verse is of this occasional character. He knew very well that the verse was not "booked for immortality." He allowed it to stand in his collected works along with a good deal of youthful nonsense, like The Spectre Pig, which a poet who took himself more seriously would, out of jealousy for his fame, have suppressed. Yet to be able to write good occasional verse is a rare accomplishment, even if not a very high one. Our poets who have tried to write odes for great and serious occasions, centennial and the like, have seldom succeeded, the chief exceptions being Emerson's Concord Hymn, which was modestly meant, and Lowell's Commemoration Ode, behind which there was deep personal feeling. In general, Holmes wrote for much lighter occasions, and it must be said that he succeeded. Whether it was Bryant's seventieth birthday, or Longfellow's departure for Europe, or a dinner to General Grant, or the dedication of a monument, or the founding of a hospital, the poem was freely given and was sure to be worthy of the occasion. Sometimes it rose to real distinction. The series of over forty poems written for the reunions of his class becomes impressive in its length and modulation-one song, as it were, in many keys. At the Saturday Club gives us the finest pictures we shall ever get of the real Longfellow, Agassiz, Hawthorne, and Emerson, as they were among their associates. Horace wrote occasional poems that are immortal: Holmes, once or twice, came near it. Light verse was clearly his forte. His frankly humorous poems, like The Deacon's Masterpiece, Parson Turell's Legacy, and How the Old Horse Won the Bet, have always held a high place. In the so-called society verse, that professedly trivial verse on trivial subjects, which demands such a light touch and which yet runs often close to seriousness, he has had no competitor in America unless it be Mr. Aldrich, and only one forerunner-the almost forgotten Philip Freneau. Poems of this class are The First Fan, La Grisette, Our Yankee Girls, The Dilemma, My Aunt, and that playfully reverent poem on an old portrait of one of his Quincy ancestors in her girlhood-Dorothy Q. A poet's final place, however, is most likely to be determined by his serious work. Holmes's entirely serious work is not much in amount, and it includes no long poems. There are a few patriotic poems, but he left nothing better in this kind than the declamatory Old Ironsides. He struck a surer note in the tender themes of Under the Violets and The Voiceless; the latter, indeed, has attained almost as wide a familiarity as any of Longfellow's lyrics: A Genuine "We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, The wild-flowers who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them:- But die with all their music in them!" But surest of all in their hold on the future are The Last Leaf and The Chambered Nautilus. Which is the greater, it is idle to ask. This distinction may be noted. The Chambered Nautilus, with all its lofty reach and perfect finish, is a meditative poem not materially different in character from half a hundred other famous lyrics in our language. On the other hand, The Last Leaf is like an instantaneous photograph that has caught something never to be caught again. We prize it because it is a unique addition to literature, unlike anything save its imitations: "I saw him once before, As he passed by the door, And again The pavement stones resound, It is a picture only, a "silhouette" Mr. Stedman has happily called it, but the quaint staccato movement throws the picture into such sharp relief that it takes on the very attributes of life. A Philosopher in Disguise. Of his prose perhaps enough has been said. It was the prose that made Holmes distinctly a man of letters; it was the prose that absorbed the best literary energies of his mature years and possibly kept him from producing any poetic masterpiece such as Whittier wrote in SnowBound. But The Autocrat is masterpiece enough. At one time or another Holmes has been compared to most of the great writers of discursive prose in modern literature, and there is probably some measure of truth in each comparison. He remains peculiarly our own-even less than our own, almost to provincialism. Concentrated New Englandism, with only the Puritan element subtracted, is Dr. Holmes. But he belongs to a company that is of many nationalities, a company of sage philosophers and shrewd humorists, who, under cover of giving amusement, afford unsuspected intellectual stimulus and add to the practical wisdom of their generation. MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE As we approach our own time the distinction between major and minor men becomes more and more difficult to draw. The next generation may overturn our judgments. Even now, as we look back upon the nineteenth century, we seem to see Bryant, for instance, receding from the eminence which he once held into a position of chiefly historical importance. And we see Thoreau, for another instance, coming gradually into a wider acceptance, though still very far from holding a secure place among writers of the first order. Even more doubtful is the position of one for whom a special criticism must yet be reserved-Walt Whitman. But if names like these can be advanced to a conspicuous position only with caution, it seems pretty clear that such a position cannot be conceded to any of the many yet unnamed. At the same time it is to be remembered that a few, as Bayard Taylor in poetry and Hale and Curtis in prose, have done work that is not far below the enduring kind. It is these and their fellow craftsmen that we must now endeavor to view in such perspective as the criticism of forty years or less enables us to obtain. 1819-1895. 1819-1892. C. E. Norton, 1827 Among the poets of New England, as it happens, the distinction between major and minor is sharply enough drawn. The men of real talent but of relatively weak poetic impulse seem to have been willing to resign the office of singing to W. W. Story, Emerson and Whittier and the Cambridge group, T. W. Parsons, pursuing for the most part other occupations. William Wetmore Story and Thomas William Parsons, both of whom were born in the same year as Lowell, were examples of such men. They at least did their share toward sustaining the reputation which Boston has held since the time of Washington Allston, as a centre of literary scholarship and art. Story, a native of Salem and a graduate of Harvard, spent only his early manhood at Boston; the latter half of his life was passed at Rome, where he devoted himself chiefly to sculpture. Among his works in sculpture are a statue of his father, Judge Story, and a bust of his friend, Lowell. Several of Lowell's early essays were written in the form of letters addressed to "My Dear Storg" (i. e., Story). His writings include poems, a drama, a novel, and miscellaneous prose. Parsons was born at Boston and spent most of his life there. A period of travel and study in Italy resulted in his admirable rhymed translation (1843, extended in 1867) of some cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy. His original poetry is grave and noble, and his Lines on a Bust of Dante take rank, with scholars at least, as an American classic. Professor Charles Eliot Norton, of Harvard, though not a poet, may also be mentioned here as an associate of the Cambridge poets and himself a scholar and translator of Dante and an authority on art. To these may be added several writers of occasional poems. As far back as 1832, Samuel Francis Smith, a Boston clergyman and a classmate of Holmes, wrote America ("My Country, 'tis of Thee"), in which patriotic and religious senti 1808-1895. Julia Ward ments combine to make a worthy national hymn. S. F. Smith, Nearly thirty years later another hymn that has risen to the distinction of being called national was written by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. She was a native of New York who at the time of her marriage took up her residence in Boston and wrote as a journalist there in the interest of the abolition of slavery and other reforms. Her Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861) was inspired by seeing the troops in the camps near Washington marching to the song of John Brown's Body. Other poets who might here be mentioned-John G. Saxe, for instance, the Vermont lawyer and humorist, or Lucy Larcom, the Massachusetts mill-girl and writer for young people-are fast being forgotten. E. E. Hale, 1822 Of the New England writers of prose, two or three who have outlived the century and with it most of their early associates, are still rather to be regarded as belonging to the old school. One is Edward Everett Hale, T.W.Higgin- who, in his long career as a Boston clergyman, has D. G. Mitchell, managed not only to identify himself with many philanthropic projects but also to produce а large amount of miscellaneous writing-historical, fictitious, son, 1823 1822 |