IBERKclEY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
THAT DOME IN AIR 
 
THAT DOME IN AIR 
 
 on Poetqj anti tjje 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN VANCE CHENEY 
 
 . . With music loud and long, 
 I would build that dome in air, 
 That sunny dome ! 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 CH I CAGO 
 
 A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 
 1895 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 
 BY A. C. MCCLURG AND Co. 
 A. D. 180; 
 
 
 IOAN STACK 
 
t 
 
 31 
 
 
 The land honour and glory of the immortall gods ; 
 . . . the memoriall and registry of all great fortunes, 
 the praise of vertue and reproof e of vice, the instruction 
 of morall doctrines, the revealing of sciences naturall 
 and other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous and 
 sturdie courages by persuasion, the consolation and 
 repose of tetnperate myndes, finally the common solace 
 of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transi- 
 torie life. GEORGE PUTTENHAM. 
 
 504 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 HE matter of this volume was pre 
 pared in the form of lectures written 
 from time to time for various audi 
 ences. Brought together, it naturally proves 
 rather, as Byron styled the " Giaour," a 
 " string of passages" than a connected series 
 of papers. Still, the ever-present conviction 
 that poetry is always poetry, that poetry is 
 of great importance, that there are laws 
 governing poetry, and that these laws can 
 be and should be familiar to the people, 
 this, perhaps, establishes sufficient continu 
 ity to warrant the issue of the collection. 
 Should the inspiring conviction stand out 
 too roughly at times, it will be smoothed 
 down by many another hand, leisured and 
 skilled not to 
 
 "leave it still unsaid in part, 
 Or say it in too great excess." 
 
 J. V. C. 
 
 CHICAGO, October 6, 1895. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE RELATION OF POETRY TO LIFE, WITH 
 
 SPECIAL REFERENCE TO RELIGION . . 11 
 
 II. RALPH WALDO EMERSON 43 
 
 III. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 61 
 
 IV. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 91 
 
 V. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW . . . 116 
 
 VI. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 127 
 
 VII. WALT WHITMAN 144 
 
 VIII. WILLIAM BLAKE 169 
 
 IX. WILLIAM COWPER iSS 
 
 X. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 207 
 
 XI. A FORGOTTEN VOLUME 218 
 
THAT DOME IN AIR. 
 
 THE RELATION OF POETRY TO LIFE WITH SPECIAL 
 REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 
 
 |S the future of poetry, as Matthew Arnold 
 prophesied, "immense"? For the 
 answer to this very important ques 
 tion, we must turn to the past, to man, his 
 nature and his needs as there recorded. If the 
 past answers that poetry has been of immense 
 influence upon the life of man, we are warranted 
 by the stability of the forces operative about us 
 and within us, in asserting that poetry will con 
 tinue to be of immense influence; indeed, we 
 cannot, with any show of reason, come to a 
 contrary conclusion. 
 
 What is the answer of the past? All that is 
 written rests on oral delivery, tradition, and 
 the tradition was poetry ; that is, the verbal ex- 
 
12 That Dome in Air. 
 
 pression of the fresh, astonished outlook of the 
 child-man, an ardent utterance of matter instinct 
 with imagination, addressed, as poetry is always 
 addressed, to both the mind and the heart, to 
 the intellect and to the emotions. Our history 
 and our literature, sacred and secular, rest on 
 folk-lore, which is always suffused with poetry, 
 luminous with it, and on minstrelsy, which is 
 song itself. War-songs and hymns of praise, 
 lyric voicings of the powers and processes of 
 nature these lie at the bottom. The matter 
 of our Hesiod and of our Homer belongs not 
 to them, but to the Hesiods and Homers of 
 others, long before them, singing in brightness 
 so far back that it was to the gaze of ancient 
 Greece impenetrable shadow. As has been ad 
 mirably said of the gleaming sea of fable from 
 which they drew, " [The legends] must be re 
 garded as neither being the inventions nor be 
 longing to the age of the poets themselves, but 
 as sacred relics and light airs breathing out of 
 better times, that were caught from the tradi 
 tions of more ancient nations, and so received 
 into the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks." 
 This sea of happy imaginings, rich with the rose 
 and gold of the rising sun, stretching betwixt us 
 and the old shores of the unknown, this sea 
 is poetry ; and it was by the sound of its waters, 
 and in the shine of their waking brightness, that 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 1 3 
 
 the records of man began. There the first res 
 cuing, preservative utterance was heard, and the 
 far-off music lingers still ; yes, and it shall tremble 
 on forever. 
 
 As it is with the writings of the Greeks, so it 
 is with the writings of all nations ; be the sub 
 stance sacred or profane, is it not all sacred ? 
 be the form, now or hereafter, verse or prose, 
 the original was matter of imagination, which 
 always speaks with the accent of song. The 
 heart of the older portion of our Bible, as of all 
 Bibles, is poetry. It is not the priest, not the 
 scribe, that holds us in this new day ; it is the 
 prophet, who, massing the idyllic and lyric tradi 
 tions of a past voiceful with the music of youth, 
 and touching them with the fresh, fusing fire of 
 genius and devotion, sings the might and glory 
 of the God of Righteousness. Farther and 
 farther we may wander away from the old con 
 cepts, but the old arc of glory bends overhead, 
 unbroken, and the old music sounds on. Ideas 
 change, but the first heart-gleams flash yet, the 
 burning early words keep the first far-off 
 splendor. 
 
 Testimony supporting the immense importance 
 of poetry in the past comes from every age and 
 clime. Merely mentioning the College of Pro 
 phets among the people that set the germs of 
 the religion prevailing in this land to-day, let us 
 
14 That Dome in Air. 
 
 turn, for a typical illustration of the great fact 
 around which these observations cluster, to Mr. 
 Edward William Lane in his " Selections from 
 the Kur-an." In Okadh, he says, was held 
 yearly a fair, where gathered the merchants 
 and the poets. It was a " literary congress," 
 where rival poets met and contended for the 
 applause of the people. It was there that the 
 language was built and purified. " It was there 
 that the Arab nation once a year inspected itself, 
 so to say, and brought forth and criticised its 
 ideals of the noble and the beautiful in life and 
 in poetry. For it was in poetry that the Arab 
 and for that matter each man all the world 
 over expressed his highest thoughts, and it 
 was at Okadh that these thoughts were meas 
 ured by the standard of the Bedawee ideal. The 
 fair not only maintained the highest standard of 
 poetry that the Arabic language has ever reached ; 
 it also upheld the noblest idea of life and duty 
 that the Arab nation has yet set forth and 
 obeyed." 
 
 The gist of Mr. Lane s report of the Arabs 
 holds true of all civilized antiquity; from time 
 immemorial, poetry has "upheld the noblest idea 
 of life and duty." It has conquered where all 
 other powers have failed, it still conquers where 
 all other powers prove inadequate ; and, reason 
 ing from both experience and the nature of man, 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 15 
 
 its future must be what its past has been, 
 "immense." Along all lines the original con 
 ception has undergone modification; it is still 
 undergoing modification, dictated by new knowl 
 edge and new needs; but the essential, basic 
 features remain. Greater modification yet is 
 inevitable; still, modification it will be, not 
 radical change ; the old foundation must stand 
 until the mind and heart of man outgrow them 
 selves, become wholly other than they have been 
 and are. Until that time radical change in the 
 place and power of poetry is impossible. 
 
 Indisputably language strikes its roots down 
 into the primitive soil of minstrelsy. Now, lest 
 it be thought less evident that the heart of our 
 Bible is of poetic origin, we may pardonably 
 interrogate a Professor of the Interpretation of 
 Holy Scripture at Oxford. Concerning the pas 
 sage from the story of Elijah where the ravens 
 bring him food, Canon Cheyne says, 
 
 "Few thinking men will admit that the verse 
 which I have read expresses a fact ; but no one 
 formed upon Shakespeare and Milton will deny that 
 it is the highest poetry, full charged, as such poetry 
 always is, with spiritual meaning. Why do we 
 teach our boys and girls Shakespeare and Milton? 
 Is it because they need amusement? No, but be 
 cause poetry is the symbolic, and if not always the 
 only adequate expression, yet the most universally 
 interesting expression, of the highest and grandest 
 
1 6 That Dome in Air. 
 
 truth. ... At each step that we take in the story of 
 Elijah we are enveloped in a golden atmosphere of 
 mingled fact and poetry ; this is an elementary lesson 
 of Bible-study. Some Bible-stories are pure facts ; 
 others, and those the most delightful, are mingled 
 fact and poetry ; this variety to a thoughtful 
 student is a part of the charm of the Biblical 
 literature. . . . 
 
 " There was once a great man his name is pre 
 cious in the history of England who wrote a De 
 fense of Poetrie. It is only in the West that such 
 * Defences are needed ; Poetry, like its sister, Re 
 ligion, has its native home in the East. I, too, stand 
 here to defend poetry to-day, the poetry of the 
 greatest of Eastern Books, the Old Testament ; and 
 I defend it on many grounds, but especially upon 
 this : that we in England are getting too old in sen 
 timent, and, I think, even in our religious sentiment ; 
 and we need to refresh ourselves at the fountains of 
 natural feeling, and above all by entering more 
 deeply into the spirit of those glorious Scriptures 
 which have come down from the time when the 
 world was young." 
 
 In the foregoing quotation, the point of the 
 poetic origin of the sacred writings is put none 
 too strongly. Why, indeed, do the Scriptures 
 keep their hold? Why, if not because of the 
 " universally interesting expression of the highest 
 and grandest truth"? The master secret of 
 poetry is its power to seize and keep the atten 
 tion; the appeal is double, taking at once the 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. \ 7 
 
 mind and the heart, enchaining the intellect 
 and the affections. An old Eastern poet is re 
 ported to have said of himself, " Saadi s whole 
 power lies in his sweet words." There is much in 
 the saying ; for, though prose may have the sub 
 stance of poetry, it can never have the music 
 and the splendor of poetry, the supernal 
 charm, the rapture. 
 
 Our Bible rests largely on poetry ; and as our 
 religion rests largely on our Bible, our religion 
 rests largely on poetry. Now, if the world has 
 all along had a religion resting largely on poetry, 
 we run little risk in saying that the religion of the 
 future will rest largely on poetry. The indica 
 tions are, indeed, that the world will rest its 
 religion on poetry more heavily in the future 
 than it has rested it in the past. Never man 
 spoke truer words than old Homer s where he 
 says, " Men cannot go on without the gods." 
 The future of religion is "immense"; from this 
 there is no escape ; and poetry is, and must con 
 tinue to be, the corner-stone of the spiritual 
 building, which is but another way of saying that 
 the future of poetry is "immense." 
 
 As Canon Cheyne phrases it, poetry is the 
 expression of the "highest and grandest truth," 
 not the highest and grandest fact. We are not 
 to cling to the letter, which killeth ; we are not 
 to believe, when reading the exalted utterances 
 
1 8 That Dome in Air. 
 
 of the old Hebrew poets, that we are getting 
 facts. To read them, in this belief, were worse, 
 perhaps, than not to read them at all : " Better 
 be without the Shu-King than to believe every 
 word of it." If we are to come at anything 
 profitable concerning poetry, here is the place 
 to begin. While every method possible to eccle 
 siastic ingenuity is still employed in defence of 
 the letter, which destroys, it behooves us to 
 observe that the class that has had the nominal 
 control in religious matters, the theologians, has 
 not had, together with the contortions, the divin 
 ing power. It has not had this power ; it has it 
 not now. It is impossible for theology to have this 
 power ; for theology is the science of religion, 
 and religion is not a science. Religion is not to 
 be scientifically stated, not to be systematized ; 
 it is a personal experience, differing with every 
 human soul in its efforts to live nobly and to 
 commune with the supreme power to which we 
 give the name God. Theology is difficult, 
 religion is simple; theology is rigid, religion is 
 elastic. Theology is a creature of the brain; 
 religion is the native, spontaneous affection of 
 the heart, 
 
 w All that has been majestical, 
 In life or death, since time began, 
 Is native in the simple heart of all, 
 The angel heart of man." 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 19 
 
 Here is the fatal mistake of theology it says 
 it knows concerning things of which we cannot 
 know. This it is that has enveloped belief in 
 the mist that enshrouds it to-day. The doubt 
 characterizing the present time, everywhere mani 
 fest from the scholar down to the unlettered 
 laborer, says, " There is no certainty about it ; 
 the scientists in matters of religion, after all, do 
 not know." The recent Religious Congresses 
 have done wisely in meeting, not as fellow theo 
 logians, but as brother men. Meeting in this 
 capacity, they have taken a step forward. They 
 have discovered that a sincere, well-meaning 
 man, whether he be Jew or Gentile, whether he 
 hail from Boston or from Bombay, is not to be 
 shrunk from ; that, whatever his faith be, he may 
 have hope of heaven. It has taken a good 
 many hundreds of years for theology to arrive at 
 this, and it is a matter for general rejoicing that 
 it has got thus far on the road of charity and 
 brotherly love. 
 
 The Religious Conferences have added a 
 graceful page to ecclesiastical history ; but the 
 sea of " obstinate questionings " sounding, day 
 and night, up and down the shore of thought, 
 the world over, to that great ocean voice has 
 come no answer. Surely were there an answer 
 to give, it would have been given. Hence it 
 appears only plainer than ever that theology has 
 
2O That Dome in Air. 
 
 done its best to give the world a sufficing, lasting 
 religion ; that it has tried, and failed. Why has 
 the religion of theology met this fate ? Largely 
 because it has taken the shell for the kernel, the 
 husk for the heart ; because it has read the fic 
 tion of the Bible for fact, the poetry of the Bible 
 for exact statement and history. Because it has 
 taken glorious outpourings of imagination for 
 positive knowledge, has made the old poets over 
 into historians and scientists. Men of this new 
 day see that scientific, positive religion is a con 
 tradiction in terms. They see that the theolo 
 gians are the last folk in a position to say that 
 they know the things whereof they speak; they 
 see that relief must come, if from any source, 
 from those that read the sacred scriptures, not 
 as science and history, but as literature, and put 
 forward that portion of them which, in striving 
 toward truth and peace and joy, soars to the 
 skies of faith, and, returning, says no more than 
 this, 
 
 " Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not : 
 He passeth on also, but I perceive him not." 
 
 Yes, science, having come to its strength, has 
 shaken the theologic towers to the ground, and 
 religion returns to go in the eternal doors whence 
 it came out when the world was young, the 
 doors of poetry. Our Bible, with the other half- 
 dozen Bibles, is literature ; and the portion of 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 21 
 
 this literature, aside from the few moral precepts 
 that underlie all right conduct, that is essential 
 for spiritual nourishment, for encouragement to 
 do faithfully and cheerfully the work of life, is 
 largely poetry. 
 
 To accept truth for fact in matters of the 
 highest concern to the human soul, is a serious 
 mistake ; it is a fatal mistake. And surely it is 
 none too early to learn that the splendid imagin 
 ings of the Bible are not history ; that its winged 
 aspiration, its celestial melody, its breathings of 
 lamentation and of joy, free as the wind, are not 
 fixed, rigid statement ; that the bulk of that por 
 tion of the old Hebrew scriptures found most 
 serviceable for spiritual nourishment and encour 
 agement in carrying on the work of life, is found 
 in one order, for example, with the old Greek 
 scriptures ; that both are found in the order of 
 poetry. Not that these two old scriptures are of 
 equal value as a stay of religion ; it is affirmed 
 simply that they belong to one and the same 
 class. Take, for illustration, two extracts, one 
 from the book of Exodus, the other from the 
 Iliad, - 
 
 And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, 
 because the Lord descended upon it in fire : and 
 the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a fur 
 nace, and the whole mount quaked greatly." Exod. 
 xix. 18. 
 
22 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Kronion spake, and bowed his dark brow, and the 
 ambrosial locks waved from the king s immortal 
 head, and he made great Olympus quake." Iliad, 
 bk. i. 
 
 What can be plainer than that these writings are 
 of one and the same order, both pure poetry? 
 The theologians would have us understand that 
 Javeh actually stood on Sinai, and held converse 
 with Moses ; while, as for Kronion s standing on 
 Olympus and talking with Thetis, he never did 
 any such thing. The theologians are not apt to 
 stickle for consistency. If one of these accounts 
 is history, why not the other? We have, at 
 least, consistency on our side when we take the 
 position that these records are simply poetic 
 flights, to give us glimpses of the one high, 
 unknown power behind all life, the power that 
 the Hebrew poet named Javeh, and the Greek 
 poet named Kronion. 
 
 These extracts are rather descriptive than 
 didactic ; but the same rule of interpretation 
 applies to the more didactic passages, except, 
 of course, those that lay down moral principles 
 in straight, unmistakable prose. 
 
 " But," cries one, " if the Bible as history and 
 science is done for, the whole building is fallen. 
 If the portion of the Bible on which we are to 
 lean heaviest is fiction, t is but ruins, rubbish ; 
 away with it ! A lame crutch indeed is dream 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 23 
 
 and shadow." No, the theology is fallen, but 
 not the poetry, the stay of religion. This 
 sort of dream, this sort of shadow, is, of all 
 supports, most strong and during. We cannot 
 afford to throw it away while there remains a 
 single soul that reaches beyond itself, that strives 
 to solve the mystery in which it lives and moves, 
 that struggles to lift itself to some recognition of 
 the infinite. This dream, this shadow, is the 
 voice of great souls that have striven in the years 
 that are behind us, the highest of all voices for 
 counsel and comfort. It is our own voice, risen 
 to the power for which we have longed ; it is our 
 own heart, grown large and valiant, beating on 
 the awful wall scaled only by the strongest, brav 
 est, and best of mortals. Away with the poetry 
 of the Bibles, of our own Bible in particular? 
 Never ; therein lies our chief encouragement, 
 our chief exaltation and joy. Yes, therein abides 
 sustenance for the only religion safe against the 
 assault of time, satisfying alike to the head and to 
 the heart ; the only religion that will not fade in the 
 growing day of knowledge. But take the Bible as 
 literature, but take the record of glorious imagin 
 ings for what they are, the sublimest utterances 
 that the ear of man has heard, and every mind 
 and every heart must find sustenance and solace, 
 find strength and joy. The poet s religion is a 
 solemn joy ; nevertheless it is a joy, and the only 
 
24 That Dome in Air. 
 
 joy that has not gone out in the gloom round 
 man s pathway since first he took up the burden 
 of life. There seems to be no way of escape 
 from the conclusion that the chief stay of our 
 strength and joy is now, and must be in the 
 future, the immortal utterance of those whom 
 Plato styles " the children of the gods, the poets 
 and prophets"; the hallowed song of those that 
 gild the few simple rules of right conduct with 
 the light that never was on sea or land, that 
 flash them into the heart ; of those that, keeping 
 pace with the increased knowledge of the years, 
 set these rules aflame with contagious emotion, 
 and, mingling with them loftiest intuitions and 
 aspirations, round all into the whole of supernal 
 beauty to which we give the name poetry. 
 
 Religion, from the present point of view, is 
 not only beyond the domain of science, it is also 
 beyond the domain of prose. It deals with 
 matters not to be calculated, not to be scientifi 
 cally stated ; matters concerning which the most 
 that can be done is to throw out hints, to give 
 expression to some momentary phase, to voice 
 some instant yearning, to speak for the sudden 
 start of emotion, the rush and lift of feeling, 
 vanishing even while it presses and rises. Prose 
 may give us the religion of figures and formulas, 
 of metaphysics and miracles, the religion of 
 theology; but this, as we have found, is the 
 religion that no longer serves, 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 25 
 
 " Ac Theologie has tened me ten score tymes, 
 The more I muse there-inne the mistier it seemeth." 
 
 Very different is the religion that rests on 
 poetry from the religion that rests on theology. 
 To adopt it, we have not to lay aside our reason, 
 have not to subject ourselves to the machinations 
 of perverted ingenuity, to torture our brains with 
 wandering through scholastic structures pillared 
 on the wind ; we have simply to be our best 
 selves, with mind and heart open to the high 
 voice that speaks to the reverent listener in all 
 times and in all places. The poet, ministering 
 to our spiritual need, but sings over in our ears 
 the noblest thought that has been sent out into 
 the vast, the purest, loftiest emotion that has 
 quickened human hearts to deeds of charity and 
 love. He does no more than hold before us the 
 grandest experiences of life, opening to us the 
 source of permanent strength and joy ; consum 
 mating his benefaction with the highest achieve 
 ment of mortal power, his suggestions, shining as 
 the stars in heaven, of Him that holds all things 
 in the hollow of his hand. 
 
 " Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment ; 
 Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain : 
 Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters ; 
 Who maketh the clouds his chariot : 
 Who walketh upon the wings of the wind." 
 
26 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Such is the God of the old Hebrew poetry, 
 such is the God of poetry to-day. 
 
 But while the poetry of our Bible is more im 
 portant to us in this land than the poetry of all 
 the other Bibles combined, by no means all that 
 may help us to lead right and rounded lives 
 comes from Job, from Isaiah, from the Psalm- 
 writers, and from the Christ. Not a little matter 
 that may help us, is the bequest of ancient 
 nations that had no Bibles proper; not a little 
 such matter is the bequest of pagan antiquity ; 
 for much of the teaching of pagan antiquity tends 
 to the exaltation of beauty, the power of which 
 is eternal among men ; and no inconsiderable 
 portion of it tend? to the perfection of the body, 
 that part of man not to be ignored if he would 
 have his steps happy while he walks the shore 
 of time. Would we lead full and happy lives, 
 we must look down as well as up ; the gray old 
 earth is a jealous mother. "Take care lest, 
 while you are watching heaven, you lose the 
 earth." The mass of mankind, whatever course 
 fanatics pursue, never forgets this excellent pagan 
 maxim. The ethics of Christianity, though vastly 
 superior in many respects to the ethics of pagan 
 ism, is weak on the physical side, on the side of 
 things terrestrial and temporal, especially in the 
 light emphasis put on the needs and privileges 
 of the body; therefore, however the teachings 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 27 
 
 of religious leaders and the histories of religious 
 sects may read, the fact remains that the masses 
 have continued to live, in certain particulars, in 
 accordance with the teachings of paganism. It 
 could not well be otherwise ; for Nature, after all, 
 is the controlling power over her children, and 
 that part of the teaching of paganism of which 
 we speak was taken verbatim from the lips of 
 the universal mother. The religion that rests on 
 poetry accepts the teachings of the universal 
 mother. The religion that rests on poetry dis 
 credits the Plutarchian account of the death of 
 Pan ; and in so doing it makes a strong appeal 
 to man, does much toward winning general 
 acceptation. 
 
 Attention has been called to the features of 
 paganism that survive ; and it may be properly 
 remarked here, that the features of the Christian 
 religion that actually survive, that really live, and 
 rule the hearts of men, are not those features 
 with which theology has overlaid and darkened 
 the simple, beautiful, universally acceptable teach 
 ings of the Master, but the utterances of the 
 Master himself; the simple, manly, wise, and 
 tender, verifiable truths of him that spoke as 
 man never spoke before, and as man has not 
 spoken since. The religion that rests on poetry 
 accepts these utterances, accepts them unreserv 
 edly and most warmly ; for they lie at the foun- 
 
28 TJiat Dome in Air. 
 
 dation of the noblest conceptions and aspirations 
 of the soul. 
 
 But while these utterances are more to us 
 than the best utterances of paganism, the religion 
 that rests on poetry cannot let go all the teach 
 ings of paganism ; the teachings of Greece in 
 particular, the Iliad, the immortal dramas, the 
 writings of Plato. Nor can be spared the 
 teachings of the old pagan race that gave us the 
 ^Eneid and the orations of Cicero. The teach 
 ing of Greece and Rome lays stress upon beauty 
 and upon physical perfection, but it does not 
 stop there. "All things are full of Jove " : here 
 Virgil voices not only the belief of his own peo 
 ple, but of all civilized antiquity. The theolo 
 gians will have it that Greece and Rome were so 
 godful as to be godless ; the people will not have 
 it so. The religion that rests mainly on the 
 poetry of the ancient Hebrews and on the sim 
 ple, verifiable teachings of Christ will not have it 
 so ; it recognizes the worth of the religion of 
 Greece and Rome. There, too, it sees the re 
 liance on the unknown and almighty power that 
 lies behind all things. " Fight not with the 
 gods," comes the warning voice of Euripides; 
 and ^Eschylus adds, " Rather have all men hos 
 tile than offend the gods." " We have excelled 
 all nations and peoples," says Cicero, "by our 
 wisdom in this, that we .have clearly perceived 
 
The Relation uf Poetry to Life. 29 
 
 that all things are governed and directed by the 
 immortal gods." And can we afford to forget 
 those words from Sophocles, 
 
 L " The man whom God unto ill doom doth lead, 
 
 Sees and is blind, deems right the wrongful deed ; 
 And brief his date is, and his doom assured " ? 
 
 The religion that rests on poetry adopts the 
 wise saying of Theodore Parker, " Nobody is as 
 great as everybody." It accepts the combined 
 wisdom of the world : the sacred books of the 
 ancient East are its inheritance, and every utter 
 ance of the unbroken strain of song and high 
 philosophy from the poets of old down to 
 Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
 Browning, and Emerson, down to the last of the 
 master voices whose melodies were our delight 
 while yet the singers were alive. 
 
 If the present findings accord with the facts, 
 the masses have leaned on poetry as the main 
 support of religion from time immemorial. The 
 reliance has been largely unconscious. This 
 may well be the distinguishing point of differ 
 ence between the religion of the past and the 
 religion of the future. The religion of the 
 future if prophecy is pardonable will con 
 sciously rest on poetry. The theology will be 
 eliminated, the sects will disappear, and men 
 will meet on the broad ground of poetry, the 
 
3O That Dome in Air. 
 
 only ground on which it is possible to unite all 
 interests, to bring all minds and hearts into 
 lasting accord. 
 
 The religion that rests on poetry, it must not 
 be forgotten, rests, of necessity, on music, on 
 sculpture and painting. Every form of high 
 imagination, every kind of noble, lifting expres 
 sion, must support and swell the riches of the 
 universal religion. All great art is the handmaid 
 of genuine religion. 
 
 But our way is not continually on the hills of 
 religion. Beauty, in and for itself, is, perhaps, 
 the next necessity after religion to one that 
 would get the most out of life. We are haunted 
 by the ideal, by the vision of perfection, by the 
 high dream, the lustre of which, glinting down 
 at fortunate moments, irradiates the common 
 way of toil and care. In the region of the 
 beautiful, the perfect, in the realm of ideality 
 lying between man s yearning toward God and 
 his efforts in the performance of the humblest 
 duty, in this wide region poetry reigns, as it 
 reigns in the realm of religion, supreme. Here, 
 also, it is the ruling power, supplementing faith, 
 patience, and reverence with health-giving, joy- 
 giving beauty, spread lavishly as the sunlight 
 is showered on the mountains and into the val 
 leys. The significant situations and experiences 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 31 
 
 of every-day life, the pleasing phenomena of 
 nature, are here woven together in imperishable 
 melody, which wells up hourly in the hearts of 
 those familiar with it, dispelling the gloom and 
 softening the harshness that make heavy the lot 
 of him that knows not the " divine delightful- 
 ness " of song. The mind, the heart, that is fed 
 on poetry, is conscious of a perpetual influx of 
 strength, buoyancy, and courage. The way, after 
 all, has a thousand flowers to one thorn, has 
 myriad happy airs to one wail of want, of doubt, 
 or despair. Poetry doth " raise and erect the 
 mind." There is something in the very move 
 ment of the words, a " happy valiancy," which 
 invigorates and enlivens, makes us strong and 
 joyous, proof against the harassing little hurts, 
 the stings of the gnat- swarm infesting the general 
 air as we journey. Many a wayfarer, in need of 
 a mental or a moral tonic, would rather recall a 
 few lines from Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, 
 or Emerson than the gist of the longest doc 
 trinal sermon ; in preference to the battle-cry of 
 an army of schoolmen, would have for martial in 
 spiration one perfect utterance aglow with the gold 
 of the morning of the heart, ringing with the 
 music of eternal youth, the music that only the 
 poet can wake. Recall the farewell scene be 
 tween crested Hector and Andromache of the 
 fragrant bosom ; summon before the mind s eye 
 
32 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Helen nearing the wall, shedding round her un 
 speakable loveliness as she comes ; look on way 
 worn Ulysses, striving to clasp his shadowy 
 mother in the dim Land of the Dead ; stand in 
 the presence of Prospero as, laying aside his 
 magic cloak, he turns to that whitest embodiment 
 of innocence, his daughter, and asks, 
 
 " Canst thou remember 
 A time before we came unto this cell ? " 
 
 behold in Paradise Lost the chariot " instinct 
 with spirit," the wheels set with beryl, aflame 
 with " careering fires," behold the chariot of 
 the Most High rolling on, bearing him that 
 stepped into it from the " right hand of glory " ; 
 let the mind fix itself for a moment on some 
 one among the thousand thousand splendors of 
 poetry new or old, then name another source 
 from which the whole being can catch the ex 
 hilaration that it gives, can take the sudden 
 strength that it imparts. There is little danger 
 of exaggerating the resources of the poets for 
 strength and joy. Those souls of the steadfast- 
 looking habit, those souls that see so deep and 
 wide, and tell what they have seen in heavenly 
 melody, what hallowing experience escapes 
 them, what vision of healing beauty? To them, 
 the wind harps of the spirit, belongs Thomson s 
 tribute, 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 33 
 
 " Ah me ! what hand can touch the string so fine, 
 
 Who up the lofty diapason roll 
 Such sweet, such sad, such solemn airs divine, 
 Then let them down again into the soul ! " 
 
 The petrifaction of bodies in the grave is rare ; 
 but the petrifaction of spirits in life is common. 
 The great preventive against this petrifaction 
 is it not poetry? To the poets with the poets 
 are included always the musical composers we 
 must look first, not only for the highest support 
 and encouragement, but for the gentle ministra 
 tion that is our consolation and joy through all 
 the vast region stretching between the highland 
 of religion and the valley of toil. 
 
 Before passing to a few closing observations on 
 the alleged strife between poetry and science, 
 a word should be said concerning the mechanical 
 theory of the early poetry. 
 
 A reason commonly assigned for the use of 
 the poetic form in the oldest writings is, that 
 certain elements of it alliteration, rhythm, and 
 so on are a great help to memory. More 
 than this should be said. It should be said that 
 tradition was embodied for preservation in much 
 the same form in which it originated because this 
 was the only form that could contain it. To 
 divorce the original substance from the original 
 form would be to divide soul from body; which 
 3 
 
34 That Dome in Air. 
 
 means, not preservation, but destruction. The 
 native voice of youth and imagination is song, 
 and song it must remain if the voice be not lost. 
 Beneath the mnemonic expedient lies one of the 
 profoundest secrets of life ; concerning which 
 Aristotle throws out a hint where he asserts the 
 parallel movement between sound vibration and 
 the pulsing of the soul, and Bacon another hint 
 where he says, " And we see that by these insin 
 uations and congruities with man s nature and 
 pleasure, joined also with the agreement and 
 consort it [poetry] hath with music, it hath 
 had access and estimation in rude times and 
 barbarous regions, where other learning stood 
 excluded." The " access " and " estimation " 
 won by poetry in the beginning, are its during 
 inheritance. 
 
 The essential features of poetry, and the old 
 need of it, be it said once more, remain ; poetry 
 endures, however, and must more and more en 
 dure, under new conditions, differentiating it, in 
 particulars, from what it has been. The old 
 tones will sound on, but the strain will be new ; 
 the imagination will move in the old strength 
 and splendor, but over unbroken ground, along 
 trackless ways. For this acquisition of territory 
 the advance of knowledge will be responsible ; 
 science especially, as the leading force of prog 
 ress. The old poetry was given to prophecy; 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life, 35 
 
 it had to do the work of the powers of exact 
 knowledge. The new poetry, while it will not 
 cease, on occasion, to anticipate the findings of 
 science, will occupy itself mainly, it is safe to 
 say, in warming and coloring, in transfiguring, 
 the findings of science for the sustenance and 
 solace, for the stay and delight, of the world. 
 Questions religious, social, and political are not 
 now what they have been. Poetry recognizes 
 this, and will recognize it more and more ; for 
 perception, and pliancy to the demand of the 
 hour, are of the fibre of its might. There should 
 be no fear that science will destroy poetry; 
 poetry, though opposed to science in method, is 
 the faithful ally of science. The thoughts of 
 God are not internecine. The master forces of 
 mind and heart are never at war among them 
 selves ; step by step, they push peacefully for 
 ward together toward perfection. 
 
 Wordsworth foresaw the change that has come, 
 and the greater change in waiting : 
 
 " If the time should ever come when what is now 
 called science becomes familiarized to men, then the 
 remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the 
 mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet s 
 art as any upon which it can be employed. He will 
 be ready to follow the steps of the man of science; 
 he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the 
 midst of the objects of science itself." 
 
36 That Dome in Air. 
 
 But, says one, suppose poetry should accommo 
 date itself to the new time, should operate on the 
 basis of new facts, its power may be dispropor 
 tionate to its power in the past ; the " aeration 
 of the understanding," now attributable to poetry, 
 may be attained by means of added facts. We 
 have no reason so to believe. If it is in the co 
 operation of fact and art that we find the secret 
 of the immortality of the Greeks, we can hardly 
 find that knowledge will reach a point where the 
 art of arts can be dispensed with. The charm 
 of beauty will, of itself, preserve poetry, maintain 
 it in the old position of supremacy. 
 
 But it is in much more than the charm of 
 beauty that poetry is supreme : it is in much 
 more than the charm of beauty that we find as 
 surance that, whatever changes come, it will hold 
 the old place and power. Poetry deals with an 
 order of truth in the pursuit of which art has no 
 rival ; it and the parent power, music, win access, 
 by methods wholly their own, to high and secret 
 places of being reached by no other ministrant. 
 Besides sharing with science dominion over man s 
 intellect, poetry holds and must ever hold in sole 
 supremacy his heart, his soul. Exact knowl 
 edge may not hope to suffice for the support and 
 solace of the emotions, of the affections. Exact 
 knowledge, multiplied a thousand times, may not 
 hope to suffice for the future man ; still will 
 weigh the heavy, 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 37 
 
 " iron time 
 Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears." 
 
 As science brings each noble task to a noble end, 
 poetry must take up the work, and carry it on to 
 the perfection that assures the satisfaction of the 
 whole man, of the brain and the heart. The 
 brain may be the man, 
 
 " And yet when all is thought and said, 
 The heart still overrules the head." 
 
 They of the Macaulay kind would send us back to 
 barbarism for the great achievements of poetry. 
 Not so ; the first of powers in time and in im 
 portance, it keeps its early hold. The mind and 
 heart of man begin in poetry, and end in it ; so 
 is the circle closed. 
 
 A recent writer, busying himself with the rela 
 tion between science and the aesthetic judgment, 
 says, 
 
 " The fact is that with the growth of our scientific 
 knowledge the basis of the aesthetic judgment is 
 changing and must change. There is more real 
 beauty in what science has to tell us of the chem 
 istry of a distant star, or in the life-history of a pro- 
 tozoon, than in any cosmogony produced by the 
 creative imagination of a pre-scientific age. By 
 more real beauty we are to understand that the 
 aesthetic judgment will find more satisfaction in the 
 former than in the latter. It is this continual grati 
 fication of the aesthetic judgment that is one of the 
 chief delights of the pursuit of pure science." 
 
38 That Dome in Air. 
 
 The assertion that there will be a shifting of 
 the sesthetic judgment has been anticipated ; 
 but the quotation makes it necessary to observe 
 that " cosmogony " is not a province of the poet. 
 That the old poet, passing his native bounds, 
 occupied a field that there was no one else to 
 take at the time, is no reason for judging him by 
 his work there, no excuse for instituting a com 
 parison between it and the work of science in 
 this new day. The old Hebrew poet he may 
 stand for the old poets occupying the empty 
 field of the scientist, did not take possession after 
 the manner of the scientist. He entered in 
 search, not of facts, but of truth. Says Canon 
 Cheyne, 
 
 "The so-called cosmogony was not meant to be 
 taken as an account of what we call facts ; it is 
 not a specimen of rudimentary science or pseudo- 
 science. How far the idea of natural science had 
 dawned upon the Babylonians may be left an open 
 question ; there is no evidence that it had dawned 
 upon the Israelites in Old Testament times. A 
 pious Hebrew writer takes a semi-mythical narrative 
 current either in his own or in some neighboring 
 nation, and moulds it into a vehicle of spiritual truth. 
 . . . It is useless then for the experts in other sub 
 jects to depreciate this document on scientific 
 grounds ; it is the underlying spiritual truths against 
 which alone, with due seriousness, it is admissible 
 to argue." 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 39 
 
 For the " real beauty," and for the real 
 might as well, of the old poet singing before 
 science was, we must take him in his own field, 
 a field that yields a small harvest to toilers in 
 cosmogony, 
 
 " When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, 
 The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained ; 
 What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? 
 And the son of man, that thou visitest him ? " 
 
 After the astronomer has spoken, there is a word 
 left to say, a word in no wise conflicting, but 
 additional and important. After science has 
 spoken its word of analysis and explanation of 
 the phenomena of nature, there is need of a 
 word further, the transfiguring word of the poet 
 concerning the Power behind the phenomena, 
 the Power 
 
 " Which shaketh the world out of her place, 
 And the pillars thereof tremble. 
 
 " Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; 
 And sealeth up the stars. 
 
 " Which alone stretcheth out the heavens, 
 And treadeth upon the waves of the sea. 
 
 " Which maketh the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, 
 And the chambers of the south. 
 
 " Which doeth great things past finding out; 
 Yea, marvellous things without number. 
 
 " Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not : 
 He passeth on also, but I perceive him not" 
 
4O That Dome in Air. 
 
 To inquire profitably into the beauty and 
 might that the poet rears on a foundation of 
 science, we must come this side of Dante 
 Dante, who mastered and bent to his use the 
 knowledge of his time down to our own day, 
 to Tennyson. Throughout Tennyson s music are 
 plainly to be heard the undertones of science ; 
 the great facts recently unearthed, the mould of 
 ages clinging to them, are launched, and borne 
 along the golden current side by side with the 
 lightest fancies. The laureate had the advan 
 tage of his predecessors, living, as he did, at 
 a time when science could become a basis for 
 the superstructure of imagination. We turn to 
 him first, among his contemporaries, because he 
 it was, in particular, that nature and training 
 enabled to seize this momentous advantage and 
 act upon it. The use he made of the new stock 
 of knowledge bears out the belief that the poetry 
 of the future will give no inconsiderable propor 
 tion of its force to the quickening, the warming, 
 of fact, to the kindling of it into the mystic igni 
 tion the flame of which the soul loves, and moves 
 in as in its own native element. Tennyson 
 strengthens us in the conviction that 
 
 " When Science reaches forth her arms 
 To feel from world to world, and charms 
 Her secret from the latest moon," 
 
 the poet will give liberally of his strength toward 
 the completion of the victory by setting the 
 
The Relation of Poetry to Life. 41 
 
 secret in transfiguring words. This will be done. 
 It must be done before the importance and 
 meaning of the secret can burn into the mind 
 and heart of the world, and so set aglow the 
 general life. Hope and love, with the voice of 
 music, must rehabilitate, yes, reshape and vital 
 ize, ignite, the fact if we are not to stop with 
 mere intellectual apprehension, if we are to pass 
 on to assimilation, to perfect appropriation and 
 practice. 
 
 Says Professor Shaler in his thoughtful little 
 volume, " The Interpretation of Nature," 
 
 " So long as learning remains in the shape in 
 which the investigator leaves it, it is generally use 
 less to the uninitiated in the science. It is only 
 when the poet does his work, when he phrases the 
 truth in a form to appeal to the imagination . . . 
 that the public has a profit from the inquiry." 
 
 " Wait, and Love himself will bring 
 The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit 
 Of wisdom. Wait; my faith is large in Time, 
 And that which shapes it to some perfect end." 
 
 Science does not speak with this accent, nor 
 does it add this final, consummating word. 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more," 
 
 sings the same poet, with the great facts of 
 science in mind, then adds yet again the con 
 summating word ; so do we move on to 
 
42 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " The closing cycle rich in good." 
 Firm is the faith in growing knowledge ; but the 
 end must be " rich in good." When growing 
 knowledge leads to another goal than this, then 
 shall it be thrust aside, 
 
 " Not only cunning casts in clay : 
 Let Science prove we are, and then 
 What matters Science unto men ? " 
 
 The immortality of life and love, the end " rich 
 in good," - these science itself will not be per 
 mitted to violate. At these its authority stops ; 
 at these the poet makes a beginning, puts on 
 his prophet s robe, and presses hopefully forward. 
 Such, roughly speaking, is the attitude of 
 poetry toward science ; but while bearing it in 
 mind, we are not to forget that the poet has, 
 beyond the power of summarizing and revoking 
 the knowledge uncovered by others, that surpass 
 ing gift, his own peculiar might in original in 
 vestigation, 
 
 " The poet in his vigil hears 
 
 Time flowing through the night, 
 A mighty stream, absorbing tears, 
 
 And bearing down delight : 
 There, resting on his bank of thought, 
 
 He listens, till his soul 
 The voices of the waves has caught, 
 
 The meaning of their roll." 
 
II. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 JHE poet Gray complained that he was 
 neither a cat to see in the dark, nor 
 
 _ an eagle to face the sun ; not a whisper 
 
 of this do we get from Emerson. Cat and eagle 
 are mere moles to him who says, "I am a trans 
 parent eyeball." Emerson, of all our poets, 
 sees; be it noontide or twilight, the glance is 
 straight and piercing. Not only does he see 
 through the light, but he absorbs it, " illuminating 
 the untried and unknown." Emerson s mastery 
 over light distinguishes him from his compeers, 
 and, coupled with his ability to put his private 
 fact into literature," gives him the electric, semi 
 nal strength which comes first in a computation 
 of his power. Sight, imagination, and inspiration 
 standing foremost among his gifts, Emerson was 
 a seer, a reporter, a mighty applier of ideas to 
 life. His aim was truth, his mission to tell us 
 how to live well " ; he was to the last the lover 
 
44 That Dome in Air. 
 
 of youth and beauty, he was a receiver of the 
 distilled wisdom of the ages, he was virile and 
 benign ; in short, he could make a brave showing 
 of the gifts characterizing the great poets of old. 
 A "redeemer of the human mind," sitting there 
 in quiet Concord so many years, he was in reality 
 as much abroad as at home ; host of the great 
 souls of all time, his hand was on the pulse of his 
 own time, to the needs of which it was his chief 
 aim to minister. 
 
 Emerson sought to fortify his fellows, to sow 
 in them the seed of growth, to render them 
 stanch, self-sufficient, and happy. He strove 
 for this, and the striving was not in vain. " O 
 my brother, God exists " ; " Think thy thought " ; 
 " Hug your fact " ; " Let us advance and advance 
 on chaos and the dark," the utterances came 
 with an accent so new that life quickened at the 
 sound, the soul took on strength, character re 
 built itself, and hope, honor, and courage were 
 once more supreme. Christian and Pantheist, 
 Stoic and Epicurean, Epictetus, Saadi, and plain 
 Yankee commingled and etherized, Emerson 
 once more set up the ideal, and Faith had again 
 a glowing mark whereon to fix her eyes. The 
 very air grew generative round him, and from 
 him spread far and wide strength and beauty 
 of living. 
 
 These spread round him, and they have not 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 45 
 
 ceased to spread. The strength and beauty of 
 living nurtured by "transcendentalism" did not 
 perish, as some would have it, with Emerson and 
 his immediate disciples. Science has been busy, 
 pushing its positivism, but it has not crowded out 
 the instinct for the higher life. Science has not 
 made away with this instinct, upon which Emer 
 son set so much and which he so strengthened, 
 nor has science sought to make away with it. 
 Such is the fact, though we be as long learning it 
 as we are that seekers for the truth, however op 
 posed their methods, are always friendly; though 
 we be as long learning it as we are in learning 
 that the essence of poetry is its practicality. 
 
 Much has been said by way of comparison 
 between Emerson and Carlyle. It is not neces 
 sary to continue this ; but one point, at least, 
 should be kept in mind : the ideality of Emerson 
 gave him an all-important possession, " im 
 mortal hilarity, the rose of joy." The abstract 
 perfection ever before his eyes, he could be 
 happy; whereas Carlyle, who looked to see 
 it embodied, was doomed to vexation and 
 sorrow. 
 
 Plato and Franklin in equal parts, poet and 
 man of affairs, Emerson is our one great teacher. 
 Revise your facts, he says, keep pace with expe 
 rience ; formulate anew, and, with the watch 
 words honesty, trust, modesty, valor, press on. 
 
46 That Dome in Air. 
 
 While the gist of the message is not new, the 
 temperament and the presentation are so rare 
 as to establish signal originality. These are of 
 the kind that "make the talent trusted"; they 
 betoken the oracle, the divinity. 
 
 Emerson was elevation and consequently 
 serenity incarnate. Strange elevation of spirit 
 seems to be characteristic of the family. Dr. 
 Holmes, speaking of Charles Chauncy Emerson, 
 the youngest brother, says, " He was for me the 
 very ideal of an embodied celestial intelligence." 
 Carlyle, recalling Emerson s stay with him, de 
 scribes him as an " angel visitant." The word 
 "angelic," seldom required in a description of 
 mortals, is one of the common words in all the 
 talk about Emerson. The "angelic " impression 
 was largely due to a gift of temperament, mani 
 fest in the seer s manner, in the light of his eye, 
 and in the tones of his voice. He did not have 
 to hitch his own wagon to a star ; nature had 
 done the hitching, he had but to get in and ride. 
 This means decided individualism ; and singu 
 larly individual Emerson remained to the last, 
 though wont to move in the very centre of the 
 wisdom of the world. " Angelic " individualism, 
 flowing from his pen, as from his person, gave 
 everywhere the touch of the extraordinary. In 
 dividual, extraordinary, Emerson is, even in his 
 borrowing. Come the matter whence it may, 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 47 
 
 the presentation is such as to " charm down 
 resistance." ^ 
 
 On the point of presentation, let us take first 
 Emerson s own notion of the poet, and see how 
 his work squares by it. "The poet," he says, is 
 one " who sees and handles that which others 
 dream of," who has the " largest power to receive 
 and to impart." " The value of genius to us is 
 the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and 
 juggle ; genius realizes and adds." Emerson s 
 might is our " largest power " ; of it can we affirm 
 with most confidence, it "realizes and adds." 
 Again he says : " This insight, which expresses 
 itself by what is called imagination, is a very high 
 sort of seeing, which does not come by study, 
 but by the intellect being where and what it sees, 
 by sharing the path, or circuit of things through 
 forms, and so making them translucid to 
 others." __^ 
 
 It would be a long look for a better definition 
 of imagination. No man can so write of poetry 
 without having the secret of it. With Emerson, 
 the poet is still the "winged man," "inhabiting 
 the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of 
 heaven." Elsewhere he adds, " Over everything 
 stands its daemon, or soul ; and as the form of 
 the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul 
 of the thing is reflected by a melody." 
 
 "Melorly" here we come to the points of 
 
48 That Dome in Air. 
 
 form and music. Beyond dispute, Emerson sees 
 and tells ; but has the voice the perfect accent ? 
 Characteristics that militate against style, whether 
 in prose or in poetry, must be at once admitted. 
 The thoughts are apt to stand isolated, or in 
 jagged lines ; nor is the effort of the reader re 
 duced to the minimum. The ideas do not run 
 together into the perfect and graceful whole, into 
 the delightful symmetry, that stamps a work of 
 art ; the procession is halting and disorderly. 
 The receiver is everywhere evident, but not the 
 maker. Moreover, Emerson is guilty of truisms 
 and paradoxes ; he is impatient of discussion, of 
 analysis ; he does not care to face his opponent, 
 he is not willing to face his differing self, as he 
 appeared yesterday, or as he may appear to 
 morrow; he trusts to the moment, seeing and 
 saying as the instant reveals and prompts. The 
 utterance abounds in "knots and stonds " ; mystic 
 riddles are stuck in many a chance corner. 
 Briefly, indifference to all but truth, wilfulness 
 unpardonable in one of less gentle spirit, is some 
 times rather the staple than the exception. 
 
 For these reasons, among others, Arnold could 
 not find Emerson a "legitimate poet"; could 
 not find him either a great poet or a great man 
 of letters. There is no gainsaying the fact that 
 Emerson exhibits grave faults, chief among them 
 being coherence of expression so slight as to 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 49 
 
 deserve a no more substantial term than atmos 
 pheric. True it is that the thoughts dart out, 
 one after another, complete in themselves, held 
 together by invisible links of the spirit only. 
 The essays, as is well known, were prepared for 
 the platform, the place where Emerson was, 
 perhaps, most at home. The method is that of 
 the talker ; and despite the after-pains to make 
 the discourses essays, discourses, platform-talks, 
 they still remain. And as with the prose, so with 
 the poetry the lyceum method continues in 
 control. 
 
 Emerson exhibits grave faults as a literary 
 artist ; but art is not the sum of human achieve 
 ment. Compared with the rare gifts of Emerson, 
 art, all but the very greatest, is common and 
 cheap. Arnold recognizes this fact, and finds 
 Emerson of "superior importance," for the hour 
 at any rate, to a "great poet," to a " great 
 writer," to a "great philosophy-maker." They 
 must be very rare and costly qualities that make 
 the possessor even the peer of a great poet ; and 
 in such a case we are not surprised to find that 
 the fortunate one is important, is great, not by 
 reason of qualifications differing from those of 
 the great poet, but by reason of certain of the 
 very same qualities that go to the making of a 
 great poet. So it is with Emerson ; he is the 
 peer of the great poets for the reason that, while 
 4 
 
50 That Dome in Air. 
 
 he has not all the qualifications of the great poet, 
 he has many of them ; and is in these so rich as 
 to compensate for the loss in the qualifications 
 weak or wanting. Sight, imagination, inspiration, 
 skill in single words and phrases, these are 
 present in such strength as to hide the deficient 
 continuity and musical sustentation. The fusing 
 power is comparatively weak ; but impressiveness, 
 wondrous impressiveness, is possible by means 
 of single words that fairly burst with meaning, 
 by reason of phrases that spread vistas rarely 
 opened by the most daring dreamers, the master 
 spirits of the world. Such is the lift of spirit 
 that the heaviest fact takes wing, and we find 
 ourselves following it, snatched up from the clod 
 and the rock to float in the ether. The pith, the 
 quintessence, of high truth is served at a mid-air 
 feast, in the dominion of the enchanter. The 
 powers of condensation another word for ex 
 pansion and suggestion, are tried to their 
 utmost, fastening things impalpable, most eva 
 nescent. It is a new world, and we are new 
 beings, strangers to our former selves. Strong in 
 heart and hope, quick in spirit, we are suddenly 
 wise and satisfied, safe against fate itself. 
 
 Surely, if the matter that can effect this is 
 neither great prose nor great poetry, it is magic 
 stuff of some sort. All our generative intellects 
 together have not had the quickening might of 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 5 1 
 
 this man, who is neither a great prose writer, a great 
 poet, nor a great philosophy-maker. Ah, but the 
 daemon ! with the daemon is the victory. In the 
 journey along the way of the cloud, on beyond, 
 where the mist can never come, what homely, 
 every-day work is wrought, work close and sub 
 stantial as any possible to the ground ! Master of 
 the practical is this serene leader on the upper 
 ways. "To him," says Lowell, "more than to all 
 other causes together, did the young martyrs of our 
 Civil War owe the sustaining strength of thought 
 ful heroism that is so touching in every record 
 of their lives." Greater victory than this was 
 never won by a great poet ; and the testimony 
 touches but one class of the many stirred to the 
 depths of being, roused, strengthened, set on to 
 new endeavor, by the gentle seer with the daemon 
 at his side. 
 
 Though Emerson s place is with Socrates and 
 Epictetus, with the immortal talkers, still, sharing, 
 as he does, with the great poets many essentials 
 of their greatness, he must be numbered among 
 them also. The poet is behind every sentence, 
 whether of prose or of verse ; and it is the poet, 
 as before shown, of the rarest kind, he with 
 the daemon. No great poet has ever leaned 
 harder upon the invisible powers that are the stay 
 of the soul, and none has ever been in closer 
 communion with them. Indeed, here is to be 
 
52 That Dome in Air. 
 
 discovered a cause for the weakness on the side 
 of art. It is too high reporting to catch more 
 than a word at a time. It is not a gaze, but 
 a series of glances. Such is the brightness 
 of the light that the eyes are closed at the 
 end of each sentence, which is in itself a com 
 plete vision. Consequently we have essay within 
 essay, poem within poem, these linked only by 
 the mystic continuity necessitated by the one 
 high source. 
 
 " Eloquent in trope and utterance when his 
 vaulting intelligence frees itself for the instant," 
 says Bronson, " yet see his loaded eye, his vol 
 leyed period ; jets of wit, sallies of sense, breaks, 
 inconsequences, all betraying the pent person 
 ality from which his rare accomplishments have 
 not yet liberated his gifts, nor given him unre 
 servedly to the Muse and mankind." Though 
 we all recognize the fidelity of this description, 
 the picture is not complete. In the verses, 
 " rammed with life," there is, besides power, both 
 music and beauty; there js, besides, that for 
 which art is, after all, the only name. There is, 
 for the soul, wholeness of impression and beauty. 
 To the nature of beauty Emerson s own words are 
 the fittest testimony : 
 
 " The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill 
 in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, 
 namely, a radiation from the work of art, of human 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 53 
 
 character, a wonderful expression through stone, 
 or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and 
 simplest attributes of our nature." 
 
 About the lovely radiation of character there 
 is no question, and this must not be left out of 
 the count. All the detractions admitted, the fact 
 remains that, beyond the great man, the great 
 teacher, Emerson is a poet. The " dearest and 
 gravest ministrations to the imagination and the 
 soul " are to be heard from him ; and of such 
 are pre-eminently the utterances of the poet. 
 His attitude toward truth, toward youth and 
 beauty, is the poet s attitude. No other man 
 among us reveals Emerson s sympathy with youth. 
 As an abstraction it is ever in his thought, and to 
 the last his favorite hearers were the young. 
 " Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we 
 adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful 
 generations concern not us. ... The flowers"! 
 jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridicu 
 lous tenderness." Close is the sympathy with 
 youth, equally close the sympathy with beauty. 
 "This indescribable beauty," he says of Nature; 
 "beauty breaks in everywhere"; and he makes 
 a like report of the spiritual world. 
 
 The reporter of truth, youth, and beauty must 
 perforce be a lover of Nature, and Emerson is 
 indeed an affectionate son of the Good Mother. 
 " He who knows the most, he who knows what 
 
54 That Dome in Air. 
 
 sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, 
 the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these 
 enchantments, is the rich and royal man." If 
 any one has known how to come at these en 
 chantments, it is the author of " Woodnotes," 
 " Monadnoc," and " May-Day." Such is his 
 love that we find in it another cause for the in 
 difference to art : as truth is more than art, so 
 Nature is more, and must be first obeyed. " Na 
 ture never rhymes her children," and he will not 
 rhyme his own well. But Emerson is no slave 
 even to nature ; he will not " camp out and eat 
 roots," he will not be a woodchuck, an experi 
 ment to which Thoreau was sorely tempted. 
 Here, as everywhere, he is sane and wise. If 
 "the perception of the inexhaustibleness of na 
 ture is an immortal youth," if he finds so much 
 in the ground, he nevertheless holds it lightly, in 
 view of the immense promise it gives of posses 
 sions beyond. 
 
 Though in Emerson s case we do not look first 
 for the artist, it is going too far to find him as 
 much a poet in his prose as in his verse. 
 
 " Now we learn what patient periods must 
 round themselves before the rock is formed, then 
 before the rock is broken, and the first lichen 
 race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate 
 into soil, and opened the door for the remote 
 Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 55 
 
 How far off yet is the trilobite ! how far the 
 quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is man ! 
 All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. 
 It is a long way from granite to the oyster ; farther 
 yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortal 
 ity of the soul." 
 
 " I wrote the past in characters 
 Of rock and fire the scroll, 
 The building in the coral sea, 
 The planting of the coal. 
 
 And thefts from satellites and rings 
 
 And broken stars I drew, 
 And out of spent and aged things 
 I formed the world anew ; 
 
 " Time and Thought were my surveyors, 
 
 They laid their courses well ; 
 They boiled the sea, and baked the layers 
 Of granite, marl, and shell. 
 
 "But he, the man-child glorious, 
 
 Where tarries he the while ? 
 
 The rainbow shines his harbinger, 
 
 The sunset gleams his smile. 
 
 " My boreal lights leap upward, 
 Forthright my planets roll, 
 And still the man-child is not born, 
 The summit of the whole." 
 
 Here, obviously enough, are two distinct styles ; 
 and if one is in doubt as to whether Emerson 
 was a true poet, if not a great poet, the doubt 
 
56 That Dome in Air. 
 
 will vanish on reading the remaining stanzas of 
 this same Nature song. 
 
 Emerson is withal a lyrist ; thinking often in 
 rhythm, he sometimes thinks in airiest melody. 
 As about the man, so about the poems, there is 
 something celestial; notwithstanding the blem 
 ishes, it is a seraph s manuscript. The faults are 
 those of the habitat. Arnold s phrase, " a strain, 
 new, moving, and unforgetable," does not tell the 
 whole story. At least one third of the volume of 
 verse published in 1846, is choice poetry, original, 
 imaginative, struck out at the bidding of the 
 daemon. Our principal literary organ at the time 
 testified to the appearance of a genius by charac 
 terizing the work as " fantastic nonsense," " silly 
 pedantry," and by calling into question the 
 author s sanity. So it has always been, and so, 
 probably, it will always be. "The Sphinx," 
 which was a stumbling-block in 1847, is a stum 
 bling-block still; but one stanza of it, if no 
 more, betokens the seer and the sayer, the re 
 porter of life born, not made : 
 
 " Up rose the merry Sphinx, 
 
 And crouched no more in stone ; 
 She melted into purple cloud, 
 
 She silvered in the moon ; 
 She spired into a yellow flame ; 
 
 She flowered in blossoms red ; 
 She flowed into a foaming wave ; 
 
 She stood Monadnoc s head." 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 57 
 
 For imagination, and movement that follows the 
 life, this stanza is a standing model. 
 
 Among the poets of late years, Wordsworth 
 only has matched the exceptional excellences of 
 the next two poems, " Each and All," and " The 
 Problem." 
 
 " I thought the sparrow s note from heaven, 
 Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; 
 I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; 
 He sings the song, but it pleases not now, 
 For I did not bring home the river and sky ; 
 He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye." 
 
 "Good-Bye," "Woodnotes," "The Rhodora," 
 " The Humble-Bee," " The Snow-Storm," - 
 these poems lack neither fusion nor continuity, 
 and they have the test accent. For ease and 
 melody weak points with Emerson how many 
 singers have surpassed such lines as these? 
 
 " Hot midsummer s petted crone, 
 Sweet to me thy drowsy tone 
 Tells of countless sunny hours, 
 Long days, and solid banks of flowers ; 
 Of gulfs of sweetness without bound 
 In Indian wildernesses found ; 
 Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure, 
 Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure." 
 
 The longer poem, "Woodnotes," is of less even 
 excellence ; but seldom, indeed, have we received 
 so exhilarating an invitation as that summed in 
 the line, 
 
58 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Put off thy years, wash in the breeze." 
 The day it was conceived, 
 
 " T was one of the charmed days 
 When the genius of God doth flow." 
 
 Strewn with those happy " finds," 
 
 " As if a sunbeam showed the place," 
 it is not only 
 
 " Painted with shadows green and proud 
 Of the tree and of the cloud," 
 
 but it is odorous and melodious with breath 
 " Breathed from the everlasting throat." 
 
 " Monadnoc," if not so thoroughly suffused with 
 beauty, bespeaks the sinew of him whose food 
 has been the 
 
 " Best of Pan s immortal meat." 
 
 Freedom and strength swing their way through 
 it at a pace few can follow ; the air is tonic at 
 every step. More than one has asked at the 
 end, has he not come, the bard and sage 
 waited for, 
 
 " Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed, 
 Shall string Monadnoc like a bead "? 
 
 " Hermione," perhaps the loveliest of Emerson s 
 poems, filled with double subtilty as from the 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 59 
 
 spirits of Wordsworth and Coleridge, this spiced 
 throughout with the new quantity, Yankee en 
 chantment, opens with the only lines that recall 
 the magic of the Abyssinian maid with her dul 
 cimer ; and to the end there is little falling off. 
 It is enough to say of any poet that his music, at 
 his best, is sweet when sounded against the 
 melody of Coleridge. This is true of the 
 opening and of other lines of " Hermione," 
 and it is true of the closing stanzas of "The 
 House," - 
 
 " She lays her beams in music, 
 
 In music every one, 
 To the cadence of the whirling world 
 Which dances round the sun ; 
 
 " That so they shall not be displaced 
 
 By lapses or by wars, 
 But, for the love of happy souls, 
 Outlive the newest stars." 
 
 " Musketaquid " is a happy bit of blank-verse 
 autobiography. And so we might go on, page 
 to page, in company with the true poet. If 
 "the friend and aider of those who would live 
 in the spirit " is always present, the poet is often 
 beside him. Only the poet can 
 
 " The bird-language rightly spell, 
 And that which roses say so well ; " 
 
60 That Dome in Air. 
 
 and only the poet can sound the depths of spirit 
 struck down to in the crowning song of lamenta 
 tion. Emerson s high place may be among the 
 immortal talkers ; but let it not be forgotten how 
 much he did to 
 
 " Bring the flown Muses back to men." 
 
III. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 I. 
 
 THE ESSAYS. 
 
 ]AD Lowell written only the essays on 
 Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden, 
 he would have proved himself the most 
 brilliant and intuitive of our critics. As one 
 closes the sixth volume of the essays in the final 
 ten-volume edition of his works, one blinks as if 
 at a pile of opals. We chance first upon the 
 author at sea : 
 
 " But what say you to a twelve days calm such 
 as we dozed through in mid-Atlantic and in mid- 
 August? I know nothing so tedious at once and 
 exasperating as that regular slap of the wilted sails 
 when the ship rises and falls with the slow breathing 
 of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy swell follow 
 ing another, slow, smooth, immitigable as the series 
 of Wordsworth s Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Even at 
 his best, Neptune, in a tete-a-tete, has a way of re- 
 
62 That Dome in Air. 
 
 peating himself, an obtuseness to the ne quid minis, 
 that is stupefying. It reminds me of organ-music 
 and my good friend Sebastian Bach. A fugue or 
 two will do very well; but a concert made up of 
 nothing else is altogether too epic for me. There 
 is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, 
 and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates. 
 F^ncy an existence in which the coming up of a 
 cliimsy finback whale, who says Pooh! to you 
 solemnly as you lean over the taffrail, is an event 
 as exciting as an election on shore ! The damp 
 ness seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifer- 
 matches, so that one may scratch a thought half a 
 dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint 
 sputter, the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes 
 far enough to leave a sense of suffocation behind it. 
 Even smoking becomes an employment instead of a 
 solace." 
 
 Here are genuine opals; and the wondrous, if 
 somewhat "unlucky," stones are poured into our 
 lap by the basketful. Whether in the jottings 
 of a journey or in the steady effort of criticism, 
 it is always the gleam, the flash, peculiar to this 
 radiant man of letters, ever the brightness and 
 the surprise. Take up any volume, and we are 
 off for a holiday with a bonfire in the evening. 
 And an all-night bonfire it will be, where learn 
 ing, now of the ploughman, now of the scholar, 
 and observation wide and keen, furnish the fuel, 
 while wit and satire vie with the purest Yankee 
 
James Russell Lowell. 63 
 
 humor as to which shall make the bravest spurt 
 in the general conflagration. There is no 
 moment too sober for a stealthy glint : 
 
 " He [Wordsworth] went quietly over to Ger 
 many to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin 
 a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time 
 when there were only two men in the world (him 
 self and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one 
 in any wise differing from those, mechanically uni 
 form, which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the 
 great pin-paper of society." 
 
 In the author s own words, "everything grows 
 fresh under his hand " ; staleness is impossible. 
 But fond as he is of fine phrases, Lowell is no 
 " mere lackey " to them ; as ready as Montaigne, 
 he is also as wise. The first seven pages in his 
 essay on Carlyle evidence the breadth of mind, 
 the knowledge, the insight, that go to the equip 
 ment of an all-round man of letters; and ere 
 long he strikes to the heart of his subject in a 
 single sentence, 
 
 " With a conceptive imagination vigorous beyond 
 any in his generation, with a mastery of language 
 equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants alto 
 gether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 
 which would have made him a poet in the highest 
 sense. He is a preacher and a prophet, anything 
 you will, but an artist he is not, and never can 
 be." 
 
64 That Dome in Air. 
 
 The shaping-power of imagination is again 
 touched on where he speaks of Lamb in the 
 essay, " Shakespeare Once More," 
 
 " Himself a fragmentary writer, he had more sym 
 pathy with imagination where it gathers into the 
 intense focus of passionate phrase than with that 
 higher form of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, 
 gives unity of design and balanced gravitation of 
 parts. And yet it is only this higher form of it 
 which can unimpeachably assure to any work the 
 dignity and permanence of a classic ; for it results 
 in that exquisite something called Style, which, like 
 the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere pervasive 
 and nowhere emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill 
 with which it effaces itself, and masters us at last 
 with a sense of indefinable completeness. On a lower 
 plane we may detect it in the structure of a sentence, 
 in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of 
 thought; but it is only where it combines and 
 organizes, where it eludes observation in particulars 
 to give the rarer delight of perfection as a whole, 
 that it belongs to art." 
 
 And who has spoken better on the point of 
 imitation of the Greeks? 
 
 " Do we show our appreciation of the Greeks most 
 wisely in attempting the mechanical reproduction of 
 their forms, or by endeavoring to comprehend the 
 thoughtful spirit of full-grown manhood in which 
 they wrought, to kindle ourselves by the emulation 
 of it, and to bring it to bear with all its plastic force 
 
James Russell Lowell. 65 
 
 upon our wholly new conditions of life and thought ? 
 It seems to me that the question is answered by the 
 fact, patent in the history of all the fine arts, that 
 every attempt at reproducing a bygone excellence 
 by external imitation of it, or even by applying the 
 rules which analytic criticism has formulated from 
 the study of it, has resulted in producing the arti 
 ficial, and not the artistic. That most subtile of 
 all essences in physical organization, which eludes 
 chemist, anatomist, microscopist, the life, is in 
 aesthetics not less shy of the critic, and will not 
 come forth in obedience to his most learned spells, 
 for the very good reason that it cannot, because in 
 all works of art it is the joint product of the artist 
 and of the time." 
 
 There is no question as to the genuineness of 
 such criticism ; and the six volumes are freighted 
 with it, agleam, moreover, with the coruscation 
 of wit and humor, of imagination and fancy. 
 Only with this equipment plainly before us can 
 we understand how it was that, besides being a 
 wit, a satirist, a moralist, a critic, the same man 
 could be poet not only, but statesman and diplo 
 matist. As it is, we are ready to believe that he 
 could run every octave possible to the gamut of 
 cleverness ; the very thing, indeed, that he did. 
 
 " He [Milton] seems always to start full-sail ; the 
 wind and tide always serve ; there is never any flut 
 tering of the canvas. In this he offers a striking 
 contrast with Wordsworth, who has to go through 
 5 
 
66 That Dome in Air. 
 
 with a great deal of yo-heave-ohing before he gets 
 under way. 
 
 " Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting 
 terms with heaven." 
 
 When we think of Lowell, this is the sort of 
 expression first in mind, for it is of the marrow 
 of the man ; it is the second thought that passes 
 on to the strength of certain of the essays as a 
 whole, such essays as those on Dante, Chaucer, 
 and Spenser in the realm of letters, and on 
 Democracy in the remote realm of politics. 
 
 Appreciating the masterly quality of the essays, 
 the brilliance and the strength ; admitting Lowell 
 to be the only man of his time that could write 
 them, granting him the many gifts that have 
 brought him homage from the literary class, 
 why has not his influence for culture spread 
 wider and deeper? Two things seem clear, 
 one, that his influence for culture is greatly dis 
 proportionate to his gifts ; another, that what is 
 new in his criticism lies mainly in the manner of 
 presentation. It is well worth while to try to as 
 certain why the manner of presentation has not, in 
 the present instance, drawn all men. It can be 
 accounted for somewhat, perhaps, by the thought 
 that, well stored as Lowell was, he erred in trust 
 ing rather to his own resources than to the font 
 of the ages. Quick, sure as the intuition may 
 
James Russell Lowell. 67 
 
 be, it is hardly safe to pit it against the cumula 
 tive wealth of time. The old self-method can 
 hardly hold its own, in any hands, against the 
 modern method of the many, the method of 
 science. If Lowell s powers were more dazzling 
 than those of Arnold, they cannot have been so 
 well guided ; for the two sowed the same 
 field, and it is Arnold s seed that is now growing. 
 Perhaps Lowell was handicapped by the munifi 
 cence of his equipment, by a superabundance of 
 scintillating matter, the very burning of which 
 darkened the theme. Perhaps this glowing 
 mind, so bright in itself, was beguiled, at times, 
 into lack of reverence for the milder but more 
 enduring light of certain of his fellow- workers, 
 and even for the steadfast beams of the high 
 star of art. Wit and humor are reactionary; 
 oddly enough, tempting the possessor to take 
 some things too seriously, and, not last among 
 them, himself. Certain it is that, squared by 
 his own rules, Lowell was defective, as an artist, 
 both in his prose and in his poetry. Brought to 
 the standard he supported, he hardly illustrated 
 the primal power of construction, and he was not 
 impeccable in minor points of technics. In 
 fact, despite his persistent humor, he could, on 
 occasion, violate the laws of taste. While humor 
 keeps a wholesome watch on taste, it is capable 
 of assaulting its own ward. It performs that 
 
68 That Dome in Air. 
 
 unnatural office, for instance, where princely 
 Goethe is put in the role of a milkmaid, pail in 
 hand, carefully working Herr Bottiger into a 
 corner. Indiscriminate humor is belittling; 
 and no combination of Celtic speed and zest, 
 of Yankee shrewdness and snap, and full and 
 ready scholarship can atone for the tendency to 
 lower high persons and things to the level of the 
 ignoble. This is flatly opposed to the endeavor 
 of the poet, and of the true critic, who studies 
 the poet in order to make the best of him for 
 the bettering of the world. One hesitates to 
 say that the question, " What will nourish us in 
 growth toward perfection ?" was the mainspring 
 of Lowell s critical work. It was the mainspring 
 of Arnold s critical work ; and this, together 
 with his remembrance of Bacon s warning, to 
 seek rather what should be thought than what 
 can be said, is sufficient largely to account for 
 the richer harvest garnered by the Englishman. 
 Arnold, as fond of a fine phrase as Lowell and 
 as capable of turning it, tries the propriety of 
 its use by a Wordsworthian seriousness ; Lowell 
 is wont not to stop for this. Here is one differ 
 ence between these two writers, and it is a wide 
 and pregnant disparity. Because of this dis 
 parity, perhaps, more than for another reason, 
 Arnold s dozen pages on Milton outweigh 
 Lowell s five dozen. When Lowell is finally 
 
James Russell Lowell. 69 
 
 through with his inimitable bantering of Professor 
 Masson, he says true and noble things ; but he 
 stops with a portrayal of his hero, satisfied, with 
 out a word of solemn rejoicing because of our 
 inheritance from him, the inheritance that nour 
 ishes in growth toward perfection. We miss the 
 rich conclusion of De Quincey : " Milton is not 
 an author among authors, or a poet among poets, 
 but a power among powers." Lowell leaves 
 before us the noblest of portraits, 
 
 " But it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the 
 habitual companions of whose mind were the Past 
 and Future. I always seem to see him leaning in 
 his blindness, a hand on the shoulder of each, sure 
 that the one will guard the song which the other had 
 inspired." 
 
 This could not be bettered so far as concerns 
 Milton, but to be sure of getting the thing that 
 concerns us, we turn to Arnold, 
 
 " All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, all the flood of 
 Anglo-Saxon commonness, beats vainly against the 
 great style, but cannot shake it, and has to accept its 
 triumph. But it triumphs in Milton, in one of our 
 own race, tongue, faith, and morals. Milton has 
 made the great style no longer an exotic here ; he 
 has made it an inmate amongst us, a leaven, and a 
 power. Nevertheless he, and his hearers on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, are English, and will remain 
 English, 
 
 4 Sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt. 
 
/o That Dome in Air. 
 
 The English race overspreads the world, and at the 
 same time the ideal of an excellence the most high 
 and the most rare abides a possession with it 
 forever." 
 
 As we lay aside these ten volumes, the indis 
 putable evidence of mental endowment in cer 
 tain respects the most encouraging developed 
 among us, our pride is tempered by unwelcome 
 reflections. Lowell, despite the rare mental 
 endowment, despite the support of health, 
 wealth, arid a long lease of years, was not always 
 abreast with the best thought or with the best 
 methods of his time. Such was the case so far 
 as concerns his criticism of poetry. He had a 
 loose hold on the essential truth that the " office 
 of poetry in the modern world is still its ancient 
 office of deliverance " ; he did not offer the 
 sacrifice Sainte-Beuve was glad to offer on the 
 altar of song ; he did not cultivate the patience, 
 the sobriety of Arnold. It is needless to say 
 that neither of these critics yields to him in the 
 stress put upon the artistic element ; they pressed 
 as far as he up the path of art, but refused to 
 rest content there. Yes, ours is a tempered 
 pride ; for, compared with the work of the few 
 with whom the author s high gifts place him, we 
 can hardly claim for much of the matter of the 
 essays on the poets and the men of letters more 
 than unique and, at times, amazing entertain 
 ment for the literary class. 
 
James Russell Lowell. 71 
 
 In this unwelcome reflection is to be heard 
 a voice of warning which should not pass 
 unheeded. Criticism, like poetry, is a hard 
 thing, demanding beyond the most brilliant gifts 
 the " dedicated spirit." " Temper destroys it, 
 a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may 
 destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing 
 itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on 
 some collateral issue about the thing, is the hard 
 est matter in the world." 
 
 Poetry herself adds the final word, 
 
 " When your eyes have done their part, 
 Thought must length it in the hart." 
 
 II. 
 
 THE POEMS. 
 
 Now, as we turn to the first of the four vol 
 umes of verse, let us adopt the simple plan of 
 noting down the impressions got from gleaning 
 through it at a sitting. The first lines to attract 
 special attention are to be found on the thir 
 teenth page, the first stanza of " With a Pressed 
 Flower," 
 
 " This little blossom from afar 
 Hath come from other lands to thine ; 
 For, once, its white and drooping star 
 Could see its shadow in the Rhine." 
 
72 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Though this poem of six stanzas is well wrought 
 throughout, the first stanza is, perhaps, the 
 choicest. 
 
 The next halting-place is at the lines, " To 
 Perdita, Singing," on page 23, 
 
 " Thy voice is like a fountain, 
 
 Leaping up in clear moonshine ; 
 Silver, silver, ever mounting, 
 Ever sinking, 
 Without thinking, 
 To that brimful heart of thine. 
 Every sad and happy feeling, 
 Thou hast had in Bygone years, 
 Through thy lips comes stealing, stealing, 
 
 Clear and low ; 
 
 All thy smiles and all thy tears 
 In thy voice awaken, 
 And sweetness, wove of joy and woe, 
 From their teaching it hath taken ; 
 Feeling and music move together, 
 Like a swan and shadow ever 
 Floating on a sky-blue river 
 In a day of cloudless weather." 
 
 To one that remembers his Wordsworth, the 
 picture of the swan is not happy, but the inspi 
 ration of this piece, too, holds to the end. 
 
 On page 32 comes the "Ode" beginning 
 with the familiar line, 
 
 " In the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder." 
 
 There is a reason for our remembering this line ; 
 it is the best line of six pages of blank verse, 
 
James Russell Lowell. 73 
 
 evenly respectable, and ending with a well-worn 
 simile, 
 
 "As when a sudden burst of rattling thunder 
 Shatters the blueness of a sky serene." 
 
 The first promise of a poet appears, perhaps, 
 on page 46, in " The Rose." Besides being of 
 interest, this piece has poetic atmosphere, an 
 important element not before noticeable. As 
 for the twenty-seven sonnets soon following, 
 suffice it to say that the high-water mark is 
 reached in the one addressed to Wendell Phillips. 
 "A Legend of Brittany" is a smooth- running 
 story, so carefully told as to make it pleasant 
 reading throughout. Among many pretty lines 
 are two not easily forgotten, 
 
 " As if a lark should suddenly drop dead 
 While the blue air yet trembled with its song." 
 
 " Prometheus " is hardly beyond the reach of a 
 cultured young man of poetic tendencies. 
 
 When we come to " An Incident in a Railroad 
 Car," toward the close are three stanzas, simple, 
 wise, and sweet, that might have dropped from 
 the pen of the Scottish ploughboy, 
 
 " It may be glorious to write 
 Thoughts that shall glad the two or three 
 High souls, like those far stars that come in sight 
 Once in a century ; 
 
74 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " But better far it is to speak 
 One simple word, which now and then 
 Shall waken their free nature in the weak 
 And friendless sons of men ; 
 
 " To write some earnest verse or line, 
 Which, seeking not the praise of art, 
 Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine 
 In the untutored heart." 
 
 The next and last stanza, the tag of the teacher, 
 shows the prevailing influence of the time, and is, 
 like all its kindred in Longfellow and the rest, a 
 blemish. 
 
 In " Rhoecus " passages of classic beauty 
 streak the sea of modern instruction with the 
 pure poetic phosphor; while in the pieces im 
 mediately following, didacticism holds its dull 
 color from page to page till we come to the fire 
 characterizing the " Stanzas on Freedom." If 
 such lines as the last two of this poem and of 
 " Columbus " are possible to other than a poet, 
 still they reveal power of condensation ; which 
 is not one of the merits of these early verses 
 generally, and which is of the very pith of 
 poetry, - 
 
 " They are slaves who dare not be 
 In the right with two or three." 
 
 " A lavish day ! One day, with life and heart, 
 Is more than time enough to find a world." 
 
James Russell Lowell. 75 
 
 Thus far we find the poetic temperament, but, 
 beyond the mere mechanics, little of the poet s 
 method of interpretation, little to convince us 
 that song is the native form of utterance. The 
 readiness of mind, characteristic of the prose 
 essays, is evidently native ; so, too, is the haste, 
 the trust reposed in the moment. Young poets 
 are not expected to master blank verse, but they 
 are supposed to know that, if " second thoughts 
 are prose," first thoughts are often something not 
 so good as prose, 
 
 " Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, 
 And disappointment s dry and bitter root, 
 Envy s harsh berries, and the choking pool 
 Of the world s scorn, are the right mother-milk 
 To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind, 
 And break a pathway to those unknown realms 
 That in the earth s broad shadow lie enthralled." 
 
 We must not omit one quotation, where the 
 didacticism and the consonant endings, rimic in 
 effect, are offset by three noble lines, 
 
 " The wicked and the weak, by some dark law, 
 Have a strange power to shut and rivet down 
 Their own horizon round us, to unwing 
 Our heaven-aspiring visions, and to blur 
 With surly clouds the Future s gleaming peaks, 
 Far seen across the brine of thankless years. 
 If the chosen soul could never be alone 
 In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, 
 No greatness ever had been dreamed or done ; 
 Among dull hearts a prophet never grew; 
 The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude." 
 
76 That Dome in Air. 
 
 The last stanza of "The Present Crisis," often 
 quoted, exhibits representative merits and de 
 fects, 
 
 " New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient 
 good uncouth ; 
 
 They must upward still, and onward, who would keep 
 abreast of Truth ; 
 
 Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires ! we ourselves must 
 Pilgrims be, 
 
 Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the 
 desperate winter sea, 
 
 Nor attempt the Future s portal with the Past s blood- 
 rusted key." 
 
 But when are we coming to the poet? On 
 the very next page. After turning upward of 
 ninety leaves, we open upon " An Indian-Sum 
 mer Reverie," and a disclosure somewhat 
 startling upon perhaps the nearest perfect 
 poem of the length that Lowell has left us. 
 Elsewhere are higher flights, but where in the 
 four volumes is there another poem of the length 
 so thoroughly poetic ? 
 
 " The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 
 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, 
 And hints at her foregone gentilities 
 
 With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves ; 
 The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, 
 Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 
 
 As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves." 
 
 Finer still is the rollicking bobolink, captured 
 at a single stroke, 
 
James Russell Lowell. 77 
 
 " Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, 
 
 Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops 
 Just ere he sweeps o er rapture s tremulous brink, 
 And twixt the winrows most demurely drops." 
 
 Again we have the master touch in the lines, 
 
 " The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, 
 As pale as formal candles lit by day. 1 
 
 We need not dwell on " The Dandelion," 
 " She Came and Went," "The Changeling," and 
 a few other pieces, all of them poetry, all beauti 
 ful as they are familiar. We pass them, bearing 
 in mind the small quantity and the excellent 
 quality of the poetry discovered. Lowell says in 
 the prefatory note to this volume, penned in his 
 old age, that he would like to put "a great 
 many pieces " well back, if not out of sight. It 
 is a pity that the white-haired sires of song 
 should be denied so proper a privilege. 
 
 One more poem in the volume remains to be 
 noticed, the next to the last, " The Vision of Sir 
 Launfal." From the first eight lines of this 
 poem is felt a poetic breath not breathed again 
 from our home hills and fields, and rarely wafted 
 from the old lands beyond the sea ; and, passing 
 on to the twenty-four lines beginning, 
 
 " And what is so rare as a day in June ? " 
 
 one exclaims, "The purest, the sweetest, and at 
 the same time the freshest, strains from any 
 
78 That Dome in Air. 
 
 singer of our soil ! " It is a dangerous attempt, 
 the piping of new variations on a theme of Ten 
 nyson s, but it is successful in the present in 
 stance. The prelude to part second is too 
 fanciful, perhaps, too pretty, for the key set in 
 the masterly beginning; and we would gladly 
 spare the line, 
 
 " He was ware of a leper, crouched by the same," 
 also the line, 
 
 " And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine." 
 
 However, these are faults easily overlooked in a 
 poem which stands next below the " Reverie " 
 in point of perfection of composition, and above 
 it in the points of key and compass. 
 
 Of the second volume, containing the incom 
 parable " Biglow Papers," one need not say that 
 here Lowell stands quite alone. 
 
 " God makes sech nights, all white an still 
 
 Fur z you can look or listen, 
 Moonshine an snow on field an hill, 
 All silence an all glisten." 
 
 It is a deep disguise, but the shining, eternal 
 angel is within. The first series of the " Biglow 
 Papers" appeared in 1848, when the author was 
 twenty-nine, while the other poems we have 
 glanced at were published when he was twenty- 
 five or twenty-six. 
 
James Russell Lowell. 79 
 
 The third volume of this definitive series in 
 cludes, with earlier work, " Under the Willows," 
 which we first saw when Lowell was in the prime 
 of manhood, about fifty. The tone is mellowed, 
 the gait easier, the style being that of the bright 
 conversationalist of letters and song, 
 
 " I love to enter pleasure by a postern, 
 Not the broad popular gate that gulps the mob." 
 
 "The First Snow- Fall," "The Wind Harp," 
 "The Foot-Path," show no progress in art be 
 yond points reached in the short poems previ 
 ously mentioned ; while here and there, as in 
 " Al Fresco," stand passages not surpassed for 
 awkwardness in the hasty days of the early 
 twenties, 
 
 " O unestranged birds and bees ! 
 O face of Nature always true ! 
 O never-unsympathizing trees ! 
 O never-rejecting roof of blue, 
 Whose rash disherison never falls 
 On us unthinking prodigals, 
 Yet who convictest all our ill, 
 So grand and unappeasable ! " 
 
 Regarding the volume " Heartsease and Rue," 
 the last bequest to us, it is sufficient to speak of 
 the poem " Agassiz." As one reads this tribute 
 to the memory of a friend, it is difficult to avoid 
 a comparison with " Thyrsis." Whether or not 
 the comparison be made, one feels at the very 
 
8o That Dome in Air. 
 
 start that the things said so excellently are, 
 after all, of a different order from those that 
 "will not stay unsaid." The impression made 
 is that of an attempt as deliberate as the per 
 formance is successful. The conversational tone 
 is uppermost, and in more than one place we 
 have hard reading. The theme is thoroughly 
 masculine, and such lines as these are well up 
 to it, 
 
 " Teach me those words that strike a solid root 
 
 Within the ears of men ; 
 Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, 
 Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben, 
 For he was masculine from head to heel." 
 
 But further on, in a like passage, the man yields 
 to the inventor, 
 
 " His look, wherever its good-fortune fell, 
 Doubled the feast without a miracle." 
 
 The Miltonic trilogy of virtues is not exemplified 
 in this ode ; which is but another way of saying 
 that we should not point to it as specifically the 
 work of a poet. The intellectual grasp is un 
 questionable, the vigorous English as well ; but 
 the atmosphere, the flavor, the grace, that we 
 must insist on for the admission of song, whether 
 it be dirge or serenade, whatever else is here, 
 these are wanting. The first stanza of " Thyrsis " 
 makes this only too plain, 
 
James Russell Lowell. 81 
 
 How changed is here each spot man makes or fills ! 
 
 In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same ; 
 
 The village street its haunted mansion lacks, 
 
 And from the sign is gone Sibylla s name, 
 
 And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stalks 
 
 Are ye too changed, ye hills ! 
 
 See, t is no foot of unfamiliar men 
 
 To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays ! 
 
 Here came I often, often, in old days, 
 
 Thyrsis and I ; we still had Thyrsis then." 
 
 Though we hear much more of the odes than of 
 "The Cathedral," the admirer of the true Lowell- 
 ian line will find it oftener here than elsewhere in 
 volume four of the verse. There is sense enough 
 in it to stock a common writer for a lifetime, and 
 one passage that not Emerson himself could bet 
 ter ; which is to say that it has peculiar virtues 
 not excelled by any poet of our time, 
 
 " One spring I knew as never any since : 
 All night the surges of the warm southwest 
 Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, 
 And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, 
 Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm 
 Startled with crocuses the sullen turf 
 And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song : 
 One summer hour abides, what time I perched, 
 Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, 
 And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof 
 An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, 
 Denouncing me an alien and a thief: 
 One morn of autumn lords it o er the rest, 
 When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves fall, 
 Balancing softly earthward without wind, 
 6 
 
82 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Or twirling with directer impulse down 
 On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, 
 While I grew pensive with the pensive year : 
 And once I learned how marvellous winter was, 
 When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, 
 I creaked adventurous o er the spangled crust 
 That made familiar fields seem far and strange 
 As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 
 In ghastly solitude about the pole, 
 And gleam relentless to the unsetting sun : 
 Instant the candid chambers of my brain 
 Were painted with these sovran images ; 
 And later visions seem but copies pale 
 From those unfading frescos of the past, 
 Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, 
 Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me 
 Parted from Nature by the joy in her 
 That doubtfully revealed me to myself. 
 Thenceforward I must stand outside the gate j 
 And paradise was paradise the more, 
 Known once and barred against satiety." 
 
 Browning is never more spontaneous, never 
 fresher, and seldom, if ever, so continuously 
 musical. Indeed few have addressed Spring at 
 any time in language fitter to take her maiden 
 heart. And why is not Lowell oftener thus de 
 lightful? Ah, the thousand powers that must 
 unite for the birth of perfect song ! After all, 
 the poet, like the bluebird, is wiled to his whiff 
 of melody ; and if Nature be not propitious, let 
 the blame be upon her. Though much of this 
 poem is hardly more than exalted talk, 
 
James Russell Lowell. 83 
 
 " I went, and, with the Saxon s pious care, 
 First ordered dinner at the pea-green inn, 
 The flies and I its only customers," 
 
 the remainder is something far from that, 
 a rich deposit of wisdom and gladdening 
 prophecy : 
 
 " Perhaps the deeper faith that is to come 
 Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt, 
 Than in the creed held as an infant s hand 
 Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein." 
 
 Finally, as to the odes, about which many have 
 had much to say, and over which we are likely 
 to be disturbed by the patriotic bias. We must 
 beware of that, otherwise we shall not see, for 
 instance, that, in the tribute to Washington, the 
 inspiration that has made famous the eighth and 
 last division of " Under the Old Elm " flags after 
 the eleventh line. Before glancing through the 
 " Commemoration Ode," let us remember that, 
 loose a term as the word " ode " is, and has ever 
 been in our language and practice, we have 
 always insisted on its being a lyrical and spir 
 ited as well as a dignified, composition on some 
 worthy theme. There must be high thought, and 
 the high thought must find expression through 
 the poet s method, the swift, direct method 
 of music and passion. Lowell being compara 
 tively deficient in music and passion, it is natural 
 to suspect that, however complete his triumph in 
 
84 That Dome in Air. 
 
 high thought, the ode will not be the species of 
 composition to reveal him at his best ; and so, 
 in the writer s judgment, it proves. There was 
 everything in the theme of the "Commemoration 
 Ode," in the occasion, and in the poet s experi 
 ence and sympathy, to rouse him to the utmost ; 
 but all this will not avail when nature says, " Not 
 quite what I intended." Proud as we are of the 
 odes, especially of the "Commemoration Ode," 
 it is a question how much they advance the 
 claims of Lowell purely as a poet ; like Ten 
 nyson s dramas, they may be more the record 
 of a last ambition than of a push of nature. 
 Indisputably there is no such mastery of this 
 form as there is in the case of the dialect pas 
 torals, of the idyllic pieces and those of the 
 order of " Credidimus Jovem Regnare." To speak 
 generally, the odes are wanting in emotion, in 
 music. Whether the ode be Pindaric or Hora- 
 tian, regular or irregular, whatever be the style, 
 high thought must ride on fire and divine 
 sound. In the " Commemoration Ode " we 
 have the high thought, but have not continu 
 ously the indefinable, inevitable quality that, 
 for example, makes the following unpreten 
 tious lines from Hood s "Ode on Autumn" out 
 weigh in poetic value Taylor s "National Ode" 
 and his " Gettysburg Ode " put in the scales 
 together : 
 
James Russell Lowell. 85 
 
 "The swallows all have wing d across the main, 
 But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, 
 
 And sighs her tearful spells 
 Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. 
 
 Alone, alone, 
 
 Upon a mossy stone, 
 
 She sits and reckons up the dead and gone, 
 With the last leaves for a love-rosary; 
 Whilst all the wither d world looks drearily, 
 Like a dim picture of the drowned past 
 In the hush d mind s mysterious far-away, 
 Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last 
 Into that distance, gray upon the gray." 
 
 It may be said that comparison cannot be 
 made between poems so different in kind. It 
 can be made, and with profit ; for poetry, what 
 ever be the order, is always poetry. 
 
 The theme of the " Commemoration Ode " is 
 noble, but, while the composition moves for the 
 most of the way with dignity, it does not move to 
 smitings of the lyre. In the sixth division come 
 twenty-two great lines to Lincoln. Too much 
 cannot be said in praise of these ; but after them 
 perhaps only two will be remembered, 
 
 " And one of Plutarch s men talked with us face to face, 
 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American." 
 The splendid line, 
 
 "And brave old wisdom of sincerity ! " 
 
86 That Dome in Air. 
 
 is followed by one that drops to the prosaic re 
 gion and road of the quadruped and the pack- 
 train, 
 
 " In that sure-footed mind s unfaltering skill." 
 
 The seventh division is prosaic ; wisdom is pres 
 ent, but not the sort that is bride to immortal 
 verse. The fourth line of division eight, 
 
 " Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk," 
 
 wretched in itself, becomes tenfold more vexing 
 since it is the very last before an outburst of pro 
 found personal sorrow. At the twenty-eighth line 
 of the eighth division is a burst of fervor, of the 
 success of which the reader is left to judge on re 
 hearing the lines, 
 
 " Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow ! 
 For never shall their aureoled presence lack ; 
 I see them muster in a gleaming row, 
 With ever-youthful brows that nobler show ; 
 We find in our dull road their shining track ; 
 
 In every nobler mood 
 We feel the orient of their spirit glow, 
 Part of our life s unalterable good, 
 Of all our saintlier aspiration ; 
 
 They come transfigured back, 
 Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
 Beautiful evermore, and with the rays, 
 Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation 1 " 
 
 It is better to go forward to the twelfth and last di 
 vision, where we may hear the poet at his best : 
 
James Russell Lowell. 87 
 
 " O Beautiful ! my Country ! ours once more ! 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
 O er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
 
 And letting thy set lips, 
 
 Freed from wrath s pale eclipse, 
 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, 
 What words divine of lover or of poet 
 Could tell our love and make thee know it, 
 Among the Nations bright beyond compare ? 
 
 What were our lives without thee ? 
 
 What all our lives to save thee ? 
 
 We reck not what we gave thee ; 
 
 We will not dare to doubt thee, 
 But ask whatever else, and we will dare ! " 
 
 At first thought these splendid lines shame us for 
 the restrictions passed upon their fellows; on 
 second thought, they shame their fellows, not us. 
 As Coleridge has finely said, music is an inte 
 gral part of the imagination. The lyric move 
 ment in his ode, " France," let us have a strain 
 of it : 
 
 " Ye Clouds ! that far above me float and pause, 
 Whose pathless march no mortal may control ! 
 Ye Ocean- Waves ! that, wheresoe er ye roll, 
 Yield homage only to eternal laws ! 
 Ye Woods ! that listen to the night-birds singing, 
 Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, 
 Save when your own imperious branches swinging 
 Have made a solemn music of the wind ! " 
 
 Gray s Ode, the " Progress of Poesy," has the 
 integral element, music, has the rapturous move 
 ment, 
 
88 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Now the rich stream of music winds along, 
 Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, 
 Through verdant vales, and Ceres golden reign; 
 Now rolling down the steep amain, 
 Headlong, impetuous, see it pour : 
 The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. * 
 
 In Cowley s ode, "The Praise of Pindar/ if 
 we omit the seventh and eighth lines, the " rich 
 stream " pours on : 
 
 " Whether at Pisa s race he please 
 To carve in polished verse the conqueror s images ; 
 Whether the swift, the skilful, or the strong 
 Be crowned in his nimble, artful, vigorous song; 
 Whether some brave young man s untimely fate 
 In words worth dying for he celebrate ; 
 
 He bids him live and grow in fame, 
 
 Among the stars he sticks his name, 
 
 The grave can but the dross of him devour, 
 
 So small is death s, so great the poet s power." 
 
 Even in the strict Horatian ode of Marvell, where 
 the close words and lines are fairly riveted to 
 gether, there, too, is the rhythmic pliancy, the rise 
 and fall of imperishable melody, of august, invul 
 nerable harmony, 
 
 " The forward youth that would appear, 
 Must now forsake his muses dear, 
 Nor in the shadows sing 
 His numbers languishing. 
 
 " T is time to leave the books in dust 
 And oil th unused armor s rust, 
 Removing from the wall 
 The corselet of the hall. 
 
James Russell Lowell. 89 
 
 " So restless Cromwell could not cease 
 In the inglorious arts of peace, 
 
 But through adventurous war 
 Urged his active star : 
 
 "And like the three-forked lightning first, 
 Breaking the clouds where it was nurst, 
 Did thorough his own side 
 His fiery way divide." 
 
 The music must not be left for the little singers ; 
 the greater the poet, the greater the imagina 
 tion, and the voice of imagination is music. The 
 half-dozen poets whose song is ever on the breath 
 of the world, not only spoke in music, but thought 
 in it. Browning was wont to leave out the music, 
 Lowell was wont to leave it out ; but Milton 
 could not speak without its going in, 
 
 " For if such holy song 
 
 Enwrap our fancy long, 
 
 Time will run back and fetch the age of gold ; 
 And speckled vanity 
 Will sicken soon and die, 
 
 And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould ; 
 And hell itself will pass away, 
 And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day." 
 
 Were one to hazard a prophecy, one would say 
 that our splendid, our lamented Lowell, so far as 
 concerns his verse, will be remembered for two 
 brief but noble eulogies of two of the noblest of 
 men, but more particularly as the author of " An 
 
go That Dome in Air. 
 
 Indian Summer Reverie " and of " The Vision of 
 Sir Launfal " ; and perhaps before these for that 
 matchless variation of the voice of rustic love 
 wherein the wild rose, Hulda, sits blushing to the 
 brook forever. 
 
IV. 
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 IN coming of age, Whittier, a shy, self- 
 taught farmer boy, found himself, not, 
 like a brother singer at even an earlier 
 age, in a college chair of modern languages, but 
 most prosaically seated in the editorial chair of 
 the "American Manufacturer." Unpromising as 
 was the outlook for poetry, the young editor was 
 hardly out of place there ; for, as became a scion 
 of his stock, he proved himself nimble -witted, 
 many-handed. Piper or politician, as the mood 
 took him, he was one hour the gentlest of 
 Quakers, the next the stiffest of fellows for a 
 fight. The contradictions were only in seeming, 
 for the greatest poets have put country and duty 
 before song; and though one call himself a 
 Quaker, Nature has the first and final say as to 
 what he is and shall be. 
 
 Whittier s bent toward poetry is shown in the 
 early turning to it; and the man, the citizen, 
 the patriot, is shown in the turning away from 
 it the moment there was something on hand of 
 
92 That Dome in Air. 
 
 greater importance. While the lad was a cham 
 pion of the red man and an ardent lover of 
 nature, and would fain sing of these, the impulse 
 was instantly checked for the stern task of bat 
 tle against wrong and oppression. The love of 
 right and freedom this was to be the govern 
 ing power. If it pointed to sunshine and song, 
 to ease and homage, be it so ; if it pointed to 
 darkness and the cry of pain, to ostracism and 
 mobbery, it was well. Either way, it mattered 
 not, he stood ready, assured of the end, 
 
 " The curse of earth s gray morning is 
 The blessing of its noon." 
 
 When one thoroughly honest and competent 
 to judge himself, offers us the key to his life, we 
 cannot accept it too readily. W r hittier s words 
 are, " I have never staked all on the chances of 
 authorship." He goes further than this : the 
 verses up to the age of almost threescore are 
 styled " simply episodical." Whittier knew him 
 self from the beginning, and was his own best 
 critic whether as a man or a poet. When he 
 threw himself heart and soul into the antislavery 
 struggle, he knew that he was setting his face 
 away from art ; a thing which another " Ameri 
 can " and " poet of democracy " did not dream 
 he was doing when the sound of his every step 
 was a violent reminder. The outcome was in no 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 93 
 
 wise doubtful : our " Kosmos," lounging among 
 the flowers, was not suffered to pluck them, while 
 our mailed and visored Quaker has, in the pauses 
 of the onset, snatched here and there a fadeless 
 blossom. Such is the meed of the hero-poet; 
 and hero and poet, if America has produced 
 either, was this very man, this friend of freedom, 
 this foe of the oppressor. 
 
 We all know so well what business it was that 
 filled the strong, active days, what absorbed the 
 whole man until the time of gray hairs, that 
 America has not in her literature lines which 
 touch her more than the couplet, written in 
 1856, 
 
 "Oh, not of choice, for themes of public wrong 
 I leave the green and pleasant paths of song." 
 
 But the song must stand or fall by itself, we 
 must not confuse the minstrel with the man. 
 Flowers we shall find before the year 1865, when 
 poetry became the vocation ; such flowers, how 
 ever, as grow high above the quiet valley, up 
 among the rocks, tossed by the warring winds. 
 
 With "Mogg Megone" and the other early 
 verses relegated to the appendix of the seven- 
 volume edition of Whittier s works, we will stay 
 but for brief illustration of the poetic instinct. 
 Among the echoes of Scott and Byron comes, 
 now and then, an accent like this, 
 
94 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " He knew the rock with its fingering vine, 
 And its gray top touch d by the slant sunshine." 
 
 The open-air freedom characteristic of the later 
 work is discoverable in the prophecy of Mogg 
 Megone, that he will possess Ruth, the outlaw s 
 daughter, 
 
 " But the fawn of the Yengees shall sleep on my breast, 
 And the bird of the clearing shall sing in my nest " ; 
 
 while in "The Sicilian Vespers" we note the 
 vividness and swing natural to the balladist, 
 
 " The startled monks thronged up, 
 
 In the torch-light cold and dim; 
 
 And the priest let fall his incense-cup, 
 
 And the virgin hushed her hymn." 
 
 The early pieces establish, moreover, an in 
 stinctive preference for home matter. Whittier, 
 ending as he began, began as a singer of his 
 native New England sod. The traditions of the 
 valley of the Merrimac, which he took in with 
 the mother-milk, never quite go out of mind; 
 while the hills and rivers of Essex vie with mo 
 mentous problems of reform in the steady press 
 for utterance. The man with a mission is, of 
 course, omnipresent from the start. Four lines 
 of the second poem of volume four, verses to a 
 fellow-toiler in the cause of freedom, might well 
 have been addressed to the author himself, 
 
John Greenleaf Whit tier. 95 
 
 " We will think of thee, O brother ! 
 And thy sainted name shall be 
 In the blessing of the captive, 
 And the anthem of the free." 
 
 Poetry is the episode ; art is not the aim, 
 
 " Art builds on sand ; the works of pride 
 And human passion change and fall ; 
 But that which shares the life of God 
 With Him surviveth all." 
 
 This favorite sentiment is repeated in the lines 
 written for Bryant s birthday, 
 
 " Thank God ! his hand on Nature s keys 
 Its cunning keeps at life s full span ; 
 But, dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these, 
 The poet seems beside the man ! " 
 
 Much has been said of the scarcity of books 
 in the little Quaker household; but Indian 
 legends, tales of Puritan persecution, " Pilgrim s 
 Progress," and Burns s poems were not all. The 
 Bible was there ; and few are the many pages of 
 this poet where is not made good the saying of 
 Coleridge, that the Bible is sufficient for the ac 
 quiring of style. In substance and in setting, 
 the Bible lies at the bottom of Whittier s art ; 
 the faith, the fervor, the simplicity and sensu- 
 ousness of the ancient Hebrew are unremittingly 
 his. 
 
 In passing, busy investigators, of the blood of 
 them that tell the number of knots in Hercules s 
 
96 That Dome in Air. 
 
 club, have given Whittier a period of " storm 
 and stress." It remains only to prove " Maud 
 Muller," "The Tent on the Beach," and "Snow- 
 Bound " a trilogy with an immense undermean- 
 ing, and Whittier, too, will be among the incom- 
 prehensibles. Such questioning of his soul as 
 he makes, results in no utterance darker than 
 this, 
 
 " O friend ! no proof beyond this yearning, 
 This outreach of our hearts, we need ; 
 God will not mock the hope He giveth, 
 No love He prompts shall vainly plead." 
 
 A distinguished critic laments Whittier s turn 
 ing from the quiet scenes of the hearthside and 
 of the home fields, 
 
 " Making his rustic reed of song 
 A weapon in the war with wrong." 
 
 Few, probably, share the sentiment; the many 
 feeling, on the other hand, that, excellent as the 
 homely idyls " and " summer pastorals " of 
 the after days prove, too much cannot be said 
 in praise of the judgment that deferred these till 
 the fire and irony, the tenderness and invective, 
 of the " Voices of Freedom " should have helped 
 to work out their great purpose, until the prayers 
 of the patriot should have been answered, and 
 his hope satisfied. The country has certainly 
 been the gainer, and one questions the loss to 
 song. Whittier s range is not wide ; he has gone 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 97 
 
 the ground over, and perhaps no other prepara 
 tion than that chosen could have served better 
 as a prelude to the last happy work, 
 
 "[The] free and pleasant thoughts, chance sown, 
 Like feathers on the wind." 
 
 If Whittier was by nature and training fitted to 
 sing the life and nature of New England, he was 
 equally equipped for the " war with wrong " ; 
 and in this, the stormier field, there was none to 
 stand beside him, his voice had no second in 
 those dark days. 
 
 " Leave studied wit and guarded phrase 
 For those who think but do not feel ; 
 Let men speak out in words which raise, 
 Where er they fall, an answering blaze, 
 
 Like flints which strike the fire from steel." 
 
 Such was the voice, the only voice in America 
 that could blend with Garrison s in the battle for 
 the slave. 
 
 " Lift again the stately emblem on the Bay State s rusted 
 
 shield, 
 Give to Northern winds the Pine Tree on our banner s 
 
 tattered field. 
 Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round 
 
 the board, 
 Answering England s royal missive with a firm, Thus 
 
 saith the Lord ! 
 Rise again for home and freedom ! set the battle in 
 
 array ! 
 What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do 
 
 to-day." 
 
98 That Dome in Air. 
 
 The effect of a trumpet blast like this at the 
 momentous time when it was sounded is sufficient 
 justification for forgetting all the rules of art save 
 those that go to the sounding of it. Whether it 
 be the torrent of scorn poured on the " paid 
 hypocrites" in their " tasselled pulpits," or the 
 wail of the broken-hearted slave-mother for her 
 daughters sold into bondage, whatever haps 
 to the fane of poesy, the temple of freedom is 
 ringed to the spire-tip with fire as of the light 
 ning. Two things worked greatly to Whittier s 
 advantage in the " war with wrong," he had the 
 prophet s fire, and he had not too much scholar 
 ship. Most of the pieces written, not for the 
 future and for the author, but for the hour and 
 for the cause, have little attraction now ; still, 
 while there are few notable poems among them, 
 there are many choice lines and not a few fine 
 stanzas. The " Song of Slaves in the Desert," 
 with a new metre, for Whittier, and a haunting 
 quality, " At Port Royal," and " The Pine Tree " 
 are among the antislavery pieces ; there, too, are 
 " Randolph of Roanoke " and " Massachusetts 
 to Virginia," 
 
 " Wild are the waves which lash the reefs along St. 
 
 George s bank ; 
 
 Cold on the shore of Labrador the fog lies white and 
 dank; 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 99 
 
 Through storm, and wave, and blinding mist, stout are 
 
 the hearts which man 
 The fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats of 
 
 Cape Ann." 
 
 As in the antislavery poems, so in the hurried 
 addresses to heroes and martyrs which make 
 the bulk of volume four, it is not always poetry, 
 not always 
 
 " The angel utterance of an upright mind." 
 
 There is no question about the upright mind ; but 
 the "angel utterance," how could we expect 
 one who was not trying for it to hold to that 
 when all on the long list of song, making it the 
 constant endeavor, have failed so often? When 
 it comes to the verses which serve as brief 
 respites from the effort of the harsher strains, 
 the charm of New England scenery is depicted 
 in the manner native to the poet ; while occa 
 sionally is to be met a touch reminiscent of 
 Keats or of Wordsworth. 
 
 "Even as the great Augustine 
 
 Questioned earth and sea and sky, 
 And the dusty tomes of learning 
 And old poesy." 
 
 That is Keats-like ; and the Wordsworthian 
 flavor is unmistakable in the closing lines of 
 " Lucy Hooper," 
 
IOO That Dome in Air. 
 
 "The sunset light of autumn eves 
 
 Reflecting on the deep, still floods, 
 Clouds, crimson sky, and trembling leaves 
 
 Of rainbow-tinted woods, 
 These, in our view, shall henceforth take 
 A tenderer meaning for thy sake ; 
 And all thou lovedst of earth and sky 
 Seem sacred to thy memory." 
 
 "The Hill-Top," too, though wholly Whittier s, 
 recalls the bard of Rydal. Here and there, 
 coming upon choice stanzas like the one in 
 " Burns," 
 
 "Not his the song whose thunderous chime 
 
 Eternal echoes render; 
 The mournful Tuscan s haunted rhyme, 
 
 And Milton s starry splendor! " 
 
 one regrets that there are not more such. Ours 
 is all the regret ; the old author bethought him 
 of other laurels, prouder than ever poet wore. 
 
 In the last half of volume three are the 
 " Songs of Labor." The author, writing of 
 things of which he is a part, exhibits quite 
 another sort of authorship than the cataloguing 
 of the various kinds of labor that drift into the 
 ken of the professional idler while observing a 
 spear of grass. If our laboring class have had 
 anything written to or about them that they or 
 their employers, for that matter can recognize 
 as approximating representative expression, it is 
 to be found in such lines as these : 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 101 
 
 " From the hill-top looks the steeple, 
 
 And the lighthouse from the sand ; 
 And the scattered pines are waving 
 
 Their farewell from the land. 
 One glance, my lads, behind us, 
 
 For the homes we leave one sigh, 
 Ere we take the change and chances 
 
 Of the ocean and the sky." 
 
 " Ho ! strike away the bars and blocks, 
 
 And set the good ship free ! 
 Why lingers on these dusty rocks 
 
 The young bride of the sea ? 
 Look ! how she moves adown the grooves, 
 
 In graceful beauty now ! 
 How lowly on the breast she loves 
 
 Sinks down her virgin prow ! " 
 
 To such verses we point all friends across the 
 seas that wish to know something of the work of 
 our soil. Would they know how our corn 
 grows ? 
 
 " All through the long, bright days of June, 
 
 Its leaves grew green and fair, 
 And waved in hot midsummer s noon 
 Its soft and yellow hair." 
 
 Would they hear a voice from our hills ? 
 
 "And a music wild and solemn, 
 From the pine-tree s height, 
 Rolls its vast and sea-like volume 
 On the wind of night." 
 
 New England is not America, but it is the 
 corner of America that our poets have favored ; 
 
IO2 That Dome in Air. 
 
 and such American life and manners and land 
 scape as the muses have seen fit to sanction are 
 to be found mainly in the work of Bryant, Emer 
 son, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell. 
 It is said that Whittier is restricted to the hills 
 and valleys of his birth-spot; and it is said, 
 again, that Whitman, of all our poets, is the one 
 to voice the sea. The first statement needs quali 
 fication ; the second, something more thorough. 
 
 " Now rest we, where this grassy mound 
 
 His feet hath set 
 
 In the great waters, which have bound 
 His granite ankles greenly round 
 
 With long and tangled moss, and weeds with cool spray 
 wet." 
 
 " . . . Just then the ocean seemed 
 To lift a half-faced moon in sight ; 
 And, shoreward, o er the waters gleamed, 
 
 From crest to crest, a line of light, 
 Such as of old, with solemn awe, 
 The fishers by Gennesaret saw, 
 Where dry-shod o er it walked the Son of God, 
 Tracking the waves with light where er his sandals trod." 
 
 " And prayer is made, and praise is given, 
 
 By all things near and far ; 
 The ocean looketh up to heaven, 
 And mirrors every star ; 
 
 " Its waves are kneeling on the strand, 
 
 As kneels the human knee, 
 Their white locks bowing to the sand, 
 The priesthood of the sea. 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 103 
 
 " I draw a freer breath, I seem 
 
 Like all I see 
 
 Waves in the sun, the white-winged gleam 
 Of sea-birds in the slanting beam, 
 And far-off sails which flit before the south wind free. 
 
 " So when time s veil shall fall asunder, 
 
 The soul may know 
 No fearful change, nor sudden wonder, 
 Nor sink the weight of mystery under, 
 But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow. 
 
 "And all we shrink from now may seem 
 
 No new revealing ; 
 Familiar as our childhood s stream, 
 Or pleasant memory of a dream 
 The loved and cherished Past upon the new life stealing." 
 
 Seeking " the breath of a new life," are we to 
 pass such movements for the flittings of the he- 
 bird and the she-bird, and other mystic broken- 
 wingedness and broken-mindedness in the open 
 ing piece of the " Sea-Drift " division of " Leaves 
 of Grass"? 
 
 Again, is the search for representative Ameri 
 can poetry to end in this ? 
 
 "A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my 
 joints the limberest joints on earth and the stern 
 est joints on earth, 
 A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my 
 
 deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, 
 A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, 
 Badger, Buckeye ; 
 
IO4 That Dome in Air. 
 
 At home on Kanadian snowshoes or up in the bush, 
 
 or with fishermen off Newfoundland, 
 At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest 
 
 and tacking, 
 At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of 
 
 Maine, or the Texan ranch, 
 Comrade of Californians, comrade of free Northwest- 
 
 erners (loving their big proportions)." 
 
 The muses are more merciful : 
 
 " Behind the scared squaw s birch canoe, 
 
 The steamer smokes and raves ; 
 And city lots are staked for sale 
 Above old Indian graves. 
 
 " I hear the tread of pioneers 
 
 Of nations yet to be ; 
 The first low wash of waves, where soon 
 Shall roll a human sea. 
 
 " The rudiments of empire here 
 
 Are plastic yet and warm ; 
 The chaos of a mighty world 
 Is rounding into form ! 
 
 "Each rude and jostling fragment soon 
 
 Its fitting place shall find, 
 The raw material of a State, 
 Its muscle and its mind ! " 
 
 For the "poet of democracy," the muses point 
 still to our soldier-poet, singing between the blasts 
 of the trumpet, 
 
 " Not from the shallow babbling fount 
 
 Of vain philosophy thou art ; 
 He who of old on Syria s Mount 
 Thrilled, warmed, by turns, the listener s heart, 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 105 
 
 "In holy words which cannot die, 
 
 In thoughts which angels leaned to know, 
 Proclaimed thy message from on high, 
 Thy mission to a world of woe. 
 
 "That voice s echo hath not died ! 
 From the blue lake of Galilee, 
 And Tabor s lonely mountain-side, 
 It calls a struggling world to thee. 
 
 " Thy name and watchword o er this land 
 
 I hear in every breeze that stirs, 
 
 And round a thousand altars stand 
 
 Thy banded party worshippers." 
 
 In the first volume of his collected works we 
 find Whittier in a favorite field. Here, among 
 the familiar poems first published under the title 
 "Ballads of New England/ are "Telling the 
 Bees," and "My Playmate," replete with pure 
 pathos, with human interest the most close and 
 tender; "The Wreck of Rivermouth" and the 
 other direct, spirited narratives leading on to 
 the brisk bit of novelty, "Skipper Ireson s 
 Ride." The simplest measures, adorned chiefly 
 by the beauty of thought, spontaneous as bird- 
 songs, straight from the heart and to the heart, 
 such are these poems, the fame of which far 
 enough exceeds the ambition of the author. 
 
 Some one has regretted the lack of display 
 of the poet s inner life : but could there be a 
 better showing of this than the steady under- 
 
106 That Dome in Air. 
 
 current of high, invincible spirit pervading, ay. 
 prompting every line? There is no need of 
 explicit announcement of this and that ; the soul 
 of the man and the music of the poet flower 
 together, telling their story plainly and sweetly 
 as do the blossoms of the native fields and 
 byways. 
 
 Whittier is somewhat inflexible, stiff; but so 
 was Wordsworth. While with both it is a stub 
 born defect, it yields to the rich inheritance of 
 spirit that refuses to be held; that, despite all 
 bonds, will leap in the freedom of the mountain 
 brook, take the sunshine, and run with grace 
 and music down into the valley where wake 
 and sleep, where toil and rest, the multitude of 
 the children of men. Patient endurance, self- 
 sacrifice, all the mind and heart devoted to a 
 high cause, this is the soil from which the 
 fadeless flowers of song have always blown, and 
 from which they will forever blow. In the guard 
 kept at the post of duty for a term of years that 
 must suffice the most of us for a lifetime, in the 
 long solemn watch upon the jeopardy of a mighty 
 cause, in this deep past of the patriot lies 
 the secret of Whittier s choicer poems, simple, 
 heartfelt, sweet as the light and air. 
 
 " So fall the weary years away ; 
 A child again, my head I lay 
 Upon the lap of this sweet day." 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 107 
 
 The simple faith, the trust and repose of the 
 child ; this, after the toil, the trial as by fire, of 
 that small band of immortals that stood for the 
 inalienable birthright of man. It is, indeed, 
 
 "... the ample air of hope, 
 And memory s sunset gold." 
 
 As has been said, Whittier is somewhat stiff. 
 He is also provincial; but he has his lifts into 
 universality as surely as certain things in the 
 human heart hold, world over. If the bleakness 
 of the old Haverhill birth-spot is on many a page, 
 a goodly number lie in the warmer light every 
 where recognized and rejoiced in. The simplest 
 forms of verse structure are the rule ; but there 
 is, too, freedom of melody that no mere master 
 of metres can hope to waken. There is, more 
 over, originality of a higher order than that of 
 intricate technics, the originality of simplicity. 
 Simplest words, for example, catch the spirit 
 of the cold : 
 
 " He comes, he comes, the Frost Spirit comes ! on 
 
 the rushing Northern blast, 
 
 And the dark Norwegian pines have bowed as his fear 
 ful breath went past." 
 
 If the imagination be more intense, still the 
 simplicity is preserved : 
 
 " Fair scenes 1 whereto the Day and Night 
 
 Make rival love, I leave ye soon, 
 What time before the eastern light 
 The pale ghost of the setting moon 
 
io8 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Shall hide behind yon rocky spines, 
 
 And the young archer, Morn, shall break 
 His arrows on the mountain pines, 
 And, golden-sandalled, walk the lake ! " 
 
 Rare in our poetry are four choicer lines of 
 description than the stanza, a little farther on, 
 
 " How rising moons shine sad and mild 
 
 On wooded isle and silvering bay; 
 Or setting suns beyond the piled 
 
 And purple mountains lead the day." 
 
 Nor is it Nature alone that Whittier can por 
 tray. Which of our artists could better the 
 miniature of Emerson? 
 
 " He who might Plato s banquet grace, 
 
 Have I not seen before me sit, 
 And watched his Puritanic face, 
 
 With more than Eastern wisdom lit ? 
 Shrewd mystic ! who, upon the back 
 Of his Poor Richard s Almanac, 
 Writing the Sum s song, the Gentoo s dream, 
 Links Manu s age of thought to Fulton s age of steam ! " 
 
 And Longfellow alone, among us, has matched 
 the grace of the prelude to " Miriam," 
 
 " I, called from dream and song, 
 Thank God ! so early to a strife so long, 
 That, ere it closed, the black, abundant hair 
 Of boyhood rested silver-sown and spare 
 On manhood s temples, now at sunset-shine 
 Tread with fond feet the path of morning time. 
 
John Green leaf Whittier. 109 
 
 And if perchance too late I linger where 
 The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare, 
 Thou, wiser in thy choice, wilt scarcely blame 
 The friend who shields his folly with thy name." 
 
 The same may be said of the dedication of the 
 "Countess"; and there is something behind 
 these lines, a solid support, that it was not the 
 privilege of the more favored singer to lean 
 against. 
 
 Perhaps we do not see Whittier quite as he is. 
 Deficient in the enchantment possible only to the 
 highest order of genius, somewhat bald, somewhat 
 crude and narrow, impatient of revision, so care 
 less that he can rhyme "banner" with "Susque- 
 hanna," and " cotton " with " fortune," so reck 
 less, indeed, as to try to force " onward " and 
 "looking" into a union of sweet sound, this 
 is one side of the equation ; but what is the 
 other? If he leads his contemporaries in faults, 
 he leads them also in the primal virtues of 
 simplicity, sinew, enthusiasm, and spontaneity. 
 With less imagination and with but a fraction of 
 the learning, a tithe of the versatility, of Lowell, 
 he is more direct and telling. The Quaker poet, 
 far more than Lowell, was the poetic power of 
 his time. With as much imagination as Long 
 fellow, he has more grip and fire ; unequal to 
 him as an artist, he has qualities even rarer than 
 the instinct of form, enthusiasm and spon- 
 
i io That Dome in Air. 
 
 taneity. Deficient in imagination, again, as 
 compared with Bryant, he has fervor and the 
 lyric gift. While Bryant is letting his imagina 
 tion wing serenely over the world and the fate 
 of the race, Whittier catches, at a stroke, some 
 happy expression on the face of Nature, sets into 
 instant vibration heart-strings that suffer the 
 breath of the elder bard to pass over them 
 without a tremor. While Bryant is spreading 
 his energy, thinning it on the long stretch, Whit- 
 tier is husbanding his for the one decisive thrust 
 to the quick. In short, by means of the first 
 poetic virtues, simplicity, enthusiasm, and viri 
 lity, by the virtues of temperament and voice that 
 take the heart, perhaps Whittier is not only the 
 representative American poet, but a poet as sure 
 as any among us to endure. When the gold of 
 his work has been cleared of the dross by one who 
 shall be to him what Arnold was to Wordsworth, 
 it is among the possibilities that the result will 
 be a contribution to poetry as characteristic and 
 lasting as America has produced. There will be 
 neither the soaring of Bryant, the subtile pene 
 tration, the indescribable flavor of Emerson, the 
 scholastic finish, the literary art of Longfellow, 
 nor the reaches that in a few instances ally 
 Lowell with the immortals ; but there may be a 
 residuum strong against the assault of time. 
 Of the two poets of this country that have 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. Hi 
 
 been read, really read, it is Whittier, not Long 
 fellow, that has drawn to him our sturdy class, 
 our " hard-headed." Whittier s strong common- 
 sense, his granitic pith and aphoristic snap, com 
 mend him to such minds : 
 
 " We sigh above our crowded nets 
 For fish that never swam." 
 
 It is not the wisdom simply ; the idea is run in 
 the mold of common things, it is part and parcel 
 of every-day life. The author worked and rested, 
 thought and dreamed, with the people, his own 
 people, whom he knew from the quiet of the 
 hearthside through all moods up to the frenzy of 
 the mob. The toil and amusements, the hopes 
 and fears, the joys and sorrows of the common 
 lot, these and the natural scenes, familiar as 
 family faces, are the staple of his song ; while 
 the language is of workaday words, moving to 
 the music of the lyre. 
 
 As for quality of depiction, poor Bloomfield 
 with his kodak, Crabbe with his dreary realism, 
 his pest-house fidelity, and Thomson with his 
 awkward, sprawling honesty, how far-off are these 
 in method from this new-world bard ! These are 
 outside the picture, while Whittier, like Cowper, 
 is in the picture, only much deeper; his heart 
 and imagination inform the shapes and colors, he 
 builds and glows with the enthusiasm and affec- 
 
112 That Dome in Air. 
 
 tion that reached full development in Words 
 worth. While Longfellow is a surer artist, the 
 best verse of Whittier has a certain advantage 
 over the smoother work of Longfellow ; this for 
 the same reason that the best verse of Cowper 
 throws the odds in his favor when we turn to it 
 from the glossy levels of " Goldy." 
 
 " She came and stood in the Old South Church, 
 
 A wonder and a sign, 
 With a look the old-time sibyls wore, 
 Half-crazed and half-divine : 
 
 " Thus saith the Lord, with equal feet 
 
 All men my courts shall tread, 
 And priest and ruler no more shall eat 
 My people up like bread ! " 
 
 " No Berserk thirst of blood had they, 
 No battle-joy was theirs, who set 
 Against the alien bayonet 
 Their homespun breasts in that old day. 
 
 " Their death-shot shook the feudal tower, 
 And shattered slavery s chain as well ; 
 On the sky s dome, as on a bell, 
 Its echo struck the world s great hour." 
 
 Such stanzas, and such descriptive hits as 
 
 " The locust by the wall 
 Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm," 
 
 are quite common with Whittier ; and the direct 
 ness and strength there, the yeoman s nerve and 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 113 
 
 sinew, we never think of looking for in Long 
 fellow. 
 
 The Nature in Whittier is the Nature that shows 
 to the eye of the heart as well as to the eye of the 
 mind ; while the men and the women are such 
 beings as find their right place in it, never 
 floating in mid-air, never any nearer heaven than 
 the mother ground gets to fairydom : 
 
 " Here dwells no perfect man sublime, 
 Nor woman winged before her time, 
 But with the faults and follies of the race, 
 Old home-bred virtues hold their not unhonored place." 
 
 It may be objected that the sturdy class, the 
 " hard-headed," the one class specified, are 
 not the tribunal to sit in the case of poetry. But 
 it is auspicious for the fame of a poet to have an 
 admixture of these with the softer sort, whose 
 trend is toward sentimentality. However, let us 
 not lay too much stress on the " practical," com 
 mon-sense element ; for while it lies at the bottom 
 of Whittier s work, it is not more conspicuous 
 than the emotion. Indeed, does not Whittier 
 aim first at the heart? 
 
 Lest it be thought that the patriot is put in 
 the place of the poet, the exceptional man and 
 citizen in the place of the indifferent minstrel; 
 lest it be thought that the bonds of poesy are 
 being drawn to fit one who, though he may be the 
 peer of a poet, is not pre-eminently a poet, be 
 8 
 
114 That Dome in Air. 
 
 it said, finally, that Whittier s verse fulfils the Mil- 
 tonic requirement : it is simple, sensuous, and 
 passionate. Moreover, no man has it faster in 
 mind than has Whittier, that "the office of 
 poetry in the modern world is still its ancient 
 office of deliverance." He holds to the old no 
 tion of poetry, and exemplifies it as clearly 
 as any singer of his time. He is, of all our 
 poets, the born lyrist, the master of pathos, 
 of rugged strength and invective, and he stands 
 second only to Longfellow as a story-teller. If 
 " Hiawatha " comes first as a contribution to 
 general literature, " Snow-Bound " shares with the 
 " Biglow Papers " the honor of the first place in 
 the literature of the white man s America. 
 
 All Whittier s shortcomings admitted, he is a 
 stanch poet ; despite his limitations as an execu 
 tant, he is an artist. In whatever nook of his 
 loved New England the muse seeks him out, 
 
 " Sweet airs of love and home, the hum 
 
 Of household melodies, 
 Come singing, as the robins come 
 To sing in door-yard trees." 
 
 From none of our poets do we hear oftener 
 " The voice of God in leaf and breeze." 
 
 Bryant is more imaginative and stately, Long 
 fellow superior in the points of high breeding 
 and finish, Emerson in seminal power, in the 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier. I r 5 
 
 mystic might of the seer, while Lowell, in his 
 rarer passages, all but catches the accent of the 
 masters ; but it would be rash to affirm that 
 the costlier fabric of any of these will outlive 
 the homespun of the blessed old saint militant of 
 Amesbury, to whom right and his country were 
 as wife and child. 
 
V. 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 |N birth, in prosperity, in health and hap 
 piness, in length of years, in all 
 these was Longfellow blest. Favored 
 of gods and men, his very disposition was a boon 
 seldom accorded to mortals ; and the events of 
 his life seem one unfaltering effort to continue 
 the first benevolence. All that one could ask 
 at the hands of heaven and of his fellow-men 
 this gentle poet received. His native powers 
 were fostered by every attention from within 
 and from without; he and fortune worked to 
 gether, and complete development was assured. 
 A born man of letters, a born singer, encour 
 aged in every way to guide his willing instinct 
 to the highest reach of culture, a stranger from 
 birth to the struggle for bread, happy in his 
 home life, called to just the positions for which 
 he was fitted, and called at the nick of time, 
 advancing by swift degrees from the most popular 
 of professors to the most popular of poets ; widely 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 117 
 
 known, widely loved, surely here is a son of 
 man to be envied. 
 
 Thrice happy maker and vender of melodies ! 
 his verse, every line of it, accepted while the 
 author was still in the greenest of the teens; 
 never an objection to the offerings of his muse 
 from either publisher or reader until so late that 
 objection was futile, productive of nothing unless 
 it was the suggestion of impotent grudging. 
 
 So complete was Longfellow s success that one 
 cannot approach him in a critical spirit without 
 fancying a kindly shade rising before him with 
 a smile rather of wonder than of reproof, as much 
 as to say, " Brother, why put yourself to the 
 trouble? The world has been answering you, 
 point by point and year by year, ever since the 
 dawn of song upon the workaday dark of our 
 wondrous young land." Really, it would seem 
 that the critic has very little to do with Long 
 fellow. To separate and analyze his verses is 
 very much like pulling apart the summer, hour 
 by hour, or flower by flower, knowing only too 
 well the while that, whatever we may say of these 
 things, combined as they were, God made the 
 summer, the glad time for every creature with 
 a heart to beat and feel. 
 
 Does one intrench one s self behind the tech 
 nics, talk learnedly of hexameters and trochaics, 
 "But," comes answer, " behold Hiawatha and 
 
ii8 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Evangeline. " Does one run up the colors of 
 foreign influence, " But," comes answer, " Hy 
 perion/ Kavanagh/ The Courtship of Miles 
 Standish, Hiawatha/ Evangeline/ both the 
 prose and the poetry, both the early and the 
 mature work, were written by one of the soil to 
 be read and re-read by the thousands of the 
 soil." Does one bring to bear the guns of pas 
 sivity, lack of depth, want of strength and verve, 
 " But," comes answer, " what is wiser than sub 
 mission, what profit fret and rage and despair? 
 Whether for the living or for the singing of life, 
 wherein may we better qualify ourselves than by 
 restraint, by hiding the discord and discontent, 
 disclosing only the harmony and peace? Does 
 it not show depth of thought and feeling when 
 one so probes into life as to find it vain for man 
 to struggle with the eternal mystery ; to find that, 
 whatever appearances may be, the world is what 
 the old prophets found it, beautiful, good? 
 And where shall strength, ay, strength coupled 
 with skill, be found, if not in one that, in order 
 to support and adorn this finding, has drawn with 
 exquisite scholarship, with an unfailing instinct 
 for the beautiful, not only from the life about him, 
 but from the life of all lands; has drawn from 
 all sources, from the savage and from the man 
 of fullest culture, from the old time and from the 
 new, and has so delivered the message that it 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 119 
 
 has sunk into the souls of his fellows as the rain 
 sinks into the dry ground ? And verve even, is 
 it not to be found in The Skeleton in Armor, 
 in The Leap of Roushan Beg/ in the Ballad of 
 the French Fleet/ and in The White Czar ? 
 Right-spirited, too, are The Wraith of Odin 
 and King Olaf s Christmas. " Make one more 
 rally, raise the old battle-cry of commonplace, 
 "But," comes answer, "by commonplace you 
 evidently mean what the world can understand 
 and love, can be interested in, can profit by, 
 can live by. Commonplace is your label for 
 the work universally found interesting, helpful, 
 beautiful, and abiding." 
 
 And so we might go on indefinitely. Never 
 theless, it is our duty now and then to approach 
 Longfellow in the critical spirit ; for he, like every 
 other poet, is at last but a special phase, an 
 impersonal phenomenon, of the art of song. If 
 art is, as we have found it, an inheritance, and the 
 great artists of all times and lands are governed by 
 the same elementary rules, however they may vary 
 in the individual exercise of them, we should 
 occasionally recall the elementary rules, and see 
 wherein Longfellow has obeyed or disobeyed 
 them ; we should inquire if he really is one of the 
 anointed. 
 
 The elementary demands of poetry set us to 
 recalling, first, fit matter ; second, clearness, sim- 
 
I2O That Dome in Air. 
 
 plicity, imagination, passion, music, as essentials 
 of expression. Longfellow s instinct for poetic 
 matter is overwhelmingly evident ; his hand fell 
 on it as by sheer gravitation. Good hunter that 
 he was, he had but to take his station, and the 
 game came to him from the four corners of the 
 world. The matter captured, compassionate 
 expression would not be left behind. This is as 
 it must be with the whole poet ; so it was with 
 Longfellow. 
 
 Among the essentials of poetic expression, we 
 cannot go amiss in naming, first, clearness. What 
 ever Longfellow tried to say, he said. At first 
 blush, this may not seem a remarkable victory ; 
 but giants have striven to win it, and gone down, 
 miserably overthrown. With clearness Longfel 
 low united simplicity ; indisputably, too, he was 
 gifted with the magic accent, the witching ca 
 dence, with music. 
 
 Coming, now, to the grand features of imagi 
 nation and passion, our commendation must be 
 qualified. Imagination Longfellow certainly had, 
 but the prose of his life-long friend, Hawthorne, 
 shows that its place among his many gifts is not 
 first. The sweep of Longfellow s imagination is 
 restricted, so to speak, in the movement up and 
 down. Sublimity, profundity these are out of 
 its way ; but on the long level sweep, there it is 
 unflagging ; and the sureness and endurance go 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 121 
 
 not a little way toward offsetting the daring vaults 
 and plunges of the few whose might we style 
 " divine." Longfellow cannot awe and amaze us, 
 cannot snatch us up to heights undreamed ; but 
 he can lift us well above the ground, for tranquil 
 travel through regions of unbroken charm. 
 
 We must speak guardedly on the point of pas 
 sion also. While the passion of Longfellow is 
 not intense, it is always at command ; we journey 
 in a summer glow, in grateful, ripening warmth. 
 Longfellow s heart, if not leaping, is large ; the 
 life current, though slow, is full. If we find 
 Whittier freer of the books, closer to the heart 
 of Nature, more penetratingly tender at times, as 
 in " In School Days," more terrible, as in " Ich- 
 abod"; if Longfellow is unequal to such a tour 
 de force of manhood as " My Triumph," we 
 remember that the inspiration of the dear old 
 Quaker-warrior is more fitful, that the bleak 
 tracts are more frequent. 
 
 The deficiency in quality of imagination and 
 in quantity of passion admitted, the censors may 
 be right, too, in finding Longfellow somewhat too 
 bookish, too ready to take things second-hand, 
 and unduly inclined toward didacticism. But 
 let us look a little closer into these charges. It 
 is possible to be a poet, yes, a great poet, and 
 at the same time be bookish ; there is no doing 
 away with Milton. So wide was Longfellow s 
 
122 That Dome in Air. 
 
 range of scholarship, and so sure was his instinct 
 for selection, that we may well pardon any lack 
 of originality that he may exhibit. There is bor 
 rowing and borrowing. Longfellow did not bor 
 row his individuality of presentation ; he did not 
 borrow the secret that enabled him to speak to 
 the heart and mind of his people and of the civ 
 ilized world. In the mastery of this secret he 
 stands with a very small company about him ; a 
 position indicating true originality, and enough 
 of it to set against a long list of deficiencies. 
 
 Again, there is a chance for a detracting stroke 
 on the point of didacticism. Overbearing di 
 dacticism is perhaps the one misfortune of Long 
 fellow s inheritance. The old Puritan blood, 
 elsewhere beneficent in its action, here works 
 against him as an artist. Clear as his sight was 
 for every shape and hue of loveliness, the Puri 
 tan film would gather, when on must go the ugly 
 tag. Still, there is this to be said : if we are 
 to be put to school before the poet has done 
 with us, no master may be more easily for 
 given this particular infirmity than the gentle 
 singer in whose class we find ourselves at this 
 hour. 
 
 Reference has been made to the sureness of 
 Longfellow s instinct in tracing right matter, and 
 of his ability to treat it when found. It must be 
 said, however, that to find the expression worthy of 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 123 
 
 the matter we must take it as a whole. Off-hand 
 work, easy, breezy though it be, is sure, when it 
 comes to detail, to prove defective. Longfel 
 low s artistic sense saves him in the wholeness of 
 impression, which is the main thing ; but more 
 than this must go to the making of the consum 
 mate workman, of the master artist. Examined 
 in detail, the work of Longfellow is so uneven as 
 to surprise one who has simply met the romancer 
 on his own generous terms, hearing rather with 
 heart than head. Beautiful, for instance, as 
 " Evangeline " is in spirit and in general inspira 
 tion, one has but to catch the opening accents of 
 that poem wafted from across the sea, 
 
 "Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm, 
 And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands," 
 
 to learn that the tender, captivating tale of 
 Acadie is not, first and last, a work of art. 
 
 We have found, too, that Longfellow has the 
 gift of music. True, but here again we must 
 speak of the general impression, we must not 
 listen measure by measure ; nor may we hope to 
 hear the poet s most exquisite melodies, the rav 
 ishing harmonies. Longfellow, gentle, refined, 
 as he was, could not overcome a certain crudity, 
 a looseness, not hard for the lover of perfect art 
 to forgive, but hard to overlook. Yes, while the 
 critic finds Longfellow a whole poet, with right 
 
124 That Dome in Air. 
 
 matter and becoming expression, while he finds 
 him thoroughly readable, he finds, too, that he 
 falls short of the high ideal of the poet. And 
 could this be otherwise with one whose heart 
 always leaned against the heart of the masses, 
 with one through and through of the people? 
 Indeed, could one who was so warm a lover of 
 his kind wish to have it otherwise ? 
 
 There are those that think that the people 
 read, that they know and love, pure poetry ; it 
 is a beautiful delusion. The comprehension of 
 high art, and the affection for it, are restricted 
 to a very few. So true is this, and so great is the 
 importance of poetry in the common walks of 
 life, that one feels like flinging away the critic s 
 robe, accounting it as rags, in the presence of a 
 poet with the master secret of getting himself 
 read. Here is Longfellow s power, here is his 
 genius; here may he divide honors with the 
 greatest in the commanding line of song. 
 
 But, all the adverse counts in, Longfellow is an 
 artist ; in a way he is our best story-teller since 
 Chaucer. Never so slipshod as Byron, he exhib 
 its more taste than Byron in his choice of themes. 
 He has points of superiority, too, over Tennyson 
 and Morris, over Tennyson, singe he never for 
 gets the inactivity, the heaviness, of the common 
 mind, the mind most in need of the ministry of 
 song ; over Morris, since he recognizes the limits 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 125 
 
 of endurance of his vast clientage, so difficult to 
 serve and at the same time maintain allegiance to 
 austere, jealous art. 
 
 Nor does the critic s concession to Longfellow, 
 as an artist, stop here. Exception may be taken 
 to details of the mass of his work, but this does 
 not prove incapacity for an occasional perform 
 ance well-nigh perfect. The two sonnets intro 
 ducing " Inferno," 
 
 " Oft have I seen at some cathedral door," 
 and 
 
 " How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers ! " 
 and the second sonnet introducing " Purgatorio," 
 " With snow-white veil and garments as of flame," 
 
 if any perfect poems have been written in Amer 
 ica, these are among them. And where else shall 
 we place "Curfew," "The Arrow and the Song," 
 " Midnight Mass for the Dying Year," and a 
 few others? The " Skeleton in Armor," "King 
 Witlafs Drinking- Horn," the " Wreck of the Hes 
 perus," these are models of spirited workman 
 ship. It is a deft hand, too, that can pen verse 
 light and charming as the piece " To the River 
 Yvette," and the airy translation, familiar as our 
 own names, "Beware." And few are the poets 
 able to hold the even excellence of the vol 
 umes, " Tales of a Wayside Inn," " Evangeline," 
 
126 That Dome in Air. 
 
 and " Hiawatha " ; not to reckon in the prelude 
 to " The Tales," perhaps the most finished com 
 position of the length to be found on the pages 
 of our home writers. 
 
 While " Hiawatha " first among American 
 additions to literature and the admirable 
 translation of Dante, would, of themselves, give 
 the author an enviable place, Longfellow s is a 
 much richer meed. A born benefactor of his 
 kind, Longfellow was the first to bring us, as 
 a people, under the spell of beauty, to lift us into 
 the sweet serene air of the higher life ; and still 
 must we look mainly to him to hold us where he 
 alone could place us. The master poets sound 
 down through other mouths, which tone their 
 high accents to the acceptance of the common 
 ear ; but this poet speaks directly, infuses his soul 
 without help or hindrance directly into the great 
 soul of the world; and because of this, assuredly 
 one does not err in claiming for him greatness, 
 greatness of an order by itself, an order all but 
 his own. 
 
VI. 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 |ERHAPS we have poets enough now, 
 but how close the escape from more 
 of them ! A few additional points of 
 time and circumstance in his favor, and the far 
 away fighter Freneau would to-day be a familiar 
 voice. The hand that penned "The Indian 
 Burying-Ground " and " The Heroes of Eutaw," 
 like that of Idris, had higher cunning than the 
 holding of the sword. Side by side with that of 
 the soldier, the ghost of the bard glides toward 
 us, in his shadowy hand a blossom of wild honey 
 suckle, 
 
 " From morning suns and evening dews 
 
 At first thy little being came ; 
 If nothing once, you nothing lose, 
 For when you die you are the same : 
 The space between is but an hour, 
 The frail duration of a flower." 
 
 Again, a few friendly lifts, and scholarly Sands 
 would be abreast with Whittier in his early 
 
128 That Dome in Air. 
 
 work; " Mogg Megone " would have a rival in 
 " Yamoyden," 
 
 "Beyond the hill the spirit sleeps, 
 His watch the power of evil keeps ; 
 The Spirit of fire has sought his bed, 
 The sun, the hateful sun, is dead. 
 Profound and clear is the sounding wave, 
 In the chambers of the Wakon-cave ; 
 Darkness its ancient portals keeps, 
 And there the spirit sleeps, he sleeps/ 
 
 And the young author of "A Health," had not 
 he, too, germs of poesy that in a kinder season 
 would have come to substantial blossoming? He 
 also saw the poetic potency of the soil, or he had 
 never chanced on that dusk beauty of the wild, 
 
 " But not a flower lies breathing there 
 Sweet as herself, or half as fair 
 Exchanging lustre with the sun, 
 A part of day she strays 
 A glancing, living, human smile, 
 On Nature s face she plays." 
 
 Another early piper of the new world, Brainard, 
 born to the realm of dreams yet never to enjoy 
 the promised inheritance, sends his gentle spirit 
 down to us in the Nature-song beginning, 
 
 " I saw two clouds at morning 
 Tinged with the rising sun ; 
 And in the dawn they floated on, 
 And mingled into one : 
 I thought that morning cloud was blest, 
 It moved so sweetly to the west." 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 129 
 
 Lines of so simple and subtile beauty as those of 
 his " Revery " are not any too common among 
 artists that, by reason of a more propitious hour, 
 make their fair colors fast : 
 
 " Yes, there are thoughts that have no sound such 
 
 thoughts 
 
 That no coined phrase of words can utter them 
 The tongue would syllable their shapes in vain 
 The cautious pen, even in a master s hand, 
 Finds nothing at its point to mark them with. 
 No earthly note can touch these airy chords; 
 Tis silent music indescribable. 
 We hear it when the ear is shut, and see 
 Its beauties when the eye is closed in sleep ; 
 We feel it when the nerves are all at rest 
 When the heart stops, and the charmed soul throbs 
 on." 
 
 Stormy old John Neal, master of all profes 
 sions and businesses, everything from boxing- 
 master to novelist, -^- he, too, must fail to take 
 the heights of song. Well, he gave success and 
 defeat a sharp tug over him. His " Birth of a 
 Poet " reads very like a family record : 
 
 " On a blue summer night, 
 
 While the stars were asleep, 
 Like gems of the deep, 
 In their own drowsy light ; 
 While the newly mown hay 
 On the green earth lay, 
 
 And all that came near it went scented away ; 
 From a lone woody place 
 There looked out a face 
 9 
 
130 That Dome in Air. 
 
 With large blue eyes 
 Like the wet, warm skies, 
 Brimful of water and light ; 
 A profusion of hair 
 Flashing out on the air, 
 And a forehead alarmingly bright. 
 
 Twas the head of a poet ! He grew 
 As the sweet strange flowers of the wilderness grow, 
 
 In the dropping of natural dew, 
 Unheeded, alone, 
 Till his heart had blown 
 
 As the sweet, strange flowers of the wilderness blow ; 
 Till every thought wore a changeable stain 
 Like flower-leaves wet with the sunset rain. 
 A proud and passionate boy was he, 
 Like all the children of Poesy ; 
 With a haughty look and a haughty tread, 
 And something awful about his head ; 
 With wonderful eyes 
 Full of woe and surprise, 
 Like eyes of them that see the dead. 
 
 Looking about, 
 
 For a moment or two, he stood 
 On the shore of the mighty wood ; 
 
 Then ventured out 
 
 With a bounding step and a joyful shout, 
 The brave sky bending o er him, 
 The broad sea all before him ! " 
 
 A score of names, now hardly known, bear 
 witness to hurried visitations of the muse deserv 
 ing of something better than forge tfulness ; but 
 the case of poor Percival seems most pitiful of 
 all. Blake himself does not better illustrate the 
 poetic temperament : 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 131 
 
 " I have of late fallen into an unconquerable habit 
 of dreaming with my eyes wide open. My whole 
 life has been a round of reveries. I have lived in a 
 world of my own imagining ; and such has been the 
 vividness of my conceptions, that I can, at any 
 moment when I have an inclination, summon them 
 to my mental presence with the ease of a magician 
 of old, when he evoked with his charmed rod the 
 shades of the departed." 
 
 With the poetic temperament, and with learn 
 ing and spontaneity rarely equalled by successful 
 adventurers up treacherous Helicon, he, with 
 the rest, must be enrolled among the almosts. 
 
 " The world is full of poetry the air 
 Is living with its spirit ; and the waves 
 Dance to the music of its melodies, 
 And sparkle in its brightness. 
 
 Earth is veiled, 
 
 And mantled with its beauty ; and the walls 
 That close the universe with crystal in 
 Are eloquent with voices that proclaim 
 The unseen glories of immensity, 
 In harmonies too perfect and too high 
 For aught but beings of celestial mould, 
 And speak to man in one eternal hymn, 
 Unfading beauty and unyielding power." 
 
 The world of poetry is peculiarly Percival s own ; 
 but there, too, a miss is as good as a mile, and 
 his name is now rarely heard. 
 
 Perhaps a dozen of our early lovers and prac- 
 tisers of verse were more than Bloomfields and 
 
132 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Clares ; yet, as these fell away at the approach 
 of robust Thomson, so our home songsters 
 dropped back into the shadow in the presence 
 of the lad that began at once his own and his 
 country s poetic career with " Thanatopsis." 
 
 With Bryant, as with Whittier, poetry is not 
 the vocation ; if Whittier gave his best years to 
 the liberation of the slave, Bryant gave his a 
 half- hundred of them to the general guidance 
 and advancement of his countrymen. Always a 
 moralist, he is at times a poet. Meditation on 
 the great theme of life and death in the calm 
 presence of Nature, this was Bryant s rest from 
 the toil of a long and busy life. 
 
 " Thanatopsis " though the " Thanatopsis " 
 of 1 8 1 1 was not the "Thanatopsis" of to-day 
 announced a new poet, a new poet with the 
 nice balance of brain that insures certainty. 
 Bryant struck surely when midway in the teens. 
 So nicely balanced were his faculties that he had 
 simply to hold the course in which he placed 
 himself at the first step. One characteristic, 
 steadiness of merit, was thus early evidenced, 
 a characteristic at once strong and weak. For, 
 while with unerring judgment another word 
 for taste we are certain of the recognition and 
 constant maintenance of fitness, are certain of 
 the artist, on the other hand, the judgment so 
 austere and inflexible that it will turn neither to 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 133 
 
 right nor left points to self-containment border 
 ing on the dangerous. Only when the mind, 
 yielding the control, is now and then carried out 
 of itself, are we sure of something better than 
 has been ; only then may we predict great prog 
 ress, and look for the occasional surprises of 
 perfection that astonish, most of all, the unwit 
 ting instrument of their production. There is 
 danger in faultlessness. Virtue herself is wont 
 to announce her regal coming by a tattered and 
 shambling herald. It is a happy augury when 
 one in the direct line of the blood of song is 
 caught paying court to the dull or the trivial ; 
 erelong he will prove as pliant in the grasp of 
 beauty and power. By the backward swing to 
 the farthest point from inspiration, impetus is 
 gained that, on the return sweep, carries to the 
 peak of achievement. While, then, we have in 
 Bryant a sure artist, we never get from him the 
 unexpected. 
 
 It is a current notion that Bryant, rearing his 
 altar in the woods and fields, is the high priest of 
 Nature. Nature is the altar ; but the goddess is 
 morals. Bryant is skilful in depicting the place 
 of his solemn ceremony, he is second to none of 
 our poets as a "Nature painter." A painter, 
 however, is not a priest. Painter of Nature, 
 priest of morals, Bryant uses his skill as an artist 
 to frame the features, to enforce the message, of 
 
134 That Dome in Air. 
 
 the lofty goddess, Duty. Wordsworth, too, 
 was high priest to the 
 
 " Stern daughter of the voice of God " ; 
 
 but, devoted as he was, he could divide the ser 
 vice between her and Nature. With the rigid 
 cast of Bryant division is impossible. Words 
 worth, domineering when with his fellow-men, 
 could surrender himself to Nature, content to be 
 her mouthpiece; hence the unevenness, the 
 variety, and the occasional ecstasy, the incar 
 nation of charm. Hence, too, the hope and the 
 
 joy> 
 
 " that blessed mood, 
 In which the burden of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lightened ; that serene and blessed mood 
 In which the affections gently lead us on 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body and become a living soul, 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony and the deep power of joy 
 We see into the life of things." 
 
 To see into the life of things, here is the pith 
 of Wordsworth s genius ; and here, again, is a 
 power that differentiates these two high priests, 
 among the more austere on the list of song. 
 While Bryant is, perhaps, our most correct 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 135 
 
 " Nature painter," the treatment of Nature is 
 external compared with the treatment of his own 
 remote, lofty soul. He stands at the altar, 
 stately and calm, compelling the elements to 
 bend to his one high mood, the mood of 
 him that would rise to the Author of all things, 
 and stand, unspotted, before him. 
 
 Wordsworth received frc _^ Nature, Bryant 
 gave to her ; Bryant masters, Wordsworth is 
 mastered. Here is the key to Bryant s limita 
 tion ; and here may we begin to account for his 
 slight production in point of quantity. The rare 
 purity and nobility of spirit being once cast in 
 language noble and pure as the spirit itself, the 
 task was ended. Material so precious is soon 
 exhausted. The riches of Bryant s nature being 
 compact and regularly developed, his unerring 
 judgment deterred him from idle digging on 
 either side of the slender gold-bearing vein. 
 
 The poet of "unbought grace" has always 
 youth, enthusiasm, inspiration ; these are among 
 the tests. Bryant was born old. The gain was 
 the shortened toil toward perfection ; the loss 
 was the youth, the enthusiasm, and the inspira 
 tion. Bryant s reliance was not on the poet s 
 rock of strength, inspiration, but on a substitute 
 for it, as good a one as may be, medi 
 tation. Nor is this all ; the meditation, though 
 in a high, broad field, is in that one field and 
 
136 That Dome in Air. 
 
 that only. Even the Nature wherein he sets up 
 his altar is of the one realm, the upper realm 
 of quiet and peace, the region of " supreme 
 repose " : 
 
 " Be it ours to meditate, 
 In these calm shades, thy milder majesty, 
 And to the beautiful order of thy works 
 Learn to conform the order of our lives." 
 
 So strong is the tendency toward tranquillity that 
 the burden of the song is less the life than the 
 fate of the race. Bryant is the laureate of gentle, 
 restful death. Plainly as this is shown in the 
 " Hymn to Death," it is as plain in " Thana- 
 topsis," "A Forest Hymn," "The Prairies;" in 
 nearly all the poems, long and short ; it is the 
 theme of the perfect lyric, embodying the love 
 liest and most familiar lines of all the thirteen 
 thousand. 
 
 Thoroughly aware, as we are in Bryant, of the 
 vegetarian even to the verse, a little shivery with 
 the chillness, ever and anon we would bespeak 
 for the white fane a red coal from the roaring 
 forge of our " Kosmos " ; we would be only too 
 glad of a live word, as out of the whirlwind, 
 sounded by the other revolter, the great English 
 rebel, able to lead more fractious legions than 
 shall ever rise, head and host in himself, 
 sounded by him who with one bold love-push 
 comes at the very heart : 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 137 
 
 "Oh, good gigantic smile o the brown old earth, 
 This autumn morning ! how he sets his bones 
 To bask i the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet 
 For the ripple to run over in its mirth ; 
 Listening the while, where on the heap of stones 
 The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet." 
 
 Indeed, we do not strike so high ; we would 
 relish a throb from the pulse of one of our 
 almosts : 
 
 "The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May 
 With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers; 
 And with it comes a thirst to be away, 
 Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours, 
 A feeling that is like a sense of wings, 
 Restless to soar above these perishing things." 
 
 A little color, a little warmth, a little of the 
 something that comes close, we fairly hunger 
 for it. This is but another way of saying that 
 Bryant, strong in simplicity and sensuousness, is 
 weak in passion, a point made before, when 
 was noted the absence of youth and enthusiasm. 
 The coldness of Bryant though he is never 
 down to the degree marked by the French critic 
 that would have his verses bound in fur is of 
 far-reaching influence. The all-conquering order 
 of imagination has its bed and procreant cradle 
 in warmth, passion. Imagination is not a fixed 
 thing ; there are degrees, there are kinds, of it 
 as well as of the reasoning power and of emotion. 
 
138 That Dome in Air. 
 
 The kind of imagination characteristic of Bryant 
 is to be found in such lines as these : 
 
 " Or haply the vast hall 
 Of fairy palace, that outlasts the night, 
 And fades not in the glory of the sun ; 
 Where crystal columns send forth slender shafts 
 And crossing arches ; and fantastic aisles 
 Wind from the sight in brightness, and are lost 
 Among the crowded pillars." 
 
 For a passage of exceptional vigor and move 
 ment, we may quote from the " Hymn to 
 Death," 
 
 " And when the reveller, 
 Mad in the chase of pleasure, stretches on, 
 And strains each nerve, and clears the path of life 
 Like wind, thou point st him to the dreadful goal, 
 And shak st thy hour-glass in his reeling eye, 
 And check st him in mid-course." 
 
 Among the lines cited by Stedman as illustrative 
 of Bryant s imagination are the following, from 
 " Thanatopsis" : - 
 
 " And, poured round all, 
 Old ocean s gray and melancholy waste." 
 
 " Take the wings 
 
 Of morning, traverse Barca s desert sands 
 Or lose thyself in the continuous woods 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, 
 Save his own dashings yet the dead are there." 
 
 True imagination ; but put it beside the imagina 
 tion all aglow with emotion, 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 139 
 
 " And have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Here we have two kinds, certainly two degrees, 
 of imagination ; and there is as great a distance 
 between them as there is between the lyrics, 
 " The Yellow Violet " and " The Solitary Reaper." 
 Stedman quotes also from " A Rain-Dream," 
 
 " T is the Wind of night ; 
 A lonely wanderer between earth and cloud, 
 In the black shadow and the chilly mist, 
 Along the streaming mountain-side, and through 
 The dripping woods, and o er the plashy fields, 
 Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes 
 The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets 
 A welcome or a friend, and still goes on 
 In darkness." 
 
 Set this against ten words from the great 
 " Laker," - 
 
 "a mind forever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." 
 
 Take " The Prairies," which Stoddard says is 
 worth going to the end of the world to write : 
 
140 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Lo ! they stretch 
 In airy undulations, far away, 
 As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, 
 Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, 
 And motionless forever." 
 
 This is excellent ; but mate it with the imagina 
 tion of the scornful Georgian, a few traces of 
 whom Swinburne has kindly permitted to re 
 main : 
 
 " The eternal surge 
 
 Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar 
 Our bubbles ; as the old burst, new emerge, 
 Lashed from the foam of ages ; while the graves 
 Of empires heave but like some .passing waves." 
 
 Will the two imaginings mate? No more than 
 will these : 
 
 " I lie and listen to her mighty voice : 
 A voice of many tones, sent up from many streams 
 That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen 
 Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air, 
 From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day, 
 And hollows of the great invisible hills, 
 And sands that edge the ocean, stretching far 
 Into the night a melancholy sound! " 
 
 " The gentleness of heaven is on the sea. 
 Listen ! the mighty being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly." 
 
 But we have gone far enough, perhaps, to ex 
 hibit the kind, or grade, of Bryant s imagination. 
 Stress has been laid on the limitations and 
 
William Cullen Bryant 141 
 
 deficiencies of America s first poet, first in 
 time, and one of the first in excellence. In his 
 case, as in that of the other poets reviewed, the 
 purpose has been to listen to the voice, forgetting 
 as far as possible who it is that sings ; for poetry, 
 not the poet, must be first in the thought if the 
 estimate is to be just and instructive. With the 
 characteristics of great poetry in mind, Bryant 
 reveals to sum up a lofty soul, a strong, 
 broad mind of exquisite poise, a sure eye for 
 natural things, and the cunning of art to give 
 these possessions perfect expression. 
 
 It would be gratifying indeed were the per- 
 fectness of Bryant s expression generally appre 
 ciated ; but poetry is little read, and there can 
 be small hope of widespread appreciation of it 
 till the heart of the poet s work is plucked out 
 and held, dripping, before the eyes of the world. 
 To do this looks something like murder, but no 
 gentler proceeding will catch and rivet the roving 
 eyes of the multitude. To edit a poet savors 
 of the criminal, but it so savors mainly to our 
 reverence and affection, qualities as misleading as 
 they are admirable. In strict truth there could 
 be neither a wiser nor a tenderer tribute paid 
 the hallowed memory of our poets than to pluck 
 out the heart of their work, and hold it up to 
 universal gaze ; and the service so rendered to 
 the people would transcend many a loud sug- 
 
142 That Dome in Air. 
 
 gestion for reform and improvement. In the 
 face of the many compilations now extant, a vol 
 ume of fifty poems could be selected from the 
 works of Bryant, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, 
 Longfellow, and Lowell, that would not only 
 surprise the English-speaking world with the 
 worth of American verse, but would prove a 
 potent stroke for culture. Bryant, for example, 
 wrote one hundred and sixty poems ; while it is 
 on a dozen of these that his fame rests. The 
 dozen include the others ; they are really all, they 
 are Bryant. As with him, so it is with the rest 
 of our poets, with all poets of all times and lands, 
 the masters excepted, whose number can be reck 
 oned by the count of one s fingers. To read the 
 poets is impossible, to read the heart of them is 
 possible ; and it would mean much for moral ele 
 vation, for spiritual growth, for the love of pure 
 beauty, were it part of our schooling to be thor 
 oughly familiar with the following poems, and 
 with a like small number of others that represent 
 a half-dozen of our poets severally as these do 
 the "Father of American Song": "Thanatop- 
 sis," "To a Water Fowl," "A Winter Piece," 
 "A Forest Hymn," "June," "The Death of 
 the Flowers," "The Evening Wind," "The 
 Prairies." 
 
 Attention being called to Bryant s fifty years 
 service in practical affairs, to his original use of 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 143 
 
 the noble metre that was the natural outlet of his 
 soul, and the medium through which he rewaked 
 the strains of the old father of the fathers of song, 
 it remains to observe that, if the trend of song 
 has been steadily away from the model on which 
 he built, fashion is, of all things,- the most ephem 
 eral, and, let change and divergence work as they 
 may, the voices of our choir will ever blend in 
 proud recognition of their venerable head. 
 
VII. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 takes one wild poet to hit off another, 
 and we may begin with Whitman by 
 applying to him Joaquin s words anent 
 Walker, the warrior, " He was a brick ! " 
 " Brick " and " bard " are hardly synonymous 
 terms, but what matter? There are other needed 
 folk besides poets, and it may be that, forty years 
 ago, we were in just the predicament to cry, " My 
 kingdom for a brick !" Such, assuredly, was 
 Whitman s notion ; and with slouch hat, and hand 
 on hip, he stepped in. 
 
 " Apart from the pulling and hauling stands. what I am, 
 Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, 
 
 unitary, 
 Looking with side-curved head curious what will come 
 
 next, 
 
 Both in and out of the game and watching and wonder 
 ing at it." 
 
 Bravo, Walt ! We surmised that the book 
 worm, the dude, the prude, the whole finikin 
 family, would catch it ; and they have. 
 
Walt Whitman. 145 
 
 Whitman is well worth heeding, if for no other 
 reason than for his insistence on the forgotten 
 fact that we are not born with our clothes on, 
 and that nature no more than he himself has a 
 predilection for "neuters and geldings." If his 
 language, in dealing with these truths, waxes so 
 emphatic as to wipe clean out the last trace of 
 moderation, to strip off the last layer of delicacy, 
 let us remember that the "brick" does nothing 
 by halves, and keep up our end. No nibbling 
 at " Leaves of Grass ; " we must fall to ox- fashion, 
 whipping up whole mouthfuls. We must take 
 things as they come, " koboos," "hind shoul 
 ders," "mystic deliria," "aliens," "space and 
 time," " tough pimples " of alligators, " Ma 
 femme," "libertad," " life and death," " Kneph," 
 " teff-wheat," " fierce-throated beauties " of 
 locomotives, " trottoirs," " tympan of the ears," 
 all the infinity of sprigs in the " bouquets of 
 incomparable feuillage." It is tough fodder; but 
 we can grind with a will, since t is death to the 
 neuter and the gelding. We shall get rid of 
 " sich," at least, and those of us that survive will 
 have the satisfaction henceforth of being able to 
 stand up to the rack with good bovine appetite, 
 able to take whatever Pan or Pandemonium may 
 provide. 
 
 There are two sides to the question of civiliza 
 tion, as to all questions, and it is only fair that 
 10 
 
146 That Dome in Air. 
 
 the wild side should now and then have its innings. 
 Enough, therefore, if we find two lines in " So 
 Long " made good throughout the volume, 
 
 " Camerado, this is no hook ; 
 Who touches this touches a man." 
 
 Though this is not the whole truth about 
 " Leaves of Grass," certain it is that we find, first 
 of all, a robust, unabashed, magnetic fellow-crea 
 ture, a being that no man of pulse and stomach 
 can afford to pass by. He " of Manhattan the 
 son," is a figure, a live figure, if not in literature, 
 out of it somewhere, illustrating the proposition 
 that it is a magnificent thing to be a first-class 
 " human critter." " Well, he looks like a man," 
 said Lincoln ; and so say we, all of us, as we 
 plunge along behind him through the lusty Grass- 
 leaves. 
 
 The finikin family find it a fact in their favor 
 that the highest encomium on our " Kosmos " 
 has come from the superintendent of a lunatic 
 asylum. The finikinese are precipitous, they 
 begin at the wrong end ; they are thinking rather 
 of the bard than of the " brick"; and they are 
 not quite the witnesses for a " brick," anyhow. 
 Let art and chaos have it out, while we hold to 
 the fact that a big " brick " of a " human critter " 
 is altogether too substantial a thing to be whisked 
 out of sight by a smart saying. Mind your reck- 
 
Walt Whitman. 147 
 
 oning, "dulce affetuosos," and see that you try 
 not to be in two places at once. We bide not 
 just now 
 
 " Where Orpheus and where Homer are "; 
 
 we are simply with Walt, on the morning side of 
 Manhattan or " yahonking " with the wild gan 
 ders, heaven knows exactly where. Away with 
 your Dante and Shakespeare and Milton ; stick 
 we to Whitman, while he " lets down the bars to 
 a good lesson " in health, strength, out-and-out- 
 ness, trust and happiness, in many a good old 
 solid doctrine. While we shall be overjoyed to 
 receive a new Solomon or a new Shakespeare as 
 soon as he can possibly come, make we the most 
 of what we have ; and it is doubtful if we have 
 anything better for the nonce than this strapping, 
 yawping boy, pet of the good old Mother. 
 
 " To behold the day-break I 
 The little light fades the immense and diaphanous 
 
 shadows, 
 The air tastes good to my palate." 
 
 " Smile, O voluptuous cool-breathed earth ! 
 Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees I 
 Earth of departed sunset earth of the mountains 
 
 misty-topt ! 
 Earth of the vitreous power of the full moon, just 
 
 tinged with blue ! " 
 
 These lines are more than dithyrambics ; they 
 are the credentials of a square-backed, thunder- 
 
148 That Dome in Air. 
 
 ing son of the ground, stamped with the sign 
 manual of the Mother. 
 
 Neither is the stickler for poetry to be wholly 
 disappointed. If the hand is that of the Sons 
 of Anak, the heart is that of the poet. Whitman 
 is keen on the poet s trail ; he knows where the 
 fat pastures are. The raw material of song he 
 is always up to the chin in that ; and the raw 
 material of song is not apt to glut the market. 
 Nor are faith and joy any too plenty. If we find 
 these essential and permanent things, is it not 
 enough? Really, it should be, and we ought to 
 be glad of a chance to hearten up, and hurry 
 after our Paumanokian " camerado," washing 
 our palate with the clean air as we go, halting 
 now and then to let the bay mare and what not 
 shame the silliness out of us. In sober truth we 
 are a sophisticated lot, and none too tight in the 
 knees ; in very truth we need the " flaunt of the 
 sunshine " and some " brick " of a " human 
 critter "to " blow grit " in us. For this purpose 
 Whitman, 
 
 " Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical," 
 
 has his place. It is not the niche of him that 
 chiselled the Venus de Milo, or of him that be 
 queathed us the griefs of Antigone ; but it is a 
 niche, and one not the easiest to fill. 
 
 The " bravuras of birds" and the "bustle of 
 
Walt Whitman. 149 
 
 growing wheat " these are no mean things, of 
 themselves ; and when we add to a renewal of 
 our acquaintance with these and their associates 
 a freshened interest in the natural man, and, 
 withal, " good heart as a radical possession and 
 habit," we establish a mission few are either pre 
 pared or inclined to undertake. Whitman does 
 undertake it, and fulfils it after a fashion. He 
 is the physician for certain disorders if one 
 can take his doses. It is answered that the 
 "if" upsets all; that only the iron-nerved 
 and ostrich-mawed can swallow his heroic po 
 tions, and that for these physic is superfluous. 
 Granted; nevertheless the halest are not without 
 their ailings, and Whitman may have a busy 
 practice, though confined to the weak spots in 
 those that forget that, after all, Achilles had a 
 heel. 
 
 The chapter in " November Boughs " entitled 
 "A Backward Glance o er Travelled Roads" 
 reveals Whitman as a middle-aged man, pos 
 sessed of a " feeling or ambition " worthy, in 
 deed, of a hero ; namely, 
 
 "To articulate and faithfully express in literary 
 or poetic form and uncompromisingly my own physi 
 cal, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic per 
 sonality in the midst of and tallying the momentous 
 spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current 
 America, and to exploit that personality, identified 
 
150 That Dome in Air. 
 
 with place and date, in a far more candid and com 
 prehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book." 
 
 Again he says, 
 
 " From another point of view Leaves of Grass 
 is avowedly the song of sex and amativeness, and 
 even animality though meanings that do not 
 usually go along with those words are behind all, and 
 will duly emerge and all are sought to be lifted 
 into a different light and atmosphere. 
 
 " I say the profoundest service that poems or any 
 other writings can do for their reader is not merely 
 to satisfy the intellect or supply something polished 
 and interesting, nor even to depict great passions or 
 persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and 
 clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good 
 heart as a radical possession and habit." 
 
 Obviously enough, when our mariner of Man- 
 nahatta set out, mighty waters were launched 
 upon ; and if they were not conquered from 
 shore to shore, we have only to record once 
 more the limitation of human effort, the balking 
 of laudable ambition, and to be thankful for the 
 success so far as it goes. Any personality is no 
 small theme, and Whitman s was no small per 
 sonality. To tally the " momentous spirit and 
 facts " of American life for twoscore years 
 this alone is an undertaking likely to keep one 
 active. 
 
Walt Whitman. 151 
 
 But the articulation is to be something more ; 
 it is to be poetry, art. The extent to which, 
 in the writer s judgment, this Titan s task was 
 performed has been indicated. Others go fur 
 ther, averring that, beyond his personality and 
 nature and the natural man, our author em 
 bodies, as he essays to, " current America " and 
 "democracy" in general, together with many 
 another bit of extensiveness ; all this " in poetic 
 form." As for America and democracy, is not 
 the "tough" somewhat too triumphant; are not 
 the " vivas " a little too loud for the " fancy man 
 and rowdy " ; are not the " snag-toothed hostler " 
 and the scavenger somewhat too emphatic? Un 
 doubtedly, the expanse of territory, the pros 
 perity of material interests and the free-arid-easy 
 government of our new republic have fostered 
 extremes, both in sentiment and diction ; still it 
 is possible that Whitman s writings are so far 
 from voicing " current America" as not to sound 
 clearly even the note of modern times. To-day, 
 " Americanos," with other civilized folk the 
 world over, live in a time which, for instance, 
 sinks the individual. Imagine our " imperturbe," 
 for whom space is a bandbox, and the past 
 nations of the earth mere preludes to his prodi 
 gious appearance, imagine him of all men in the 
 role of spokesman for such a period ! The heart 
 of Whitman s strength lies largely in his resist- 
 
152 That Dome in Air. 
 
 ance to his time, in his onslaught of the semi- 
 savage upon the " civilizee." In both spirit and 
 method he belongs back in the simpler, stronger, 
 gladder days. Much at home as he makes him 
 self in the thundering bustle, amid the astonish 
 ing conquests peculiar to the period, after all, 
 the secret of his power is to be traced to his kin 
 ship with the able-bodied, unsophisticated, be 
 lieving, joyous early man. This early man, 
 tricked out in modern fashion, he has "ex 
 ploited " ; he has said good things about Nature ; 
 but " current America " and " democracy," it 
 were safer to say, still await articulation. 
 
 Whitman s articulation, whatever it be, is in 
 his own way. Is Whitman s way the poet s way? 
 Certain critics, certain poets, so affirm. Here 
 some of us must call a halt, and, if such be the 
 poetic form of democracy, cry, Feudalism for 
 ever ! The shining target for the Finikin family, 
 the superintendent of lunatics, before mentioned, 
 says, 
 
 " I am myself fully satisfied that Walt Whitman 
 is one of the greatest men, if not the very greatest 
 man, that the world has so far produced." 
 
 Mr. W. M. Rossetti adds, - 
 
 " I sincerely believe him to be of the order of 
 great poets. ... His voice will one day be potential 
 or magisterial wherever the English language is 
 spoken." 
 
Walt Whitman. 153 
 
 There is nothing faint-hearted about these 
 announcements ; the honors for courage resting 
 easy between them. While the point raised by 
 Mr. Rossetti is, in one sense, secondary, in 
 another it is of prime importance, affecting, as it 
 does, not only Whitman, but the art of poetry at 
 large. It is strange enough that, while the great 
 laws of Nature, once formulated, are settled for 
 ever, equally sovereign laws of art must be set up 
 over and over, lest the multitude, ay, the critics 
 and poets, be led astray. Whitman did not 
 revolt against art, says one that should know, 
 since he was not born in some such regulative 
 realm and reign as fell to the lot of Queen 
 Anne ; being born in America in the nineteenth 
 century, he is " remote from authority." On 
 these terms ours is a free land, indeed. Not 
 all America can rise to this height of democ 
 racy. Some among us find that at the North 
 Pole or at the South Pole, or at any station be 
 tween, two presences have authority over the 
 poet. Calendars and geographies do not affect 
 these ; they are indifferent alike to Queen Annes 
 and President Harrisons. Certain critics forget 
 this in their treatment of Browning, forget it 
 again in the case of Browning s brother revolter. 
 Poetic truth and poetic beauty these are pres 
 ent forever, and absolute in authority; and to 
 these Whitman does not submit, against these he 
 does revolt. 
 
154 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Of the order of great poets " ! What is Mr. 
 Rossetti saying? All the great poets together 
 do not number more than a dozen, and Walt is 
 to make the dozen a baker s. In the great poet 
 we have high imagination, great thought, great 
 constructive power, perfect form, supernal music 
 and beauty. If we are not sure that these are to 
 be found in Tennyson, we shall do well to think 
 many times before swearing that one cannot 
 fail to find them in the thirteenth member of 
 the sovereign circle, in him hailing from " fish- 
 shape Paumanok." Had Mr. Rossetti exclaimed, 
 " Jabber of Caliban, belch of chaos ! " he would 
 have done Whitman no more injustice than he has 
 done the art of poetry in the expression, " of the 
 order of great poets." With " Leaves of Grass " 
 in one hand and the elementary principles of 
 any poetry, great or small, in the other, possibly 
 the critic will find the division " Songs of My 
 self," what the author styles it, " yawp " ; the 
 division "Children of Adam," eroticism cropped 
 of its first, third, and fourth syllables ; the rest of 
 the volume, in the main, a series of instantaneous 
 photographs, paralleled only by the cavorting of 
 Muybridge s horses. 
 
 Few " Americanos " claim for their country, as 
 yet, a great poet ; the most of us think, however, 
 that " these States " can make a showing of sev 
 eral genuine poets. Whitman may have been a 
 
Walt Whitman. 155 
 
 greater man th an any of our poets ; he may have 
 done a more useful work than theirs, these are 
 other questions, not to be considered here, but 
 the work was done in his own way, not in their 
 way, not in the poet s way. Indeed, on the point 
 of art, we are compelled to find in " Leaves of 
 Grass," instead of the inauguration of a new 
 literature, a revival of the raw period before liter 
 ature was, the progress of 
 
 " the irregular crab 
 
 Which, though t go backward, thinks that it goes right, 
 Because it goes its own way." 
 
 Walt went at his work in his own way, with his 
 trousers in his boots and his shirt-sleeves rolled 
 up ; the way, after all, proved commendably 
 effective. Here we should stop ; not go on to 
 say that, because he can with one Sullivanic 
 punch floor a dozen mincing "eleves," be 
 cause he calls without ceasing on all with any 
 blood in their veins to stand up, to enjoy them 
 selves, to " loaf," and again to "whack away," 
 because he does this and much more of the 
 sort, that he " articulates " anything in " poetic 
 form." We should not be done up in the 
 " eleves," nor should we be afraid of a brush 
 with the world, of a frisk with the flesh and the 
 devil ; but we should insist upon it that in song 
 " yawp " can never be " potential or magiste 
 rial " ; that we step beyond the boundary line of 
 
156 That Dome in Air. 
 
 art the moment we begin to " loaf v or to "whack 
 away." Whitman was a king in the realm of 
 physique, an emperor in the realm of comrade 
 ship, in short, a giant of his shaggy, hearty kind ; 
 all this, however, and much more with it does 
 not necessitate a poet. The man, the child of 
 Nature, the patriot, the author of " Leaves of 
 Grass," red as the blood ran in his veins, "lot" 
 of him that there was, "and all so luscious," was 
 not animated by the ichor that inspires the impe 
 rial line of the sons of song. Whitman simply 
 held to the apron-strings of the wise old Mother 
 when, at the outset, he strode away from the 
 circle of all poets, great and small. 
 
 Since Whitman commands admiration for what 
 he really was, it is quite unnecessary to wrench 
 elementary laws in order to set him up for what 
 he was not. Much of the commendation of 
 Emerson, Symonds, Thoreau, and even of Bur 
 roughs, is merited ; but that any man of cul 
 ture can find Walt a great poet, is disheartening 
 enough to the hopes of art. The sober truth 
 would seem to be that one piece, "My Captain," 
 which is at the farthest remove from the bulk of 
 his writings, and the nearest to acknowledged 
 models, is the only composition in " Leaves of 
 Grass " that may be indisputably termed a 
 poem. 
 
 The pieces "Out of the Cradle, etc.," and 
 
Walt Whitman. 157 
 
 " Lincoln s Burial Hymn/ are ranked among 
 the more convincing witnesses to Whitman s 
 poetic gifts. One critic, whose word goes a 
 long way, finds the " Burial Hymn" "exquisitely 
 idyllic" ; he finds it in the " melodious manner," 
 and gives it a place it cannot be said how near 
 on the line with Lowell s " Commemoration 
 Ode." Let us read the opening divisions, 
 
 i. 
 
 " When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom d, 
 And the great star early droop d in the western sky in 
 
 the night, 
 I mourn d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. 
 
 " Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, 
 Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, 
 And thought of him I love. 
 
 " O powerful western fallen star ! 
 O shades of night O moody, tearful night ! 
 O great star disappear d O the black murk that hides 
 
 the star ! 
 O cruel hands that hold me powerless O helpless soul 
 
 of me ! 
 O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul ! 
 
 3- 
 " In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the 
 
 white-wash d palings, 
 Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped 
 
 leaves of rich green, 
 
 With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the 
 perfume strong I love, 
 
158 That Dome in Air. 
 
 With every leaf a miracle and from this bush in the 
 
 dooryard, 
 With delicate color d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves 
 
 of rich green, 
 A sprig with its flower I break." 
 
 A part is not the whole ; but if there are few 
 signs of more than the raw material in the first 
 seventeen lines, there can be neither the exqui- 
 siteness nor the melody the poets have taught us 
 to look for in the composition entire. Let us 
 read the first six lines once more, 
 
 " The last time the lilacs blossomed in my dooryard, 
 it was a season of mourning. One night, gazing on 
 the early star as it went down in the West, I stood, 
 thinking of a friend lately passed away ; and now 
 again the three are with me, the lilacs, the star, 
 and the grief. They are with me now, and they will 
 always be with me at this season of the year, coming 
 together in the spring-time." 
 
 Tried by any test or standard, from Musneus 
 down to Sir Lewis Morris, what is there of poetry 
 in the magisterial dithyrambs not in the prose 
 version? What beauty, what music, what atmos 
 phere, what captivating cadence, is present to give 
 the grass-leaves the advantage? Nor can more 
 be discovered to differentiate the second division, 
 as art, from the diarial apostrophes to be found 
 in profusion at any of our seminaries for young 
 ladies. In the third division there are instances 
 of a good eye and fine sympathy for natural 
 
Walt Whitman. 159 
 
 things, the " heart-shaped leaves of rich green " 
 and the " pointed blossom rising delicate " ; but 
 occasional words and phrases, though of the 
 choicest, do not insure an exquisite and melo 
 dious idyl. We have not simply to say over the 
 names of the stars, of the trees and flowers, to 
 win the laurels of a Theocritus or a Tennyson. 
 If Nature is to be the poet, she can do her own 
 writing. If man is to be the poet, he must do 
 his own writing ; and the writing must be more 
 knightly than the pricking of a sway-backed prose 
 hack over a poetic road. 
 
 " There is no man in the marsh-land, in whose 
 deep pools could be found death, whose thick 
 grasses could moor a boat forever. It is a lonely 
 place, and only my thought is there, striving to 
 possess it all with wide vision. 
 
 " Over the marsh-land stray odors from border 
 flowers, but there is no sense to harbor them. 
 Over the marsh-land the sound-waves float, but 
 there is no tongue to awaken them to speech and no 
 ear to receive them. In the marsh-land is God, 
 without the souls in which alone He shines unto 
 His own vision ; in the marsh-land is God, a light 
 without His own darkness. 
 
 " The marsh-land is a lonely place ; there is no 
 man there. Only my thought is there, holding what 
 it can encompass of God." 
 
 The quotation is from a story-writer, an 
 Americana, too ; but, really, if the "Burial Hymn " 
 
160 That Dome in Air. 
 
 is poetry, Miss Wilkins should lose no time in 
 getting together her "pastels in prose," and 
 announce a new volume of song. 
 
 All biases aside, nothing in our minds but the 
 wish to discover the link coupling the "Burial 
 Hymn " with any exquisite or melodious poem, 
 with this in mind, and only this, we are in a 
 world, not void, but without form ; and without 
 form there is no poetry. The sack of raw ma 
 terial is simply slit and allowed to leak ; the pro 
 cess is a mere spilling, gravitation being the only 
 law of order at work. The eye runs down a list 
 of exquisitely idyllic things, but the setting ! The 
 occasional felicities of word and phrase only em 
 phasize the fact that they are aliens, strangers in 
 a strange land. It is unnecessary to go through 
 this composition line by line ; but, for example, 
 if the line, 
 
 " Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring," 
 
 is song, idyllic or other, we have but to twist 
 every-day speech, to spoil our common talk, and 
 Olympus is won. 
 
 Another critic finds Whitman the " clear fore 
 runner of the great American poet." While 
 this is less startling than Mr. Rossetti s dic 
 tum, a glance will show how far, in point of 
 poetic form, we are behind a wild bard of days 
 bygone, 
 
Walt Whitman. 161 
 
 "As roll a thousand waves to the rock, 
 
 So Swaran s host came on ; 
 As meets a rock a thousand waves, 
 So Inisfail met Swaran." 
 
 Or again, 
 
 " My love is a son of the hill ; 
 He pursues the flying deer. 
 His gray dogs are panting round him, 
 His bowstring sounds in the wind. 
 Dost thou rest by the fount of the rock, 
 Or by the noise of the mountain-stream? 
 The rushes are nodding to the wind, 
 The mist flies over the hill." 
 
 Vivas for Vinvela ! We hope to match her 
 music some day. We hope to catch up with 
 her and Agandecca leaving the " hall of her 
 secret sigh," " loveliness around her as a light," 
 and " her steps like the music of songs." We 
 take courage ; but the way is long from our cur 
 rent American 
 
 " Girls, mothers, housekeepers, in all their performances." 
 
 Of the critics quoted, three live on the thither 
 shore of the Atlantic. The immediate inheritors 
 of the greatest literature the world has known, 
 continue to fly in the face of the genius that gave 
 it them whenever the matter considered is an 
 American product. The critics brought up on 
 Shakespeare and Milton find the nearest American 
 approach to these in writers at the very farthest 
 remove from them, yes, distressingly distant 
 
1 62 That Dome in Air. 
 
 from the humblest of their successors? Perhaps 
 the English findings in the case of our literature 
 are all based on the " remote- from-authority " 
 theory. Whatever the explanation be, the fact re 
 mains that when we see one of our rimers swing 
 ing it round the British Isle, we make short work 
 of the mystery by surmising that things were not 
 quite comfortable at home. Does some enthu 
 siast among us issue a volume entitled " Gems 
 from Walt Whitman," we smile over the sparkle 
 of the first gem, 
 
 " See, projected through time, 
 For me an audience interminable," 
 
 and, withdrawing in a body, leave the author in 
 the undisturbed enjoyment of the jewels. But 
 whither shall we flee, where hide our confusion, 
 when the British critic in high place, the critic 
 nurtured in the air and light of the winged 
 Elizabethans, says to us that he finds in Whit 
 man s sayings on life and death the accent of 
 great poetry, of such lines as these, 
 
 " I swear, t is better to be lowly born, 
 And range with humble livers in content, 
 Than to be perk d up in a glistering grief 
 And wear a golden sorrow " ; 
 
 "For within the hollow crown 
 That rounds the mortal temples of a king 
 Keeps death his court " ; 
 
Walt Whitman. 163 
 
 " T is of all sleeps the sweetest; 
 
 Children begin it to us, strong men seek it, 
 
 And kings from height of all their painted glories 
 
 Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre"; 
 
 " Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain " ? 
 
 But England begins to redeem herself; Mr. 
 Watts, in the course of his article, " Walt Whit 
 man," in the Athenaum (April 2, 1892) says: 
 " Poetic genius no one now dreams of crediting 
 him with." 
 
 It is time for a word of accord. It is generally 
 recognized that Whitman is exceptionally happy in 
 his headings. Happy indeed he is ; so happy, in 
 fact, that the table of contents of " Leaves of 
 Grass " would not be out of place in the body of 
 the volume. 
 
 " To the garden the world, from pent-up aching rivers 
 I sing the body electric. 
 A woman waits for me, spontaneous me ; 
 One hour to madness and joy 
 
 O hymen ! O hymenee ! " 
 
 Surely this initiatory bit of the contents-table of 
 " Children of Adam " might with propriety find a 
 place in the body of the division, there to suffer 
 neither in point of rhythm nor of consecutiveness 
 of thought. 
 
164 That Dome in Air. 
 
 But, seriously, we gnaw the horn searching for 
 poetry in "Leaves of Grass " ; we gnaw the horn, 
 and we wrong Walt. Let us turn from Walt " of 
 the order of great poets" to Walt the Wild, the 
 chanter of " Calamus." What is it, Walt, that you 
 say about death? 
 
 " They are alive and well somewhere, 
 The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, 
 And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not 
 
 wait at the end to arrest it, 
 And ceas d the moment life appear d. 
 All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 
 And to die is different from what any one supposed, and 
 
 luckier. 
 
 * Has any one supposed it lucky to be born ? 
 I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, 
 and I know it." 
 
 Through me shall the words be said to make death ex 
 hilarating, 
 
 Give me your tone therefore, O Death, that I may ac 
 cord with it, 
 
 Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now 
 above all, and are folded inseparably together, you 
 love and death are, 
 
 Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I 
 was calling life, 
 
 For now it is convey d to me that you are the purports 
 essential, 
 
 That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, 
 and that they are mainly for you, 
 
 That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real 
 reality, 
 
Walt Whitman. 165 
 
 That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, 
 no matter how long, 
 
 That you will one day perhaps take control of all, 
 
 That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of ap 
 pearance, 
 
 That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not 
 last so very long, 
 
 But you will last very long." 
 
 Shall we recant ? We have heard all this be 
 fore, and couched in terms more winning. Once 
 more we say the same of the articulations on 
 " democracy " and " current America," and pass 
 ing on, with a glance here and there, stop at such 
 places as these, 
 
 " I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I 
 
 will be the bard of personality, 
 And I will show of male and female that either is but 
 
 the equal of the other, 
 And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, 
 
 for I am determin d to tell you with courageous 
 
 clear voice to prove you illustrious." 
 
 " What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me, 
 Me going in for my chances." 
 
 Herein do we see the real Whitman ; herein 
 do we find him at home, and offering first-hand 
 matter, as is his wont when the natural man and 
 Nature are the theme, and as is not his wont 
 when democracy, or war, or death, or manual 
 labor is in the ascendant. We find no poems, 
 nothing nearer it than the suggestion of themes, 
 as in the line 
 
1 66 That Dome in Air. 
 
 "The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the 
 bushy hill," 
 
 or in the marching title, 
 
 " As I walk these broad, majestic days." 
 
 " Expecting the main things from you," Whitman 
 says to us naively. Nothing could be apter; if 
 we are to have poems, we must furnish them our 
 selves. We find never " the blossom and the fra- 
 grancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, 
 human passions, emotions, language," but " roots 
 and leaves themselves alone." We find not the 
 "autobiography of a soul"; we find the word 
 soul, but the thing flesh, perpetually, even to the 
 " sweet-fleshed day." Walt Whitman had a soul ; 
 but, come what might, it would weigh some two 
 hundred pounds, and wear a low-cut collar. In 
 short, we find in this last hard look, not a poet, 
 but a "brick" of a "human critter," with whom 
 we will " go gallivant," 
 
 " I know I am august, 
 
 I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be under 
 stood, 
 
 I see that the elementary laws never apologize, 
 (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my 
 house by, after all.) 
 
 " Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, 
 Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breed 
 ing. 
 
Walt Whitman. 167 
 
 No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or 
 
 apart from them, 
 No more modest than immodest." 
 
 Ay, we will "go gallivant." Have but a dozen 
 superior souls found a fraction of the good re 
 ported, every one of us must find something. 
 Whitman says it will be grit, and he should 
 know; "clean grit and human natur," blasts 
 of them driven even to the marrow. The poets 
 crowned, wound from top to toe, there is plenty 
 of laurel left in the woods. Nature sees to it 
 that her own brows are not stripped naked, and 
 she keeps a sprig, too, for her yawping boy. It is 
 idle to argue with the fond old Mother. " I know," 
 she answers ; " but he is my boy ! " Yes, we will 
 take the Mother s word for it. "Old topknot" 
 calls, your "head slues round on your neck"; 
 here s for you, Walt, we will "go gallivant" ! 
 
 " Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess 
 the origin of all poems, 
 
 You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there 
 are millions of suns left,) 
 
 You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, 
 nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on 
 the spectres in books, 
 
 You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take 
 things from me, 
 
 You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your 
 self." 
 
 " The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple 
 boughs wag." 
 
i68 That Dome in Air. 
 
 "The hairy wild bee that murmurs and hankers up and 
 down." 
 
 The wet of woods through the early hours. 
 
 " But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, 
 sings, 
 
 Which babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the 
 land, 
 
 Which the birds know in the woods mornings and even 
 ings." 
 
 " The great laws take and effuse without argument, 
 I am of the same style, for I am their friend, 
 I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make 
 salaams." 
 
 " I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and 
 
 the reasons of things, 
 They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen." 
 
 " The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts 
 all good." 
 
 " It seems to me that everything in the light and air ought 
 
 to be happy, 
 
 Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him 
 know he has enough." 
 
VIII. 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE. 
 
 : With a thousand angels upon the wind" 
 
 [HERE, and so accompanied, rode Blake 
 the mystic, from childhood to the end 
 of his threescore and ten. The poem 
 entitled " Verses," from which this line is taken, 
 opens with couplets that fitly introduce the singer 
 so strange in equipment and method, standing 
 well toward the front among the defiant forces, 
 the insoluble phenomena, 
 
 " With happiness stretched across the hills 
 In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils, 
 With a blue sky spread over with wings, 
 And a mild sun that mounts and sings ; 
 With trees and fields full of fairy elves, 
 And little devils who fight for themselves, 
 Remembering the verses that Hayley sung 
 When my heart knocked against the root of my tongue, 
 With angels planted in hawthorn bowers, 
 And God himself in the passing hours ; 
 With silver angels across my way, 
 And golden demons that none can stay." 
 
170 That Dome in Air. 
 
 We are swung at once into midair, and the 
 natural exclamation is, Madman ! Blake, in his 
 lifetime, was known to many as a madman, but 
 let us not be too hasty in consigning great gifts 
 to the asylum ; for Coleridge, De Quincey, Byron, 
 and even Wordsworth, have been tracked beyond 
 the bounds of sanity. The spice of madness de 
 manded for the poet, Blake assuredly had ; and 
 this is all that concerns us at present. 
 
 The many make too little of such a mind, while 
 a few make too much of it. Mr. Gilchrist and 
 Swinburne are guilty on the side of over-apprecia 
 tion. If, here and there, are applied to Blake 
 adulatory adjectives larger than his erratic genius 
 can well carry, he is very different from what he 
 has been found to be by his detractors. The 
 sympathetic reader finds a deal of queerness, a 
 medley of Ezekiel, Ossian, and an innominable 
 tertium quid ; finds independence, intolerance, 
 wildness ; finds incoherence, vast scattering, rhap 
 sody thinning away into nebula, mysticism slip 
 ping into nonsense, in short, defiance of much 
 that is right in thought and in method ; finds 
 this, but, mingled with it, strains and whole 
 poems possible only to the poet pure and simple, 
 to the singer by the grace of God. Indeed, 
 Blake, at his best, is, what we should always joy 
 to discover, an excellent illustration of the old 
 notion, the true notion, of the poet ; with imagi- 
 
William Blake. 171 
 
 nation, vision, faith, enthusiasm, he has the poet s 
 kind of thought, his straight sight, and his swift 
 method, his fire and his music shining and sing 
 ing along the native, inevitable lines. As we 
 read the place of his birth, there is something 
 prophetic in the names, "Broad Street, Golden 
 Square " j of a truth, he was the babe for a spa 
 cious, radiant cradle. 
 
 It is a waste of time to look for system in the 
 work of such a mind ; as in the case of Emerson, 
 the light is too white for more than gleams, flashes. 
 Blake is a reporter, a flesh-and-blood conduit for 
 the high might that descends, through certain 
 rare organisms, to become the precious possession 
 of men. We get from him occasional meteor 
 streaks of prophecy ; we get scattered blossoms 
 of philosophy ; we hear the voice of the teacher, 
 indirect, trembling with passion ; we listen to the 
 joyous songs of nature and of "humble livers" 
 from the lips of one the color of whose singing- 
 robe matches the sunset purple of Wordsworth s ; 
 we hear the last echo of the days when youth 
 and music ruled the English world ; and, having 
 this, we have something harder to find than 
 theories and systems. 
 
 The vision is mightier in this poet than the 
 faculty divine. He sees so much that he forgets 
 the blindness of the world ; with so much of the 
 poet in himself, he forgets how little of the poet 
 there is in us ; he draws the rapid outlines, dashes 
 
172 That Dome in Air. 
 
 off the sketch, and our own imagination is left to 
 complete the picture. It should not be forgotten, 
 however, that in many cases the poems are but 
 half the artistic whole ; that it was Blake s habit 
 to engrave his poems, illustrating them with col 
 ored drawings round the page or on a separate 
 page. To read the poems apart from the designs 
 is like listening to Wagner s operas, blindfold. To 
 be sure, the poems must stand or fall by them 
 selves ; still it is only right to bear in mind that 
 without the illustrations we do not realize the full 
 action of the author s imagination. 
 
 Emerson describes himself as a " transparent 
 eyeball," yet his vision is normal; Blake s vision 
 is abnormal. If Emerson sees more than he can 
 tell, Blake is determined that language shall fel 
 low his limitless vision : 
 
 " I assert for myself that I do not behold the out 
 ward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not 
 action. l What ! it will be questioned, when the 
 sun rises, do you not see a disc of fire, somewhat 
 like a guinea? Oh no, no! I see an innumerable 
 company of the heavenly host, crying, Holy, holy, 
 holy is the Lord God Almighty ! I question not 
 my corporeal eye, any more than I would question 
 a window, concerning a sight. I look through it, 
 and not with it." 
 
 The more we inquire into the matter of art, the 
 more evident it becomes that patience is of the 
 very essence of success in it ; but, unluckily, all 
 the patience of the little Blake family was in the 
 
William Blake. 173 
 
 heart of faithful, black-eyed Catherine. Had it 
 been among the temperamental treasures of the 
 master of the house, what might he not have 
 done, he that in green boyhood can remind us 
 of the old masters of the drama? 
 
 " And may our duty, Chandos, be our pleasure. 
 Now we are alone, Sir John, I will unburden 
 And breathe my hopes into the burning air, 
 Where thousand Deaths are posting up and down, 
 Commissioned to this fatal field of Cressy. 
 Methinks I see them arm my gallant soldiers, 
 And gird the sword upon each thigh, and fit 
 Each shining helm, and string each stubborn bow, 
 And dance to the neighing of our steeds. 
 Methinks the shout begins, the battle burns ; 
 Methinks I see them perch on English crests, 
 And roar the wild flame of fierce war upon 
 The thronged enemy ! In truth, I am too full ; 
 It is my sin to love the noise of war. 
 
 Considerate age, my lord, views motives, 
 
 And not acts, when neither warbling voice 
 
 Nor trilling pipe is heard, nor pleasure sits 
 
 With trembling age, the voice of Conscience then, 
 
 Sweeter than music in a summer s eve, 
 
 Shall warble round the snowy head, and keep 
 
 Sweet symphony to feathered angels, sitting 
 
 As guardians round your chair ; then shall the pulse 
 
 Beat slow, and taste and touch and sight and sound 
 
 and smell, 
 That sing and dance round Reason s fine-wrought 
 
 throne, 
 
 Shall flee away, and leave him all forlorn ; 
 Yet not forlorn if Conscience is his friend." 
 
174 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Further along, we come upon the splendid 
 expression, 
 
 " Threatening as the red brow of storms." 
 (In passing, the adjective "red" illustrates the 
 inexplicable poetic force of certain words. We 
 find it again in Beddoes s 
 
 " The red outline of beginning Adam.") 
 
 Blake had not the shaping power of imagina 
 tion for protracted composition, neither was he 
 specially fitted for the favorite effort to unite 
 taste with condensation. The longer pieces are 
 loose, shapeless ; and worse than failures are such 
 hyperbolic announcements as, 
 
 " A game-cock clipped and armed for fight 
 Doth the rising sun affright " ; 
 
 " Every tear from every eye 
 Becomes a babe in eternity." 
 
 Blake poised on a thin ridge, on the one side 
 chaos, on the other the depth of the ridiculous ; 
 and he made missteps both right and left. True ; 
 but the recovery ! Not only does he balance on 
 the height once more, in the rest of the blessed 
 cloud, but rises on the songbird s wing, and circles 
 and carols at blissful ease in the empyrean. 
 
 There is no denying that Blake is prone to go 
 " beating in the void." We must expect it of 
 one that can write, even to a friend, after the 
 following fashion : 
 
William Blake. 175 
 
 " I am more famed in heaven for my works than 
 I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and 
 chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which 
 I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my 
 mortal life ; and these works are the delight and 
 study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious 
 about the riches or fame of mortality? The Lord 
 our Father will do for us and with us according to 
 His divine will, for our good. You, O dear Flax- 
 man, are a sublime archangel, my friend and com 
 panion from eternity. In the divine bosom is our 
 dwelling-place. I look back into the regions of 
 reminiscence, and behold our ancient days before 
 this earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my 
 mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity, 
 which can never be separated, though our mortal 
 vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of 
 heaven from each other." 
 
 The visionary that can so write has no diffi 
 culty in summoning the builder of the pyramids 
 from the shades to sit for his portrait ; and the 
 completion of the work is appropriately celebrated 
 by repairing to the garden arbor, there to while 
 away a summer hour with Catherine, neither of 
 the two further from nakedness than were the 
 first man and woman of sacred legend ere yet 
 the fig-leaf wear came into fashion. 
 
 But it is not always in the void ; the author of 
 the " Book of Thel "is at home on the ground, 
 as much at ease there as are the " Chimney- 
 Svveeper " and the "Little Black Boy," yes, as are 
 the humblest animal and plant. 
 
176 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " Names alter, things never alter." 
 
 " To be good only is to be 
 A God, or else a pharisee." 
 
 " Great things are done when men and mountains meet." 
 
 " He who has suffered you to impose on him knows you." 
 
 If on the one side is madness, on the other 
 is good old-fashioned sanity; in fact, it is not 
 difficult for Blake to be as worldly-wise as one 
 could wish. Despite his abnormal vision and 
 incoherent utterance, despite his inequality and 
 his thousand vagaries, Blake was a close critic 
 of life. While his vision was abnormally active, 
 the range is round a few elementary principles. 
 It is the safe circuit of Epictetus himself; the 
 favorite themes, love, youth, and childhood, in 
 dicating not only sanity, but special qualification 
 for the office of poet. Sweet-tempered and 
 joyous, barring the few lapses unavoidable by 
 one with so ardent a temperament, he saw tne 
 world as the old prophets saw it, beautiful, good ; 
 he trusted it, looked up from it to the Maker of 
 all, and sang as he journeyed, angels overhead 
 and lambs at his feet. No man has lived a more 
 thoroughly poetic life ; few men have come closer 
 to a realization of his own happy phrase, a " shin 
 ing lot." 
 
 For an instance of the peculiar manner of this 
 
William Blake. 177 
 
 reporter of life, we may take a stanza of the 
 poem "Night," where the ever-present angels 
 are exercising their gentle office, 
 
 " They look in every thoughtless nest 
 Where birds are covered warm ; 
 
 They visit caves of every beast, 
 To keep them all from harm : 
 
 If they see any weeping 
 
 That should have been sleeping, 
 
 They pour sleep on their head, 
 
 And sit down by their bed." 
 
 This is unlike anything we have heard before. 
 Again, he says of Christ, he 
 
 " O erturned the tent of secret sins, 
 And its golden cords and pins." 
 
 And in that intense poem, "Broken Love," we 
 have the stanza, 
 
 " A deep winter dark and cold 
 
 Within my heart thou dost unfold ; 
 
 Iron tears and groans of lead 
 
 Thou bind st around my aching head." 
 
 The voice sametimes rises to a shriek, 
 
 " The God of war is drunk with blood, 
 The earth doth faint and fail ; 
 The stench of blood makes sick the heavens, 
 Ghosts glut the throat of hell ! " 
 
 But the secret of genius soon confronts us again, 
 hiding in such lines as those where Dalila lies at 
 the feet of Samson, 
 
 12 
 
178 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " He seemed a mountain, his brow among the clouds ; 
 She seemed a silver stream, his teet embracing." 
 
 This is more striking than Tennyson s picture of 
 Vivien at the feet of Merlin, drawn with four 
 times as many lines save one, 
 
 " There lay she all her length and kiss d his feet, 
 As if in deepest reverence and love. 
 A twist of gold was round her hair ; a robe 
 Of samite without price, that more exprest 
 Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs, 
 In color like the satin-shining palm 
 On sallows in the windy gleams of March." 
 
 Little importance attaches to the environment 
 as a means of accounting for Blake s poetry. 
 Swinburne makes too much of it, as he does of 
 the oracles of the poet s later period. Blake 
 was kin to the Elizabethans, and were he writing 
 to-day he would probably take his inspiration 
 from them as surely as he did in the third 
 quarter of the last century. True, Shakespeare 
 and the whole nest of singing birds were being 
 closely studied when he began writing, but he 
 was just the man to find them out at any time. 
 
 If the Elizabethans were Blake s inspiration, 
 they were by no means Blake. Fuseli s familiar 
 admission concerning his pictures is of special 
 significance in this connection : " Blake is a 
 damned good fellow to steal from." In other 
 words, he was a painter full of original ideas. 
 
William Blake. 179 
 
 The same may be said of him as a poet. We 
 discover in Blake touches, perhaps the first, that 
 we know as Coleridgean; for instance, the last 
 stanza of " The Little Boy Lost," 
 
 " The night was dark, no father was there, 
 
 The child was wet with dew ; 
 The mire was deep, and the child did weep, 
 And away the vapor flew." 
 
 Blake, turn whither he may for inspiration, is 
 an original genius ; his method of reporting is 
 his own. The poems bear witness to this, and 
 their testimony is both confirmed and supple 
 mented by the kindred but distinct expression 
 from which they should not be divorced. Mr. 
 William Rossetti, author of the descriptive cata 
 logue of Blake s art works, uses language helpful 
 in the effort to comprehend the expression of 
 this most daring and startling soul of his time, 
 
 " ELOHIM CREATING ADAM. 
 
 " The Creator is an amazingly grand figure, 
 worthy of a primeval imagination or intuition. He 
 is struggling, as it were, above Adam, who lies dis 
 tended on the ground, a serpent twined around one 
 leg. The colour has a terrible power in it ; and the 
 entire design is truly a mighty one. 
 " FIRE. 
 
 "Blake, the supreme painter of fire, in this his 
 typical picture of fire, is at his greatest; perhaps it 
 is not in the power of art to transcend this treatment 
 
I So That Dome in Air. 
 
 of the subject in its essential features. The water 
 colour is unusually complete in execution. The con 
 flagration, horrid in glare, horrid in gloom, fills the 
 background ; its javelin-like cones surge up amid 
 conical forms of buildings ( Langham Church 
 steeples, they may be called, as in No. 151). In 
 front, an old man receives from two youths a box 
 and a bundle which they have recovered ; two 
 mothers and several children crouch and shudder, 
 overwhelmed; other figures behind are running 
 about, bewildered what to do next." 
 
 The design "When the Morning Stars Sang 
 Together," is, in the language of Dante Rossetti, 
 one that " never has been surpassed in the whole 
 range of Christian art." 
 
 We have noted some of Blake s defects. His 
 weaknesses, his failures, conceded, his fame, 
 without the aid of his wondrous work in the 
 sister art, stands firm on a few poems, poems 
 now exquisite, now virile, always imaginative, 
 musical, and masterly. If ever poet was born, 
 it was the author of these lines, written when he 
 had barely entered the teens, 
 
 " How sweet I roamed from field to field, 
 
 And tasted all the summer s pride, 
 Till I the Prince of Love beheld 
 Who in the sunny beams did glide. 
 
 " He showed me lilies for my hair, 
 
 And blushing roses for my brow ; 
 He led me through his gardens fair 
 Where all his golden pleasures grow. 
 
William Blake. 181 
 
 " With sweet May-dews my wings were wet, 
 
 And Phoebus fired my vocal rage ; 
 He caught me in his silken net, 
 And shut me in his golden cage. 
 
 " He loves to sit and hear me sing, 
 
 Then, laughing, sports and plays with me ; 
 Then stretches out my golden wing, 
 And mocks my loss of liberty." 
 
 The inspiration is so like that of music itself 
 that no name can be given the first eight poems ; 
 they are entitled simply " Song." None but a 
 son born of the muses could thus address 
 them, 
 
 " Whether on Ida s shady brow, 
 
 Or in the chambers of the East, 
 The chambers of the Sun, that now 
 From ancient melody have ceased ; 
 
 " Whether in heaven ye wander fair, 
 Or the green corners of the earth, 
 Or the blue regions of the air 
 
 Where the melodious winds have birth ; 
 
 " Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, 
 
 Beneath the bosom of the sea, 
 
 Wandering in many a coral grove ; 
 
 Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry ; 
 
 " How have you left the ancient love 
 That bards of old enjoyed in you ! 
 The languid strings do scarcely move, 
 The sound is forced, the notes are few ! " 
 
 Such are the verses of a boy, an untrained son 
 of a London hosier, fallen on the evil days of 
 
1 82 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Pope. Let us not spend too much time prying 
 into the environment. Nature reaches out her 
 hand in the dry time and in the barren land, 
 and some eternal bloom is sure to respond ; she 
 calls amid the din and jar of an indifferent 
 world, and at its hoarsest hour a voice answers 
 in tones so pure, so sweet, that they never leave 
 the hearts of men, but tremble on, echoes out of 
 heaven, from generation to generation. 
 
 "LOVE S SECRET. 
 
 " NEVER seek to tell thy love, 
 
 Love that never told can be ; 
 For the gentle wind doth move 
 Silently, invisibly. 
 
 *- 1 told my love, I told my love, 
 
 I told her all my heart, 
 Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears. 
 Ah ! She did depart 1 
 
 " Soon after she was gone from me, 
 
 A traveller came by 
 Silently, invisibly : 
 
 He took her with a sigh/ 
 
 Or, to go back to the period of boyhood, 
 " SONG. 
 
 " JOYS upon our branches sit, 
 Chirping loud and singing sweet; 
 Like gentle streams beneath our feet, 
 Innocence and virtue meet. 
 
William Blake. 183 
 
 Thou the golden fruit dost bear, 
 I am clad in flowers fair ; 
 Thy sweet boughs perfume the air, 
 And the turtle buildeth there. 
 
 There she sits and feeds her young, 
 Sweet I hear her mournful song ; 
 And thy lovely leaves among 
 There is Love : I hear his tongue. 
 
 Among the lyrics, rippling the melodies that 
 neither time nor toil can teach, that neither 
 wisdom nor ambition can attain, here is the 
 haunt of the real Blake. Here is the poet; 
 where one line is worth all his riddles of politics, 
 of metaphysics, and what not, which serve no 
 purpose but to show into what unavailing vapor, 
 into what damp and devouring shadow, the 
 bright child of song may wander. A thousand 
 "Jerusalems" and "Urizens" cannot smother 
 the pure star-flame ; it springs triumphant de 
 spite such extinguishers as the " Book of 
 Ahania " and the " Song of Los." 
 
 " Father, O Father! What do we here, 
 In this land of unbelief and fear? 
 The land of dreams is better far, 
 Above the light of the morning star." 
 
 While this mood holds, we learn anew the differ 
 ence between the stocks and stones of prose 
 and the rejoicing stars of song. 
 
 Atmosphere is confessedly one of the sure 
 
184 That Dome in Air. 
 
 tests of the poet, and the secret of Blake s power 
 in this element remained inviolate until the time 
 of Coleridge. Be it sleeping child or prowling 
 beast, the magic accents fall, and we are envel 
 oped by heavenly innocence or by horrors of 
 the wild. 
 
 A CRADLE SONG. 
 
 SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright, 
 Dreaming in the joys of night ; 
 Sleep, sleep ; in thy sleep 
 Little sorrows sit and weep. 
 
 Sweet babe, in thy face 
 Soft desires I can trace, 
 Secret joys and secret smiles, 
 Little pretty infant wiles. 
 
 As thy softest limbs I feel, 
 Smiles as of the morning steal 
 O er thy cheek, and o er thy breast 
 Where thy little heart doth rest. 
 
 Oh the cunning wiles that creep 
 In thy little heart asleep ! 
 When thy little heart doth wake, 
 Then the dreadful light shall break. 
 
 THE TIGER. 
 
 TIGER, tiger, burning bright 
 In the forests of the night, 
 What immortal hand or eye 
 Framed thy fearful symmetry ? 
 
William Blake. 185 
 
 In what distant deeps or skies 
 Burned that fire within thine eyes ? 
 On what wings dared he aspire ? 
 What the hand dared seize the fire ? 
 
 And what shoulder and what art 
 Could twist the sinews of thy heart ? 
 When thy heart began to beat, 
 What dread hand formed thy dread feet ? 
 
 What the hammer, what the chain, 
 Knit thy strength and forged thy brain ? 
 What the anvil ? What dread grasp 
 Dared thy deadly terrors clasp ? 
 
 When the stars threw down their spears, 
 And watered heaven with their tears, 
 Did he smile his work to see ? 
 Did he who made the lamb make thee ? 
 
 If Cowper first counsels a loving return to 
 Nature, Blake seconds him with insight not found 
 again until we come to Wordsworth, and with 
 passion not found again till we come to Burns. 
 The photography of Thomson, the classic hand 
 ling of Gray and Collins, the smooth, sooth 
 ing rurality of Goldsmith, the close, hard-lined 
 matter of Crabbe, none of these exhibit the 
 enthusiasm and affection that in Blake s work and 
 in Cowper s stamp these two blessed madmen as 
 the ancestors of Nature s laureate, the poet of 
 Rydal ; and not Wordsworth himself was more at 
 home with the simplest beings and things, the 
 children, the lambs, and the blossoms. Does 
 
1 86 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Blake sing of these, the notes of gentle old Ram 
 say are not more native and sweet; and none 
 of all the singers named excel him in evanescent 
 touches, in airy ignition, mystic flashes, beyond 
 the reach of will and endeavor. And it must not 
 be forgotten that this distinguishing charm of the 
 Elizabethans was recalled amid the monotonous, 
 choppy hum of the phrase-factory still running 
 with the impetus of the Restoration. 
 
 In the light of modern research it is hardly 
 safe to decide that Blake did not see things invis 
 ible to the physical eye. If he was a man when 
 he said he had touched the sky with his stick, he 
 was a child when he saw, on the tree, angels for 
 apples. He had, from the first, what we term a 
 sixth sense ; and while at times he pushed this 
 gift too hard, not always is he to be taken seri 
 ously. One can easily imagine a twinkle in his 
 great eyes as he gravely asks a stiff, unimagina 
 tive companion, "By the way, did you ever see 
 a fairy funeral?" But fact or fancy, let us be 
 thankful for so pretty stories ; few are they that 
 can tell them : 
 
 " I was walking alone in my garden ; there was 
 great stillness among the branches and flowers, and 
 more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a 
 low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it 
 came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower 
 move, and underneath I saw a procession of crea- 
 
William Blake. 187 
 
 tures, of the size and colour of green and grey grass 
 hoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, 
 which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. 
 It was a fairy funeral." 
 
 " All things," Blake affirms, " exist in the 
 human imagination." This he believed. "It 
 must be right," he says ; " I saw it so." Whether 
 or not he hobnobbed with Moses and Homer 
 is of little importance compared with the fact 
 expressed in his own noble words, " I possess 
 my visions and peace." Madness of the right 
 sort has its charms for the stablest critic. " There 
 is something in the madness of the man," says 
 Wordsworth of Blake, " that interests one more 
 than the sanity of Byron and Walter Scott." Ay, 
 would the world were full of so brave, so joyous, 
 so beautiful lunacy ! Heaven send many such 
 madmen ; for it is largely through them that we 
 learn to scorn the dust and darkness of the 
 ground. Hark ! it is the call of this free, soaring 
 son of the morning : 
 
 " O Earth, O Earth, return ! 
 
 Arise from out the dewy grass! 
 Night is worn, 
 And the morn 
 
 Rises from the slumbrous mass." 
 
IX. 
 
 WILLIAM COWPER. 
 
 [HE loss of a tender mother when he was 
 but six years old, the hard experience 
 of a boarding-school, and two years 
 treatment by an oculist this the boy Cowper 
 endured before getting to Westminster School. 
 Nor did his fortunes rise on leaving this institu 
 tion. At eighteen he went to live with a solicitor, 
 and three years afterward took chambers ; then 
 came disappointment in love, and, at thirty-two, 
 eighteen months in a madhouse. The subsequent 
 life with the Unwins had a brighter side ; but this, 
 too, must have proved dreary to other than a 
 lone, stricken, helpless soul escaped from mad 
 ness. Poverty meanwhile pressed in ; and, what 
 was worse, the person of the Rev. Mr. John 
 Newton, ex-rake and slave-trader. Next and 
 naturally came a second fit of madness, which 
 in its turn gave way to drawing, carpentering, 
 and gardening, to any employ that might take 
 a frail, frightened hypochondriac out of his miser 
 able self. 
 
William Cowper. 189 
 
 Such, in outline, was Cowper s preparation for 
 the office of poet. Something good should come 
 of so severe schooling ; and something good did 
 come, though hardly at the first attempt. " The 
 Progress of Error," "Truth," "Expostulation," 
 "Charity," "Hope," "Conversation," "Retire 
 ment " these efforts were initiatory, as were 
 the fifty years of suffering ; they must be endured 
 before the pent fire could burst through the 
 tough strata of sorrow and theology. Besides, 
 a new influence, a smack of the world and the 
 flesh, must come, Lady Austen must appear, 
 before all things were in readiness for " The 
 Task." 
 
 But we are getting to " The Task " too soon. 
 Let us look closer into the singular constitution 
 and the forlorn fortunes of this gentleman singer 
 to the peasantry, of this gyved Newtonian whom 
 Nature loved to free for a season, of this doomed 
 madman whom the hovering muses held from 
 destruction. 
 
 "I was a stricken deer that left the herd 
 Long since ; with many an arrow deep infix d 
 My panting side was charged, when I withdrew 
 To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. 
 There was I found by One who had Himself 
 Been hurt by the archers. In His side He bore, 
 And in His hands and feet, the cruel scars. 
 With gentle force soliciting the darts, 
 He drew them forth, and heal d and bade me live. 
 
That Dome in Air. 
 
 Since then, with few associates, in remote 
 And silent woods I wander, far from those 
 My former partners of the peopled scene ; 
 With few associates, and not wishing more." 
 
 We have here a religious recluse; and this 
 on mature deliberation, with the resolve to so 
 remain. But why a recluse ; because nature so 
 intended? There is no evidence to support an 
 inborn tendency toward isolation; furthermore, 
 there is no evidence to prove a constitutional 
 determination for the apostleship of a narrow, 
 ascetic theology. It is not always remembered 
 that Cowper was as much a son of Poesy as 
 he was of his dear lost mortal mother; or, if 
 this be remembered, it is forgotten how deli 
 cate, how weak and brittle, are certain of the 
 poetic fibres. It was Cowper s misfortune to 
 inherit en masse the frailties of his high-born 
 race, and to fall on a time and into a way of life 
 so uncongenial as to be fatal to his peace and 
 all but to his existence. It is hard enough for 
 any child to lose a fond mother ; for this child 
 it was a blight of his very being. And in her 
 stead stood immediately the boarding-school ! 
 
 " I choose to conceal a particular recital of the 
 many acts of barbarity with which he [a ruffian 
 school-fellow] made it his business continually to 
 persecute me. It will be sufficient to say that his 
 savage treatment of me impressed such a dread of 
 
William Cowper. 191 
 
 his figure upon my mind, that I well remember being 
 afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than to his 
 knees, and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles 
 than by any other part of his dress." 
 
 And the Temple was little better suited to 
 the needs of the sensitive, dependent being whose 
 chief happiness, in a life of threescore years and 
 ten, was to be led, like a child, by a loving 
 woman s hand. The very thought of an office, 
 the prospect of which would be transporting to 
 the sons of poverty in general, meant to him 
 despondency, torture. Cowper was thirty-one 
 years old when trying to prepare for the " Clerk 
 ship of the Journals," but he is the same trem 
 bling child that could not see above the bully s 
 shoe-buckles, 
 
 "The feelings of a man when he arrives at the 
 place of execution are, probably, much as mine 
 were every time I set my foot in the office, which 
 was every day for more than half a year together." 
 
 To overlook the constitutional delicacy, the 
 brittleness of the poetic fibre, the predisposi 
 tion to heart-break, and attribute the abnormal 
 condition to religion, which came afterward and 
 was accidental, is to fall into error. " I was a 
 stricken deer " this is the whole story. Hence 
 we have the recluse ; and as for the religious ele 
 ment, it may be said, first, that affliction, that 
 
192 That Dome in Air. 
 
 madness, finds its own way to relief; secondly, 
 that time and circumstances set the present 
 victim on the Newtonian course, and sustained 
 him in it. 
 
 At fifty years, then, we find Cowper hurt be 
 yond healing, all but lost in doleful theology ; a 
 refugee from the world of which he knew little, 
 and that little horrible to recall; a child still, 
 whose only hope was in the one power that can 
 minister to children, woman s affection. Good 
 soul that " Mary " was, Cowper s stay, his earthly 
 salvation, how the wound must have bled to 
 reduce him to the submission that he portrays ! 
 
 " As to amusements, I mean what the world 
 calls such, we have none. The place, indeed, 
 swarms with them ; and cards and dancing are the 
 professed business of almost all the gentle inhabi 
 tants of Huntingdon. We refuse to take part in 
 them, or to be accessories to this way of murdering 
 our time, and by so doing have acquired the name 
 of Methodists. 
 
 " Having told you how we do not spend our time, I 
 will next say how we do. We breakfast commonly 
 between eight and nine ; till eleven, we read either 
 the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher 
 of those holy mysteries ; at eleven we attend divine 
 service, which is performed here twice every day ; 
 and from twelve to three we separate, and amuse 
 ourselves as we please. During that interval, I either 
 read in my own apartment, or walk, or ride, or work 
 in the garden. We seldom sit an hour after dinner, 
 
William Cow per. 193 
 
 but, if the weather permits, adjourn to the garden, 
 where, with Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have gener 
 ally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea- 
 time. If it rains, or is too windy for walking, we 
 either converse within doors or sing some hymns of 
 Martin s collection, and by the help of Mrs. Unwin s 
 harpsichord make up a tolerable concert, in which 
 our hearts, I hope, are the best performers. After 
 tea we sally forth to walk in good earnest. Mrs. 
 Unwin is a good walker, and we have generally 
 travelled about four miles before we see home again. 
 When the days are short, we make this excursion in 
 the former part of the day, between church-time and 
 dinner. At night we read and converse as before 
 till supper, and commonly finish the evening either 
 with hymns or a sermon, and last of all, the family 
 are called to prayers. I need not tell you that such 
 a life as this is consistent with the utmost cheerful 
 ness ; accordingly, we are all happy, and dwell 
 together in unity as brethren." 
 
 This is pathetic indeed ; but dwell for a mo 
 ment on that most misplaced man at whose nod 
 Cowper s spirits rose and sank like the willow spray 
 before a northeaster. The Rev. Mr. John New 
 ton was, no doubt, of good battering-ram service 
 against the coarse immorality, the rough-and- 
 tumble profligacy of his time ; but think of such 
 an engine whanging against a statuette of spun 
 glass, imagine such a master for Cowper ! It is 
 a wonder that the brittle victim did not break, 
 shatter into a thousand pieces. Were the author 
 
194 That Dome in Air. 
 
 of " The World before the Flood " addressing an 
 audience of that period, he might be pardoned 
 one passage in his preface to the Olney Hymns : 
 
 "To Newton the world owes Cowper, as Cowper 
 appears to the world. It is not presumed that had 
 the latter never fallen in with the former, he might 
 not have broken out from inglorious obscurity, in all 
 the power of irrepressible genius, but whatever 
 other, or even higher, achievements he might have 
 wrought, under different circumstances, those by 
 which he will be forever known and honored and 
 endeared, were all (directly or indirectly) called from 
 his slumbering mind (oppressed by a burden more 
 awful than Etna, and all its fires, on the breast of the 
 giant Enceladus), by the awakening voice, the ani 
 mating example, and the cordial companionship of 
 Newton." 
 
 At this safe distance, it may not be rash to 
 try a few strains of the " awakening voice," 
 
 "Such was the wicked murderer Cain, 
 
 And such by nature still are we, 
 Until by grace we re born again, 
 Malicious, blind, and proud as he. 
 
 " I would, but cannot sing, 
 
 Guilt has untuned my voice, 
 The serpent s sin-envenom d sting 
 Has poison d all my joys." 
 
 Such awakening, animating cordiality as this 
 might serve well the hardened wretches of Olney 
 
William Cowper. 195 
 
 a hundred and twenty years ago ; but it was spe 
 cially directed toward the softest of wretches, 
 our poor ruined poet, too innocent already. 
 Cheering companion indeed ! Cowper could not 
 write him a letter that was not black as a thun 
 der-cloud; he must shrink from disclosing to 
 him the awful fact that he had been penning 
 certain harmless lines to a sofa, a dozen of 
 which are worth many dozens of those inspired by 
 the " animating example " and " cordial compan 
 ionship." 
 
 The time is at last ripe for change, the pent 
 poetry is about to burst through. The chief in 
 centive to song may be disclosed in Cowper s 
 own happy language : 
 
 " Now therefore for the interruptions at which I 
 hinted. There came a lady into this country, by 
 name and title Lady Austen, the widow of the late 
 Sir Robert Austen. At first she lived with her sis 
 ter, about a mile from Olney, but in a few weeks 
 took lodgings at the vicarage here. Between the 
 vicarage and the back of our house are interposed 
 our garden, an orchard, and the garden belonging to 
 the vicarage. She had lived much in France, was 
 very sensible, and had infinite vivacity. She took a 
 great liking to us, and we to her. She had been 
 used to a great deal of company, and we, fearing 
 that she would find such a transition into silent re 
 tirement irksome, contrived to give her our agreeable 
 company often. Becoming continually more and 
 
196 That Dome in Air. 
 
 more intimate, a practice obtained at length of our 
 dining with each other alternately every day, Sundays 
 excepted. In order to facilitate our communication, 
 we made doors in the two garden-walls abovesaid, 
 by which means we considerably shortened the way 
 from one house to the other, and could meet when 
 we pleased without entering the town at all, a meas 
 ure the rather expedient, because in winter the town 
 is abominably dirty, and she kept no carriage. On 
 her first settlement in our neighborhood, I made it 
 my particular business (for at that time I was not 
 employed in writing, having published my first 
 volume, and not begun my second) to pay my 
 devoirs to her ladyship every morning at eleven. 
 Customs very soon became laws." 
 
 " Sensible " indeed was " Sister Anne," and, 
 whatever the world before the flood may think, 
 we moderns must style her the " animating " 
 spirit ; for to her we owe not only " The Task," 
 but the lines " On the Loss of the Royal George," 
 not to speak of " The Diverting History of John 
 Gilpin." 
 
 Though he failed to assert himself for a round 
 half-century, Cowper was a born poet. " When 
 I can find no other occupation," he says, " I 
 think ; and when I think, I am very apt to think 
 in rhyme." What lines may be cited as exam 
 ples of Cowper s thought in numbers ? It were 
 safer to look for them the farthest possible from 
 the Newtonian Methodism, in the tranquil pres- 
 
William Cowper. 197 
 
 ence of Nature and in those simple homely scenes 
 dear to a warm, home-loving heart. From this 
 source were drawn the choicer strains of " The 
 Task." If the spread of "rural ease" is some 
 what lavish, there is no danger that the rushing 
 world will partake too freely ; nor is it to be 
 feared that the protuberant " piety and virtue " 
 will do any more harm than to interfere now 
 and then, as in the case of Wordsworth, with the 
 requirements of art. 
 
 "Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, 
 Exhilarate the spirit, and restore 
 The tone of languid Nature. Mighty winds, 
 That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood 
 Of ancient growth, make music not unlike 
 The dash of Ocean on his winding shore, 
 And lull the spirit, while they fill the mind ; 
 Unnumber d branches waving in the blast, 
 And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once. 
 Nor less composure waits upon the roar 
 Of distant floods, or on the softer voice 
 Of neighboring fountain, or of rills that slip 
 Through the cleft rock, and, chiming as they fall 
 Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length 
 In matted grass, that with a livelier green 
 Betrays the secret of their silent course. 
 
 Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, 
 Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, 
 And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
 Throws up a steamy column, and the cups 
 That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, 
 So let us welcome peaceful evening in. 
 
198 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Thus oft reclined at ease, I lose an hour 
 At evening, till at length the freezing blast 
 That sweeps the bolted shutter, summons home 
 The recollected powers, and snapping short 
 The glassy threads with which the fancy weaves 
 Her brittle toys, restores me to myself. 
 How calm is my recess ! and how the frost 
 Raging abroad, and the rough wind, endear 
 The silence and the warmth enjoy d within ! " 
 
 Direct, easeful, chaste Covvper s best work 
 is all this, and more ; the superstructure is raised 
 on the sound foundation of good judgment. Be 
 yond the qualifications, excellent sense, sponta 
 neity, and taste, Cowper s work reveals both 
 pathos and humor. Could we go on, and add 
 the supreme gift, imagination, we should have a 
 poet of the first order. But it will not do to 
 claim for Cowper great imaginative power; nor 
 can we credit him with the certainty, the conti 
 nuity, of inspiration that stamps a master of the 
 guild. We look to him in vain for the sublime ; 
 furthermore, we find that if he can move lightly 
 and gracefully on levels not the highest, he can 
 also plod there, and that right heavily. The 
 tread gets heavy, the hand gets heavy ; the fin 
 gers are naturally nimble, but suddenly on go 
 the Methodist mittens, and we are in for a pull 
 of theologic fumbling. On his own statement 
 Cowper had a poor memory, and one of the 
 easiest things for him to forget was that polemics 
 
William Cowper. 199 
 
 is not poetry. He was prone, moreover, to pon 
 derosity; he could attack a sore toe with as 
 much gravity as if storming the towers of Ilium : 
 
 " Oh, may I live exempted (while I live 
 Guiltless of pampered appetite obscene) 
 From pangs arthritic, that infest the toe 
 Of libertine excess!" 
 
 Again, it must be remembered that, with all 
 his sincerity, and regard for the poet s office, 
 Cowper was writing against time. A poet may 
 tug away indefinitely at lettuces and cauliflowers 
 for his own private delectation ; but, unless it 
 be in a match against time, he will not com 
 pel the muse to toil with him for the space of 
 ninety-eight lines on that " prickly and green- 
 coated gourd " vulgarly known as the cucumber. 
 Unquestionably, Cowper wrote against time ; but 
 let it not be understood that he held the office of 
 poet in light esteem. On the contrary, he held 
 it in high regard, and gave to his art patient, in 
 telligent study. What he says of Thomson s 
 verse and of his own, what he says of Pope s 
 verse, especially of his translation of Homer, what 
 he says of poetry in general, goes straight to the 
 mark. If he could not hold up to his ideal, 
 neither could Wordsworth, neither could other 
 poets greater than Wordsworth. Whatever be 
 his performance, there is no question as to his 
 ideal. " Perspicuity," he says, "is more than 
 
2OO That Dome in Air. 
 
 half the battle. A meaning that does not stare 
 you in the face is as bad as no meaning." Pithy 
 observations of this sort are common with him. 
 
 Cowper was deficient in imagination, in the 
 staying power; he lacked passion, he confused 
 rhyme with religion, and stuck the rough stalk 
 of didacticism in the place of the light leaves 
 and the beauteous, odorous blossoms of song; 
 he was narrow and priest-ridden; his heart 
 a pardonable failing could beat down his 
 judgment ; and lastly, poor soul ! he was a vic 
 tim of even a worse tyrant than the curate of 
 Olney, a "troublesome stomach"; and yet, 
 all this admitted, largely on him rests the burden 
 of English song for his century. He touched the 
 graver social questions of his time, yes, the great 
 problems of the race, with a new and quickening 
 hand which pointed the more highly inspired of 
 his followers the way to glory; and he is the 
 leader on the loving return to Nature, to the 
 wholesome gospel of the ground. Unstable, 
 helpless, in certain particulars, when it comes to 
 accuracy of sight, to purity of report, he is inde 
 pendent, stanch ; here, indeed, he stands quite 
 by himself. He read with more or less attention 
 the gifted prose writers that ushered in his era ; 
 read his contemporaries illustrious in fiction ; 
 read the historians Robertson and Gibbon, and 
 the half-dozen poets who sang with him and still 
 
William Cowper. 201 
 
 make themselves heard while their fellows have 
 dropped into silence, he read these men, but 
 owed them little. Shakespeare, Milton, and 
 Rousseau we can hardly add a fourth to those 
 exercising a direct influence on the writings of 
 this poet. Cowper set down only his own ; he 
 took his matter first-hand, nor was he an imitator 
 in point of style. 
 
 " My descriptions," he says, " are all from nature : 
 not one of them second-hand. My delineations of 
 the heart are from my own experience : not one of 
 them borrowed from books, or in the least degree 
 conjectural. In my numbers, which I have varied 
 as much as I could (for blank verse without variety 
 of numbers is no better than bladder and string), 
 I have imitated nobody, though sometimes perhaps 
 there may be an apparent resemblance ; because at 
 the same time that I would not imitate, I have not 
 affectedly differed." 
 
 His blank verse, at its best, is free and lucid ; 
 he was no novice at the lyric ; and his Pegasus 
 now and then pricked his ears at a mild " crack 
 of the satiric thong." 
 
 Among the shorter pieces, " On the Loss of 
 the Royal George," "Boadicea," "The Shrub 
 bery," not to go further, would add to the laurels 
 of a poet of the first order : 
 
 "Oh, happy shades to me unblest ! 
 Friendly to peace, but not to me ! 
 How ill the scene that offers rest, 
 And heart that cannot rest, agree ! 
 
2O2 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " This glassy stream, that spreading pine, 
 Those alders quivering to the breeze, 
 Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine, 
 And please, if anything could please. 
 
 " The saint or moralist should tread 
 
 This moss-grown alley, musing slow ; 
 They seek, like me, the secret shade, 
 But not, like me, to nourish woe ! 
 
 " Me fruitful scenes and prospects waste, 
 
 Alike admonish not to roam ; 
 These tell me of enjoyments past, 
 And those of sorrows yet to come." 
 
 Here is perfect finish, without a suggestion of 
 the sleekness of much of Goldsmith s work, with 
 out a trace of the labor that shows equally with 
 the beauty in the verses of Gray. 
 
 And what poet could ask for more propitious 
 moods than those that inspired such passages as 
 the opening of "The Pineapple and the Bee," 
 and such a poem as "The Needless Alarm"? 
 
 " The pineapples, in triple row, 
 Were basking hot, and all in blow ; 
 A bee of most discerning taste 
 Perceived the fragrance as he pass d ; 
 On eager wing the spoiler came, 
 And searched for crannies in the frame, 
 Urged his attempt on every side, 
 To every pane his trunk applied ; 
 But still in vain, the frame was tight, 
 And only pervious to the light : 
 Thus having wasted half the day, 
 He trimm d his flight another way." 
 
William Cowper* 203 
 
 The appetite sharpened with the taste of this, 
 one cannot help adding an extract from " The 
 Needless Alarm," a kindred composition where 
 no "Cynthio," or other ogling ugliness, brushes 
 in to frighten off the muse, 
 
 " Sheep grazed the field ; some with soft bosom press d 
 The herb as soft, while nibbling stray d the rest; 
 Nor noise was heard but of the hasty brook, 
 Struggling, detain d in many a petty nook. 
 All seem d so peaceful, that, from them convey d, 
 To me their peace by kind contagion spread. 
 
 " But when the huntsman, with distended cheek, 
 Gan make his instrument of music speak, 
 And from within the wood that crash was heard, 
 Though not a hound from whom it burst appear d, 
 The sheep recumbent and the sheep that grazed, 
 All huddling into phalanx, stood and gazed, 
 Admiring, terrified, the novel strain, 
 
 Then coursed the field around, and coursed it round again ; 
 But recollecting, with a sudden thought, 
 That flight in circles urged advanced them nought. 
 They gather d close around the old pit s brink, 
 And thought again but knew not what to think." 
 
 These are choice specimens of art, worthy of 
 the poet the first to revive the happy report of 
 Nature that dropped into silence with the magic 
 numbers of Milton. The life of Nature and the 
 glow of the home hearth were so faithfully re 
 flected from his soul that they shine to-day, and 
 will shine on as long as men remember the few 
 abiding elements of strength and happiness. 
 
2O4 That Dome in Air. 
 
 This child of sorrow was also the child of song, 
 of jealous, unforgetful Poesy ; his strains are min 
 gled with the music of the years. 
 
 We are wont to speak of Cowper as a poet 
 only, and we accept and love him with all his 
 imperfections on his head ; but the letters who 
 has surpassed them, who has equalled them? 
 " We are now quiet as dormice in a hollow tree " ; 
 " Harrold, who is subtle as a dozen foxes " ; 
 " Many an ugly bundle can find a husband in such 
 a place as Olney, while Venus herself would shine 
 there unnoticed ; " " An almost general cessation 
 of egg-laying among the hens has made it im 
 possible for Mrs. Unwin to enterprise a cake," 
 like felicitous expressions recur to us, parts 
 of an artistic whole, the framework and details 
 of which are at the very top of literary cun 
 ning. Southey is right : Cowper is the cham 
 pion correspondent. 
 
 TO LADY HESKETH. 
 
 OLNEY, Feb. 9, 1786. 
 
 MY DEAREST COUSIN, ... And now, my dear, 
 let me tell you once more, that your kindness in 
 promising us a visit has charmed us both. I shall 
 see you again. I shall hear your voice. We shall 
 take walks together. I will show you my pros 
 pects, the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse, and its 
 banks, everything that I have described. I antici- 
 
William Cowper. 205 
 
 pate the pleasure of those days not very far dis 
 tant, and feel a part of it at this moment. Talk 
 not of an inn ! Mention it not for your life ! We 
 have never had so many visitors but we could easily 
 accommodate them all ; though we have received 
 Unwin, and his wife, and his sister, and his son, all 
 at once. My dear, I will not let you come till the 
 end of May, or beginning of June, because before 
 that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive 
 us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. 
 When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with 
 mats, and spread the floor with mats ; and there you 
 shall sit with a bed of mignonette at your side, and 
 a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine ; and I 
 will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day. Sooner 
 than the time I mention the country will not be in 
 complete beauty. And I will tell you what you shall 
 find at your first entrance. Imprimis, as soon as you 
 have entered the vestibule, if you cast a look on 
 either side of you, you shall see on the right hand 
 a box of my making. It is the box in which have 
 been lodged all my hares, and in which lodges Puss 
 at present; but he, poor fellow, is worn out with 
 age, and promises to die before you can see him. 
 On the right hand stands a cupboard, the work of 
 the same author; it was once a dove-cage, but I 
 transformed it. Opposite to you stands a table, 
 which I also made ; but a merciless servant having 
 scrubbed it until it became paralytic, it serves no 
 purpose now but of ornament ; and all my clean 
 shoes stand under it. On the left hand, at the 
 further end of this superb vestibule, you will find the 
 door of the parlour, into which I will conduct you, 
 
206 That Dome in Air. 
 
 and where I will introduce you to Mrs. Unwin, unless 
 we should meet her before, and where we will be as 
 happy as the day is long. . . . 
 
 Adieu! my dearest, dearest cousin. 
 
 W. C. 
 
X. 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 
 
 ]N one of the best editions of the Eng 
 lish Poets we are informed that " Words 
 worth s poetry and his idea of the office 
 of poetry must be traced to the Revolution." 
 The tracings, the domicile, the dates, and 
 other kindred matters, take more than their share 
 of the critic s attention nowadays, putting into 
 the background the two important points, what 
 does the poet say, and how does he say it? 
 Like Cowper, Wordsworth was orphaned at a 
 tender age ; Dorothy is ministering angel in place 
 of Mary, and Coleridge heaven be praised 
 therefor is counsellor in the place of the Rev. 
 Mr. Newton ; it is now stamp-distributing instead 
 of hutch- building, and again we have a long 
 stretch of years with little reading and much 
 Nature and solitude. It is very well to know 
 this ; but, with it and more of the sort, we are yet 
 far from knowing the two poets. Better bio 
 graphical matter will be found by questioning the 
 poets themselves. Cowper answers, 
 
208 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " I was a stricken deer that left the herd 
 Long since; with many an arrow deep infixed 
 My panting side was charged, when I withdrew 
 To seek a tranquil death in distant shades." 
 
 Wordsworth responds, in the opening lines of 
 the introduction to "The Prelude," 
 
 " O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, 
 A visitant that while it fans my cheek 
 Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings 
 From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. 
 Whate er its mission, the soft breeze can come 
 To none more grateful than to me ; escaped 
 From the vast city, where I long had pined 
 A discontented sojourner : now free, 
 Free as a bird to settle where I will. 
 What dwelling shall receive me ? in what vale 
 Shall be my harbour ? underneath what grove 
 Shall I take up my home ? and what clear stream 
 Shall with its murmur lull me into rest ? 
 The earth is all before me. With a heart 
 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, 
 I look about ; and should the chosen guide 
 Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, 
 I cannot miss my way. I breathe again ! 
 Trances of thought and mountings of the mind 
 Come fast upon me : it is shaken off, 
 That burthen of my own unnatural self, 
 The heavy weight of many a weary day 
 Not mine, and such as were not made for me. 
 Long months of peace (if such bold word accord 
 With any promises of human life), 
 Long months of ease and undisturbed delight 
 Are mine in prospect ; whither shall I turn, 
 By road or pathway, or through trackless field, 
 Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing 
 Upon the river point me out my course ? " 
 
William Wordsworth. 209 
 
 If these two very different recluses do not 
 stand before us now, distinctly outlined, the com 
 mentators must toil on in vain. 
 
 " With a heart 
 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, 
 
 Trances of thought and mountings of the mind," 
 
 these lines stamp the new man. Strength, joy, 
 imagination ; here is a trinity of power not found 
 in Cowper. Our solitaries are to devote them 
 selves largely to Nature; what are to be their 
 methods? We are prepared for dissimilarity, 
 and we shall find it. Take the familiar echoes 
 of their voices at the fall of evening : - 
 
 " Come, evening, once again, season of peace, 
 Return, sweet evening, and continue long ! 
 Methinks I see thee in the streaky west, 
 With matron step slow moving, while the night 
 Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ d 
 In letting fall the curtain of repose 
 On bird and beast, the other charged for man 
 With sweet oblivion of the cares of day ; 
 Not sumptuously adorn d, nor needing aid, 
 Like homely-featured night, of clustering gems ; 
 A star or two just twinkling on thy brow 
 Suffices thee ; save that the moon is thine 
 No less than hers, not worn indeed on high 
 With ostentatious pageantry, but set 
 With modest grandeur in thy purple zone, 
 Resplendent less, but of an ampler round. 
 Come, then, and thou shalt find thy votary calm, 
 Or make me so," 
 
2io That Dome in Air. 
 
 Thus Cowper ; and now to Wordsworth : 
 
 "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; 
 The holy time is quiet as a nun 
 Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 
 Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 
 The gentleness of heaven is on the sea. 
 Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly." 
 
 The class of composition does not matter; 
 blank verse or sonnet, it is all one to our imme 
 diate purpose. In the first quotation, a meek 
 votary draws a lovely picture ; in the second, an 
 inspired reporter gives an unsurpassed presenta 
 tion of evening before reaching the end of the 
 third line, and at the sixth line introduces the 
 informing Presence that lies at the heart of his 
 might, employing in the introduction the com 
 manding cadence that bespeaks the voice for all 
 time. If, as Arnold says, Wordsworth is not an 
 exponent of the grand style, he abounds in such 
 passages as these, the peculiar power of which is 
 not more than matched by Milton himself. Pro 
 vided these utterances are characteristic respec 
 tively of the voices of Olney and Rydal, the 
 sympathetic student must now have a clew to 
 their open secrets. These test accents well in 
 mind, one is ready for Arnold s essay, and his 
 selections from Wordsworth ; which, in turn, being 
 mastered, there is hope of profit from the poet s 
 
William Wordsworth. 21 1 
 
 complete works chronologically arranged and pre 
 sented by the steady hand of Mr. John Morley. 
 
 In one of Cowper s spirited passages, beginning 
 "Nor rural sights alone," we see what the sights 
 and sounds of Nature do for him; they "restore 
 the tone," they " exhilarate the spirit." With 
 Wordsworth the influence rises to a continuous 
 benediction, to a perpetual revelation of the 
 myriad phenomena of life, of Nature not only but 
 of the soul, one with Nature in a union mystic 
 and indissoluble : 
 
 " Wisdom and Spirit of the universe ! 
 Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought! 
 And giv st to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion 1 not in vain, 
 By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn 
 Of childhood didst them intertwine for me 
 The passions that build up our human soul; 
 Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man, 
 But with high objects, with enduring things, 
 With life and nature ; purifying thus 
 The elements of feeling and of thought, 
 And sanctifying by such discipline 
 Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." 
 
 If we wish to learn how Wordsworth came 
 to break with the conventionalities, in litera 
 ture, politics, and religion; to hold steady on 
 his course while his contemporaries, Byron, 
 Shelley, Keats, reeled to and fro; to push de 
 lusion aside, and stake all on a few eternal 
 
212 TJiat Dome in Air. 
 
 principles ; how he came, in a word, to see 
 and to meet the new requirements of modern 
 life and modern art, to return to Nature, to 
 champion free thought and deed, to reassert 
 the native strength and splendor of man, if we 
 wish to learn all this, we must not rest content 
 with a date, we must go back of the convenient 
 1793. The American and the French Revo 
 lutions plus the rupture of all Europe these, 
 combined, are not to be credited with Words 
 worth s poetry. In the very first verses, written 
 at fourteen years of age, we discover the Words 
 worth to come : 
 
 " The Power of Education seemed to rise; 
 Not she whose rigid precepts trained the boy 
 Dead to the sense of every finer joy, 
 
 But she who trains the generous British youth 
 In the bright paths of fair majestic Truth. 
 
 From thence to search the mystic cause of things 
 And follow Nature to her secret springs; 
 Nor less to guide the fluctuating youth, 
 Firm in the sacred paths of moral truth, 
 To regulate the mind s disordered frame, 
 And quench the passions kindling into flame; 
 The glimmering fires of Virtue to enlarge, 
 And purge from Vice s dross my tender charge." 
 
 Here is Wordsworth, pretty green, and fresh 
 from Pope withal, but the very Wordsworth, whom 
 
William Wordsworth. 213 
 
 revolutions may quicken and strengthen, this 
 and no more. Poesy, indifferent to the chance 
 of empire, took this child to her heart, and held 
 him there. 
 
 The boy Wordsworth was conscious of the 
 honor conferred ; he never forgot it, as his devo 
 tion and egotism abundantly testify. He was a 
 " dedicated spirit," an account of whom was 
 worth hugging fifty years, to be given by his 
 own hand as a last bequest to the world. If 
 this boy, grown to manhood, sojourned in learned 
 Germany, it was to continue the work begun 
 in the English hills, to write poetry ; and 
 if chance brought him a distinguished visitor 
 at home or abroad, he proceeded to entertain 
 him by reciting some of his verses. The 
 egotism of Wordsworth is, after all, loyalty to 
 his lineage, faithfulness to the exalted duties of 
 his priesthood. If he depreciated other poets, 
 it was because, as he saw it, they were not of 
 the anointed ; they were prone to profane 
 the sacred office. This attitude, while it indi 
 cates weakness, limitation, indicates also strength 
 of the purest kind, the strength of sincerity, 
 total absorption, consecration. 
 
 Wordsworth s notion of the poet s office is 
 the old notion, grievously besieged, but safe for 
 ever, the old notion that the great poet s office 
 is to teach us " how to live well." So does he 
 
\ 
 
 214 That Dome in Air. 
 
 establish his kinship with the great sons of song 
 from time immemorial, and rebuke once more the 
 perverse ingenuity untiringly exercised to robe the 
 poet solely as a priest of pleasure. " To console 
 the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by 
 making the happy happier ; to teach the young 
 and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and 
 feel, and therefore to become more actively and 
 sincerely virtuous," such was Wordsworth s no 
 tion of his office. 
 
 In Wordsworth we have sincerity, simplicity, 
 health, strength, the accent of the masters, 
 imagination, and inspiration ; enough surely to 
 place him " on a line just short of the greatest 
 of all time." Why just short of the greatest? 
 Because the flower-field is, at times, all stalks, 
 and in the place of melody and harmony there 
 is creaking of cart-wheels. Humor is absent ; 
 taste is often otherwhere, taste which never 
 quits the fair eternal field. The austerity of 
 Art! The rarest gifts must bend to her; 
 the highest resolves, the warrior wills must bow 
 down to her. Wordsworth was not always an 
 artist, and he falls just short of the greatest. 
 " Surely he was not an artist in the strictest 
 sense of the word," says Lowell, " neither was 
 Isaiah ; but he had a rarer gift, the capability of 
 being greatly inspired." He was, like our 
 Emerson, a seer, a rarer being than the artist, 
 
William Wordsworth. 215 
 
 but a being with whom the artist must be united 
 if the song is to reach the height of the greatest 
 of all time. Any one of some twenty or thirty 
 of the short poems, however, proclaims Words 
 worth a thorough artist in his happier moments ; 
 and thankful indeed may we be for such mo 
 ments as made possible " The Solitary Reaper " 
 or the choicer of the sonnets. 
 
 Regarding the ode, " Intimations of Immor 
 tality," Arnold remarks, " But to say that uni 
 versally this instinct [of delight in Nature] is 
 mighty in childhood, and tends to die away after 
 wards, is to say what is extremely doubtful." 
 The objectors to the truth of this experience 
 speak as if Wordsworth dealt with infancy only, 
 whereas he passes on to youth ; and surely the 
 fading of the splendors of youth is no fancy. 
 
 Again, Mr. Morley finds the line, 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," 
 
 "nonsense." Mr. Morley can hardly have 
 weighed Wordsworth s own explanation of the 
 line ; and one prefers to think that he has over 
 looked a certain passage in Coleridge. 
 
 " But the Ode," says Coleridge, " was intended 
 for such readers only as had been accustomed 
 to watch the flux and reflux of their utmost 
 nature, to venture at times into the twilight 
 realms of consciousness, and to feel a -deep 
 
216 That Dome in Air. 
 
 interest in modes of inmost being, to which they 
 know that the attributes of time and space are 
 inapplicable and alien, but which cannot be con 
 veyed, save in symbols of time and space. For 
 such readers the sense is sufficiently plain." 
 
 In the face of the " something declamatory " 
 found by Arnold, the " inequality " very plain to 
 Swinburne, the " nonsense " apparent to Mr. 
 Morley, the fact remains that rarely among the 
 noblest poems in our language is to be found a 
 composition the general effect of which is so 
 impressive. At once a dirge and a song of 
 triumph, this ode pours forth the mystic power 
 that "enricheth the blood of the world." 
 
 We are not inclined to give much heed to 
 Southey, these days, but his prediction concern 
 ing Wordsworth is not of the wildest sort : " He 
 will probably possess a mass of merits superior 
 to all except only Shakespeare." A mass of 
 merits is already his admitted possession. To 
 carry to full fruition the germs that sprouted in 
 Thomson and Crabbe and Cowper, that bloomed 
 here and there in the music of Burns ; to perfect 
 the overthrow of the affectation, the stiltedness, 
 the rule-bound, book-blind monotony of the last 
 century; to enlarge the breathing space of the 
 i soul, to make morality and religion more attrac 
 tive than the pleasures that are for a season ; to 
 chant away the barriers between us and the great 
 
William Wordsworth. 2 1 7 
 
 eternal facts and beauties, and lead us by sum 
 mer paths into the realm of abiding joy ; to build 
 a " princely throne on humble truth"; to stock 
 a very heaven with the " simple produce of the 
 common day" ; to give us glimpses that make us 
 less forlorn not only, but make us " heirs of truth 
 and pure delight," to do all this is to establish 
 the possession of a " mass of merits " ; and if 
 any English poet has accomplished this, it is 
 William Wordsworth. 
 
XL 
 
 A FORGOTTEN VOLUME. 
 
 ]N American edition of Lowth s "Lectures 
 on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews " 
 was brought out by Calvin E. Stowe, 
 Andover, 1829. A writer in the " North Ameri 
 can Review" (v. 31, 1830), commenting on 
 the fact that the edition was presented with an 
 apology, uses these words : 
 
 " It will hereafter, perhaps, be regarded as an anom 
 aly in the history of the human intellect, that the 
 poems of Homer should for ages have attracted the 
 attention of the profoundest minds, and been made 
 for a time almost the exclusive object of criticism in all 
 its forms, and of associated inquiry in all its ten thou 
 sand wanderings, and yet that the Hebrew writings 
 of the inspired volume, though equally before the 
 eye and in the memory of men, should have been 
 long passed by with such total absence of everything 
 like an attentive study, as to have left the great body 
 of the most learned critics completely ignorant of 
 their true nature, and gravely mistaking their poetry 
 for prose." 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 219 
 
 Concerning the confusion and loss consequent 
 on the common blindness, the reviewer goes on 
 to say, 
 
 " The evils which have arisen from a wrong con 
 ception of the nature of so great a portion of the 
 inspired writings have been multiplied. They have 
 been the occasion of almost all the objections of in 
 fidels and the cavils of irreligious men. There can 
 not be a doubt that just in proportion as the Hebrew 
 Scriptures, especially the poetical parts of them, are 
 keenly and critically scrutinized, such objections and 
 such cavils will utterly fade from the mind." 
 
 There is much truth in this ; moreover, re 
 newed warrant for preferring Matthew Arnold 
 as counsel in the case of poetry. He, in par 
 ticular, of late years, has had the discernment and 
 the courage to declare that the " best of religion 
 is its poetry " ; and to him more, perhaps, than 
 to another the people owe the little right-seeing 
 that they begin to have of the Old Scriptures, the 
 straight sight that takes these writings as they were 
 meant and for what they are, a profound " criti 
 cism of life under the conditions fixed for such a 
 criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
 beauty." The ancient Hebrews had the lan 
 guage, the land, and the life to push the imagi 
 nation to its highest ; of which fact we need no 
 further proof than that, after the waste and change 
 of centuries, still theirs are the writings that men 
 
22O That Dome in Air. 
 
 of to-day find fullest of beauty and majesty, 
 and name reverently the Sacred Book, The 
 Book. 
 
 The views of Bishop Lowth concerning Hebrew 
 poetry support so strongly, point by point, the 
 views of the present writer that the temptation 
 is strong to follow him in this particular path ; 
 but, for the present, let us quote him concerning 
 the first great principles of all poetry as they 
 have come down to us on the long authentic 
 voice of the ages. First, as to the point so long 
 blown round and round by the twisting winds of 
 metaphysics, whirling up new difficulty with each 
 circuit, 
 
 " Poetry is commonly understood to have two 
 objects in view, namely, advantage and pleasure, or 
 rather an union of both. I wish those who have 
 furnished us with this definition had rather proposed 
 utility as its ultimate object, and pleasure as the 
 means by which that end may be effectually accom 
 plished. The philosopher and the poet, indeed, 
 seem principally to differ in the means by which 
 they pursue the same end. Each sustains the char 
 acter of a preceptor, which the one is thought best to 
 support, if he teach with accuracy, with subtlety, and 
 with perspicuity; the other, with splendor, harmony, 
 and elegance. The one makes his appeal to reason 
 only, independent of the passions ; the other ad 
 dresses the reason in such a manner as even to en 
 gage the passions on his side. The one proceeds to 
 virtue and truth by the nearest and most compen- 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 221 
 
 dious ways ; the other leads to the same point through 
 certain deflections and deviations, by a winding but 
 pleasanter path. It is the part of the former so to 
 describe and explain these objects that we must 
 necessarily become acquainted with them; it is the 
 part of the latter so to dress and adorn them that 
 of our own accord we must love and embrace 
 them. 
 
 " I therefore lay it down as a fundamental maxim 
 that poetry is useful, chiefly because it is agreeable ; 
 and should I, as we are apt to do, attribute too much 
 to my favorite occupation, I trust Philosophy will 
 forgive me when I add that the writings of the poet 
 are more useful than those of the philosopher, inas 
 much as they are more agreeable " (p. 4). 
 
 A few lines farther on, is asked a question that 
 should be no more readily put than answered ; 
 and yet there is no end of hesitation and stam 
 mering when it comes, for example, to certain 
 lines of Browning s, 
 
 " For what is a poet, destitute of harmony, of 
 grace, and of all that conduces to allurement and 
 delight? . . . The reason, therefore, why Poetry is 
 so studious to embellish her precepts with a certain 
 inviting sweetness, and, as it were, 
 
 . . . tincture them with the honey of the Muses, 
 
 is plainly by such seasoning to conciliate favor to 
 her doctrine, as is the practice of even physicians, 
 who temper with pleasant flavors their least agree 
 able medicines : 
 
222 That Dome in Air. 
 
 Thus, the sick infant s taste disguis d to meet, 
 They tinge the vessel s brim with juices sweet: 
 The bitter draught his willing lip receives; 
 He drinks deceiv d, and so deceiv d he lives ; 
 
 as Lucretius expresses himself in illustration of his 
 own design, as well as that of poetry in general" 
 (pp. 5,6).. 
 
 And now, for a moment, think of the multitu 
 dinous definitions and decipherings, divisions 
 and subdivisions, all the painful processes of 
 inquiry, saddled on some one kind or style of 
 poetry, we will say the heroic ; what is the gain 
 if this much be not settled first ? 
 
 " But if it be manifest, even in authors who directly 
 profess improvement and advantage, that those will 
 most efficaciously instruct who afford most enter 
 tainment, the same will be still more apparent in 
 those who, dissembling the intention of instruction, 
 exhibit only the blandishments of pleasure ; and while 
 they treat of the most important things, of all 
 the principles of moral action, all the offices of life, 
 yet laying aside the severity of the preceptor, adduce 
 at once all the decorations of elegance and all the 
 attractions of amusement; who display, as in a 
 picture, the actions, the manners, the pursuits and 
 passions of men; and by the force of imitation and 
 fancy, by the harmony of numbers, by the taste and 
 variety of imagery, captivate the affections of the 
 reader, and imperceptibly, or perhaps reluctantly, 
 impel him to the pursuit of virtue. Such is the real 
 purpose of heroic poetry; such is the noble effect 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 223 
 
 produced by the perusal of Homer. . . . From phi 
 losophy a few cold precepts may be deduced; in 
 history, some dull and spiritless examples of manners 
 may be found : here we have the energetic voice of 
 Virtue herself, here we behold her animated form. 
 Poetry addresses her precepts not to the reason alone ; 
 she calls the passions to her aid ; she not only ex 
 hibits examples, but infixes them in the mind. She 
 softens the wax with her peculiar ardour, and renders 
 it more plastic to the artist s hand. Thus does 
 Horace most truly and most justly apply this com 
 mendation to the poets : 
 
 What s fair, and false, and right, these bards describe, 
 Better and plainer than the Stoic tribe " (pp. 6, 7). 
 
 If we are to form a just notion of what poetry 
 is through the instrumentality of critics, this is 
 the order of them to which our inquiries should 
 be first addressed. "Poetry is the supreme of 
 power " : Keats s words are gospel to this old 
 bishop and the good old minds behind him. The 
 inevitable conclusion stares them in the face. 
 There is not a single "if" to trip over, not so 
 much as a "but " to stumble over. So with the 
 student of to-day ; he will find the way clear pro 
 vided he turn to solid counsellors. Like the 
 solicitous bishop of days by-gone, we must be 
 content only with the best intelligence : 
 
 " Since the sensible world," says Bacon, " is in 
 dignity inferior to the rational soul, poetry seems to 
 endow human nature with that which lies beyond 
 
224 That Dome in Air. 
 
 the power of history, and to gratify the mind with 
 at least the shadow of things where the substance 
 cannot be had. For, if the matter be properly con 
 sidered, an argument may be drawn from poetry, 
 that a superior dignity in things, a more perfect 
 order, and a more beautiful variety delights the soul 
 of man, than is found in nature since the fall. As, 
 therefore, the actions and events which are the 
 subject of true history are not of sufficient amplitude 
 to content the mind of man ; poetry is at hand, and 
 invents actions of a more heroic nature. Because 
 true history reports the success of events not pro- 
 portionably to desert, or according to the virtue or 
 vice that has been displayed in them ; poetry corrects 
 this, and represents events and fortunes according 
 to justice and merit. Because true history, from 
 the obvious similarity of actions, and the satiety 
 which this circumstance must occasion, frequently 
 creates a distaste in the mind; poetry cheers and 
 refreshes it, exhibiting things uncommon, varied, 
 and full of vicissitude. As poetry, therefore, con 
 tributes not only to pleasure, but to magnanimity and 
 good morals, it is deservedly supposed to participate 
 in some measure of Divine inspiration; since it 
 raises the mind and fills it with sublime ideas, by 
 proportioning the appearances of things to the 
 desires of the mind, and not submitting the mind 
 to things, like reason and history " (p. 9). 
 
 Had Donnelly, instead of playing the zany 
 over Shakespeare and Bacon, instead of tinkering 
 at a greater man than the Almighty himself was 
 willing to set his hand to, spent his time crying 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 225 
 
 this passage up and down the streets, he would 
 have displayed originality meriting something 
 better than bread and water and shackles. The 
 most of us have read this passage at one time or 
 another, but we have not taken it and other 
 great sayings that belong with it to our business 
 and bosoms. 
 
 As in heroic poetry, so in tragedy, there is no 
 escaping the conclusion that poetry is superior 
 to philosophy as well as to history : 
 
 " But if from the Heroic we turn to the Tragic 
 Muse, to which Aristotle indeed assigns the prefer 
 ence, because of the true and perfect imitation, we 
 shall yet more clearly evince the superiority of poetry 
 over philosophy, on the principle of its being more 
 agreeable. Tragedy is, in truth, no other than phi 
 losophy introduced upon the stage, retaining all its 
 natural properties, remitting nothing of its native 
 gravity, but assisted and embellished by other favour 
 ing circumstances. What point, for instance, of 
 moral discipline have the tragic writers of Greece 
 left untouched or unadorned ? What duty of life, 
 what principle of political economy, what motive or 
 precept for the government of the passions, what 
 commendation of virtue is there which they have not 
 treated of with fulness, variety, and learning? . . . 
 
 " Should it be objected that some have been emi 
 nent in this walk of poetry who never studied in the 
 schools of the philosophers nor enjoyed the advan 
 tages of an education above the common herd of 
 mankind, I answer that I am not contending about 
 
226 That Dome in Air. 
 
 the vulgar opinion, or concerning the meaning of a 
 word. The man who, by the force of genius and 
 observation, has arrived at a perfect knowledge of 
 mankind ; who has acquainted himself with the natu 
 ral powers of the human mind, and the causes by 
 which the passions are excited and repressed; who 
 not only in words can explain, but can delineate to 
 the senses, every emotion of the soul; who can excite, 
 can temper and regulate the passions such a man, 
 though he may not have acquired erudition by the 
 common methods, I esteem a true philosopher. The 
 passion of jealousy, its causes, circumstances, its 
 progress and effects, I hold to be more accurately, 
 more copiously, more satisfactorily described in one 
 of the dramas of Shakespeare than in all the dispu 
 tations of the schools of philosophy. 
 
 " Now, if Tragedy be of so truly a philosophical 
 nature ; and if to all the force and gravity of wisdom 
 it add graces and allurements peculiarly its own, 
 the harmony of verse, the contrivance of the fable, 
 the excellence of imitation, the truth of action ; shall 
 we not say that philosophy must yield to poetry in 
 point of utility? or shall we not rather say that the 
 former is greatly indebted to the latter, of whose 
 assistance and recommendation it makes so advan 
 tageous a use, in order to attain its particular 
 purpose, utility, or improvement?" (pp. 7, 8.) 
 
 The wise old bishop will press on beyond most 
 travellers of to-day when it comes to distinguish 
 ing between the inspiration of Shakespeare and 
 that of the author of " Job " ; but so far as we 
 can accompany him his words are certainly worth 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 227 
 
 whole shelves of modern books on the subject of 
 poetry. 
 
 " But, after all, we shall think more humbly of 
 poetry than it deserves, unless we direct our atten 
 tion to that quarter where its importance is most 
 eminently conspicuous ; unless we contemplate it as 
 employed on sacred subjects and in subservience to 
 religion. This indeed appears to have been the 
 original office and destination of poetry ; and this it 
 still so happily performs that in all other cases it 
 seems out of character, as if intended for this pur 
 pose alone. In other instances poetry appears to 
 want the assistance of art, but in this to shine forth 
 with all its natural splendour, or rather to be ani 
 mated by that inspiration which, on other occasions, 
 is spoken of without being felt. These observations 
 are remarkably exemplified in the Hebrew poetry, 
 than which the human mind can conceive nothing 
 more elevated, more beautiful, or more elegant ; in 
 which the almost ineffable sublimity of the subject is 
 fully equalled by the energy of the language and the 
 dignity of the style. And it is worthy observation 
 that as some of these writings exceed in antiquity 
 the fabulous ages of Greece, in sublimity they are 
 superior to the most finished productions of that pol 
 ished people. Thus, if the actual origin of poetry 
 be inquired after, it must of necessity be referred to 
 religion ; and since it appears to be an art derived 
 from nature alone, peculiar to no age or nation, and 
 only at an advanced period of society conformed to 
 rule and method, it must be wholly attributed to the 
 more violent affections of the heart, the nature of 
 which is to express themselves in an animated and 
 
228 That Dome in Air. 
 
 lofty tone, with a vehemence of expression far 
 remote from vulgar use " (p. 18). 
 
 Whatever our religious belief, we can agree 
 with this; and in the agreement we shall go 
 a long way toward settling contention and con 
 fusion, toward preventing waste of time over com 
 mentators as injurious as ingenious, as delusive 
 as voluminous. 
 
 This critic of great poetry will not be found 
 scorning the small poetry. So thoroughly is he 
 at home in the art that he can unbend with all 
 the grace and fervor of Jean Paul to dwell 
 fondly on the precious lyrics of slender theme, 
 the little wafts of fancy, the fitful breaths of bird- 
 like melody, which charm in moments of mirth 
 or idleness, 
 
 " Not entirely to omit the lighter kinds of poetry, 
 many will think that we allow them full enough 
 when we suppose their utility to consist in the enter 
 tainment which they afford. Nor is this altogether 
 to be despised if it be considered that this entertain 
 ment, this levity itself, affords relaxation to the mind 
 when wearied with laborious investigation of truth ; 
 that it unbends the understanding after intense ap 
 plication ; restores it when debilitated ; and refreshes 
 it, even by an interchange and variety of study. In 
 this we are countenanced by the example and 
 authority of the greatest men of Greece, by that of 
 Solon, Plato, and Aristotle ; among the Romans, by 
 that of Scipio and Leelius, Julius and Augustus 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 229 
 
 Caesar, Varro and Brutus, who filled up the intervals 
 of their more important engagements, their severer 
 studies, with the agreeableness and hilarity of this 
 poetical talent. Nature indeed seems in this most 
 wisely to have consulted for us, who, while she 
 impels us to the knowledge of truth, which is fre 
 quently remote, and only to be prosecuted with 
 indefatigable industry, has provided also these pleas 
 ing recreations as a refuge to the mind, in which it 
 might occasionally shelter itself, and find an agree 
 able relief from languor and anxiety " (p. 15). 
 
 The critic that so finds can go further; can 
 find that the practice as well as the reading 
 of poetry is essential as a means of culture, 
 
 " But there is yet a further advantage to be derived 
 from these studies, which ought not to be neglected ; 
 for, beside possessing in reserve a certain solace of 
 your labours, from the same repository you will also 
 be supplied with many of the brightest ornaments of 
 literature. The first object is, indeed, to perceive 
 and comprehend clearly the reasons, principles, and 
 relations of things ; the next is, to be able to explain 
 your conceptions, not only with perspicuity, but 
 with a degree of elegance. For in this respect we 
 are all of us in some measure fastidious. We are 
 seldom contented with a jejune and naked exposition 
 even of the most serious subjects ; some of the 
 seasonings of art, some ornaments of style, some 
 splendour of diction, are of necessity to be adopted ; 
 even some regard is due to the harmony of numbers 
 and to the gratification of the ear. In all these 
 respects, though I grant that the language of poetry 
 
230 That Dome in Air. 
 
 differs very widely from that of all other kinds of 
 composition, yet he who has bestowed some time 
 and attention on the perusal and imitation of the 
 poets will, I am persuaded, find his understanding 
 exercised and improved as it were in this Palaestra, 
 the vigour and activity of his imagination increased, 
 and even his manner of expression to have insen 
 sibly acquired a tinge from this elegant intercourse. 
 Thus we observe in persons who have been taught 
 to dance, a certain indescribable grace and manner ; 
 though they do not form their common gesture and 
 gait by any certain rules, yet there results from that 
 exercise a degree of elegance which accompanies 
 those who have been proficients in it even when they 
 have relinquished the practice. Nor is it the least, 
 improbable that both Caesar and Tully (the one the 
 most elegant, the other the most eloquent of the 
 Romans) might have derived considerable assistance 
 from the cultivation of this branch of polite litera 
 ture, since it is well known that both of them were 
 addicted to the reading of poetry, and even exer 
 cised in the composition of it. This too is so appar 
 ent in the writings of Plato that he is thought not 
 only to have erred in his judgment, but to have 
 acted an ungrateful part, when he excluded from his 
 imaginary commonwealth that art to which he was 
 so much indebted for the splendour and elegance 
 of his genius, from whose fountains he had derived 
 that soft, copious, and harmonious style for which 
 he is so justly admired " (pp. 15-17). 
 
 Blessed old bishop ! Poetry is serviceable 
 even as a sort of Delsarte practice for the mind 
 and heart. 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 231 
 
 Verily the Oxford boys one hundred and fifty 
 years ago had a decided advantage over their 
 successors of to-day. Were the present time as 
 favorable to poetry as theirs, we should hear not 
 a word, for instance, of the warfare between 
 Poetry and Science, Science which the enlight 
 ened Tyndall terms Poetry s " younger sister " ; 
 not a syllable would be lisped on such a topic as 
 "Is Verse in Danger?" The good bishop 
 would as soon have thought of doubting the 
 existence of the soul and the High Power on 
 which it leans as of questioning the imperisha 
 bility of song, song, which has taught us the 
 most we know of these. 
 
 With this peep into a forgotten volume, it 
 remains but to commend it to young and old, to 
 all ranks and classes from shoeblack to scholar ; 
 to commend it for a better understanding of the 
 Scriptures and for advancement in knowledge con 
 cerning the ruling force, the " supreme of power," 
 poetry. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 Bishop Lowth began lecturing in 1741, one 
 hundred and fifty-eight years after Sidney wrote 
 his " Defence of Poesy." A few quotations from 
 Sidney will show, without argument, that the old 
 notion of poetry was transmitted intact, and so 
 held till the middle of the eighteenth century. 
 
232 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " This heart-ravishing knowledge " is one of his 
 expressions ; another is, " That unspeakable and 
 everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the 
 mind." The purpose of poetry is " to teach and 
 delight " ; poetry is the " sweet food of sweetly 
 uttered knowledge." The poet "doth not only 
 show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into 
 the way as will entice any man to enter into it." 
 
 Eighty years later, in Shelley s "Defense of 
 Poetry," we find the old notion getting dim. 
 If Shelley be right when he says, " The distinc 
 tion between poets and prose writers is a vulgar 
 error," Sidney s exposition is without mean 
 ing; there is no substance in his firm phrase, 
 " that same exquisite observance of number and 
 measure in words, and that high-flying liberty of 
 conceit proper to the poet." Taken in the half- 
 sense, there is truth in Shelley s blunt statement, 
 and in Sidney s " there have been many most ex 
 cellent poets that never versified " ; but taken in 
 the whole sense, both observations are mislead 
 ing. We cannot have poetry proper without the 
 poet s vision and method and music, 
 
 "... The numbers which could call 
 The stones into the Theban wall." 
 
 Shelley would have it that the aim of the poet 
 is, not to " teach and delight," but to delight. 
 He says, 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 233 
 
 "Those in whom the poetical faculty, though 
 great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, 
 Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and 
 the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact pro 
 portion to the degree in which they compel us to 
 advert to this purpose." 
 
 Teaching and compelling us to advert to the 
 teaching are very different things. The poet 
 teaches and delights, delights because he does 
 not compel us to advert to his purpose, but 
 effects it while, in our delight, we are uncon 
 scious of what he is really doing. 
 
 Again Shelley says, 
 
 " And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose 
 is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of 
 Milton s genius." 
 
 On Milton s intent it is safe to take the testi 
 mony of Milton himself, 
 
 "... What in me is dark 
 Illumine; what is low raise and support; 
 That to the height of this great argument 
 I may assert eternal Providence, 
 And justify the ways of God to men." 
 
 If Shelley meant that the poet should not use 
 the prose teacher s method, he is right ; if he 
 meant more than this, and probably he did, 
 he is wrong. The great poets, as we have 
 learned from Bishop Lowth, "dissembling the 
 intention of instruction," exhibiting " only the 
 
234 That Dome in Air. 
 
 blandishments of pleasure," still " treat of the 
 most important things, of all the offices of life." 
 However, Shelley s testimony, taken as a whole, 
 is a sufficient answer to any errant portion of 
 it ; 
 
 * But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what 
 would have been the moral condition of the world 
 if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, 
 had ever existed ; if Raphael and Michael Angelo 
 had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry had 
 never been translated ; if a revival of the study 
 of Greek literature had never taken place ; if no 
 monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed 
 down to us ; and if the poetry of the religion of the 
 ancient world had been extinguished together with 
 its belief. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legis 
 lators of the world." 
 
 Coming down seventy years, from 1821 to 
 1891, it may be profitable to inquire briefly into 
 the success of Mr. Theodore Watts s attack on 
 the old notion of poetry as formulated by Arnold. 
 In his article on Lowell (The Athen&um, August 
 22, 1891) Mr. Watts says, 
 
 " It is always difficult to know when Matthew 
 Arnold is in earnest and when he is playing with his 
 readers ; but if he was in earnest when he defined 
 poetry to be a criticism of life, he certainly achieved 
 in one famous phrase a definition of poetry which for 
 whimsical perversity can never be surpassed. Had 
 
A Forgotten Volume. 235 
 
 he said the opposite of this, had he said that all 
 pure literature except poetry may be a criticism of 
 life, but that poetry must be a simple projection of 
 life in order for it to be separated from prose, he 
 might perhaps have got nearer to the truth." 
 
 If Mr. Watts, with all his acuteness, is not 
 keen enough to discover when Arnold is in ear 
 nest and when he is at play, we must not blame 
 him for being blind to very plain things ; among 
 them, the flippancy and padding, the newspaper 
 recklessness, sometimes displayed in the columns 
 of the Athenceum. In this article we are in 
 formed at the first dash that most Americans 
 lack " moral, high-bred courage." This may be ; 
 but some of us have enough patience and cour 
 tesy to hear a speaker through before beginning 
 to dispute him. Arnold did not define poetry as 
 a " criticism of life," but as a " criticism of life 
 under the conditions fixed for such a criticism 
 by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty " ; 
 as a " powerful application of ideas to life" under 
 the conditions fixed by these laws. In exempli 
 fying this application, he says that it has the 
 accent of such a line as, 
 
 "Absent thee from felicity awhile " ; 
 
 an injunction to which Mr. Watts seems to have 
 yielded temporary obedience. Mr. Watts goes 
 on to say, 
 
236 That Dome in Air. 
 
 " If there is in any literary work a true projection 
 of life, it must sometimes be classed as poetry, even 
 though the writer shows but an imperfect conception 
 of poetic art. Although much of Browning s noble 
 and brilliant writing is a criticism of life, and is, 
 therefore, as I think, not poetry, a very considerable 
 portion of his work is poetry, because it is a true 
 projection, and not a criticism, of life. But Lowell s 
 verse is all criticism of life. Of poetic projection 
 there is almost nothing at all." 
 
 While Mr. Watts is right in saying that much 
 of Browning s writing is not poetry (he goes 
 altogether too far in finding " almost nothing " 
 of poetry in Lowell), how is it that, with his mind 
 and experience, and Anglo-moral courage to top 
 it all, he does not see that, instead of combating 
 Arnold s idea, he is reproducing it in less happy 
 words of his own ? In saying that, because much 
 of Browning s work is rather a criticism than a 
 " projection " of life, it is something different 
 from poetry, he is simply saying what Arnold 
 says better ; namely, that it is something different 
 from poetry because it has not the " matter and 
 the inseparable manner " of " adequate poetic 
 criticism." 
 
 THE END. 
 
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