Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/71

 sible. Never did a country need more than America such an influence as his. We may understand and even approve his reproachful and scornful fear of the overweening "British element" when we see what it has hitherto signified in the literature of his country. Once as yet, and once only, has there sounded out of it all one pure note of original song—worth singing, and echoed from the singing of no other man; a note of song neither wide nor deep, but utterly true, rich, clear, and native to the singer; the short exquisite music, subtle and simple and sombre and sweet, of Edgar Poe. All the rest that is not of mocking-birds is of corncrakes, varied but at best for an instant by some scant-winded twitter of linnet or of wren.

We have been looking up too long from the microscope; it is time to look in again and take note of the subject. We find indeed one American name on which our weekly critics cluster in swarms of praise; one poet whom they who agree in nothing else but hate agree to love and laud as king of American verse; who has sung, they tell us, a song at last truly national and truly noble. The singer is Mr. Lowell; but the song is none of the Biglow Papers, where the humours could not but tickle while the discords made us wince; we laughed, with ears yet flayed and teeth still on edge. The song so preferable to any "Drum-Tap" of Whitman's