Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/70

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS or basic strata of the Parnassus mountain—the emotional (yet here it occurs to me that these crop out again near the apex, as in some lofty dramatic outburst, like

and this household poem, without the factitious aid of a popular air, holds a place by its own music and the associations which it conveys.

Indeed, I am not sure that the present article was not suggested by a visit made one day to the rooms where a painter has translated into his own form of expression this and another of our simplest primary lyrics. Multitudes are now buying the pretty chromolithographs of Jerome Thompson's paintings of "The Old Oaken Bucket," and "Home, Sweet Home"; nor do I hesitate to say that few more grateful and attractive pictures, within the means of the average country-dweller, can hang upon his walls, than these truthful representations of the birth-place of Samuel Woodworth, and the "Sweet Home" of John Howard Payne.

The last-named ditty, though still more obviously depending upon a sentiment, has a world of help from the air to which it was composed. Looking at the [56]