not often rise to the level of this, yet things of beauty were interspersed; and already he had permanently triumphed over prejudice and fastidiousness. Had he been one to boast, he might have claimed that English literature could more easily dispense with several of his brilliant contemporaries than with him. Nevertheless-I cannot but suspect, cannot but fear, that the singer of the woful and sweet tragedy of Grand-Pré, of the Indian Edda-as various as it is harmonious-of the frankness of the bright Puritan maiden, of the Golden Legend itself, may sometimes have sighed to himself, as his brush laid-on his silvery moonlight, or evening afterglow-may have been tempted to envy the stormy passionateness of members of his craft both in the New World and the Old-may have complained of his Muse that she was placidly content to reflect the radiance of other suns instead of burning with fire of her own. The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Edition. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1865. Complete 1 Song of the Silent Land. From the German of Salis, p. 27. 2 Evangeline, Part I, pp. 103-4. The Song of Hiawatha, XIX, The Ghosts, p. 240. Footsteps of Angels, p. 4. The Bridge, p. 303. 'A Gleam of Sunshine, p. 294. The Light of Stars, p. 3. The Reaper and the Flowers, pp. 3-4. • Blind Bartimeus, p. 290. 19 The Day is Done, stanzas 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, p. 97. 11 Nuremberg, pp. 296–7. 13 King Robert of Sicily, p. 220. 12 Walter von Vogelweid, p. 99. 14 The Belfry of Bruges: Carillon, pp. 291 and 292. 15 The Beleaguered City, p. 5. 17 Ibid., iv, p. 173. 16 The Golden Legend, iv, pp. 171-2. 18 Ibid., ii, p. 150. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1819-1891 LOWELL might be forgiven if in later life he had grown jealous of Hosea Biglow. The Biglow Papers shone with a brilliancy which, in the eyes of the ordinary reader, put out the flame of a lifetime of serious poetizing. By many admirers of the Papers it seems almost to be forgotten even now that their author was a poet by profession. Certainly very few act as if they were aware that his poetry is of a kind particularly requiring quiet, intelligent, and, I may say, continuous, study. Not that his crusade of satire against slavery was a casual adventure, or tour de force, outside of his regular course. On the contrary, it was a natural stage in his career, and ought to be reckoned as one of its milestones. He did not belong to the old order of poets. They were by profession, as it might happen, soldiers and sailors, courtiers, diplomatists, politicians, churchmen, mystics, dramatists, men of letters, first. By compulsion of imagination, or by accident, they were poets afterwards. As little is he to be classed among those who in these latter days have fenced round for themselves a life apart, as a shrine for their chosen Muse. It could not have occurred to him to appropriate his age with its joys, troubles, and interests, as mere material and incentive for inspiration. He never dissembled either his occupation of poet, or that as poet he was citizen also, and fighter, and preacher. Wherever the battle of humanity was hottest, there was he to be found, with his lyre. In the intervals he mounted the pulpit. His poems, the serious as much as the burlesque and satirical, the Ghost-Seer, and Hunger and Cold, equally with the Biglow Papers, are part of the history of the period and its thought. Justly to appreciate either sort, his reader must in memory, or in fancy, descend into the field, and imagine himself a combatant. A necessary result is some risk of confusing in the poetry matter and spirit. The ethereal is apt to get chained to an incident antiquated or dead. When the subject-matter is philosophy, it is philosophy blown red-hot with disputation. The song, which at the time it was sung was itself the comment, now itself wants commentaries. Not everybody is able, and comparatively few are at pains, to read between the lines. Then too the poet's impetuous fluency adds to the turmoil. His fancy exulting in the chances of a fiery conflict, whether to end in a victory or a rout, would burst into a rush of verse. On it sped, disdaining to be stayed while there was a public still passionate enough to supply readers. As I turn page after page, it is tantalizing to feel that a living idea, a burning thought, is gasping for breath beneath a cinder-pile of newspaper wranglings, or of free-fights in Congress. To its lovers poetry is self-sufficing, a being with a complete life of its own, neither a conflagration, nor a scaffolding. They are no better pleased when the bard abandons party strife, and takes, as his legitimate and normal vocation, to philosophy. Readers of Lowell are generally between Scylla and Charybdis. They are offered their choice of vital social and metaphysical problems to guess, one more intricate than another. He never sat down to write a line without a driving sense of a message to deliver, now down upon earth, and now aloft among the stars. His public is expected to follow and decipher the whole. Wisdom, generous indignation, phosphoric wit, criticism constructive as well as destructive, lightnings opening Heaven as they strike the earth, are all there. The pity is that too often either the thinker has overlaid the poet, or the inspiration is playing about a dead theme. It is as when a canvas has rotted under a masterpiece of art. The poet, however, is there always, though, it may be, in the background; it is the readers, I am afraid, who are likely to be in default. The general public neither interests itself in bygone partisanships, nor has spare intelligence for dialectics. Even an enthusiast for poetry does not expect to have to keep the fire on his hearth alight with the ashes of yesterday, or steam coal. None could perceive more clearly how he missed popularity for his graver verse, or bear the loss more cheerfully, than Lowell himself: Who's striving Parnassus to climb With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme ;1 and, visiting Chartres, to feed my eye, And give to Fancy one clear holiday, Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred ;- Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, Meet symbol of the senses and the soul, And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought When the poet is working in him, and not, apparently, the thinker, he still is as much of a meditator as a minstrel. The sadder and more pensive phases of human experience are those to which he turns by preference. He mourns the death of an infant son: A cherub who had lost his way And wandered hither, so his stay With us was short, and 'twas most meet Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet To stand before his God: Oh, blest word-Evermore ! 3 The contrast between universal laughing, busy nature and the sudden pause and muteness of death surprises, and bewilders him : The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps ; Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm, The summer air with happy living sounds; And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.+ He gazes down, while he shudders, at the abyss, yet deeper than the grave, which separates the nearest and dearest from the darkened mind: There thou sittest; now and then thou moanest; Thou dost talk with what we cannot see, Lookest at us with an eye so doubtful, It doth put us very far from thee; There thou sittest; we would fain be nigh thee, Strange it is that, in this open brightness, As the hum outliving the hushed bell.5 Akin to the attraction-with more still in it of the attraction of repulsion-which draws him to the contem |