In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the _North American
Review_. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the editors,
said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no American
who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced a
remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and
unobserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was
published, and Christopher North, in _Blackwood_, saluted it as "by far
the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But
it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine
years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the
Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event
in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society
in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848,
or Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old,
and had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as
in his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with
many Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand
of Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next
year, showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite
literary cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded
the uncouth literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers
and early Boston.
The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit,
have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct
revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and
contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the
consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender
reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the
morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is
that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a
first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical
Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces
already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not
a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven
years before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to
contribute to _The Collegian_, a college magazine. Two years later, in
1831, appeared the _New England Magazine_, in which the young writer,
as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of verse
and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpassed lightness and grace
and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed
coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing
team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant
and undiminished delight.
Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday
shows how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us
that his first contribution to the _New England Magazine_ was published
in the third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy
of verses of an unpromising title--"To an Insect". But that particular
insect, seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it
was the katydid, whose voice is perennial:
"Thou sayest an undisputed thing
In such a solemn way."
In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a
frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new
literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these
bright prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and
refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The
stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor
might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines
as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to
Parnassus lay over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge:
"What is a poet's fame?
Sad hints about his reason,
And sadder praise from gazetteers,
To be returned in season.
"For him the future holds
No civic wreath above him;
Nor slated roof nor varnished chair,
Nor wife nor child to love him.
"Maid of the village inn,
Who workest woe on satin,
The grass in black, the graves in green,
The epitaph in Latin,
"Trust not to them who say
In stanzas they adore thee;
Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay,
With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!"