Text: John Forster (?), “[Review of The Poets and Poetry of America, etc.],” Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. 33, whole no. 64, January 1844, pp. 159-176

[page 159:]

ART I. — 1. The Poets and Poetry of American; with an Historical Introduction. By RUFUS W. GRISWOLD. Philadelphia. 1842

2. Voices of the Night, and other Poems. By [[By]] HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. London. 1843.

3. Poems. By WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. London. 1842.

4. Tecumseh; or, The West Thirty Years Since: a Poem. By GEORGE H. COLTON. New York. 1842.

5. Washington: a National Poem. Part I. Boston. 1843.

‘AMERICAN Poetry’ always reminds us of the advertisements in the newspapers, headed ‘The best Substitute for Silver:’ — if it be not the genuine thing, it ‘looks just as handsome, and is miles out of sight cheaper.’

We are far from regarding it as a just ground of reproach to the Americans, that their poetry is little better than a far-off echo of the father-land; but we think it is a reproach to them that they should be eternally thrusting their pretensions to the poetical character in the face of educated nations. In this particular, as in most others, what they want in the integrity of their assumption, they make up in swagger and impudence. To believe themselves, they are the finest poets in the whole world; before we close this article we hope to satisfy the reader that, with two or three exceptions, there is not a poet of mark in the whole Union.

The circumstances of America, from the commencement of her history to the present [column 2:] time, have been peculiarly unfavourable to the development of poetry, and if the people were wise they would be content to take credit for the things they have done, without challenging criticism upon the things they have failed in attempting. They have felled forests, drained marshes, cleared wildernesses, built cities, cut canals, laid down railroads (too much of this too with other people's money), and worked out a great practical exemplification, in an amazingly short space of time, of the political immoralities and social vices of which a democracy may be rendered capable. This ought to be enough for their present ambition. They ought to wait patiently, and with a befitting modesty, for the time to come when all this frightful crush and conflict of wild energies shall in some measure have subsided, to afford repose for the fine arts to take root in their soil and ‘ripen in the sun.’ It is not enough that there are individuals in the towing multitude afflicted with babbling desires for ease, and solitude, and books and green places; such dreamers are only in the way, and more likely to be trampled down in the blind commotion, than, like Orpheus, to still the crowd and get audience for their delicate music. There must be a national heart, and national sympathies, and an intellectual atmosphere for poetry. There must be the material to work upon as well as to work with. The ground must be prepared before the seed is cast into it, and tended and well-ordered, or it will become choked with weeds, as American literature, such as it is, is now choked in every one of its multifarious manifestations. As yet the American [page 160:] is horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, ready for all weathers, with an incredible genius for lying, a vanity elastic beyond com- prehension, the hide of a buffalo, and the shriek of a steam-engine; ‘a real nine-foot breast of a fellow, steel twisted, and made of horse-shoe nails, the rest of him being cast iron with steel springs.’ If anybody can imagine that literature could be nourished in a frame like this, we would refer him for final satisfaction to Dr. Channing, whose testimony is indisputable where the honour of his country is concerned. ‘Do we possess,’ he inquires, ‘what may be called a national literature? Have we produced eminent writers in the various departments of intellectual effort? Are our chief sources of instruction and literary enjoyment furnished from ourselves? We regret that the reply to these questions is so obvious. The few standard works which we have produced, and which promise to live, can hardly, by any courtesy, be denominated a national literature.’

How can it be otherwise? All the ‘quickening influences’ are wanted. Peopled originally by adventurers of all classes and castes, America has been consistently replenished ever since by the dregs and outcasts of all other countries. Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English, Irish, Welsh, and Scotch, have from time to time poured upon her coasts like wolves in search of the means of life, living from hand to mouth, and strug- gling outward upon the primitive haunts of the free Indians whom they hunted, cheated, demoralized, and extirpated in the sheer fury of hunger and fraudulent aggrandizement. Catholics, Unitarians, Calvinists and Infidels, were indiscriminately mixed up in this work of violent seizure and riotous colonisation, settling down at last into sectional democracies bound together by a common interest and a common distrust, and evolving an ultimate form of self-government and federal centralisation to keep the whole in check. This brigand confederation grew larger and larger every day, with a rapidity unexampled in the history of mankind,* by continual accessions from all parts of the habitable world. All it required to strengthen itself was human muscles; it lacked nothing but workmen, craftsmen, blood, bones, and sinews. Brains were little or nothing to the purpose — character, morality, still less. ‘A long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether,’ was the [column 2:] one thing needful. Every new hand was a help, no matter what brand was upon its palm. The needy and dissolute, tempted by the prospect of gain — the debased, glad to escape from the old society which had flung them off — the criminal, flying from the laws they had outraged — all flocked to America as an open haven of refuge for the Pariahs of the wide earth. Thus her population was augmented and is daily augmenting; thus her republics are armed; thus her polite assemblies and select circles are constantly enlivened by fresh draughts of kindred spirits and foreign celebrities — the Sheriff Parkinses, the General Holts, the town-treasurer Flinns, the Chartist secretary Campbells, and the numerous worthies who, having successfully swindled their own countrymen, seek an elegant retirement in the free states of the Union to enjoy the fruits of their plunder. The best blood America boasts of was injected into her at the time of the Irish rebellion, and she looks up with a justifiable pride, taking into consideration the peculiar quality of her other family and heraldic honours, to such names as those of Emmet and M’Nevin.

Can poetry spring out of an amalgam so monstrous and revolting? Can its pure spirit breathe in an air so fetid and stifling? You might as reasonably expect the vegetation of the tropics on the wintry heights of Lapland. The whole state of American society, from first to last, presents insuperable obstacles to the cultivation of letters, the expansion of intellect, the formation of great and original minds. There is an instinctive tendency in it to keep down the spiritual to the level of the material. The progress is not upwards but onwards. There must be no ‘vulgar great’ in America, lifted on wings of intellectual power above the level of the community. American greatness is only greater than all the rest of the world; at home, all individual distinctions are absorbed in the mass; and everything that is likely to interfere with that concrete idea, by exercising a disturbing mental influence on the surface, is cut down at once by a tyranny as certain in its stroke as the guillotine. The result is that whenever men of more than ordinary capacity have arisen in America, they have adapted themselves, forewarned of their fate, to the overruling exigencies in which they found themselves placed. Instead of venturing upon the dangerous experiment of endeavouring to elevate their countrymen to their own height, they have sunk into the arms of the mob. Hence America has never produced statesmen, but teems with politicians. Hence the judges on the bench constantly give way to popular clamour, and law itself is abrogated [page 161:] by the law-makers, and openly violated by its functionaries. Hence the total abnegation of all dignity, earnestness, truth, consistency, and courage, in the administration of public affairs. Hence the ascendency of Lynch- law over state-law; hence assassination in the daylight in the thronged streets; hence impunity to crime, backed by popular fury; hence the wild justice of revenge bearding the justice of the judicature in its own courts; hence the savage bowie-knife glittering in the band of the murderer on the floor of Congress, where if decency, or self- respect, the subjugation of passion, or a de- liberate sense of any sort of responsibility, existed anywhere in the country, we might hope to discover it; and hence that intimidation from without which makes legislation itself a farce, and which, trampling upon all known principles of human rights, has prohibited the discussion of slavery in the chambers, where discussion, to be of any value at all, ought to be free and above suspicion, exhibiting in the most comprehensive spirit a fearless representation of all classes, all interests, and all opinions. The ablest men in America have bowed down before these demoralizing necessities. They have preserved their own equivocal and insecure position fey a servile obedience to the masses. No man in America stands clear of this rotten despotism. No man dare assert his own independence, apart from the aggregate independence of the people. He has no liberty but theirs, and the instant he asserts the right of private judgment he is disfranchised of every other. So thoroughly and universally, is this acknowledged, so implicitly is it submitted to, that it nas long ceased to excite observation. It is one of the fundamental conditions of society; a matter of tacit usage, universal and unavoidable. It ranges with equal force throughout all orders, from the highest to the lowest. It even governs questions of taste, as it coerces questions of policy. The orator is compelled to address himself to the low standard of the populace: he must strew his speech with flowers of Billingsgate, with hyperbolical expletives, and a garnish of falsehoods, to make it effective, and rescue it from the chance of being serious or refined. The preacher must preach down to the fashion of his congregation, or look elsewhere for bread and devotion. The newspaper editor must make his journal infamous and obscene if he would have it popular; for let it never be supposed that the degradation of the American press is the work of the writers in it, but of the fright- ful eagerness of the public appetite for gross- ness and indecency — as one of these very poets, of whom we are about to speak, says, [column 2:] Not theirs the blame who furnish forth the treat; But ours, who throng the board and grossly eat.

We shall not be suspected of even a misgiving about the practical benefits of public liberty. But the case of America is no longer a safe example of the working of republican institutions, or of the experiment of universal franchise; something more is required in one direction, and a great deal less in another, to constitute her that which she claims to be, the ‘model republic’ of the world; and he who best appreciates the value of true liberty, will be the very last to applaud the condition of social anarchy into which America has fallen out of the very lap, as it were, of freedom. We must be careful to distinguish between use and abuse, the true and the counterfeit, the genuine and the spurious. The whole question is — what is liberty? A great authority, whose dictum will not be disputed at the other side of the water, tells us that liberty consists in the obedience of a people to laws of their own making. America presents the very converse of this proposition, and seems to have literally mistaken outrage and disorder and naked licentiousness for the assertion of personal and political rights. Her journalists, echoing back in frantic exultation this universal drunkenness of the people, openly glory in their profanities and perjuries, and in their having cast off every semblance of order, control, and moral responsibility. This is the crowning evidence of that depravity which rots like a canker at the core of American society. ‘Every element of thought,’ says the ‘leading journal’ of New York, in a passage we recently quoted from its scandalous columns, ‘society, religion, politics, morals, literature, trade, currency, and philosophy, is in a state of agitation, transition, and change. Everything is in a state of effervescence! 50,000 persons have taken the benefit of the act, and wiped out debts to the amount of 60,000,000 of dollars. In religion we have dozens of creeds, and fresh revelations starting every year, or oftener. In morals we have all sorts of ideas: and in literature everything in confusion. Sceptical philosophy and materialism seem, however, to be gaining ground and popularity at every step’

This is a portrait of American society, drawn by one who knows it well, and who is of all men the best qualified to describe it accurately. The literature that comes of it, and that is expressly addressed to it, must inevitably partake, more or less, of all these characteristics. It is essential to a national literature that it should have some standard of appeal in the settled tastes and habits of [page 162:] the people. But where is this to be found in the state of convulsion so faithfully delineated above? That there are educated and highly intelligent men in America, who look with sorrow upon the condition of their country, we are glad to acknowledge; but they form no class, and are not even numerous enough to produce any sensible effect upon the tone of the community. They are scattered over the face of the land, arc powerless for good by segregation and dispersion, and, giving them full credit for a grave desire to resist the malignant circumstances of their destiny, — are finally sucked into the whirlpool that surges and roars around them. A national literature craves the fosterage and protection of thoughtful minds, of cultivated leisure, of scholarship resident somewhere amongst the people, and constantly moulding and refining their usages, and raising gradually out of the mass an intellectual order of men to give a dignified and distinctive stamp to the national character. That such a result may yet be educed from the tangled and hideous democracy of America, we will not attempt to deny; although its accomplishment seems too remote for any useful speculation. But it is obvious that no such means exist in the United States for the production and sustentation of literature at present, and least of all for those forms of literature which make a direct appeal to the imagination. The one thing that goes down most successfully in America is money. This is the Real which has so effectually strangled the Ideal in its iron gripe. A bag of dollars is a surer introduction to the ‘ best society’ in America than the highest literary reputation. A famous author w ill be stared at, and jostled about, and asked questions, and have his privacy scared and broken in upon by impertinent curiosity; but a rich man moves in an atmosphere of awe and servility, and commands everything that is to be had in the way of precedence, and pomp, and circle-worship. As there must be an aristocracy everywhere of some sort, of blood, or talent, or titles, so America has made her election, and set up her aristocracy of dollars — the basest of all. It would be the greatest of calamities were it not also the greatest of burlesques; and there is hope that its essential absurdity may at length bring it into general contempt. People are sometimes laughed out of their vices, who cannot by any means be induced to reason upon them; and so it will happen, doubtless, in the fulness of time, with the aristocracy of America. It cannot be endured for ever. A sense of the ridiculous must one day set in, and the whole fabric must be smelted, and such proportion of ore as it may really [column 2:] contain will be separated from the dross with which it is now’ mixed up. Generals and colonels keeping whisky stores and boarding houses — titles of honour borrow’ed ‘ from the old world, and labelled upon the meanest of callings in the new, suggest such an irresistibly ludicrous association of ideas, that the Americans themselves, once they begin to see things in that aspect, must be glad to be relieved from a motley fool's costume which only excites the derision of other countries, making itself felt in shouts of laughter that may be said to come pealing upon them over the broad waters of the Atlantic. But in the meanwhile it interferes fatally with the culture of letters. The aforesaid bag of dollars, no matter how acquired — utter indifference to the honesty of the means of acquisition giving additional impetus to the naked passion for gain — is worth a dozen poets in America. The poets are keenly alive to their condition, and sometimes, in sheer self-defence, embrace the idol they despise, and through whose brazen ascendency they are themselves despised, They adopt the creed and practice of the ‘money-changers in the temple, and are ready at a moment's notice to take part in the sacrilege, to fall foul of the priests themselves, and slay them on their own altar.

We have collected all the publications containing American poetry we could procure. The titles of only a few of the most prominent will be found in the heading; for we have not thought it necessary to encumber the reader with an enumeration of books and ephemera which could not possibly interest him, and of which he is not likely ever to hear again. Through this mass we have laboured with diligence. We do not think a single versifier has escaped us; certainly not one who enjoys the least celebrity, We have drawn our materials from a variety of sources, occasionally from complete editions w hen such could be had, and, in lack of other means, from a huge anthology collected by a Mr. Griswold — the most conspicuous act of martyrdom yet committed in the service of the transatlantic muses.

The anthology is ‘got up’ in a style creditable to the American press. But we are loth to pay a compliment to the printers at the expense of the poets. The plan is something similar to the collections of English poetry by Southey, Campbell, and others. All the poetasters who could be scrambled together are crammed into the volume, which is very large, double-columned, and contains nearly five hundred pages. There is an ‘historical introduction’ (!) and a biographical notice prefixed to each name, and the specimens are, of course, the best that can [page 163:] be selected. By dint of hunting up all manner of periodicals and newspapers and seizing upon every name that could be found attached to a scrap of verse in the obscurest holes and corners, Mr. Griswold has mustered upwards of a hundred ‘poets.’ The great bulk of these we have no doubt were never heard of before by the multifarious public of the Union, and many of them must have been thrown into hysterics on awaking in their beds and finding themselves suddenly famous. The book is curious in this respect, that it not only assists us to a complete coup d’oeil of American poetry, but also to a running flavour of American criticism. But let us ‘suspend our admiration for a while.’

The whole batch is spread over a period of about eighty years. Within the same period England has given birth to Bums, Bloomfield, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, Crabbe, Wilson, Campbell, Rogers, Scott, Montgomery, Barry Cornwall, Leigh Hunt, Joanna Baillie, Tennyson, Talfourd, Knowles, Ingoldsby, and others who will live in the worlds memory, and who were oppressed by a difficulty from which America as a nation, with manners and inspirations of her own, was exempt — that of having been preceded by an illustrious race of poets, who had already occupied so large a space, as to render it a work of genius in itself to strike into ‘fresh fields and pastures new.’ We do not refer to these names by way of instituting, or even suggesting, a comparison. On the contrary, we mention them to put them out of court altogether, for it would be too much of a good thing to place them side by side with the Trumbulls, Frisbies, Alsops, Clasons, Crunches, Leggetts, Pikes, and the rest of the euphonious brood of American jinglers. But suppose some enthusiastic Griswold on this side of the water were to scrape up out of magazines and annuals a book, or books (for he might easily manufacture fifty such volumes), of English verse, belonging to that class which, for convenience, is called minor poetry, embracing specimens of Mrs. Cornwall Baron Wilson, Major Calder Campbell, Lord Gardner, Miss Eliza Cook, Miss Camilla Toulmin, Miss Skelton, Lady E. S. Wortley, the false Montgomery, the Hon. Julia Augusta Maynard, Swain, Bowles, Watts, Hervey, and a score or two more; — we can honestly assure the reader that, hopeless as such a collection would be, it would immeasurably transcend in freshness and intellectual vigour this royal octavo from the United States. The Delphic Oracle of old did not more cruelly beguile its questioners, [column 2:] than brother Jonathan is beguiled by the poetry of the Philadelphia press.

One grand element is wanted for the nurture of the poetical character in America: — she has no traditions. She started at once into life, rude, rugged, savage, self-confident. She has nothing to fall back upon in her history — no age of gold-no fabulous antiquity — no fairy-land. If she had carved a National Poetry out of her peculiar circumstances, she would have solved a philosophical doubt which can never again be tested by an experiment so vast and perfect in its kind. By a National Poetry we mean a poetry moulded and modified by the national mind, reflecting the character and life of the people, and reposing upon a universal faith. This does not seem to be a thing to be grown hi a season like maize or carrots, or to be knocked up on a sudden like a log-house. Yet it is in tins way the Americans seek to supply the want. Having no national poetry of their own, they import the national poetry of England, and try to adapt it to their own use; but it is an indigenous product, and cannot be transplanted without degeneracy. The lack of a poetical machinery is felt so forcibly that the poets are obliged to borrow foreign agencies, and work at second-hand. But how the poor fairies and hamadryads lose themselves in the American woods! — How the elves and sprites mope about in the dismal solitudes! Their enforced presence only reminds us the more painfully of the prosaic desolation of the land, which is so miserably destitute of all poetical appliances. America has not even a poetical name to ring the changes upon, and, in the last extremity of distress, the poets sometimes call her the Western Star! One of them, in a sort of despair, expresses serious doubts whether she has properly any distinctive designation whatever; and considering that America is the name of the whole continent; that Columbia, never actually adopted, is now ‘ repudiated that North America includes Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Texas; that the term United States applies equally to the Southern Con- federation; and that there is nothing left, native to the soil, except the ludicrous New England title of Yankee, it does seem as if he founders of the Republic forgot to give it a name.

The poetry of all other countries is distinguished by particular characteristics — by its forms, colouring, temperament. There is nothing of this kind in American poetry. It takes all forms and colours. It is national only in one sense — it never fails, opportunity serving, to hymn the praise of [page 164:]

Upon this point all the poets are unanimous. The want of historical elements is supplied by the intensity of the glorification. The two great subjects are Liberty end the Indians. Upon these two subjects, the poetical genius of the country runs riot, from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, from the Alleganies to the sea, with sundry significant exceptions in the south and west. Two more unfortunate topics could not have been hit upon. All men are born equal, says the declaration of independence; we are the freest of the free, says the poet; and so the slave-owner illustrates the proposition by trafficking in his own sons and daughters, and enlarging his seraglio to increase his live stock. He is his own lusty breeder of equal-born men. A curious instance of American liberty is cited by a traveller, who informs us that he knows a lady residing near Washington who is in the habit of letting out her own natural brother! As to the Indians, nothing can exceed the interest these writers take in their picturesque heads, and flowing limbs — except the interest they take in their lands. Nobody could ever suspect, while reading these fine effusions upon the dignity and beauty of the Indians, that they were written by people through whose cupidity, falsehood, and cruelty the Indians have been stripped of their possessions, and left to starve and rot; that while they were thus evincing the tenderest regard for the Indian nations in octo-syllabic verse, Congress was engaged, through its servants, in suborning Indian chiefs, and making them drunk to entrap them into deeds of sale of their hunting-grounds: and, as if these and similar atrocities were not enough to mark the difference between the poetry and the policy of the States, importing blood- hounds from Cuba to hunt the Indians of Florida! It is quite impossible to account for the incredible folly which tempts them to indulge in such themes, unless we refer it to the same infatuation which makes them boast of their morality in the face of their filthy newspaper press, and their honesty in the teeth of pocket-picking Pennsylvania.

It might be anticipated that the scenery of America would produce some corresponding effect upon her poetry, and that, if there were nothing else to stamp it with nationality, there would at least be found something like a reflection of the surrounding grandeur. But here the reader will be grievously disappointed. A spirit of dreary immensity settles down upon the descriptive verse, as if the mountains were too huge, the cataracts too awful, the forests too stupendous to be dealt with in the ordinary way; as if the [column 2:] sense were stunned rather than inspired by their magnitude. The result is that three- piled hyperbole which gives you exaggeration without distinctness, the turgidity and the vagueness of the false sublime. This is merely want of imagination. But aggravated bombast is not the only evil arising from the want of imagination; it sometimes falls down on the other side. We could bear to have Niagara tumbling double its depths into bathos, and the springs of Saratoga splashing the stars; but it is not so endurable to have grand natural objects stript of all their poetical associations, and examined with the naked eye of utilitarian calculation. Lakes, rivers, prairies are viewed sometimes in reference to their capabilities, as if they were merely auxiliaries to the great business of draining, clearing, and building. Colonization, or settling down, occupies an important phase in American life. It is the remote alternative to which every man looks in the event of being driven to extremity — it is the ready resource of a people w ho exist in a state of perpetual fluctuation, who are never sure of to-morrow, who are afflicted with an irresistible love of change and movement, and who are accustomed to contemplate without emotion the vicissitudes of a semi-barbarous mode of society. The novelty and strangeness of the settler's position are abundantly suggestive; but the American poet takes the matter as it is, literally” and has no conception of anything beyond the most common and trivial circumstances. He goes to work like a backwoodsman, and hews away until the thunders of the axe drive every image from the mind except that of struggling toil and its precarious tenement. All this may answer well enough in the United States, where wood and water are regarded chiefly as sources of profit and convenience; but it is nothing better than daily labour put into verse. Such subjects are not necessarily unpoetical, but penury and baldness of treatment sink them below’ criticism.

The earliest specimens of American poetry are of this class. The art seems to have struck its roots amidst the drudgery of tin woods and fields. The very first poet treats us to a succinct view of the life of the settler, recounts the severities of the winter and the calamities of the spring; how’ the worms destroy much of the corn before it is grown; how the birds and squirrels pluck it as it grows, and the racoons finally annihilate it in full ear; how, in lack of warm clothing, they are forced to put’ clout upon clout;’ how they are obliged to substitute pumpkins and parsnips for puddings and custards; and how, there being no malt, they are compelled [page 165:]

with a sly fling at some who were not over-satisfied with this style of living, and inviting others to supply their place:

and winding up with this commodious advice to the new-comers —

By way of extenuation for a heap of doggrel of this kind, Mr. Griswold reminds his readers that the early age of American colonization was not poetical — a piece of information he might have spared himself the trouble of communicating. ‘ Our fathers,’ he says, ‘were like the labourers of an architect; they planted deep and strong in religious virtue and useful science, the foundations of an edifice, not dreaming how great and magnificent it was to be. They did well their part; it was not meet for them to fashion the capitals and adorn the arches of the temple.’ If they ‘planted deep and strong,’ they did something which was not warranted by English grammar; but, setting aside their manner of planting temples, this little passage, although the writer is very innocent of such an intention, puts the poetical claims of America completely at rest. By fashioning capitals and adorning arches Mr. Griswold means the cultivation of poetry — or, as he expresses it a little higher up, ‘the poet's glowing utterance.’ It was not meet for ‘our fathers’ to trouble themselves with the graces of literature; they were too busy laying the foundations of the republic, and they left poetry and ‘ such small deer’ for those who came after them. Now this is exactly the experiment that has been tried in America, and in America alone. They began at the wrong end. They put the cart before the horse, and expect the whole world to wonder at the marvellous progress they have made. In all other countries poetry appeared first and utility afterwards, the slow fruit of necessity and experience. Mr. Griswold admits, that, in America, utility was all in all at the beginning, and poetry nothing; but, in the stupidity of his candour, cannot see how fatally, by that simple admission, he compromises the whole question at issue. It is not pretended that there was anything approaching to poetry in America until

after she had achieved her independence. ‘ The poetry of the colonies,’ says Mr. Griswold, in large type, meant to make a profound impression, ‘ was without originality, energy, feeling, or correctness of diction.’ This is meant to convey a severe sarcasm upon England, Mr. Griswold being again unconscious that he is all the time cutting the ground from under his own countrymen. The criticism, however, unfortunately for the argument it is meant to insinuate, applies with too much accuracy to nearly all the poetry that has been produced in America ever since. The independent manufacture is scarcely a shade better than the colonial article.

The earliest poet admitted into the recognized literature of the States, is one Philip Freneau. He died in 1832. We have no need to travel very far back for the Augustan age of America. The life and works of Freneau were as varied as those of his all-but namesake, Freney, the Irish rapparee. Failing in an attempt to get up a paper in New York, he was appointed to a place in one of the public offices; but this was too sedentary ‘ for a man of his ardent temperament,’ and he threw it up to conduct a journal of Philadelphia. The journal failed, and he went to sea in command of a merchant vessel; qualification being as little required in commanding American vessels as in writing American poetry. Like too many great men of antiquity, nothing more is known of Freneau, except that he lived in Philadelphia in 1810, and had a house burned in New Jersey in 1815; but whether, in the ardour of his temperament, he burned it himself, or somebody burned it for him, does not appear. He wrote satires, songs, politics, and naval ballads, and even contemplated an epic; but some of these pieces, Mr. Griswold says, were ‘ deserving of little praise for their chasteness.’ They enjoyed unbounded popularity for all that, and his songs were sung everywhere with enthusiasm — a practical commentary on the ‘religious virtue’ in which the great edifice was planted. We will not trouble the reader with any specimens of this patriarchal poet, whose principal merit consists in having been born before those who came after him.

The declaration of independence threw all the small wits into a state of effervescence. The crudest talent for tagging verses and scribbling songs ad captandum was hailed as a miracle; and some estimate may be formed of the taste of the people by a glance at one or two of the ballads which stirred their blood to battle, and ‘like a trumpet made their spirits dance.’ The two emphatically national songs of America are those [page 166:] entitled ‘ Hail, Columbia,’ and ‘The Star-spangled Banner.’ These songs are still as popular as ever. Mr. Griswold assures us, that they are ‘ as well known throughout the United States as the Rhine Song in Germany, or the Marseilles [?] Hymn in France.’ The former was written by no less a person than the ‘ late excellent Judge Hopkinson,’ and opens like a cannonade.

The poet has no sooner given them credit for their good sense in enjoying the blessings of peace when the war was over, than he recommends them to raise an altar to the skies, and rally round their liberty; and in the opening of the next stanza he calls upon them, rather unexpectedly, to go to war again:

This standing invitation to go to war, although there be no foe to fight withal, hits off with felicity the empty bluster of the national character. This call upon the ‘immortal patriots’ to ‘rise once more’ is sung at all hours in every corner of the Union by men, women, and children; and it is very likely that every day the ‘heaven- born band’ get up out of their beds they believe they are actually rising once more to defend their rights and their shore. This is the key to the popularity of ‘Hail, Columbia.’ It flatters the heroic qualities of the people, without making any further requisition upon their valour than that they shall implicitly believe in it themselves. ‘The Star-spangled Banner’ is constructed on the same principle, and blows the ‘heaven-born’ bubble with equal enthusiasm; closing with the vivacity of a cock that knows when to crow on the summit of its odoriferous hill.

These are genuine samples of the cock-a- doodle-doo style of warlike ballads. But the most remarkable writer of this class was Robert Paine, a heaven-born genius, who is said to have ruined himself by his love of the ‘wine-cup’ — which is American for [column 2:] mint-julep and gin-sling. He was so depraved in his tastes, and so insensible to the elegant aspirations of his family as to marry an actress! It is amusing and instructive to learn from the American editor that this monstrous union between two professors of two kindred arts was regarded with such genteel horror in the republican circles as to lead to poor Paine's ‘exclusion from fashionable society, and to a disagreement with his father, which lasted till his death!’ The false nature of all this is as striking as its pseudo fine breeding; and it show s now much bigotry and intolerance may be packed under the surface of a large pretension to liberality and social justice. Certainly there is nothing so vulgar and base as American refinement — nothing so coarse as American delicacy — nothing so tyrannical as American freedom. The worthy woman in the comedy who cries out at every turn, ‘ What will Mrs. Grundy say?’ is the exact type of the fashionable society of America. It lives in constant terror of its dignity, and is as much afraid of catching any contagion in its polite manners as honest people would be of incurring a public shame. A marriage with an actress is punished by a sentence of ostracism; as if the actress might not be, and out of the very joyousness and spirituality of her life had not a fair chance of being, a hundred times more intellectual and loveable in mind and heart than the whole mob of her persecutors. In England, where we have a legitimate frame-work of society, and something at stake in the intermixture of orders, marriages of this kind, in spite of a little begging of the question between aristocracy and art, are frequent enough for the vindication of poor humanity. American exclusiveness would be abominably shocked at an enumeration of the people who have married from the stage into high life, and done honour to it in the end. Lady Herbert married Beard, the singer; Lady Bertie married Gallini, the dancer; Lady Susan Strangeways conferred her lustre on O’Brien, the comedian; Mrs. Robinson became Lady Peterborough; Lavinia Fenton became Duchess of Bolton; Miss Bolton was married to Lord Thurlow; Miss Brunton to the Earl Craven; Miss Farren to the Earl of Derby; Harriet Mellon to the Duke of St. Albans; Miss O’Neill to Sir Wrixon Beecher; a catalogue which might be advantageously enlarged by the introduction of the names of Miss Tree, Miss Searle, and twenty others. It is not worth while to ask why the actress, w ho may thus ascend to rank and prosperity in England, is not permitted by the Americans to pass ‘ between the wind and their gentility.’ [page 167:]

But to return to Robert Paine. Notwithstanding his evil reputation, he was the most popular of all the poets. Perhaps, if the truth were known, his bad character helped him on by stimulating the morbid curiosity of those who affected in public to abhor his practices, while they read his verses with avidity in private. Certain it is that his poems had an enormous sale, since he was paid no less than fifteen hundred dollars for a single poem; which was at the rate of upwards of one pound English per line. For a song of half a dozen stanzas, called ‘Adams and Liberty,’ he received seven hundred and fifty dollars, equal to 150l. of our money. This song is regarded as his chef-d’oeuvre, and the following stanza is pronounced to be the best it contains. If payment and popularity go for anything, it ought to be the best in the whole range of the American Helicon.

If he had made Franklin turn his sword in- to a conductor, it would have been more to the purpose; although that prudent philosopher would scarcely have attempted the feat with the thunder, whatever experiments he might have tried with the lightning. The American editor observes that ‘the absurd estimate of this gentleman's abilities shows the wretched condition of taste and criticism in his time? This is frank at all events; but what shall be said for the taste and criticism of the present time, when the still more deplorable trash of Judge Hopkinson is regarded as an article of faith? Paine, with all his faults, had a certain fantastic wildness in his verse not ill calculated to fascinate the ignorant; but he married an actress, and was not to be forgiven. Decency demanded that he should be offered up as a victim to the outraged decorum of fashionable society

Ascending from the popular ballad-makers who, in America, occupy the lowest rank,

let us turn to the poems of James Gates I Percival. This gentleman is a very voluminous writer, and enjoys great credit in the States. If he have not the ‘inspiration,’ he has at least the ‘melancholy madness’ of poetry, for he is said to take no delight in any society but that of his books or the [column 2:] fields. His critics describe him as being possessed in an eminent degree of the ‘creative faculty’ and a ‘versatile genius;’ which is true in this sense — he writes a great deal, on a variety of subjects; a description which seems to include his whole merit. He aims at realizing the greatest possible quantity of words with the fewest possible number of ideas; and sometimes without any ideas at all. He speaks of the ‘poetic feeling’ as sitting at a banquet with ‘celestial forms’ as lovely as ever haunted wood and wave when earth was peopled:

This is a fair specimen. If it be asked which is ‘mighty as the gods’ — the ‘poetic feeling,’ ‘the celestial forms,’ or the ‘nymph and naiad?’ — whether the ‘palace’ is Olympus and the clouds, or Olympus only? — which bore that awful grandeur on his features, the ‘gods’ or the ‘clouds’ — and what is meant by bowing the eye, unless it be gouging? we cannot answer. We have no notion w hat it all means; and we are in the same dilemma with the bulk of Mr. Percival's poetry. It is only fair, however, to mention that he candidly avows his opinion that poetry ought to ‘foam up with the spirit of life, and glow with the rainbow's of a glad inspiration? Under such circumstances perhaps his verse is as good as can be expected.

John Pierpont, a barrister of reputation, is celebrated as the author of a work called the ‘Airs of Palestine,’ in which the influence of music is traced through a variety of illustrations. He has also produced numerous short pieces in a variety of metres, impressed for the most part with an earnest piety and cheerful benevolence, which entitle him to the full respect of his readers. A poet of this description rarely commits himself to absurdities, and he is accordingly tolerably free from the usual excesses of imagery and expression; but little more can be said for him. The grain of his poetry is irretrievably commonplace. Like all the rest, he has his son's of triumph and congratulation on the victories of the revolution. In one of these, having dismissed the subject of war, he makes a stirring apostrophe to the ‘God of Peace.’

It is a curious tendency in the American mind to be thus eternally invoking the God of Peace to lead them on to battle. Mr. Pierpont will not be satisfied without another revolution and innumerable Washingtons, to establish on a lasting basis the belligerent tranquillity of America.

Amongst the didactic poets, Charles Sprague occupies a high position. He is cashier of the Globe Bank in Massachusetts, mixes very little in society, and never was thirty miles from his native city. The effect of this life-long monotony is palpable in his verse, which is evolved from a study of books with little fancy and less originality. His principal poem, ‘Curiosity,’ is a sample of what the American critics call an elegant mediocrity but the elegance is by no means so apparent as the mediocrity. The best passages are mechanically constructed on the model of Pope, and not always with success. The failure is most conspicuous where he attempts to imitate the polished irony of the English satirist; thus speaking of the corruption and dishonesty of the news- paper press:

Pope would hardly have made even Ned Ward toss coppers to determine which side of a question he should take. But the comparison has obviously a peculiar force and fitness in its application to the American writers; and if we were to Select a satire in which the low state of the public taste and intelligence is fairly, fearlessly, and most appropriately depicted, we should certainly choose this poem of ‘Curiosity.’ It is honest, at all events, and bespeaks a just, although a very inferior mind.

Dana, the author of the ‘ Buccaneer,’ and Drake, who has written a pretty little poem called the ‘Culprit Fay,’ may be dismissed as agreeable versifiers. Neither of them rises above the display of neat dexterity, and neither possesses any sustaining power. The ‘Buccaneer’ is a hobgoblin pirate story, not unskilfully related, but terminating with an abruptness fatal to its final impression. With the single exception of the ‘Culprit Fay,’ Drake has produced nothing worth remembering. Sometimes he wrote so ill that, in the end, he had the good sense to wish to be forgotten. In one of his odes, for instance, he favours us with the following comical account, intended to be highly poetical, of the origin of the stripes and stars in the American flag:

This word ‘baldric’ is in great’ request. The Americans make heavy demands on the vocabulary of chivalry, at the manifest risk of the most ludicrous associations of ideas.

One of the most formidable metrical productions of the union is the narrative romance of ‘Tecumseh.’ It occupies a whole volume to itself, and is intended as a record of the western tribes, now rapidly passing into oblivion. The measure is fitful and irregular, after the manner of Scott; but miserably deficient in that variety of melody which can alone carry the attention over so extended a surface. It is not easy to understand why Mr. Colton did not prefer prose as the medium of his Indian story. He writes very sensible prose and execrable verse. But teaching cannot make poets, and it would be idle to enter into details. In the same category may be included the author of a poem of tremendous pretensions, called ‘Washington,’ expressly designed by the author to be the National Epic. Dr. Channing's remarks on the deficiencies of the national literature made a deep impression on him, and he resolved to do something to relieve his country from the disgraceful imputation. ‘I determined,’ he exclaims, ‘to write a national poem.’ But he found he could not write the poem and carry on his business at the same time; what was he to do in such an awful ‘fix?’ Why, like a prudent man, carry on his business first and write his poem after to be sure. ‘I made it a matter of conscience,’ he says, ‘not to spoil a good man of business in order to make a bad poet.’ So he worked at his trade till he made money, then retired upon his imagination to make a poem. We believe the case is quite new in the history of epics. But then so is the epic itself. The subject is boldly announced, how

But the folks were not to be reared or trampled upon. No-they had a soul above kings. Their course was clear,

Washington advises them to strike while the iron is hot, and undertakes, on his part, to raise the people in a single night. [page 169:]

He comes home in the evening, and finds his wife at tea —

But it is no time for tea-drinking — he begs to be excused —

This is quite enough for a taste of an American epic. The author says he is gathering the effect of its publication from ‘the loophole of retreat.’ We hope it is a ‘ retreat’ provided for him by his friends; in which case, we advise them to stop up the ‘loophole,’ as communication with the outer world, in his present state, can only increase his excitement.

The poem of ‘Washington’ appears to have been composed under the impression that America had not hitherto produced a work of heroic dimensions. This is a mistake. She boasts of no less than two previous epics: the ‘Conquest of Canaan,’ by Dwight, in eleven books — a dismal load of very blank verse; and the ‘Colombiad,’ by Barlow, a work of twenty years’ gestation, which we are relieved from noticing by Mr. Griswold, who declares that it has neither unity, strength, nor passion, that it is sometimes incorrect and often inelegant, yet that it has ‘ many bursts of eloquence and patriotism.’ He does not inform us how many bursts go to an epic poem. If we may judge by the number of candidates for admission, the ‘ retreats’ of the poets ought to be capacious. Mr. Gallagher ought to be provided for, who apostrophizes the west in this style —

Mr. Neal, who says that he loves to dream of ‘shadowy hair and half-shut eyes,’ and describes the head of a poet with large eyes,

betrays dangerous symptoms.

We find a pleasant relief from these distressing hallucinations in the poems of Alfred B. Street. He is a descriptive poet, and at the head of his class. His pictures of American scenery are full of gusto and freshness; sometimes too wild and diffuse, but always true and healthful. The opening of a piece called the ‘Settler,’ is very striking.

His poems are very unequal, and none of them can be cited as being complete in its kind. He runs into a false luxuriance in the ardour of his love of nature, and in the wastefulness of a lively, but not large imagination; and like Browne, the author of the ‘Pastorals,’ he continually sacrifices general truth to particular details, making un-likenesses by the crowding and closeness of his touches. Yet with all his faults his poems cannot be read without pleasure.

There are several female poets in America; but only one who deserves to be especially distinguished — Mrs. Brooks, formerly known as Maria del Occidente. The poem of ‘Zophiel,’ originally published in London, is a work of singular merit; fantastic and passionate to a height, rarely, if ever before, reached by the genius of a woman. The conception is no less remarkable than the almost masculine vigour with which the author wrestles against the difficulties of the obstructive stanza which she has infelicitously chosen. But nobody reads ‘Zophiel? The tasteless splendour of the diction wearies the ear; the passion is too fervid, the style too strained for enjoyment. She writes like a prodigal, and squanders her brilliant powers as if they were so much loose cash. The only wonder is, that she does not exhaust herself as well as her readers. Leisurely criticism alone will ever bestow patience enough on ‘Zophiel,’ to extricate its spiritual beauty from the mass of glittering phrases under which it is buried. The feeble verbosity of Mrs. Sigourney — who is usually advertised, as if it were something to boast of, as the American Hernans — is familiar to all readers of Annuals. For the lady-like inanity of her lines, we can imagine many excuses; but none for her habit of putting words to the torture — such as super’fices for su’perfices — calisthenics for calisthenics, &c. Verse-making has latitude enough without taking liberties with language. Mrs. Osgood, who published a book here some years ago, aims at writing [page 170:] tragedies, but succeeds best in stringing verses for children. Her juvenile rhymes are juvenile as they ought to be; the worst of it is, her tragedies are juvenile also. In the first eight lines of her dedicatory verses, she flings her book on the stream of time, in the same manner, she informs us, as the maiden ‘ in the Orient,’ trims her lamp, and gives her ‘ fairy bark’ to the ‘ doubtful waves.’ There is no saying what may have happened to the bark, but it is certain the book has long since gone to the bottom.

Of the score, or so, of poets we have now run through — the previous picking of the multitude — it will be seen that we nave not yet found one who rises above the level of the ‘elegant mediocrity’ already referred to. Mr. Griswold himself admits that there are very few who have written for posterity. We are happy at last to be in a fair way of coming to these few. having cleared the audience of the rabble. That the select circle of these choice spirits should be so small, is to us matter of great and sincere regret.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he has written very little in this way, comes accredited to us by unmistakable manifestations of an original and poetical mind. He is the author of a volume of profound Essays, recently re-published in England, under the editorship of Mr. Carlyle, who discovered in him a spiritual faculty congenial to his own. Mr. Emerson was formerly a Unitarian minister, but he embraced the Quaker interpretation of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and threw up his church. He is now the editor of a quarterly magazine in Boston. The same thoughtful spirit which pervades his prose writings is visible in his poetry, bathed in the ‘purple light’ of a rich fancy. Unfortunately he has written too little to ensure him a great reputation; but what he has written is quaint and peculiar, and native to his own genius. From a little poem addressed ‘To the Humble Bee,’ which, without being in the slightest degree an imitation, constantly reminds us of the gorgeous beauty of ‘l’Allegro,’ we extract two or three passages.

This is not merely beautiful, though ‘ beauty is its own excuse for being.’ There, is pleasant wisdom hived in the bag of the ‘yellow breeched philosopher,’ who sees only what is fair and sips only what is sweet. Mr. Emerson evidently cares little about any reputation to be gained by writing verses; his intellect seeks other vents, where it is untrammelled by forms and conditions. But he cannot help his inspiration. He is a poet in his prose.

Fitz-Greene Halleck has acquired a wider celebrity, and won it well. He is the author, amongst other things, of a noble lyric, ‘ Marco Bozzaris.’ Had he written nothing more he must have earned a high popularity; but he has written much more, equally distinguished by a refined taste and cultivated judgment. But the ‘Marco Bozzaris,’ containing not more than a hundred lines, or thereabouts, is his master-piece. It is consecrated to the Greek chief of that name who fell in an attack on the Turkish camp at Laspi, and is, as a whole, one of the most perfect specimens of versification we are acquainted with in American literature. We will not detract from its intrinsic claims by inquiring to what extent Mr. Halleck is indebted to the study of well- known models; for, although in this piece we catch that ‘stepping in music’ of the rhythm which constitutes the secret charm of the ‘Hohenlinden,’ we are glad to recognize in all his productions, apart from incidental resemblances of this kind, a knowledge as complete, as it is rare among his contemporaries, of the musical mysteries of his art. It is in this Mr. Halleck excels, and it is for this melodiousness of structure that his lines are admired even where their real merit is least understood. We are too much pressed in space to afford room for the whole of this poem, and arc unwilling to injure its effect by an isolated passage. The chrysolite must not be broken. But here is an extract from a poem called ‘ Red Jacket,’ which will abundantly exhibit the freedom and airiness of Mr. Halleck's versification. Red Jacket was a famous Indian chief [page 171:]

The author of these stanzas, strange to say, is superintendent of the affairs of Mr. Astor, the capitalist, who built the great hotel in New York. We have been all along looking out for a purely American poet, who should be strictly national in the comprehensive sense of the term. The only man who approaches that character is William Cullen Bryant; but if Bryant were not a sound poet in all other aspects, his nationality would avail him nothing. Nature made him a poet, and the accident of birth has placed him amongst the forests of America. Out of this national inspiration he draws universal sympathies — not the less universal because their springs are ever close at hand, ever in view, and ever turned to with renewed affection. He does not thrust the American flag in our faces, and threaten the world with the terrors of a gory peace; he exults in the issues of freedom for nobler ends and larger interests. He is the only one of the American poets [column 2:] who ascends to ‘the height of this great argument,’ and lifts his theme above the

earthy taint of bigotry and prejudice. In him, by virtue of the poetry that is in his heart, such themes grow up into dignity. His genius makes all men participators in them, seeking and developing the universality that lies at their core. The woods, prairies, mountains, tempests, the seasons, the life and destiny of man, are the subjects in which he delights. He treats them with religious solemnity, and brings to the contemplation of nature, in her grandest revelations, a pure and serious spirit. His poetry is reflective, but not sad; grave in its depths, but brightened in its flow by the sunshine of the imagination. His poems addressed to rivers, woods, and winds, all of which he has separately apostrophized, have the solemn grandeur of anthems, voicing remote and trackless solitudes. Their beauty is affecting, because it is true and full of reverence. Faithful to his inspiration, he never interrupts the profound ideal that has entered into his spirit to propitiate the genius loci; — he is no middleman standing between his vernal glories and the enjoyment of the rest of mankind. He is wholly exempt from verbal prettiness, from flaunting imagery and New World conceits; he never paints on gauze; he is always in earnest, and always poetical. His manner is everywhere graceful and unaffected.

Two collections of Mr. Bryant's poems have been published in London, and the reader may be presumed to be already acquainted with nearly all he has written. The following passage, descriptive of the train of thoughts suggested by the shutting in of evening, has appeared only in the American editions:

When America shall have riven birth to a few such poets as Bryant, she may begin to build up a national literature, to the recognition of which all the world will subscribe.

Only one name now remains, that of the most accomplished of the brotherhood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But we have some doubts whether he can be fairly considered an indigenous specimen. His mind was educated in Europe. At eighteen years of age he left America, and spent four years in travelling through Europe, lingering to study for a part of the time at Gottingen. On his return he was appointed professor of modern languages in Bowdoin College; but at the end of a few years he went into Sweden and Denmark, to acquire a

knowledge of the literature and languages of the Northern nations. When he again returned, he accepted the professorship of the French and Spanish languages in Harvard College, Cambridge, which he now holds. We must not be surprised to find his poetry deeply coloured by these experiences, and cultivated to a height of refinement far above the taste of his countrymen. But America claims him, and is entitled to him; and has much reason to be proud of this ripe and elegant scholar. He is unquestionably the first of her poets, the most thoughtful and chaste; the most elaborate and finished. Taking leave of the others, with a just appreciation of the last mentioned two or three, and coming suddenly upon Longfellow's lyrics, is like passing out of a ragged country into a rich Eastern garden, with the music of birds and falling waters singing in our ears at every step. His poems are distinguished by severe intellectual beauty, by dulcet sweetness of expression, a wise and hopeful spirit, and complete command over every variety of rhythm. They are neither numerous nor long; but of that compact texture which will last for

[column 2:] posterity. His translations from the continental languages are admirable; and in one of them, from the Swedish of Bishop Tegner, he has successfully rendered into English, the ‘inexorable hexameters’ of the original.

We believe nearly all Mr. Longfellow's poems have been re-printed in England; and we hope they may be extensively diffused, and received with the honourable welcome they deserve. From the ‘Prelude to the Voices of the Night,’ we take a few stanzas of exquisite grace and tenderness.

The artful modulation of these lines is not less worthy of critical notice than the pathos of the emotion which literally gushes like tears through them.

Having arrived at this point — beyond which there is nothing but the Future, and a very Chaos of a Future it seems — we leave the evidence on the whole case to the dispassionate judgment of others. Our survey has been necessarily rapid and desultory; but it is sufficient as a sort of outline map of general characteristics. We might have submitted the subject to a severer analysis, and accumulated a larger variety of illustrations; but it could have served no other end than that of showing still more elaborately the paucity of exceptions to the rule. We have made the exceptions clear, which is the chief thing. For the rest, we have no compunctious visitings. We are well aware that amidst such a heap of craving and unequal pretensions, individual vanities must be wounded — above all by total omission. But our business lay with the spirit, forms, and influence of the whole body of American poetry, which we have endeavoured to trace through the representatives of classes, as far as such a method was practicable with materials so crude and Unmanageable. We have nothing to do with respective merits, which must be adjusted at home by the native scale: a scale so peculiar, that we should despair of being able to accommodate ourselves to its demands. In the obscurest recesses of the Union there are men of such renown, that it would be idle to talk of Socrates or Bacon in their neighbourhoods. Of what avail would it be to apply to these illustrious persons any standard of criticism, except that which they have themselves set up and pronounced final? You must take American fame at its word, or have nothing to do with it. Yet this American fame is not very easy to understand after all, since one hardly knows what relative value to place on it: and relative value it must have, if it have any; since, although all men are born equal, all men are not born to equal fame, even in America. When we are informed, for instance, that Mr. Willis is enjoying the laurels of a European reputation, ‘at his beautiful estate on the Susquehanna,’ we are sorely perplexed, and cast into a maze of wonder to know what it can possibly mean.

We observed at starting, that American [column 2:] poetry was little better than a far-off echo of the Father-land. It is necessary to enter a little into this point, for the sake of exhibiting the nature, as well as the extent of the echo.

All poetry is imitative. True poetry imitates nature: that which imitates poetry ought to have some other name. Of this latter sort — the Spurious — there are several kinds; inasmuch as there are several kinds of models, good models and bad, old models and new. The old models are better than the new, because they are nearer to the source, and fresher, and are less artificial, and less conventional. The tendency of America is strenuously towards the new. She is new herself, and being afflicted with perpetual restlessness and curiosity, she is always looking round her, and forward; but she never looks back. The past is, to her, oblivion. There are no modes in it to be revived: no grandmother's hoops, no voluminous wigs, no buckles, no ruffs. She is always on the watch for the last fashion, with the eagerness of a citizen's wife, who thinks the world at an end if she does not dress in the taste of the day. Even in this, America is unfortunate, for by the time the fashions reach her, they are pretty well cast off in the old countries. Her newest shapes are out of date. Stepping out of the literature of England into that of America, is like going back twenty years into a sort of high- life-below-stairs resuscitation of the style of that period.

We find constantly-recurring examples of this fade spirit scattered through their poetry; which is everywhere patched up with phrases long since worn threadbare — such as ‘ realms yet unborn,’ ‘a magic and a marvel in the name,’ the eagle's’ quenchless eye,’c the beautiful and brave,’ ‘the land of the storm,’ &c. All this looks trifling enough separated from the context, but pettiness and trashiness are the crying sins of this description of verse. If there were nothing to complain of but that drowsy familiarity of tournure, which sends vague fragments of reminiscences flitting through one's memory, it would be hardly worth noting; but unfortunately this petty larceny forms a prominent and ostentatious feature in these productions. It is almost the first peculiarity you detect in an American poem. It is common to nearly all the poets. The majority of them are distinctly modelled upon some particular author, whose manner and subject they strive to copy with the exactitude of a fac-simile. These models are all selected from our modern writers. The old ones are never imitated. The Spenserian stanza is occasionally attempted — but [page 174:] the original kept in view, is not the ‘Fairy Queen,’ but the ‘Castle of Indolence,’ itself an avowed imitation.

Mrs. Sigourney alone seems to be proud of her position as the shadow of a poet. But there are others who are not less entitled to that distinction. Sprague, whom we have already spoken of as a close follower of Pope, is glad to follow any one else when it helps out his purpose. Thus, in an ode on Shakspeare, he has no objection to avail himself of Collins, with a distant line burlesqued from Shakspeare himself:

This is nothing to the description of Shakspeare:

Having undertaken to write about Shakspeare, who had depicted all the passions, Mr. Sprague naturally had recourse to Collins, who wrote an ode on them. In another poem he gives us a glimpse of ‘the bower she planted,’ speaking of a departed friend:

It would be a pity not to treat the reader to a soupçon of this gentleman's felicitous manner of taking the plums out of Pope's tragedy and putting them into his own comedy.

Mr. Wilcox has written two poems called ‘The Age of Benevolence,’ and ‘The Religion of Taste,’ in which Thomson is imitated, at incredible length, with a perseverance quite unexampled. Not content with dogging the poet through the Seasons, he hunts him into the Castle of Indolence, and gets up a rival establishment which he calls the Castle of Imagination. Mr. Trumbull, in like manner, has devoted himself to the service of ‘Hudibras,’ of which he obliges us with an elaborate imitation, entitled [column 2:] ‘M’Fingal.’ The Trumbull-Hudibras is by no means the worst of the large family of the Hudibrases, notwithstanding that we occasionally stumble upon such lines as the following:

Timothy Dwight makes an experiment on the ‘ Rape of the Lock,’ in a poem called ‘ Greenfield Hill.’ The attempt to adapt its fine sarcastic spirit to the habits of American society is eminently ludicrous, and not much mended by rhymes of this kind —

We are in entire ignorance of the nature of the operation described by waving a courtesy trim. The ‘sip of tay’ from ‘proud Nanking’ seems to fall within the same system of orthoepy which celebrated the activity of Lord Peersay.

Paine is esteemed by his countrymen as a copier of Dryden's; but he copies him so badly that we are inclined to let him off as a worse original. He resembles Dryden in nothing but his turgid bombast (the vice chiefly of Dryden's plays), and here he out-does him.

Pierpont, of whom we have already spoken, is crowded with coincidences which look very like plagiarisms. Take one:

And so on to the end. Burns is frequently complimented in this way. Poe is a capital artist after the manner of Tennyson; and approaches the spirit of his original more closely than any of them. His life has been as wild and Tennysonian as his verse. He was adopted in infancy by a rich old gentle- man, who helped him to a good education and a visit to England for improvement, and intended to make him his heir: but incurring some debts of honour, which the old gentleman very properly refused to dis- charge, Poe discharged his patron in a fit of poetry, and went off to join the Greeks. Stopping by the way at St. Petersburg he got into debt again. From this trouble he was extricated by the consul; and upon his return to America he found the old gentleman married to a young wife. The lady was looked upon as an interloper, and Poe quarrelled with her, for which the old gentleman, very properly again, quarrelled with [page 175:] him, and so they parted, Poe to get married on his own account, and the old gentleman to go to heaven, leaving an infant son behind to inherit his wealth. All this has a strong Tennysonian tinge — we mean of course poetically; for there is none of this unhinging and rebellion in the blood or actions of the true Tennyson. Here is a specimen of the metrical imitation:

Again —

In another place an ‘opiate vapour’ —

And this is even still more like — a strain under an ‘open lattice’ —

These passages have a spirituality in them) usually denied to imitators; who rarely possess the property recently discovered in the mocking-birds — a solitary note of their own. A Mr. Hill toils hopelessly after the bounding lyrics of Barry Cornwall: ex. gr.

Barry Cornwall is not very likely to be imitated with success; although the freedom and beauty of his style are peculiarly calculated to fascinate imitators. Picked words and a dancing measure are not enough; there must be a luxuriant imagination, earnestness, and high enthusiasm. With such Squalifications, however, a man might set up or himself.

A Mr. Fairfield has a sone, or ode, the first stanza of which opens with — [column 2:]

The second with,

The third,

And thus to the close — the body of the verse being constructed on the same honest principle. Another writer has a song,

and ‘I think of thee’ in every verse, refrain, and all stolen, gipsy-fashion, and disguised. But these are venial offences. It is reserved for Charles Fenno Hoffman to distance all plagiarists of ancient and modern times in the enormity and openness of his thefts. “No American,” says Mr. Griswold, “is comparable to him as a song-writer.” We are not surprised at the fact, considering the magnitude of his obligations to Moore. Hoffman is Moore hocused for the American market. His songs are rifaciamentos. The turns of the melody, the flooding of the images, the scintillating conceits — are all Moore. Sometimes he steals his very words. One song begins, ‘Blame not the bowl’ — a hint taken from ‘Blame not the bard another’ One bumper yet, gallants, at parting.’ Hoffman is like a hand-organ — a single touch sets him off — he wants only the key note, and he plays away as long as his wind lasts. The resemblance, when it runs into whole lines and verses, is more like a parody than a simple plagiarism. One specimen will be ample.

He had Moore's measure ringing in his ear, and demanding a simile in the middle of the first quatrain — hence the music from the ocean. The third and fourth lines are an echo of a sound without the smallest particle of meaning or application in them. They constitute the means, nevertheless, by which Hoffman hocuses the Americans. Drop them out altogether, and, so far as the sense is concerned, the song would be materially improved. But enough, and more than enough, of these monkeyana.

The result upon the whole examination may be thus briefly summed up: — that American poetry is deficient in originality; [page 176:] that it is not even based upon the best examples; that it is wanting in strength of thought, in grace and refinement; and errs largely on the side of false taste and frothy exuberance. The classical acquirements of the American poets are loudly insisted upon by their critics; but no such influence is visible in their works — Longfellow and three or four more excepted. It might rather be predicated that they are utterly ignorant of the principles of art, or that they hold all principles in contempt. The qualifications of the poet are lowered in them to the meanest and scantiest elements. They are on a level with the versifiers who fill up the corners of our provincial journals, into which all sorts of platitudes are admitted by the indiscriminate courtesy of the printer. Their poetry is emphatically provincial, even to its diction, which often stands in as much need of a glossary as one of our dialects. They not only employ words obsolete long ago in England, but use current words in new senses, frequently converting substantives into verbs, adjectives into adverbs, and shuffling and cutting all the parts of speech to suit their purposes. You ever and anon meet such phrases as ‘unshadow,’ ‘ tireless,’ ‘environment,’ ‘flushful,’ ‘fadeless,’ ‘unway,’ ‘unbrokenly,’ ‘medlied,’ ‘incessancy,’ ‘delightless.’ Rapidity of execution is another peculiarity by which these writers are distinguished. Numerous anecdotes are related, even by themselves, of their velocity in composition. We can readily believe them. But they will find out in the long run, that the go-ahead system is as fallacious in literature as they have already, to their cost, found it to be in more substantial affairs.

We repeat, however, that it is matter of regret, and not of censure, that America should be destitute of a national literature. The circumstances through which she has hitherto struggled, and to which she continues to be exposed, arc fatal to its cultivation. With the literature of England pouring in upon her, relieved of the charges of copyright and taxation, it is impossible there can be any effectual encouragement for native talent. Literature is, consequently, the least tempting of all conceivable pursuits; and men must float with the stream, and live as they can with the society in which they have been educated. Even were the moral materials by which this vast deposit of human dregs is supplied, other than they are — purer, wiser, and more refined, — still America could not originate or support a literature of her own, so long as English productions can be imported free of cost, and circulated through the Union at a cheaper rate than [column 2:] the best productions of the country. The remedy for this is obvious, and its necessity has long been felt on both sides of the water, — a law for the protection of international copyright. Such a law would be valuable to us, simply in a commercial point of view — but to America its advantages would be of incalculably greater importance. It would lay the foundation of a comprehensive intellectual movement which never can be accomplished without its help; and by which alone, she can ever hope to consolidate and dignify her institutions. We trust the day is not far distant when the unanimous demand of the enlightened of both countries will achieve a consummation so devoutly to be wished for.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 160, column 1:]

*Although the progress of population in America has not quite borne out Mr. Malthus's theory

(which is presumed to have been based upon it), it has advanced at an alarming ratio, doubling itself within thirty years, commencing with the first census of Congress in 1790.