THE MODERN WORLD..

27

ets": pp.

is more correctly applied than to any former period. The new learning the passage from the childlike Cp. “Vicand phenomenal way of regarding things to the ab-torian Po solute, scientific penetration of their true entities and 7-21. relations has directly told upon the work of the poet, requiring new language, imagery, invention, as he adapts himself to a deeper purpose and the hope of a sublimer faith. I have pointed out, as well, the struggles, devices, defeats, and victories of the English minstrels under the stress of latter-day iconoclasm and the invincible demands of modern thought; taking into account, also, the minor and obvious forces antagonistic to a devoted pursuit of the ideal, among the rest the world's material activity, displayed in labor, invention, construction, the world's realistic eagerness, that makes of the newspaper, the novel, and the bulletins of science the food and outlets of the imagination, and renders mankind intent alone upon each day's labor, so to hasten on the golden. year. Reluctant to confront these ceaseless and perturbing manifestations, until out of them the world. shall have derived a more assured philosophy, many of the latest singers have ignored them altogether: the weaker busying themselves with mere dilettanteism and the technique of their vocation, the nobler being devoted to the worship of beauty pure and simple, and often going back to its early revelations and the antique forms.

V.

last.

THESE generic burdens of the age itself have borne Dawn at even more severely upon American idealists than upon their transatlantic brethren. Yet it was when they first began to have their weight and not until then,

that the true light of Poetry in America ventured to appear. Under the very shadow of the whirlwind it brightened into dawn. Possibly the new learning was most of all needed here, as an offset to puritanism, superstition, and sentimentalism in its mawkish forms. Honest fact and a search for our own resources gave an impulse to healthy inspiration. But the opportunity for the achievements of our leading poets, so famous and beloved in their hoary years, really came when the specific restrictions, to which so much space has been here devoted, at last yielded measurably to Special ad- time and national progress. Coincidently with their decline, certain positive aids to our lyrical genius behome-poets. came apparent, and were felt, and aroused to joyous activity its instinct, courage, and imagination.

vantages of our

American First of all, as I have shown, the American with landscape. an eye for natural beauty, led by his seclusion to close

National feeling

and musing observation, had a subject for poetic expression in the landscape of the New World, by turns impressive, bewildering, reposeful, but always beautiful and strong. If its primeval aspect stupefied the toiling settlers, while its grandeur seemed to belittle humanity and to defer the proper study of mankind, it afterward compelled our ideal recognition, and inspired the early and reverent anthems of the father of our choir. Next, and most vital of the elements required for the promotion of a home-school, a national feeling grew up when the compactness and growth of the United States, as a nation, became assured. Half a century was needed to bring this feeling to the blossoming form of art. Meanwhile, it had been strengthening and finding expression in other ways; for example, in the patriotic eloquence which marked our oratory, and which warmed the blood and stirred the impulse of many a poetic youth, as he read

AIDS OF OUR POETS.

in his school-books the speeches of the founders and preservers of liberty. Hence our strongest emotional traits, love of freedom, hatred of oppression, respect for ancestral faith, the sense of independence which makes an American stand erect and believe himself the peer of any man, the audacity and ambition found among no other people; finally, an adventurous habit of experimenting without much regard to precedent or training. Out of some of these traits came, it is true, a commonplace and widely scattered product in literature. But if a host of writers ended in mediocrity, this, too, was in the order of evolution. The feeble books of one generation are often horn-books for the people, the promise and cause of better work in the next. The late Civil War was not of itself an incentive to good poetry and art, nor directly productive of them. Such disorders seldom are; action is a substitute for the ideal, and the thinker's or dreamer's life seems ignoble and repugnant. But we shall see that the moral and emotional conflicts preceding the war, and leading to it, were largely stimulating to poetic ardor; they broke into expression, and buoyed with earnest and fervid sentiment our heroic verse. Lastly, it must be observed that, about the time from which I date the appearance of a group of noteworthy poets, a material support was afforded to ideal work. Both artists and writers began to be paid, and found their respective gifts to some extent a means of subsistence. American publishers, as I have said, took heart, and made ventures in behalf of our own literature. Journalism also lent its aid, paying critical attention to native authors, and enabling not a few of them to gain a foothold by labor upon the great newspapers and magazines. All these aids, I repeat, came into service after the scientific

Advent of

a true po

etic school.

restraint of the modern period began to have weight. They assisted us to bear up against it, and alleviated the special restrictions of an earlier time. The sweet and various measures of a band of genuine singers at length were heard, and found an audience in whatsoever regions know the English tongue. American poetry took its place in literature, and entered upon a first term, now brought to an end, and constituting the main field of this review.

CHAPTER II.

GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL.

H

I.

summary:

AVING given an outline of the situation which | A retrorendered the new country, in the earlier pe- spective riods of settlement, an untoward region for the pur-1607-1860. suit of song, and also of the specific aids which at last have enabled America to have some voice and inspiration of her own, I now wish to glance at the actual record of her lyrical exploits that culminated with the rise of the group of poets to whom this work is chiefly devoted. To do this minutely would require us to travel over dreary wastes indeed, though gaining rest at last upon the borders of a land of promise. From what has been written, I shall rightly "The First be understood to agree with Mr. Whipple in his state-Century of ment that the course of our literature has been, upon lic": the whole, subsidiary to the general movement of the American mind; that our imagination has found exercise in the subjugation of a continent, in establishing liberty, in war, politics, and government, — above all, in the inventive and constructive energy and the financial boldness needed to develop and control the material heritage which has fallen to us. But to this let me add that the course of our poetry, for the same reasons, was long subsidiary to the course of other literature, at once, or by turns, to our theological, political, and educational achievements in prose, and

the Repub

Harper's

Mag., 1876.