Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/153

 A Down East Homer.

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��1815, are summed up in the twenty- second and twenty-third stanzas :

"Their array went to Washington, And there destruction they begun ; From there and Baltimore they tied, After their General was dead.

"We lost some frigates by our foe, Who took them where they could do so; And look our vessels great and small. When they Into their hands did fall."

Only one victory of our anus is men- tioned, and that happened to be an affair that came off after the treaty was signed, and had the least signifi- cance of all as related to the subject of the poem :

"While marching to New Orleans town, Our gallant Jackson cut them down; And boat their haughty army then By killing thousands of their men."

The "improvement" of all this in "Part Second" is a call to give over the contention of party strife :

"Unite, unite now all as one, Let party spirit all be gone."

Political writers of the time were fa- vored with some excellent counsel, which perhaps entitles the whole per- formance to perpetuity.

" Ye printers come now take a hint, No more contention ever print; And so let party spirit die. That has so long been printer's cry."

After rehearsing to political editors the sad story of Ahab, he again calls to them, —

"Now for God 's sake forsake this trade. For this lying the devil made."

It is worth keeping in mind, that while Shaw was attentive to a not very exacting muse on the birch-cov- ered gravel hills of Standish Neck, he could look across Sebago lake to the

��head of Kettle Cove where Hawthorne kept his boat tied, and half a mile to the right he could see the tops of the pines which grew about that lad's home and deepened what was later spoken of as "that cursed solitude of Ray- mond." At the same time, too, up at the head of Long Pond, Seba Smith was getting ready to do some of that political writing which our poet so earnestly deprecated. Over in Gor- ham, only three or four miles away, Sargent S. Prentiss was living on a farm, and Isaac McClellan was be- ginning his work. At the city, John Neal must have been heard by that time, and his was a strong-voiced muse ; Mellen was cultivating a smoother strain ; and Longfellow was already engaged upon his earlier tasks.

But these belonged to another gen- eration, and a happier one for literary enterprise or indulgence. We are not often reminded novv how little chance tiiere was for any art to survive the two wars we had with England. Sometimes when we examine the rec- ords of towns and parishes for that period, we see how great a falling off there was from colonial times in re- gard to preparation for clerical work. So, too, the fact that work like Shaw's was made to order, as it were, and that it supplied a real demand, marks a sort of zero point upon the scale of popular taste and interest. The work had just one redeeming quality, — in common with most of the oratory of that period,— its spirit of genuine patriotism ; and that was enough to excuse and atone for all literary de- linquencies.

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