The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862

'He forced Latinisms into his line,Like raw undrilled recruits,'

that have yet done immense service in his conflicts with the enemy. This pedantry, so inimitable, is unequaled even by the most weighty pages of the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' of Sir Thomas Browne. That it should prove obnoxious to some critics only testifies to its perfection and their own incapacity for enjoyment. If a man does not relish the caviare and truffles at a dinner, he does not question the wisdom of his Lucullus in providing them; the fault is in his own palate, not in the judgment of his host. The aggrieved individuals, who are either too weak or too indolent to scale the numberless peaks of Lowell's genius, may comfort themselves with the reflection that the treasures of their minds will never be tesselated into the mosaic of any satirist's fancy, for in them can abound only emptiness and cobwebs—as saith the Staphyla of Plautus:—

'Nam hic apud nos nihil est aliud qua sti furibus,Ita inaniis sunt oppletæ atque araneis.'

Caricatures have never been disdained by the greatest minds. They were rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours. Even the stern and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful exercises. We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and Æneas are represented with the heads of apes and pigs. Lessing even tells us in his Laocoon that in Thebes the rage for these caricatura was so great that a law was passed forbidding the production of any work conflicting with the severe and absolute laws of beauty.

In quite another vein, yet transfused with the same irrepressible mirth, we have Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' which, with its 'preliminary notes and few candid remarks to the reader,' is a literary curiosity whose parallel we have not in any work by an American author. It is all one merry outburst of youth and health, and music and poetry, with the spice of a criticism so rare and genial, that one could almost court dissection at his hands, for the mere exquisitely epicurean bliss of an artistic euthanasia. It is genius on a frolic, coquetting with all the Graces, and unearthing men long since become gnomes,

  'In that countryWhere are neither stars nor meadows,'

to join in his merry carousing. They float on floods of Chian and moor their barks under 'hills of spice.' What golden wine of inspiration has our poet drunk, whose flush is on his brow and its fire in his veins? For every sentence of this poem is aglow with vigor and life and power;

'Its feeldes have een and its woodes have eeres.'

And if he sometimes stumbles over a metre or lets his private friendships and preferences run away with his cool discretion and judgment, why, bonus dormitat Homerus, let us, like the miser Euclio, be thankful for the good the gods vouchsafe us. Taken in themselves and without regard to their poetical surroundings, no more comprehensive, faithful, concise portraitures of our authors have ever been produced. They unite in the highest degree candor and justice, and there is withal a tone so kindly and a wit so pure, that we almost believe him to be describing a community of brothers affiliated by the close ties of deep mutual appreciation. He flings his diamonds of learning upon the page, and we recognize the scholar whom no extravagance in knowledge can make bankrupt. We seem to have come by rare chance upon one of those wardrobes of the early kings, wherein are all savory treasures,—the rose and violet colored sugars of Alexandria, sweet almonds, and sharp-toothed ginger. We pardon his puns, indeed we believe them to be inevitable, the flash of the percussion cap, the sparks of electricity, St. Elmo's stars, phosphorescent gleams, playing over the restless ocean of his fruitful imagination. And we are persuaded that if the venerable Democritus (who was uncanonized only because the Holy See was still wavering, an anomalous body, in Weissnichtwo, and who existed forty days on the mere sight of bread and honey) had been regaled with the piquant delicacies of Lowell's picture of a Critic, he might have continued unto this present. It is a satire so pleasantly constructed, so full of palpable hits at the 'musty dogmas' of the day, so rich in mirthful allusion, and with such a generously insinuated tribute to the true and earnest-hearted critic, that we know not which most to admire, the sketch, or the soul whence it emanated. The following description of a 'regular heavy reviewer' is complete:

'And here I must say he wrote excellent articlesOn the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles,They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for;And nobody read that which nobody cared for;If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,He could fill forty pages with safe erudition;He could gauge the old books by the new set of rules,And his very old nothings pleased very old fools.But give him a new book fresh out of the heart,And you put him at sea without compass or chart,—His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,Exhausting the sap of the native, and true in him,So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite,New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet,Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must createIn the soul of their critic the measure and weight,Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,To compute their own judge and assign him his place,Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,And reporting each circumstance just as he found it,Without the least malice—his record would beProfoundly æsthetic as that of a flea,Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,Or, borne by an Arab guide, venture to render aGeneral view of the ruins of Denderah.'

He draws with a few strokes of his magical charcoal a sharp silhouette of Brownson upon the wall of our waiting curiosity, fills in his sketch of Parker with a whole wilderness of classical shades, disposes of Willis with a kiss and a blow, gives pages of sharp pleasantries to Emerson, pays a graceful tribute to Whittier, and Hawthorne,—

'His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;When Nature was shaping him, clay was not grantedFor making so full-sized a man as she wanted,So to fill out her model, a little she sparedFrom some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,And she could not have hit a more excellent planFor making him fully and perfectly man.'

Turning backward from these evidences of Lowell's ripening powers to his early poems, astonishment at his versatility is the first emotion produced. It is hard to believe that the 'Biglow Papers' slid from under the hand that wrote the 'Prometheus' and the 'Legend of Brittany.' His genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic architecture—the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing easily out of its severer lines. What resistless magic is there in the fingers whose touch upon the same rich banks of keys, summons solemn, vibrant peals as of Beethoven's grandest fugues, endless harmonies as of the deep seas, and the light and graceful fantasies of Rossini, which are as the glad sunshine upon their waves. Truly the poet's gift is a divine and an awful one. His heart must needs be proud and humble too, who is claimed as nearer of kin than a brother by myriads of stranger souls, each, perhaps, owning its separate creed, and in whose unspoken prayers his name is ever present. In his 'Conversations on some of the old Poets,' we discover the alembic through which his crude opinions, his glowing impulses, his exquisitely minute discrimination were distilled;—the old poets, to whom the heart turns ever lovingly as to the wide west at eve. They were the nursing mothers of his intellectual infancy, and it is probably to his reverent but not blind esteem for them, his earnest study of them, not merely as poets, but as men, citizens, and friends, that much of the buoyancy and vigor of his poetry is to be attributed. The 'Conversations' themselves are alive with that enthusiasm and sympathetic inquiry that disproves the false saying of the Parisian Aspasia of Landor—'Poets are soon too old for mutual love.' They are the warm photographs of feeling as it bubbles from a burning heart; sometimes burned over-deep, with a leaning to fanaticism, but with so much of the generosity and justice of maturity in their decisions that these necessary errors of an ardent youth are overlooked, and the more as they have disappeared almost entirely from the productions of later years. He betrays in his quick conception of an author's mood and meaning a delicacy so extreme, an organization so nervously alive to beauties and discords, and a religious sentiment so cultured to the last degree of feeling, that we dread lest we shall encounter the weakness, morbidness or bigotry that naturally results from the contact of such a soul with the passions of everyday life, recalling the oft-quoted 'Medio in fonte leporum'—

'In the bowl where pleasures swim,The bitter rises to the brim,And roses from the veriest brakeMay press the temples till they ache.'

But among the roses of his criticisms we look in vain for thorns. In style, it is true, these essays are halting and unequal. His adoption of the colloquial form for the expression of opinion to the public has never seemed to us remarkably felicitous, in spite of its venerable precedents. Where his imagery becomes lofty and his flow of thought should be continuous, we are indignant at its sudden arrest, and involuntarily devote the intruder to a temporary bungalow in Timbuctoo.

It is refreshing to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems. There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect in their construction, but from a fancied want of congeniality between their character and his own. In spite of its Italian origin, the sonnet always seems to demand the severest classical outlines, both in spirit and expression, calm and steadfastly flowing without ripples or waves, a poem cut in the marble of stately cadences that imprison some vast and divine thought. Lowell is too elastic, impulsive, for a sonneteer. But considered apart from our peculiar ideas of the sonnet, the following is full of a very tender beauty:—

'I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leapFrom being's sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken,And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep,Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise,Which by the toil of gathering energiesTheir upward way into clear sunshine keep,Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences,Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of greenInto a pleasant island in the seas,Where, 'mid tall palms, the cave-roofed home is seenAnd wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour,Hearing the leaves and loving God's dear power.'

And what could be more drippingly quaint than his song to 'Violets,' which breathes so gentle and real a sympathy with its subject, that we almost imagine it was written in those early times when men communed with Nature in her own audible language. It is even more beautiful than Herrick's

'Why do ye weep, sweet babe? Can tearsSpeak grief in you, who were but bornJust as the modest mornTeemed her refreshing dew?'

We give but a fragment of the Violet.

'Violet! sweet violet!Thine eyes are full of tears;  Are they wet  Even yetWith the thought of other years?Or with gladness are they full,For the night is beautiful,And longing for those far-off spheres?Thy little heart, that hath with loveGrown colored, like the sky aboveOn which thou lookest ever—  Can it know  All the woeOf hope for what returneth never,All the sorrow and the longingTo these hearts of ours belonging?'

And there are touches of what we are wont to call dear, womanly feeling, as when the 'Forlorn,' out in the bitter cold,

'Hears a woman's voice within  Singing sweet words her childhood knew,And years of misery and sin  Furl off and leave her heaven blue.'

The 'Changeling' alone would sustain a reputation. It seems always like the plaintive but sweet warble of some unknown bird rising from the midst of tall water-rushes in the day's dim dawning. A wonderful melody as of Mrs. Browning's best efforts pervades every verse, priceless and rare as some old intaglio. But when we come to his 'Odes to the Past and the Future,' the full power of poesy unfolds before us. Their images are not the impalpable spectres of a poet's dream, but symbols hardened into marble by his skill, and informed with the fire of life by his genius.

'Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,  O kingdom of the past!There lie the bygone ages in their palls,  Guarded by shadows vast;There all is hushed and breathless,  Save when some image of old error falls,Earth worshiped once as deathless.'

Was ever picture of silence more effective and complete? We can see the desolate quiet of the vast arched halls, left undisturbed by centuries, and as the moldering statue totters forward from its niche, we feel a faith has fallen which was once the heaven of nations, and the awful tumult is audible as a voice from the drear kingdom of death. And the hymn to the Future, with all the joyful Titian hues of its opening strophes, the glowing fervor of its deep yearning, swelling through 'golden-winged dreams' of the 'Land of Promise':—

'To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered hands  And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smileThou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,  And her old woe-worn face a little whileGrows young and noble: unto thee the Oppressor    Looks and is dumb with awe;    The eternal lawWhich makes the crime its own blindfold redresser,Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,    And he can see the grim-eyed Doom    From out the trembling gloomIts silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading.'

We pass by the 'Legend of Brittany,' which, as a mere artistic study of light and shade in words, is worthy an extended notice. Its fine polish and refinement of feeling remind us of Spencer's silver verses, frosted here and there with the old fret-work of his lovable affectations. But we pause at the 'Prometheus,' honestly believing that no poem made up of so many excellences was ever written in America. Its defects are not of conception, but in an occasional carelessness of execution—a gasp in the rhythm; and when we consider its richness and majesty, when we feel its resistless grasp upon the heart, we could pardon it if its great pearls were strung on straws or its diamonds hidden in a sand-hill of sentimentality. But never was poem freer from morbidness: it repels the sickly pallor of our modern stereotyped sorrow, and is made up only of a grief that is regal—more—divine. If any place by its side the Prometheus of Æschylus and appeal to the unapproachable dignity of their model, we can only say that we hold these two poems distinct as the East is from the West, only between them springs boldly the blue arch of a universal humanity that suffered and enjoyed as now when the earth was young. But it must not be forgotten that the Greek lived when with men was born a boundless sympathy for, and pride in, their gods; that what are now to us but the wonderful dreams of a primeval poesy, shadowing mighty truths, were to the ancients living influences that molded their lives. And if it be urged that already faith must have grown dim in so great a mind as that of Æschylus, then indeed we wonder not at the marvels of magnificent despair, the death-in-life of a godlike suffering which reach in his 'Prometheus Chained' a height of sublimity we may scarcely hope to see approached in modern times, for the mind that created it stood in a light shallop, drifting away from the old landmarks of a worn-out creed into the dark, unknown night of doubt and speculation. But the Prometheus of Lowell is not the god-man writhing in an awful conflict with his slavery but begun. His heart

'For ages hath been empty of all joy,Except to brood upon its silent hope,As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now.'

The defiant pride and scornful dignity that raised him above our sympathy in Æschylus, are tempered by Lowell with a human longing for comfort that, in its mighty woe, might melt adamant, or draw from the watchful heavens

'Mild-eyed Astarte, his best comforter,With her pale smile of sad benignity.'

Chained to the rock in utter loneliness he lies. Long since the 'crisped smiles' of the waves and the 'swift-winged winds' had ceased to listen to his call.

'Year after year will pass away and seemTo me, in mine eternal agony,But as the shadows of dark summer clouds,Which I have watched so often darkening o'erThe vast Sarmatian plain, league-wide at first,But, with still swiftness lessening on and on,Till cloud and shadow meet and mingle whereThe gray horizon fades into the sky,Far, far to northward. Yes, for ages yetMust I lie here upon my altar huge,A sacrifice for man.'

'A sacrifice for man.' The theme has won a high significance with time. One more passage, and we are done—a passage which rivals Shakspeare in its startling vividness, as it whispers with awful power close to our ears. All night had the prisoned god heard voices,—

    'Deeper yetThe deep, low breathings of the silence grew    And then toward me cameA shape as of a woman; very paleIt was, and calm; its cold eyes did not move,And mine moved not, but only stared on them.Their fixed awe went through my brain like ice;A skeleton hand seemed clutching at my heart,And a sharp chill, as if a dank night-fogSuddenly closed me in, was all I felt.And then, methought, I heard a freezing sigh,A long, deep, shivering sigh, as from blue lipsStiffening in death, close to mine ear. I thoughtSome doom was close upon me, and I lookedAnd saw the red morn, through the heavy mist,Just setting, and it seemed as it were falling,Or reeling to its fall, so dim and deadAnd palsy-struck it looked. Then all sounds mergedInto the rising surges of the pines,Which, leagues below me, clothing the gaunt loinsOf ancient Caucasus with hairy strength,Sent up a murmur in the morning wind,Sad as the wail that from the populous earthAll day and night to high Olympus soars,Fit incense to thy wicked throne, O Jove!'

Mr. Lowell is no fine dreamer, no enthusiast in the filmy questions of some cloud-land of poetry: the sword of power is in his hand, and the stern teachings of Right and Justice ring through his heart. To such men, Destiny looks for her unfolding. Woe to them, if upon their silence, inaction or irresolution in these great days, the steadfast gaze of her high expectation falls unheeded.

RESURGAMUS

Go where the sunlight brightly falls,  Through tangled grass too thick to wave;Where silence, save the cricket's calls,  Reigns o'er a patriot's grave;And you shall see Faith's violets springFrom whence his soul on heavenward wing  Rose to the realms where heroes dwell:  Heroes who for their country fell;  Heroes for whom our bosoms swell;    Heroes in battle slain.God of the just! they are not dead,—Those who have erst for freedom bled;—Their every deed has boldly said  We all shall rise again.A patriot's deeds can never die,—  Time's noblest heritage are they,—Though countless æons pass them by,  They rise at last to day.The spirits of our fathers riseTriumphant through the starry skies;  And we may hear their choral song,—  The firm in faith, the noble throng,—  It bids us crush a deadly wrong,    Wrought by red-handed Cain.AND WE SHALL CONQUER! for the RightGoes onward with resistless might:His hand shall win for us the fight.    We, too, shall rise again!

AMONG THE PINES

My last article left the reader in the doorway of the Colonel's mansion. Before entering, we will linger there awhile and survey the outside of the premises.

The house stands where two roads meet, and, unlike most planters' dwellings, is located in full view of the highway. It is a rambling, disjointed structure, thrown together with no regard to architectural rules, and yet there is a kind of rude harmony in its very irregularities that has a pleasing effect. The main edifice, with a frontage of nearly eighty feet, is only one and a half stories high, and is overshadowed by a broad projecting roof, which somehow, though in a very natural way, drops down at the eaves, and forms the covering of a piazza, twenty-feet in width, and extending across the entire front of the house. At its south-easterly angle, the roof is truncated, and made again to form a covering for the piazza, which there extends along a line of irregular buildings for sixty yards. A portion of the verandah on this side being enclosed, forms a bowling-alley and smoking-room, two essential appendages to a planter's residence. The whole structure is covered with yellow-pine weather boarding, which in some former age was covered with paint of a grayish brown color. This, in many places, has peeled off and allowed the sap to ooze from the pine, leaving every here and there large blotches on the surface, which somewhat resemble the 'warts' I have seen on the trunks of old trees.

The house is encircled by grand, old pines, whose tall, upright stems, soaring eighty and ninety feet in the air, make the low hamlet seem lower by the contrast. They have stood there for centuries, their rough, shaggy coats buttoned close to their chins, and their long, green locks waving in the wind; but man has thrust his long knife into their veins, and their life-blood is fast oozing away.

With the exception of the negro huts, which are scattered at irregular intervals through the woods in the rear of the mansion, there is not a human habitation within an hour's ride; but such a cosey, inviting, hospitable atmosphere surrounds the whole place, that a stranger does not realize he has happened upon it in a wilderness.

The interior of the dwelling is in keeping with the exterior, though in the drawing-rooms, where rich furniture and fine paintings actually lumber the apartments, there is evident the lack of a nice perception of the 'fitness of things,' and over the whole hangs a 'dusty air,' which reminds one that the Milesian Bridget does not 'flourish' in South Carolina.

I was met in the entrance-way by a tall, fine-looking woman, to whom the Colonel introduced me as follows:—

'Mr. K–, this is Madam –, my housekeeper; she will try to make you forget that Mrs. J– is absent.'

After a few customary courtesies were exchanged, I was shown to a dressing-room, and with the aid of 'Jim,' a razor, and one of the Colonel's shirts,—all of mine having undergone a drenching,—soon made a tolerably presentable appearance. The negro then conducted me to the breakfast-room, where I found the family assembled.

It consisted, besides the housekeeper, of a tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired personage, with a low brow, a blear eye and a sneaking look, the Overseer of the plantation; and of a well-mannered, intelligent lad,—with the peculiarly erect carriage and uncommon blending of good-natured ease and dignity which distinguished my host,—who was introduced to me as the housekeeper's son.

Madam P–, who presided over the 'tea things,' was a person of perhaps thirty-five, but a rich olive complexion, enlivened by a delicate red-tint, and relieved by thick masses of black hair, made her appear to a casual observer several years younger. Her face showed vestiges of great beauty, which time, and, perhaps, care, had mellowed but not obliterated, while her conversation indicated high cultivation. She had evidently mingled in refined society in this country and in Europe, and it was a strange freak of fortune that reduced her to a menial condition in the family of a backwoods planter.

After some general conversation, the Colonel remarked that his wife and daughter would pass the winter in Charleston.

'And do you remain on the plantation?' I inquired.