Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/184

 opening division of this sweet, sad monody was unmistakably his own—that of the man who always faced openly, but without appeal, a relentless fate or situation. None but himself could have written this lyric; as a whole its effect is synthetic, and indisputably that of his swan-song—not of a kind with Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," or with the "Prospice" and "Epilogue" of Browning, but charged with the "ruling passion" of a poet who half a century before had sung:

Putnam's Monthly, from the first, welcomed the young New York poet, and Stoddard well repaid its hospitality. He had previously, it is true, written much verse; had published and suppressed a booklet, and then made up a volume of poems full of promise, with open indebtedness to Keats, the idol of his formative period—as Shelley was of Bayard Taylor's. His contributions to the Monthly, however, were soon recognizable through a fresh and individual tone which was peculiar to his unstudied songs and sustained pieces, if not to his enforced journey work, through his after career. The series, which extended from March, 1853, to the number for November, 1856,—the last issue but one of the magazine,—embraced a full score of poems; so many and so good as to constitute their author, one may say, the laureate, certainly the chief minnesinger, of that eminently American periodical. Doubtless some of his songs were the