Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/320

 304 GEORGE W, CUTTER. [IBW-JO. tones may come of themselves, and link themselves together, and sing themselves, if they will ; but they get little help from Mr. Cutter, that is clear. The poetic spirit with which he is possessed, takes him and does with him whatsoever it will. He feels more poetry than he writes. Now and then the pent lightning within him flashes forth full into the dark of language, and dazzles all ; but for the most part he has not half told himself, because he has never studied expression. Poetry may be born, it is true ; but it is not born into language : expression is an achievement of high art, wherein "there is no excellence without great labor." And, from the manifestations of genius in Mr. Cutter's poems, there can be. no doubt that, had he patiently and assiduously applied this labor, America could have boasted a real, live lyric poet. " The Song of Steam," penned in an hour of such high inspiration as sometimes comes with a power of miracles, is, we think, a fair indication of his capacity. And this opinion is corroborated by "The Song of Lightning," and by passages all through his writings — horizon-flashes of that lightning which wanted but the fit medium of lan- guage in order to illumine and electrify the world. Many of these passages are equal, as far as they go, to "The Song of Steam," but they do not go far; they are not sus- tained ; the divine element of patience is not in them — the principle " to labor and to wait." "The Song of Steam" has been as popular perhaps as any other lyric of the century; and it will be popular as long as steam itself is popular. It is the whole sublime power of that element wrought out into thunderous verse. Sublimity, indeed, is Mr. Cutter's forte. Hence war and the glorious fatherland are his principal themes. It is the subtile electricity of poetry and the hot energy of battle mingling in his veins. He loves, in his own language, to be " Where muskets ring and sabers flash And round the miagliug squadi'ons reel! '" " There is stern pleasure in the shock of war, The wheeling squadron and the bayonet's jar, When martial lines their gleaming fronts enlarge, And the earth reels beneath their fiery charge ! " For, he says. And let us cite a few other examples of Mr. Cutter's sublimity ''And they shook the black and starless au" With a wild and fearful yell ! " "We'll view the glittering iceberg roll Where the ocean is frozen white. As we slacken sail at the sunless pole By the glare of the northern light." " And when the latest trump of God, Dissolving death's mysterious chain, Shall rend the marble and the sod, To give each form its soul again :