Final impressions of his verse and prose. IV. If the question is asked, Would the verse of Doctor Holmes be held in so much favor if he had not confirmed his reputation by prose replete with poetic humor and analogy? the fairest answer may be in the negative. Together, his writings surely owe their main success to an approximate exhibition of the author himself. Where the man is even more lively than his work, the public takes kindly to the one and the other. The jester is privileged though in the court of art and letters; yet if one could apply to Holmes -the jester, homilist, and man of feeling his own process, we should have analysis indeed. Were the theme assigned to himself, we should have an inimitably honest setting forth of his merits and foibles, from this keen anatomist of mind and body, this smilebegetter, this purveyor to so many feasts. As a New Englander he long ago was awarded the highest sectional praise, that of being, among all his tribe, the cutest. His cleverness and versatility bewilder outside judges. Is he a genius? By all means. And in what degree? His prose, for the most part, is peculiarly original. His serious poetry scarcely has been the serious work of his life; but in his specialty, verse suited to the frolic or pathos of occasions, he has given us much of the best delivered in his own time, and has excelled all others in delivery. Both his strength and weakness lie in his genial temper and his brisk, speculative habit of mind. For, though almost the only modern poet who has infused enough spirit into table and rostrum verse to make it worth recording, his poetry has appealed to the present rather than the future; and, again, he has too curious and analytic a brain for purely artistic work. Of Holmes POET OF MANNERS AND THE TIME. as a satirist, which it is not unusual to call him, I have said but little. His metrical satires are of the amiable sort that debars him from kinsmanship with the Juvenals of old, or the Popes and Churchills of more recent times. There is more real satire in one of Hosea Biglow's lyrics than in all our laughing philosopher's irony, rhymed and unrhymed. Yet he is a keen observer of the follies and chances which satire makes its food. Give him personages, reminiscences, manners, to touch upon, and he is quite at home. He may not reproduce these imaginatively, in their stronger combinations; but the Autocrat makes no unseemly boast when he says: "It was in talking of Life that we came together. I thought I knew something about that, that I could speak or write about it to some purpose." Let us consider, then, that if Holmes had died young, we should have missed a choice example of the New England fibre which strengthens while it lasts; that he has lived to round a personality that will be traditional for at least the time granted to one or two less characteristic worthies of revolutionary days; that a few of his lyrics already belong to our select anthology, and one or two of his books must be counted as striking factors in what twentieth-century chroniclers will term (and here is matter for reflection) the development of early American literature. 303 His harp "the harp of Life."" CHAPTER IX. JAMES RUSSELL LOWEll. I. A typical man of letters. Represent IN Na liberal sense, and somewhat as Emerson stands for American thought, the poet Lowell has become our representative man of letters. Not as our most laborious scholar, though of a rich scholarship, and soundly versed in branches which he has chosen to follow. Not as an indomitable writer, yet, when he writes, from whom else are we as sure to receive what is brilliant and original? Nor yet chiefly as a poet, in spite of the ideality, the feeling, the purpose, and the wit that belong to his verse and that first brought him into reputation. But, whatsoever the conjunction that has enabled Mr. Lowell to reach and maintain his typical position, we feel that he holds it, and, on the whole, ought to hold it. His acquirements and versatile writings, the conditions of his life, his inter national honors, the mould of the man, his speech bearing, and the spirit of his whole work, have given him a peculiar distinction, and this largely without his thought or seeking. Such a nimbus does not form around one who summons it: it glows and gathers almost without his knowledge, — and not at once, but, like the expression of a noble face, after long expe rience and service. I have spoken of one poet as excelling others in American the adroitness of a man of the world. Lowell's qual ing, also, REPUBLICAN CULTURE. 305 its best. "Studies p. 472. ities secure him honor and allies without the need culture at of adroitness. He is regarded not only as a man of letters, but as a fine exemplar of culture, and of a culture so generous as to be thought supra-American by those observers who, while pronouncing him a citizen of the world, are careful to exclude this country from his range. Professor Dowden, for instance, says: Dowden's "Taken as a whole, the works of Lowell do not mir- in Literaror the life, the thoughts, and passions of the nation. ture," They are works, as it were, of an English poet who has become a naturalized citizen of the United States; who admires the institutions and has faith in the ideas of America, but who cannot throw off his allegiance to the old country and its authorities." But here is a manifest assumption. Doubtless, Lowell's mirror does not reflect Dr. Dowden's conception of the life, the thoughts, and passions of this nation, but that conception, formed at, such a distance, might be revised upon a close approach. In the poet's writings we find the life and passion of New England, to a verity, and the best thought of our people at large. For, when I say that he is a type of American culture, The ReI mean of republican culture, and nothing more or less. publican Those who hold to the republican idea believe that its value is to be found in its levelling tendency; by which I do not mean a general reduction to the lowest caste, but the gradual elevation of a multitude To adto the standard which individuals have reached, among them so many of the writing craft, from Frank-grade of lin's generation to our own. In this respect I do not, equally of course, mention Lowell's position as distinctive, the names of other scholars and writers instantly come to mind, nor have our men of culture been confined fare. to any guild or profession. Marshall and Story, Pinkney, Wirt, Winthrop, Sumner and Bayard, jurists, idea, viz. vance the general Culture, with that of mate rial wel orators, and statesmen, - soldiers, merchants, artisans, We count Lowell, among others, as a specimen not of foreign, but of home, culture, and especially of our Eastern type. His life shows what the New England training, not always so fortunate, can do for a man of genius. And thus, even aside from his writings, he is a person of note. The tributes frequently paid him would of themselves keep his name before us. Many of his sayings, like those of Emerson, are a portion of our usual discourse and reference, and the people have taken some of his lyrics faithfully to heart. He has written one work that has become a classic. Whether as a poet and critic, or as a man of affairs, of rare breeding and the healthiest moral tone, Lowell is one of whom it may be affirmed, in the words applied to another, that a thing derives more weight from the fact that he has said it. Are we conscious, then, of having in view a man better than his best writings? But this may be said of many authors, and there must be, at all events, a live personality behind good work. Lowell's sense of this, and of the strength and fulness of existence, keep him void of conceit. He often has seemed impatient of his art, half-ready to cry out upon it, lest it lead him from green fields and forests, from the delight of life itself. He is not swift to magnify his office above the heroic action of other men, |