Chapter X: Part 10

With Freneau the case is different. Some of his choicest verse did not appear until 1786, when he published a collection containing “The House of Night”; and in 1795 he brought together in another collection what he apparently considered best in his output for twenty-five years or more preceding. This was very uneven, including much that might better have been left unprinted, and other work which stamps Freneau as the one American of true poetical genius before 1800. He was not unaware of his powers, and aimed to develop them by frequent perusal of good models in ancient and modern literature; but he was not sufficiently self-critical. He prolonged a career of travel and rapid composition, in both poetry and prose, beyond the normal span of life, making still another collection of his works in 1815. His latter years were darkened by the thought that he was being unwarrantably neglected for men of lesser talent. A man of great bodily vigour, he was meditating yet another, a final, edition of his writings, when he came to his unfortunate end. In 1832 he lost his way as he was returning home through a snow-storm, and died from exposure. His once maligned personality has of late been duly vindicated, and his work has received generous praise. It is claimed that Scott and Campbell were content to borrow lines from him. Furthermore, he has been deemed a co-worker with Coleridge and Wordsworth in bringing about in literature the so-called “return to nature.” The parallel might easily be carried too far. Until literary scholarship has broadened and deepened its knowledge of the entire period in which Freneau was active, neither the worth of his poetry nor the possible extent of his influence can be judicially determined. There can be no question that such poems as “The Wild Honeysuckle,” “The Hurricane,” “The Dying Indian,” and “Eutaw Springs” have more than a transitory value. However, it is by his satirical verse that Freneau might seem more likely to persist; for the nature of satire tolerates in some measure a free and easy style such as he developed.

_Early Minor Poets._--Of the minor poetry prior to 1815 there is little to be said by way of praise. We see in it how the influence of Akenside and other English didactic writers of a previous age gives ground before the newer spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge; although the satires of the Revolution had a lineage, in Paine and others, that did not quickly die away; and although several other literary fashions had their intervals of existence, as, for example, the imitation of “Ossian” and the cult of the Della Cruscans. The intellect of Akenside made itself felt in such work as “The Power of Solitude” (1804), by Joseph Story (1779-1845), and the anonymous “Pains of Memory,” published four years later. “Of much higher merit,” thinks Professor Bronson, “are the didactic poems of Robert Treat Paine (1773-1811), a man of versatile and brilliant parts, but dissipated character. His lyrics, orations, and dramatic criticisms all show ability. But his best work is ‘The Ruling Passion,’ a poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1797.” This is “frankly on the model of Pope, but so witty, vigorous, and pointed that it does honour to its original.” William Cliffton’s “Poems” (1800), and Thomas G. Fessenden’s “Original Poems” (1804), can only be mentioned.

A word may be added on the poetesses of the time, several of whom, for example Mrs. Mercy Warren (1728-1814), having made themselves heard during the American struggle for liberty, continued to find an audience in the early years of the Republic. Mrs. Warren’s poems were collected in 1790, Mrs. Susanna H. Rowson’s in 1804. The sentimental Mrs. Sarah W. Morton may also be noted; she flourished somewhat later than the others (1759-1846). She is no longer interesting as the “American Sappho,” nor is it generally recalled that she considered Paine to be the American “Menander.” She was an exponent of the inane “Della Cruscan” style, which had its vogue in England until it was attacked by William Gifford, and in the United States until Gifford’s “Baviad” and “Mæviad” were republished at Philadelphia (1799), seconded by a poetical epistle to their author from the pen of the young Quaker Cliffton.

Not less pernicious than the Della Cruscans were the imitators of MacPherson’s “Ossian,” including Joseph B. Ladd (1764-1786), Jonathan M. Sewall (1746-1808), and John Blair Linn (1777-1804). Both schools gave place when the Wordsworthian reaction set in against “poetic diction” and the habit of writing verse about natural objects without having looked at them.

When party spirit runs high, satire is likely to be thriving. Political tension during the latter part of Washington’s presidency and during the administrations of Adams and Jefferson gave birth to a brood of satiric poems, many of them unacknowledged by their authors. Anonymous or otherwise, in most of them the writer’s pen was wielded as a bludgeon rather than a knife. Freneau himself was none too delicate in his censure of the government, although he ill deserved the reputation of a man lacking in love for his country; but Freneau was merely the most gifted among a number, more partisan than he, who, according as they were Federalists or Democrats, bitterly assailed the measures of the opposing faction. The “Democratiad” and the “Guillotina” were anonymous attacks in 1795 and 1796 upon the Democrats. William Cobbett, the Englishman, and Alexander Hamilton, whose private life offered an easy target, were pilloried as representatives of the Federalist party, in Carey’s “Porcupiniad” (1799) and a collection entitled “Olio” (1801).

Nor was factional spleen unrelated to a variety of patriotic sentiment which displayed itself in verse for holidays and state occasions; but, like all the satires, most of the post-Revolutionary effusions of patriotism have long since ceased to excite emotion. As has been noted, Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798) is one of the exceptions. Colonel David Humphreys (1753-1818), a large part of whose verse amounted to eulogies on Washington, to the general public is hardly so much as a memory; and his intention “to make use of poetry for strengthening patriotism, promoting virtue, and extending happiness” has gone the way of many similar purposes of great excellence unaided by genius.

_Washington Allston._--The first poet of distinction who evidently represents the tradition of Wordsworth was the artist Washington Allston (1779-1843), a friend of Coleridge, and declared by him to have a genius for literature and painting “unsurpassed by any man of his age.” Southey too was an enthusiastic admirer; and Wordsworth, who was chary of praise for the age in which he lived, commended the American painter ungrudgingly. In Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813) there is evidence of the exact eye of an artist, and there is much delicacy of sentiment and gentle play of fancy; but great constructive and imaginative vigour are not present, and a certain tameness in the rhymes and obviousness in the succession of thoughts serve to explain why the poem has not secured a more lasting recognition. His “America and Great Britain” was included by Coleridge in “Sibylline Leaves” (1817), “for its moral no less than its patriotic spirit.” As an attempt to incorporate in language the conception of abstract, so to speak, intellectual, beauty, “The Angel and the Nightingale” reminds one of Shelley.

Before Allston, there had been ballad-writers who dealt with themes that are now familiar to readers of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In particular, the motive of the young and innocent girl who has been betrayed, and through her betrayal crazed, was a notable favourite. Lucius M. Sargent’s “Hubert and Ellen” (1812) is described as a poor imitation of Wordsworth, taking its cue, like Joseph Hutton’s ballad on Crazy Jane (“Leisure Hours,” 1812) and Henry C. Knight’s “Poor Margaret Dwy,” from one study or another of mental derangement in “Lyrical Ballads” or the “Poems” (by Wordsworth) of 1807. Doubtless a large number of parallels could be found in American literature to Wordsworth’s “Ruth,” and to his sympathetic treatment of other lowly types of humanity. In like manner, just as the same English poet fraternises with the robin and the butterfly, and Coleridge hails a young ass as his “brother,” and as Shelley in 1815 claims kindred with “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast,” so Knight addresses “The Caterpillar” (1821) as “cousin reptile.” The Puritans had averred, Most sins, and all sinners, are equal; Rousseau and the French Revolutionists went further, declaring, All men are equal; and now, responsive to the doctrine of Coleridge and his Pantisocrats, American poets were implying, All creatures are equal. Thus thrives the principle of democracy and fraternity. Themistocles is at length no better than the boorish islander, and the Apostles have lost their superiority to sparrows. “Cousin reptile,” of course, is an extreme case.

On its saner side, the new impulse set in motion several writers of not a little promise. Such was John Neal (1793-1876), whose poem “The Battle of Niagara” (1818) reflects Wordsworthianism at second hand through Shelley and Keats, with a touch of Byronic grandiloquence and tameness, but with a touch, too, of aboriginal nature, however crude. The native powers of Neal were later dissipated in journalism, novel-writing, and the like.

_Joseph Rodman Drake._--Of great promise likewise, but cut short by a premature demise, was the career of Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820). Drake was a precocious spirit, working swiftly, and valuing his easily produced and quickly moving verses perhaps a little below their true worth. A friend of Halleck, and like Halleck under the sway of the novelist Fenimore Cooper, he reveals also how familiar he was with the half-luminous, half-misty style of Coleridge. In Drake’s happiest attempt, “The Culprit Fay” (1816), he aimed to find an utterance for the poetry of the great American rivers, hitherto neglected, as he and his friends decided, in the native literature. The outcome of a discussion between Drake, Freneau, and Cooper, this fanciful story is nevertheless replete with the cadences of Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), however difficult it may be to explain the resemblance. Needless to say, “The Culprit Fay” could not make a general appeal like that of “The American Flag,” by the same author--a rhetorical and manneristic piece that, up to a few years ago, was on the lips of every American school-boy:

When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.

Set them where? In spite of the fact that it is grandiose and unprecise, “The American Flag” may yet be yielded an advantage in point of style over Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with which one naturally compares it.

_Fitz-Greene Halleck._--The final quatrain of “The American Flag” was written by Drake’s associate in the “Croaker Papers,” Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). Halleck was a witty poet, who aimed at no lasting fame, but humorously chastised the passing follies of New York society, much as Lord Byron scourged society in London. He wrote clearly and gracefully, and was greatly overpraised in his time. His satiric poem “Fanny” (1819) was highly popular. “Marco Bozzaris,” a lyric recital of the Byronic type, portrayed with a good deal of life, but with a suspicion of rant too, a dramatic incident in the struggle of modern Greece against the Turk. His tribute to Burns (1827) was warmly approved by the Scottish bard’s sister: “nothing finer,” she said in 1855, “has been written about Robert.” “Red Jacket” and the monody on “Drake” also belong to Halleck’s early period. In fact, his main activity as a poet was confined to the ten or eleven years commencing with the death of Drake (1820). As Allston was the first of our poets to arouse much admiration abroad, so Halleck was the first to receive notable posthumous honours at home. In general, he owed a large measure of his inspiration to Washington Irving.

_James Kirke Paulding._--So did James Kirke Paulding (1779-1860), though his “Lay of the Scotch Fiddle” (1813) was a parody of Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and though his title to enduring fame, as he supposed, was an epic, “The Backwoodsman” (1818), representing life on the American frontier. Neither the clever ballad, nor the prosy epic, nor his second instalment of _Salmagundi_ has outwitted the envy of time. In its own day Paulding’s effort to repeat the first success of Irving was eclipsed by “The Croakers” of Halleck and Drake. His “Peter Piper” still lingers.

_John Howard Payne._--A case similar to “Peter Piper” is that of a song in “Clari” (1823), one of the dramas by John Howard Payne (1791-1852). Payne, who tried his hand at various pursuits, was a friend of Irving, and acquainted with Coleridge and Lamb. At one time he was United States consul at Tunis. As an actor and a journalist he knew the temper of his American public; hence he was able to enjoy a considerable reputation as playwright. His “Brutus” (1818) was well received; yet he would be totally forgotten save for a single lyric in “Clari,” “Home, Sweet Home,” which successive generations of his countrymen have handed down as an heirloom of the people.

_Woodworth_, _Morris_, _Hoffman_, _Willis, etc._--Two other writers of the same period, now known chiefly through brief and homely songs or rhetorical selections, were Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842), still remembered for “The Old Oaken Bucket” (1826), and George P. Morris (1802-64), whose “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and “The Main Truck” (otherwise called “A Leap for Life”) have re-echoed from the platform of many a village schoolhouse, and given many a young rustic his principal conceptions of impassioned eloquence. The songs of Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-84), while by no means so familiar as these, are not at all inferior. Hoffman was a student at Columbia College, bred up in the literary traditions of New York City. So also were James W. Eastburn (1797-1819) and Robert C. Sands (1799-1832). Under a rather indefensible nomenclature, all three would be included with Paulding and Halleck as members of the “Knickerbocker School,” the bright luminary in which is Irving (“Diedrich Knickerbocker”). To these we may add McDonald Clarke (1798-1842), “the mad poet,” irritatingly personal in his allusions to the belles of the metropolis; Park Benjamin (1809-64); and N. P. Willis (1806-67), whose reign of cleverness succeeded that of Halleck. Flippant, careless how or whom he hit, Willis made an extraordinary name at home, and was able to create a stir abroad. In America he published where and what he pleased, for the editors were glad to pay him well, so eager were people to read him. But he had the reward of a lightly won popularity: when the generation for whom he wrote had passed away he was deservedly neglected. His championship of American literature against the strictures of Lockhart and Marryat, and the redeeming candour of his opinions, make poor amends for his abuse of talents that might have improved, rather than satisfied, the taste of the garish day.

_William Cullen Bryant._--However different in aim and permanence from the last mentioned adherent of the “Knickerbocker School,” to the same general category may be assigned William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who from 1826 until his death was an active force in the literary life of New York. The author of “Thanatopsis” and one of the best verse translations of Homer was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, attended a local school, was taught Latin and Greek by private tutors, two clergymen of ability, and studied for part of a year at Williams College, where the standard of scholarship was then low. Leaving that institution in 1811, he made ready to enter the profession of law. During his preparation he had an interval of experience as adjutant in the State militia. After that, he practised as a lawyer in his native State, at Plainfield and Great Barrington, until 1825, when he yielded to the strong propensity of nature, and took up literature for the business of life.

As a mere child, Bryant showed an exceptional leaning toward poetry. He was unweariedly studious, and an omnivorous reader. He wrote verses before he was nine; in his youth, so he says, he varied his private devotions from the ordinary Calvinistic models, by supplicating that he “might receive the gift of poetic genius and write verses that might endure.” The gift came to him through the instrumentality of Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” (the American edition of 1802), whose mastery over him he afterwards acknowledged, and bore witness to in his practice. At first, however, he was imbued with the tendencies of his own predecessors in America. A Federalist in his political sympathies, he opposed the aims of Jefferson’s administration--although later he grew to be a staunch supporter of “Jeffersonian Democracy.” Encouraged by his father, a well-known physician, who himself indulged in verse, young Cullen, before he was fifteen, saw in print his political satire “The Embargo” (1808), a work in the manner of Freneau and Trumbull, in which Jefferson was invited to resign the presidency. In Wordsworth, fortunately, Byrant had a model choicer than the satirists. He became acquainted with “Lyrical Ballads” in 1810. Sometime in the autumn of 1811, his inward eye having been taught to see the operation of a benign and healing spirit in the world of nature, this thoughtful youth, now about to begin the study of law, and, as it were, to commence the effort of life, was moved to record his sentiments on the all-pervading fact of death: the universal debt is not an evil; to pay it is as natural as to be born; and to obey the voice of nature, to confide in her will, is the source of human satisfaction. That is the burden of “Thanatopsis.”

When “Thanatopsis” was submitted by the poet’s father to _The North American Review_ (in 1817), people would hardly believe that such an exalted strain had been conceived outside of England. “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” (written in 1815) are indeed in many ways Wordsworthian; the similarity is immediately noticeable. Yet the similarity is not complete. In the first place, they are founded, and very definitely founded, upon the natural scenery of Bryant’s own New England environment; and they sprang out of a unified individual experience to which his personal observation contributed as much as his reading. But, as has been remarked before, the note of Bryant is a less joyous note than that of his great English exemplar, not only because of a difference in the selection of subjects, but through a difference in the treatment of detail as well. It is not to be expected that in perfection of technique a boy of seventeen could equal a poet who at the age of thirty-two (when Wordsworth first became at all generally known in America) was virtually master of his craft. Moreover, “Thanatopsis” as we now have it is actually an immense improvement upon the version that came out in _The North American_; yet in finality of expression it cannot vie with the “Lines” associated with Tintern Abbey, not to speak of certain portions of “The Prelude” or “The Excursion” written in the zenith of Wordsworth’s power. Still, “Thanatopsis” was the first great American poem; in its ultimate form it bids fair to please most readers in all ages. The majesty of Thucydides is borrowed in the conception that the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; there is Homeric splendour of epithet in such expressions as the “all-beholding sun.” The “healing sympathy” of nature, of course, is Wordsworthianism pure and simple; but the poem as a whole is tinged with a pantheism much more stoical than the pantheism of Wordsworth, and curiously out of keeping with the touch of New England moralising toward the end. This touch is even more pronounced in the verses “To a Waterfowl.”

“To a Waterfowl” was published with several other poems, including “Thanatopsis,” in 1821. According to that wayward genius Hartley Coleridge, it is the best short poem in the English language; a perilously sweeping judgment, like Shelley’s on “France,” the magnificent ode by Hartley’s father. At all events, “To a Waterfowl” is hardly surpassed by any of Bryant’s later work, and probably unsurpassed by anything of comparable subject and scope ever written in America.

In 1821, Bryant, then practising law at Great Barrington, was married to Miss Frances Fairchild. In 1825, he gave up the law and a secure livelihood, and, removing to New York, assumed the editorship of _The New York Review_. After a brief connection with _The United States Review_, he became assistant editor of _The Evening Post_; in 1829 he was made editor-in-chief. His lifelong guidance of this most influential paper is briefly touched upon elsewhere. It may be readily thought that Bryant’s prolonged editorial labours interfered with his subsequent development as a poet. Yet his partial ownership of _The Post_ finally gave him abundant means for travel and a widening of his experience in his own and foreign lands; and his habits of industry, supported by a temperate bodily régime, enabled him to achieve during his extended career a noble literary monument outside of journalism.

By 1832 he was ready to publish another edition of his “Poems,” adding more than eighty pieces that were new--notably, the “Forest Hymn,” the “Song of Marion’s Men,” and “The Death of the Flowers.” At intervals of a few years (1834, 1836, 1842, 1844, etc.) other editions or volumes followed; giving evidence that his imagination was not dormant, for they contained in each case material in part or wholly fresh. Thus the “Poems” of 1854 included “O Mother of a Mighty Race” and “Robert of Lincoln,” the latter a favourite with many, though inferior to Bryant’s general standard. Of the “Thirty Poems” issued ten years later (1864), twenty-seven were new; the presence of selections, in English, from Book V of the Odyssey is worthy of particular remark. They had already appeared, a few months before, in _The Atlantic Monthly_.

The achievement of Bryant’s declining years was his translation of Homer. He had at various times amused himself with renderings of one or another passage that pleased him in foreign tongues. He was an ardent admirer of the Greek epics. He was dissatisfied with the versions of Cowper and Pope. It is possible that he was acquainted with the counsels of Matthew Arnold, called forth by the Homer of Francis Newman. The favour met by his attempts with the Odyssey encouraged him to try his hand at the Iliad. On the death of his wife, in 1866, he felt the need of some employment to distract his attention, and resolved to translate the Iliad entire. By 1869 he had finished the first twelve books, at the rate of from forty to seventy-five lines a day. These twelve books were published in February, 1870, the remainder of the Iliad in June. By the first of July he was engaged upon the Odyssey; on December 7, 1871, he sent his printers “the twenty-fourth and concluding book of [his] translation of Homer’s Odyssey, together with the table of contents for the second volume.” To misunderstand the repression of feeling in these simple words, with which the venerable Bryant takes leave of his final work, is to miss the hidden fire animating his whole existence. In a great poet there is little waste of energy in the outward expression. The moment feeling shows itself, it is transmuted into artistic form. The form is adequate, but it is something different from the sentiment that gives it life.

The excellence of Bryant’s blank-verse translation of Homer is not a theme for long discussion here. He aimed at simplicity and faithfulness. He rejected several of the customary ornaments of modern verse, choosing for his medium that rhythm which is most nearly related to the cadence of everyday speech. Tested by its effect on the layman of the present day, his attempt is more successful than other well-known metrical versions, less than the cadenced prose of translators, like Myers and Lang, who have profited by the advice of Arnold with respect to diction, but in avoiding the trammels of metre have followed the example set by the scholars of King James in the Authorised Version of the Scriptures. However, Bryant’s rendering is too noble a piece of imaginative scholarship to be passed over.

Bryant spent something like six years upon his Homer. He survived its completion by six years more, full of honours, rejoicing in a hale old age, still visited occasionally by poetical inspiration, still influential in the political thought of his nation, able at four score and four to make a public address in honour of the Italian patriot Mazzini. During this address, “his uncovered head was for a time exposed to the full glare of the sun. Shortly after, while entering a house, he fell backwards, striking his head upon the stone steps; concussion of the brain and paralysis followed.” He died in New York, June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, on Long Island Sound, near the beautiful country home where for thirty-five years his literary toils had been “sweetened to his taste.”

Owing to his artistic reserve, Bryant had the reputation of a temperamental coldness, a reputation that is belied both by the tenderness of his domestic ties and by his well chosen and enduring friendships. His patriotism also was unswerving. If he “let no empty gust of passion find an utterance in his lay,” nevertheless he knew and valued

... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the boundless deep.

He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant.

Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead, and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was “_facile princeps_” among American poets, this eminence arose from no merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a noble, well rounded, and representative human life.

_Saxe_, _Melville_, _Alice and Phoebe Cary.--_After Bryant it is convenient to speak of a few poets, very different from him, and for the most part from each other, whose contemporaneous presence in New York is almost the only thing that connects them. John G. Saxe (1816-87), a native of Vermont, in his time was counted a leader among satirists. He staggers now under the accusation of extreme superficiality; none the less is he lively and readable. He consciously imitated Hood; he could scarcely avoid imitating Wendell Holmes. Of himself he had a remarkable turn for epigram and for punning in rhyme. His burlesque adaptations of Ovid are smart and amusing. On the whole it may be said that Saxe was at his best in “The Proud Miss MacBride,” where he girds at an upstart aristocracy:

Of all the notable things on earth,
The queerest one is pride of birth,
Among our “fierce Democracie.”

Herman Melville (1819-91), who wrote a fascinating account (“Typee,” 1846) of his stay among the aborigines of the Marquesas, also published “Battle-Pieces” (1866) and other poems. His verse is less objective and sincere than his prose. Alice Cary (1820-71) and her sister, Phoebe (1824-71), were born in Ohio, where they were locally appreciated. Removing first to Philadelphia, then to New York, they supported themselves by their pens. The talents of Alice Cary were manifestly superior; yet for a time, yielding to her admiration of Poe, she allowed the element of harmonious sound in her poetry to overbalance that of meaning. Her hymns, one of which is almost a classic, are noble in their purity of sentiment.

_Dana_, _Sprague_, _Hillhouse, etc._--Although his life and activity were centred elsewhere, Bryant, as we have seen, was a product of western Massachusetts. From him and the city of his adoption we naturally turn to a number of writers whose careers are to be more closely identified with New England. Many of these, like Richard Henry Dana senior (1787-1879), of Boston, were poets only secondarily. Dana was a journalist and politician--an admirer of Wordsworth and a lecturer on Shakespeare. An edition of his prose and verse in 1833 contained a poem, “The Buccaneer,” inspired by Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” His shorter poems are moral--

Oh, listen, man!
A voice within us speaks the startling word,
“Man, thou shalt never die”--

and are mostly tame and artificial. Though inferior in native talent to his brother-in-law, Washington Allston, Dana was more widely known as a writer, partly because of his ability as literary critic. His verse was melancholy and his meditation not virile. As a poet he won a smaller audience than did Charles Sprague (1791-1875), also of Boston; yet it is not now easy to understand why Sprague’s longest poem, “Curiosity” (1823), should have been “largely read and quoted in this country, and grossly plagiarised in England” (Onderdonk). James A. Hillhouse (1789-1841), who wrote a Biblical drama called “Hadad” (1824), published “Dramas, Discourses, and Other Pieces” in 1839. He is interesting as an early exponent of the dramatic art in America. His style shows a strange blending of elements from Lord Byron and the Scriptures. It would probably be fairer to judge him by “Demetria” than by “Hadad.” A Byronic sentimentalism runs through the work of James Gates Percival (1795-1856), whose “Prometheus” (1820) luxuriates in the sorrows of men and the vanity of human wishes. His poetry often belies his everyday life, since for all his facile pessimism he was a man of genuine attainments and solid interest in science. He could not make his own experience the fundamental thing in his verse;--unlike his contemporary John Pierpont (1785-1866), a clergyman of Boston. In his hymns and patriotic odes, Pierpont was masculine and sane, a good representative of the New England abolitionist, as may be gathered from “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star.” “Warren’s Address to the American Soldiers” is even better known, and still withholds the name of Pierpont from oblivion. John G. C. Brainard (1796-1828) died before his poetical gift could find complete expression. He dealt with the scenery and legends of Connecticut, but is hardly remembered outside the histories of American literature.

_Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Sigourney._--The same generation produced several women of note, whose poetry demands some attention; in particular, Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865), a prolific maker of books, not to speak of “more than two thousand articles in prose and verse” which were issued during her long and quiet life in Hartford. Mrs. Sigourney was no genius, albeit she passed for “the American Hemans.” She was a person of great moral worth and the most charitable disposition. It has been suggested that the beauty of her character was responsible for her extraordinary vogue. More probably the attention she gave to the legends of her own country, the not unwholesome cast of sentimentalism in her thought, and her readiness to contribute verses for any occasion, however slight, will in large part account for the unbounded admiration which she enjoyed. In 1822 appeared her poem, in five cantos, “Traits of the American Aborigines”; her “Lays of the Heart” were published in 1848. Besides her innumerable shorter articles, she is said to have been responsible for something like fifty volumes. “Maria del Occidente” (Mrs. Maria Gowen Brooks, 1795-1845) was of a different cast, less homely in her sentiments, a romantic soul, filled with the spirit of Southey and Moore, leaning toward the sensuous and exotic. When she bent her energies to verse, as in “Judith, Esther, and Other Poems” (1820), and “Zophiel, or The Bride of Seven” (1833)--a story based on the Apocryphal Book of Tobit--she showed herself far removed from Mrs. Sigourney and “The Power of Maternal Piety” or “The Sunday School.” On the whole, the taste of “Maria del Occidente,” as Southey called her, was worse than that of “the American Hemans”; and if Southey termed Mrs. Brooks “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” he paid an astounding tribute to his own acumen as a critic. Emma H. Willard (1787-1870), like Mrs. Sigourney, was prominent as an educator, accomplishing more as the head of a female seminary in Troy, N. Y., than by her writings. She was the author of “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.” In the next generation were Sarah H. Whitman (1803-78) and Frances S. Osgood (1811-50), who composed verse not lacking in merit, but who are recalled rather for their championship of Edgar Allan Poe. Mrs. Whitman was at one time betrothed to him.

_Minor Poets of New England._--Among the minor New England poets who came slightly later, was Samuel Longfellow (1819-92)--younger brother of Henry W. Longfellow--a hymn-writer of singular purity. Sylvester Judd (1813-53), a Unitarian minister, wrote an epic entitled “Philo” (1850). William Wetmore Story (1819-95), who edited the life and letters of his distinguished father, Chief Justice Story, forsook the bar at an early age and went to Italy to engage in sculpture. He was a poet of refinement, touched with melancholy, intellectual rather than passionate--yet with a fondness for the intangible--influenced by Longfellow and Holmes, by Tennyson and Browning. In verse, his chief works were “Poems” (1847), “Graffiti d’Italia” (1868), “A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem” (1870), “He and She” (1883), and “Poems” (1886). Among his individual pieces “Cleopatra” seems to be the best known. Theophilus W. Parsons (1819-92) shows a similar Continental influence, whose most valuable result was his free translation of Dante’s “Inferno” (cantos I-X, 1843, completed in 1867); this was preceded by his fine lines “On a Bust of Dante” (1841), which are justly admired. Henry H. Brownell (1820-72) attracted notice by a poem on Farragut, and through Farragut’s good offices entered the United States Navy. His “War Lyrics and Other Poems” (1866) contained a stirring piece, “The River Fight,” on the exploits of Farragut, somewhat in the style of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

=Poetry in the South.=--The major poets of New England, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, and perhaps one or two others, constitute the one group in America that may rightfully be dignified with the name of school. Before approaching them, however, let us give some consideration to the poets of the South.

Though the institution of slavery gave the dominant classes in the Southern States a leisure comparable to that enjoyed by classic Greece, plantation life was not favourable to a thorough and imaginative education; nor were there great civic centres to collect, for mutual inspiration, such individuals as showed artistic and literary bent. Furthermore, in modern times most of the poets have been furnished by a restless and aspiring middle class, which was virtually lacking in the South. Among the owners of plantations, personal ambition rarely soared much higher than local, state, or sectional politics, and political and occasional oratory, with some noteworthy exceptions, was flamboyant and insincere. Save for a few noteworthy exceptions, accordingly, the career of poet languished, and literature of a high order failed of appreciation. The leading poets of the South realised only too well the weight of inertia against which they strove, in a civilisation where the odds were continually against their success.

_The Forerunners._--Early and minor poets in the South need not long detain us. William Crafts (1789-1826), of Charleston, South Carolina, a graduate of Harvard, and an orator of repute, composed a “Raciad,” or epic on horse-racing, and “Sullivan’s Island.” His “Miscellaneous Writings” (1828) were published posthumously. William J. Grayson (1788-1863), who was more voluminous, attempted in his poem “The Hireling and the Slave” (1856) to represent slavery as a preferable state for the negro. Richard H. Wilde (1789-1847), Edward C. Pinkney (1802-28), George H. Calvert (1803-89), Philip P. Cooke (1816-50) and others, show a range of imitation running all the way from Byron through Scott and Moore to Tennyson. Cooke’s “Florence Vane” was warmly admired by Poe. Albert Pike (1809-91), should be remembered as the author of “Dixie,” which, “set to a popular air which has been traced back to slavery times in New York State, became, in a multitude of variations, a Southern Marseillaise” (Onderdonk).

_Timrod_, _Hayne_, _and Simms_.--Of a high order was the poetry of that champion of the Southern cause Henry B. Timrod (1829-67). Denied by fortune the sort of education that he craved, striving throughout much of his life with poverty and sickness, and finally defeated, saddened by personal bereavement as well as by the downfall of the South, Timrod died before he could make adequate report of his endowments. His volume of “Poems” (1860), issued at the beginning of the Civil War, was almost unnoticed; and even yet he has not obtained the recognition due him. His devotion to the South was not greater than his reverence for his art. Few of our poets have so clearly understood themselves and their craft. Unusual courage breathes in all he wrote. In the year of his death, a prey to disease and sorrow, he could say to the Confederate soldiers buried “At Magnolia Cemetery”:

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone.

Timrod’s works were brought to light again in 1873 by Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-86), who, prior to the war, had united with Simms and Timrod to erect, if possible, the drooping spirit of poetry in the South. Hayne’s “Poems” (1855) and “Sonnets and Other Poems” (1857) had a chance to make their way before the outbreak of hostilities; and he survived the conflict long enough to publish “Legends and Lyrics” (1872) and “The Mountain of the Lovers, and Other Poems” (1873). A complete edition of his poems appeared in 1882. “The Laureate of the South,” as he was called, was an enthusiast in sub-tropical life and scenery, a word-painter and word-musician after the manner of Poe. His music is more obvious than Timrod’s and not so likely to please a delicate ear; and he did not have Timrod’s unity and clearness of conception.

Less careful still in his workmanship, and still more lacking in concentration, was the third of the trio, William Gilmore Simms (1806-70). Simms was a most abundant writer, known later for his novels and biographies rather than his poems. In his earlier poetry he was under the sway of Byron and Moore. His scanty advantages in the way of schooling were atoned for in part by voluminous indiscriminate reading; yet he never overcame certain defects in thinking to which self-taught men are prone. His first publication was “Lyrical and Other Poems” (1827). “Atalantis” (1832), a closet-drama in blank verse, in its general structure harks back to Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” His selected works, in nineteen volumes, were published in 1859. Simms’ commanding presence, the vigour of his personality, his determination to conquer all obstacles in his own path, and to vitalise the literary atmosphere of the South, make him an impressive, even heroic, figure.

_Edgar Allan Poe._--The life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) is duly recounted in another place, where his prose fiction is handled at some length. When Poe ran away from the ledgers in his guardian’s office, he carried with him in manuscript the first heir of his invention, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” for which he found a publisher at Boston (1827). “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems” followed in 1829. In 1831, the year of his discharge from West Point, appeared the volume of “Poems” with which Poe thought to win the interest of the cadets. Thereafter, most of his poetry first saw the light in various periodicals; for example, “The Raven” (1845) in the New York _Evening Mirror_, “The Bells” (1849) in _Sartain’s Magazine_, “Annabel Lee” (1849) in _The New York Tribune_.

In the opinion of the present writer, Poe’s verse is generally rated above its value, even for those qualities in which it is supposed particularly to excel. Certain poetical gifts this author unquestionably had in abundance. He had the _copia verborum_ which is indispensable to every literary artist. His sensations were vivid, if not numerous. He knew how to choose the symbols with which to attain his ends. If we are to trust the substance of his remarks in “The Philosophy of Composition,” and of those which he made regarding “The Raven,” his choice and manipulation of literary artifice were for the most part very conscious. He was able through the use of carefully selected diction and imagery to produce in his reader precisely the shade of feeling--the glimmer of the supernatural, the sense of grey and subdued, occasionally the sense of Weird and poignant, grief--which he desired. He never forgets the music of his words, and through habit, almost without trying, he can write continuously in a minor key. And yet, his music is not inevitable enough, nor does it undergo enough variation, or variation sufficiently delicate. It is too forced, too repetitious. His effects all lie within narrow limits, and he runs his gamut over and over again. This is altogether aside from his failure to make his music grow out of that strong underlying poetical good sense which is to be confidently expected of every great imagination. People too often forget how far Poe falls short of his master, Coleridge, in the mere element of harmonious sound; just as they too often forget how far Coleridge falls short of _his_ master, Milton, in the union of ethereal as well as sonorous cadences with a finely modulated or robust thought and sentiment. Were Poe’s appeals to the external senses more wonderful than they are, he would still lag behind those poets--and in the history of literature they are not after all so few--who can touch every chord, whether sad or joyous, known to the human ear, and still maintain that basis of firm reason without which human communication ceases to be broadly human. The intellect also has its music, lacking which no poetry has ever long survived.

Furthermore, all allowance being made for the tragic outcome of Poe’s career, for the part of his fate which was not the outgrowth of his own character, or could not, humanly considered, be attributed at some point in his development to his own will, his poetry is not uplifting. True, in his handling of material he is, in the ordinary acceptation, entirely clean. That is, he is wholly free from obscenity, as he is free also from that more perilous seeming cleanness which so often cloaks real impurity. Nevertheless may he be dangerous food for those whom he most readily attracts. Poe is essentially pessimistic, hopeless, toward general human experience. His favourite topic is death; and his vision does not pierce beyond the worm and the grave. Nay, like his predecessors in England and on the Continent, he luxuriates in the tomb and the charnel. As in his stories, so in his verse, though less patently, he follows some of the most pernicious motives in art that the older civilisation afforded his age. And it is the lethal progeny--Baudelaire and the rest--of that movement in European literature typified by Ann Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis that has been quickest to take up with Poe and exploit him abroad. We may seek to explain and exculpate him; we may sorrow for his blighted life; but the fact remains that what Poe wrote sprang out of his career, hence, on the whole, was morbid. The flowers of his poetry are the flowers of Lethe. The stimulants with which he catches the reader are violent and exciting. His ideal of intellectual beauty was detached and unnatural. It is little wonder, then, that he would not enter into sympathy with the English poet by whom the normal Bryant was inspired, and whose works, the most normalising and healthful influence that American literature thus far has felt, were purposely reactive against artificial and abnormal stimulation.

_Sidney Lanier._--Among the representatives of the “New South,” Sidney Lanier (1842-81), musician, poet, teacher of English, is easily foremost. He was born in Macon, Georgia, and received his education at Oglethorpe College, where, on graduating, he became a tutor; he volunteered in the Confederate Army (1860), toward the end of the war was captured, and perhaps owed his subsequent ill-health to his imprisonment of five months at Point Lookout. When the war was over, he taught again, in Alabama, read law, supported himself by his music--he was an adept on the flute--wrote for magazines, and by private study in Baltimore eventually fitted himself to take a lectureship in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. Courageous in his struggle with adverse circumstances, buoyant and energetic in spite of his long battle with disease, Lanier greatly resembles Timrod. Like Timrod, too, dying early, he left but a slender volume of poetry, uneven in excellence, an earnest of what he might have accomplished, hardly a standard by which to appraise him. Lanier’s was a delicate and sensuous rather than a profound imagination; however, both in his observation of external nature and in the thoroughness and extent of his acquaintance with general literature, he was unusually well prepared for the office of poet. His interest in science fortified and disciplined his contemplation of the outer world; his poetical instinct was nurtured through industrious and select reading; and he brought to bear upon his own literary craftsmanship, and upon the literary work of others, the ear of a trained musician. His musical ear helped him greatly in his studies on metre, where his contributions to scholarship are distinctly more valuable than in his lectures on the English novel. Deeply sympathetic and generous and sane in all relations of life, Lanier had a subtle understanding for the realm that lies outside the haunts of men--for the domain of wild fauna and flora, for the seldom heeded and the escaping phenomena of the woods and the marsh and the sea. The poor reception given to his “Tiger Lilies” (1867), a novel based on experiences in the army, did not dishearten him. In 1875 he definitely announced himself by his poem entitled “Corn,” published in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, a vision of the South restored through agriculture. This brought him the opportunity of writing the “Centennial Cantata” for the Philadelphia Exposition, where he expressed the faith he now had in the future of the reunited nation. The Cantata finished, he immediately began a much longer centennial ode, his “Psalm of the West” (1876), which appeared in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, and which, with “Corn” and “The Symphony,” made part of a small volume published in the autumn of 1876. Lanier’s important critical works were the product of the years between 1876 and his death. Some three years after he died, his poems were collected and edited by his wife. If we had to rely upon one poem to keep alive the fame of Lanier, thinks his biographer, Mr. Edwin Mims, we “could single out ‘The Marshes of Glynn’ with assurance that there is something so individual and original about it, and that, at the same time, there is such a roll and range of verse in it, that it will surely live not only in American poetry but in English.” “He is the poet of the marshes as surely as Bryant is of the forests.”

_Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Preston._--Our notice of Southern writers may conclude with Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Margaret Preston. James Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) is commonly associated with the Middle West, since he was born and died in Indiana. His early life, however, was spent in Kentucky and Georgia, he saw service in the Confederate Army, and much of his verse and prose carries the stamp of his experiences in the South and his acquaintance with Southern literature. He was a lawyer by profession, but by instinct a natural scientist. In 1885 he was appointed State Geologist of Indiana. From 1890 on he was connected with the New York _Independent_. His style was crisp and neat, sometimes over-elaborate; but he kept an eye on the thing he was talking about, so that in general what he has said of nature is very acceptable. His devotion to the pastimes of fishing and archery gave him a good deal of literary material. His extensive and exact knowledge of the ways of birds enters into many of his poems, as for example “An Early Bluebird.” The strain of regenerate patriotism in “Lincoln’s Grave” is the same that we find in Lanier. Mrs. Preston (1820-97) was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Junkin, founder of Lafayette College and afterward president of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. Before her marriage, in 1857, she had done some writing. In 1866 she published “Beechenbrook, a Rhyme of the War”; in 1870, “Old Songs and New.” Her “Cartoons” (1875) and “Colonial Ballads” (1887) show her at her best. She has been styled “the greatest Southern poetess”; there have been few claimants to dispute the title.

=Major Poets of New England.=--With this caption we return to the main stream of American verse, and reach the men whose lives and works may be said to justify a connected account of poetry in the United States. We shall take up Longfellow first. Whatever vicissitudes his literary standing has suffered, or is likely to suffer, he is bound for a long time to appear as the central figure among our poets.

_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow._--The subject of this sketch was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. He came of a gifted stock. His father was a lawyer of ability, and his mother a woman of artistic temperament and varied attainments, so that the boy grew up in an atmosphere of study and refinement. Longfellow was a wise and gentle child, fond of books, not too sensitive, always normal and sane. Until 1821 he went to school in Portland; in 1822 he entered the sophomore class at Bowdoin College. Here he attained a good rank in scholarship, and became acquainted, not intimately, with the future novelist Hawthorne. Upon graduation in 1825, Longfellow went abroad, in order to fit himself for a professorship in modern languages which lay open to him at Bowdoin. He visited France, Germany, England, and the South of Europe; on his return in 1829 he gave himself up with ardour and success to the activity of teaching. In 1831 he was married to Miss Mary S. Potter. In 1835, having received an invitation to the chair of modern languages at Harvard, he went abroad again for further travel and study, this time mainly to Germany and the North. The death of his young wife, shortly after their arrival in Holland, filled his cup with bitterness, but did not swerve him from preparation for the duties of his chair at Cambridge. Nevertheless, as may be read beneath the surface of his romance “Hyperion,” his determination that he must ultimately become a poet, and not end as a teacher in the classroom, can be traced to this critical epoch in his life.