he caught 
 Mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach. 
 O thou, whose daily life anticipates 
 The life to come, and in whose thought and word 
 The spiritual world preponderates, 
 Hermit of Amesbury! thou too hast heard 
 Voices and melodies from beyond the gates, 
 And speakest only when thy soul is stirred." 
 
 Whittier is, indeed, the " hermit-thrush " of our 
 American song, and is never so much himself 
 and so much to others as when embodying in 
 verse these " melodies from beyond the gates." 
 
 From his honorable ancestry, the Greenleafs 
 and Husseys and Batchelders, he had come by 
 right to this inheritance of a clear eye for the 
 inner light and an open ear to every hallowed 
 voice, so that when he wrote in prose or verse, 
 on secular or sacred themes, he always wrote as 
 a disciple and lover of the truth, as an author 
 with a message from God to men, and in the 
 meditative manner of one of the Hebrew- pro- 
 phets. 
 
 It is indeed difficult for us to understand how 
 his pacific and quiet spirit could bring itself, as 
 it did, voluntarily into contact with the coarse 
 
J01IX GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 01 
 
 political conflicts of the time, save as we remem- 
 ber that it was only thus that he could effect the 
 beneficent work on behalf of national honor and 
 the rights of man which it was given him to do. 
 Indeed, it is questionable whether a reformer of 
 sterner mold and more defiant methods would 
 have so well succeeded when error was to be 
 met by the simple force of truth, and human 
 wrong to be righted by patience and love and 
 conciliatory measures. It was thus that Whittier 
 often succeeded where such aggressive spirits as 
 Garrison failed, and in the heat and thick of the 
 wildest passions of the populace preserved the 
 peace of his spirit, the even tenor of his way, his 
 faith in God and faith in man, and often by a 
 simple national lyric secured results which balls 
 and bayonets could not effect. 
 
 It was by these songs of " religious and artis- 
 tic repose," as Kennedy terms them, that he won 
 his way into the hearts of his very enemies, and 
 endeared himself to the thousands whose cause 
 he had espoused. 
 
 The verse of Whittier is, in a valid sense, lyric 
 or idyllic from first to last, and to this degree has 
 in it a distinctive reflective element, dealing with 
 the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, the 
 
92 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 struggles and triumphs of men, and always with 
 his eye upon that spiritual principle underneath 
 them all and that spiritual outcome to which they 
 all were working. 
 
 More specifically, his poems might be classified 
 as national, lyric, and religious or ethical, includ- 
 ing, respectively, such examples as " The Vir- 
 ginia Slave Mother," " Among the Hills," and 
 " My Soul and I." No careful reader of Whit- 
 tier, however, need be told that these distinc- 
 tions are purely conventional, and that it is a 
 distinction without a difference to tell us that 
 " The Centennial Hymn " is national only, and 
 " The Tent on the Beach " lyric only, while 
 " Telling the Bees " is ethical and contemplative. 
 
 Among, his poems called national are such 
 titles as " Laus Deo," "The Reformer," "The 
 Moral Warfare," and "The Exiles"; while 
 such descriptive lyrics as "The River Path," 
 " The Changeling," " St. Gregory's Guest," and 
 " Among the Hills," are replete with sober re- 
 flection, and cannot be appreciatively read save 
 by him who takes them up with clearness of 
 spirit, and for high and noble ends. Among 
 his poems, however, that have a pronounced 
 meditative type, often assuming a specific reli- 
 
JOHX GREEN LEAF WHITTIER, 93 
 
 gious impressiveness, may be cited " Questions of 
 Life," " The Shadow and the Light," " Truth," 
 " Revelation," " The Cry of a Lost Soul," " The 
 Eternal Goodness," " At Last," " The Common 
 Question," "The Crucifixion," "Trinitas," "Thy 
 Will be Done," " Forgiveness," " Andrew Ry Is- 
 mail's Prayer," and such Hebraic verses as 
 " Ezekiel." These are poems surcharged with 
 moral and spiritual life, and would scarcely be 
 out of place under the category of American 
 hymnology. In such a list as this it is almost 
 invidious to make selections. A few representa- 
 tive lines may be cited. 
 
 Thus we read in the poem, " Trust " : 
 
 " The same old baffling questions! O my friend, 
 I cannot answer them. . . . 
 I have no answer for myself or thee, 
 Save that I learned beside my mother's knee : 
 All is of God that is, and is to be ; 
 And God is good. Let this suffice us still, 
 Resting in childlike trust upon His will 
 Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill." 
 
 So, in the " Shadow and the Light " : 
 
 " Oh, why and whither? God knows all; 
 I only know that He is good, 
 And that whatever may befall, 
 
 Or here or there, must be the best that could, 
 
94 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 And dare to hope that he will make 
 
 The rugged smooth, the doubtful plain; 
 His mercy never quite forsake, 
 
 His healing visit every realm of pain ; 
 Ah me! we doubt the shining skies, 
 
 Seen through our shadows of offense, 
 And drown with our poor, childlike cries 
 
 The cradle-hymn of kindly Providence." 
 
 So, in " Andrew Rykman's Prayer," one of the 
 most tender and holy utterances of Whittier's, 
 beginning : 
 
 " Pardon, Lord, the lips that dare 
 Shape in words a mortal's prayer! 
 Father! I may come to Thee 
 Even with, the beggar's plea, 
 As the poorest of Thy poor, 
 With my needs and nothing more; 
 Yet, O Lord, through all a sense 
 Of Thy tender providence 
 Stays my failing heart in Thee 
 And confirms the feeble knee. 
 Hours there be of inmost calm, 
 Broken but by grateful psalm, 
 When I love Thee more than fear Thee, 
 And Thy blessed Christ seems near me, 
 With forgiving look, as when 
 He beheld the Magdalen. 
 Well I know that all things move 
 To the spheral rhythm of love, 
 That to Thee, O Lord of all! 
 Nothing can of chance befall ; " 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 95 
 
 and so on through lines of exquisite spiritual 
 richness, so pertinently closing- with the query : 
 
 " Thus did Andrew Rykman pray. 
 Are we wiser, better grown, 
 That we may not, in our day, 
 Make his prayer our own? " 
 
 In his matchless lyric, " The Eternal Good- 
 ness," where shall we begin or end! 
 
 " No offering of my own I have, 
 
 Nor works my faith to prove ; 
 I can but give the gifts He gave, 
 
 And plead His love for love. 
 And so beside the Silent Sea 
 
 I wait the muffled oar ; 
 No harm from Him can come to me 
 
 On ocean or on shore, 
 I know not where His islands lift 
 
 Their fronded palms in air ; 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 
 Beyond His love and care." 
 
 This is not only as choice lyric verse as can 
 be found within the limits of English literature, 
 but it is suffused and saturated with spiritual 
 life, sanctified throughout by the presence of a 
 holy trust in God and goodness, and an ever- 
 present and a controlling desire to be of moral 
 service to men. In no British or American 
 
96 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 verse has the border-line between the seeular 
 and the sacred been so narrow, nor has any poet 
 been less subject than Whittier to the charge of 
 carrying the secular to the extreme of the coarse 
 and the frivolous, or the sacred to the extreme 
 of the somber and morose. Poetry was with 
 him nothing less than a divinely assigned voca- 
 tion for the realization of the highest human 
 ends. No prophet or preacher ever plied his 
 calling with a more devoted consecration to the 
 interests of truth and righteousness ; so that, 
 whatever his theme might be, he approached 
 it and presented it in a reverent spirit, never 
 allowing himself to descend to those shifts and 
 devices by which so many authors seek to gain 
 the popular ear. In his " Songs of Labor and 
 Reform," as they are called, and in his " Anti- 
 slavery Poems " and " Poems of Nature," as well 
 as in his specifically subjective and ethical verse, 
 there is found this same reflective and reverent 
 vein running through them all, and thus giving 
 them a character and adorning that definitely 
 marked them from all the inferior forms of con- 
 temporary poetry. 
 
 He wrote on " Seed-time and Harvest," " The 
 Fishermen " and " Lumbermen " and " Ship- 
 
J01IX GREENLEAF WHITTIER. ' 97 
 
 builders," " The River Path " and " Hazel Blos- 
 soms," " The Slave-ship," and " The Crisis," 
 with his characteristic serenity and moral grav- 
 ity, so as to carry the truth he was uttering 
 with impressiveness and effectiveness to the 
 hearts and consciences of men. Never has a 
 poet more thoroughly deserved to be called " the 
 poet of conscience," as he appealed directly and 
 continuously to the moral faculty, and to the 
 sense of right in man, to the convictions of jus- 
 tice and law and national obligation. It was 
 this feature more than all else that redeemed the 
 " Antislavery Poems " of Whittier from the criti- 
 cism of being sentimental or indignant tirades 
 against an existing evil ; the fanatical outbursts 
 of a would-be reformer, whose better judgment 
 for the time was under the control of his passions 
 and prejudices. Never did a man hold himself 
 better in hand, or better know precisely what 
 he was doing and why he was doing it, than did 
 Whittier when penning such fiery invectives as 
 "The Hunters of Men," " Stanzas for theTimes," 
 " The Branded Hand," and " Clerical Oppres- 
 sors." It was, indeed, a holy war that he was 
 waging in those days and those verses, when 
 smooth-flowing lyrics on love and friendship 
 
98 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 gave way by right to impassioned protests in the 
 name of God against injustice and cruelty and 
 violations of moral law. 
 
 " Shall tongues be mute when deeds are wrought 
 Which well might shame extremest hell? 
 
 Shall freemen lock the indignant thought? 
 Shall Pity's bosom cease to swell? 
 
 Shall Honor bleed? shall Truth succumb? 
 
 Shall pen and press and soul be dumb? " 
 
 So, in " The Crisis," he writes in similar strain : 
 
 " By all for which the martyrs bore the agony and shame, 
 By all the warning words of truth for which the prophets came, 
 By the Future which awaits us, by ail the hopes which cast 
 Their faint and trembling beams across the blackness of the 
 
 Past, 
 And by the blessed thought of Him who for earth's freedom 
 
 died — 
 O my people! my brothers! let us choose the righteous 
 
 side." 
 
 This is Whittier, speaking, as Longfellow tells 
 us, when his " soul is stirred," when his con- 
 science is quickened, if so be he may quicken 
 the conscience of others, and, to some degree, at 
 least, rectify the wrongs that pass un rebuked be- 
 fore his eyes. We call this meditative verse, and 
 so it is, not in the sense that it is subdued and 
 subjective, as his lines on "Trust" and "The 
 
JOHX GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 99 
 
 Prayer-seeker" and "The Friends Burial," but 
 that it is the intense utterance of his reflections 
 on national history, as developing before him. As 
 he mused, the fire burned, and must reveal itself, 
 as it did, in the language of spiritual passion. In 
 this and kindred verse Whittier was not only a 
 political reformer, but a Christian reformer, and 
 sought what he sought in the name and for the 
 glory of God. 
 
 Attention has often been called to the domes- 
 ticity of Whittier's verse, the homeness of it, so 
 that, as we read it, we think of Burns in his 
 " Cotter's Saturday Night," or Allan Ramsay's 
 " Gentle Shepherd," and can, indeed, gather 
 from his pages a full-sized picture of the local 
 life of the New England of his day. The}* have 
 this reminiscent or retrospective element in 
 them, recalling the old days and the old friends 
 and the old scenes. In no form of his poetry 
 does this attractive meditative feature appear 
 more fully, taking on richer type and meaning 
 as the years go by and increasing age does its 
 mellowing and gracious work. Never outside 
 the limits of his native land, and but seldom be- 
 yond the borders of his own New England, he 
 was a son of the soil and a poet of the soil as but 
 
100 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE IYRICS. 
 
 few have been, so that all he spoke and wrote 
 was English and New English to the core, and 
 ever marked by the distinctive lineaments of its 
 Puritan origin and home. He thus writes of 
 "Maud Muller," "The Old Burying-ground," 
 " In School-days," and "June on the Merrimac," 
 with all the gusto of a New England boy ; and 
 would have us know in " Snow-bound " that, as 
 the rigor of winter increased, the inside delights 
 of the fireside were heightened, and he and his 
 friends were happy all the livelong day and all 
 the livelong year ; nor amid all the joy does 
 he allow us for a moment to forget it is to a 
 kindly Providence over us that we owe all our 
 earthly blessings, and must render daily praise 
 and service. 
 
 In fine, so pronounced is this contemplative 
 feature and so persistent is the poet in remind- 
 ing his readers of their obligations to God and 
 man, that the charge of extreme religiousness 
 has been made against him, a charge that can- 
 not be substantiated by the honest reader, but 
 one, we are free to say, that Whittier would will- 
 ingly have incurred rather than to have invited 
 the criticism at the other extreme of a manifest 
 want of moral motive. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 101 
 
 In noting the meditative character of Whit- 
 tier's verse, special reference should be made to 
 what may be called his hymns. One of these is 
 found in the poem entitled " The Wish of To- 
 day," and opens with the lines: 
 
 " I ask not now for gold to gild 
 
 With mocking shine a weary frame; 
 The yearning of the mind is stilled; 
 I ask not now for fame." 
 
 His " Eternal Goodness," from which we have 
 already quoted, is substantially a hymn. The 
 poem " Our Master " is virtually a hymn, and so 
 embodied by Duffield in his " English Hymns" : 
 
 " Immortal Love, forever full, 
 Forever flowing free, 
 Forever shared, forever whole, 
 A never-ebbing sea." 
 
 So, such poems as "The Star of Bethlehem," 
 " Invocation," " Vesta," and " At Last," are 
 easily classified under hymnologVj both as to 
 context and spirit, so illustrative are they of 
 the mingling of praise and prayer, and, as Duf- 
 field states it, " come naturally, like the verses 
 of Keble, into the service of the church." 
 
 What earlier or later poet, we may ask, has 
 
102 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 wrought more effectively and lovingly in the 
 service of the church? His life from first to last 
 was ministerial, a worship and a ministry in one, 
 intense in its devotion to every good cause, and 
 actively instrumental in every line of Christian 
 effort. 
 
 Not a few worthy authors are now busily at 
 work in the expanding field of American letters, 
 men of genius in their way, and giving promise 
 of large and beneficent result ; but where shall 
 we look to find a true successor of this old mas- 
 ter of song, who sang as naturally as the birds 
 sing, and only for the divine glory and the com- 
 mon good ! 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 103 
 
>;v>«:.:' ' : :j . «>, / 
 
 iSig-iSgi. 
 
CHAPTER SEVENTH. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Mr. Lowell, in so far as his poetry is con- 
 cerned, is remembered, more especially, perhaps, 
 by his " Biglow Papers " and " The Fable for 
 Critics," the satirical and serio-comic character 
 of each of these poems making them attractive 
 to all classes of people. In neither of them, 
 however, is there any distinctive presence of the 
 contemplative element, so that readers of these 
 productions only might be unwittingly led to 
 assume that this was Lowell's only form of verse. 
 A closer inspection of his poetry reveals the fact 
 that the humorous and satirical are but a portion 
 of his poetic product, the general descriptive and 
 lyric feature being also prominent. Critics speak 
 also of his national and legendary verse, in each 
 of which classes, if regarded as distinct, as con- 
 spicuously in the lyric, the meditative tone and 
 quality are, in fact, the most characteristic. 
 107 
 
1 OS A MERIt \1 X Ml: Dl 7 ,/ 7 7 1 T E 7, ) 'RIC \S\ 
 
 When Lowell is called " our new Theocritus," 
 reference is made to the prominent presence of 
 this idyllic quality. In his" Poemsof Nature," so- 
 called, as in his sonnets, his poems of sentiment 
 and of religion, it is needless to note that the re- 
 flective phase is necessarily pronounced. More- 
 over, Mr. Lowell is reflective in his own way, 
 and in fullest accord with his unique individual- 
 ity as an author, even as Bryant and Emerson 
 and Longfellow and Whittier and Holmes are, 
 respectively, meditative. A contemplative son- 
 net from Lowell, such as the one beginning: 
 
 " Great truths are portions of the soul of man," 
 
 or the one : 
 
 " There never yet was flower fair in vain," 
 
 has in its lines and between the lines the peculiar 
 Lowellian cast and character, meaning from Lo- 
 well something different from that which a simi- 
 lar sonnet would mean from any of his great 
 contemporaries whom we are studying. We 
 look in vain in Lowell for such subjective poems 
 as Bryant's " Thanatopsis " and " The Flood of 
 Years," or Emerson's " Sphinx " and " Brahma," 
 or Longfellow's " Divine Tragedy," or Whittier's 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 109 
 
 " Toussaint l'Overture," or Holmes's " Living 
 Temple." Each of these authors looks at the 
 world and human life from his own point of 
 view ; has his own method of solving the press- 
 ing moral problems that confront him ; insists 
 upon the choice and use of his own phraseology ; 
 and is, in fact, as careful not to be confounded in 
 his meditative verse with any other poet as he is 
 not to be confounded with any other in any im- 
 portant sphere of authorship. Of the six poets 
 mentioned, Lowell and Holmes are less contem- 
 plative than the others, both in their personal- 
 ity and poetry, and Holmes the least so of all. 
 There is a spiritual fineness in Emerson not 
 found in any of them, as there is a sweetness of 
 temper in Whittier nowhere else discernible. If 
 we may so express it, the meditative type of 
 Holmes is that of a thoughtful man of the world, 
 as compared with the more introspective type of 
 such a poet as Longfellow, while Lowell may 
 fitly be called the scholarly observer of the 
 morals and manners of men. His reflections 
 are from the standpoint of educated sense and 
 taste, and always presented in attractive form. 
 He is, by way of excellence, the cultured thinker, 
 never forgetting in his musings and moraliz- 
 
110 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 ings that he is a man of letters, at his study 
 windows and among his books. It is this 
 studied and artistic element that differentiates 
 his meditative verse from that of others, and 
 somewhat detracts from its value in the eye of 
 readers whose natures are deeply emotional and 
 quickly responsive to every impassioned appeal. 
 For this reason, if for no other, Lowell's reflec- 
 tive poems will never have so vital a hold upon 
 the hearts of men as those of Longfellow and 
 Whittier. 
 
 In noting more particularly what Lowell has 
 written of this subjective or pensive order, we find 
 numerous examples of it in three out of the four 
 volumes of his recently collected works — in "The 
 Earlier Poems," in " Under the Willows," and in 
 "Heartsease and Rue." 
 
 In the first of these collections are such poems 
 as "Irene," "The Forlorn," "A Parable," his 
 various sonnets, " A Legend of Brittany," " The 
 Sower," " Extreme Unction," " Longing," and 
 " The Vision of Sir Launfal." Thus, in "Irene," 
 we read : 
 
 " 1 1 ers is a spirit deep, and crystal clear; 
 Calmly beneath her earnest face it lies, 
 Free without boldness, meek without a fear, 
 Quicker to look than speak its sympathies. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Ill 
 
 Far down into her large and patient eyes 
 I gaze, deep drinking of the infinite, 
 As, in the mid-watch of a clear, still night, 
 
 I look into the fathomless blue skies." 
 
 So, in the lines in " Longing," he speaks a help- 
 ful word as he sings : 
 
 " Ah! let ib hope that to our praise 
 
 Good God not only reckons 
 The moments when we trust His ways, 
 
 But when the spirit beckons ; 
 That some slight good is also wrought 
 
 Beyond self satisfaction, 
 When we are simply good in thought, 
 
 Howe'er we fail in action." 
 
 In the second collection are such examples 
 as " Godminster Chimes," "The Parting of the 
 Ways," " The Darkened Mind," " In the Twi- 
 light," and " The Foot-path." From the first 
 of these we read : 
 
 " Through aisles of long-drawn centuries 
 
 My spirit walks in thought, 
 And to that symbol lifts its eyes 
 
 Which God's own pity wrought; 
 From Calvary shines the altar's gleam, 
 
 The Church's East is there, 
 The Ages one great minster seem, 
 
 That throbs with praise and prayer. 
 
 " And, as the mystic aisles I pace, 
 By aureoled workmen built, 
 
112 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Lives ending at the Cross I trace 
 
 Alike through grace and guilt; 
 One Mary bathes the blessed feet 
 
 With ointment from her eyes, 
 With spikenard one, and both are sweet, 
 
 For both are sacrifice." 
 
 In the third collection we emphasize his poems 
 of affectionate tribute to Agassiz, Holmes, and 
 Whittier, his " Das Ewig-Weibliche," " The Re- 
 call," "Absence," and "A Christmas Carol." 
 written for Sabbath-school children, and full of 
 suggestive biblical reference. 
 
 " ' What means this glory round our feet,' 
 
 The Magi mused, ' more bright than morn? ' 
 And voices chanted clear and sweet, 
 ' To-day the Prince of Peace is born.' 
 
 ' ' What means that star? ' the shepherds said, 
 ' That brightens through the rocky glen? ' 
 And angels, answering overhead, 
 
 Sang, ' Peace on earth, good-will to men.' 
 
 " 'Tis eighteen hundred years and more 
 Since those sweet oracles were dumb. 
 We wait for Him, like them of yore; 
 Alas! He seems so slow to come! 
 
 " But it was said, in words of gold, 
 No time or sorrow e'er shall dim, 
 That little children might be bold 
 In perfect trust to come to Him. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 113 
 
 " All round about our feet shall shine 
 A light like that the wise men saw 
 If we our loving wills incline 
 
 To that sweet Life, which is the Law. 
 
 " So shall we learn to understand 
 
 The simple faith of shepherds then, 
 And, clasping kindly hand in hand, 
 
 Sing, ' Peace on earth, good-will to men.' 
 
 " And they who do their souls no wrong, 
 But keep at eve the faith of morn, 
 Shall daily hear the angel sing, 
 
 ' To-day the Prince of Peace is born.' " 
 
 From the publication of Milton's " Ode on the 
 Morning of Christ's Nativity," in 1629, to Whit- 
 tier's " Christmas Carmen," we have no Christ 
 carol more beautiful than this, while it possesses 
 peculiar interest as coming from Lowell in the 
 way of a loving service to children. From 
 Longfellow we are led to look for such remem- 
 brances of childhood as he gives us in " The 
 Children's Hour " and other selections, of which 
 Whittier so sweetly sings in his "The Poet and 
 the Children," as Whittier himself, in his " Child 
 Songs " and elsewhere, is thoroughly at home 
 when writing for the young. In Lowell, how- 
 ever, such a strain is less frequently heard and 
 less in accord with his distinctive mental and 
 
114 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 literary type, and this, when it is found, as in this 
 exquisite poem, is all the more impressive. His 
 poetry fittingly closes in meditative manner with 
 the quotation on his " Sixty-eighth Birthday " : 
 
 " As life runs on, the road grows strange 
 With faces new, and near the end 
 The milestones into headstones change ; 
 'Neath every one we find a friend." 
 
 Those most intimate with Lowell could not 
 but mark, as his life drew on toward its close, 
 how some of the less attractive features of his 
 earlier years were modified ; how scholastic re- 
 serve gave place by gradual process to a more 
 genial bearing, and the mellowing influences of 
 years came at length to do their perfect work. 
 
 In speaking of the reflective quality of Lo- 
 well's verse, as of that of his noted American 
 contemporaries, it occurs to us to say that this 
 contemplative spirit is thoroughly germane to the 
 mission of the poet in the world of letters as a 
 specifically spiritual mission. When it is remem- 
 bered that the earlier forms of verse were reli- 
 gious, that the minstrel was often the prophet and 
 the priest, that the poet as such was supposed to 
 be in communion with the invisible world, that 
 the ideal is essential to the very conception of 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 115 
 
 poetry, it is not strange if we should find in all 
 standard verse, epic, dramatic, and lyric, the su- 
 pernal, spiritual feature expressing itself in medi- 
 tative forms, and, most especially, in the lyric. 
 It would seem to require a special effort on the 
 poet's part to be other than sober-minded, rever- 
 ent toward truth and goodness, and responsive 
 to every high and holy appeal. A flippant, 
 frivolous, undevout poet is as abnormal as the 
 undevout astronomer, and, for the same reason, 
 that it is his special vocation to deal with what 
 is elevated and unearthly. Unnatural as it is 
 in the sphere of prose expression, it is far more 
 so in poetry, where, through the medium of the 
 imagination, the poet is supposed to soar beyond 
 all that is visible and material into the upper and 
 purer air of thought and truth and love and 
 beauty. It is to the lasting honor of American 
 letters that no one of her representative poets 
 has failed to meet these high conditions, even 
 Foe, with all his errors and weaknesses, holding 
 an exalted view of verse as the " rhythmical ex- 
 pression of beauty," and never condescending 
 for a moment to the role of the buffoon and 
 mountebank. By no one of our poets was this 
 high conception of verse more vigorously main- 
 
116 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 tained than by Lowell, so that nothing more 
 surely provoked his righteous contempt than the 
 spectacle of one of these misguided poetasters 
 playing with his mission as a toy, utterly obli- 
 vious of the divine vocation to which he was 
 called. Even in his humor he was serious, and 
 insisted that the man of letters as such should be 
 above the base and belittling, and dwell, as Mil- 
 ton dwelt, " in the quiet and still air of delightful 
 studies." Thus, in one of his sonnets, suggested 
 by the reading of the meditative Wordsworth, 
 he writes : 
 
 " Far 'yond this narrow parapet of Time, 
 With eyes uplift, the poet's soul should look 
 Into the Endless Promise, nor should brook 
 One prying doubt to shake his faith sublime ; 
 To him the earth is ever in her prime 
 And dewiness of morning ; he can see 
 Good lying hid from all eternity, 
 Within the teeming womb of sin and crime; 
 His soul should not be cramped by any bar; 
 His nobleness should be so godlike high 
 That his least deed is perfect as a star, 
 His common look majestic as the sky, 
 And all o'erflooded with a light from far, 
 Undimmed by clouds of weak mortality." 
 
 This is the Lowellian view of verse, and to- 
 ward this celestial ideal he looked and wrought. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 117 
 
 In such poems as " The Cathedral " and " The 
 Vision of Sir Launfal," he made close approxi- 
 mation to its realization, while in the general 
 tenor of his lines he never forgot the special 
 sphere in which he was working, and the " great 
 cloud of witnesses" by which he "was compassed 
 about." 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 
 
 119 
 
/oajja^rtU V^/x^k 
 
 1825-1878. 
 
CHAPTER EIGHTH. 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 It might seem at first a little strange that, in 
 a survey of the more reflective American poets, 
 the name of Taylor should be at all included. 
 We think of him, most especially, as a writer 
 of prose, in the province of fiction, journalism, 
 travels, letters, and critical miscellany ; as the 
 author of " Hannah Thurston," of " Views 
 Afoot," and "Studies in German Literature"; 
 and yet even here we are at once impressed with 
 the uniform gravity of bearing and style that 
 he evinces, which characterizes him at once as a 
 meditative writer. Turning to his verse, we are 
 surprised, perhaps, at its variety and compass, 
 as it appears in descriptive, lyric, dramatic, and 
 didactic form — in every accepted form, indeed, 
 save that of the distinctly epic. As early as 
 1844, before he had reached his majority, the 
 first collection of his verse appeared. Other col- 
 123 
 
124 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 lections were prepared and published in due suc- 
 cession, such as " Rhymes of Travel," " A Book 
 of Romances and Lyrics and Song," "Poems 
 of the Orient," " Poems of Home and Travel," 
 " Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics," with 
 such separate poems as " Lars, a Pastoral of 
 Norway," and "The Picture of St. John"; his 
 " Local Idylls and Ballads of the Civil War " re- 
 vealing the depth and intensity of his loyalty in 
 the face of such strong inducements to surrender 
 it. No reader can run over this list of descrip- 
 tive and idyllic verse without being impressed 
 with its contemplative type and purpose, the 
 didactic element in its best form being every- 
 where present. It was this specific teaching 
 quality that Taylor possessed and aimed to ex- 
 hibit, so that, from first to last, he pens his poems 
 not so much for the sake of penning them, or for 
 any distinct artistic effect, as thereby to diffuse 
 sound and wholesome principles, and advance 
 the cause of truth. 
 
 His great work as a translator in rendering 
 Goethe's "Faust" to English readers is de- 
 veloped along the same high line of serious en- 
 deavor, while his three more elaborate dramatic 
 poems are characteristically ethical in theme, de- 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 120 
 
 velopment, and purpose. In a word, the verse 
 is essentially reflective, as much so, indeed, as 
 is that of any of his great contemporaries, and 
 so persuasively so as to make it unintelligible 
 to those who examine it from any other point 
 of view. With this didactic feature, moreover, 
 there is seen in all such a clear and emotive 
 quality that interest is added to instruction, and 
 all the finer feelings of the heart awakened. 
 Seldom has a poet succeeded in being at one 
 and the same time so serious and so attractive, 
 so that in such selections as " Lars " or " St. 
 John" or " Amram's Wooing" or the "Ode 
 to Shelley," deep emotion is under the safe re- 
 strictions of reason, and reason, under the more 
 genial and generous influence of feeling. Of the 
 first of his dramas, " The Masque of the Gods," 
 the author tells us that his chief purpose is to 
 show " the gradual development of man's con- 
 ception of God." Of the second one, " The 
 Prophet," he writes that he aims " to represent 
 phases of spiritual development and their external 
 results which are hardly possible in any other 
 country than ours " ; while of the last and great- 
 est drama, '• Prince Deukalion," he states : " The 
 central design or germinal cause of the poem is 
 
126 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 to picture forth the struggle of man to reach the 
 highest, justest, happiest, and hence most per- 
 fect conditions of human life on this planet." 
 
 Nothing could more clearly evince the pro- 
 foundly meditative temper of Taylor's mind and 
 poetic work than this conception and elabo- 
 ration of his three dramatic poems along semi- 
 religious lines, and with reference to the great 
 problems of human life and destiny. 
 
 In stating, by way of preface, the argument 
 of this last work — " Prince Deukalion," he al- 
 ludes to " the passing away of the classic faith 
 and the emergence of Christianity," and predicts 
 an " era of which no simply loving and believing 
 creature of God can fail to discover the prophecy 
 within his own nature." He takes up in turn 
 the sublime questions of God and truth and im- 
 mortality, and seeks in poetic form to embody 
 and express some of the soul's deepest yearnings. 
 The closing lines, as spoken by Prometheus, are 
 thus significant : 
 
 " For Life, whose source not here began, 
 Must fill the utmost sphere of Man, 
 And, so expanding, lifted be 
 Along the line of God's decree, 
 To find in endless growth all good, 
 In endless toil beatitude," 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 127 
 
 In seeking for specific evidences and exam- 
 ples of Taylor's more meditative verse, we turn 
 from his dramatic lines to the various collections 
 of his lyrics, and, first of all, to his " Poems of 
 the Orient." " When I read these poems," writes 
 Stoddard, " I think that Bayard Taylor has cap- 
 tured the poetic secret of the East as no Eng- 
 lish-writing poet but Byron has." The very 
 name of the collection suggests their semi-re- 
 ligious and reflective character, being a coun- 
 terpart in verse of his prose papers on Eastern 
 lands and peoples. Some of the titles are as 
 follows : " The Temptation of Hassan Ben 
 Khaled," " Arab Prayer," " Amram's Wooing," 
 " The Angel of Patience," " Bedouin Song," 
 " The Birth of the Prophet," " The Arab to the 
 Palm," "The Mystery," and "To the Nile." 
 One of these poems, " The Shekh," from the 
 Arabic, deserves citation in full : 
 
 " Not a single star is twinkling 
 
 Through the wilderness of cloud ; 
 On the mountain, in the darkness, 
 Stands the Shekh, and prays aloud : 
 
 " ' God, who kindlest aspirations, 
 Kindlest hope the heart within, 
 God, who promisest Thy mercy, 
 Wiping out the debt of sin, 
 
128 AMERICA X MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " ' God, protect me in the darkness, 
 
 When the awful thunders roll : 
 Evil walks the world unsleeping, 
 Evil sleeps within my soul. 
 
 " ' Keep my mind from every impulse 
 Which from Thee may turn aside; 
 Keep my heart from every passion 
 By Thy breath unsanctified. 
 
 " ' God, preserve me from a spirit 
 
 Which Thy knowledge cannot claim ; 
 From a knee that bendeth never 
 In the worship of Thy name; 
 
 "' ' From a heart whose every feeling 
 Is not wholly vowed to Thee ; 
 From an eye that, through its weeping, 
 Thy compassion cannot see ; 
 
 " ' From a prayer that goes not upward 
 In the darkness and the fear, 
 From the soul's impassioned center, 
 Seeking access at Thy ear. 
 
 " ' When the night of evil threatens, 
 Throw Thy shelter over me ; 
 Let my spirit feel Thy presence, 
 And my days be full of Thee.' " 
 
 This reads almost like a hymn from Watts or 
 Heber, reverent, trustful, and tender, pervaded 
 by that spirit of the Orient which, with some 
 admixture of superstition and possible bigotry, 
 is yet worshipful and devout. 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 129 
 
 In moments of lighter and yet contemplative 
 strain, he sings thus in his lines " In the Mea- 
 dows " : 
 
 " I lie in the summer meadows, 
 In the meadows all alone, 
 With the infinite sky above me, 
 And the sun on his midday throne. 
 
 " The infinite bliss of Nature 
 I feel in every vein ; 
 The light and the life of summer 
 Blossom in heart and brain. 
 
 " But, darker than any shadow- 
 By thunder-clouds unfurled, 
 The awful truth arises, 
 
 That Death is in the world." 
 
 So, in the sennet beginning: 
 
 " The soul goes forth, and finds no resting-place 
 On the wide breast of Life's unquiet sea 
 But in the heart of man." 
 
 So, in his " In Articulo Mortis," he writes in 
 most emphatic protest against all popish proffer 
 of pardon in the hour of direst need : 
 
 " Nay, Priest! nay; 
 Stand not between me and the fading light 
 Of my last hour ; I know my soul is weighed 
 With many sins ; but even knowing this, . . . 
 I will not lean upon another's arm, 
 
130 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Or bid a human intercessor plead 
 
 My perilous cause ; but I will stagger on 
 
 Beneath my sins unto the feet of God." 
 
 One of the closing poems of this collection, 
 entitled " The Mid-watch," is unique in Ameri- 
 can verse, both in its title and its peculiar lyri- 
 cal excellence : 
 
 " I pace the deck in the dead of night, 
 When the moon and the starlight fail, 
 And the cordage creaks to the lazy swells, 
 And heavily flaps the sail." 
 
 In fine, one scarcely knows the salient char- 
 acteristics and innermost spirit of Taylor who 
 has not read and re-read these lyrics of the 
 Orient, in their picture of the weird and semi- 
 historical life of Arab and Moor. As we read 
 them, and become absorbed for the time in their 
 teachings and spiritual temper, we forget that 
 we are reading the lines of Taylor, the novelist 
 and journalist and traveler and literary critic and 
 acute Anglo- German author. We recall, how- 
 ever, the fact that he was constitutionally con- 
 templative ; that much of his travel was in the 
 lands of the Orient; that his " Letters" to his 
 wife and others are full of a deep and tender 
 pathos ; that his Teutonic studies and affinities 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 131 
 
 induced in him an intellectual gravity ; and that, 
 even in his work as a critic, he always discovered 
 and emphasized those underlying moral convic- 
 tions that make authors and literatures what 
 they are. Thus interpreted, we come at length 
 to look in his verse for clear indications of the 
 presence of the meditative. In his collection, 
 "Home Pastorals, Ballads, Lyrics, and Odes," the 
 somewhat severe sobriety of the Orient poems 
 gives place to a more flexible and attractive ex- 
 pression of feeling, as he sings of " The Holly- 
 tree," "The Burden of the Day," "The Sun- 
 shine of the Gods," " In my Vineyard," and 
 " The Guests at Night." Thus, in " The Bur- 
 den of the Day," we read: 
 
 ' ' Who shall rise and cast away 
 First, the burden of the day? 
 Who assert his place, and teach 
 Lighter labor, nobler speech, 
 Standing firm, erect, and strong, 
 Proud as freedom, free as song? 
 
 Higher paths there are to tread; 
 Fresher fields around us spread; 
 Other flames of sun and star 
 Flash at hand and lure afar ; 
 Larger manhood might we share, 
 Surer fortune, did we dare!" 
 
132 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Here we mark a freer, fuller note, as if, in- 
 deed, from the impassioned pen of Whittier, as 
 he pleads for truth and right. 
 
 So, in his " Casa Guidi Windows," he sings in 
 plaintive strain of Mrs. Browning: 
 
 " The quiet brow ; the face so frail and fair 
 For such a voice of Sony; the steady eye, 
 Where shone the spirit fated to outwear 
 Its fragile house; and in her features lie 
 The soft half-shadows of her drifting hair." 
 
 So, of Bryant he beautifully sings : 
 
 " For he, our earliest minstrel, fills 
 
 The land with echoes sweet and long, 
 Gives language to her silent hills, 
 And bids her rivers move to song. 
 
 " He sings of mountains and of streams, 
 Of storied field and haunted dale, 
 Yet hears a voice through all his dreams, 
 Which says, ' The good shall yet prevail.' " 
 
 Of his" Gettysburg Ode " suffice it to say that 
 it is confessedly one of the few historic national 
 lyrics of English verse, as it closes so sublimely : 
 
 " Take them, God, our brave, 
 
 The glad fulfilleFS of Thy dread decree, 
 Who grasped the sword for Peace, and smote to save, 
 And, dying here for Freedom, also died for Thee." 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR. 133 
 
 Thus the verse runs on in drama, description, 
 narrative, pastoral, sonnet, and general lyric, 
 and always marked by a kind of Senecan dignity 
 and seriousness, well befitting the poet himself, 
 the high themes he treated, and the final pur- 
 pose of his writing. 
 
 It was, indeed, largely because of this govern- 
 ing desire as an author to be helpful in his au- 
 thorship to those for whom he wrote, that he ever 
 keeps above the lower level of the flippant and 
 trivial, on the high plane of sober endeavor and 
 a reverent study of God and man. 
 
 It is thus that Stedman writes so appreciatively 
 of him : " To think of him is to recall a per- 
 son larger in make and magnanimity than the 
 common sort, a man of buoyancy, hopefulness, 
 sweetness of temper, stainless in morals, and of 
 an honesty so natural that he could not be sur- 
 prised into an untruth or the commission of a 
 mean act." " Life for me," says the poet him- 
 self, " is the making of all that is possible out 
 of such powers as I may have." 
 
 The powers he had were of no inferior order. 
 No American writer in prose or verse has de- 
 voted himself with more intensity of purpose to 
 making the most and best of that which God 
 
134 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 had given him, and these are the authors of 
 whom it may be said, as we read in Taylor's 
 " Bedouin Song," that they will live 
 
 " Till the sun grows cold, 
 And the stars are old, 
 And the leaves of the judgment-book unfold." 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 135 
 
/ftarw Jfe^&/&<rfffi™j. 
 
 i8oq-i8q4. 
 
CHAPTER NINTH. 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 In such a writer and poet as Holmes it might 
 be argued, presumptively, that the reflective fea- 
 ture would be less prominent than in Bryant, 
 Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell, 
 while an historical examination of his verse fully 
 confirms this presupposition. The main cur- 
 rents of his mind set in other directions ; his 
 prevailing themes were of a different order ; 
 his literary ambitions, preferences, and purposes 
 were, in the main, different ; so that his literary 
 constituency were led to expect from his pen 
 prose and verse in accordance with such a con- 
 stitutional bias. All this is true, and yet any 
 reader of Holmes fails to read his lines aright, 
 or to read aright between the lines, who fails to 
 find a meditative element fundamentally pres- 
 ent and potent, not so conspicuous and demon- 
 139 
 
140 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 strative as in other American poets, not so 
 often seen, perhaps, but still existent and real, 
 and all the more impressive, at times, by reason 
 of its subdued and reserved character, and espe- 
 cially by reason of its close relation to other 
 forms of verse so radically different. Nor is 
 the explanation far to find : Holmes was a poet 
 of man and human life ; of the world about him 
 and the world within him ; and, hence, some- 
 what of the world above him ; a poet of his 
 own experience and of that of his fellows, in 
 all the wealth and width of that experience ; a 
 versatile, many-sided delineator of human in- 
 stincts, passions, and ideals, so that, in the 
 nature of things, he must enter all avenues of 
 lyric expression, strike all the chords of the 
 heart of man, and treat of God and the world 
 and human life and destiny. As he himself in- 
 dicates, he has given us " Songs in Many Keys," 
 singing now a note of gladness and now a note 
 of more pensive tone, each heard in its fitting 
 place and time, and together filling out the 
 completed choral strain. Moreover, Holmes, 
 as the son of Rev. Abiel Holmes, pastor of the 
 Congregational Church at Cambridge, and au- 
 thor of "The Memoirs of the French Protes- 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 1-41 
 
 tants," had an inherited tendency to the more 
 devout and reflective side of verse ; his volun- 
 tary passage from Congregationalism to Uni- 
 tarianism being, as he conceived it, a transition 
 from the narrower to the broader in matters of 
 faith, giving him a wider range and larger lib- 
 erty in the expression of his meditations on God 
 and man. In his poem " The School-boy," as 
 in his " Harvard Anniversary Poem of '86," he 
 alludes to this change of front, the occasion of 
 it, and its natural results. Whatever his doc- 
 trinal or denominational attitude, however, there 
 was always a deep substratum of sober thought 
 and life, revealing itself often when least antici- 
 pated, and, when expressed in unison with the 
 lighter and more playful forms of verse, produc- 
 ing an effect altogether unique and impressive. 
 A more specific inquiry as to the particular 
 modes in which this contemplative element 
 manifests itself will be of interest. 
 
 The poetry of Holmes in its entirety might 
 be classified into three generic divisions, as 
 national, humorous, and meditative, this last 
 division being fully as characteristic as any, 
 and expressed in various subordinate forms. 
 As first in order, we note his " Hymns," which 
 
142 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 in themselves constitute a list of some dozen 
 titles. Two of these are of special interest as 
 included in our American hymnology for use in 
 sacred worship. The one is called "A Hymn 
 of Trust," as it reads: 
 
 " O Love Divine, that stooped to share 
 Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear, 
 On Thee we cast each earth-born care, 
 We smile at pain when Thou art near!" 
 
 The other is called "A Sun-day Hymn," as it 
 reads : 
 
 " Lord of all being! throned afar, 
 Thy glory flames from sun and star, 
 Center and soul of every sphere, 
 Yet to each loving heart how near!" 
 
 Each of these hymns, it is interesting to note, 
 was published in " The Professor at the Break- 
 fast-Table," " hymns," writes Duffield, " among 
 our most acceptable and admirable Christian 
 lyrics." It was in connection with the second 
 of these lyrics that the author invited all his 
 readers " to join in singing [inwardly] this hymn 
 to the Source of the light we all need to lead 
 us." Closely connected in spirit with these 
 two selections is what is called " The Parting 
 Hymn": 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 143 
 
 " Father of mercies, heavenly Friend, 
 We seek Thy gracious throne ; 
 To Thee our faltering prayers ascend, 
 Our fainting hearts are known!" 
 
 So, the lyric entitled " The Army Hymn " : 
 
 " O Lord of hosts! almighty King!" 
 
 In addition are such as the " Hymn after the 
 Emancipation Proclamation," " Hymn for the 
 Fair at Chicago," " For the Dedication of Me- 
 morial Hall at Cambridge," " For the Laying 
 of the Corner-stone of Harvard Memorial Hall," 
 " For the Two Hundredth Anniversary of 
 King's Chapel," " At the Dedication of the 
 Holmes Hospital at Hudson," " The Word of 
 Promise," " At the Funeral Services of Charles 
 Sumner," " For the Inauguration of the Statue 
 of Governor Andrew," and the " Hymn for the 
 Class-meeting," one of his choicest lyrics, as it 
 opens : 
 
 " Thou gracious Power, whose mercy lends 
 The light of home, the smile of friends, 
 Our gathered flock Thine arms infold 
 As in the peaceful days of old." 
 
 In fine, there are not a few of these poems, 
 under the title of songs, odes, tributes, and 
 
144 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 sonnets, which in character and form are so 
 strictly reflective that they could safely be 
 classed under the division of hymns, surcharged 
 as they are with a kind of devotional and spirit- 
 ual fervor. In addition to hymns, there is a 
 second class of meditative poems that might be 
 termed " Verses for Occasions," written at the 
 time for special purposes, and embracing much 
 of that commemorative or reminiscent verse in 
 the composition of which Holmes was often at 
 his best. Such are his loving tributes to the 
 great American authors and benefactors of his 
 time, in which he voices his own personal grati- 
 tude, and congratulates American letters and 
 the American people as the inheritors of their 
 fame. Thus, in his poem " Bryant's Seventieth 
 Birthday," he sings in grateful strain: 
 
 " This was the first sweet singer in the cage 
 Of our close-woven life. A new-born age 
 Claims in his vesper song its heritage. 
 How can we praise the verse whose music flows 
 With solemn cadence and majestic close, 
 Pure as the dew that filters through the rose? 
 How shall we thank him that in evil days 
 He faltered never; nor for blame nor praise 
 Nor time nor party shamed his earlier lays? " 
 
 So, in his lines to Longfellow : 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 145 
 
 " Ah, gentlest soul! how gracious, how benign 
 Breathes through our troubled life that voice of thine." 
 
 So, to Whittier, on his eightieth birthday, he 
 writes in loving" salutation, as also " In Memory 
 of Lincoln," and in sorrow for the smitten nation ■ 
 
 " Dear Lord, with pitying eye behold 
 
 This martyr generation, 
 Which Thou, through trials manifold, 
 
 Art showing Thy salvation; 
 Oh, let the blood by murder spilt 
 Wash out Thy stricken children's guilt 
 
 And sanctify our nation ! 
 Our hearts lie buried in the dust 
 
 With him so true and tender, 
 The patriot's stay, the people's trust 
 
 The shield of the offender : 
 Yet every murmuring voice is still, 
 As, bowing to Thy sovereign will, 
 
 Our best-loved we surrender." 
 
 Thus these memorial tributes continue, to 
 Burns, to Garfield, Halleck, Everett, Moore, 
 Lowell, Washington, Mrs. Stowe, and others, al- 
 ternating between eulogy and elegy ; emphasiz- 
 ing the reflective and the pensive elements of life, 
 and expressing in varied form many of the finest 
 forms of idyllic verse. Nothing that Holmes 
 has written, in prose or song, more clearly re- 
 
146 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 veals his sensitive and affectionate nature, the 
 firm hold that he had upon the friends of his 
 earlier and middle life, and how easy it was for 
 him for the time being to subordinate the pro- 
 fessor and the poet to the man and the friend. 
 So true is this that even in his national and hu- 
 morous verse the more sedate and meditative 
 features of his character come into prominence, 
 as in " Old Ironsides," " Robinson of Leyden," 
 " An Appeal for the Old South," " The Last 
 Charge," " God Save the Flag," and " A Voice 
 of the Loyal North." 
 
 By far the most extended list of his medita- 
 tive poems, however, is found in those special 
 lyrics which have been well characterized as 
 " Poems of Moral and Spiritual Beauty," suf- 
 fused with genuine sentiment, with a deep emo- 
 tive and ethical purpose, and which, to the ob- 
 serving and sympathetic reader, unbosom, as 
 nothing else can, the innermost life and spirit of 
 the author. Among these rich and choice se- 
 lections any distinctions are almost invidious, so 
 uniform is their poetic merit and so high the 
 purpose that pervades them. If forced to a dis- 
 crimination we should cite the following : " Un- 
 der the Violets," " The Crooked Foot-path," 
 
OLIVER W EX DELL HOLMES. l-i7 
 
 " The Voiceless," " Homesick in Heaven," " The 
 Secret of the Stars," " Sun and Shadow," " The 
 Last Look," " The Chambered Nautilus," " Our 
 Limitations," "The Iron Gate," "The Living 
 Temple," " A Mother's Secret," " An Old Year's 
 Song," and "The Silent Melody." 
 
 From this rare anthology an occasional cita- 
 tion must suffice. Thus, in " The Voiceless " : 
 
 " Nay, grieve not for the dead alone, 
 
 Whose song has told their heart's sad story ; 
 Weep for the voiceless, who have known 
 
 The cross without the crown of glory! 
 If singing breath or echoing chord 
 
 To every hidden pang were given, 
 What endless melodies were poured, 
 
 As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!" 
 
 In " Our Limitations " we read: 
 
 " We trust and fear, we question and believe, 
 From life's dark threads a trembling faith to weave. 
 Eternal Truth ! beyond our hopes and fears 
 Sweep the vast orbits of Thy myriad spheres!" 
 
 So, in " The Iron Gate " : 
 
 "If word of mine another's gloom has brightened, 
 
 Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came 
 If hand of mine another's task has lightened, 
 It felt the guidance that it dares not claim." 
 
148 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 In " The Living Temple " he sings, as a devout 
 Christian scientist and in loftiest strain : 
 
 " Not in the world of light alone, 
 Where God has built His blazing throne, 
 Nor yet alone in earth below, 
 With belted seas that come and go, 
 And endless isles of sunlit green 
 Is all thy Maker's glory seen ; 
 Look in upon thy wondrous frame, 
 Eternal wisdom still the same! . . . 
 O Father! grant Thy love divine 
 To make these mystic temples Thine! 
 When wasting age and wearying strife 
 Have sapped the leaning walls of life, 
 When darkness gathers over all, 
 And the last tottering pillars fall, 
 Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms, 
 And mold it into heavenly forms!" 
 
 Such are some examples of this wealth of 
 lyric verse on its contemplative side, expressing 
 some of the sweetest poetic sentiments that 
 Holmes has given us, and, even on the strictly 
 literary and artistic side, yielding not a whit to 
 anything that he has written. Readers of Holmes 
 who think of him as merely an after-dinner 
 poet or a maker of jolly rhymes for festivals 
 and class reunions, or as the author only of 
 "Aunt Tabitha," "Bill and Joe," and '"The 
 
OLIVER HEX DELI. HOLMES. 149 
 
 Broomstick Train," quite mistake, after all, his 
 real temper and merit, and unwittingly lose a 
 large part of that personal satisfaction that comes 
 from a closer familiarity with his more subdued 
 and sensitive verse. And this leads us to note 
 that the great characteristic of his poetry as 
 meditative is its mental and moral wholesome- 
 ness ; its soundness, sanity, and good sense ; its 
 conspicuous freedom from the morose, ascetic, 
 and revolting; and from those one-sided and 
 hence defective views which mar the unity of so 
 many gifted authors in modern prose and verse. 
 Meditative verse, from its very etymology (med- 
 itavi), means thoughtful verse, sentiment marked 
 by sense and some good degree of mental life, 
 while it is equally suggestive to note that the 
 word " meditation " is from the same verbal base 
 as mcdcri, meaning " to heal " ; so that we have 
 here the two ideas of sanity and soundness, 
 thought in healthful forms, free from the morbid 
 and injurious, and directly contributive to the 
 best results in mind and character. A recent 
 writer in the " Forum " emphasizes the neces- 
 sity of a healthful tone in American Letters. 
 Whittier, in a review of Holmes's poems, pur- 
 posely speaks of mirth and medicine as a 
 
150 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 happy combination illustrated in his verse. In 
 no American or English bard have these two ele- 
 ments been so aptly conjoined, so that the sum- 
 total effect has been healing to the spirit, and 
 provocative of every wholesome impulse and 
 tendency. 
 
 In meditative verse such a characteristic is 
 especially notable and helpful, mainly because of 
 the comparative ease with which such a type 
 of verse degenerates into the unduly sedate and 
 serious. 
 
 Holmes has shown us most conclusively that 
 verse, because reflective, need not be revolting; 
 that sober suggestion may be couched in the 
 most attractive forms ; that rational pleasantry 
 and good cheer have their appropriate place in 
 such an order of poetry, and that it is the envi- 
 able office of the lyrist, on the contemplative 
 side, to gladden, inspire, and encourage the hu- 
 man heart, and lift the life of his fellows toward 
 God and all that tends to goodness. 
 
 It is by the perusal of just such poetry as 
 this — true, tender, and ennobling — that many a 
 weary hour may be enlivened and enriched. 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 151 
 
^^YBa^^^ 
 
 lSl2- 
 
CHAPTER TENTH. 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 " No one," writes Mr. Stedman, " can enter 
 upon the most cursory review of our literature 
 without being struck by the share which wo- 
 men have had in its production. A sisterhood 
 of song has even in America a just and distinc- 
 tive regard." To the same effect, and by way of 
 prophecy, Professor Richardson writes: " There 
 can be no question that the work of women in 
 American literature is hereafter to command a 
 study as deep as that bestowed upon the work 
 of men." While we have no American author- 
 ess of the rank of Mrs. Browning in verse or 
 George Eliot in fiction, we have in our earlier 
 and developing literature a goodly number of 
 women who have done and are doing a most 
 commendable work in authorship, and so in- 
 155 
 
156 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 creasingly distinctive as to demand the special 
 study of the critic. 
 
 If we inquire as to the particular provinces in 
 which our authoresses have done their best work, 
 we shall not find them, naturally, in the realm 
 of historical and philosophic criticism, nor, in- 
 deed, in that of epic and dramatic verse, but 
 rather in the wide departments of descriptive 
 miscellany, fiction, and lyric verse. It is signifi- 
 cantly to the last of these departments, the lyric, 
 that our attention is directed, as illustrated in 
 such collections as Mrs. Sigourney's " Moral 
 Pieces in Prose and Verse " and Celia Thaxter's 
 "Driftweed." Still more to our purpose, it is 
 pertinent to state that it is, most of all, in the 
 domain of the meditative lyric that American 
 poetesses, as also British, have won distinction, 
 as there is no order of verse which, in its deep 
 and delicate sensibilities, is more thoroughly 
 germane to the nature and ideals of woman. 
 Emotional verse, especially in the line of the re- 
 flective and pensive, is her chosen sphere, and, 
 indeed, absolutely essential to the highest ex- 
 pression of her genius. Such a compend as the 
 recently prepared " Library of American Liter- 
 ature " or Griswold's " Female Poets of Amer- 
 
HARRIET B EEC HER STOIVE. 157 
 
 ica " will furnish abundant examples illustrative 
 of the character and spirit of our contemplative 
 verse. 
 
 The names and poems of some of these lyrists 
 may be cited and sufficient extracts quoted to 
 give to the reader the desire to multiply them 
 at pleasure. Thus from the pen of the gifted 
 Celia Thaxter we note such a title as " The 
 Watch of Boon Island," beginning: 
 
 " They crossed the lonely and lamenting sea." 
 
 One of her poems, entitled " Song," is full of 
 tender beauty : 
 
 " We sail toward evening's lonely star 
 
 That trembles in the tender blue ; 
 One single cloud, a dusky bar, 
 
 Burnt with dull carmine through and through, 
 Slow-smoldering in the summer sky, 
 
 Lies low along the fading west. 
 How sweet to watch its splendors die, 
 
 Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed! 
 
 " How like a dream are earth and heaven, 
 
 Star-beam and darkness, sky and sea; 
 Thy face, pale in the shadowy even, 
 
 Thy quiet eyes that gaze on me! 
 Oh, realize the moment's charm, 
 
 Thou dearest! we are, at life's best, 
 Folded in God's encircling arms, 
 
 Wave- cradled thus and wind-caressed." 
 
158 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton makes selec- 
 tion almost invidious among such choice exam- 
 ples as " The House of Death," " To-night," and 
 " We Lay Us Down to Sleep." We quote from 
 the last a stanza or two : 
 
 ' ' We lay us down to sleep, 
 And leave to God the rest, 
 Whether to wake and weep 
 Or wake no more be best. 
 
 " Some faithful friends we've found, 
 But they who love us best, 
 When we are underground, 
 Will laugh on with the rest. 
 
 " No task have we begun 
 
 But other hands can take ; 
 No work beneath the sun 
 
 For which we need to wake." 
 
 Of similar reflective pathos and beauty are 
 some of the lyrics of Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spof- 
 ford, such as " A Sigh " and " Magdalen," 
 " Fantasia, " and that exquisite production, 
 " Music in the Night": 
 
 " When stars pursue their solemn flight, 
 Oft in the middle of the night 
 A strain of music visits me, 
 Hushed in a moment silverly: 
 
HARRIET BE EC HER STOWE. 159 
 
 Such rich and rapturous strains as make 
 The very soul of silence ache 
 With longing for the melody." 
 
 Mrs. Piatt's "Why Should We Care?" 
 11 Transfigured," and " His Share and Mine," are 
 of the same deep and pensive pathos, breaking 
 out at times into something like poetic passion. 
 
 " If sand is in the South, frost in the North, 
 
 And sorrow everywhere and passionate yearning, 
 If stars fade from the skies, if men go forth 
 
 From their own thresholds and make no returning, 
 Why should we care? " 
 
 Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, in her " Two Mys- 
 teries," " The Stars," " Infoldings," and " Shad- 
 ow Evidence," sounds the same subjective strain. 
 
 Miss Phelps (Mrs. Ward), in her "Songs of 
 the Silent World,' J has sounded as clear and 
 sweet a note as any of her sex in this particular 
 species of American lyrics, as in " An Autumn 
 Violet " and other selections. So, in the deeply 
 religious lines of the Carys, Alice and Phoebe, 
 and of the Goodales, Elaine and Dora, poetic 
 genius and art combine to furnish a well-nigh 
 perfect product, as seen in such specimens as 
 " Nearer Home," "Ashes of Roses," and " Even- 
 tide." Helen Jackson, in her " Resurgam," Mrs. 
 
160 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Sarah Orne Jewett, in " A Child's Grave," 
 Emma Lazarus, in her lyrico-dramatic " Dance 
 to Death," and Miss Woolsey, in " Lohengrin," 
 Miss Osgood, in " Driving Home the Cows,"Miss 
 Perry, in " Some Day of Days," Miss Smith, in 
 " Sometime," Miss Wilcox, in " Solitude," Miss 
 Bates, in " A Lament," Miss Clymer, in her 
 " Song," beginning: 
 
 " Oh, trust me not unless thy soul 
 Can claim my soul as thine," 
 
 and similarly excellent specimens from the pens 
 of Miss Larcom, Miss Thomas, Mrs. Whitney, 
 Miss Coolbrith, and others, and a large and 
 worthy list of similarly gifted singers, are open 
 to the study of the lover of heartfelt verse ex- 
 pressed in finished form and taste. It is only 
 when one begins to select from this list either as 
 to names or poems that he finds his difficulties 
 so increasing as to compel him to refer the reader 
 to his own intelligent judgment. The marvel is 
 that Mr. Stedman and Miss Hutchinson, in their 
 " Library of American Literature," have evinced 
 such delicate wisdom in this regard, so as prac- 
 tically to meet the full purpose of their collection 
 and yet be true to the living and the dead. Dif- 
 
HARRIET BEECIIER STOIVE. 161 
 
 ficult as such a discrimination is with reference 
 to authors proper, it is preeminently so in regard 
 to that large and growing class of authoresses 
 whose special work and place so often put to the 
 extremest test the judgment of the critic. 
 
 There is one American authoress, however, of 
 so representative a reputation that she deserves 
 at our hands a separate study, in common with 
 the names of Lowell, Emerson, and Holmes. 
 The gifted daughter of a gifted father ; a member 
 of a characteristic American family of national re- 
 pute, through the father and sons, in the Amer- 
 ican pulpit ; the wife of a distinguished biblical 
 scholar and teacher; and possessed of a nature 
 constitutionally devout and earnest, it is but nat- 
 ural that we find her, both in prose and verse, 
 making valid contributions to serious and sub- 
 stantial literature. Penninginhergirlhood a the- 
 sis on "The Immortality of the Soul," this medita- 
 tive spirit evinced itself in such prose produc- 
 tions as " The Minister's Wooing," " Old Town 
 Folks," ''Footsteps of the Master," "Bible 
 Heroines," and " House and Home Papers," 
 to say nothing of " Dred," and her most notable 
 work, " Uncle Tom's Cabin," begotten as it was 
 out of her profound personal interest in the suf- 
 
162 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 ferings of the oppressed. Never has a writer 
 undertaken and prosecuted literary work with a 
 more devout desire to realize the Baconian ideal, 
 " in the glory of God and the relief of man's 
 estate." But we are writing of American med- 
 itative verse, and we turn at once to Mrs. Stowe's 
 " Religious Poems," her one most distinctive 
 contribution in this direction, and signally indic- 
 ative of her innermost religious spirit. Though 
 embodied in a single volume of but little more 
 than one hundred pages, they are replete with 
 beauty and literary interest, especially signifi- 
 cant as coming from the writer of " Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin," and serving to confirm the same pro- 
 found contemplative character that we discern in 
 her most secular prose. The titles of some of 
 the choicest of these religious lyrics are as fol- 
 lows : " St. Catharine Borne by Angels," "The 
 Other World," "The Inner Voice," "Abide in 
 Me and I in You," " Consolation," " Only a 
 Year," " Hours of the Night," with its seven sep- 
 arate poems, and " St. Peter's Church." From 
 first to last these poems are idyllic, full of the 
 tenderest religious feeling, marked, above all, by 
 a pervading purpose to be of personal service 
 in them to those in need of sympathy, and re- 
 
HARRIET BEECH ER STOWE. 103 
 
 vealing, as nothing else she has written does, 
 what her ideal of literature and life has been and 
 how efficiently she has realized it. 
 
 In the first selection of the volume, " St. Cath- 
 erine Borne by Angels," are some beautiful 
 stanzas : 
 
 " Slow through the solemn air, in silence sailing, 
 Borne by mysterious angels, strong and fair, 
 She sleeps at last, blest dreams her eyelids veiling, 
 Above this weary world of strife and care. 
 
 " So, o'er our hearts sometimes the sweet, sad story 
 
 Of suffering saints, borne homeward, crowned and blest, 
 Shines down in stillness with a tender glory, 
 And makes a mirror there of breathless rest. 
 
 " For not alone in those old Eastern regions 
 
 Are Christ's beloved ones tried by cross and chain ; 
 In many a home are His elect ones hidden, 
 His martyrs suffering in their patient pain." 
 
 So, in the exquisite poem "The Charmer," in 
 which Christ is represented as the one for whom 
 the pagan world was looking and ardently wait- 
 ing: 
 
 " ' Where is that Charmer whom thou bidst us seek? 
 
 On what far shores may His sweet voice be beard? 
 When shall these questions of our yearning souls 
 Be answered by the bright Eternal Word? ' 
 
164 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " But years passed on; and lo! the Charmer came, 
 Pure, simple, sweet, as comes the silver clew, 
 And the world knew Him not: He walked alone, 
 Encircled only by His trusting few." 
 
 A similar Christian strain is heard in " Only 
 a Year," " The Old Psalm Tune," " The Other 
 World," and " The Inner Voice," in all of which 
 it is difficult to tell which is the more "impressive, 
 the sweet and tender sentiment of the songs, or 
 the rich and rhythmic melody in which they are 
 written. 
 
 So, in that inimitable lyric of prayer, " Abide 
 in Me and I in You," as it opens: 
 
 " That mystic word of Thine, O sovereign Lord, 
 Is all too pure, too high, too deep, for me ; 
 Weary of striving, and with longing faint, 
 I breathe it back again in prayer to Thee." 
 
 In her serial poem " The Hours of the Night ; 
 or, Watches of Sorrow," passing from " Mid- 
 night," through the four hours to " Day Dawn," 
 and closing with the poem, " When I Awake I 
 am Still With Thee," consolatory verse rises to 
 its highest and purest level, as we find it in the 
 best hymnology of the Christian church. 
 
 In fine, no reader of American verse, on its 
 meditative side, can-be said to know it fully, and 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 165 
 
 no student of the life and writings of Mrs. Stowe 
 can be said to know her fully and at her best, 
 until he has read these uplifting religious lyrics. 
 The}* remind us more directly of the tender sen- 
 timents of the English Bonar and Heber and Miss 
 Havergal, and our American Palmer, and that 
 delicately sensitive nature, the lamented Sidney 
 Lanier, than of any others, and serve to add to 
 Mrs. Stowe's reputation for intellectual vigor 
 and creative literary genius the scarcely less im- 
 portant qualities of sensibility and grace and ex- 
 quisite artistic taste. 
 
 Nor does American literature or any other 
 literature suffer by the prominent presence of 
 genuine feeling in its prose and verse. To the 
 degree in which it is genuine, it is healthful and 
 helpful, serving to give tone to thought to soften 
 what would otherwise be harsh and rough, and 
 to give to authorship that gentleness and mel- 
 lowness that it so often needs. Here lies the 
 mission of such an order of prose as that of Irv- 
 ing, and here, especially, lies the mission of lyric 
 verse as distinct from the epic and dramatic, 
 in maintaining what Disraeli has called " the 
 Amenities of literature." When, moreover, 
 these lyrics pass out of the strictly secular into 
 
1G6 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 the sphere of the subjective and even the sacred, 
 as they do in the verse of Mrs. Stowe, and, to a 
 great degree, in that of all the lyrists we have 
 studied, then does poetic expression rise to its 
 most attractive form, and take its place, as it 
 rightly should, among the most beneficent min- 
 istries to men. 
 
AMERICAN MEMORIAL LYRICS: ELEGIES. 
 
 167 
 
CHAPTER ELEVENTH. 
 
 AMERICAN MEMORIAL LYRICS: 
 ELEGIES. 
 
 Of the various forms of meditative verse, the 
 elegy, from its very nature and purpose, is the 
 most distinctively so. In fact, this is its exclu- 
 sive feature. The different classes of lyric poetry 
 are sometimes viewed under the one title — odes. 
 These are heroic or epic, as seen in the na- 
 tional sonnets of Wordsworth and Milton ; hu- 
 morous, as seen in Moore ; amatory, as in Burns ; 
 pastoral, as in Ramsay and Shenstone; sacred, 
 as seen in Christian hymnology ; moral or devo- 
 tional, as seen in Spenser's " Heavenly Love " 
 and " Heavenly Beauty " ; and elegiac. This 
 final form, as stated, is the most specifically med- 
 itative. It is sometimes called the Mournful 
 Ode, or the Memorial Ode, being specifically 
 lyrical in that it embodies and aims to express 
 169 
 
170 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 the deepest and tenderest feelings of the 
 human heart; while there are in all prominent 
 literatures many poems that are not properly 
 called elegies, in which, however, the elegiac 
 element and spirit are so pronounced as to give 
 them practically an elegiac effect. Readers are 
 familiar with the standard elegies of British 
 letters, Tennyson's, In Memoriam, Milton's 
 " Lycidas, " Shelley's " Adonais, " Gray's 
 "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and 
 Matthew Arnold's " Thyrsis," nearly all of which 
 could strictly be called In Memoriams or com- 
 memorative poems, tributes to the memory 
 of such cherished friends as Arthur Hallam, 
 Edward King, the poet Keats, and Arthur Hugh 
 Clough. As far back as Chaucer's " Booke of 
 the Duchesse," a tribute to Lady Blanche, and 
 Spenser's " Astrophel," a tribute to Sir Philip 
 Sidney, we note this memorial verse, appearing 
 later in such poems as Dryden's " Heroic Stan- 
 zas " on Cromwell, Wordsworth's lines, " At the 
 Grave of Burns," and Landor's lines, " On 
 Southey's Death" ; while many poems, such as 
 Milton's " II Penseroso " and Hood's " Death- 
 bed," have a .definitely marked elegiac quality, 
 not to speak of those numerous sonnets, scattered 
 
ELEGIES. 171 
 
 up and down the pages of English letters, which 
 may be said to possess more of this feature than 
 of any other. 
 
 In American letters the same literary laws 
 obtain, though on a narrower scale. We note 
 the same divisions of lyric verse, the same me- 
 morial spirit characterizing much of the poetry, 
 while, here and there, a separate elegy is found 
 possessed of special idyllic merit, and expressing 
 meditative sentiment on the side of grief. Nat- 
 urally, in such a body of verse as the American, 
 this particular type of lyric cannot be expected 
 to be abundant or even singularly able. The 
 nation is as yet too young, the range and depth 
 of its experience too limited, the distinctive qual- 
 ity and aim of its civilization too material, for 
 its developing literature to express much of this 
 subjective spirit in its verse. Almost any kind 
 of lyric is more in keeping with the prevailing 
 impulses and the environment, while it is this 
 very fact that lends special significance to any 
 such meditative poetry that does exist, and in- 
 sures its fuller expression, as a form, in the future 
 history of the literature. Memorial tributes are 
 found, as far back as 1657, in " The Life and 
 Death of John Cotton," by John Norton ; in 1670, 
 
172 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 in " The Life and Death of Richard Mather," by 
 Increase Mather; in 1678, in Norton's " Funeral 
 Elegy upon Anne Broadstreet " ; in 1685, in 
 Cotton Mather's quaint discourse, " An Elegy 
 on the Much-to-be-Deplored Death of that 
 Never-to-be-Forgotten Person, Rev. Mr. Na- 
 thaniel Collins " ; until, in 1682, we note, by Cot- 
 ton Mather, " A Poem to the Memory of Hiram 
 Oakes " ; in 1 7 1 5 , "A Poem on the Death of 
 Joseph Green," by Nicholas Noyes ; in 1727, 
 "A Poem on the Death of George I.," by Mather 
 Byles ; " An Elegy on the Death of Daniel Oli- 
 ver," in 1732, by the same author, one of the 
 most prolific elegiac poets of the time; "An 
 Elegiac Poem on the Death of George White- 
 field," by PhiliisWheatley Peters, in 1 770 ; and so 
 on, through the eighteenth century, in the verse 
 of Brackenridge and Barlow, and closing with 
 Alsop's " Monody on the Death of Washington," 
 in 1800 — a collection of memorial literature, both 
 in prose and verse, whose merit is in the inverse 
 ratio of its amount, whose enforced reading- 
 might have endangered the health of the heroes 
 it eulogizes, and whose record is important only 
 as showing the continuity of literary growth. 
 That the editors of the recently published 
 
ELEGIES. 173 
 
 " Library of American Literature " patiently and 
 courageously traversed this wide waste of words, 
 and are still living and in good spirits, is proof 
 positive of what man and woman can endure. 
 Coming to the nineteenth century, a few of the % 
 most notable of our American elegies may be 
 cited. In the verse of Poe there is a decided 
 elegiac tone and quality. In fact, it might be 
 said that, with some rare exceptions, as " El- 
 dorado " and " Eulalie," the poetry throughout 
 is pitched in the minor key, often breaking out 
 in a dirge or a despairing wail over the woes of 
 earth and the fate of man. Even of " The Bells " 
 the two longest stanzas sound this dire note, 
 beginning, respectively : 
 
 " Hear the loud alarum bells," 
 
 and 
 
 " Hear the tolling of the bells." 
 
 The theme of his most celebrated poem, " The 
 Raven, "as he tells us, is that of " a lover lament- 
 ing his deceased mistress," a veritable ele«v, 
 with its sad refrain of " nevermore." So, in his 
 poems " Lenore," "The Colosseum," "Annabel 
 Lee," " Ulalume," and briefer selections, there 
 is the same commemorative tenor and spirit over 
 something or some one lost. 
 
174 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Turning to Bryant, we note such elegiac poems 
 as " Blessed Are They that Mourn," beginning: 
 
 " Oh, deem not they are blest alone 
 Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep; 
 The Power who pities man hath shown 
 A blessing for the eyes that weep." 
 
 So, his" Hymn to Death," "The Indian Girl's 
 Lament," " Rizpah, 2 ' " The Old Man's Funeral," 
 " The Two Graves," " The Living Lost," " The 
 Burial of Love," and his significant lines on " The 
 Death of Lincoln " : 
 
 " Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, 
 Gentle and merciful and just! 
 Who, in the fear of God, didst bear 
 The sword of power, a nation's trust! 
 
 " In sorrow by thy bier we stand 
 Amid the awe that hushes all, 
 And speak the anguish of a land 
 That shook with horror at thy fall. 
 
 " Thy task is done; the bond are free; 
 We bear thee to an honored grave, 
 Whose proudest monument shall be 
 The broken fetters of the slave. 
 
 " Pure was thy life; its bloody close 
 
 Hath placed thee with the sons of light, 
 Among the noble host of those 
 
 Who perished in the cause of Right," 
 
ELEGIES. 175 
 
 This noble eulogy and elegy is fitly followed by 
 the poem " The Death of Slavery." 
 
 All readers have marked the meditative char- 
 acter of Bryant's verse, while it is here in place 
 to note that this contemplative cast often ap- 
 pears in the elegiac form, as best expressive of 
 the pensive habit of Bryant's mind. The same 
 is true, approximately, of Emerson, in so far as 
 the general character of his verse is concerned, 
 while he has given us, in two or three instances, 
 notable examples of the elegy proper, as in his 
 " In Memoriam," written as a tribute to his 
 brother Edward, as he sings in plaintive strain : 
 
 " There is no record left on earth, 
 Save in tablets of the heart, 
 Of the rich inherent worth, 
 
 Of the grace that on him shone. 1 ' 
 
 So, in his " Dirge " : 
 
 " But they are gone — the holy ones 
 
 Who trod with me this lovely vale; 
 The strong, star-bright companions 
 Are silent, low, and pale." 
 
 It is especially in his threnody over the 
 death of his beloved and promising son that he 
 unbosoms his soul in lines of tenderest grief; 
 
176 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " And, looking over the hills, I mourn 
 The darling who shall not return. . . . 
 The gracious boy, who did adorn 
 The world whereunto he was born ; 
 I hearken for thy household cheer, 
 O eloquent child! . . . 
 The brook into the stream runs on, 
 But the deep-eyed boy is gone. 
 Was there no star that could be sent, 
 No watcher in the firmament, 
 No angel from the countless host 
 That borders round the crystal coast, 
 Could stoop to heal that only child, 
 Nature's sweet marvel undefiled, 
 And keep the blossom of the earth, 
 Which all her harvests were not worth? 
 
 child of Paradise, 
 
 Boy who made dear his father's home, 
 
 In whose deep eyes 
 
 Men read the welfare of the times to come, 
 
 1 am too much bereft." 
 
 Thus the lines run on in deep, pathetic flow, 
 revealing, as nothing else does which Emerson 
 has written, what a large and loving nature the 
 great man had, and how little we know of au- 
 thors until some bitter sorrow has sanctified their 
 natures and opened up the well-springs of feel- 
 ing and sympathy that hitherto have lain con- 
 cealed. Bayard Taylor, in similar strain, wrote 
 his elegy on the death of his beloved wife, Mary 
 
ELEGIES. Ill 
 
 Agnew. So, in Longfellow's verse, there is a 
 decided elegiac element, appearing, partly, in 
 such meditative poems as " The Reaper and the 
 Flowers," "God's- Acre," " Resignation," " Sus- 
 piria," and " The Two Angels," and, also, in 
 specific examples of memorial poetry, as his lines 
 on " Charles Sumner " : 
 
 " Garlands upon his grave 
 
 And flowers upon his hearse, 
 And to the tender heart and brave 
 The tribute of this verse. 
 
 "His was the troubled life, 
 The conflict and the pain, 
 The grief, the bitterness of strife, 
 The honor without stain. . . . 
 
 " Were a star quenched on high, 
 For ages would its light, 
 Still traveling downward from the sky, 
 Shine on our mortal sight. 
 
 " So, when a great man dies, 
 For years beyond our ken 
 The light he leaves behind him lies 
 Upon the paths of men." 
 
 So that' beautiful and touching elegy entitled 
 " Three Friends of Mine," beginning: 
 
 " When I remember them, those friends of mine, 
 Who are no longer here, the noble three 
 Who half my life were more than friends to me, 
 And whose discourse was like a generous wine." 
 
178 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 So, most of all, in his " Morituri Salutamus," a 
 poem from which no one line can be spared, 
 filled to the full with tender lyric richness, re- 
 plete with thought and love and faith and hope, 
 the inimitable model of all modern elegies, a 
 poem sufficient in itself to have made the name 
 of Longfellow great and dear for all time. 
 
 Turning to Whittier, the poet of trust and 
 cheer and simple, homely life, we find his pages 
 full of idyllic charm, characteristically reflec- 
 tive, and often marked by deep elegiac feeling. 
 Such poems are " The Female Martyr," <: Tell- 
 ing the Bees," " The Swan Song of Parson 
 Avery," his tributes to Toussaint l'Ouver- 
 ture, to Garrison, Channing, Wordsworth, 
 Burns, and others. His poem " Ichabod," an 
 elegy on the lost reputation of Webster by 
 reason of his compromising attitude toward the 
 fugitive-slave law, is one of painful interest, as 
 he writes : 
 
 " So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn 
 Which once he wore! 
 The glory from his gray hairs gone 
 Forevermore!" 
 
 In " The Lost Occasion," written thirty years 
 later, he continues the elegiac lament over the 
 
ELEGIES. 179 
 
 fallen hero in that he did not live to see the final 
 triumph of justice in the outcome of the Civil. 
 War, the emancipation of the slave. 
 
 One of the four volumes of Whittier's most 
 recently published verse is entitled " Poems 
 Reminiscent and Religious." This is but an- 
 other name for meditative verse, in which the 
 elegiac feature is also prominent, as in " Mem- 
 ories," a sweet testimonial to a " beautiful and 
 happy girl " of his youth, and in " My Trust," 
 touching lines to the memory of his mother : 
 
 " A picture memory brings to me: 
 I look across the years to see 
 Myself beside my mother's knee; 
 • I wait in His good time to see 
 
 That, as my mother dealt with me, 
 So with His children dealeth He." 
 
 In such poems as " At Last," " What the Trav- 
 eler Said at Sunset," and "The Light that is 
 Felt," who can discern the dividing line between 
 the contemplative and the prophetic, as, with his 
 eye both on earth and heaven, he is rapidly 
 preparing for the peace of God that just awaits 
 him, and has already been granted him ! 
 
 Turning to the poetry of Lowell, it is signifi- 
 cant to note that it opens with his " Threnodia " : 
 
180 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 " Gone, gone from us! and shall we see 
 Those sibyl-leaves of destiny, 
 Those calm eyes, nevermore? " 
 
 Of a similar spirit is his sonnet " To the Spirit 
 of Keats," and his tender poem " On the Death 
 of a Friend's Child," in which we read the sug- 
 gestive lines : 
 
 " 'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, 
 Whose golden rounds are our calamities, 
 Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God 
 The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. 
 True is it that Death's face seems stern and cold, 
 When he is sent to summon those we love; 
 But all God's angels come tb us disguised: 
 Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 
 One after other lift their frowning masks, • 
 And we behold the seraph's face beneath, 
 All radiant with the glory and the calm 
 Of having looked upon the front of God." 
 
 So, his poems " She Came and Went " and 
 " The Changeling," his memorial verses to 
 Kossuth, Garrison, Charming, Hood, and others, 
 " Auf Wiedersehen," "After the Burial," and 
 "The First Snowfall," in which he sings of his 
 lost child : 
 
 " I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn, 
 Where a little headstone stood." 
 
ELEGIES. 181 
 
 His three notable memorial poems, " The 
 Fight at Concord Bridge," " Under the Old 
 Elm," and "An Ode for the Fourth of July," are 
 national in character and purpose, though remi- 
 niscent and reflective. Thus, from first to last, 
 through the record of our American verse this 
 meditative and memorial strain is heard, some- 
 times in the quiet and subdued notes of contem- 
 plation, and often in the deep and passionate cry 
 of sorrow over the irreparable losses of earth. 
 Moreover, it may be said that, with the single 
 exception of the hopeless key to which the verse 
 of Poe is tuned, these poetic sentiments are hal- 
 lowed and glorified by the presence of Christian 
 hope and trust. Even in so rollicking and hu- 
 morous a poet as Holmes, rare examples of the 
 reflective and commemorative are found, while 
 in such poets as Willis and the sisters Cary and 
 Mrs. Stowe the secular passes into the scriptural 
 and spiritual, and the contemplative into the de- 
 votional and religious ; eulogy and elegy com- 
 bine, and the final effect of the verse, as a whole, 
 is to ennoble and subdue the hearts of those who 
 read it with anything like an appreciative sym- 
 pathy. 
 
AMERICAN DEVOTIONAL LYRICS: HYMNS. 
 
 183 
 
CHAPTER TWELFTH. 
 
 AMERICAN DEVOTIONAL LYRICS: 
 HYMNS. 
 
 ACCORDING to that division of lyric verse by 
 which all its forms are included under the one 
 title of odes, the most natural and complete 
 classification of the odes would be that of secular 
 and sacred, this last order being divisible into 
 inspired or biblical, religious or spiritual, and 
 moral or ethical. It is in this second collection 
 of odes, the religious, that the hymns of the 
 Christian church belong, midway between the 
 inspired productions of Hebrew verse and the 
 ethical poems of Wordsworth and Spenser and 
 kindred authors. Each of these orders is dis- 
 tinctly meditative, while it is reserved for reli- 
 gious odes, as expressed in hymns, to embody 
 this refiective element in some of the most de- 
 vout and impressive forms known to literature. 
 185 
 
186 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Moreover, it may be said that American hym- 
 nology, as distinct from British, has had an in- 
 creasingly creditable history from the beginning. 
 This history opens, in 1640, with the publication 
 of the now celebrated " Bay Psalm-book," be- 
 lieved, on good authority, to have been the first 
 book printed in America, by the first printing- 
 press in America, in Cambridge, in the house 
 of Rev. Henry Dunster, the first president of 
 Harvard, who was chosen afterward to issue the 
 version in a revised and more acceptable form. 
 As the title indicates, it was exclusively a psalter, 
 " the whole Book of Psalms faithfully translated 
 into English meter." Then followed various col- 
 lections, such as that of Sternhold and Hopkins, 
 1693 ; of Tate and Brady, 1 741 ; Watts's Hymns, 
 1 741; Nettleton's "Village Hymns," 1824; 
 " Songs by the Way," 1824, by Bishop Doane ; 
 Bishop Coxe's "Christian Ballads," 1840; 
 Hastings's "Devotional Hymns," 18 15 ; Palmer's 
 "Hymns and Sacred Pieces," 1865 ; Mrs. Stowe's 
 "Religious Poems," 1 867 ; Phcebe Cary's "Poems 
 of Faith, Hope, and Love," 1868. The list of 
 what may be called denominational hymnals is 
 well-nigh limitless, and need not here be cited. 
 A question of special interest arises here as 
 
HYMNS. 187 
 
 to our American hymnists, who they are, in the 
 main, and what classes of the community they 
 mainly represent. The large majority of them 
 belong to the clergy, with a goodly number from 
 our distinctively literary men and women, au- 
 thors by profession. 
 
 As to the first of these orders, the clergy, one 
 is impressed by their prominence along this line 
 if he will turn to the index of names in such 
 a compilation as Duffield's " English Hymns," 
 in which we have a list given us of our American 
 hymn- writers from 1640 to 1850. So conspic- 
 uous is the abbreviation "Rev." in these col- 
 umns that it first catches the eye and commands 
 the attention. Beginning with the " Bay Psalm- 
 book," its three editors, Welde, Richard Mather, 
 and Eliot, "the apostle to the Indians," were 
 clergymen. Following the list as it runs, we 
 note the names of Cotton Mather, Nettleton, 
 Judson, Leonard, Bacon, James Waddell Alex- 
 ander, Bethune, Hedge, Hatfield, Palmer, Jo- 
 seph Addison Alexander, Robinson, and others. 
 Of bishops there is a notable list, as seen in 
 Onderdonk, Whittingham, Bergen, Coxe, Hunt- 
 ington, and Doane. Not a few of these devo- 
 tional authors have been college presidents, as 
 
188 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Dunster of Harvard, Davies of Princeton, " the 
 earliest American hymnist, " and Timothy 
 D wight of Yale, one of the revisers of Watts's 
 collection. In this worthy work the Unitarian 
 church has had a large and useful place, as seen 
 in the hymns of Clarke and Hedge, Furness, 
 Ware, Higginson, and Samuel Longfellow. In 
 fine, American hymnology, as a species of medi- 
 tative verse, has had from the outset this ministe- 
 rial origin and impress, nor is it at all unnatural. 
 Just because these lyrics are semi-scriptural and 
 religious, born out of a definite Christian expe- 
 rience, and written on behalf of character and 
 personal piety, are they germane to clerical habit, 
 thought, and purpose. Who knows, indeed, but 
 that in some instances more decided Christian 
 results have been reached by some of the hymns 
 of these preachers and teachers than by all the 
 sermons and lectures they have delivered! while 
 the history of our hymnology is thus happily 
 connected with that of the American church and 
 the American college. What better work did 
 President Dunster ever do than to put the " Bay 
 Psalm-book " into such form as to make it the 
 acceptable version throughout the colonial era ! 
 The fact that Dwight's revision of Watts was 
 
HYMNS, 189 
 
 adopted not only by Congregationalists, but 
 by the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1800, 
 clearly shows its value. Who can compute the 
 sacred influence of Muhlenberg's " I would not 
 live alway," or of Bethune's " It is not death 
 to die," or of any one of a score of Ray Palmer's 
 religious lyrics that might be cited ! 
 
 How much hvmnal theolo^v there is in the 
 Christian church ; substantial, evangelical doc- 
 trine, presented through the medium of the de- 
 vout and tender lyric, and thus all the more 
 designed to reach the head through the heart ! 
 All bigotry and even denominational difference 
 vanishes under the hallowed and fusing influence 
 of these sacred songs. The debates and nice 
 distinctions of the schools of divinity disappear 
 when the people of God in the unity and com- 
 munity of a simple faith come together in a ser- 
 vice of song to unbosom the deepest yearnings 
 of the human heart. All Protestants are then 
 one great religious order, while even Protestants 
 and Romanists may find common ground in the 
 great Latin hymns of the older church. We have 
 yet to learn what a safe guide the heart is, after 
 all, in matters of faith and Christian doctrine. 
 
 The second class of prominence in the pro- 
 
190 AM ERICA X MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 duction of our hymns we find in our specifically 
 literary men and women as a distinct order, 
 writers by profession and preference, the stand- 
 ard names in American letters. To many of 
 these as hymnists reference has already been 
 made — to Whittier, Holmes, and Mrs. Stowe. 
 An early and most fitting illustration of this 
 type of lyrist is William Cullen Bryant, the au- 
 thor of no less than twenty hymns, such as " O 
 Thou whose love can ne'er forget," " Deem 
 not that they are blessed alone," " All praise 
 to Him of Nazareth," " Go forth, O word of 
 Christ, go forth," and the characteristic dedi- 
 catory quatrain : 
 
 " Thou whose own vast temple stands, 
 Built over earth and sea, 
 Accept the walls that human hands 
 Have raised to worship Thee." 
 
 So, from Mrs. Sigourney, the hymn " Onward, 
 onward, men of heaven" ; from Phoebe Cary, 
 the lines, " One sweetly solemn thought" and 
 the lyric " Nearer Home," and, from her sister, 
 Alice, various lines of similar spirit. 
 
 As mentioned in discussing the meditative 
 verse of such poets as Emerson, Longfellow, and 
 Lowell, the dividing line between the moral 
 
HYMNS. 191 
 
 poem, so-called, and the religious poem or hymn 
 is so delicate as scarcely to be discernible. Nor 
 is the emphasis here to be laid, as to the work 
 of our best authors in the line of hymnology, on 
 the amount of such verse that they have com- 
 posed. This, as compared with that of the clergy, 
 is limited indeed. The fact of interest is that 
 our standard authors should have written any 
 poems of this specific order, evincing thus the 
 best features of their personal characters, their 
 sympathy with the existence and mission of the 
 Christian church, and their effort to minimize, 
 as far as possible, the distance in American verse 
 between the secular and the sacred. 
 
 Here again, however, the production of such 
 a species of verse by standard secular writers is 
 not unnatural, in that poetry, in its best forms, 
 is the most fitting expression of the deeper and 
 finer sensibilities, of hope and love and joy and 
 trust, the utterance of genuine feeling, cultivated 
 taste, and of imagination in its loftiest and purest 
 exercise. As in British letters the sacred verse 
 of Milton, Addison, Pope, and Cowper is a nor- 
 mal form of poetic utterance, so, when our rep- 
 resentative American poets enter the domain of 
 the religious lyric, they but add another evidence 
 
192 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 of their genuine gift and mission as poets. In 
 this high sense, a hymn from Holmes or Whit- 
 tier is as appropriate as when it comes from the 
 pen of Hastings or Palmer. Just here it is in 
 place to state that, as we have in English and 
 classical literature debates and orations that were 
 never pronounced in public, so may we expect 
 to find, and do find, some of these sacred lyrics 
 which have been composed with no reference 
 whatever to their use in the exercises of Christian 
 worship, but simply as one of the types in which 
 poetic genius embodies itself, composed as liter- 
 ature, and not specifically as religious literature. 
 Thus Whittier wrote his lyrics " The Eternal 
 Goodness " and " Our Master," which, though 
 not written as hymns, may be so used if need 
 be. Thus Holmes and Bryant and Lowell wrote 
 reflective verse as verse, but so imbued with 
 moral and spiritual life as to make it serviceable 
 in the rites of the church. In this way, what 
 Brookes calls "the theology of the English poets" 
 has been made an essential and attractive part 
 of English literature. 
 
 So, on the other hand, hymns as such should 
 possess some distinctive literary character, 
 should have an artistic as well as a religious 
 
HYMNS. 193 
 
 quality, and should be in good taste from an es- 
 thetic point of view, so as to commend themselves 
 to all students of form and lovers of literary art. 
 The violation of this principle is far too frequent, 
 so frequent as to have brought the whole de- 
 partment of hymnology into peril at the hands 
 of literary critics. The mere fact that such lyrics 
 are composed for the service of the church and 
 the needs of the common people does not, in 
 their judgment, justify the absence of definite 
 artistic excellence. Readers of taste are often 
 pained by these unliterary and non-literary ef- 
 fusions that are found in our collections and pass 
 for sacred poetry. In no sense known to criti- 
 cism can they be called poetry, and should not 
 as such be imposed upon the acceptance of wor- 
 shipers. It is, indeed, because of the presumable 
 literary ignorance of the people as a whole that 
 they are thus imposed, devoid as they are both 
 of the structure and spirit of genuine verse, ill- 
 conceived and ill-expressed, and worthy of the 
 name of verse only in the sense that the lines 
 are metrical. It is needless to say that much of 
 the hymnology in use by the modern lay evan- 
 gelist is greatly at fault in this particular, a mere 
 jingle and doggerel and trick of words, as illiter- 
 
194 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 ate and unpoetic as verse could well be and be 
 verse at all. It cannot be wondered at that such 
 an order of sacred song should offend the cul- 
 tivated taste of literary men, and estrange them 
 permanently from the ordinances of the church. 
 The comparison of these productions with 
 such a lyric as Milton's ode " On the Morning 
 of Christ's Nativity," or Heber's "Epiphany 
 Hymn," or the sacred oratorios of Handel and 
 Mendelssohn, will indicate the difference be- 
 tween unliterary and literary hymnology. 
 
 Outside the two classes of hymnists men- 
 tioned, the clergy and the literati, it is interesting 
 to note the origin of some of our religious poems 
 from other sources, professional and non-profes- 
 sional — some of them, indeed, from obscure 
 and unknown sources. President John Quincy 
 Adams composed a- number of hymns, as found 
 in Lunt's " Christian Psalter." Dr. Abraham 
 Coles, in his admirable version of " Dies Irae," 
 has worked along the same lyric line. Examples 
 of hymns whose authors are but little known are 
 seen in such opening lines as 
 
 " Oh, could I find from day to day 
 A nearness to my God!" 
 
 written by Benjamin Cleveland ; 
 
//yj/A'S. 195 
 
 " There is an hour of peaceful rest," 
 
 by Tappan ; 
 
 " I love to steal awhile away," 
 
 by Mrs. Brown ; 
 
 " Humbly before Thine awful throne," 
 
 by Hillhouse ; and others of equal excellence 
 by equally unknown authors, the same principle 
 beino- even more largely illustrated in British 
 verse. The beautiful patriotic lyric " God bless 
 our native land," so finely combining Chris- 
 tian truth and national good, and written by John 
 S. Dwiffht, son of President Dwight, is none the 
 less excellent because the reputation of the son 
 was overshadowed by that of the father. The 
 enjoyment of such literary work as "The Let- 
 ters of Junius " or " The Imitation of Christ " is 
 not dependent upon the settlement of the dis- 
 puted question of their authorship. 
 
 A closing thought is in place, drawn from the 
 Greek etymology of our word " hymn," from 
 untnoSy "a song," "a festive poem." The idea 
 of cheerful praise is a prominent one in the 
 root meaning, as also in that of " psalm," and, in 
 the Christian sense, cannot be too pronounced. 
 Meditative verse, as embodied in hymns, need 
 
196 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 not thereby be unduly sedate, and, least of all, 
 mournful and morose, but find its best and 
 most natural expression in happy, hopeful senti- 
 ment. Memorial hymns there must be, hymns 
 adapted to times of trial and struggle, penitential 
 hymns, hymns of humiliation and spiritual mis- 
 giving, hymns of consecration, and such as set 
 forth in poetic form the cardinal doctrines of the 
 church. These have their place, but a compar- 
 atively limited place, in any properly conducted 
 Christian anthology. Etymologicahy and spir- 
 itually, the prime purpose of the hymn and psalm 
 is praise, as uttering the various emotions of 
 gratitude and hope and joy and adoration — 
 praise for common and special mercies, praise 
 for divine grace in all its manifold ministries to 
 the -soul, the very word " praise " radically de- 
 noting the payment of a tribute to the source of 
 blessing. Hence the fitness of the Hallelujahs 
 of our Christian hymnology : " Praise ye Jeho- 
 vah " is the appropriate refrain of the religious 
 lyric. Wisely, indeed, was good Bishop Ken 
 guided by the grace of God and his own poetic 
 genius when he thus gave us the " Te Deum 
 Laudamus " of the Protestant church in his in- 
 spired doxology : 
 
 " Praise God, from whom all blessings flow." 
 
SOME LATER LYRISTS. 
 
 197 
 
CHAPTER THIRTEENTH. 
 
 SOME LATER LYRISTS. 
 
 WHEN we pass from the earlier representa- 
 tive poetry of America to the subsequent and 
 closing decades of the century, we pass by no 
 means from lyric verse of a high order of merit 
 to that of mediocrity. The great writers of 
 idyllic song have gone, in the death of Whittier 
 and Lowell and their inimitable fellow-craftsmen, 
 and yet the volume of such verse is ever enlar- 
 ging before us, while, here and there, in "the choir 
 at large," is heard a voice that seems to have 
 caught somewhat of the art of the older bards, 
 so that we are led to hope that the day of poetic 
 power has not altogether passed away. It is as 
 satisfactory as it is surprising and even anoma- 
 lous to note that a nation as young as ours, and 
 as commercial in its instincts and ambitions, 
 should exhibit, from age to age through its 
 199 
 
200 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 literary history, so pronounced a development 
 along the lines of lyric expression, and, most of 
 all, on its contemplative side. Rich as our an- 
 thology is, and, naturally so, in lyrics of adven- 
 ture and civic interest, of bold and martial ardor 
 and of passionate outbursts on the rights and 
 the wrongs of man, it is far richer in that sub- 
 dued and more subjective order of ode and son- 
 net to which these pages have referred. Even 
 close upon the ending of the Civil War this 
 meditative type asserted its presence, and pa- 
 triotic devotion embodied its feeling as much 
 in the quiet expression of national losses and 
 trials as in the more demonstrative expression 
 of national triumph. The verses of our poets 
 at the completion of our first century as a re- 
 public are marked by the same reflective com- 
 ment on the past and present of the nation's 
 history, while the ever-increasing tide of mate- 
 rialism in philosophy and trade has not, as yet, 
 been able to quench, in any valid sense, this 
 steady expression of the sentiments of the heart. 
 A passing reference to some of these later and 
 living lyric bards is all that can be attempted, 
 the name of Sidney Lanier recalling a life whose 
 end seemed to be so untimely, and whose rich 
 
SOME LATER LYRISTS. 201 
 
 introspective verse was so full of poetic promise. 
 John James Piatt, in his " Idyls and Lyrics of 
 the Ohio Valley " and " Poems of House and 
 Home," is a name to be remembered, such poems 
 as " The Morning Street," "A Lost Graveyard," 
 "Apart," and " Leaves at My Window," indicat- 
 ing the reflective quality. William Winter, in his 
 lines on " An Empty Heart " and " Constance," 
 strikes the same minor key, especially touching 
 in the tribute to Poe : 
 
 " He was the voice of beauty and of woe, 
 
 Passion and mystery and the dread unknown ; 
 
 Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow, 
 
 Cold as the icy winds that round them moan, 
 
 Dark as the cave wherein earth's thunders groan, 
 Wild as the tempests of the upper sky, 
 
 Sweet as the faint, far-off celestial tone 
 
 Of angel whispers, fluttering from on high, 
 
 And tender as love's tears when youth and beauty die." 
 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in his verse through- 
 out, reveals a high order of genius along this 
 special idyllic line, so that one is in serious doubt 
 as to what selections to emphasize among such as 
 " Flower and Thorn," " An Untimely Thought," 
 "An Old Castle," "Prescience," and "Sleep," 
 this last sonnet reading thus sweetly : 
 
202 AM ERIC AX MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 '* When to soft sleep we give ourselves away, 
 And in a dream, as in a fairy bark, 
 Drift on and on through the enchanted dark 
 To purple daybreak, little thought we pay 
 To that sweet, better world we know by day; 
 We are clean quit of it, as is a lark 
 So high in heaven no human eye can mark 
 The thin, swift pinion cleaving through the gray. 
 Till we awake ill fate can do no ill, 
 The resting heart shall not take up again 
 The heavy load that yet must make it bleed ; 
 For this brief space the loud world's voice is still, 
 No faintest echo of it brings us pain. 
 How will it be when we shall sleep indeed? " 
 
 This is the very perfection of lyric verse in its 
 more subdued and gentle forms, where thought 
 and feeling and taste and rhythmic art so com- 
 bine as to leave nothing wanting in the final 
 impression of the poem. 
 
 So, Howells and Maurice Thompson, Richard 
 Henry Stoddard, Boner, and Cheney, in his "A 
 Saint of Yore," have done noteworthy work as 
 poets in meditative miscellany. R. W. Gilder, 
 in " The New Day " and other collections, has 
 given us some of the most exquisite verse of the 
 time in such examples as "The Celestial Passion," 
 " A Christmas Hymn," and " Sonnet," while 
 the masterly American critic, Stedman, has 
 
SOME LATER LYRISTS. '203 
 
 added to all his other estimable work his " Lyrics 
 and Idyls," so marked by classical correctness 
 and genuine poetic sentiment. 
 
 No one of our living lyrists has done more rep- 
 resentative work along these special lines than 
 has Mr. Stedman. We have but to glance down 
 the list of his themes in verse to note the emphatic 
 presence of this chaste idyllic quality on the 
 side of reflection. Such are the poems " Too 
 Late," "The Protest of Faith," "Hope De- 
 ferred," " A Mother's Picture," " The Old 
 Love and the New," " At Twilight," " Dark- 
 ness and Shadow," " The Sad Bridal," and 
 " The Ordeal by Fire," which last poem, had we 
 space, might be quoted in its entirety as illus- 
 trative of a profound and tender meditative- 
 ness. His justly celebrated " Dartmouth Ode," 
 in its ten separate sections, is full of this quiet 
 charm of spirit and manner, as he recounts the 
 trials and triumphs, the hopes and disappoint- 
 ments, of youth. Thus, in the sixth section, 
 " Youth and Age," he sings in sweet and sober 
 strain : 
 
 " How slow, how sure, how swift 
 The sands within each glass ; 
 The brief, illusive moments pass ; 
 Half unawares we mark their drift, 
 
204 AMERICAN MEDITATIVE LYRICS. 
 
 Till the awakened heart cries out, 'Alas, 
 
 Alas! the fair occasion fled, 
 
 The precious chance to action all unused! ' 
 
 And murmurs in its depths the old refrain, 
 
 ' Had we but known betimes what now we know in vain! ' " 
 
 So, in the beautiful reverie " The Undiscov- 
 ered Country " : 
 
 " Could we but know 
 The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel, 
 Where lie those happier hills and meadows low, — 
 Ah, if beyond the spirit's inmost cavil, 
 Aught of that country could we surely know, 
 Who would not go!" 
 
 Here is heard the voice of one of the new- 
 masters, if not of the old — a clear, hopeful, and 
 an inspiring voice ; and he who heeds it and fol- 
 lows it will rise at once to noble endeavor and 
 wider outlook. 
 
 So have our departed lyrists sung, and so are 
 singing those who still are among us ; while the 
 poverty of American letters in epic and dra- 
 matic verse finds its partial compensation in this 
 wealth of reflective lyric product. 
 
 In fine, no literature of note has a richer rec- 
 ord of lyric verse within the compass of a cen- 
 tury, while no element of our developing poetic 
 
SOME LATER LYRISTS. 205 
 
 life is fuller of promise than this as to the ex- 
 cellence and permanence of our literary work. 
 American literature has few great poets and 
 few great poems. It has, however, a large 
 amount of poetry that is thoroughly good — 
 characterized by faith in God and faith in man, 
 by faith in truth and right and love and spirit- 
 ual law, and ministrant thereby to human life in 
 its daily and deepest needs.