Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/305

Rh The Backwoodsman (1818), from which this conventional couplet is taken, recounts, without much plot, in sturdy heroics more like Crabbe's realism than Goldsmith's idyllic sentiment, the rugged life and wild surroundings of a frontiersman and his family. It is an honest document, if not distinguished literature.

James Gates Percival (1795-1856) typified that crude manifestation of Romanticism, the self-constituted, the self-conscious poetic genius. Similarly, he typified the poetic mood that is without the poetic reason. The stuff of him is preeminently the stuff of poetry, but unclarifled, uncontrolled, unorganized. It is often as if the personalities of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Moore, and Bryant had been merged into one helpless hypnoidal state of metrical and emotional garrulity. Yet every now and then an open-minded reader is surprised by some first-hand observation, some graceful analogy, some picturesqueness or energy, some short lyric cry; and once at least he wrought a little gem—his simple stanzas on Seneca Lake. He typified, too, a not altogether ignoble phase of earlier American culture in his zealous acquisitiveness, both in science (he died as state geologist of Wisconsin), and in languages (he wrote verse in Scandinavian and German, and translated from innumerable tongues). But he belongs chiefly to the student of human nature; lonely, shy, unmarried, disappointed, poor, and dirty, he was in appearance and mode of life a character for Dickens, in heart and soul a character for Thackeray or George Eliot. Lowell pilloried him in an essay; Bryant was perhaps juster in his kindlier obituary criticism in The Evening Post. He was once a famous man.

Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842) and George P. Morris (1 802-1864), Knickerbocker editors of literary journals and charitably remembered respectively for The Old Oaken Bucket and Woodman, Spare that Tree, were popular song writers in the sentimental fashion (perhaps more developed in America than in England) that seems to have originated with Tom Moore. Yet such songs had music, point, and refinement that sets them far above their popular descendants—the raucous, vulgar inanities born of vaudeville and cabaret.

Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-1884), another