Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20.djvu/385

1867.]

Or that,

Or this most delicate and exquisite bit of description, which seems painted a tempera,—in colors mixed with the transparent blood of snowdrops and Alpine harebells:—

There is not great range of sentiment in "May-Day," and through all the incoherence of the poem there is a constant recurrence to the master-theme. This recurrence has at times something of a perfunctory air, and the close of the poem does not seal the whole with any strong impression. There is a rise—or a lapse, as the reader pleases to think—toward a moral at the close; but the motion is evidently willed of the poet rather than the subject. It seems to us that, if the work have any climax, it is in those lines near the end in which the poet draws his reader nearest his own personality, and of which the delicately guarded and peculiar pathos scarcely needs comment:—

Among the other poems in this volume, it appears to us that "The Romany Girl," "Voluntaries," and "The Boston Hymn" are in their widely different ways the best. The last expresses, with a sublime colloquiality in which the commonest words of every-day parlance seem cut anew, and are made to shine with a fresh and novel lustre, the idea and destiny of America. In "Voluntaries" our former great peril and delusion—the mortal Union which lived by slavery—is at first the theme, with the strong pulse of prophecy, however, in the mournful music. Few motions of rhyme so win and touch as those opening lines,—

in which the poet, with a hardly articulate sorrow, regards the past; and Mr. Emerson's peculiarly exalted and hopeful genius has nowhere risen in clearer and loftier tones than in those stops which open full upon us after the pathetic pleasing of his regrets:—

In an age of fops and toys, Wanting wisdom, void of right, Who shall nerve heroic boys To hazard all in Freedom's fight,— Break sharply off their jolly games, Forsake their comrades gay, And quit proud homes and youthful dames, For famine, toil, and fray? Yet on the nimble air benign Speed nimbler messages, That waft the breath of grace divine To hearts in sloth and ease.