There have been collected in a cluster nearly five thousand big and
little American poems--all that diligent and long-continued research
could lay hands on! The author of 'Old Grimes is Dead' commenced
it, more than fifty years ago; then the cluster was pass'd on and
accumulated by C. F. Harris; then further pass'd on and added to by the
late Senator Anthony, from whom the whole collection has been bequeath'd
to Brown University. A catalogue (such as it is) has been made and
publish'd of these five thousand poems--and is probably the most curious
and suggestive part of the whole affair. At any rate it has led me to
some abstract reflection like the following.
I should like, for myself, to put on record my devout acknowledgment not
only of the great masterpieces of the past, but of the benefit of _all_
poets, past and present, and of _all_ poetic utterance--in its entirety
the dominant moral factor of humanity's progress. In view of that
progress, and of evolution, the religious and esthetic elements, the
distinctive and most important of any, seem to me more indebted to
poetry than to all other means and influences combined. In a very
profound sense _religion is the poetry of humanity_. Then the points of
union and rapport among all the poems and poets of the world, however
wide their separations of time and place and theme, are much more
numerous and weighty than the points of contrast. Without relation as
they may seem at first sight, the whole earth's poets and poetry--_en
masse_--the Oriental, the Greek, and what there is of Roman--the oldest
myths--the interminable ballad-romances of the Middle Ages--the hymns
and psalms of worship--the epics, plays, swarms of lyrics of the British
Islands, or the Teutonic old or new--or modern French--or what there is
in America, Bryant's, for instance, or Whittier's or Longfellow's--the
verse of all tongues and ages, all forms, all subjects, from primitive
times to our own day inclusive--really combine in one aggregate and
electric globe or universe, with all its numberless parts and radiations
held together by a common centre or verteber. To repeat it, all poetry
thus has (to the point of view comprehensive enough) more features of
resemblance than difference, and becomes essentially, like the planetary
globe itself, compact and orbic and whole. Nature seems to sow countless
seeds--makes incessant crude attempts--thankful to get now and then,
even at rare and long intervals, something approximately good.