Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/91

Rh poets," we simply imply that America has not yet produced an "Iliad," or a "Divine Comedy," or a "Jerusalem Delivered;" not yet a "Prometheus Bound," or a "Macbeth," a "Faery Queene," or a "Paradise Lost;" not yet, to approach more debatable ground, a "Marmion," or a "Childe Harold," an "Excursion," or a "Gertrude of Wyoming." We will add, however, that in the matter of living poets, we have anything but a crushing majority of merit. And doubtless the day will dawn—it may be soon—when the American imagination shall prove its creative power. And her first great poet—one of her living prophets hath prophesied it—will take his inspiration "from those very themes and objects from which, in her young and imitative time, the transatlantic muse seeks to escape. He will teach truth by American parable. The wisdom which is of all time and of every land, will be presented by him in the especial form and striking aspects which she has chosen for herself in the country wherein he sings." America's future will have its poetry "uttered," as her past has its poetry "unexpressed"—

The time has been when Richard Henry Dana was regarded as America's brightest orb of song. And there are probably still those who claim for him this bright particular star-shine. His verses are distinguished by meditative calmness, religious aspirations, and manly simplicity. This simplicity, indeed, trenches on the bald and barren, and has been called morbid in its character. His diction is often common-place and prosaic, but occasionally indulges in abrupt, and often spasmodic, intervals of "strong endeavour." Sometimes unruffled and musical, it is at others rasping, rugged, grating, to "ears polite." That Mr. Dana specifically and of set purpose imitates any one particular bard, we do not believe: whatever of the imitative feebleness just referred to may attach to his poems, is there rather implicitly, and by "spontaneous generation" (if that may be said of anything imitative). His tendency, however, is to the reflective stand-point of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and his doctrines of idealism and super-sensual-insight, now widely and earnestly affirmed, and often exaggerated, at Boston and other nests of the singing birds, were once scouted as heretical by haters of paradox, and by cui bono men of letters.

For his prose writings as well as his verse, a permanent place is assured to him by Griswold, in the literature of America. As a prose writer (though malicious detractors may affect to see nothing but prose in him) he is almost unwholly unknown in England. His "Paul Felton" and "Tom Thornton" have been heard of; voilà taut. Yet his doings in romance, politics, and criticism, have been considerable, though far from successful in a pecuniary sense;—his son's graphic narrative of "Two Years before the Mast" has had a run to which he is quite a stranger. It is nearly forty years since he began his contributions to the North American Review, in the editorship of which he afterwards took part. It was in this journal that he excited the opposition of the "Queen Anne's Men" and reigning arbiters in poetical criticism, by his eulogy of the Lake poets. He "thought poetry was something more than a recreation; that it was something superinduced upon the realities of life; he believed the ideal and the spiritual might be as real as the