CRITICISM Page 5

  Come thronging at his call.

  Such graves as his are pilgrim-shrines,

  Shrines to no code or creed confined The Delphian vales, the Palastines,

  The Meccas of the mind.

  They linger by the Doon's low trees,

  And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,

  And round thy Sepulchres, Dumfries!

  The Poet's tomb is there. Wyoming is composed of nine Spenserian stanzas. With some unusual excellences, it has some of the worst faults of Halleck. The lines which follow are of great beauty.

  I then but dreamed: thou art before me now,

  In life- a vision of the brain no more,

  I've stood upon the wooded mountain's brow,

  That beetles high thy love! valley o'er;

  And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore,

  Within a bower of sycamores am laid;

  And winds as soft and sweet as ever bore

  The fragrance of wild flowers through sun and shade

  Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head.

  The poem, however, is disfigured with the mere burlesque of some portions of Alnwick Castle- with such things as he would look particularly droll

  In his Iberian boot and Spanish plume; and

  A girl of sweet sixteen

  Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn

  Without a shoe or stocking- hoeing corn, mingled up in a pitiable manner with images of real beauty.

  The Field of the Grounded Arms contains twenty-four quatrains, without rhyme, and, we think, of a disagreeable versification. In this poem are to be observed some of the finest passages of Halleck. For example Strangers! your eyes are on that valley fixed

  Intently, as we gaze on vacancy,

  When the mind's wings o'erspread

  The spirit world of dreams. and again O'er sleepless seas of grass whose waves are flowers.

  Red-jacket has much power of expression with little evidence of poetical ability. Its humor is very fine, and does not interfere, in any great degree, with the general tone of the poem.

  A Sketch should have been omitted from the edition as altogether unworthy of its author.

  The remaining pieces in the volume are Twilight, Psalm cxxxvii; To...; Love; Domestic Happiness; Magdalen, From the Italian; Woman; Connecticut; Music; On the Death of Lieut. William Howard Allen; A Poet's Daughter; and On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake. Of the majority of these we deem it unnecessary to say more than that they partake, in a more or less degree, of the general character observable in the poems of Halleck. The Poet's Daughter appears to us a particularly happy specimen of that general character, and we doubt whether it be not the favorite of its author. We are glad to see the vulgarity of

  I'm busy in the cotton trade

  And sugar line, omitted in the present edition. The eleventh stanza is certainly not English as it stands- and besides it is altogether unintelligible. What is the meaning of this?

  But her who asks, though first among

  The good, the beautiful, the young

  The birthright of a spell more strong

  Than these have brought her.

  The Lines on the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake, we prefer to any of the writings of Halleck. It has that rare merit in composition of this kind- the union of tender sentiment and simplicity. This poem consists merely of six quatrains, and we quote them in full.

  Green be the turf above thee,

  Friend of my better days!

  None knew thee but to love thee,

  Nor named thee but to praise.

  Tears fell when thou wert dying

  From eyes unused to weep,

  And long, where thou art lying,

  Will tears the cold turf steep.

  When hearts whose truth was proven,

  Like thine are laid in earth,

  There should a wreath be woven

  To tell the world their worth.

  And I, who woke each morrow

  To clasp thy hand in mine,

  Who shared thy joy and sorrow,

  Whose weal and woe were thine It should be mine to braid it

  Around thy faded brow,

  But I've in vain essayed it,

  And feel I cannot now.

  While memory bids me weep thee,

  Nor thoughts nor words are free,

  The grief is fixed too deeply,

  That mourns a man like thee.

  If we are to judge from the subject of these verses, they are a work of some care and reflection. Yet they abound in faults. In the line,

  Tears fell when thou wert dying; wert is not English.

  Will tears the cold turf steep, is an exceedingly rough verse. The metonymy involved in

  There should a wreath be woven

  To tell the world their worth, is unjust. The quatrain beginning,

  And I who woke each morrow, is ungrammatical in its construction when viewed in connection with the quatrain which immediately follows. "Weep thee" and "deeply" are inaccurate rhymes- and the whole of the first quatrain,

  Green be the turf, amp;c. although beautiful, bears too close a resemblance to the still more beautiful lines of William Wordsworth,

  She dwelt among the untrodden ways

  Beside the springs of Dove,

  A maid whom there were none to praise

  And very few to love.

  As a versifier Halleck is by no means equal to his friend, all of whose poems evince an ear finely attuned to the delicacies of melody. We seldom meet with more inharmonious lines than those, generally, of the author of Alnwick Castle. At every step such verses occur as,

  And the monk's hymn and minstrel's song True as the steel of their tried blades For him the joy of her young years Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath And withered my life's leaf like thinein which the proper course of the rhythm would demand an accent upon syllables too unimportant to sustain it. Not infrequently, too, we meet with lines such as this,

  Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, in which the multiplicity of consonants renders the pronunciation of the words at all, a matter of no inconsiderable difficulty.

  But we must bring our notice to a close. It will be seen that while we are willing to admire in many respects the poems before us, we feel obliged to dissent materially from that public opinion (perhaps not fairly ascertained) which would assign them a very brilliant rank in the empire of Poesy. That we have among us poets of the loftiest order we believe- but we do not believe that these poets are Drake and Halleck.

  BRYANT'S POEMS

  MR. BRYANT'S poetical reputation, both at home and abroad, is greater, we presume, than that of any other American. British critics have frequently awarded him high praise, and here, the public press have been unanimous in approbation. We can call to mind no dissenting voice. Yet the nature, and, most especially the manner, of the expressed opinions in this case, should be considered as somewhat equivocal, and but too frequently must have borne to the mind of the poet doubts and dissatisfaction. The edition now before us may be supposed to embrace all such of his poems as he deems not unworthy his name. These (amounting to about one hundred) have been "carefully revised." With the exception of some few, about which nothing could well be said, we will speak briefly of them one by one, but in such order as we may find convenient.

  The Ages, a didactic piece of thirty-five Spenserian stanzas, is the first and longest in the volume. It was originally printed in 1821, With about half a dozen others now included in this collection. The design of the author in this poem is "from a survey of the past ages of the world, and of the successive advances of mankind in knowledge and virtue, to justify and confirm the hopes of the philanthropist for the future destinies of the human race." It is, indeed, an essay on the perfectability of man, wherein, among other better arguments some in the very teeth of analogy, are deduced from the eternal cycle of physical nature, to sustain a hope of progression in happiness. But it is only as a poem that we wish to examine The Ages.
Its commencement is impressive. The four initial lines arrest the attention at once by a quiet dignity of manner, an air of placid contemplation, and a versification combining the extremes of melody and force When to the common rest that crowns our days,

  Called in the noon of life, the good man goes,

  Or full of years, and ripe in wisdom, lays

  His silver temples in their last reposeThe five concluding lines of the stanza, however, are not equally effective When, o'er the buds of youth, the death-wind blows,

  And brights the fairest; when our bitterest tears

  Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close,

  We think on what they were, with many fears

  Lest goodness die with them, and leave the coming years. The defects, here, are all of a metrical and of course minor nature, but are still defects. The line

  When o'er the buds of youth the death-wind blows, is impeded in its flow by the final th in youth, and especially in death where w follows. The word tears cannot readily be pronounced after the final st in bitterest; and its own final consonants, rs, in like manner render an effort necessary in the utterance of stream which commences the next line. In the verse

  We think on what they were, with many fears the word many is, from its nature, too rapidly pronounced for the fulfilment of the time necessary to give weight to the foot of two syllables. All words of two syllables do not necessarily constitute a foot (we speak now of the Pentameter here employed) even although the syllables be entirely distinct, as in many, very, often, and the like. Such as, without effort, cannot employ in their pronunciation the time demanded by each of the preceding and succeeding feet of the verse, and occasionally of a preceding verse, will never fail to offend. It is the perception of this fact which so frequently forces the versifier of delicate ear to employ feet exceeding what are unjustly called legitimate dimensions. For example. We have the following lines Lo! to the smiling Arno's classic side,

  The emulous nations of the West repair!

  These verses are exceedingly forcible, yet, upon scanning the latter we find a syllable too many. We shall be told possibly that there should be an elision of the e in the at the commencement. But no- this was not intended. Both the and emulous demand a perfect accentuation. The verse commencing Lo!

  Lo! to the smiling Arno's classic side, has, it will be observed, a Trochee in its first foot. As is usually the case, the whole line partakes, in consequence, of a stately and emphatic enunciation, and to equalize the time in the verse succeeding, something more is necessary than the succession of Iambuses which constitute the ordinary English Pentameter. The equalization is therefore judiciously effected by the introduction of an additional syllable. But in the lines

  Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close,

  We think on what they were with many fears, lines to which the preceding observations will equally apply, this additional syllable is wanting. Did the rhyme admit of the alteration, everything necessary could be accomplished by writing

  We think on what they were with many a fear,

  Lest goodness die with them and leave the coming year. These remarks may be considered hypercritical- yet it is undeniable that upon a rigid attention to minutiae such as we have pointed out, any great degree of metrical success must altogether depend. We are more disposed, too, to dwell upon the particular point mentioned above, since, with regard to it, the American Monthly, in a late critique upon the poems of Mr. Willis, has evidently done that gentleman injustice. The reviewer has fallen into what we conceive the error of citing, by themselves, (that is to say insulated from the context) such verses as

  The night-wind with a desolate moan swept by.

  With difficult energy and when the rod.

  Fell through, and with the tremulous hand of age.

  With supernatural whiteness loosely fell. for the purpose of animadversion. "The license" he says "of turning such words as 'passionate' and 'desolate' into two syllables could only have been taken by a pupil of the Fantastic School." We are quite sure that Mr. Willis had no purpose of turning them into words of two syllables- nor even, as may be supposed upon a careless examination, of pronouncing them in the same time which would be required for two ordinary, syllables. The excesses of measure are here employed (perhaps without any definite design on the part of the writer, who may have been guided solely by ear) with reference to the proper equalization, of balancing, if we may so term it, of time, throughout an entire sentence. This, we confess, is a novel idea, but, we think, perfectly tenable. Any musician will understand us. Efforts for the relief of monotone will necessarily produce fluctuations in the time of any metre, which fluctuations, if not subsequently counterbalanced, affect the ear like unresolved discords in music. The deviations then of which we have been speaking, from the strict rules of prosodial art, are but improvements upon the rigor of those rules, and are a merit, not a fault. It is the nicety of this species of equalization more than any other metrical merit which elevates Pope as a versifier above the mere couplet-maker of his day, and, on the other hand, it is the extension of the principle to sentences of greater length which elevates Milton above Pope. Knowing this, it was, of course, with some surprise that we found the American Monthly (for whose opinions we still have the highest respect,) citing Pope in opposition to Mr. Willis upon the very point to which we allude. A few examples will be sufficient to show that Pope not only made free use of the license referred to, but that he used it for the reasons, and under the circumstances which we have suggested.

  Oh thou! whatever title please thine ear,

  Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!

  Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air,

  Or laugh and shake in Rabelais easy chair. Any person will here readily perceive that the third line

  Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air, differs in time from the usual course of the rhythm, and requires some counterbalance in the line which succeeds. It is indeed precisely such a verse as that of Mr. Bryant's upon which we have commented,

  Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close, and commences in the same manner with a Trochee. But again, from Pope we have Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines

  Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines.

  Else all my prose and verse were much the same,

  This prose on stilts, that poetry fallen lame.

  And thrice he lifted high the birth-day brand

  And thrice he dropped it from his quivering hand.

  Here stood her opium, here she nursed her owls,

  And here she planned the imperial seat of fools.

  Here to her chosen all her works she shows;

  Prose swell'd to verse, verse loitering into prose.

  Rome in her Capitol saw Querno sit

  Throned on seven hills, the Antichrist of wit.

  And his this drum whose hoarse heroic bass

  Drowns the loud clarion of the braying ass.

  But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise

  Twelve starveling bards of these degenerate days.

  These are all taken at random from the first book of the Dunciad. In the last example it will be seen that the two additional syllables are employed with a view of equalizing the time with that of the verse,

  But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise, a verse which will be perceived to labor in its progress- and which Pope, in accordance with his favorite theory of making sound accord with sense, evidently intended so to labor. It is useless to say that the words should be written with elision-starv'ling and degen'rate. Their pronunciation is not thereby materially affectedand, besides, granting it to be so, it may be as well to make the elision also in the case of Mr. Willis. But Pope had no such intention, nor, we presume, had Mr. W. It is somewhat singular, we may remark, en passant, that the American Monthly, in a subsequent portion of the critique alluded to, quotes from Pope as a line of "sonorous grandeur" and one beyond the ability of our American poet, the well known

&
nbsp; Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel. Now this is indeed a line of "sonorous grandeur"- but it is rendered so principally if not altogether by that very excess of metre (in the word Damien) which the reviewer has condemned in Mr. Willis. The lines which we quote below from Mr. Bryant's poem of The Ages will suffice to show that the author we are now reviewing fully appreciates the force of such occasional excess, and that he has only neglected it through oversight in the verse which suggested these observations.

  Peace to the just man's memory- let it grow

  Greener with years, and blossom through the flight

  Of ages- let the mimic canvass show

  His calm benevolent features.

  Does prodigal Autumn to our age deny

  The plenty that once swelled beneath his sober eye?

  Look on this beautiful world and read the truth

  In her fair page.

  Will then the merciful One who stamped our race

  With his own image, and who gave them sway

  O'er Earth and the glad dwellers on her face,

  Now that our flourishing nations far away

  Are spread, where'er the moist earth drinks the day,

  Forget the ancient care that taught and nursed

  His latest offspring?

  He who has tamed the elements shall not live

  The slave of his own passions.

  When liberty awoke

  New-born, amid those beautiful vales.

  Oh Greece, thy flourishing cities were a spoil

  Unto each other.

  And thou didst drive from thy unnatural breast

  Thy just and brave.

  Yet her degenerate children sold the crown.

  Instead of the pure heart and innocent hands Among thy gallant sons that guard thee well

  Thou laugh'st at enemies. Who shall then declare Far like the comet's way thro' infinite space.

  The full region leads

  New colonies forth.

  Full many a horrible worship that, of old,

  Held o'er the shuddering realms unquestioned sway.

  All these instances, and some others, occur in a poem of but thirty-five stanzas- yet in only a very few cases is the license improperly used. Before quitting this subject it may be as well to cite a striking example from Wordsworth There was a youth whom I had loved so long,