Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/775

Rh there are no concealments. We never suspect him of with holding half of what he knows, or of formularising for our satisfaction a belief which he does not sincerely hold. He is transparently honest and honourable. His courage has no limits. Isolated by force of character, there is no weak ness in his solitude. He leads us into a region where we escape at once from deserts and from noisy cities; for he rises above without depreciating ordinary philanthropy, and his philosophy at least endeavours to meet our daily wants. In every social and political controversy he has thrown his weight into the scale of justice, on the side of a rational and progressive liberty; and his lack of sym pathy with merely personal emotions is recompensed by a veneration for the ideal of the race which recalls the beau tiful sentiment of Malebranche : &quot; When I touch a human hand I touch heaven.&quot; Poetry. Half the literary men and all the literary women of this century in America have written verses; most of them are respectable and many are excellent. But a brief review of the poetry of the West must dwell on the works of four or five authors who most clearly and saliently express the main tendencies of their nation. It must suffice here to name as familiar, or worthy to be so, the graceful vers de societe of Holmes, especially his &quot; Punch Bowl&quot; and &quot; Old Ironsides ;&quot; the patriotic chants of James Percival ; the sparkling fancies of J. E. Drake s &quot;Culprit Fay;&quot; the fashionable satires of Halleck ; the lyrics and romances of the great traveller and prolific author, J. Bayard Taylor ; the well-balanced stanzas of Hillhouse ; the plays of Conrad and Bird : &quot; Woodman, spare that Tree &quot; and the &quot; Whip- poor-Will.&quot; by G. P. Morris ; A. B. Street s &quot; Settler,&quot; and &quot; Forest Walk ;&quot; and, pre-eminent among female minstrels, Mrs Sigourney, whose blank verse descriptions of nature approach those of Bryant; the youthful prodigies, Lucretia and Maria Davidson; and Maria Brooks, authoress of the richly imaginative southern romance of Zophiel, whom Southey, her friend and admirer, pronounced to be &quot; the most impassioned of poetesses.&quot; We proceed to review the position of the really great poets of the United States, as re presenting some what different manners and modes of thought. 1. THE EUKOPEAN SCHOOL. Of these, in our judgment, Mr Longfellow is still the first. His works are free from the defects that stamp the national literature of his country. He has none of the uncouth power and spasmodic exag geration of his contemporaries. He is all grace, polish, and sweetness. His prose masterpiece, &quot; Hyperion,&quot; is the key-note of his minor poems. The source of their inspira tion is &quot; Outre Mer &quot; among feudal towers, Flemish towns, and Alpine passes. Like Irving in the variety of his culture and superior in genius, his imagination is Teutonic rather than American. He lingers in Nuremberg, Bruges, and Prague; and chooses for his emblem of life s river, not the Ohio, nor the Hudson, nor the Assabeth, but the &quot; Moldau s rushing stream.&quot; His &quot; New England Trage dies&quot; are perhaps his least successful efforts, partly because dramatic literature has seldom yet flourished in American soil, and partly because his sympathy with the ruder age is not keen enough to enable him to vitalise it. Mr Long fellow has given us the best translations in the world from Swedish, German, Spanish, and Italian authors, and many of his best verses are avowedly suggested by proverbs or sentences, or bits of old romance. A few words from an old French author give him the burden of the &quot; Old Clock on the Stairs;&quot; a leaf out of Mather s Magnolia Christi is rhymed into the &quot; Phantom Ship ;&quot; the ballad of the Count Arnaldos sets him dreaming over the secret of the sea; a verse of Euripides is the key-note to his &quot;Voices of the Night;&quot; a few lines from Goethe gather 731 up the essence of the &quot;Psalm of Life.&quot; In the New World, but not of it, he dwells with almost wearisome fondness on the word &quot; old.&quot; Volumes of old days, old associations that we cannot buy with gold, quaint old cities, old poets and painters, sweet old songs, old haunted houses, dear old friends, the grey old manse, Nature tho dear old nurse, dear old England, on phrases and thoughts like these his fancy broods. American verse is fre quently rough-hewn and audacious, sometimes obscure and pedantic; its novelty is often more striking than its truth. Every sentence that Longfellow has penned is as clear as crystal and as pure as snow. He wears his weight o learning lightly as a flower; and though he cannot create, he cannot touch without adorning. He seldom gives us thoughts absolutely new, but ho puts our best thoughts in the best language. Critics react against his popularity, and complain of his want of concentration and the con ventionality of his epithets (a fault more rare in his later volumes); but his place as the laureate of women and children and gentle men is unassailable; and there are seasons when we-prefer his company to that of the grand old masters, when we seek an anodyne rather than a- stimulant &quot; His songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care.&quot; Longfellow s command of verse alone proves him to be a genuine poet. There aro passages in the &quot; Arsenal,&quot; the &quot; Occultation of Orion,&quot; the &quot; Building of the Ship,&quot; and the &quot; Household Poems 5 unsurpassed in melody by any in contemporary English verse. The introduction to &quot; Hia watha,&quot; the closing lines of &quot; Evangeline,&quot; and some of the character sketches which preface the &quot; Tales of the Wayside Inn,&quot; have a music equally attractive and more decidedly original. The highest flights of Longfellow s imagination are in the strangely-confused old-world story of the &quot; Golden Legend;&quot; but the work on which his fame most securely rests is &quot;Hiawatha.&quot; This poem, in which a series of idylls are strung together on the thread of an idea common to Indian and Scandinavian legend, has that exhilarating flavour of nationality wanting in many of the author s works, and it yields to none of them in artistic finish. The monotony of the verse is like that of a bird s song which has only two or three notes, and yet from its everlasting freshness never palls upon the ear. Most modern attempts to reproduce old ballads put new wine into old bottles; but the American poet has thrown himself as completely into the spirit of aboriginal western life as he has into that of Gothic paganism in the &quot; Chal lenge of Thor.&quot; Like Chibiabos the musician he is at home among the pine-groves and the prairies and &quot;the great lakes of the Northland;&quot; and &quot; All the many sounds of Nature Borrow sweetness from his singing.&quot; Longfellow s descriptions charm us more than they astonish. Inferior in luxuriance to those of &quot; Enoch Arden,&quot; in in&amp;lt;- tensity to those of &quot; Locksley Hall,&quot; in subtilty to Brown ing s Italian pictures, they are superior in simplicity. li they do not adorn Nature as a mistress with the subjective fancies of a lover, they bring her before us as a faithful nurse, careful for her children. In &quot;Evangeline&quot; the poet follows the wheels of the emigrant s waggon over &quot; Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in sunshine and shadow;&quot; and &quot; Over them wander the buffalo herds and the elk and tha roebuck.&quot; Hiawatha speaks of Nature with the familiarity of an inhabitant; there is no trace of the grandiose stylo of the tourist. In the best episodes of the volume as the account of the hero s childhood and his friends of the wooing of Minnehaha of the son of the evening star of