Library of the Best American Literature

FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS.

WHOSE WRITINGS, BIOGRAPHIES AND PORTRAITS APPEAR IN THIS VOLUME.

Abbott, Lyman.

Adams, Charles Follen, (Yawcob Strauss).

Adams, Wm. T., (Oliver Optic).

Alcott, Louisa May.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey.

Alger, Horatio, Jr.

Anthony, Susan B.

Artemus Ward, (Charles F. Browne).

Austin, Jane Goodwin.

Bancroft, George H.

Barr, Amelia E.

Beecher, Henry Ward.

Bellamy, Edward.

Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye).

Browne, Charles F., (Artemus Ward).¹

Bryant, William Cullen.

♦Burdette, Robert J.

♦ ‘Burdett’ replaced with ‘Burdette’

Burnett, Frances Hodgson.

Cable, George W.

Carleton, Will.

Cary, Alice.

Cary, Phoebe.

Child, Lydia Maria.¹

Clay, Henry.

Clemens, Samuel L., (Mark Twain).

Cooper, James Fenimore.

Craddock, Charles Egbert, (Mary N. Murfree).

Crawford, Francis Marion.

Dana, Charles A.

Davis, Richard Harding.

Depew, Chauncey M.

Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth.

Dodge, Mary Abigail, (Gail Hamilton).¹

Dodge, Mary Mapes.¹

Eggleston, Edward.

Ellis, Edward.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

Everett, Edward.

Field, Eugene.

Finley, Martha.

Fiske, John.¹

French, Alice, (Octave Thanet).

Gail Hamilton, (Mary Abigail Dodge).¹

Gilder, Richard Watson.

Gough, John B.

Grady, Henry W.

Greeley, Horace.

Grace Greenwood, (Sarah J. Lippincott).

Hale, Edward Everett.

Halstead, Murat.

Harris, Joel Chandler, (Uncle Remus).

Harte, Bret.

Hawthorne, Julian.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.

Hay, John.

Henry, Patrick.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth.

Holley, Marietta, (Josiah Allen’s Wife).¹

Holmes, Oliver Wendell.

Howe, Julia Ward.

Howells, William Dean.

Ik Marvel, (Donald G. Mitchell).

Irving, Washington.

Jackson, Helen Hunt.

Joaquin Miller (Cincinnatus Heine Miller).

Josiah Allen’s Wife, (Marietta Holly).¹

Josh Billings, (Henry W. Shaw).¹

Larcom, Lucy.

Lippincott, Sarah Jane, (Grace Greenwood).

Livermore, Mary A.

Lockwood, Belva Ann.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.

Lowell, James Russell.

Mabie, Hamilton W.

Mark Twain, (Samuel L. Clemens).

Marion Harland, (Mary V. Terhune).

McMaster, John B.

Miller, Cincinnatus Heine, (Joaquin).

Mitchell, Donald Grant (Ik Marvel).

Motley, John L.

Moulton, Louise Chandler.

Murfree, Mary N., (Chas. Egbert Craddock).

Nye, Edgar Wilson, (Bill Nye).

Oliver Optic, (William T. Adams).

Octave Thanet, (Alice French).

Page, Thomas Nelson.

Parkman, Francis.¹

Parton, James.

Phillips, Wendell.

Poe, Edgar Allen.¹

Prescott, William.

Reid, Whitelaw.

Riley, James Whitcomb.

Roe, Edward Payson.

Shaw, Albert.

Shaw, Henry W., (Josh Billings).

Sigourney, Lydia H.

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence.

Stockton, Frank.

Stoddard, Richard Henry.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher.

Taylor, Bayard.¹

Terhune, Mary Virginia.

Thompson, Maurice.¹

Wallace, General Lew.¹

Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Warner, Charles Dudley.

Watterson, Henry.

Webster, Daniel.

Whitman, Walt.

Whittier, John Greenleaf.

Willard, Frances E.

Willis, Nathaniel Parker.

Whitcher, Mrs. (The Widow Bedott).¹

¹ No Portrait.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands.”

 Longfellow.

GREAT POETS OF AMERICA.

WELL KNOWN AMERICAN POETS

N. P. WILLIS
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH • WALT WHITMAN
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
RICHARD WATSON GILDER • COL. JOHN HAY

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE POET OF NATURE.

T is said that “genius always manifests itself before its possessor reaches manhood.” Perhaps in no case is this more true than in that of the poet, and William Cullen Bryant was no exception to the general rule. The poetical fancy was early displayed in him. He began to write verses at nine, and at ten composed a little poem to be spoken at a public school, which was published in a newspaper. At fourteen a collection of his poems was published in 12 mo. form by E. G. House of Boston. Strange to say the longest one of these, entitled “The Embargo” was political in its character setting forth his reflections on the Anti-Jeffersonian Federalism prevalent in New England at that time. But it is said that never after that effort did the poet employ his muse upon the politics of the day, though the general topics of liberty and independence have given occasion to some of his finest efforts. Bryant was a great lover of nature. In the Juvenile Collection above referred to were published an “Ode to Connecticut River” and also the lines entitled “Drought” which show the characteristic observation as well as the style in which his youthful muse found expression. It was written July, 1807, when the author was thirteen years of age, and will be found among the succeeding selections.

“Thanatopsis,” one of his most popular poems, (though he himself marked it low) was written when the poet was but little more than eighteen years of age. This production is called the beginning of American poetry.

William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Hampshire Co., Mass., November 3rd, 1784. His father was a physician, and a man of literary culture who encouraged his son’s early ability, and taught him the value of correctness and compression, and enabled him to distinguish between true poetic enthusiasm and the bombast into which young poets are apt to fall. The feeling and reverence with which Bryant cherished the memory of his father whose life was

“Marked with some act of goodness every day,”

is touchingly alluded to in several of his poems and directly spoken of with pathetic eloquence in the “Hymn to Death” written in 1825:

Bryant was educated at Williams College, but left with an honorable discharge before graduation to take up the study of law, which he practiced one year at Plainfield and nine years at Great Barrington, but in 1825 he abandoned law for literature, and removed to New York where in 1826 he began to edit the “Evening Post,” which position he continued to occupy from that time until the day of his death. William Cullen Bryant and the “Evening Post” were almost as conspicuous and permanent features of the city as the Battery and Trinity Church.

In 1821 Mr. Bryant married Frances Fairchild, the loveliness of whose character is hinted in some of his sweetest productions. The one beginning

“O fairest of the rural maids,”

was written some years before their marriage; and “The Future Life,” one of the noblest and most pathetic of his poems, is addressed to her:—

Among his best-known poems are “A Forest Hymn,” “The Death of the Flowers,” “Lines to a Waterfowl,” and “The Planting of the Apple-Tree.” One of the greatest of his works, though not among the most popular, is his translation of Homer, which he completed when seventy-seven years of age.

Bryant had a marvellous memory. His familiarity with the English poets was such that when at sea, where he was always too ill to read much, he would beguile the time by reciting page after page from favorite authors. However long the voyage, he never exhausted his resources. “I once proposed,” says a friend, “to send for a copy of a magazine in which a new poem of his was announced to appear. ‘You need not send for it,’ said he, ‘I can give it to you.’ ‘Then you have a copy with you?’ said I. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I can recall it,’ and thereupon proceeded immediately to write it out. I congratulated him upon having such a faithful memory. ‘If allowed a little time,’ he replied, ‘I could recall every line of poetry I have ever written.’”

His tenderness of the feelings of others, and his earnest desire always to avoid the giving of unnecessary pain, were very marked. “Soon after I began to do the duties of literary editor,” writes an associate, “Mr. Bryant, who was reading a review of a little book of wretchedly halting verse, said to me: ‘I wish you would deal very gently with poets, especially the weaker ones.’”

Bryant was a man of very striking appearance, especially in age. “It is a fine sight,” says one writer, “to see a man full of years, clear in mind, sober in judgment, refined in taste, and handsome in person.... I remember once to have been at a lecture where Mr. Bryant sat several seats in front of me, and his finely-sized head was especially noticeable.... The observer of Bryant’s capacious skull and most refined expression of face cannot fail to read therein the history of a noble manhood.”

The grand old veteran of verse died in New York in 1878 at the age of eighty-four, universally known and honored. He was in his sixth year when George Washington died, and lived under the administration of twenty presidents and had seen his own writings in print for seventy years. During this long life—though editor for fifty years of a political daily paper, and continually before the public—he had kept his reputation unspotted from the world, as if he had, throughout the decades, continually before his mind the admonition of the closing lines of “Thanatopsis” written by himself seventy years before.

THANATOPSIS.¹

The following production is called the beginning of American poetry.

That a young man not yet 19 should have produced a poem so lofty in conception, so full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery, and, above all, so pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy, may well be regarded as one of the most remarkable examples of early maturity in literary history.

¹ The following copyrighted selections from Wm. Cullen Bryant are inserted by permission of D. Appleton & Co., the publishers of his works.

O him who, in the love of Nature, holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language; for his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides

Into his darker musings with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice.—Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,

Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourish’d thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again;

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place

Shalt thou retire alone,—nor couldst thou wish

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down

With patriarchs of the infant world,—with kings,

The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills

Rock-ribb’d and ancient as the sun,—the vales

Stretching in pensive quietness between;

The venerable woods,—rivers that move

In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, pour’d round all,

Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—

Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,

Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings

Of morning, traverse Barca’s desert sands,

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound

Save its own dashings,—yet—the dead are there,

And millions in those solitudes, since first

The flight of years began, have laid them down

In their last sleep,—the dead reign there alone.

So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw

In silence from the living, and no friend

Take note of thy departure? All that breathe

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh

When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care

Plod on, and each one, as before, will chase

His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come

And make their bed with thee. As the long train

Of ages glides away, the sons of men—

The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes

In the full strength of years, matron and maid,

And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man—

Shall, one by one, be gather’d to thy side,

By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live that, when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain’d and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

WAITING BY THE GATE.

ESIDES the massive gateway built up in years gone by,

Upon whose top the clouds in eternal shadow lie,

While streams the evening sunshine on the quiet wood and lea,

I stand and calmly wait until the hinges turn for me.

The tree tops faintly rustle beneath the breeze’s flight,

A soft soothing sound, yet it whispers of the night;

I hear the woodthrush piping one mellow descant more,

And scent the flowers that blow when the heat of day is o’er.

Behold the portals open and o’er the threshold, now,

There steps a wearied one with pale and furrowed brow;

His count of years is full, his ♦allotted task is wrought;

He passes to his rest from a place that needs him not.

In sadness, then, I ponder how quickly fleets the hour

Of human strength and action, man’s courage and his power.

I muse while still the woodthrush sings down the golden day,

And as I look and listen the sadness wears away.

Again the hinges turn, and a youth, departing throws

A look of longing backward, and sorrowfully goes;

A blooming maid, unbinding the roses from her hair,

Moves wonderfully away from amid the young and fair.

Oh, glory of our race that so suddenly decays!

Oh, crimson flush of morning, that darkens as we gaze!

Oh, breath of summer blossoms that on the restless air

Scatters a moment’s sweetness and flies we know not where.

I grieve for life’s bright promise, just shown and then withdrawn;

But still the sun shines round me; the evening birds sing on;

And I again am soothed, and beside the ancient gate,

In this soft evening sunlight, I calmly stand and wait.

Once more the gates are opened, an infant group go out,

The sweet smile quenched forever, and stilled the sprightly shout.

Oh, frail, frail tree of life, that upon the greensward strews

Its fair young buds unopened, with every wind that blows!

So from every region, so enter side by side,

The strong and faint of spirit, the meek and men of pride,

Steps of earth’s greatest, mightiest, between those pillars gray,

And prints of little feet, that mark the dust away.

And some approach the threshold whose looks are blank with fear,

And some whose temples brighten with joy are drawing near,

As if they saw dear faces, and caught the gracious eye

Of Him, the Sinless Teacher, who came for us to die.

I mark the joy, the terrors; yet these, within my heart,

Can neither wake the dread nor the longing to depart;

And, in the sunshine streaming of quiet wood and lea,

I stand and calmly wait until the hinges turn for me.

♦ ‘alloted’ replaced with ‘allotted’

“BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN.”

 DEEM not they are blest alone

Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep;

The Power who pities man has shown

A blessing for the eyes that weep.

The light of smiles shall fill again

The lids that overflow with tears;

And weary hours of woe and pain

Are promises of happier years.

There is a day of sunny rest

For every dark and troubled night;

And grief may bide an evening guest,

But joy shall come with early light.

And thou, who, o’er thy friend’s low bier,

Sheddest the bitter drops like rain,

Hope that a brighter, happier sphere

Will give him to thy arms again.

Nor let the good man’s trust depart,

Though life its common gifts deny,—

Though with a pierced and bleeding heart,

And spurned of men, he goes to die.

For God hath marked each sorrowing day,

And numbered every secret tear,

And heaven’s long age of bliss shall pay

For all his children suffer here.

THE ANTIQUITY OF FREEDOM.

ERE are old trees, tall oaks, and gnarled pines,

That stream with gray-green mosses; here the ground

Was never touch’d by spade, and flowers spring up

Unsown, and die ungather’d. It is sweet

To linger here, among the flitting birds

And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks and winds

That shake the leaves, and scatter as they pass

A fragrance from the cedars thickly set

With pale blue berries. In these peaceful shades—

Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old—

My thoughts go up the long dim path of years,

Back to the earliest days of Liberty.

O Freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,

A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,

And wavy tresses gushing from the cap

With which the Roman master crown’d his slave,

When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,

Arm’d to the teeth, art thou: one mailed hand

Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,

Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarr’d

With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs

Are strong and struggling. Power at thee has launch’d

His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;

They could not quench the life thou hast from Heaven.

Merciless Power has dug thy dungeon deep,

And his swart armorers, by a thousand fires,

Have forged thy chain; yet while he deems thee bound,

The links are shiver’d, and the prison walls

Fall outward; terribly thou springest forth,

As springs the flame above a burning pile,

And shoutest to the nations, who return

Thy shoutings, while the pale oppressor flies.

Thy birth-right was not given by human hands:

Thou wert twin-born with man. In pleasant fields,

While yet our race was few, thou sat’st with him,

To tend the quiet flock and watch the stars,

And teach the reed to utter simple airs.

Thou by his side, amid the tangled wood,

Didst war upon the panther and the wolf,

His only foes: and thou with him didst draw

The earliest furrows on the mountain side,

Soft with the Deluge. Tyranny himself,

The enemy, although of reverend look,

Hoary with many years, and far obey’d,

Is later born than thou; and as he meets

The grave defiance of thine elder eye,

The usurper trembles in his fastnesses.

Thou shalt wax stronger with the lapse of years,

But he shall fade into a feebler age;

Feebler, yet subtler; he shall weave his snares,

And spring them on thy careless steps, and clap

His wither’d hands, and from their ambush call

His hordes to fall upon thee. He shall send

Quaint maskers, forms of fair and gallant mien,

To catch thy gaze, and uttering graceful words

To charm thy ear; while his sly imps, by stealth,

Twine round thee threads of steel, light thread on thread,

That grow to fetters; or bind down thy arms

With chains conceal’d in chaplets. Oh! not yet

Mayst thou unbrace thy corslet, nor lay by

Thy sword, nor yet, O Freedom! close thy lids

In slumber; for thine enemy never sleeps.

And thou must watch and combat, till the day

Of the new Earth and Heaven. But wouldst thou rest

Awhile from tumult and the frauds of men,

These old and friendly solitudes invite

Thy visit. They, while yet the forest trees

Were young upon the unviolated earth,

And yet the moss-stains on the rock were new,

Beheld thy glorious childhood, and rejoiced.

TO A WATERFOWL.

HITHER, ’midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler’s eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,

As, darkly limn’d upon the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

Seek’st thou the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,

Or where the rocking billows rise and sink

On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—

The desert and illimitable air,—

Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fann’d,

At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,

Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,

Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,

And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,

Soon, o’er thy shelter’d nest.

Thou’rt gone; the abyss of heaven

Hath swallow’d up thy form; yet on my heart

Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,

And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.

ROBERT OF LINCOLN.

ERRILY swinging on brier and weed,

Near to the nest of his little dame,

Over the mountain-side or mead,

Robert of Lincoln is telling his name:

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Snug and safe is that nest of ours,

Hidden among the summer flowers.

Chee, chee, chee.

Robert of Lincoln is gayly dressed,

Wearing a bright black wedding coat;

White are his shoulders and white his crest,

Hear him call in his merry note:

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Look what a nice new coat is mine,

Sure there was never a bird so fine.

Chee, chee, chee.

Robert of Lincoln’s Quaker wife,

Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings,

Passing at home a patient life,

Broods in the grass while her husband sings,

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Brood, kind creature; you need not fear

Thieves and robbers, while I am here.

Chee, chee, chee.

Modest and shy as a nun is she,

One weak chirp is her only note,

Braggart and prince of braggarts is he,

Pouring boasts from his little throat:

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Never was I afraid of man;

Catch me, cowardly knaves if you can.

Chee, chee, chee.

Six white eggs on a bed of hay,

Flecked with purple, a pretty sight

There as the mother sits all day,

Robert is singing with all his might:

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Nice good wife, that never goes out,

Keeping house while I frolic about.

Chee, chee, chee.

Soon as the little ones chip the shell

Six wide mouths are open for food;

Robert of Lincoln bestirs him well,

Gathering seed for the hungry brood.

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

This new life is likely to be

Hard for a gay young fellow like me.

Chee, chee, chee.

Robert of Lincoln at length is made

Sober with work and silent with care;

Off is his holiday garment laid,

Half-forgotten that merry air,

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

Nobody knows but my mate and I

Where our nest and our nestlings lie.

Chee, chee, chee.

Summer wanes; the children are grown;

Fun and frolic no more he knows;

Robert of Lincoln’s a humdrum crone;

Off he flies, and we sing as he goes:

Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

When you can pipe that merry old strain,

Robert of Lincoln, come back again.

Chee, chee, chee.

DROUGHT.

LUNGED amid the limpid waters,

Or the cooling shade beneath,

Let me fly the scorching sunbeams,

And the southwind’s sickly breath!

Sirius burns the parching meadows,

Flames upon the embrowning hill,

Dries the foliage of the forest,

And evaporates the rill.

Scarce is seen the lonely floweret,

Save amid the embowering wood;

O’er the prospect dim and dreary,

Drought presides in sullen mood!

Murky vapours hung in ether,

Wrap in gloom, the sky serene;

Nature pants distressful—silence

Reigns o’er all the sultry scene.

Then amid the limpid waters,

Or beneath the cooling shade,

Let me shun the scorching sunbeams

And the sickly breeze evade.

THE PAST.

No poet, perhaps, in the world is so exquisite in rhythm, or classically pure and accurate in language, so appropriate in diction, phrase or metaphor as Bryant.

He dips his pen in words as an inspired painter his pencil in colors. The following poem is a fair specimen of his deep vein in his chosen serious themes. Pathos is pre-eminently his endowment but the tinge of melancholy in his treatment is always pleasing.

HOU unrelenting Past!

Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,

And fetters, sure and fast,

Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

Far in thy realm withdrawn

Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom,

And glorious ages gone

Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.

Childhood, with all its mirth,

Youth, Manhood, Age that draws us to the ground,

And, last, Man’s Life on earth,

Glide to thy dim dominions, and are bound.

Thou hast my better years,

Thou hast my earlier friends—the good—the kind,

Yielded to thee with tears,—

The venerable form—the exalted mind.

My spirit yearns to bring

The lost ones back;—yearns with desire intense,

And struggles hard to wring

Thy bolts apart, and pluck thy captives thence.

In vain:—thy gates deny

All passage save to those who hence depart;

Nor to the streaming eye

Thou giv’st them back,—nor to the broken heart.

In thy abysses hide

Beauty and excellence unknown;—to thee

Earth’s wonder and her pride

Are gather’d, as the waters to the sea;

Labors of good to man,

Unpublish’d charity, unbroken faith,—

Love, that midst grief began,

And grew with years, and falter’d not in death.

Full many a mighty name

Lurks in thy depths, unutter’d, unrevered;

With thee are silent fame,

Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappear’d.

Thine for a space are they:—

Yet shalt thou yield thy treasures up at last;

Thy gates shall yet give way,

Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!

All that of good and fair

Has gone into thy womb from earliest time,

Shall then come forth, to wear

The glory and the beauty of its prime.

They have not perish’d—no!

Kind words, remember’d voices once so sweet,

Smiles, radiant long ago,

And features, the great soul’s apparent seat,

All shall come back; each tie

Of pure affection shall be knit again;

Alone shall Evil die,

And Sorrow dwell a prisoner in thy reign.

And then shall I behold

Him by whose kind paternal side I sprung,

And her who, still and cold,

Fills the next grave,—the beautiful and young.

THE MURDERED TRAVELER.

HEN spring, to woods and wastes around,

Brought bloom and joy again;

The murdered traveler’s bones were found,

Far down a narrow glen.

The fragrant birch, above him, hung

Her tassels in the sky;

And many a vernal blossom sprung,

And nodded careless by.

The red bird warbled, as he wrought

His hanging nest o’erhead;

And fearless, near the fatal spot,

Her young the partridge led.

But there was weeping far away,

And gentle eyes, for him,

With watching many an anxious day,

Were sorrowful and dim.

They little knew, who loved him so,

The fearful death he met,

When shouting o’er the desert snow,

Unarmed and hard beset;

Nor how, when round the frosty pole,

The northern dawn was red,

The mountain-wolf and wild-cat stole

To banquet on the dead;

Nor how, when strangers found his bones,

They dressed the hasty bier,

And marked his grave with nameless stones,

Unmoistened by a tear.

But long they looked, and feared, and wept,

Within his distant home;

And dreamed, and started as they slept,

For joy that he was come.

Long, long they looked—but never spied

His welcome step again.

Nor knew the fearful death he died

Far down that narrow glen.

THE BATTLEFIELD.

Soon after the following poem was written, an English critic, referring to the stanza ♦beginning—“Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,”—said: “Mr. Bryant has certainly a rare merit for having written a stanza which will bear comparison with any four lines as one of the noblest in the English language. The thought is complete, the expression perfect. A poem of a dozen such verses would be like a row of pearls, each beyond a king’s ransom.”

♦ ‘begining’ replaced with ‘beginning’

NCE this soft turf, this rivulet’s sands,

Were trampled by a hurrying crowd,

And fiery hearts and armed hands

Encounter’d in the battle-cloud.

Ah! never shall the land forget

How gush’d the life-blood of her brave,—

Gush’d, warm with hope and courage yet,

Upon the soil they fought to save.

Now all is calm, and fresh, and still,

Alone the chirp of flitting bird,

And talk of children on the hill,

And bell of wandering kine, are heard.

No solemn host goes trailing by

The black-mouth’d gun and staggering wain;

Men start not at the battle-cry:

Oh, be it never heard again!

Soon rested those who fought; but thou

Who minglest in the harder strife

For truths which men receive not now,

Thy warfare only ends with life.

A friendless warfare! lingering long

Through weary day and weary year;

A wild and many-weapon’d throng

Hang on thy front, and flank, and rear.

Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,

And blench not at thy chosen lot;

The timid good may stand aloof,

The sage may frown—yet faint thou not,

Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,

The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;

For with thy side shall dwell, at last,

The victory of endurance born.

Truth, crush’d to earth, shall rise again;

The eternal years of God are hers;

But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,

And dies among his worshippers.

Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,

When they who help’d thee flee in fear,

Die full of hope and manly trust,

Like those who fell in battle here.

Another hand thy sword shall wield,

Another hand the standard wave,

Till from the trumpet’s mouth is peal’d

The blast of triumph o’er thy grave.

THE CROWDED STREETS.

ET me move slowly through the street,

Filled with an ever-shifting train,

Amid the sound of steps that beat

The murmuring walks like autumn rain.

How fast the flitting figures come;

The mild, the fierce, the stony face—

Some bright, with thoughtless smiles, and some

Where secret tears have left their trace.

They pass to toil, to strife, to rest—

To halls in which the feast is spread—

To chambers where the funeral guest

In silence sits beside the bed.

And some to happy homes repair,

Where children pressing cheek to cheek,

With mute caresses shall declare

The tenderness they cannot speak.

And some who walk in calmness here,

Shall shudder as they reach the door

Where one who made their dwelling dear,

Its flower, its light, is seen no more.

Youth, with pale cheek and tender frame,

And dreams of greatness in thine eye,

Go’st thou to build an early name,

Or early in the task to die?

Keen son of trade, with eager brow,

Who is now fluttering in thy snare,

Thy golden fortunes tower they now,

Or melt the glittering spires in air?

Who of this crowd to-night shall tread

The dance till daylight gleams again?

To sorrow o’er the untimely dead?

Who writhe in throes of mortal pain?

Some, famine struck, shall think how long

The cold, dark hours, how slow the light;

And some, who flaunt amid the throng,

Shall hide in dens of shame to night.

Each where his tasks or pleasure call,

They pass and heed each other not;

There is one who heeds, who holds them all

In His large love and boundless thought.

These struggling tides of life that seem

In wayward, aimless course to tend,

Are eddies of the mighty stream

That rolls to its appointed end.

NOTICE OF FITZ-GREEN HALLECK.

As a specimen of Mr. Bryant’s prose, of which he wrote much, and also as a sample of his criticism, we reprint the following extract from a Commemorative Address which he delivered before the New York Historical Society in February 1869. This selection is also valuable as a character sketch and a literary estimate of Mr. Halleck.

A CORN-SHUCKING IN SOUTH CAROLINA.

From “The Letters of a Traveler.”

In 1843, during Mr. Bryant’s visit to the South, he had the pleasure of witnessing one of those antebellum southern institutions known as a Corn-Shucking—one of the ideal occasions of the colored man’s life, to which both men and women were invited. They were free to tell all the jokes, sing all the songs and have all the fun they desired as they rapidly shucked the corn. Two leaders were usually chosen and the company divided into two parties which competed for a prize awarded to the first party which finished shucking the allotted pile of corn. Mr. Bryant thus graphically describes one of these novel occasions:

Barnwell District,
South Carolina, March 29, 1843.

UT you must hear of the corn-shucking. The one at which I was present was given on purpose that I might witness the humors of the Carolina negroes. A huge fire of light-wood was made near the corn-house. Light-wood is the wood of the long-leaved pine, and is so called, not because it is light, for it is almost the heaviest wood in the world, but because it gives more light than any other fuel.

The light-wood-fire was made, and the negroes dropped in from the neighboring plantations, singing as they came. The driver of the plantation, a colored man, brought out baskets of corn in the husk, and piled it in a heap; and the negroes began to strip the husks from the ears, singing with great glee as they worked, keeping time to the music, and now and then throwing in a joke and an extravagant burst of laughter. The songs were generally of a comic character; but one of them was set to a singularly wild and plaintive air, which some of our musicians would do well to reduce to notation. These are the words:

Johnny come down de hollow.

Oh hollow!

Johnny come down de hollow.

Oh hollow!

De nigger-trader got me.

Oh hollow!

De speculator bought me.

Oh hollow!

I’m sold for silver dollars.

Oh hollow!

Boys, go catch the pony.

Oh hollow!

Bring him round the corner.

Oh hollow!

I’m goin’ away to Georgia.

Oh hollow!

Boys, good-by forever!

Oh hollow!

The song of “Jenny gone away,” was also given, and another, called the monkey-song, probably of African origin, in which the principal singer personated a monkey, with all sorts of odd gesticulations, and the other negroes bore part in the chorus, “Dan, dan, who’s the dandy?” One of the songs commonly sung on these occasions, represents the various animals of the woods as belonging to some profession or trade. For example—

De cooter is de boatman—

The cooter is the terrapin, and a very expert boatman he is.

De cooter is de boatman.

John John Crow.

De red-bird de soger.

John John Crow.

De mocking-bird de lawyer.

John John Crow.

De alligator sawyer.

John John Crow.

The alligator’s back is furnished with a toothed ridge, like the edge of a saw, which explains the last line.

When the work of the evening was over the negroes adjourned to a spacious kitchen. One of them took his place as musician, whistling, and beating time with two sticks upon the floor. Several of the men came forward and executed various dances, capering, prancing, and drumming with heel and toe upon the floor, with astonishing agility and perseverance, though all of them had performed their daily tasks and had worked all the evening, and some had walked from four to seven miles to attend the corn-shucking. From the dances a transition was made to a mock military parade, a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became necessary for the commander to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he called upon a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the wall, looking upon the frolic with an air of superiority. He consented, came forward, demanded a bit of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in his day. He spoke of “de majority of Sous Carolina,” “de interests of de state,” “de honor of ole Ba’nwell district,” and these phrases he connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make nothing. At length he began to falter, when the captain with admirable presence of mind came to his relief, and interrupted and closed the harangue with an hurrah from the company. Toby was allowed by all the spectators, black and white, to have made an excellent speech.

CORN-SHUCKING IN SOUTH CAROLINA.

EDGAR ALLEN POE.

THE WEIRD AND MYSTERIOUS GENIUS.

DGAR Allen Poe, the author of “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Haunted Palace,” “To One in Paradise,” “Israfel” and “Lenore,” was in his peculiar sphere, the most brilliant writer, perhaps, who ever lived. His writings, however, belong to a different world of thought from that in which Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Lowell lived and labored. Theirs was the realm of nature, of light, of human joy, of happiness, ease, hope and cheer. Poe spoke from the dungeon of depression. He was in a constant struggle with poverty. His whole life was a tragedy in which sombre shades played an unceasing role, and yet from out these weird depths came forth things so beautiful that their very sadness is charming and holds us in a spell of bewitching enchantment. Edgar Fawcett says of him:—

Edgar Poe was born in Boston February 19th, 1809. His father was a Marylander, as was also his grandfather, who was a distinguished Revolutionary soldier and a friend of General Lafayette. The parents of Poe were both actors who toured the country in the ordinary manner, and this perhaps accounts for his birth in Boston. Their home was in Baltimore, Maryland.

When Poe was only a few years old both parents died, within two weeks, in Richmond, Virginia. Their three children, two daughters, one older and one younger than the subject of this sketch, were all adopted by friends of the family. Mr. John Allen, a rich tobacco merchant of Richmond, Virginia, adopted Edgar (who was henceforth called Edgar Allen Poe), and had him carefully educated, first in England, afterwards at the Richmond Academy and the University of Virginia, and subsequently at West Point. He always distinguished himself in his studies, but from West Point he was dismissed after one year, it is said because he refused to submit to the discipline of the institution.

In common with the custom in the University of Virginia at that time, Poe acquired the habits of drinking and gambling, and the gambling debts which he contracted incensed Mr. Allen, who refused to pay them. This brought on the beginning of a series of quarrels which finally led to Poe’s disinheritance and permanent separation from his benefactor. Thus turned out upon the cold, unsympathetic world, without business training, without friends, without money, knowing not how to make money—yet, with a proud, imperious, aristocratic nature,—we have the beginning of the saddest story of any life in literature—struggling for nearly twenty years in gloom and poverty, with here and there a ray of sunshine, and closing with delirium tremens in Baltimore, October 7th, 1849, at forty years of age.

To those who know the full details of the sad story of Poe’s life it is little wonder that his sensitive, passionate nature sought surcease from disappointment in the nepenthe of the intoxicating cup. It was but natural for a man of his nervous temperament and delicacy of feeling to fall into that melancholy moroseness which would chide even the angels for taking away his beautiful “Annabel Lee;” or that he should wail over the “Lost Lenore,” or declare that his soul should “nevermore” be lifted from the shadow of the “Raven” upon the floor. These poems and others are but the expressions of disappointment and despair of a soul alienated from happy human relations. While we admire their power and beauty, we should remember at what cost of pain and suffering and disappointment they were produced. They are powerful illustrations of the prodigal expense of human strength, of broken hopes and bitter experiences through which rare specimens of our literature are often grown.

To treat the life of Edgar Allen Poe, with its lessons, fully, would require the scope of a volume. Both as a man and an author there is a sad fascination which belongs to no other writer, perhaps, in the world. His personal character has been represented as pronouncedly double. It is said that Stevenson, who was a great admirer of Poe, received the inspiration for his novel, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” from the contemplation of his double character. Paul Hamilton Hayne has also written a poem entitled, “Poe,” which presents in a double shape the angel and demon in one body. The first two stanzas of which we quote:—

It must be said in justice to Poe’s memory, however, that the above idea of his being both demon and angel became prevalent through the first biography published of him, by Dr. Rufus Griswold, who no doubt sought to avenge himself on the dead poet for the severe but unanswerable criticisms which the latter had passed upon his and other contemporaneous authors’ writings. Later biographies, notably those of J. H. Ingram and Mrs. Sarah Ellen Whitman, as well as published statements from his business associates, have disproved many of Griswold’s damaging statements, and placed the private character of Poe in a far more favorable light before the world. He left off gambling in his youth, and the appetite for drink, which followed him to the close of his life, was no doubt inherited from his father who, before him, was a drunkard.

It is natural for admirers of Poe’s genius to contemplate with regret akin to sorrow those circumstances and characteristics which made him so unhappy, and yet the serious question arises, was not that character and his unhappy life necessary to the productions of his marvelous pen? Let us suppose it was, and in charity draw the mantle of forgetfulness over his misguided ways, covering the sad picture of his personal life from view, and hang in its place the matchless portrait of his splendid genius, before which, with true American pride, we may summon all the world to stand with uncovered heads.

As a writer of short stories Poe had no equal in America. He is said to have been the originator of the modern detective story. The artful ingenuity with which he works up the details of his plot, and minute attention to the smallest illustrative particular, give his tales a vivid interest from which no reader can escape. His skill in analysis is as marked as his power of word painting. The scenes of gloom and terror which he loves to depict, the forms of horror to which he gives almost actual life, render his mastery over the reader most exciting and absorbing.

As a poet Poe ranks among the most original in the world. He is pre-eminently a poet of the imagination. It is useless to seek in his verses for philosophy or preaching. He brings into his poetry all the weirdness, subtlety, artistic detail and facility in coloring which give the charm to his prose stories, and to these he adds a musical flow of language which has never been equalled. To him poetry was music, and there was no poetry that was not musical. For poetic harmony he has had no equal certainly in America, if, indeed, in the world. Admirers of his poems are almost sure to read them over and over again, each time finding new forms of beauty or charm in them, and the reader abandons himself to a current of melodious fancy that soothes and charms like distant music at night, or the rippling of a nearby, but unseen, brook. The images which he creates are vague and illusive. As one of his biographers has written, “He heard in his dreams the tinkling footfalls of angels and seraphim and subordinated everything in his verse to the delicious effect of musical sound.” As a literary critic Poe’s capacities were of the greatest. “In that large part of the critic’s perceptions,” says Duyckinck, “in knowledge of the mechanism of composition, he has been unsurpassed by any writer in America.”

Poe was also a fine reader and elocutionist. A writer who attended a lecture by him in Richmond says: “I never heard a voice so musical as his. It was full of the sweetest melody. No one who heard his recitation of the ‘Raven’ will ever forget the beauty and pathos with which this recitation was rendered. The audience was still as death, and as his weird, musical voice filled the hall its effect was simply indescribable. It seems to me that I can yet hear that long, plaintive ‘nevermore.’”

Among the labors of Poe, aside from his published volumes and contributions to miscellaneous magazines, should be mentioned his various positions from 1834 to 1848 as critic and editor on the “Literary Messenger” of Richmond, Virginia, the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of Philadelphia, “Graham’s Magazine” of Philadelphia, the “Evening Mirror” of New York, and the “Broadway Journal” of New York, which positions he successively held. The last he gave up in 1848 with the idea of starting a literary magazine of his own, but the project failed, perhaps on account of his death, which occurred the next year. His first volume of poems was published in 1829. In 1833 he won two prizes, one for prose and one for poetic composition, offered by the Baltimore “Saturday Visitor,” his “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” being awarded the prize for prose and the poem “The Coliseum” for poetry. The latter, however, he did not ♦receive because the judges found the same author had won them both. In 1838 Harper Brothers published his ingenious fiction, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” In 1840 “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” were issued in Philadelphia. In 1844 he took up his residence at Fordham, New York, where his wife died in 1847, and where he continued to reside for the balance of his life. His famous poem the “Raven” was published in 1845, and during 1848 and 1849 he published “Eureka” and “Elalume,” the former being a prose poem. It is the crowning work of his life, to which he devoted the last and most matured energies of his wonderful intellect. To those who desire a further insight into the character of the man and his labors we would recommend the reading of J. H. Ingram’s “Memoir” and Mrs. Sarah Ellen Whitman’s “Edgar Poe and His Critics,” the latter published in 1863.

♦ ‘recieve’ replaced with ‘receive’

THE CITY IN THE SEA.

THE CITY IN THE SEA.

O! Death has rear’d himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim west,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines, and palaces, and towers,

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town;

But light from out the lurid sea

Streams up the turrets silently—

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—

Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—

Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—

Up shadowy, long-forgotten bowers

Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—

Up many and many a marvellous shrine

Whose wreathed friezes intertwine

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While from a proud tower in the town

Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves

Yawn level with the luminous waves;

But not the riches there that lie

In each idol’s diamond eye—

Not the gayly-jewell’d dead

Tempt the waters from their bed;

For no ripples curl, alas!

Along that wilderness of glass—

No swellings tell that winds may be

Upon some far-off happier sea—

No heavings hint that winds have been

On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave—there is a movement there!

As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide—

As if their tops had feebly given

A void within the filmy heaven.

The waves have now a redder glow—

The hours are breathing faint and low—

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.

ANNABEL LEE.

T was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea;

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven

Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsman came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre,

In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

In this kingdom by the sea),

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we—

Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea—

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

TO HELEN.

The following poem was published first “To ――,” afterwards the title was changed, “To Helen.” It seems to have been written by Poe to Mrs. Sarah Ellen Whitman whom many years afterwards he was engaged to marry. The engagement was, however, broken off. The poem was no doubt written before his acquaintance with the lady; even before his marriage or engagement to his wife, and at a time perhaps when he did not expect to be recognized as a suitor by the unknown woman who had completely captured his heart, in the chance meeting which he here so beautifully describes.

 SAW thee once—once only—years ago:

I must not say how many—but not many.

It was a July midnight; and from out

A full-orbed moon that, like thine own soul, soaring,

Sought a precipitant pathway up through heaven,

There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,

With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber,

Upon the upturned faces of a thousand

Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,

Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe—

Fell on the upturned faces of these roses

That gave out, in return for the love-light,

Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death—

Fell on the upturned faces of these roses

That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted

By thee and by the poetry of thy presence.

CLAD ALL IN WHITE, UPON A VIOLET BANK

I SAW THEE HALF RECLINING; WHILE THE MOON

FELL ON THE UPTURNED FACES OF THE ROSES,

AND ON THINE OWN, UPTURNED—ALAS! IN SORROW.

Was it not Fate that, on this July midnight—

Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow)

That bade me pause before that garden-gate

To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?

No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,

Save only thee and me. I paused—I looked—

And in an instant all things disappeared.

(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)

The pearly lustre of the moon went out:

The mossy banks and the meandering paths,

The happy flowers and the repining trees,

Were seen no more: the very roses’ odors

Died in the arms of the adoring airs.

All, all expired save thee—save less than thou:

Save only the divine light in thine eyes—

Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.

I saw but them—they were the world to me.

I saw but them—saw only them for hours—

Saw only them until the moon went down.

What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten

Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!

How dark a wo, yet how sublime a hope!

How silently serene a sea of pride!

How daring an ambition! yet how deep—

How fathomless a capacity for love!

But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight

Into a western couch of thunder-cloud,

And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees

Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained.

They would not go—they never yet have gone.

Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,

They have not left me (as my hopes have) since.

They follow me, they lead me through the years;

They are my ministers—yet I their slave.

Their office is to illumine and enkindle—

My duty, to be saved by their bright light,

And purified in their electric fire—

And sanctified in their elysian fire.

They fill my soul with beauty (which is hope),

And are far up in heaven, the stars I kneel to

In the sad, silent watches of my night;

While even in the meridian glare of day

I see them still—two sweetly scintillant

Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!

 ISRAFEL.¹

¹“And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”—Koran.

N heaven a spirit doth dwell

“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”

None sing so wildly well

As the angel Israfel,

And the giddy stars (so legends tell)

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell

Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above

In her highest noon,

The enamour’d moon

Blushes with love,

While, to listen, the red levin

(With the rapid Pleiads, even,

Which were seven)

Pauses in heaven.

And they say (the starry choir

And the other listening things)

That Israfeli’s fire

Is owing to that lyre

By which he sits and sings—

The trembling living wire

Of those unusual strings.

But the skies that angel trod,

Where deep thoughts are a duty—

Where Love’s a grown-up god—

Where the Houri glances are

Imbued with all the beauty

Which we worship in a star.

Therefore, thou art not wrong,

Israfeli, who despisest

An unimpassion’d song;

To thee the laurels belong,

Best bard, because the wisest!

Merrily live, and long!

The ecstasies above

With thy burning measures suit—

Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,

With the fervor of thy lute—

Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, heaven is thine; but this

Is a world of sweets and sours;

Our flowers are merely—flowers,

And the shadow of thy perfect bliss

Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell

Where Israfel

Hath dwelt, and he where I,

He might not sing so wildly well

A mortal melody,

While a bolder note than this might swell

From my lyre within the sky.

TO ONE IN PARADISE.

HOU wast all that to me, love,

For which my soul did pine—

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreath’d with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!

Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise

But to be overcast!

A voice from out the Future cries,

“On! on!”—but o’er the Past

(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies

Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! with me

The light of life is o’er!

No more—no more—no more—

(Such language holds the solemn sea

To the sands upon the shore)

Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,

Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,

And all my nightly dreams

Are where thy dark eye glances,

And where thy footstep gleams—

In what ethereal dances,

By what eternal streams.

LENORE.

Mrs. Whitman, in her reminiscences of Poe, tells us the following incident which gave rise to the writing of these touching lines. While Poe was in the Academy at Richmond, Virginia,—as yet a boy of about sixteen years,—he was invited by a friend to visit his home. The mother of this friend was a singularly beautiful and withal a most kindly and sympathetic woman. Having learned that Poe was an orphan she greeted him with the motherly tenderness and affection shown toward her own son. The boy was so overcome that it is said he stood for a ♦minute unable to speak and finally with tears he declared he had never before known his loss in the love of a true and devoted mother. From that time forward he was frequently a visitor, and the attachment between him and this kind-hearted woman continued to grow. On Poe’s return from Europe when he was about twenty years of age, he learned that she had died a few days before his arrival, and was so overcome with grief that he went nightly to her grave, even when it was dark and rainy, spending hours in fancied communion with her spirit. Later he idealized in his musings the embodiment of such a spirit in a young and beautiful woman, whom he made his lover and whose untimely death he imagined and used as the inspiration of this poem.

♦ ‘miuute’ replaced with ‘minute’

H, broken is the golden bowl,

The spirit flown forever!

Let the bell toll!

A saintly soul

Floats on the Stygian river;

And, Guy de Vere,

Hast thou no tear?

Weep now or never more!

See, on yon drear

And rigid bier

Low lies thy love, Lenore!

Come, let the burial-rite be read—

The funeral-song be sung!—

An anthem for the queenliest dead

That ever died so young—

A dirge for her the doubly dead,

In that she died so young!

“Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth,

And hated her for her pride;

And when she fell in feeble health,

Ye bless’d her—that she died!

How shall the ritual, then, be read?

The requiem how be sung

By you—by yours, the evil eye—

By yours the slanderous tongue

That did to death the innocence

That died, and died so young?”

Peccavimus;

But rave not thus!

And let a sabbath song

Go up to God so solemnly, the dead
may feel no wrong!

The sweet Lenore

Hath “gone before,”

With Hope, that flew beside,

Leaving thee wild

For the dear child

That should have been thy bride—

For her, the fair

And debonair,

That now so lowly lies,

The life upon her yellow hair

But not within her eyes—

The life still there,

Upon her hair—

The death upon her eyes.

“Avaunt! to-night

My heart is light.

No dirge will I upraise,

But waft the angel on her flight

With a pæan of old days!

Let no bell toll!—

Lest her sweet soul,

Amid its hallow’d mirth,

Should catch the note,

As it doth float—

Up from the damned earth.

To friends above, from fiends below,

The indignant ghost is riven—

From hell unto a high estate

Far up within the heaven—

From grief and groan,

To a golden throne,

Beside the King of Heaven.”

THE BELLS.

This selection is a favorite with reciters. It is an excellent piece for voice culture. The musical flow of the metre and happy selection of the words make it possible for the skilled speaker to closely imitate the sounds of the ringing bells.

EAR the sledges with the bells—

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding bells—

Golden bells!

What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!

Through the balmy air of night

How they ring out their delight!

From the molten-golden notes,

And all in tune,

What a liquid ditty floats

To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats

On the moon!

Oh, from out the sounding cells,

What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!

How it swells!

How it dwells.

On the future! how it tells

Of the rapture that impels

To the swinging and the ringing

Of the bells, bells, bells,—

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

Hear the loud alarum bells—

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!

Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire

Leaping higher, higher, higher,

With a desperate desire,

And a resolute endeavor,

Now—now to sit or never,

By the side of the pale-faced moon.

Oh, the bells, bells, bells!

What a tale their terror tells

Of despair!

How they clang, and clash, and roar!

What a horror they outpour

On the bosom of the palpitating air!

Yet the ear it fully knows,

By the twanging,

And the clanging,

How the danger ebbs and flows;

Yet the ear distinctly tells,

In the jangling

And the wrangling,

How the danger sinks and swells,

By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—

Of the bells—

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

Hear the tolling of the bells—

Iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!

In the silence of the night,

How we shiver with affright,

At the melancholy menace of their tone!

For every sound that floats

From the rust within their throats

Is a groan.

And the people—ah, the people—

They that dwell up in the steeple,

All alone,

And who tolling, tolling, tolling,

In that muffled monotone,

Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone—

They are neither man nor woman—

They are neither brute nor human—

They are ghouls:

And their king it is who tolls;

And he rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls,

A pæan from the bells!

And his merry bosom swells

With the pæan of the bells!

And he dances and he yells;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the pæan of the bells—

Of the bells;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells—

Of the bells, bells, bells,

To the sobbing of the bells;

Keeping time, time, time.

As he knells, knells, knells,

In a happy Runic rhyme,

To the rolling of the bells,—

Of the bells, bells, bells,—

To the tolling of the bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,—

Bells, bells, bells,—

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

THE RAVEN.

This poem is generally allowed to be one of the most remarkable examples of a harmony of sentiment with rhythmical expression to be found in any language. While the poet sits musing in his study, endeavoring to win from books “surcease of sorrow for the lost Lenore,” a raven—the symbol of despair—enters the room and perches upon a bust of Pallas. A colloquy follows between the poet and the bird of ill omen with its haunting croak of “Nevermore.”

THE RAVEN.

NCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of ♦forgotten lore,—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber-door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I mutter’d, “tapping at my chamber-door—

Only this and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore,—

For the rare and ♣radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,—

Nameless here forevermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain,

Thrilled me,—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,

“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber-door,—

Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber-door;

That it is, and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger: hesitating then no longer,

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is, I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber-door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door:

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”

Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window-lattice;

Let me see then what thereat is and this mystery explore,—

Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore;—

’Tis the wind, and nothing more.”

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber-door,—

Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber-door—

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebon bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven;

Ghastly, grim, and ancient raven, wandering from the nightly shore,

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night’s Plutonian shore?”

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber-door,

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber-door

With such name as “Nevermore!”

But the raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing further then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered—

Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before,

On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said, “Nevermore!”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,

Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster

Follow’d fast and follow’d faster, till his songs one burden bore,

Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore,

Of—‘Never—nevermore!’”

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door,

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking “Nevermore!”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,

But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er

She shall press—ah! nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by seraphim, whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor,

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee,—by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget the lost Lenore!”

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

“Prophet!” cried I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!

Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—

On this home by horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore,—

Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

“Prophet!” cried I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore,

Tell this soul, with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore;

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore!”

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting,—

“Get thee back into the tempest and the night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber-door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

THE POET OF THE PEOPLE.

“He who sung to one clear harp in divers tones.”

N an old square wooden house upon the edge of the sea” the most famous and most widely read of all American poets was born in Portland, Maine, February 7th, 1807.

In his personality, his wide range of themes, his learning and his wonderful power of telling stories in song, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stood in his day and still stands easily in front of all other poets who have enriched American literature. Admitting that he was not rugged and elemental like Bryant and did not possess the latter’s feelings for the colossal features of wild scenery, that he was not profoundly thoughtful and transcendental like Emerson, that he was not so earnestly and passionately sympathetic as Whittier, nevertheless he was our first artist in poetry. Bryant, Emerson and Whittier commanded but a few stops of the grand instrument upon which they played; Longfellow understood perfectly all its capabilities. Critics also say that “he had not the high ideality or dramatic power of Tennyson or Browning.” But does he not hold something else which to the world at large is perhaps more valuable? Certainly these two great poets are inferior to him in the power to sweep the chords of daily human experiences and call forth the sweetness and beauty in common-place every day human life. It is on these themes that he tuned his harp without ever a false tone, and sang with a harmony so well nigh perfect that the universal heart responded to his music. This common-place song has found a lodgement in every household in America, “swaying the hearts of men and women whose sorrows have been soothed and whose lives raised by his gentle verse.”

Longfellow’s life from the very beginning moved on even lines. Both he and William Cullen Bryant were descendants of John Alden, whom Longfellow has made famous in “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” The Longfellows were a family in comfortable circumstances, peaceful and honest, for many generations back. The poet went to school with Nathaniel P. Willis and other boys who at an early age were thinking more of verse making than of pleasure. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825 with Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S. C. Abbott, and others who afterwards attained to fame. Almost immediately after his graduation he was requested to take the chair of Modern Languages and Literature in his alma mater, which he accepted; but before entering upon his duties spent three years in Germany, France, Spain and Italy to further perfect himself in the languages and literature of those nations. At Bowdoin College Longfellow remained as Professor of Modern Languages and Literature until 1835, when he accepted a similar position in Harvard University, which he continued to occupy until 1854, when he resigned, devoting the remainder of his life to literary work and to the enjoyment of the association of such friends as Charles Sumner the statesman, Hawthorne the romancer, Louis Agassiz the great naturalist, and James Russell Lowell, the brother poet who succeeded to the chair of Longfellow in Harvard University on the latter’s resignation.

The home of Longfellow was not only a delightful place to visit on account of the cordial welcome extended by the companionable poet, but for its historic associations as well; for it was none other than the old “Cragie House” which had been Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, the past tradition and recent hospitality of which have been well told by G. W. Curtis in his “Homes of American Authors.” It was here that Longfellow surrounded himself with a magnificent library, and within these walls he composed all of his famous productions from 1839 until his death, which occurred there in 1882 at the age of seventy-five. The poet was twice married and was one of the most domestic of men. His first wife died suddenly in Europe during their sojourn in that country while Longfellow was pursuing his post graduate course of study before taking the chair in Bowdoin College. In 1843 he married Miss Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Europe and who figures in the pages of his romance “Hyperion.” In 1861 she met a most tragic death by stepping on a match which set fire to her clothing, causing injuries from which she died. She was buried on the 19th anniversary of their marriage. By Longfellow’s own direction she was crowned with a wreath of orange blossoms commemorative of the day. The poet was so stricken with grief that for a year afterwards he did practically no work, and it is said neither in conversation nor in writing to his most intimate friends could he bear to refer to the sad event.

Longfellow was one of the most bookish men in our literature. His knowledge of others’ thoughts and writings was so great that he became, instead of a creator in his poems, a painter of things already created. It is said that he never even owned a style of his own like Bryant and Poe, but assimilated what he saw or heard or read from books, reclothing it and sending it out again. This does not intimate that he was a plagiarist, but that he wrote out of the accumulated knowledge of others. “Evangeline,” for instance, was given him by Hawthorne, who had heard of the young people of Acadia and kept them in mind, intending to weave them into a romance. The forcible deportation of 18,000 French people touched Hawthorne as it perhaps never could have touched Longfellow except in literature, and also as it certainly never would have touched the world had not Longfellow woven the woof of the story in the threads of his song.

“Evangeline” was brought out the same year with Tennyson’s “Princess” (1847), and divided honors with the latter even in England. In this poem, and in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” and other poems, the pictures of the new world are brought out with charming simplicity. Though Longfellow never visited Acadia or Louisiana, it is the real French village of Grand Pré and the real Louisiana, not a poetic dream that are described in this poem. So vivid were his descriptions that artists in Europe painted the scenes true to nature and vied with each other in painting the portrait of Evangeline, among several of which there is said to be so striking a resemblance as to suggest the idea that one had served as a copy for the others. The poem took such a hold upon the public, that both the poor man and the rich knew Longfellow as they knew not Tennyson their own poet. It was doubtless because he, though one of the most scholarly of men, always spoke so the plainest reader could understand.

THE WAYSIDE INN.

Scene of Longfellow’s Famous “Tales of the Wayside Inn.”

In “The Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863), the characters were not fictions, but real persons. The musician was none other than the famous violinist, Ole Bull; Professor Luigi Monte, a close friend who dined every Sunday with Longfellow, was the Sicilian; Dr. Henry Wales was the youth; the poet was Thomas W. Parsons, and the theologian was his brother, Rev. S. W. Longfellow. This poem shows Longfellow at his best as a story teller, while the stories which are put into the mouth of these actual characters perhaps could have been written by no other living man, for they are from the literature of all countries, with which Longfellow was so familiar.

Thus, both “The Tales of a Wayside Inn” and “Evangeline”—as many other of Longfellow’s poems—may be called compilations or rewritten stories, rather than creations, and it was these characteristics of his writings which Poe and Margaret Fuller, and others, who considered the realm of poetry to belong purely to the imagination rather than the real world, so bitterly criticised. While they did not deny to Longfellow a poetic genius, they thought he was prostituting it by forcing it to drudge in the province of prosaic subjects; and for this reason Poe predicted that he would not live in literature.

It was but natural that Longfellow should write as he did. For thirty-five years he was an instructor in institutions of learning, and as such believed that poetry should be a thing of use as well as beauty. He could not agree with Poe that poetry was like music, only a pleasurable art. He had the triple object of stimulating to research and study, of impressing the mind with history or moral truths, and at the same time to touch and warm the heart of humanity. In all three directions he succeeded to such an extent that he has probably been read by more people than any other poet except the sacred Psalmist; and despite the predictions of his distinguished critics to the contrary, such poems as “The Psalm of Life,” (which Chas. Sumner allowed, to his knowledge, had saved one man from suicide), “The Children’s Hour,” and many others touching the every day experiences of the multitude, will find a glad echo in the souls of humanity as long as men shall read.

THE PSALM OF LIFE.

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.

This poem has gained wide celebrity as one of Mr. Longfellow’s most popular pieces, as has also the poem “Excelsior,” (hereafter quoted). They strike a popular chord and do some clever preaching and it is in this their chief merit consists. They are by no means among the author’s best poetic productions from a critical standpoint. Both these poems were written in early life.

ELL me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,—act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwreck’d brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH.

NDER a spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long;

His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat;

He earns whate’er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell

When the evening sun is low.

They love to see the flaming forge,

And hear the bellows roar,

And catch the burning sparks that fly

Like chaff from the threshing floor.

THE BRIDGE.

A favorite haunt of Longfellow’s was the bridge between Boston and Cambridge, over which he had to pass, almost daily. “I always stop on the bridge,” he writes in his journal. “Tide waters are beautiful,” and again, “We leaned for a while on the wooden rails and enjoyed the silvery reflections of the sea, making sundry comparisons.” Among other thoughts, we have these cheering ones, that “The old sea was flashing with its heavenly light, though we saw it only in a single track; the dark waves are dark provinces of God; illuminous though not to us.”

The following poem was the result of one of Longfellow’s reflections, while standing on this bridge at midnight.

 stood on the bridge at midnight,

As the clocks were striking the hour,

And the moon rose o’er the city,

Behind the dark church tower;

And like the waters rushing

Among the wooden piers,

A flood of thought came o’er me,

That filled my eyes with tears.

How often, O how often,

In the days that had gone by,

I had stood on that bridge at midnight,

And gazed on that wave and sky!

How often, O how often,

I had wished that the ebbing tide

Would bear me away on its bosom

O’er the ocean wild and wide!

For my heart was hot and restless,

And my life was full of care,

And the burden laid upon me,

Seemed greater than I could bear.

But now it has fallen from me,

It is buried in the sea;

And only the sorrow of others

Throws its shadow over me.

Yet whenever I cross the river

On its bridge with wooden piers,

Like the odor of brine from the ocean

Comes the thought of other years.

And I think how many thousands

Of care-encumbered men,

Each having his burden of sorrow,

Have crossed the bridge since then.

I see the long procession

Still passing to and fro,

The young heart hot and restless,

And the old, subdued and slow!

And forever and forever,

As long as the river flows,

As long as the heart has passions,

As long as life has woes;

The moon and its broken reflection

And its shadows shall appear,

As the symbol of love in heaven,

And its wavering image here.

RESIGNATION.

HERE is no flock, however watched and tended,

But one dead lamb is there!

There is no fireside, howsoe’r defended,

But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying

And mournings for the dead;

The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,

Will not be comforted!

Let us be patient! These severe afflictions

Not from the ground arise,

But oftentimes celestial benedictions

Assume this dark disguise.

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;

Amid these earthly damps

What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers

May be heaven’s distant lamps.

There is no Death! What seems so is transition:

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life elysian,

Whose portal we call Death.

She is not dead,—the child of our affection,—

But gone unto that school

Where she no longer needs our poor protection,

And Christ himself doth rule.

In that great cloister’s ♦stillness and seclusion,

By guardian angels led,

Safe from temptation, safe from sin’s pollution,

She lives whom we call dead.

Day after day we think what she is doing

In those bright realms of air;

Year after year, her tender steps pursuing,

Behold her grown more fair.

Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken

The bond which nature gives,

Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken,

May reach her where she lives.

Not as a child shall we again behold her;

For when with raptures wild

In our embraces we again enfold her,

She will not be a child:

But a fair maiden, in her Father’s mansion,

Clothed with celestial grace;

And beautiful with all the soul’s expansion

Shall we behold her face.

And though, at times, impetuous with emotion

And anguish long suppressed,

The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean

That cannot be at rest,—

We will be patient, and assuage the feeling

We may not wholly stay;

By silence sanctifying, not concealing

The grief that must have way.

♦ ‘stillnes’ replaced with ‘stillness’

GOD’S ACRE.

 like that ancient Saxon phrase which calls

The burial-ground God’s acre! It is just;

It consecrates each grave within its walls,

And breathes a benison o’er the sleeping dust.

God’s Acre! Yes, that blessed name imparts

Comfort to those who in the grave have sown

The seed that they had garnered in their hearts,

Their bread of life, alas! no more their own.

Into its furrows shall we all be cast,

In the sure faith that we shall rise again

At the great harvest, when the archangel’s blast

Shall winnow, like a fan the chaff and grain.

Then shall the good stand in immortal bloom,

In the fair gardens of that second birth;

And each bright blossom mingle its perfume

With that of flowers which never bloomed on earth.

With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,

And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;

This is the field and Acre of our God!

This is the place where human harvests grow!

EXCELSIOR.

HE shades of night were falling fast,

As through an Alpine village passed

A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,

A banner with the strange device,

Excelsior!

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,

Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,

And like a silver clarion rung

The accents of that unknown tongue,

Excelsior!

In happy homes he saw the light

Of household fires gleam warm and bright;

Above, the spectral glaciers shone,

And from his lips escaped a groan,

Excelsior!

“Try not to Pass!” the old man said;

“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,

The roaring torrent is deep and wide!”

And loud that clarion voice replied,

Excelsior!

“O, stay,” the maiden said, “and rest

Thy weary head upon this breast!”

A tear stood in his bright blue eye,

But still he answered, with a sigh,

Excelsior!

“Beware the pine-tree’s withered branch!

Beware the awful avalanche!”

This was the peasant’s last Good-night;

A voice replied, far up the height,

Excelsior!

At break of day, as heavenward

The pious monks of Saint Bernard

Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,

A voice cried through the startled air,

Excelsior!

A traveler, by the faithful hound,

Half-buried in the snow was found,

Still grasping in his hand of ice

That banner with the strange device,

Excelsior!

There, in the twilight cold and gray,

Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,

And from the sky, serene and far,

A voice fell, like a falling star,

Excelsior!

THE RAINY DAY.

HE day is cold, and dark and dreary;

It rains, and the wind is never weary;

The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,

But at every gust the dead leaves fall,

And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;

It rains, and the wind is never weary;

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,

But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,

And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark dreary.

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

The writing of the following poem, “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” was occasioned by the news of a ship-wreck on the coast near Gloucester, and by the name of a reef—“Norman’s Woe”—where many disasters occurred. It was written one night between twelve and three o’clock, and cost the poet, it is said, hardly an effort.

T was the schooner Hesperus

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughter,

To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds

That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now west, now south.

Then up and spake an old sailor,

Had sailed the Spanish main:

“I pray thee put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.

“Last night the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!”

The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and colder blew the wind,

A gale from the north-east;

The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm and smote amain

The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable’s length.

“Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,

And do not tremble so,

For I can weather the roughest gale

That ever wind did blow.”

He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat,

Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

“Oh father! I hear the church-bells ring,

Oh say what may it be?”

“’Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast;”

And he steered for the open sea.

“Oh father! I hear the sound of guns,

Oh, say, what may it be?”

“Some ship in distress, that cannot live

In such an angry sea.”

“O father! I see a gleaming light,

Oh, say, what may it be?”

But the father answered never a word—

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face to the skies,

The lantern gleamed, through the gleaming snow,

On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands, and prayed

That saved she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the waves

On the lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept,

Towards the reef of Norman’s Woe.

And ever, the fitful gusts between,

A sound came from the land;

It was the sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,

She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew

Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves

Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side

Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,

With the masts, went by the board;

Like a vessel of glass she stove and sank—

Ho! ho! the breakers roared.

At daybreak on the bleak sea-beach,

A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair

Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,

The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,

On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow;

Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman’s Woe

THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS.

OMEWHAT back from the village street

Stands the old-fashioned country seat;

Across its antique portico

Tall poplar trees their shadows throw;

And, from its station in the hall,

An ancient timepiece says to all,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

Half-way up the stairs it stands,

And points and beckons with its hands,

From its case of massive oak,

Like a monk who, under his cloak,

Crosses himself, and sighs, alas!

With sorrowful voice to all who pass,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

By day its voice is low and light;

But in the silent dead of night,

Distinct as a passing footstep’s fall,

It echoes along the vacant hall,

Along the ceiling, along the floor,

And seems to say at each chamber door,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

Through days of sorrow and of mirth,

Through days of death and days of birth,

Through every swift vicissitude

Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood,

And as if, like God, it all things saw,

It calmly repeats those words of awe,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

In that mansion used to be

Free-hearted Hospitality;

His great fires up the chimney roared;

The stranger feasted at his board;

But, like the skeleton at the feast,

That warning timepiece never ceased

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

There groups of merry children played;

There youths and maidens dreaming strayed;

Oh, precious hours! oh, golden prime

And affluence of love and time!

Even as a miser counts his gold,

Those hours the ancient timepiece told,—

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

From that chamber, clothed in white,

The bride came forth on her wedding night;

There, in that silent room below,

The dead lay, in his shroud of snow;

And, in the hush that followed the prayer,

Was heard the old clock on the stair,—

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

All are scattered now, and fled,—

Some are married, some are dead:

And when I ask, with throbs of pain,

“Ah!” when shall they all meet again?

As in the days long since gone by,

The ancient timepiece makes reply,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

Never here, forever there,

Where all parting, pain, and care

And death, and time shall disappear,—

Forever there, but never here!

The horologe of Eternity

Sayeth this incessantly,

“Forever—never!

Never—forever!”

THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.

The writing of this famous ballad was suggested to Mr. Longfellow by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall-River, Massachusetts—a circumstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to it the spirit of a Norse Viking song of war and of the sea. It is written in the swift leaping meter employed by Drayton in his “Ode to the Cambro Britons on their Harp.”

PEAK! speak! thou fearful guest!

Who, with thy hollow breast

Still in rude armor drest,

Comest to daunt me!

Wrapt not in Eastern balms,

But with thy fleshless palms

Stretch’d, as if asking alms,

Why dost thou haunt me?”

Then, from those cavernous eyes

Pale flashes seemed to rise,

As when the Northern skies

Gleam in December;

And, like the water’s flow

Under December’s snow,

Came a dull voice of woe

From the heart’s chamber.

“I was a Viking old!

My deeds, though manifold,

No Skald in song has told,

No Saga taught thee!

Take heed, that in thy verse

Thou dost the tale rehearse,

Else dread a dead man’s curse!

For this I sought thee.

“Far in the Northern Land,

By the wild Baltic’s strand,

I, with my childish hand,

Tamed the ger-falcon;

And, with my skates fast-bound,

Skimm’d the half-frozen Sound,

That the poor whimpering hound

Trembled to walk on.

“Oft to his frozen lair

Track’d I the grizzly bear,

While from my path the hare

Fled like a shadow;

Oft through the forest dark

Followed the were-wolf’s bark,

Until the soaring lark

Sang from the meadow.

“But when I older grew,

Joining a corsair’s crew,

O’er the dark sea I flew

With the marauders.

Wild was the life we led;

Many the souls that sped,

Many the hearts that bled,

By our stern orders.

“Many a wassail-bout

Wore the long winter out;

Often our midnight shout

Set the cocks crowing,

As we the Berserk’s tale

Measured in cups of ale,

Draining the oaken pail,

Fill’d to o’erflowing.

“Once as I told in glee

Tales of the stormy sea,

Soft eyes did gaze on me,

Burning out tender;

And as the white stars shine

On the dark Norway pine,

On that dark heart of mine

Fell their soft splendor.

“I woo’d the blue-eyed maid,

Yielding, yet half afraid,

And in the forest’s shade

Our vows were plighted.

Under its loosen’d vest

Flutter’d her little breast,

Like birds within their nest

By the hawk frighted.

“Bright in her father’s hall

Shields gleam’d upon the wall,

Loud sang the minstrels all,

Chanting his glory;

When of old Hildebrand

I ask’d his daughter’s hand,

Mute did the minstrel stand

To hear my story.

“While the brown ale he quaff’d

Loud then the champion laugh’d,

And as the wind-gusts waft

The sea-foam brightly,

So the loud laugh of scorn,

Out of those lips unshorn,

From the deep drinking-horn

Blew the foam lightly.

“She was a Prince’s child,

I but a Viking wild,

And though she blush’d and smiled,

I was discarded!

Should not the dove so white

Follow the sea-mew’s flight,

Why did they leave that night

Her nest unguarded?

“Scarce had I put to sea,

Bearing the maid with me,—

Fairest of all was she

Among the Norsemen!—

When on the white sea-strand,

Waving his armed hand,

Saw we old Hildebrand,

With twenty horsemen.

“Then launch’d they to the blast,

Bent like a reed each mast,

Yet we were gaining fast,

When the wind fail’d us;

And with a sudden flaw

Came round the gusty Skaw,

So that our foe we saw

Laugh as he hail’d us.

“And as to catch the gale

Round veer’d the flapping sail,

Death! was the helmsman’s hail,

Death without quarter!

Mid-ships with iron keel

Struck we her ribs of steel;

Down her black hulk did reel

Through the black water.

“As with his wings aslant,

Sails the fierce cormorant,

Seeking some rocky haunt,

With his prey laden.

So toward the open main,

Beating to sea again,

Through the wild hurricane,

Bore I the maiden.

“Three weeks we westward bore,

And when the storm was o’er,

Cloud-like we saw the shore

Stretching to lee-ward;

There for my lady’s bower

Built I the lofty tower,

Which, to this very hour,

Stands looking sea-ward.

“There lived we many years;

Time dried the maiden’s tears;

She had forgot her fears,

She was a mother;

Death closed her mild blue eyes,

Under that tower she lies;

Ne’er shall the sun arise

On such another!

“Still grew my bosom then,

Still as a stagnant fen!

Hateful to me were men,

The sun-light hateful!

In the vast forest here,

Clad in my warlike gear,

Fell I upon my spear,

O, death was grateful!

“Thus, seam’d with many scars

Bursting these prison bars,

Up to its native stars

My soul ascended!

There from the flowing bowl

Deep drinks the warrior’s soul,

Skål! to the Northland! skål!”¹

—Thus the tale ended.

¹ Skål! is the Swedish expression for “Your Health.”

KING WITLAF’S DRINKING-HORN.

ITLAF, a king of the Saxons,

Ere yet his last he breathed,

To the merry monks of Croyland

His drinking-horn bequeathed,—

That, whenever they sat at their revels,

And drank from the golden bowl,

They might remember the donor,

And breathe a prayer for his soul.

So sat they once at Christmas,

And bade the goblet pass;

In their beards the red wine glistened

Like dew-drops in the grass.

They drank to the soul of Witlaf,

They drank to Christ the Lord,

And to each of the Twelve Apostles,

Who had preached his holy word.

They drank to the Saints and Martyrs

Of the dismal days of yore,

And as soon as the horn was empty

They remembered one Saint more.

And the reader droned from the pulpit,

Like the murmur of many bees,

The legend of good Saint Guthlac

And Saint Basil’s homilies;

Till the great bells of the convent,

From their prison in the tower,

Guthlac and Bartholomæus,

Proclaimed the midnight hour.

And the Yule-log cracked in the chimney

And the Abbot bowed his head,

And the flamelets flapped and flickered,

But the Abbot was stark and dead.

Yet still in his pallid fingers

He clutched the golden bowl,

In which, like a pearl dissolving,

Had sunk and dissolved his soul.

But not for this their revels

The jovial monks forbore,

For they cried, “Fill high the goblet!

We must drink to one Saint more!”

EVANGELINE ON THE PRAIRIE.

EAUTIFUL was the night. Behind the black wall of the forest,

Tipping its summit with silver, arose the moon. On the river

Fell here and there through the branches a tremulous gleam of the moonlight,

Like the sweet thoughts of love on a darkened and devious spirit.

Nearer and round about her, the manifold flowers of the garden

Poured out their souls in odors, that were their prayers and confessions

Unto the night, as it went its way, like a silent Carthusian.

Fuller of fragrance than they, and as heavy with shadows and night dews,

Hung the heart of the maiden. The calm and the magical moonlight

Seemed to inundate her soul with indefinable longings,

As, through the garden gate, and beneath the shade of the oak-trees,

Passed she along the path to the edge of the measureless prairie.

Silent it lay, with a silvery haze upon it, and fire-flies

Gleaming and floating away in mingled and infinite numbers.

Over her head the stars, the thoughts of God in the heavens,

Shone on the eyes of man, who had ceased to marvel and worship,

Save when a blazing comet was seen on the walls of that temple,

As if a hand had appeared and written upon them, “Upharsin.”

And the soul of the maiden, between the stars and the fire-flies,

Wandered alone, and she cried, “O Gabriel! O my beloved!

Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee?

Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me?

Ah! how often thy feet have trod this path to the prairie!

Ah! how often thine eyes have looked on the woodlands around me!

Ah! how often beneath this oak, returning from labor,

Thou hast lain down to rest, and to dream of me in thy slumbers.

When shall these eyes behold, these arms be folded about thee?”

Loud and sudden and near the note of a whippoorwill sounded

Like a flute in the woods; and anon, through the neighboring thickets,

Farther and farther away it floated and dropped into silence.

“Patience!” whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness;

And, from the moonlit meadow, a sigh responded, “To-morrow!”

LITERARY FAME.

As a specimen of Mr. Longfellow’s prose style we present the following extract from his “Hyperion,” written when the poet was comparatively a young man.

Souvenir of Longfellow

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

THE LIBERATOR OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

O classify Emerson is a matter of no small difficulty. He was a philosopher, he was an essayist, he was a poet—all three so eminently that scarcely two of his friends would agree to which class he most belonged. Oliver Wendell Holmes asks:

But whatever he did was done with a poetic touch. Philosophy, essay or song, it was all pregnant with the spirit of poetry. Whatever else he was, Emerson was pre-eminently a poet. It was with this golden key that he unlocked the chambers of original thought, that liberated American letters.

Until Emerson came, American authors had little independence. James Russell Lowell declares, “We were socially and intellectually bound to English thought, until Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue waters. He was our first optimistic writer. Before his day, Puritan theology had seen in man only a vile nature and considered his instincts for beauty and pleasure, proofs of his total depravity.” Under such conditions as these, the imagination was fettered and wholesome literature was impossible. As a reaction against this Puritan austerity came Unitarianism, which aimed to establish the dignity of man, and out of this came the further growth of the idealism or transcendentalism of Emerson. It was this idea and these aspirations of the new theology that Emerson converted into literature. The indirect influence of his example on the writings of Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and Lowell, and its direct influence on Thoreau, Hawthorne, Chas. A. Dana, Margaret Fuller, G. W. Curtis and others, formed the very foundation for the beautiful structure of our representative American literature.

Emerson was profoundly a thinker who pondered the relation of man to God and to the universe. He conceived and taught the noblest ideals of virtue and a spiritual life. The profound study which Emerson devoted to his themes and his philosophic cast of mind made him a writer for scholars. He was a prophet who, without argument, announced truths which, by intuition, he seems to have perceived; but the thought is often so shadowy that the ordinary reader fails to catch it. For this reason he will never be like Longfellow or Whittier, a favorite with the masses. Let it not be understood, however, that all of Emerson’s writings are heavy or shadowy or difficult to understand. On the contrary, some of his poems are of a popular character and are easy of comprehension. For instance, “The Hymn,” sung at the completion of the Concord Monument in 1836, was on every one’s lips at the time of the Centennial celebration, in 1876. His optimistic spirit is also beautifully and clearly expressed in the following stanza of his “Voluntaries:”

These are but two instances of many that may be cited. No author is, perhaps, more enjoyed by those who understand him. He was a master of language. He never used the wrong word. His sentences are models. But he was not a logical or methodical writer. Every sentence stands by itself. His paragraphs might be arranged almost at random without essential loss to the essays. His philosophy consists largely in an array of golden sayings full of vital suggestions to help men make the best and most of themselves. He had no compact system of philosophy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, within “A kite-string of the birth place of Benjamin Franklin” with whom he is frequently compared. The likeness, however, consists only in the fact that they were both decidedly representative Americans of a decidedly different type. Franklin was prose, Emerson poetry; Franklin common sense, real; Emerson imaginative, ideal. In these opposite respects they both were equally representative of the highest type. Both were hopeful, kindly and shrewd. Both equally powerful in making, training and guiding the American people.

In his eighth year young Emerson was sent to a grammar school, where he made such rapid progress, that he was soon able to enter a higher department known as a Latin school. His first attempts at writing were not the dull efforts of a school boy; but original poems which he read with real taste and feeling. He completed his course and graduated from Harvard College at eighteen. It is said that he was dull in mathematics and not above the average in his class in general standing; but he was widely read in literature, which put him far in advance, perhaps, of any young man of his age. After graduating, he taught school for five years in connection with his brother; but in 1825, gave it up for the ministry. For a time he was pastor of a Unitarian Congregation in Boston; but his independent views were not in accordance with the doctrine of his church, therefore, he resigned in 1835, and retired to Concord, where he purchased a home near the spot on which the first battle of the Revolution was fought in 1775, which he commemorated in his own verse:—

In this city, Emerson resided until the day of his death, which occurred in Concord, April 27, 1882, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

HOME OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, CONCORD, MASS.

It was in Concord that the poet and essayist, as the prophet of the advanced thought of his age, gathered around him those leading spirits who were dissatisfied with the selfishness and shallowness of existing society, and, who had been led by him to dream of an ideal condition in which all should live as one family. Out of this grew the famous “Brook Farm Community.” This was not an original idea of Emerson’s, however. Coleridge and Southey, of England, had thought of founding such a society in Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River. Emerson regarded this community of interests as the clear teachings of Jesus Christ; and, to put into practical operation this idea, a farm of about two hundred acres was bought at Roxbury, Mass., and a stock company was formed under the title of “The Brook Farm Institution of Agriculture and Education.” About seventy members joined in the enterprise. The principle of the organization was coöperative, the members sharing the profits. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the greatest of romancers, Chas. A. Dana, of the New York Tribune, Geo. W. Curtis, of Harper’s Monthly, Henry D. Thoreau, the poet naturalist, Amos Bronson Alcott, the transcendental dreamer and writer of strange shadowy sayings, and Margaret Fuller, the most learned woman of her age, were prominent members who removed to live on the farm. It is said that Emerson, himself, never really lived there; but was a member and frequent visitor, as were other prominent scholars of the same school. The project was a failure. After five years of experience, some of the houses were destroyed by fire, the enterprise given up, and the membership scattered.

But the Brook Farm served its purpose in literature by bringing together some of the best intellects in America, engaging them for five years in a common course of study, and stimulating a commerce of ideas. The breaking up of the community was better, perhaps, than its success would have been. It dispersed and scattered abroad the advanced thoughts of Emerson, and the doctrine of the society into every profession. Instead of being confined to the little paper, “The Dial,” (which was the organ of the society) its literature was transferred into a number of widely circulated national mediums.

Thus, it will be seen how Emerson, the “Sage of Concord,” gathered around him and dominated, by his charming personality, his powerful mind, and his wholesome influence, some of the brightest minds that have figured in American literature; and how, through them, as well as his own writings, he has done so much, not only to lay the foundation of a new literature, but to mould and shape leading minds for generations to come. The Brook Farm idea was the uppermost thought in Edward Bellamy’s famous novel, “Looking Backward,” which created such a sensation in the reading world a few years since. The progressive thought of Emerson was father to the so-called “New Theology,” or “Higher Criticism,” of modern scholars and theologians. It is, perhaps, for the influence which Emerson has exerted, rather than his own works, that the literature of America is mostly indebted to him. It was through his efforts that the village of Concord has been made more famous in American letters than the city of New York.

The charm of Emerson’s personality has already been referred to,—and it is not strange that it should have been so great. His manhood, no less than his genius was worthy of admiration and of reverence. His life corresponded with his brave, cheerful and steadfast teachings. He “practiced what he preached.” His manners were so gentle, his nature so transparent, and his life so singularly pure and happy, that he was called, while he lived, “the good and great Emerson;” and, since his death, the memory of his life and manly example are among the cherished possessions of our literature.

The reverence of his literary associates was little less than worship. Amos Bronson Alcott,—father of the authoress, Louisa M. Alcott,—one of the Brook Farm members, though himself a profound scholar and several years Emerson’s senior, declared that it would have been his great misfortune to have lived without knowing Emerson, whom he styled, “The magic minstrel and speaker! whose rhetoric, voiced as by organ stops, delivers the sentiment from his breast in cadences peculiar to himself; now hurling it forth on the ear, echoing them; then,—as his mood and matter invite it—dying like

... such is the rhapsodist’s cunning in its structure and delivery.”

Referring to his association with Emerson, the same writer acknowledges in a poem, written after the sage’s death:

HYMN SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE CONCORD MONUMENT, 1836.

Y the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set to day a votive stone,

That memory may their deed redeem

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit that made those heroes dare

To die or leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

THE RHODORA.

N May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook;

The purple petals fallen in the pool

Made the black waters with their beauty gay;

Young Raphael might covet such a school;

The lively show beguiled me from my way.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky,

Dear tell them, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for being.

Why, thou wert there, O, rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew,

But in my simple ignorance suppose

The selfsame Power that brought me there, brought you.

THE TRUE HERO.

AN EXTRACT FROM “VOLUNTARIES.”

The following story is told of the manner in which the poem, “Voluntaries,” obtained its title. In 1863, Mr. Emerson came to Boston and took a room in the Parker House, bringing with him the unfinished sketch of a few verses which he wished Mr. Fields, his publisher, to hear. He drew a small table to the centre of the room and read aloud the lines he proposed giving to the press. They were written on separate slips of paper which were flying loosely about the room. (Mr. Emerson frequently wrote in such independent paragraphs, that many of his poems and essays might be rearranged without doing them serious violence.) The question arose as to title of the verses read, when Mr. Fields suggested ♦“Voluntaries,” which was cordially accepted by Mr. Emerson.

 WELL for the fortunate soul

Which Music’s wings unfold,

Stealing away the memory

Of sorrows new and old!

Yet happier he whose inward sight,

Stayed on his subtle thought,

Shuts his sense on toys of time,

To vacant bosoms brought;

But best befriended of the God

He who, in evil times,

Warned by an inward voice,

Heeds not the darkness and the dread,

Biding by his rule and choice,

Telling only the fiery thread,

Leading over heroic ground

Walled with immortal terror round,

To the aim which him allures,

And the sweet heaven his deed secures.

Peril around all else appalling,

Cannon in front and leaden rain,

Him duty through the clarion calling

To the van called not in vain.

Stainless soldier on the walls,

Knowing this,—and knows no more,—

Whoever fights, whoever falls,

Justice conquers evermore,

Justice after as before;—

And he who battles on her side,

God, though he were ten times slain,

Crowns him victor glorified,

Victor over death and pain

Forever: but his erring foe,

Self-assured that he prevails,

Looks from his victim lying low,

And sees aloft the red right arm

Redress the eternal scales.

He, the poor for whom angels foil,

Blind with pride and fooled by hate,

Writhes within the dragon coil,

Reserved to a speechless fate.

♦ ‘Voluntaires’ replaced with ‘Voluntaries’

MOUNTAIN AND SQUIRREL.

HE mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel;

And the former called the latter “Little Prig.”

Bun replied:

“You are doubtless very big;

But all sorts of things and weather

Must be taken in together,

To make up a year

And a sphere.

And I think it no disgrace

To occupy my place.

If I’m not so large as you,

You are not so small as I,

And not half so spry.

I’ll not deny you make

A very pretty squirrel track;

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;

If I cannot carry forests on my back,

Neither can you crack a nut.”

THE SNOW STORM.

NNOUNCED by all the trumpets of the sky

Arrives the snow, and driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

The sled and traveler stopp’d, the courier’s feet

Delay’d, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fire-place, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north-wind’s masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnish’d with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer’s sighs, and at the gate

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are number’d, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonish’d Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

THE PROBLEM.

 LIKE a church, I like a cowl,

I love a prophet of the soul,

And on my heart monastic aisles

Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles,

Yet not for all his faith can see

Would I that cowled churchman be.

Why should the vest on him allure,

Which I could not on me endure?

Not from a vain or shallow thought

His awful Jove young Phidias brought;

Never from lips of cunning fell

The thrilling Delphic oracle;

Out from the heart of nature roll’d

The burdens of the Bible old;

The litanies of nations came,

Like the volcano’s tongue of flame,

Up from the burning core below,—

The canticles of love and wo.

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,

And groin’d the aisles of Christian Rome,

Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew,

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Know’st thou what wove yon wood-bird’s nest

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast;

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,

Painting with morn each annual cell;

Or how the sacred pine tree adds

To her old leaves new myriads?

Such and so grew these holy piles,

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon

As the best gem upon her zone;

And morning opes with haste her lids

To gaze upon the Pyramids;

O’er England’s Abbeys bends the sky

As on its friends with kindred eye;

For, out of Thought’s interior sphere

These wonders rose to upper air,

And nature gladly gave them place,

Adopted them into her race,

And granted them an equal date

With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass,

Art might obey but not surpass.

The passive Master lent his hand

To the vast Soul that o’er him plann’d,

And the same power that rear’d the shrine

Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.

Ever the fiery Pentacost

Girds with one flame the countless host,

Trances the heart through chanting choirs,

And through the priest the mind inspires.

The word unto the prophet spoken,

Was writ on tables yet unbroken;

The word by seers or sybils told

In groves of oak or fanes of gold,

Still floats upon the morning wind,

Still whispers to the willing mind.

One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world hath never lost

I know what say the Fathers wise,—

The book itself before me lies,—

Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,

And he who blent both in his line,

The younger Golden Lips or mines,

Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines;

His words are music in my ear,

I see his cowled portrait dear.

And yet, for all his faith could see,

I would not the good bishop be.

TRAVELING.

THE COMPENSATION OF CALAMITY.

SELF-RELIANCE.

FROM “NATURE.”

Souvenir of Emerson

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

“THE POET OF FREEDOM.”

N a solitary farm house near Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the valley of the Merrimac, on the 17th day of December, 1807, John Greenleaf Whittier was born. Within the same town, and Amesbury, nearby, this kind and gentle man, whom all the world delights to honor for his simple and beautiful heart-songs, spent most of his life, dying at the ripe old age of nearly eighty-five, in Danvers, Massachusetts, September 7th, 1892. The only distinguishing features about his ancestors were that Thos. Whittier settled at Haverhill in 1647, and brought with him from Newberry the first hive of bees in the settlement, that they were all sturdy Quakers, lived simply, were friendly and freedom loving. The early surroundings of the farmer boy were simple and frugal. He has pictured them for us in his masterpiece, “Snowbound.” Poverty, the necessity of laboring upon the farm, the influence of Quaker traditions, his busy life, all conspired against his liberal education and literary culture. This limitation of knowledge is, however, at once to the masses his charm, and, to scholars, his one defect. It has led him to write, as no other poet could, upon the dear simplicity of New England farm life. He has written from the heart and not from the head; he has composed popular pastorals, not hymns of culture. Only such training as the district schools afforded, with a couple of years at Haverhill Academy comprised his advantages in education.

In referring to this alma mater in after years, under the spell of his muse, the poet thus writes:—

It was natural for Whittier to become the poet of that combination of which Garrison was the apostle, and Phillips and Sumner the orators. His early poems were published by Garrison in his paper, “The Free Press,” the first one when Whittier was nineteen years of age and Garrison himself little more than a boy. The farmer lad was elated when he found the verses which he had so timidly submitted in print with a friendly comment from the editor and a request for more. Garrison even visited Whittier’s parents and urged the importance of giving him a finished education. Thus he fell early under the spell of the great abolitionist and threw himself with all the ardor of his nature into the movement. His poems against slavery and disunion have a ringing zeal worthy of a Cromwell. “They are,” declares one writer, “like the sound of the trumpets blown before the walls of Jericho.”

As a Quaker Whittier could not have been otherwise than an abolitionist, for that denomination had long since abolished slavery within its own communion. Most prominent among his poems of freedom are “The Voice of Freedom,” published in 1849, “The Panorama and Other Poems,” in 1856, “In War Times,” in 1863, and “Ichabod,” a pathetically kind yet severely stinging rebuke to Daniel Webster for his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. Webster was right from the standpoint of law and the Constitution, but Whittier argued from the standpoint of human right and liberty. “Barbara Frietchie,”—while it is pronounced purely a fiction, as is also his poem about John Brown kissing the Negro baby on his way to the gallows,—is perhaps the most widely quoted of his famous war poems.

Whittier also wrote extensively on subjects relating to New England history, witchcraft and colonial traditions. This group includes many of his best ballads, which have done in verse for colonial romance what Hawthorne did in prose in his “Twice-Told Tales” and “Scarlet Letter.” It is these poems that have entitled Whittier to be called “the greatest of American ballad writers.” Among them are to be found “Mabel Martin,” “The Witch of Wenham,” “Marguerite” and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” But it is perhaps in the third department of his writings, namely, rural tales and idyls, that the poet is most widely known. These pastoral poems contain the very heart and soul of New England. They are faithful and loving pictures of humble life, simple and peaceful in their subject and in their style. The masterpieces of this class are “Snowbound,” “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “Among the Hills,” “Telling the Bees,” etc. The relation of these simple experiences of homely character has carried him to the hearts of the people and made him, next to Longfellow, the most popular of American poets. There is a pleasure and a satisfaction in the freshness of Whittier’s homely words and homespun phrases, which we seek in vain in the polished art of cultivated masters. As a poet of nature he has painted the landscapes of New England as Bryant has the larger features of the continent.

Whittier was never married and aside from a few exquisite verses he has given the public no clew to the romance of his youth. His home was presided over for many years by his sister Elizabeth, a most lovely and talented woman, for whom he cherished the deepest affection, and he has written nothing more touching than his tribute to her memory in “Snowbound.” The poet was shy and diffident among strangers and in formal society, but among his friends genial and delightful, with a fund of gentle and delicate humor which gave his conversation a great charm.

Aside from his work as a poet Whittier wrote considerable prose. His first volume was “Legends of New England,” published in 1831, consisting of prose and verse. Subsequent prose publications consisted of contributions to the slave controversy, biographical sketches of English and American reformers, studies of scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimac valley. Those of greatest literary interest were the “Supernaturalisms of New England,” (1847,) and “Literary Recreations and Miscellanies,” (1852.)

In 1836 Whittier became secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and he was all his life interested in public affairs, and wrote much for newspapers and periodicals. In 1838 he began to edit the “Pennsylvania Freeman” in Philadelphia, but in the following year his press was destroyed and his office burned by a pro-slavery mob, and he returned to New England, devoting the larger part of his life, aside from his anti-slavery political writings, to embalming its history and legends in his literature, and so completely has it been done by him it has been declared: “If every other record of the early history and life of New England were lost the story could be constructed again from the pages of Whittier. Traits, habits, facts, traditions, incidents—he holds a torch to the dark places and illumines them every one.”

Mr. Whittier, perhaps, is the most peculiarly American poet of any that our country has produced. The woods and waterfowl of Bryant belong as much to one land as another; and all the rest of our singers—Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and their brethren—with the single exception of Joaquin Miller, might as well have been born in the land of Shakespeare, Milton and Byron as their own. But Whittier is entirely a poet of his own soil. All through his verse we see the elements that created it, and it is interesting to trace his simple life, throughout, in his verses from the time, when like that urchin with whom he asserts brotherhood, and who has won all affections, he ate his

and, when a little older his fancy dwelt upon the adventures of Chalkley—as

In these reveries, “The Barefoot Boy” and others, thousands of his countrymen have lived over their lives again. Every thing he wrote, to the New Englander has a sweet, warm familiar life about it. To them his writings are familiar photographs, but they are also treasury houses of facts over which the future antiquarian will pour and gather all the close details of the phase of civilization that they give.

The old Whittier homestead at Amesbury is now in charge of Mrs. Pickard, a ♦niece of the poet. She has recently made certain changes in the house; but this has been done so wisely and cautiously that if the place some day becomes a shrine—as it doubtless will—the restoration of the old estate will be a simple matter. The library is left quite undisturbed, just as it was when Whittier died.

♦ ‘neice’ replaced with ‘niece’

MY PLAYMATE.

HE pines were dark on Ramoth Hill,

Their song was soft and low;

The blossoms in the sweet May wind

Were falling like the snow.

The blossoms drifted at our feet,

The orchard birds sang clear;

The sweetest and the saddest day

It seemed of all the year,

For more to me than birds or flowers,

My playmate left her home,

And took with her the laughing spring,

The music and the bloom.

She kissed the lips of kith and kin,

She laid her hand in mine:

What more could ask the bashful boy

Who fed her father’s kine?

She left us in the bloom of May:

The constant years told o’er

The seasons with as sweet May morns,

But she came back no more.

I walk with noiseless feet the round

Of uneventful years;

Still o’er and o’er I sow the Spring

And reap the Autumn ears.

She lives where all the golden year

Her summer roses blow;

The dusky children of the sun

Before her come and go.

There haply with her jeweled hands

She smooths her silken gown,—

No more the homespun lap wherein

I shook the walnuts down.

The wild grapes wait us by the brook,

The brown nuts on the hill,

And still the May-day flowers make sweet

The woods of Follymill.

The lilies blossom in the pond,

The birds build in the tree,

The dark pines sing on Ramoth Hill

The slow song of the sea.

I wonder if she thinks of them,

And how the old time seems,—

If ever the pines of Ramoth wood

Are sounding in her dreams.

I see her face, I hear her voice;

Does she remember mine?

And what to her is now the boy

Who fed her father’s kine?

What cares she that the orioles build

For other eyes than ours,—

That other hands with nuts are filled,

And other laps with flowers?

O playmate in the golden time!

Our mossy seat is green,

Its fringing violets blossom yet,

The old trees o’er it lean.

The winds so sweet with birch and fern

A sweeter memory blow;

And there in spring the veeries sing

The song of long ago.

And still the pines of Ramoth wood

Are moaning like the sea,—

The moaning of the sea of change

Between myself and thee!

THE CHANGELING.

OR the fairest maid in Hampton

They needed not to search,

Who saw young Anna Favor

Come walking into church,—

Or bringing from the meadows,

At set of harvest-day,

The frolic of the blackbirds,

The sweetness of the hay.

Now the weariest of all mothers,

The saddest two-years bride,

She scowls in the face of her husband,

And spurns her child aside.

“Rake out the red coals, goodman,

For there the child shall lie,

Till the black witch comes to fetch her,

And both up chimney fly.

“It’s never my own little daughter,

It’s never my own,” she said;

“The witches have stolen my Anna,

And left me an imp instead.

“O, fair and sweet was my baby,

Blue eyes, and ringlets of gold;

But this is ugly and wrinkled,

Cross, and cunning, and old.

“I hate the touch of her fingers,

I hate the feel of her skin;

It’s not the milk from my bosom,

But my blood, that she sucks in.

“My face grows sharp with the torment;

Look! my arms are skin and bone!—

Rake open the red coals, goodman,

And the witch shall have her own.

“She’ll come when she hears it crying,

In the shape of an owl or bat,

And she’ll bring us our darling Anna

In place of her screeching brat.”

Then the goodman, Ezra Dalton,

Laid his hand upon her head:

“Thy sorrow is great, O woman!

I sorrow with thee,” he said.

“The paths to trouble are many,

And never but one sure way

Leads out to the light beyond it:

My poor wife, let us pray.”

Then he said to the great All-Father,

“Thy daughter is weak and blind;

Let her sight come back, and clothe her

Once more in her right mind.

“Lead her out of this evil shadow,

Out of these fancies wild;

Let the holy love of the mother,

Turn again to her child.

“Make her lips like the lips of Mary,

Kissing her blessed Son;

Let her hands, like the hands of Jesus,

Rest on her little one.

“Comfort the soul of thy handmaid,

Open her prison door,

And thine shall be all the glory

And praise forevermore.”

Then into the face of its mother,

The baby looked up and smiled;

And the cloud of her soul was lifted,

And she knew her little child.

A beam of slant west sunshine

Made the wan face almost fair,

Lit the blue eyes’ patient wonder

And the rings of pale gold hair.

She kissed it on lip and forehead,

She kissed it on cheek and chin;

And she bared her snow-white bosom

To the lips so pale and thin.

O, fair on her bridal morning

Was the maid who blushed and smiled

But fairer to Ezra Dalton

Looked the mother of his child.

With more than a lover’s fondness

He stooped to her worn young face

And the nursing child and the mother

He folded in one embrace.

“Now mount and ride, my goodman

As lovest thine own soul!

Woe’s me if my wicked fancies

Be the death of Goody Cole!”

His horse he saddled and bridled,

And into the night rode he,—

Now through the great black woodland;

Now by the white-beached sea.

He rode through the silent clearings,

He came to the ferry wide,

And thrice he called to the boatman

Asleep on the other side.

He set his horse to the river,

He swam to Newburg town,

And he called up Justice Sewall

In his nightcap and his gown.

And the grave and worshipful justice,

Upon whose soul be peace!

Set his name to the jailer’s warrant

For Goody Cole’s release.

Then through the night the hoof-beats

Went sounding like a flail:

And Goody Cole at cock crow

Came forth from Ipswich jail.

THE WORSHIP OF NATURE.

HE ocean looketh up to heaven,

As ’twere a living thing;

The homage of its waves is given

In ceaseless worshiping.

They kneel upon the sloping sand,

As bends the human knee,

A beautiful and tireless band,

The priesthood of the sea!

They pour the glittering treasures out

Which in the deep have birth,

And chant their awful hymns about

The watching hills of earth.

The green earth sends its incense up

From every mountain-shrine,

From every flower and dewy cup

That greeteth the sunshine.

The mists are lifted from the rills,

Like the white wing of prayer;

They lean above the ancient hills,

As doing homage there.

The forest-tops are lowly cast

O’er breezy hill and glen,

As if a prayerful spirit pass’d

On nature as on men.

The clouds weep o’er the fallen world,

E’en as repentant love;

Ere, to the blessed breeze unfurl’d,

They fade in light above.

The sky is as a temple’s arch,

The blue and wavy air

Is glorious with the spirit-march

Of messengers at prayer.

The gentle moon, the kindling sun,

The many stars are given,

As shrines to burn earth’s incense on

The altar-fires of Heaven!

THE BAREFOOT BOY.

LESSINGS on thee, little man,

Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!

With thy turned up pantaloons,

And thy merry whistled tunes;

With thy red lip, redder still

Kissed by strawberries on the hill;

With the sunshine on thy face,

Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace!

From my heart I give thee joy;

I was once a barefoot boy.

Prince thou art—the grown-up man,

Only is republican.

Let the million-dollared ride!

Barefoot, trudging at his side,

Thou hast more than he can buy,

In the reach of ear and eye:

Outward sunshine, inward joy,

Blessings on the barefoot boy.

O! for boyhood’s painless play,

Sleep that wakes in laughing day,

Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,

Knowledge never learned of schools:

Of the wild bee’s morning chase,

Of the wild flower’s time and place,

Flight of fowl, and habitude

Of the tenants of the wood;

How the tortoise bears his shell,

How the woodchuck digs his cell,

And the ground-mole sinks his well;

How the robin feeds her young,

How the oriole’s nest is hung;

Where the whitest lilies blow,

Where the freshest berries grow,

Where the ground-nut trails its vine,

Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine;

Of the black wasp’s cunning way,

Mason of his walls of clay,

And the architectural plans

Of gray hornet artisans!

For, eschewing books and tasks,

Nature answers all he asks;

Hand in hand with her he walks,

Part and parcel of her joy,

Blessings on the barefoot boy.

O for boyhood’s time of June,

Crowding years in one brief moon,

When all things I heard or saw,

Me, their master, waited for!

I was rich in flowers and trees,

Humming-birds and honey-bees;

For my sport the squirrel played,

Plied the snouted mole his spade;

For my taste the blackberry cone

Purpled over hedge and stone;

Laughed the brook for my delight,

Through the day, and through the night:

Whispering at the garden wall,

Talked with me from fall to fall;

Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,

Mine the walnut slopes beyond,

Mine, on bending orchard trees,

Apples of Hesperides!

Still, as my horizon grew,

Larger grew my riches too,

All the world I saw or knew

Seemed a complex Chinese toy,

Fashioned for a barefoot boy!

O, for festal dainties spread,

Like my bowl of milk and bread,

Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,

On the door-stone, gray and rude!

O’er me like a regal tent,

Cloudy ribbed, the sunset bent,

Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,

Looped in many a wind-swung fold;

While for music came the play

Of the pied frogs’ orchestra;

And, to light the noisy choir,

Lit the fly his lamp of fire.

I was monarch; pomp and joy

Waited on the barefoot boy!

Cheerily, then, my little man!

Live and laugh as boyhood can;

Though the flinty slopes be hard,

Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,

Every morn shall lead thee through

Fresh baptisms of the dew;

Every evening from thy feet

Shall the cool wind kiss the heat;

All too soon these feet must hide

In the prison cells of pride,

Lose the freedom of the sod,

Like a colt’s for work be shod,

Made to tread the mills of toil,

Up and down in ceaseless moil,

Happy if their track be found

Never on forbidden ground;

Happy if they sink not in

Quick and treacherous sands of sin.

Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,

Ere it passes, barefoot boy!

MAUD MULLER.

AUD MULLER, on a summer’s day,

Raked the meadow sweet with hay.

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

Of simple beauty and rustic health.

Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee

The mock-bird echoed from his tree.

But, when she glanced to the far off town,

White from its hill-slope looking down,

The sweet song died, and a vague unrest

And a nameless longing filled her breast—

A wish, that she hardly dared to own,

For something better than she had known.

The Judge rode slowly down the lane,

Smoothing his horse’s chestnut mane.

He drew his bridle in the shade

Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid.

And ask a draught from the spring that flowed

Through the meadow across the road.

She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,

And filled for him her small tin cup,

And blushed as she gave it, looking down

On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.

“Thanks!” said the Judge, “a sweeter draught

From a fairer hand was never quaffed.”

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,

Of the singing birds and the humming bees;

Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether

The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.

And Maud forgot her briar-torn gown,

And her graceful ankles bare and brown;

And listened, while a pleased surprise

Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.

At last, like one who for delay

Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away.

Maud Muller looked and sighed: “Ah me!

That I the Judge’s bride might be!

“He would dress me up in silks so fine,

And praise and toast me at his wine.

“My father should wear a broadcloth coat;

My brother should sail a painted boat.

“I’d dress my mother so grand and gay,

And the baby should have a new toy each day.

“And I’d feed the hungry and clothe the poor,

And all should bless me who left our door.”

The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,

And saw Maud Muller standing still.

“A form more fair, a face more sweet,

Ne’er hath it been my lot to meet.

“And her modest answer and graceful air

Show her wise and good as she is fair.

“Would she were mine, and I to-day,

Like her, a harvester of hay:

“No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,

Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues,

“But low of cattle, and song of birds,

And health, and quiet, and loving words.”

But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,

And his mother, vain of her rank and gold.

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,

And Maud was left in the field alone.

But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,

When he hummed in court an old love-tune;

And the young girl mused beside the well,

Till the rain on the unraked clover fell.

He wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,

He watched a picture come and go;

And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes

Looked out in their innocent surprise.

Oft when the wine in his glass was red,

He longed for the wayside well instead;

And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms,

To dream of meadows and clover-blooms.

And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,

“Ah, that I were free again!

“Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay.”

She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door.

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain,

Left their traces on heart and brain.

And oft, when the summer sun shone hot

On the new mown hay in the meadow lot,

And she heard the little spring brook fall

Over the roadside, through the wall,

In the shade of the apple-tree again

She saw a rider draw his rein,

And gazing down with timid grace,

She felt his pleased eyes read her face.

Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls

Stretched away into stately halls;

The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,

The tallow candle an astral burned;

And for him who sat by the chimney lug,

Dozing and grumbling o’er pipe and mug,

A manly form at her side she saw,

And joy was duty and love was law.

Then she took up her burden of life again,

Saying only, “It might have been.”

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge!

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes;

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

MEMORIES.

 BEAUTIFUL and happy girl

With step as soft as summer air,

And fresh young lip and brow of pearl

Shadow’d by many a careless curl

Of unconfined and flowing hair:

A seeming child in every thing

Save thoughtful brow, and ripening charms,

As nature wears the smile of spring

When sinking into summer’s arms.

A mind rejoicing in the light

Which melted through its graceful bower,

Leaf after leaf serenely bright

And stainless in its holy white

Unfolding like a morning flower:

A heart, which, like a fine-toned lute

With every breath of feeling woke,

And, even when the tongue was mute,

From eye and lip in music spoke.

How thrills once more the lengthening chain

Of memory at the thought of thee!—

Old hopes which long in dust have lain,

Old dreams come thronging back again,

And boyhood lives again in me;

I feel its glow upon my cheek,

Its fulness of the heart is mine,

As when I lean’d to hear thee speak,

Or raised my doubtful eye to thine.

I hear again thy low replies,

I feel thy arm within my own,

And timidly again uprise

The fringed lids of hazel eyes

With soft brown tresses overblown.

Ah! memories of sweet summer eves,

Of moonlit wave and willowy way,

Of stars and flowers and dewy leaves,

And smiles and tones more dear than they!

Ere this thy quiet eye hath smiled

My picture of thy youth to see,

When half a woman, half a child,

Thy very artlessness beguiled,

And folly’s self seem’d wise in thee.

I too can smile, when o’er that hour

The lights of memory backward stream,

Yet feel the while that manhood’s power

Is vainer than my boyhood’s dream.

Years have pass’d on, and left their trace

Of graver care and deeper thought;

And unto me the calm, cold face

Of manhood, and to thee the grace

Of woman’s pensive beauty brought,

On life’s rough blasts for blame or praise

The schoolboy’s name has widely flown;

Thine in the green and quiet ways

Of unobtrusive goodness known.

And wider yet in thought and deed

Our still diverging thoughts incline,

Thine the Genevan’s sternest creed,

While answers to my spirit’s need

The Yorkshire peasant’s simple line.

For thee the priestly rite and prayer,

And holy day and solemn psalm,

For me the silent reverence where

My brethren gather, slow and calm.

Yet hath thy spirit left on me

An impress time has not worn out,

And something of myself in thee,

A shadow from the past, I see

Lingering even yet thy way about;

Not wholly can the heart unlearn

That lesson of its better hours,

Not yet has Time’s dull footstep worn

To common dust that path of flowers.

Thus, while at times before our eye

The clouds about the present part,

And, smiling through them, round us lie

Soft hues of memory’s morning sky—

The Indian summer of the heart,

In secret sympathies of mind,

In founts of feeling which retain

Their pure, fresh flow, we yet may find

Our early dreams not wholly vain!

THE PRISONER FOR DEBT.

OOK on him—through his dungeon-grate,

Feebly and cold, the morning light

Comes stealing round him, dim and late,

As if it loathed the sight.

Reclining on his strawy bed,

His hand upholds his drooping head—

His bloodless cheek is seam’d and hard,

Unshorn his gray, neglected beard;

And o’er his bony fingers flow

His long, dishevell’d locks of snow.

No grateful fire before him glows,—

And yet the winter’s breath is chill:

And o’er his half-clad person goes

The frequent ague-thrill!

Silent—save ever and anon,

A sound, half-murmur and half-groan,

Forces apart the painful grip

Of the old sufferer’s bearded lip:

O, sad and crushing is the fate

Of old age chain’d and desolate!

Just God! why lies that old man there?

A murderer shares his prison-bed,

Whose eyeballs, through his horrid hair,

Gleam on him fierce and red;

And the rude oath and heartless jeer

Fall ever on his loathing ear,

And, or in wakefulness or sleep

Nerve, flesh, and fibre thrill and creep,

Whene’er that ruffian’s tossing limb,

Crimson’d with murder, touches him!

What has the gray-hair’d prisoner done?

Has murder stain’d his hands with gore?

Not so: his crime’s a fouler one:

God made the old man poor!

For this he shares a felon’s cell—

The fittest earthly type of hell!

For this—the boon for which he pour’d

His young blood on the invader’s sword,

And counted light the fearful cost—

His blood-gain’d liberty is lost!

And so, for such a place of rest,

Old prisoner, pour’d thy blood as rain

On Concord’s field, and Bunker’s crest,

And Saratoga’s plain?

Look forth, thou man of many scars,

Through thy dim dungeon’s iron bars!

It must be joy, in sooth, to see

Yon monument uprear’d to thee—

Piled granite and a prison cell—

The land repays thy service well!

Go, ring the bells and fire the guns,

And fling the starry banner out;

Shout “Freedom!” till your lisping ones

Give back their cradle-shout:

Let boasted eloquence declaim

Of honor, liberty, and fame;

Still let the poet’s strain be heard,

With “glory” for each second word,

And everything with breath agree

To praise, “our glorious liberty!”

And when the patriot cannon jars

That prison’s cold and gloomy wall,

And through its grates the stripes and stars

Rise on the wind, and fall—

Think ye that prisoner’s aged ear

Rejoices in the general cheer!

Think ye his dim and failing eye

Is kindled at your pageantry?

Sorrowing of soul, and chain’d of limb,

What is your carnival to him?

Down with the law that binds him thus!

Unworthy freemen, let it find

No refuge from the withering curse

Of God and human kind!

Open the prisoner’s living tomb,

And usher from its brooding gloom

The victims of your savage code,

To the free sun and air of God!

No longer dare as crime to brand,

The chastening of the Almighty’s hand!

THE STORM.

FROM “SNOW-BOUND.”

Snow-bound is regarded as Whittier’s master-piece, as a descriptive and reminiscent poem. It is a New England Fireside Idyl, which in its faithfulness recalls, “The Winter Evening,” of Cowper, and Burns’ “Cotter’s Saturday Night”; but in sweetness and animation, it is superior to either of these. Snow-bound is a faithful description of a winter scene, familiar in the country surrounding Whittier’s home in Connecticut. The complete poem is published in illustrated form by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., by whose ♦permission this extract is here inserted.

♦ ‘permisssion’ replaced with ‘permission’

NWARNED by any sunset light

The gray day darkened into night,

A night made hoary with the swarm

And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,

As zigzag wavering to and fro

Crossed and recrossed the winged snow;

And ere the early bedtime came

The white drift piled the window-frame,

And through the glass the clothes-line posts

Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

So all night long the storm roared on:

The morning broke without a sun;

In tiny spherule traced with lines

Of Nature’s geometric signs,

In starry flake, and pellicle,

All day the hoary meteor fell;

And, when the second morning shone,

We looked upon a world unknown,

On nothing we could call our own.

Around the glistening wonder bent

The blue walls of the firmament,

No cloud above, no earth below,—

A universe of sky and snow!

The old familiar sight of ours

Took marvelous shapes; strange domes and towers

Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,

Or garden wall, or belt of wood;

A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,

A fenceless drift what once was road;

The bridle-post an old man sat

With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;

The well-curb had a Chinese roof;

And even the long sweep, high aloof,

In its slant splendor, seemed to tell

Of Pisa’s leaning miracle.

A prompt, decisive man, no breath

Our father wasted: “Boys, a path!”

Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy

Count such a summons less than joy?)

Our buskins on our feet we drew;

With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,

To guard our necks and ears from snow,

We cut the solid whiteness through,

And, where the drift was deepest, made

A tunnel walled and overlaid

With dazzling crystal: we had read

Of rare Aladdin’s wondrous cave,

And to our own his name we gave,

With many a wish the luck were ours

To test his lamp’s supernal powers.

ICHABOD.

The following poem was written on hearing of Daniel Webster’s course in supporting the “Compromise Measure,” including the “Fugitive Slave Law”. This speech was delivered in the United States Senate on the 7th of March, 1850, and greatly incensed the Abolitionists. Mr. Whittier, in common with many New Englanders, regarded it as the certain downfall of Mr. Webster. The lines are full of tender regret, deep grief and touching pathos.

O fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

For evermore!

Revile him not,—the Tempter hath

A snare for all!

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall.

Oh! dumb be passion’s stormy rage,

When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age

Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh to mark

A bright soul driven,

Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,

From hope and heaven?

Let not the land, once proud of him,

Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim

Dishonor’d brow.

But let its humbled sons, instead,

From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead,

In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honor’d, nought

Save power remains,—

A fallen angel’s pride of thought

Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul has fled:

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

Souvenir of Whittier

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

POET, ESSAYIST AND HUMORIST.

HIS distinguished author, known and admired throughout the English speaking world for the rich vein of philosophy, good fellowship and pungent humor that runs through his poetry and prose, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29th, 1809, and died in Boston, October 27th, 1894, at the ripe old age of eighty-five—the “last leaf on the tree” of that famous group, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Bryant, Poe, Willis, Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and others who laid the foundation of our national literature, and with all of whom he was on intimate terms as a co-laborer at one time or another.

Holmes graduated at Harvard College in 1829. His genial disposition made him a favorite with his fellows, to whom some of his best early poems are dedicated. One of his classmates said of him:—“He made you feel like you were the best fellow in the world and he was the next best.” Benjamin Pierce, the astronomer, and Rev. Samuel F. Smith, the author of our National Hymn, were his class-mates and have been wittily described in his poem “The Boys.” Dr. Holmes once humorously said that he supposed “the three people whose poems were best known were himself, one Smith and one Brown. As for himself, everybody knew who he was; the one Brown was author of ‘I love to Steal a While Away,’ and the one Smith was author of ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee.’”

After graduation Holmes studied medicine in the schools of Europe, but returned to finish his course and take his degree at Harvard. For nine years he was Professor of Physiology and Anatomy at Dartmouth College, and in 1847 he accepted a similar position in Harvard University, to which his subsequent professional labors were devoted. He also published several works on medicine, the last being a volume of medical essays, issued in 1883.

Holmes’ first poetic publication was a small volume published in 1836, including three poems which still remain favorites, namely, “My Aunt,” “The height of the Ridiculous” and “The Last Leaf on the Tree.” Other volumes of his poems were issued in 1846, 1850, 1861, 1875 and 1880.

Dr. Holmes is popularly known as the poet of society, this title attaching because most of his productions were called forth by special occasions. About one hundred of them were prepared for his Harvard class re-unions and his fraternity (Phi Beta Kappa) social and anniversary entertainments. The poems which will preserve his fame, however, are those of a general interest, like “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” in which the Yankee spirit speaks out, “The Voiceless,” “The Living Temple,” “The Chambered Nautilus,” in which we find a truly exalted treatment of a lofty theme; “The Last Leaf on the Tree,” which is a remarkable combination of pathos and humor; “The Spectre Pig” and “The Ballad of an Oysterman,” showing to what extent he can play in real fun. In fact, Dr. Holmes was a many-sided man, and equally presentable on all sides. It has been truthfully said of him, “No other American versifier has rhymed so easily and so gracefully.” We might further add, no other in his personality, has been more universally esteemed and beloved by those who knew him.

As a prose writer Holmes was equally famous. His “Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” “Professor at the Breakfast Table” and “Poet at the Breakfast Table,” published respectively in 1858, 1859 and 1873, are everywhere known, and not to have read them is to have neglected something important in literature. The “Autocrat” is especially a masterpiece. An American boarding house with its typical characters forms the scene. The Autocrat is the hero, or rather leader, of the sparkling conversations which make up the threads of the book. Humor, satire and scholarship are skilfully mingled in its graceful literary formation. In this work will also be found “The Wonderful One Horse Shay” and “The Chambered Nautilus,” two of the author’s best poems.

Holmes wrote two novels, “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel,” which in their romance rival the weirdness of Hawthorne and show his genius in this line of literature. “Mechanism in Thought and Morals” (1871), is a scholarly essay on the function of the brain. As a biographer Dr. Holmes has also given us excellent memoirs of John Lothrop Motley, the historian, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Among his later products may be mentioned “A Mortal Antipathy,” which appeared in 1885, and “One Hundred Days in Europe” (1887).

Holmes was one of the projectors of “The Atlantic Monthly,” which was started in 1857, in conjunction with Longfellow, Lowell and Emerson, Lowell being its editor. It was to this periodical that the “Autocrat” and “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” were contributed. These papers did much to secure the permanent fame of this magazine. It is said that its name was suggested by Holmes, and he is also credited with first attributing to Boston the distinction of being the “Hub of the solar system,” which he, with a mingling of humor and local pride, declared was “located exactly at the Boston State House.”

Unlike other authors, the subject of this sketch was very much himself at all times and under all conditions. Holmes the man, Holmes the professor of physiology, the poet, philosopher, and essayist, were all one and the same genial soul. His was the most companionable of men, whose warm flow of fellowship and good cheer the winters of four score years and five could not chill,—“The last Leaf on the Tree,” whose greenness the frost could not destroy. He passed away at the age of eighty-five still verdantly young in spirit, and the world will smile for many generations good naturedly because he lived. Such lives are a benediction to the race.

Finally, to know Holmes’ writings well, is to be made acquainted with a singularly lovable nature. The charms of his personality are irresistible. Among the poor, among the literary, and among the society notables, he was ever the most welcome of guests. His geniality, humor, frank, hearty manliness, generosity and readiness to amuse and be amused, together with an endless store of anecdotes, his tact and union of sympathy and originality, make him the best of companions for an hour or for a lifetime. His friendship is generous and enduring. All of these qualities of mind and heart are felt as the reader runs through his poems or his prose writings. We feel that Holmes has lived widely and found life good. It is precisely for this reason that the reading of his writings is a good tonic. It sends the blood more courageously through the veins. After reading Holmes, we feel that life is easier and simpler and a finer affair altogether and more worth living for than we had been wont to regard it.

The following paragraph published in a current periodical shortly after the death of Mr. Holmes throws further light upon the personality of this distinguished author:

“Holmes himself must have harked back to forgotten ancestors for his brightness. His father was a dry as dust Congregational preacher, of whom some one said that he fed his people sawdust out of a spoon. But from his childhood Holmes was bright and popular. One of his college friends said of him at Harvard, that ‘he made you think you were the best fellow in the world, and he was the next best.’”

Dr. Holmes was first and foremost a conversationalist. He talked even on paper. There was never the dullness of the written word. His sentences whether in prose or verse were so full of color that they bore the charm of speech.

One of his most quoted poems “Dorothy Q,” is full of this sparkle, and carries a suggestion of his favorite theme:

BILL AND JOE.

OME, dear old comrade, you and I

Will steal an hour from days gone by—

The shining days when life was new,

And all was bright as morning dew,

The lusty days of long ago,

When you were Bill and I was Joe.

Your name may flaunt a titled trail,

Proud as a cockerel’s rainbow tail:

And mine as brief appendix wear

As Tam O’Shanter’s luckless mare;

To-day, old friend, remember still

That I am Joe and you are Bill.

You’ve won the great world’s envied prize,

And grand you look in people’s eyes,

With HON. and LL.D.,

In big brave letters, fair to see—

Your fist, old fellow! off they go!—

How are you, Bill? How are you, Joe?

You’ve worn the judge’s ermined robe;

You’ve taught your name to half the globe;

You’ve sung mankind a deathless strain;

You’ve made the dead past live again;

The world may call you what it will,

But you and I are Joe and Bill.

The chaffing young folks stare and say,

“See those old buffers, bent and gray;

They talk like fellows in their teens!

Mad, poor old boys! That’s what it means”—

And shake their heads; they little know

The throbbing hearts of Bill and Joe—

How Bill forgets his hour of pride,

While Joe sits smiling at his side;

How Joe, in spite of time’s disguise,

Finds the old schoolmate in his eyes—

Those calm, stern eyes that melt and fill

As Joe looks fondly up at Bill.

Ah, pensive scholar! what is fame?

A fitful tongue of leaping flame;

A giddy whirlwind’s fickle gust,

That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;

A few swift years, and who can show

Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?

The weary idol takes his stand,

Holds out his bruised and aching hand,

While gaping thousands come and go—

How vain it seems, this empty show—

Till all at once his pulses thrill:

’Tis poor old Joe’s “God bless you, Bill!”

And shall we breathe in happier spheres

The names that pleased our mortal ears,—

In some sweet lull of harp and song,

For earth-born spirits none too long,

Just whispering of the world below,

Where this was Bill, and that was Joe?

No matter; while our home is here

No sounding name is half so dear;

When fades at length our lingering day,

Who cares what pompous tombstones say?

Read on the hearts that love us still

Hic jacet Joe. Hic jacet Bill.

UNION AND LIBERTY.

LAG of the heroes who left us their glory,

Borne through their battle-fields’ thunder and flame,

Blazoned in song and illuminated in story,

Wave o’er us all who inherit their fame.

Up with our banner bright,

Sprinkled with starry light,

Spread its fair emblems from mountain to shore,

While through the sounding sky

Loud rings the Nation’s cry—

Union and Liberty! One Evermore!

Light of our firmament, guide of our Nation,

Pride of her children, and honored afar,

Let the wide beams of thy full constellation

Scatter each cloud that would darken a star!

Empire unsceptred! What foe shall assail thee

Bearing the standard of Liberty’s van?

Think not the God of thy fathers shall fail thee,

Striving with men for the birthright of man!

Yet if, by madness and treachery blighted,

Dawns the dark hour when the sword thou must draw,

Then with the arms to thy million united,

Smite the bold traitors to Freedom and Law!

Lord of the universe! shield us and guide us,

Trusting Thee always, through shadow and sun!

Thou hast united us, who shall divide us?

Keep us, O keep us the Many in One!

Up with our banner bright,

Sprinkled with starry light,

Spread its fair emblems from mountain to shore,

While through the sounding sky

Loud rings the Nation’s cry—

Union and Liberty! One Evermore!

OLD IRON SIDES.

The following poem has become a National Lyric. It was first printed in the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” when the Frigate “Constitution” lay in the navy-yard at Charlestown. The department had resolved upon breaking her up; but she was preserved from this fate by the following verses, which ran through the newspapers with universal applause; and, according to “Benjamin’s American Monthly Magazine,” of January, 1837, it was printed in the form of hand-bills, and circulated in the city of Washington.

Y, tear her tatter’d ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle-shout,

And burst the cannon’s roar;

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,

Where knelt the vanquish’d foe,

When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,

And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor’s tread,

Or know the conquer’d knee;

The harpies of the shore shall pluck

The eagle of the sea!

O, better that her shatter’d hulk

Should sink beneath the wave;

Her thunders shook the mighty deep,

And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,—

The lightning and the gale!

MY AUNT.

Y aunt! my dear unmarried aunt!

Long years have o’er her flown;

Yet still she strains the aching clasp

That binds her virgin zone;

I know it hurts her,—though she looks

As cheerful as she can:

Her waist is ampler than her life,

For life is but a span.

My aunt, my poor deluded aunt!

Her hair is almost gray;

Why will she train that winter curl

In such a spring-like way?

How can she lay her glasses down,

And say she reads as well,

When, through a double convex lens,

She just makes out to spell?

Her father—grandpapa! forgive

This erring lip its smiles—

Vow’d she would make the finest girl

Within a hundred miles.

He sent her to a stylish school;

’Twas in her thirteenth June;

And with her, as the rules required,

“Two towels and a spoon.”

They braced my aunt against a board,

To make her straight and tall;

They laced her up, they starved her down,

To make her light and small;

They pinch’d her feet, they singed her hair,

They screw’d it up with pins,—

Oh, never mortal suffer’d more

In penance for her sins.

So, when my precious aunt was done,

My grandsire brought her back

(By daylight, lest some rabid youth

Might follow on the track);

“Ah!” said my grandsire, as he shook

Some powder in his pan,

“What could this lovely creature do

Against a desperate man!”

Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche,

Nor bandit cavalcade

Tore from the trembling father’s arms

His all-accomplish’d maid.

For her how happy had it been!

And Heaven had spared to me

To see one sad, ungather’d rose

On my ancestral tree.

THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS.

 WROTE some lines once on a time

In wondrous merry mood,

And thought, as usual, men would say

They were exceeding good.

They were so queer, so very queer,

I laugh’d as I would die;

Albeit, in the general way,

A sober man am I.

I call’d my servant, and he came:

How kind it was of him,

To mind a slender man like me,

He of the mighty limb!

“These to the printer,” I exclaim’d,

And, in my humorous way,

I added (as a trifling jest),

“There’ll be the devil to pay.”

He took the paper, and I watch’d,

And saw him peep within;

At the first line he read, his face

Was all upon the grin.

He read the next; the grin grew broad,

And shot from ear to ear;

He read the third; a chuckling noise

I now began to hear.

The fourth; he broke into a roar;

The fifth, his waistband split;

The sixth, he burst five buttons off,

And tumbled in a fit.

Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,

I watch’d that wretched man,

And since, I never dare to write

As funny as I can.

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

HIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,

Sails the unshadow’d main,—

The venturous bark that flings

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings

In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,

And coral reefs lie bare,

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;

Wreck’d is the ship of pearl!

And every chamber’d cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,

As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,

Before thee lies reveal’d,—

Its iris’d ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unseal’d!

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretch’d in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap, forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born

Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

OLD AGE AND THE PROFESSOR.

Mr. Holmes is as famous for his prose as for his poetry. The following sketches are characteristic of his happy and varied style.

THE BRAIN.

MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOL-MISTRESS.

A RANDOM CONVERSATION

ON OLD MAXIMS, BOSTON AND OTHER TOWNS.

(From “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”)

Souvenir of Holmes

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

POET, CRITIC, AND ESSAYIST.

HILE the popularity of Lowell has not been so great as that of Whittier, Longfellow or Holmes, his poetry expresses a deeper thought and a truer culture than that of any one of these; or, indeed, of any other American poet, unless the exception be the “transcendental philosopher,” Emerson. As an anti-slavery poet, he was second only to Whittier.

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819, and died in the same city on August 12, 1891, in the seventy-third year of his age. He was the youngest son of the Rev. Charles Lowell, an eminent Congregational clergyman, and was descended from the English settlers of 1639. He entered Harvard in his seventeenth year and graduated in 1838, before he was twenty. He began to write verses early. In his junior year in college he wrote the anniversary poem, and, in his senior year, was editor of the college magazine. Subsequently, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1840; but, it seems, never entered upon the practice of his profession. If he did it is doubtful if he ever had even that first client whom he afterwards described in a humorous sketch.

His first appearance in literature was the publication, in 1839, of the class poem which he had written, but was not permitted to recite on account of his temporary suspension from College for neglect of certain studies in the curriculum for which he had a distaste. In this poem he satirized the Abolitionists, and the transcendental school of writers, of which Emerson was the prophet and leader. This poem, while faulty, contained much sharp wit and an occasional burst of feeling which portended future prominence for its author.

Two years later, in 1841, the first volume of Lowell’s verse appeared, entitled “A Year’s Life.” This production was so different from that referred to above that critics would have regarded it as emanating from an entirely different mind had not the same name been attached to both. It illustrated entirely different feelings, thoughts and habits, evinced a complete change of heart and an entire revolution in his mode of thinking. His observing and suggestive imagination had caught the tone and spirit of the new and mystical philosophy, which his first publication had ridiculed. Henceforth, he aimed to make Nature the representative and minister of his feelings and desires. Lowell was not alone, however, in showing how capricious a young author’s character may be. A notable parallel is found in the great Englishman, Carlyle whose “Life of Schiller” and his “Sator Resartus,” are equally as unlike himself as were Lowell’s first two publications. In 1844, came another volume of poems, manifesting a still further mark of advancement. The longest in this collection—“The Legend of Brittany”—is, in imagination and artistic finish, one of his best and secured the first general consent for the author’s admission into the company of men of genius.

During this same year (1844) Mr. Lowell married the poetess, Maria White, an ardent Abolitionist, whose anti-slavery convictions influenced his after career. Two of Mrs. Lowell’s poems, “The Alpine Sheep” and the “Morning Glory” are especially popular. Lowell was devotedly attached to his singularly beautiful and sympathetic poet wife and made her the subject of some of his most exquisite verses. They were both contributors to the “Liberty Bell” and “Anti-slavery Standard,” thus enjoying companionship in their labors.

HOME OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

In 1845, appeared Lowell’s “Conversation on Some Old Poets,” consisting of a series of criticisms, and discussions which evince a careful and delicate study. This was the beginning of the critical work in which he afterward became so famous, that he was styled “The First Critic of America.”

Lowell was also a humorist by nature. His irrepressible perception of the comical and the funny find expression everywhere, both in his poetry and prose. His “Fable for Critics” was a delight to those whom he both satirized and criticised in a good-natured manner. Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne and Whittier, each are made to pass in procession for their share of criticism—which is as excellent as amusing—and Carlyle and Emerson are contrasted admirably. This poem, however, is faulty in execution and does not do its author justice. His masterpiece in humor is the famous “Biglow Papers.” These have been issued in two parts; the first being inspired by the Mexican War, and the latter by the Civil War between the states. Hosea Biglow, the country Yankee philosopher and supposed author of the papers, and the Rev. Homer Wilber, his learned commentator and pastor of the first church at Jaalem, reproduce the Yankee dialect, and portray the Yankee character as faithfully as they are amusing and funny to the reader.

In 1853, Mrs. Lowell died, on the same night in which a daughter was born to the poet Longfellow, who was a neighbor and a close friend to Lowell. The coincident inspired Longfellow to write a beautiful poem, “The Two Angels,” which he sent to Mr. Lowell with his expression of sympathy:

Quite in contrast with Lowell, the humorist, is Lowell, the serious and dignified author. His patriotic poems display a courage and manliness in adhering to the right and cover a wide range in history. But it is in his descriptions of nature that his imagination manifests its greatest range of subtilty and power. “The Vision of Sir Launfal” is, perhaps, more remarkable for its descriptions of the months of June and December than for the beautiful story it tells of the search for the “Holy Grail” (the cup) which held the wine which Christ and the Apostles drank at the last supper.

Lowell’s prose writings consist of his contributions to magazines, which were afterwards gathered in book form, and his public addresses and his political essays. He was naturally a poet, and his prose writings were the outgrowth of his daily labors, rather than a work of choice. As a professor of modern languages in Harvard College (in which position he succeeded the poet Longfellow); as editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” on which duty he entered at the beginning of that magazine, in 1857, his editorial work on the “North American Review” from 1863 to 1872, together with his political ministry in Spain and England, gave him, he says, “quite enough prosaic work to do.”

It was to magazines that he first contributed “Fireside Travels,” “Among My Books,” and “My Study Window,” which have been since published in book form. These publications cover a wide field of literature and impress the reader with a spirit of inspiration and enthusiasm. Lowell, like Emerson and Longfellow, was an optimist of the most pronounced type. In none of his writing does he express a syllable of discontent or despair. His “Pictures from Appledore” and “Under the Willows” are not more sympathetic and spontaneous than his faith in mankind, his healthful nature, and his rosy and joyful hope of the future.

In 1877, Mr. Lowell was appointed minister to Spain by President Hayes, and, in 1880, was transferred, in the same capacity to London. This position he resigned in 1885 and returned to America to resume his lectures in Harvard University. While in England, Mr. Lowell was lionized as no other minister at that time had been and was in great demand as a public lecturer and speaker. Oliver Wendell Holmes thus writes of his popularity with the “British Cousins:”

He delivered a memorial address at the unveiling of the bust of the poet Coleridge in Westminster Abbey. On his return to America, this oration was included with others in his volume entitled “Democracy and Other Addresses.” (1887).

As a public man, a representative of the United States Government, in foreign ports, he upheld the noblest ideals of the republic. He taught the purest lessons of patriotism—ever preferring his country to his party—and has criticised, with energy, and indignation, political evils and selfishness in public service, regarding these as the most dangerous elements threatening the dignity and honor of American citizenship.

Among scholars, Lowell, next to Emerson, is regarded the profoundest of American poets; and, as the public becomes more generally educated, it is certain that he will grow in popular favor. To those who understand and catch the spirit of the man, noticeable characteristics of his writings are its richness and variety. He is at once, a humorist, a philosopher, and a dialectic verse writer, an essayist, a critic, and a masterful singer of songs of freedom as well as of the most majestic memorial odes.

Unlike Longfellow and Holmes, Lowell never wrote a novel; but his insight into character and ability to delineate it would have made it entirely possible for him to assay, successfully, this branch of literature. This power is seen especially in his “Biglow Papers” as well as in other of his character sketches. The last of Lowell’s works published was “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses,” issued in 1892, after his death.

THE GOTHIC GENIUS.

FROM “THE CATHEDRAL.”

 SEEM to have heard it said by learned folk,

Who drench you with æsthetics till you feel

As if all beauty were a ghastly bore,

The faucet to let loose a wash of words,

That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse;

But, being convinced by much experiment

How little inventiveness there is in man,

Grave copier of copies, I give thanks

For a new relish, careless to inquire

My pleasure’s pedigree, if so it please—

Nobly I mean, nor renegade to art.

The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness,

Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,

The one thing finished in this hasty world—

For ever finished, though the barbarous pit,

Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout

As if a miracle could be encored.

But ah! this other, this that never ends,

Still climbing, luring Fancy still to climb,

As full of morals half divined as life,

Graceful, grotesque, with ever-new surprise

Of hazardous caprices sure to please;

Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern,

Imagination’s very self in stone!

With one long sigh of infinite release

From pedantries past, present, or to come,

I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth.

Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream,

Builders of aspiration incomplete,

So more consummate, souls self-confident,

Who felt your own thought worthy of record

In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop

Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill,

After long exile, to the mother tongue.

THE ROSE.

I.

N his tower sat the poet

Gazing on the roaring sea,

“Take this rose,” he sighed, “and throw it

Where there’s none that loveth me.

On the rock the billow bursteth,

And sinks back into the seas,

But in vain my spirit thirsteth

So to burst and be at ease.

Take, O sea! the tender blossom

That hath lain against my breast;

On thy black and angry bosom

It will find a surer rest,

Life is vain, and love is hollow,

Ugly death stands there behind,

Hate, and scorn, and hunger follow

Him that toileth for his kind.”

Forth into the night he hurled it,

And with bitter smile did mark

How the surly tempest whirled it

Swift into the hungry dark.

Foam and spray drive back to leeward,

And the gale, with dreary moan,

Drifts the helpless blossom seaward,

Through the breaking, all alone.

II.

Stands a maiden, on the morrow,

Musing by the wave-beat strand,

Half in hope, and half in sorrow

Tracing words upon the sand:

“Shall I ever then behold him

Who hath been my life so long,—

Ever to this sick heart fold him,—

Be the spirit of his song?

“Touch not, sea, the blessed letters

I have traced upon thy shore,

Spare his name whose spirit fetters

Mine with love forever more!”

Swells the tide and overflows it,

But with omen pure and meet,

Brings a little rose and throws it

Humbly at the maiden’s feet.

Full of bliss she takes the token,

And, upon her snowy breast,

Soothes the ruffled petals broken

With the ocean’s fierce unrest.

“Love is thine, O heart! and surely

Peace shall also be thine own,

For the heart that trusteth purely

Never long can pine alone.”

III.

In his tower sits the poet,

Blisses new, and strange to him

Fill his heart and overflow it

With a wonder sweet and dim.

Up the beach the ocean slideth

With a whisper of delight,

And the moon in silence glideth

Through the peaceful blue of night.

Rippling o’er the poet’s shoulder

Flows a maiden’s golden hair,

Maiden lips, with love grown bolder,

Kiss his moonlit forehead bare.

“Life is joy, and love is power,

Death all fetters doth unbind,

Strength and wisdom only flower

When we toil for all our kind.

Hope is truth, the future giveth

More than present takes away,

And the soul forever liveth

Nearer God from day to day.”

Not a word the maiden muttered,

Fullest hearts are slow to speak,

But a withered rose-leaf fluttered

Down upon the poet’s cheek.

THE HERITAGE.

HE rich man’s son inherits lands,

And piles of brick, and stone, and gold,

And he inherits soft white hands,

And tender flesh that fears the cold,

Nor dares to wear a garment old;

A heritage, it seems to me,

One scarce would wish to hold in fee.

The rich man’s son inherits cares;

The bank may break, the factory burn,

A breath may burst his bubble shares,

And soft, white hands could hardly earn

A living that would serve his turn;

A heritage, it seems to me,

One scarce would wish to hold in fee.

The rich man’s son inherits wants.

His stomach craves for dainty fare;

With sated heart he hears the pants

Of toiling hinds with brown arms bare,

And wearies in his easy chair;

A heritage, it seems to me,

One scarce would wish to hold in fee.

What doth the poor man’s son inherit?

Stout muscles and a sinewy heart,

A hardy frame, a hardier spirit;

King of two hands, he does his part

In every useful toil and art;

A heritage, it seems to me,

A king might wish to hold in fee.

What doth the poor man’s son inherit?

Wishes o’erjoy’d with humble things,

A rank adjudged by toil-worn merit,

Content that from employment springs,

A heart that in his labor sings;

A heritage, it seems to me,

A king might wish to hold in fee.

What doth the poor man’s son inherit?

A patience learn’d of being poor,

Courage, if sorrow come, to bear it,

A fellow-feeling that is sure

To make the outcast bless his door;

A heritage, it seems to me,

A king might wish to hold in fee.

O rich man’s son! there is a toil,

That with all others level stands;

Large charity doth never soil,

But only whiten, soft, white hands,—

This is the best crop from thy lands;

A heritage, it seems to me,

Worth being rich to hold in fee.

O poor man’s son! scorn not thy state;

There is worse weariness than thine,

In merely being rich and great;

Toil only gives the soul to shine,

And makes rest fragrant and benign;

A heritage, it seems to me,

Worth being poor to hold in fee.

Both, heirs to some six feet of sod,

Are equal in the earth at last;

Both, children of the same dear God,

Prove title to your heirship vast

By record of a well-fill’d past;

A heritage, it seems to me,

Well worth a life to hold in fee.

ACT FOR TRUTH.

HE busy world shoves angrily aside

The man who stands with arms akimbo set,

Until occasion tells him what to do;

And he who waits to have his task mark’d out

Shall die and leave his errand unfulfill’d.

Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds;

Reason and Government, like two broad seas,

Yearn for each other with outstretched arms

Across this narrow isthmus of the throne,

And roll their white surf higher every day.

One age moves onward, and the next builds up

Cities and gorgeous palaces, where stood

The rude log huts of those who tamed the wild,

Rearing from out the forests they had fell’d

The goodly framework of a fairer state;

The builder’s trowel and the settler’s axe

Are seldom wielded by the selfsame hand;

Ours is the harder task, yet not the less

Shall we receive the blessing for our toil

From the choice spirits of the after-time.

The field lies wide before us, where to reap

The easy harvest of a deathless name,

Though with no better sickles than our swords.

My soul is not a palace of the past,

Where outworn creeds, like Rome’s gray senate, quake,

Hearing afar the Vandal’s trumpet hoarse,

That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change;

Then let it come: I have no dread of what

Is call’d for by the instinct of mankind;

Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart

Because we tear a parchment more or less.

Truth is eternal, but her effluence,

With endless change, is fitted to the hour:

Her mirror is turn’d forward, to reflect

The promise of the future, not the past.

He who would win the name of truly great

Must understand his own age and the next,

And make the present ready to fulfil

Its prophecy, and with the future merge

Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave.

The future works out great men’s destinies;

The present is enough for common souls,

Who, never looking forward, are indeed

Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age

Are petrified forever: better those

Who lead the blind old giant by the hand

From out the pathless desert where he gropes,

And set him onward in his darksome way.

I do not fear to follow out the truth,

Albeit along the precipice’s edge.

Let us speak plain: there is more force in names

Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep

Its throne a whole age longer if it skulk

Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name.

Let us all call tyrants tyrants, and maintain

That only freedom comes by grace of God,

And all that comes not by His grace must fall;

For men in earnest have no time to waste

In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

THE FIRST SNOW-FALL.

HE snow had begun in the gloaming,

And busily all the night

Had been heaping field and highway

With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock

Wore ermine too dear for an earl,

And the poorest twig on the elm-tree

Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

From sheds new-roofed with Carrara

Came Chanticleer’s muffled crow,

The stiff rails were softened to swan’s down,

And still fluttered down the snow.

I stood and watched by the window

The noiseless work of the sky,

And the sudden flurries of snow-birds,

Like brown leaves whirling by.

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn

Where a little headstone stood;

How the flakes were folding it gently,

As did robins the babes in the wood.

Up spoke our own little Mabel,

Saying, “Father, who makes it snow?”

And I told of the good All-father

Who cares for us here below.

Again I looked at the snow-fall

And thought of the leaden sky

That arched o’er our first great sorrow,

When that mound was heaped so high.

I remembered the gradual patience

That fell from that cloud like snow,

Flake by flake, healing and hiding

The scar of our deep-plunged woe.

And again to the child I whispered,

“The snow that husheth all,

Darling, the merciful Father

Alone can make it fall!”

Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her;

And she, kissing back, could not know

That my kiss was given to her sister,

Folded close under deepening snow.

FOURTH OF JULY ODE.

I.

UR fathers fought for liberty,

They struggled long and well,

History of their deeds can tell—

But did they leave us free?

II.

Are we free from vanity,

Free from pride, and free from self,

Free from love of power and pelf,

From everything that’s beggarly?

III.

Are we free from stubborn will,

From low hate and malice small,

From opinion’s tyrant thrall?

Are none of us our own slaves still?

IV.

Are we free to speak our thought,

To be happy, and be poor,

Free to enter Heaven’s door,

To live and labor as we ought?

V.

Are we then made free at last

From the fear of what men say,

Free to reverence To-day,

Free from the slavery of the Past?

VI.

Our fathers fought for liberty,

They struggled long and well,

History of their deeds can tell—

But ourselves must set us free.

THE DANDELION.

EAR common flower, that grow’st beside the way,

Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,

First pledge of blithesome May,

Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold,

High-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they

An Eldorado in the grass have found,

Which not the rich earth’s ample round

May match in wealth—thou art more dear to me

Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.

Gold such as thine ne’er drew the Spanish prow

Through the primeval hush of Indian seas,

Nor wrinkled the lean brow

Of age, to rob the lover’s heart of ease;

’Tis the Spring’s largess, which she scatters now

To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand,

Though most hearts never understand

To take it at God’s value, but pass by

The offer’d wealth with unrewarded eye.

Thou art my trophies and mine Italy;

To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime;

The eyes thou givest me

Are in the heart, and heed not space or time;

Not in mid June the golden-cuirass’d bee

Feels a more summer-like, warm ravishment

In the white lily’s breezy tint,

His conquer’d Sybaris, than I, when first

From the dark green thy yellow circles burst.

Then think I of deep shadows on the grass—

Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze,

Where, as the breezes pass,

The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways—

Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass,

Or whiten in the wind—of waters blue

That from the distance sparkle through

Some woodland gap—and of a sky above,

Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.

My childhood’s earliest thoughts are link’d with thee;

The sight of thee calls back the robin’s song,

Who, from the dark old tree

Beside the door, sang clearly all day long,

And I, secure in childish piety,

Listen’d as if I heard an angel sing

With news from heaven, which he did bring

Fresh every day to my untainted ears,

When birds and flowers and I were happy peers.

How like a prodigal doth Nature seem,

When thou, for all thy gold, so common art!

Thou teachest me to deem

More sacredly of every human heart,

Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam

Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show,

Did we but pay the love we owe,

And with a child’s undoubting wisdom look

On all these living pages of God’s book.

THE ALPINE SHEEP.

It is proper, in connection with the writings of Lowell, to insert the following poem by his wife, Maria White Lowell, a singularly accomplished and beautiful woman, born July 8, 1821, married to the poet Lowell in 1844, died on the 22d of October, 1853. In 1855 her husband had a volume of her poetry privately printed, the character of which may be judged from the following touching lines addressed to a friend after the loss of a child.

HEN on my ear your loss was knell’d,

And tender sympathy upburst,

A little spring from memory well’d,

Which once had quench’d my bitter thirst,

And I was fain to bear to you

A portion of its mild relief,

That it might be a healing dew,

To steal some fever from your grief.

After our child’s untroubled breath

Up to the Father took its way,

And on our home the shade of Death

Like a long twilight haunting lay,

And friends came round, with us to weep

Her little spirit’s swift remove,

The story of the Alpine sheep

Was told to us by one we love.

They, in the valley’s sheltering care,

Soon crop the meadow’s tender prime,

And when the sod grows brown and bare,

The shepherd strives to make them climb

To airy shelves of pasture green,

That hang along the mountain’s side,

Where grass and flowers together lean,

And down through mists the sunbeams slide.

But naught can tempt the timid things

The steep and rugged path to try,

Though sweet the shepherds calls and sings,

And sear’d below the pastures lie,

Till in his arms his lambs he takes,

Along the dizzy verge to go:

Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,

They follow on o’er rock and snow.

And in these pastures, lifted fair,

More dewy-soft than lowland mead,

The shepherd drops his tender care,

And sheep and lambs together feed.

This parable, by Nature breathed,

Blew on me as the south wind free

O’er frozen brooks that flow unsheathed

From icy thraldom to the sea.

A blissful vision through the night

Would all my happy senses sway

Of the Good Shepherd on the height,

Or climbing up the starry way,

Holding our little lamb asleep,

While, like the murmur of the sea,

Sounded that voice along the deep,

Saying, “Arise and follow me.”

Souvenir of Lowell

BAYARD TAYLOR.

RENOWNED POET, TRAVELER AND JOURNALIST.

HE subject of this sketch ♦began life as a farmer boy. He was born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, January 11th, 1825. After a few years study in country schools he was apprenticed to a West Chester printer, with whom he remained until he learned that trade. In his boyhood he wrote verses, and before he was twenty years of age published his first book entitled, “Ximena and other Poems.” Through this book he formed the acquaintance of Dr. Griswold, editor of “Graham’s Magazine,” Philadelphia, who gave him letters of recommendation to New York, where he received encouragement from N. P. Willis and Horace Greeley, the latter agreeing to publish his letters from abroad in the event of his making a journey, contemplated, to the old world.

♦ “begun” replaced with “began”

Thus encouraged he set out to make a tour of Europe, having less than one hundred and fifty dollars to defray expenses. He was absent two years, during which time he traveled over Europe on foot, supporting himself entirely by stopping now and then in Germany to work at the printer’s trade and by his literary correspondence, for which he received only $500.00. He was fully repaid for this hardship, however, by the proceeds of his book (which he published on his return in 1846), “Views Afoot, or Europe as Seen with Knapsack and Staff.” This was regarded as one of the most delightful books of travel that had appeared up to that time, and six editions of it were sold within one year. It is still one of the most popular of the series of eleven books of travel written during the course of his life. In 1848 he further immortalized this journey and added to his fame by publishing “Rhymes of Travel,” a volume of verse.

Taylor was an insatiable nomad, visiting in his travels the remotest regions. “His wandering feet pressed the soil of all the continents, and his observing eyes saw the strange and beautiful things of the world from the equator to the frozen North and South;” and wherever he went the world saw through his eyes and heard through his ears the things he saw and heard. Europe, India, Japan, Central Africa, the Soudan, Egypt, Palestine, Iceland and California contributed their quota to the ready pen of this incessant traveler and rapid worker. He was a man of buoyant nature with an eager appetite for new experiences, a remarkable memory, and a talent for learning languages. His poetry is full of glow and picturesqueness, in style suggestive of both Tennyson and Shelly. His famous “Bedouin Song” is strongly imitative of Shelly’s “Lines to an Indian Air.” He was an admirable parodist and translator. His translation of “Faust” so closely adheres to Goethe’s original metre that it is considered one of the proudest accomplishments in American letters. Taylor is generally considered first among our poets succeeding the generation of Poe, Longfellow and Lowell.

The novels of the traveler, of which he wrote only four, the scenes being laid in Pennsylvania and New York, possess the same eloquent profusion manifest in his verse, and give the reader the impression of having been written with the ease and dash which characterize his stories of travel. In fact, his busy life was too much hurried to allow the spending of much time on anything. His literary life occupied only thirty-four years and in that time he wrote thirty-seven volumes. He entered almost every department of literature and always displayed high literary ability. Besides his volumes of travel and the four novels referred to he was a constant newspaper correspondent, and then came the greatest labor of all, poetry. This he regarded as his realm, and it was his hope of fame. Voluminous as were the works of travel and fiction and herculean the efforts necessary to do the prose writing he turned off, it was, after all, but the antechamber to his real labors. It was to poetry that he devoted most thought and most time.

In 1877 Bayard Taylor was appointed minister to Berlin by President Hayes, and died December 19th, 1878, while serving his country in that capacity.

THE BISON-TRACK.

TRIKE the tent! the sun has risen; not a cloud has ribb’d the dawn,

And the frosted prairie brightens to the westward, far and wan;

Prime afresh the trusty rifle—sharpen well the hunting-spear—

For the frozen sod is trembling, and a noise of hoofs I hear!

Fiercely stamp the tether’d horses, as they snuff the morning’s fire,

And their flashing heads are tossing, with a neigh of keen desire;

Strike the tent—the saddles wait us! let the bridle-reins be slack,

For the prairie’s distant thunder has betray’d the bison’s track!

See! a dusky line approaches; hark! the onward-surging roar,

Like the din of wintry breakers on a sounding wall of shore!

Dust and sand behind them whirling, snort the foremost of the van,

And the stubborn horns are striking, through the crowded caravan.

Now the storm is down upon us—let the madden’d horses go!

We shall ride the living whirlwind, though a hundred leagues it blow!

Though the surgy manes should thicken, and the red eyes’ angry glare

Lighten round us as we gallop through the sand and rushing air!

Myriad hoofs will scar the prairie, in our wild, resistless race,

And a sound, like mighty waters, thunder down the desert space:

Yet the rein may not be tighten’d, nor the rider’s eye look back—

Death to him whose speed should slacken on the madden’d bison’s track!

Now the trampling herds are threaded, and the chase is close and warm

For the giant bull that gallops in the edges of the storm:

Hurl your lassoes swift and fearless—swing your rifles as we run!

Ha! the dust is red behind him; shout, my brothers, he is won!

Look not on him as he staggers—’tis the last shot he will need;

More shall fall, among his fellows, ere we run the bold stampede—

Ere we stem the swarthy breakers—while the wolves, a hungry pack,

Howl around each grim-eyed carcass, on the bloody bison-track!

THE SONG OF THE CAMP.

IVE us a song!” the soldiers cried,

The outer trenches guarding,

When the heated guns of the camps allied

Grew weary of bombarding.

The dark Redan, in silent scoff,

Lay, grim and threatening, under;

And the tawny mound of the Malakoff

No longer belched its thunder.

There was a pause. A guardsman said,

“We storm the forts to-morrow,

Sing while we may, another day

Will bring enough of sorrow.”

There lay along the battery’s side,

Below the smoking cannon,

Brave hearts, from Severn and from Clyde,

And from the banks of Shannon.

They sang of love, and not of fame;

Forgot was Britain’s glory;

Each heart recalled a different name

But all sang “Annie Lawrie.”

Voice after voice caught up the song,

Until its tender passion

Rose like an anthem, rich and strong,—

Their battle-eve confession.

Dear girl, her name he dared not speak,

But, as the song grew louder,

Something on the soldier’s cheek

Washed off the stains of powder.

Beyond the darkening ocean burned

The bloody sunset’s embers,

While the Crimean valleys learned

How English love remembers.

And once again a fire of hell

Rained on the Russian quarters,

With scream of shot, and burst of shell,

And bellowing of the mortars!

And Irish Nora’s eyes are dim

For a singer, dumb and gory;

And English Mary mourns for him

Who sang of “Annie Lawrie.”

Sleep, soldier! still in honored rest

Your truth and valor wearing;

The bravest are the tenderest,—

The loving are the daring.

BEDOUIN SONG.

ROM the Desert I come to thee

On a stallion shod with fire;

And the winds are left behind

In the speed of my desire.

Under thy window I stand,

And the midnight hears my cry:

I love thee, I love but thee,

With a love that shall not die

Till the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the Judgment

Book unfold!

Look from thy window and see

My passion and my pain;

I lie on the sands below,

And I faint in thy disdain.

Let the night-winds touch thy brow

With the heat of my burning sigh,

And melt thee to hear the vow

Of a love that shall not die

Till the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the Judgment

Book unfold!

My steps are nightly driven,

By the fever in my breast,

To hear from thy lattice breathed

The word that shall give me rest.

Open the door of thy heart,

And open thy chamber door,

And my kisses shall teach thy lips

The love that shall fade no more

Till the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the Judgment

Book unfold!

THE ARAB TO THE PALM.

EXT to thee, O fair gazelle,

O Beddowee girl, beloved so well;

Next to the fearless Nedjidee,

Whose fleetness shall bear me again to thee;

Next to ye both I love the Palm,

With his leaves of beauty, his fruit of balm;

Next to ye both I love the Tree

Whose fluttering shadow wraps us three

With love, and silence, and mystery!

Our tribe is many, our poets vie

With any under the Arab sky;

Yet none can sing of the Palm but I.

The marble minarets that begem

Cairo’s citadel-diadem

Are not so light as his slender stem.

He lifts his leaves in the sunbeam’s glance

As the Almehs lift their arms in dance—

A slumberous motion, a passionate sign,

That works in the cells of the blood like wine.

Full of passion and sorrow is he,

Dreaming where the beloved may be.

And when the warm south-winds arise,

He breathes his longing in fervid sighs—

Quickening odors, kisses of balm,

That drop in the lap of his chosen palm.

The sun may flame and the sands may stir,

But the breath of his passion reaches her.

O Tree of Love, by that love of thine,

Teach me how I shall soften mine!

Give me the secret of the sun,

Whereby the wooed is ever won!

If I were a King, O stately Tree,

A likeness, glorious as might be,

In the court of my palace I’d build for thee!

With a shaft of silver, burnished bright,

And leaves of beryl and malachite.

With spikes of golden bloom a-blaze,

And fruits of topaz and chrysoprase:

And there the poets, in thy praise,

Should night and morning frame new lays—

New measures sung to tunes divine;

But none, O Palm, should equal mine!

LIFE ON THE NILE.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

POET AND JOURNALIST.

ITH no commanding antecedents to support him, Richard Henry Stoddard has, step by step, fought his way to a position which is alike creditable to his indomitable energy and his genius. Stoddard was born July 2, 1825, at Hingham, Mass. His father was a sea-captain, who, while the poet was yet in his early youth, sailed for Sweden. Tidings of his vessel never came back,—this was in 1835. The mother removed, the same year, with her son to New York, where he attended the public schools of the city. Necessity compelled the widow, as soon as his age permitted, to put young Stoddard to work, and he was placed in an iron foundry to learn this trade. “Here he worked for some years,” says one of his biographers, “dreaming in the intervals of his toil, and even then moulding his thoughts into the symmetry of verse while he moulded the moulten metal into shapes of grace.” At the same time he pursued a course of private reading and study, and began to write poems and sketches for his own pleasure.

It was in 1847 that the earliest blossoms of his genius appeared in the “Union Magazine,” which gave evidence that his mind as well as his body was toiling. In 1848 he issued a small volume of poems entitled, “Footprints,” which contained some pieces of merit; but he afterwards suppressed the entire edition. About this time his health failed and, to recuperate, he gave up, temporarily, his mechanical vocation; but literature took such possession of him that he never returned to the foundry.

In 1852 he issued his second volume entitled, “Poems,” and became a regular contributor to the magazines. In 1860 he was made literary editor of the “New York World,” which position he retained until 1870, and since 1880 he has held a similar position on the “New York Mail and Express.” He, also, from 1853 to 1873 held a government position in the Custom House of New York. During this time Mr. Stoddard also edited a number of works with prefaces and introductions by himself, among which may be mentioned the “Bric-a-Brac Series.” Prominent titles of the author’s own books are “Songs of Summer,” which appeared in 1856; “The King’s Bell,” a series of most delicate suggestive pictures, (1862); “Abraham Lincoln, A Horatian Ode,” (1865); “The Book of the East,” poems, (1871); a collective edition entitled, “Poems,” (1880), and “The Lion’s Cub,” poems, (1890).

One of our most eminent literary critics declares: “Mr. Stoddard’s mind is essentially poetical. All his works are stamped with earnestness. His style is characterized by purity and grace of expression. He is a master of rythmical melody and his mode of treating a subject is sometimes exquisitely subtle. In his poems there is no rude writing. All is finished and highly glazed. The coloring is warm, the costumes harmonious, the grouping symmetrical. His poetry always possesses a spiritual meaning. Every sound and sight in nature is to him a symbol which strikes some spiritual chord. The trees that wave at his window, and the moon that silvers his roof are to him things that play an intimate part in his existence. Thus in all his poems will be found an echo from an internal to an external nature, the harmony resulting from the intimate union of both.”

Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, the wife of the author, has shared heartily in the literary labors of her husband, assisting him in his compilations, and is, herself, author of numerous contributions to the magazines and a number of pleasing poems. She has also written several novels.

A dinner was given to Mr. Stoddard by the Author’s Club at the Hotel Savoy on March 25th, 1897, at which more than one hundred and fifty persons gathered to do honor to the venerable poet. Mr. E. C. Stedman, the poet, presided, and good talk abounded. It is impossible in this space to give any extended note of the addresses. Letters of regret were received from many friends of Mr. Stoddard who were unable to be present, including Bishop Potter, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. Andrew D. White, William Allen Butler, Donald G. Mitchell, James Whitcomb Riley and others.

The admirable letter of Donald G. Mitchell (the famous Ik Marvel), closed in these words:

“There is not one of you who has a truer relish for the charming ways in which that favorite poet can twist our good mother-English into resonant shapes of verse. I pray you to tell him so, and that only the weakness of age—quickened by this wintry March—keeps me from putting in an ‘Adsum,’ at the roll-call of your guests.”

The “Hoosier Poet” sent these lines to represent him:

Mr. Stoddard responded to Mr. Riley and others in the poem quoted below, which shows the vigor of mind and spirit enjoyed by this venerable poet of three score years and ten and five, on whom the snows of three-quarters of a century have fallen so lightly that they seem but to have mellowed rather than weakened his powers.

A CURTAIN CALL.

ENTLEMEN: If I have any right

To

come before you here to-night

It is conferred on me by you,

And more for what I tried to do

Than anything that I have done.

A start, perhaps, a race not won!

But ’tis not wholly lost, I see,

For you, at least, believe in me.

Comrades, nay, fellows, let me say,

Since life at most is but a play,

And we are players, one and all,

And this is but a curtain call,

If I were merely player here,

And this assumption of his part,

I might pretend to drop a tear,

And lay my hand upon my heart

And say I could not speak, because

I felt so deeply your applause!

I cannot do this, if I would;

I can but thank you, as I should,

And take the honors you bestow—

A largess, not a lawful claim;

My share thereof is small, I know,

But from your hands to-night is fame—

A precious crown in these pert days

Of purchased or of self-made bays;

You give it—I receive it, then,

Though rather for your sake than mine.

A long and honorable line

Is yours—the Peerage of the Pen,

Founded when this old world was young,

And need was to preserve for men

(Lost else) what had been said and sung,

Tales our forgotten fathers told,

Dimly remembered from of old,

Sonorous canticles and prayers,

Service of elder gods than theirs

Which they knew not; the epic strain

Wherein dead peoples lived again!

A long, unbroken line is ours;

It has outlived whole lines of kings,

Seen mighty empires rise and fall,

And nations pass away like flowers—

Ruin and darkness cover all!

Nothing withstands the stress and strain,

The endless ebb and flow of things,

The rush of Time’s resistless wings!

Nothing? One thing, and not in vain,

One thing remains: Letters remain!

Your art and mine, yours more than mine,

Good fellows of the lettered line,

To whom I owe this Curtain Call,

I thank you all, I greet you all.

Noblesse oblige! But while I may,

Another word, my last, maybe:

When this life-play of mine is ended,

And the black curtain has descended,

Think kindly as you can of me,

And say, for you may truly say,

“This dead player, living, loved his part,

And made it noble as he could,

Not for his own poor personal good,

But for the glory of his art!”

HYMN TO THE BEAUTIFUL.

Y heart is full of tenderness and tears,

And tears are in mine eyes, I know not why;

With all my grief, content to live for years,

Or even this hour to die.

My youth is gone, but that I heed not now;

My love is dead, or worse than dead can be;

My friends drop off like blossoms from a bough,

But nothing troubles me,

Only the golden flush of sunset lies

Within my heart like fire, like dew within my eyes!

Spirit of Beauty! whatsoe’er thou art,

I see thy skirts afar, and feel thy power;

It is thy presence fills this charméd hour,

And fills my charmed heart;

Nor mine alone, but myriads feel thee now,

That know not what they feel, nor why they bow;

Thou canst not be forgot,

For all men worship thee, and know it not;

Nor men alone, but babes with wondrous eyes,

New-comers on the earth, and strangers from the skies!

We hold the keys of Heaven within our hands,

The gift and heirloom of a former state,

And lie in infancy at Heaven’s gate,

Transfigured in the light that streams along the lands!

Around our pillows golden ladders rise,

And up and down the skies,

With winged sandals shod,

The angels come, and go, the messengers of God!

Nor do they, fading from us, e’er depart,—

It is the childish heart;

We walk as heretofore,

Adown their shining ranks, but see them nevermore!

Not Heaven is gone, but we are blind with tears,

Groping our way along the downward slope of years!

From earliest infancy my heart was thine;

With childish feet I trod thy temple aisle;

Not knowing tears, I worshipped thee with smiles,

Or if I ever wept, it was with joy divine!

By day, and night, on land, and sea, and air,—

I saw thee everywhere!

A voice of greeting from the wind was sent;

The mists enfolded me with soft white arms;

The birds did sing to lap me in content,

The rivers wove their charms,

And every little daisy in the grass

Did look up in my face, and smile to see me pass!

Not long can Nature satisfy the mind,

Nor outward fancies feed its inner flame;

We feel a growing want we cannot name,

And long for something sweet, but undefined;

The wants of Beauty other wants create,

Which overflow on others soon or late;

For all that worship thee must ease the heart,

By Love, or Song, or Art:

Divinest Melancholy walks with thee,

Her thin white cheek forever leaned on thine;

And Music leads her sister Poesy,

In exultation shouting songs divine!

But on thy breast Love lies,—immortal child!—

Begot of thine own longings, deep and wild:

The more we worship him, the more we grow

Into thy perfect image here below;

For here below, as in the spheres above,

All Love is Beauty, and all Beauty, Love!

Not from the things around us do we draw

Thy light within; within the light is born;

The growing rays of some forgotten morn,

And added canons of eternal law.

The painter’s picture, the rapt poet’s song,

The sculptor’s statue, never saw the Day;

Not shaped and moulded after aught of clay,

Whose crowning work still does its spirit wrong;

Hue after hue divinest pictures grow,

Line after line immortal songs arise,

And limb by limb, out-starting stern and slow,

The statue wakes with wonder in its eyes!

And in the master’s mind

Sound after sound is born, and dies like wind,

That echoes through a range of ocean caves,

And straight is gone to weave its spell upon the waves!

The mystery is thine,

For thine the more mysterious human heart,

The temple of all wisdom, Beauty’s shrine,

The oracle of Art!

Earth is thine outer court, and Life a breath;

Why should we fear to die, and leave the earth?

Not thine alone the lesser key of Birth,—

But all the keys of Death;

And all the worlds, with all that they contain

Of Life, and Death, and Time, are thine alone;

The universe is girdled with a chain,

And hung below the throne

Where Thou dost sit, the universe to bless,—

Thou sovereign smile of God, eternal loveliness!

A DIRGE.

 FEW frail summers had touched thee,

As they touch the fruit;

Not so bright as thy hair the sunshine,

Not so sweet as thy voice the lute.

Hushed the voice, shorn the hair, all is over:

An urn of white ashes remains;

Nothing else save the tears in our eyes,

And our bitterest, bitterest pains!

We garland the urn with white roses,

Burn incense and gums on the shrine,

Play old tunes with the saddest of closes,

Dear tunes that were thine!

But in vain, all in vain;

Thou art gone—we remain!

THE SHADOW OF THE HAND.

OU were very charming, Madam,

In your silks and satins fine;

And you made your lovers drunken,

But it was not with your wine!

There were court gallants in dozens,

There were princes of the land,

And they would have perished for you

As they knelt and kissed your hand—

For they saw no stain upon it,

It was such a snowy hand!

But for me—I knew you better,

And, while you were flaunting there,

I remembered some one lying,

With the blood on his white hair!

He was pleading for you, Madam,

Where the shriven spirits stand;

But the Book of Life was darkened,

By the Shadow of a Hand!

It was tracing your perdition,

For the blood upon your hand!

A SERENADE.

HE moon is muffled in a cloud,

That folds the lover’s star,

But still beneath thy balcony

I touch my soft guitar.

If thou art waking, Lady dear,

The fairest in the land,

Unbar thy wreathed lattice now,

And wave thy snowy hand.

She hears me not; her spirit lies

In trances mute and deep;—

But Music turns the golden key

Within the gate of Sleep!

Then let her sleep, and if I fail

To set her spirit free!

My song shall mingle in her dream,

And she will dream of me!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

ITHOUT the rich imagination of Stoddard, or the versatility of Stedman, Mr. Aldrich surpasses them both in delicate and artistic skill. His jewelled lines, exquisitely pointed, express a single mood or a dainty epigram with a pungent and tasteful beauty that places him easily at the head of our modern lyrical writers.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 11, 1836. In childhood he was taken to Louisiana, where he remained a number of years, his father being a merchant at New Orleans. After returning to Portsmouth, he was preparing for college when his father suddenly died, making it necessary for him to relinquish this design, to take a position of immediate remuneration, which he found in his uncle’s counting house in New York. This pursuit he found so far removed from the bent of his mind, however, that he gave it up after three years to take a situation as a reader in a New York publishing house. During his mercantile career he contributed to the current press, and afterwards became attached to various periodicals as contributor or in an editorial capacity. Among others, he worked on N. P. Willis’ “Home Journal,” the “Illustrated News,” and the “New York Evening Mirror.” During the Civil War he was for a time with the Army of the Potomac, as a newspaper correspondent. In 1865, he married, and removed to Boston, where he edited “The Weekly Journal” every Saturday. He remained with this paper until 1874. In 1881 he succeeded William Dean Howells as editor of the “Atlantic Monthly.” This position he resigned in 1890 in order to devote himself to personal literary work and travel. The degree of A. M. was conferred upon him in 1883 by Yale, and in 1896 by Harvard University.

Mr. Aldrich had published one volume of verse, “The Bells” (1854), a collection of juvenile verses, before the “Ballad of Baby Bell and Other Poems” appeared in 1858, and made his reputation as a poet. Other volumes of his poetry issued at the following dates are entitled: “Pampinea and Other Poems” (1861), “Cloth of Gold and Other Poems” (1873), “Flower and Thorn” (1876), “Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book” (1881), “Mercedes and Later Lyrics” (1883), “Wyndham Towers” (1889), “Judith and Holofernes, a Poem” (1896).

Among the prose works of the author we mention “Out of His Head, a Romance” (1862), “The Story of a Bad Boy” (1869),—which became at once a favorite by its naturalness and purity of spirit,—“♦Marjorie Daw and Other People” (1873), “Prudence Palfrey” (1874), “The Queen of Sheba” (1877), “The Stillwater Tragedy” (1880), “From Ponkapog to Pesth” (1883),“The Sisters Tragedy” (1890), “An Old Town by the Sea;” and “Two Bites at a Cherry and other Tales” (1893), “Unguarded Gates” (1895). “Complete Works,” in eight volumes, were published in 1897. Mr. Aldrich is said to be a man of the world as well as a man of letters and his personal popularity equals his literary reputation. We cannot better illustrate his companionable nature and close this sketch than by presenting the following pen picture of an incident, clipped from a recent magazine:

♦ ‘Majorie’ replaced with ‘Marjorie’

During a visit to England, upon one occasion, Mr. Aldrich was the guest of William Black, with a number of other well known people. An English journalist of some distinction, who had no time to keep in touch with the personality of poets, met Mr. Aldrich, and they became excellent friends. They went on long shooting expeditions together, and found each other more than good companions. The last night of their stay came, and after dinner Mr. Black made a little speech, in which he spoke of Mr. Aldrich’s poetry in a graceful fashion. The London journalist gave a gasp, and looked at Mr. Aldrich, who rose to make a response, as if he had never seen him before. As the poet sat down he leaned over him, and said:—

“Say, Aldrich, are you the man who writes books?”

“Yes,” Mr. Aldrich said. “I am glad you don’t know, for I am sure you liked me for myself.”

THOMAS B. ALDRICH’S STUDY.

ALEC YEATON’S SON.¹

GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720.