LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.
1837-1861.
Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States
until very recently. Even now the number of those who support
themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the
reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as
_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for
intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to
poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.
About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and
_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a
page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine
of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American
books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want
of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap
reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic
product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the
first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies
in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_,
and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest
writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a
fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further
restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the
field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of
Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in
installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals.
The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded
expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely
Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted
men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as
giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could
address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made
independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like
Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they
could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work.
Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and
making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing
here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves
freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of
some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities
and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that
Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he
afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that
Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the
break-up of the Brook Farm Community.
In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest
American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes
of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily
newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was
"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."
Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western-most county of
Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and
practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great
Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social
and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with
Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts.
Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a
literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a
brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review
and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the _Evening Post_, a
Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected
till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered
the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had
been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted
immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two
years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a
wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was
not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the
universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank
verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is
extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English
blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it
falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was
characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into
possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and
about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity,
and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in
his own _Hymn to the North Star_:
"And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet,
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main."
In 1821 he read _The Ages_, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas,
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year
brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in
1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington
Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience
in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by
heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's
school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though
not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor,
with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or
openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere
imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best
poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its
calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His
office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be
the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of
nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Water-fowl_,
_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song,
"O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than is common in
Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious
resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade,"
and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled--as
Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of
Nature."
Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his poetry is all
of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods
and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban
strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial,
the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian
Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose
subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease,
consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the
Flowers_, and amid whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pass
away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of
June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant
gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day
that is
"simply perfect from its own resource,
As to the bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air."
Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast
the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of
deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks
of himself, by anticipation, as of one
"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is--that his grave is green."
Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the
yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an
entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and
the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be
associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine,
and Emerson's with the rhodora.
Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there
are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as
these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_:
"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshipers."
He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new
collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His
work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as
any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces the
_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as
any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's
poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of
affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important,
consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to
the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy
stories, _Tales of the Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of Europe,
entitled _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in 1849 and
1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age,
and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of
Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half-century of service as the
editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening Post_,
under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous,
and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York.
Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like
Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf
Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farm-house near
Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed
mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury.
The local color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the
Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a
region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the
low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and
Salisbury. The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of
Whittier: the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their
factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back
country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow
between which glide the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a local corruption of
gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such
education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two
years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a
picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the
only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many
others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities
look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of
knowledge.
"Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.
"Within the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official,
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial."
A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he
began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in
Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston,
and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he
edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of
George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much
promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose
"Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his
first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled _Legends of New
England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his
early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which
had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to
good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and
similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence
and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford.
One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus
Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is
the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After
a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to
farming.
The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw
himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the
reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its
speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract
against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of
the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the
convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a
Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John
Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its
own communion. The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an
earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a
strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a
friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring
of a Tyrtaeus or a Körner, added to the stern religious zeal of
Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown
before the walls of Jericho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon
the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan
strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit
of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal
collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; _The Panorama, and Other
Poems_, 1856; and _In War Time_, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of
freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the
constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid
_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit:
"Loud and long
Lift the old exulting song,
Sing with Miriam by the sea--
He has cast the mighty down,
Horse and rider sink and drown,
He hath triumphed gloriously."
Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil war, the
best, or at all events the most popular, is _Barbara Frietchie_.
_Ichabod_, expressing the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel
Webster's seventh of March speech in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law,
is one of Whittier's best political poems, and not altogether unworthy
of comparison with Browning's _Lost Leader_. The language of
Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely
devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been
included in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of faith and
doubt, the best are perhaps _Our Master_, _Chapel of the Hermits_, and
_Eternal Goodness_; one stanza from the last of which is familiar;
"I know not where his islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift,
Beyond his love and care."
But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely
life of the New England country-side. His rural ballads and idyls are
as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and
have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier's
co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably
_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper
Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as
poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a
descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow-Bound_, 1866, a New England
fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of
Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness
and animation is superior to either of them. Although in some things a
Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a
Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject
of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The most impressive
of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them, the _King's
Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History of Boston_ in
1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has
been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The _Bridal of
Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which contain some
of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators,
after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. As an
artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or
rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the
eight-syllabled rhyming couplet--
"Maud Muller on a summer's day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.
and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do
some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from
affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in
part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical
equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are
not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an
artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," which give
his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.
Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a
besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme
and meter, ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly
contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches
of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery
and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest
were the _Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers
in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854.
While Massachusetts was creating an American literature other sections
of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too
raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the
country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently
be described. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were busy filling the
columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a
considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction,
travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated
most of these to the dusty top shelves. To rehearse the names of the
numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to
_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern
Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and
poetasters in Poe's papers on the _Literati of New York_, would be very
much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of an old
grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the
book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one
encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow,
Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature.
It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to
predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold
relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of
their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and
scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable
periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would
sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter
were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public
sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance."
The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily
ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is
constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry
on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be
predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it
sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions
change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary
critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see
how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie.
From among the professional _littérateurs_ of his day emerges, with
ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first
volume, _Tamerlane, and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that city
and bore upon its title-page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his
parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern. His father was a
Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself
the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by
the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a
wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English
school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and
afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was
wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and
perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by
whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary
hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon
brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently
of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia.
These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated
habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New
York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then on the
_Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital
in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in literary
history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the
"eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is
popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so
insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were
constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character
came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great
tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly,
and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of
moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers,
except where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor
favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending
obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's
books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses
for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who
praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious
honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in
any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as
Bryant's in its austerity.
By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had
attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of
his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the
_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It
was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his
more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste.
Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of
development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the
realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there
was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's,
though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and
the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific
exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a
mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of
his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects,
such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the
consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy of
Composition_ he described how his best-known poem, the _Raven_, was
systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of
lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a
starting-point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed
will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes
the way in which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that any
such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the
associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's
pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not
only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of
thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the
_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and
the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic
faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried
treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious
crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all
parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to
work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification,
like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments
at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful
introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this
kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie
Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less
degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett
Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's
_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a
plot-hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the
very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale
predicted in advance.
In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge,
who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse
often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still
oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in
the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing
else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with
melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is
curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of
poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images,
original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little
meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from
nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his
poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance,
without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real
world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed
upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a
great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic
Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral
exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or
goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it
gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this
indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a
"ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"--filled
with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet
there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The
reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of
language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or
passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an
obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a
ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems,
originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845.
Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most
people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic
feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most
fascinating, of its author's creations.
Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in
Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and
speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not
the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh
and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the
shadowy borderland between death and life.
"The play is the tragedy 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."
The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of
the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of
the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, _The
Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the
same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let
the soul go free from the body.
This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_,
1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few of
them, like _William Wilson_, and _The Man of the Crowd_, have some
resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's
peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in general the
tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of
material forces. The passion of physical fear or of superstitious
horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. These tales
represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the
mere bugaboo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes children afraid to
go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the _Cask of
Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is
the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its solemn
and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its
richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as
his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In descriptive pieces
like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of adventure like the
_Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea-tale, _The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness
almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without a mocking
irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the
facetious were mostly failures.
Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon
the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his
country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for
any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame
has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been
favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_,
translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy
poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in
character--a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If
he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of
Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.
"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky!"
Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and
breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar
genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with
Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The
conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary
and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to
the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin
in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery,
making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of
field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large
plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the
States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a
comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its
peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the
North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into
politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and
excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the
free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor
whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in
the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great
educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture
of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as
the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and
from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary
prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing
can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical
editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war,
or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews
in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.
In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two
Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done
something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in
1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred
dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the
prize to Poe's first story, the _MS. Found in a Bottle_, was John P.
Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary
of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had
published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country
life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels,
_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the
Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of
colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting
as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern
writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who
died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of
Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the
best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was
an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys'
books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly
Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City
Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings
include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses,
and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote
numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of
the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there
illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and
Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong
_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best
Southern novel produced before the civil war.
When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the
metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N.
P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which
journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary
reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written
in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_
in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published
_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of European
saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing
stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from
Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his
country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always
graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in
substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of
popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most
successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death,
in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable
public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and
its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the literary wants
of the _beau monde_. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though
clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as
_F. Smith_, _The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall_, _Edith Linsey_, and the
_Lunatic's Skate_, together with some of the _Letters from Under a
Bridge_, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but
as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and
Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of his simpler
poems, like _Unseen Spirits_, _Spring_, _To M---- from Abroad_, and
_Lines on Leaving Europe_, still retain a deserved place in collections
and anthologies.
The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very
popular song-writer, and his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still
survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single
famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General
Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night
Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the
land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but
now remembered only as the author of the song _Sparkling and Bright_,
and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native
of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar
figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode
with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and
occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was
published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like
Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are
still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not
within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their
contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in
1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned
among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County,
who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his
juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with
credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining
encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set
out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany
and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the
expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his
_Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel
written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and
his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California,
India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and
the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His
head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for
the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many
volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations,
and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the
magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from
_Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and
home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old
Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat
mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four
days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince
Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a
great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for
learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his
favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external
impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at
once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something
"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's
work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of
glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not
unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, for
example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_:
"From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry;
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die."
The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets
made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876,
contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great
translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close
reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American
literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among
our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of
Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius
self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity
and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has
made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than
some other writers less generously endowed.
Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse,
eloquent, and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture
of bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story
of Kennett_; 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old
Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his
boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a
satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived
character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of
Kennett_, which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and
reality than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In
these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is
greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing
plots.
Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young
poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to
Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about
1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on
the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.
Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our
sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but
some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a
natural sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the
methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's
Ride_--perhaps his most current piece--is a rather forced production,
and has been overpraised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe
Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary
success seemed assured. They made that city their home for the
remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of
Memory_, and Phoebe's _Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There
is nothing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It
is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely
feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet,
cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.
A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_,
_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _'Way Down South_, _Nelly was a
Lady_, _My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work, not of any
Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa.,
and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and
music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years
1847 to 1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital
addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and
entitle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers.
As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the
plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings
of the Negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This
is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of
thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some
forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized
form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating
libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other
single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the
public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more
even than Garrison's _Liberator_, more than the indignant poems of
Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It
presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it
made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It
was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture
was exaggerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. The
system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes
happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and
art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally
melodramatic, that some of the characters are conventional, and that
the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse. In
spite of all, it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great book,
the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and
uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart
of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first
success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the
_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have
a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial
ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink
and White Tyranny_ and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism.
There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs.
L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as
"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of
New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of
value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler
poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral
Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early
friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that
his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little
cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G.
Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by
virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, 1850, and
_Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series of
reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal
freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life
which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most
important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the
literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had
been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of
orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and
daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and
independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher,
the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to
give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons,
lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed
in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the
large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up
of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star
Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful
_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly
wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in
letters. Like Willis's _Ephemera_ they are excellent literary
journalism, but hardly literature.
We may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a
brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the
time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in
1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been
printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good
deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention,
but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for
his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant,
of which the following is a fair specimen:
"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the few large stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!"
The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of
the psalms of David and of some of the prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_,
and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed
Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the
old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases
attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to
the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which
was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures
and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom.
There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his
so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of
prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation
and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few
literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like
Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have
something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing
else--in writings from this side of the water, before they will
acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering
in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the
greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is
"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling
rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's
poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry,
the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of
conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse
elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and
even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to
be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and
nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the
conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the
salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole
classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the
divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled _Children of
Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness,
Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the
body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are
divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get
every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes
to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without
selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for
descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the
full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the
prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square
miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and
prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to
accept lines like these:
"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north."
Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of
brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the
crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the
people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway
omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver
were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I
loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic,
simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same as any
other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great
tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil
war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the
Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the
_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready
comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call
himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a
slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers
allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in
the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra
civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all
his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of
life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his
panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because
he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such
a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the
human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not
many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the
_Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the
individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the
_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too
early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But
it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet
as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and
feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and
even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the
literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate
reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists,
but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward
the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new
stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the
_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most
inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank
verse, for example, in the _Man-of-War-Bird_:
"Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.;
and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters:
"Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . .
Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth."
Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary
verse, as a stanza of it will show:
"My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won.
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck, my captain lies
Fallen, cold and dead."
This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman
has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry:
_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and, more recently,
_Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New
Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in
1876.
1. William Cullen Bryant. _Thanatopsis_. _To a Water-fowl_. _Green
River_. _Hymn to the North Star_. _A Forest Hymn_. "_O Fairest of
the Rural Maids_." _June_. _The Death of the Flowers_. _The Evening
Wind_. _The Battle-Field_. _The Planting of the Apple-tree_. _The
Flood of Years_.
2. John Greenleaf Whittier. _Cassandra Southwick_. _The New Wife and
the Old_. _The Virginia Slave Mother_. _Randolph of Roanoke_.
_Barclay of Ury_. _The Witch of Wenham_. _Skipper Ireson's Ride_.
_Marguerite_. _Maud Muller_. _Telling the Bees_. _My Playmate_.
_Barbara Frietchie_. _Ichabod_. _Laus Deo_. _Snow-Bound_.
3. Edgar Allan Poe. _The Raven_. _The Bells_. _Israfel_. _Ulalume_.
_To Helen_. _The City in the Sea_. _Annabel Lee_. _To One in
Paradise_. _The Sleeper_. _The Valley of Unrest_. _The Fall of the
House of Usher_. _Ligeia_. _William Wilson_. _The Cask of
Amontillado_. _The Assignation_. _The Masque of the Red Death_.
_Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_.
4. N. P. Willis. _Select Prose Writings_. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons. 1886.
5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. _Oldtown Folks_.
6. W. G. Simms, _The Partisan_. _The Yemassee_.
7. Bayard Taylor. _A Bacchic Ode_. _Hylas_. _Kubleh_. _The Soldier
and the Pard_. _Sicilian Wine_. _Taurus_. _Serapion_. _The
Metempsychosis of the Pine_. _The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled_.
_Bedouin Song_. _Euphorion_. _The Quaker Widow_. _John Reid_.
_Lars_. _Views Afoot_. _By-ways of Europe_. _The Story of Kennett_.
_The Echo Club_.
8. Walt Whitman. _My Captain_. "_When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard
Bloomed_." _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. _Pioneers, O
Pioneers_. _The Mystic Trumpeter_. _A Woman at Auction_. _Sea-shore
Memoirs_. _Passage to India_. _Mannahatta_. _The Wound Dresser_.
_Longings for Some_.
9. _Poets of America_. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &
Co. 1885.