Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/230

200 appeal of the loveliest and most successful nova antica—of a poem like "The Hamadryad" or "Œnone"—is to the æsthetic sense chiefly, and therefore in some measure restricted. After Landor Raison d'être. and Keats and Tennyson and Swinburne, our younger school cannot find a real need for this sort of thing. I remember my own chagrin, twenty years ago, when Mr. Lowell wrote a most judicious notice of one of my books, and failed to mention a blank-verse poem, with a classical theme, upon which I had expended the technical "Local flavor" not to be contemned. skill and imagery at my command. On the other hand, he was more than kind to my native, if homely, American lyrics and ballads, written with less pains, yet more spontaneously; and he told me very frankly that he thought the simple home-fruit of more real significance than my attempt to reproduce some apple of the Hesperides. He was right, and I have not forgotten the lesson. With respect to another art, I wonder that the A home-field. American sculptor does not still more frequently make a diversion from his imitations of the mediæval and the antique. What subjects he has close at hand,—such as a Greek, if he now could chance upon them, would handle with eagerness and truth! Surely our American workman, at labor and in repose, our young athletes, our beasts of the forest and of the field, are available models; and Ward's "Indian Hunter," Donoghue's "The Boxer," and Tilden's "The Ball-Thrower," at least