Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/158

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS often or with more pleasure. Its beautiful succession of lyrics, thrown off in a style thoroughly his own—all compact of wild and witching music, full as Shelley's of sudden cadences and dying falls, and spontaneous as the carols of the Elizabeth songsters—were each a work of melodious English art. They so dwelt upon the ear as to draw attention from the more extended compositions of which they were the overture. "The Abdication of Noman the Elder" is a masterpiece. "The Fisher and Charon"—a classical production of some length—as an example of noble and sustained blank-verse has not been excelled, in our way of thinking, by any American poem. It is stately Doric, and imaginative to a high degree.

A book of the East should represent the meridian of age, experience, and culture. What may we fairly demand from an Eastern poet? First, the genius that should inform a poet of whatever clime or period; secondly, a breadth of training and thought, not only enabling him to equal the poet of a newer region in the latter specialty, but giving him a poly-sided skill to excel in many specialties. He must touch life through and through and all around—"best bard because the wisest." It is time to estimate by some such high test a poet whose home is that portion of this New World which, to regions westward, has already become the Old.

In The Book of the East we accordingly find that Stoddard retains his lyrical faculty and technical skill, and we also discover that he composes not merely from the love of faultless execution, but with the [144]