The Contemporary American Poet Series 
 
 OBeorge Qftrtoarb Jootrfierrj> 
 
 A STUDY of HIS POETRY 
 
 BY -LOUIS V LEDOUX 
 
 [5T
 
 AROiffivWSTIN-COATES 
 
 HIS BOOK
 
 UJUAJI 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY 
 AMERICAN POET SERIES 
 
 EDITORS : William Stanley Braithwaite 
 Joseph Lebowich
 
 The Contemporary 
 American Poet Series 
 
 George Edward Woodberry 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 Bliss Carman 
 
 Josephine Preston Peabody 
 James Oppenheim 
 Anna Hempstead Branch 
 George Sterling 
 Edgar Lee Masters 
 Amy Lowell 
 Richard Le Gallienne 
 Robert Frost 
 Percy Mackaye 
 
 THE POETRY REVIEW COMPANY 
 
 12 CHAUNCYSTREKT 
 CAMBRIDGE :: :: MASSACHUSETTS
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 A STUDY OF HIS POETRY

 
 George Edward Woodberry 
 A Study of his Poetry 
 
 By 
 Louis V. Ledoux 
 
 The Poetry Review Company 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts 
 1917
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY LOUIS V. LEDOUX 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March, 1917
 
 BY LOUIS V. LEDOUX 
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 THE STORY OF ELEUSIS 
 
 YZDRA 
 
 THE SHADOW OF JETNA 
 
 ETC. 
 
 2023978
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I .... 13 
 
 CHAPTER II .... 19 
 
 CHAPTER III .... 33 
 
 CHAPTER IV .... 44 
 
 CHAPTER V .... 51 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY .... 57
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 I. 
 
 George Edward Woodberry, whose ancestors, com- 
 ing from English Devon, had been among the first 
 settlers of Beverly, Massachusetts, was born there in 
 the family home facing the sea, on May 12, 1855 ; the 
 son of Henry Elliott and Sarah Dane (Tuck) Wood- 
 berry. The New England tradition was his birth- 
 right; and the love of the sea, for many of his people 
 had been sea-faring folk, and his boyhood was passed 
 where the sea-interest is greater than that of the land. 
 Inherited associations and habits of thought form the 
 background of any writer's work, whether he be a 
 carrier on of the tradition in which he was bred or in 
 revolt against it; and any estimate of Mr. Wood- 
 berry's poetry must take into account the stem from 
 which it sprang, the roots deep in the New England- 
 ism of other days and the New England sap which, as 
 his spiritual vision widened, gave something of its own 
 character to the half -exotic blossoms of his later verse. 
 
 The chronicles of The North Shore that most 
 beautiful part of Massachusetts which lies between 
 Boston and Cape Ann are full of the doings of the 
 Woodberry family. John Woodberry, who came to 
 Salem in 1626 and was an original member of the first 
 church there, was, with his brother William, among 
 the four who first established a permanent settlement 
 at Beverly. In 1635 he was granted a farm of two 
 hundred acres and it is likely that he or his son was 
 one of the interested petitioners who requested a few 
 years later that the name of the settlement be changed 
 for reasons of which "the first is the great dislike and 
 
 [13]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 discontent of many of our people for this name of 
 Beverly, because (we being but a small place) it has 
 caused on us a constant nickname of Beggarly, being 
 in the mouths of many." They seem to have been a 
 godly lot these Woodberrys founders and deacons 
 of churches ; men who were ready to fight and die for 
 their country when the need came, and in their daily 
 lives had to do with the sea, building ships and trading. 
 Of such a stock the poet came ; the love of the sea is in 
 his verse the color and sound of it with the New 
 England sense of spiritual and moral values, the New 
 England seriousness, and passion for things of the soul. 
 After a boyhood spent in Beverly wandering among 
 the fields in search of flowers or drifting day-long on 
 the bay, Mr. Woodberry went up to Harvard, leaving, 
 it would seem, among his school-fellows at Exeter 
 where he had early identified himself with the literary 
 life, the reputation of a poet. At Harvard, Lowell and 
 Charles Eliot Norton quickly discerned the promise of 
 the lad and it is said that the former kept a room at 
 his house where young Woodberry would be welcome 
 when he wished to come. The class oration which he 
 prepared for graduation was not delivered because 
 certain members of the faculty feared that it might 
 be misinterpreted by the more conservative part of 
 the audience, but was privately printed by the Signet 
 Society in an edition of thirty copies ; and The Rela- 
 tion of Pallas Athene to Athens has become the first 
 of those scarce little pamphlets now eagerly sought by 
 collectors. Graduation from Harvard in 1877 was fol- 
 lowed by some years of teaching in the University of 
 Nebraska, of wandering in Southern Europe, of re- 
 viewing and editing, with occasional creative work in 
 prose or in verse. In -1891 Mr. Woodberry was 
 called to Columbia University where he remained for 
 
 [141
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 more than a decade as head of the department of 
 Comparative Literature, winning among the students 
 friends whose continued and peculiar devotion, illus- 
 trated by the recent formation of a society to foster 
 his ideals in American life, testifies to his power as a 
 teacher and his unique influence as an inspiration to 
 the young. Since leaving Columbia, he has made his 
 home at Beverly, not connected with any institution 
 but giving occasional courses of lectures at various 
 universities, and spending much of his time in that 
 Mediterranean world Southern Italy and Sicily, 
 North Africa, Greece and Asia Minor whose culture 
 has been a vitally important element in his thought and 
 in his work. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry has received many academic honors, 
 and has written a number of distinguished prose books 
 which rank with the finest of modern interpretative 
 criticism ; but the work that has probably meant most 
 to him, and will probably mean most to his readers, is 
 that which the present study is designed to treat, his 
 verse. 
 
 II. 
 
 The most constant characteristics of Mr. Wood- 
 berry's poetry are its insistence upon spiritual values 
 and its passionateness the intensity of the emotion it 
 seeks to express. His poems, except for a few occa- 
 sional pieces, seem the record of passionate hope, of 
 passionately cherished ideals, of disappointment or 
 disillusion passionately felt, and, in some of his later 
 work, of convictions passionately held. He burns with 
 that intensity of emotion which is characteristic of 
 the creative artist ; but in him the object of passion is 
 two- fold tragic opposites which are in perpetual con- 
 flict. One the white horse of the Phaedrus is the 
 yearning, intense desire to remain perpetually in the 
 
 [15]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 ideal, spiritual world, to realize it in life, to bring it 
 to others ; its opposite is an almost equal devotion to 
 aspects of the world of sense, an ecstatic appreciation 
 of color and fragrance, with a fineness of perception 
 and rendering in the light effects that suggests Turner 
 or Shelley. His poems glow with color. Superficially 
 he is the poet of light, but considering more deeply, 
 one gets the impression of a man who had seen among 
 dark tree-trunks a fitful gleaming of the Grail, and, 
 having given himself wholly, passionately to the quest, 
 is unmindful of all save the fleeting vision and the 
 unattainment. The ideal world is one in which many 
 spiritually gifted people have taken holiday ; to some 
 it seems like home, but there are none who live there, 
 for its children are exiles. A passionate devotion to 
 the things of the spirit, an intense delight in visible 
 beauty ; these are the constant elements in Mr. Wood- 
 berry's poetry ; the one was fostered in him by his 
 New England heritage, the other came perhaps, as it 
 has come to so many Northern poets, a gift of the 
 Mediterranean world. One gives to his work a back- 
 ground of sad nobility, the other the warmth and color 
 of life ; but to Mr. Woodberry the two seem forces in 
 irreconcilable conflict, the world that we call "real" 
 with the world that we call "ideal". 
 
 Italy, like a dream, 
 
 Unfolds before my eyes; 
 But another fairer dream 
 
 Behind me lies; 
 Could I turn from the dream that is 
 
 To where that first light flies 
 Could I turn from the dream that was 
 
 In a dream life dies! 
 
 16
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 One masters the spirit of life 
 
 Through love of life to be; 
 I am not master, O Love, 
 
 Thou slayest the will in me! 
 Give me the dream that is, 
 
 Earth like heaven to see; 
 Or grant the dream that was, 
 
 Love's immortality! 
 
 The beauty that is seen lies open to many; the 
 beauty that is "unseen" is visible only to a few, and to 
 them merely in momentary glimpses as though a veil 
 had been suddenly lifted to drop as suddenly again. 
 Literature records many of these moments of vision, 
 and the sadness of English poetry has largely to do 
 with their passing ; for while most in their youth have 
 had glimpses of the ideal world, it has a way of mark- 
 ing for its own those who are specially endowed, and 
 these, driven onward by an inner necessity follow the 
 gleam among the obstacles of life, through continued 
 unattainment to what should be, but is not always, a 
 final disillusion ; learning that in the world we know 
 the wings of the spirit can never be wholly free. 
 Many poets, especially those whose habit of mind fitted 
 them to receive the Platonic idealism, have treated 
 the subject, but in the work of only a few is the 
 record of the vision and its passing, the quest, the 
 disillusion, so preeminent a part as it is in Mr. Wood- 
 berry's. This is the golden thread which a critic must 
 follow in order to find the spiritual and the poetic 
 value of the work under consideration; the technique, 
 and that glow of color in the pages which makes many 
 of the poems seem as though they had been bathed in 
 light, are less important subjects of discussion, though 
 all are correlated and work together to produce the 
 total effect. 
 
 [17]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 III. 
 
 Another trait which is obvious in Mr. Woodberry's 
 work, and which it may be as well to examine before 
 following our golden thread, is the growing externality 
 of his interests. The early poems, as is natural, are 
 chiefly concerned with the individual, the moods of 
 the soul and its reactions; but through them there 
 runs a desire to be of service to the race, a- conviction 
 of destiny that will make the personal soul an active 
 agent in bringing a better world. In considering Mr. 
 Woodberry's poetry chronologically this thought is 
 seen to develop until the chief interest is outside of the 
 individual who comes finally to be conceived as merely 
 a part of a whole a single pulsation in the rhythm of 
 the universe, rather than as an entity self-bounded and 
 self-sufficient. The change is paralleled by a growth 
 from purely personal feeling for New England and 
 that older England from which it sprang, through the 
 Americanism of My Country and certain of the son- 
 nets, to an enthusiasm for what might be called world- 
 citizenship without nationality ; a conviction of abso- 
 lute equality and brotherhood that leads to an almost 
 Franciscan devotion to the outcast and the humble. 
 This is part of the working out of a philosophy, of the 
 reaction of life itself upon the ideal of life, and will 
 be discussed later ; now it is time to turn to the poems 
 themselves. 
 
 18
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 I. 
 
 The volume of collected poems which was pub- 
 lished in 1903 contains most of the pieces which had 
 appeared in two earlier books and a number which had 
 not previously been published in book form. Near 
 the front of this volume is an early poem which Mr. 
 Woodberry has referred to elsewhere as the "cry of 
 dying boyhood," and which, though it is not so uni- 
 formly felicitous in expression as some others, shows 
 clearly through images of the northern lights the 
 poetic mood we have attempted to describe. Like the 
 false dawn of those flashing lights is the dream in the 
 heart of a boy, youth's aspiration toward the ideal 
 world, youth's glowing trust in the things of the spirit ; 
 and like it also is the subsequent disillusion when the 
 young soul perceives by the dying glow of its own fire 
 the broken dreams and hopes which were the sword 
 and shield of its chivalry. When youth lies wounded, 
 it does not know that wounds may heal, and the poem 
 is a poem of youth, true to the mood and repetitive of 
 an ancient cry. 
 
 FALSE DAWN; 
 
 God dreamt a dream ere the morning woke 
 
 Or ever the stars sang out; 
 The glory, although it never broke, 
 Filled heaven zvith a golden shout; 
 
 And' when in the North there's a quiver and beam 
 Of mystical lights that heavenward stream, 
 The heart of a boy will dream God's dream. 
 
 F191
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 O Norns, who sit by the pale sea's capes, 
 
 Loosen the wonderful shine! 
 The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes 
 And every one divine. 
 
 Dartle and listen o'er the blue height; 
 Drift and shimmer, flight on flight; 
 The heart of a boy is God's delight. 
 
 O, clamber and weave with the Milky Way 
 
 The Rose in the East that sprang, 
 From star to star, with blossom and spray, 
 On heaven's gates to hang! 
 
 O Vine of the Morning, cling and climb, 
 
 Till the stars like birds in your branches chime! 
 
 The heart of a boy is God's springtime. 
 
 'Tis dawn that shadows the glowing roof! 
 
 'Tis Light with the Dragon strives! 
 Ah, Night's black warp with the rainbow-woof 
 The shuttle of Destiny drives. 
 
 They swerve and falter, gather and fly, 
 Wane, and shiver, and slip from the sky 
 O Norns, is the heart of a boy God's lief 
 
 O Childless Ones, would your blind charms 
 
 Might seal our darling's eyes! 
 Dead, with the dead Da^vn in his arms, 
 In the pale north Light lies. 
 
 Glimmer and glint, O fallen fire! 
 The lights of heaven like ghosts expire; 
 The heart of a boy is God's desire. 
 [20]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 O dream God dreamt ere the morning woke 
 
 Or ever the stars sang out; 
 O glory diviner than ever broke, 
 
 Of the false, false dawn the shout! 
 False dawn, false dawn, false dawn 
 
 Alas, when God shall wake! 
 False dawn, false dawn, false dawn 
 
 Alas, our young mistake! 
 False dawn, false dawn, false dawn 
 
 O heart betrayed, break, break! 
 
 It may be said in passing that Mr. Woodberry seems 
 always to have had a special feeling for youth. His 
 books contain a little gallery of portraits of children 
 the child who touched him in the city street, the Ionian 
 boy, the orphans found wandering at Delphi, and a 
 whole row of young Sicilians, all of whom are seen so 
 vividly against their backgrounds as to suggest an un- 
 usual sense of contour and color in the author. 
 
 Boy on the almond bough, 
 
 Clinging against the wind, 
 A-sway from foot to brow, 
 
 With the emerald sea behind; 
 
 Could a picture be painted more deftly? Obviously 
 the man who writes such lines as these has a feeling 
 for children; and in his treatment of them there are 
 notes of reverence and of sadness, a somewhat 
 Platonic or Wordsworthian reverence for the young 
 heart in which the golden dream still lives, and the 
 sadness of one who, resting his hand on a child's head, 
 thinks of the lessons that must be learned, the griefs 
 that must be endured. 
 
 [21]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 II. 
 
 Something of Mr. Woodberry's own youth, of value 
 to us because its moods are a part of common ex- 
 perience, can be seen in The North Shore Watch, an 
 elegy for the friend with whom much of his boyhood at 
 Beverly had been passed. The poem was first printed 
 (in a subscription edition of two hundred copies) 
 while the poet was still in his twenties, but it is one 
 that has been given high praise and that shows with 
 his native idealism that colorfulness of expression, 
 that sense of sea-backgrounds, which have been noted 
 as among the external characteristics of his work. 
 It is typical of the poetry of youth with its references 
 to field excursions and to boating, its sense of intimate 
 comradeship with nature, its exaltation of friendship, 
 and in the poignancy of its grief for the loss of one 
 who wa~s 
 
 First dead of all my dead that are to be. 
 
 Young also in its idealism and in its recoil at the reve- 
 lation of phases of life first revealed at the close of 
 boyhood, the poem moves forward through a succes- 
 sion of sea-pictures and glimpses of the pine-hung 
 Northern Shore, seen at dawn or sunset when "pools 
 of opal gem the windless bay," or when, wrapped in 
 more mysterious umbrage, 
 
 . . . the dark pines, -whose heart is like the sea's, 
 Mourn for one darling flower they nurtured here. 
 
 The solution of the poem is Shelleyean: Through 
 love "we look toward life with conquering eyes" ; and 
 in it is expressed a faith in the endurance of Beauty, 
 a conviction of the things that are seen being merely
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 temporal, and those that are unseen eternal, which, 
 though with many it is a passing mood of youth illus- 
 trating the natural affinity between the young soul and 
 the doctrines of Platonic idealism, is in Mr. Wood- 
 berry the first expression of a belief passionately held 
 or clung to with passionate regret. The North Shore 
 Watch is a poem of youth, young in its idealism and 
 in its melancholy; and it is one to which the heart 
 of youth makes quick response a twilight thing with 
 the colors of the north in it, untouched as yet by 
 Mediterranean splendor, though already reaching out 
 in imagination to that more vivid eastern world where 
 the friend for whom the poet mourns had gone in 
 the glow of his own youth and found darkness. 
 
 What though o'er him the tropic sunset bloom, 
 With hyacinthine hues and sanguine dyes, 
 
 And down the central deep's profoundest gloom 
 Soft blossoms, fallen from the wreathed skies, 
 The seas imparadisef 
 
 With light immingling, colors, dipped in May, 
 Through multitudinous changes still endure 
 Orange and unimagined emeralds pure 
 Drift through the softened day; 
 
 "Alas" he zvhispers, "and art thou not nigh? 
 
 Earth reaches now her height of beauty ere I die." 
 
 Extended quotation is unnecessary, but the stanzas 
 which lead to the final landscape pictures may be given 
 as expressing the intellectual conclusions of the poem 
 and as sufficiently illustrative of the verse movement: 
 
 Beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change, 
 Eternal refuge of the orphaned mind; 
 Where'er a lonely wanderer, I range, 
 
 [231
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 The tender flowers shall my woes unbind, 
 
 The grass to me be kind; 
 And lovely shapes innumerable shall throng 
 On sea and prairie, soft as children's eyes; 
 Morn shall awake me with her glad surprise; 
 
 The stars shall hear my song; 
 And heaven shall I see, whatever my road, 
 Steadfast, eternal, life's impregnable abode. 
 
 Love, too, abides, and smiles at savage death, 
 
 And swifter speeds his might and shall endure; 
 The secret flame, the unimagined breath, 
 That lives in all things beautiful and pure, 
 
 Invincibly secure; 
 
 In Him creation hath its glorious birth, 
 Subsists, rejoices, moves prophetic on, 
 Till that dim goal of all things shall be won 
 
 Men yearn for through the earth; 
 Voices that pass we are of Him, the Song, 
 Whose harmonies the winds, the stars, the seas, pro- 
 long. 
 
 III. 
 
 Agathon, a dramatic poem first published in the 
 volume of 1890, but privately printed before that by 
 some of his devoted students at the University of 
 Nebraska, is Mr. Woodberry's first extended treat- 
 ment of the theme that has haunted him life-long, 
 the conflict in the soul between love of the beauty 
 that is perceived by the senses and that which is 
 perceived by the spirit, youth's final rejection of 
 what is transient, and definite self -consecration to the 
 ideal, despite the earthly hopelessness of such service : 
 
 The love that mates with heaven weds in the grave. 
 [241
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 This poem takes us at once into the heart of philo- 
 sophic idealism ; it expresses a definite philosophy of 
 life, and while with many poets criticism could confine 
 itself mainly to the pointing out of external poetic 
 excellencies the beauties of phrase and music in 
 Mr. Woodberry's work the intellectual and spiritual 
 elements are so important that more attention must 
 be given to what he has to say than to how he says it. 
 When the subject matter of poetry is essentially poetic 
 the manner of its expression takes immediately its 
 proper place of secondary importance. Mr. Wood- 
 berry has the technical mastery of his art, and, what 
 is far more, he has that peculiar ability to make 
 magical haunting phrases, lines that remain in the 
 memory ; to evoke pictures with a word, to illumine 
 by sudden flashes of insight, which is essential to 
 poetry. 
 
 The deeper elements in such a poem as Agathon give 
 expression to thoughts and experiences which, though 
 usually realized less intensely, are common to the more 
 sensitive natures among mankind, and make a direct 
 human appeal, recalling to the reader his own past 
 phases of consciousness when life was all ahead and 
 the soul stood confident in unstained armor. Looked 
 back to, there is pathos about these moods the pathos 
 of Richard II. deposed by Bolingbroke. The percep- 
 tion of impermanence in the world, the decay of love, 
 the fading of beauty, is that which often enough gives 
 the first rude shock of awakening; the world we knew 
 or thought we knew is gone, and in its stead is a 
 universe in which life is but a dream in the night of 
 death, a moment's glow in the northern sky ; beauty 
 a malign phase of transitoriness and love an emblem 
 of mockery. The virgin arms are stained, and after 
 their first defeat few are able to see again the gleaming 
 
 [251
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 of the Grail. Most are absorbed, during the later 
 years, by the daily routine of life, seeing only what 
 is about them, desiring only the things of this world; 
 "but some whose eyes were more divinely touched" 
 carry with them to the end a sense of exile, a nos- 
 talgia for the land across whose borders the eyes of 
 boyhood looked when mists closed in and the vision 
 was blotted from all but memory. For such, the clouds 
 are occasionally lifted, and for them the value of life 
 lies wholly in the frequency and duration of the 
 moments of vision when the soul feels its wings, and, 
 in the radiance of the eternal, sees once more a world 
 of permanence and of spiritual values an ideal world 
 which is realized to be of greater actuality than the 
 transitory phenomena perceived daily by the senses. 
 It is only the ideal that has actual reality. 
 
 The machinery of the poem, which is simple enough 
 to one who has even a rudimentary knowledge of 
 Platonic thought and imagery, is lucidly explained in 
 the Argument, but the peculiar success of it is that a 
 poem so burdened with philosophic meaning is never 
 overweighted. It has the glow of spring upon it a 
 richer spring turning to summer; it expresses the 
 nobility of youth such youth Plato must have had 
 when he walked with his master, or as, when death 
 had claimed him, his friends thought of in Sir Philip 
 Sidney clear-eyed and familiar with the stars. It 
 has the same lovely landscapes, though here they are 
 of the Mediterranean world, but it has a richer music 
 than that of The North Shore Watch, a greater power 
 of verbal evocation, a more mature technique and mas- 
 tery of line and phrase. There are many things in 
 Agathon which have not been touched on in this brief 
 resume, much observation of life, much wisdom ; but, 
 like its predecessor, it is a subjective, what might be 
 
 [261
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 called a centripetal poem, the author's interest being 
 still drawn inward, and directed mainly toward the 
 relation between the individual and the universe, or 
 rather toward the effect of the universe on the person. 
 Only in his later work does the interest broaden until 
 individual experience is seen merely as a pulsation in 
 the eternal rhythm a falling wave which though dis- 
 tinguishable for a moment, lives only as part of an 
 infinite whole, a manifestation of something greater 
 than itself. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The group of lyrics gathered together under the 
 collective title of Wild Eden and first published in 
 1899 form a distinctly different part of the volume 
 under consideration and represent to many the height 
 of Mr. Woodberry's achievement. Wild Eden is the 
 poet's tribute to the beauty of the earth. In these 
 lyrics, the two opposing forces which the first quoted 
 poem described as in conflict, seem to have ceased for 
 a time contending for the poet's allegiance ; the love 
 of the beauty that is seen fills and satisfies him, what 
 might be called his ascetism appearing only in occa- 
 sional moods of regret or self-reproach. In the main 
 they are exquisite love-poems, almost touching in their 
 tenderness and spirituality ; or nature-poems written 
 by one who knows whereof he speaks and who has 
 loved the out-of-doors in all weathers : The bat and 
 the humming bird are dear to him ; he has watched 
 devotedly through sunlit, musing hours the bees in 
 the linden's bloom, the garden flowers ; he has known 
 the exhilaration of the storm and reveled in the might 
 of the sea. 
 
 The daily aspects of nature come to Mr. Wood- 
 berry with the vividness of a revelation; he brings 
 that emotional intensity which has been noted as a 
 
 [27]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 characteristic, to all that he feels or sees, and the 
 lyrics seem to spring spontaneously from his lips as 
 though the emotion that was in him forced him to 
 find unpremeditated relief in the creative act. 
 
 A voice in the roaring pine wood, 
 
 A voice in the breaking sea, 
 A voice in the storm-red morning, 
 
 That will not let me be. 
 
 Might in the pine wood tossing, 
 
 Might on the racing sea, 
 The Weather-spirit, my brother, 
 
 Is calling, calling to me. 
 
 These are not the words of a mystic or of one who 
 has given himself wholly to the far glimmer of the 
 Grail. 
 
 The love-poems have the charm and color of slow 
 twilights, the delicacy of April, they are not things of 
 the summer noon; and it would be difficult to repre- 
 sent them by quotation, for their effect is cumulative 
 like that which comes through praying generations to 
 a cathedral, giving in the end a sense of spiritual pres- 
 ence there. Some of them leave an impression of alle- 
 gorical significance as though the Maiden described 
 were, like the Lady of Shelley's Sensitive Plant, an 
 incarnation of the ideal ; but most are direct enough 
 and one will serve as well as another to give the type. 
 
 THE ROSE. 
 O love's star over Eden, 
 
 How pale and faint thou art! 
 Now lost, now seen above, 
 
 Thy white rays point and dart. 
 
 [281
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 O, liquid o'er her move, 
 
 Shine out and take my part! 
 I have sent her the rose of love, 
 
 And shut in the rose is tny heart. 
 
 The fireflies glitter and rush 
 
 In the dark of the summer mead; 
 Pale on the hawthorn bush, 
 
 Bright on the larkspur seed ; 
 And long is heaven aflush 
 
 To give my rose god-speed; 
 If she breathe a kiss, it will blush; 
 
 If she bruise a leaf, it will bleed. 
 
 O bright star over Eden, 
 
 All beautiful thou art; 
 To-day, in the rose, the rose, 
 
 For my love I have perilled my heart; 
 Now, ere the dying glows 
 
 From the placid isles depart, 
 The rose-bathed planet knows 
 
 It is hers, my rose, my heart! 
 
 No matter how rapt the poet's delight in the things 
 of earth may be, the sense of their transitoriness, the 
 perception of that eternal world whose beauty fades 
 not, neither passes away, is never long in abeyance. 
 Even in Wild Eden it comes on him occasionally and 
 one other poem from the group must be quoted, partly 
 because it shows curiously the sense of the eternal 
 coming in the midst of an ecstatic appreciation of 
 the temporal the two being not in conflict, but the 
 one, as it were, a means of ascent to the other and 
 partly because it illustrates, if our theory be correct, 
 that gift which his Mediterranean experiences gave 
 
 [29]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 the author. The poem is luminous ; it is bathed in 
 light and color the color of Sorolla, not of Corot 
 and its climax in the word "incandescent" is one that 
 no other writer would have been apt to reach with 
 such telling effectiveness. The landscape, which prob- 
 ably to the poet was of New England, suggests rather 
 to the reader some garden above Naples on a sum- 
 mer noon ; it has the glow and color of the South, the 
 light in which sculpture should be seen and which has 
 made the sculptor's art a southern one as that of the 
 painter is northern. In its thought as in its picture, 
 this poem is peculiarly characteristic of Mr. Wood- 
 bery. 
 
 THE ROSE BOWER. 
 A crimson bower the garden glows, 
 In overhanging noon, intense and bare, 
 Enisled and bathed in silence and repose. 
 As it were mirrored on the azure air; 
 All molten lies the faint blue-shimmering deep, 
 Impalpably transparent, smooth with light; 
 Far in the fragrant pines the hot winds sleep; 
 And nothing moves, and all dark things are bright. 
 Yet is this fair round of tranquillity, 
 This swathe of color, wheresoe'er it be, 
 The burning shell of elemental strife; 
 And never yet so fleeting seemed sweet life; 
 So fragile this thin film of human eyes, 
 In whose slight orb are springtime and sunrise; 
 So perishable this incandescent frame, 
 Lone Nature's inextinguishable pyre 
 Of transitory loveliness and bliss, 
 This undulating and eternal flame 
 Of beauty burning in its perfumed fire, 
 And passion dying in its tropic kiss. 
 
 [301
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 Even now the sweet-hued vision sinks away, 
 And from these bathing flames of night and day, 
 As in my hour to come it soon may seem 
 When fades to ashes earth's majestic dream, 
 My soul springs up erect, alone, supreme, 
 And, passing from this glory, doth survey, 
 As some spent meteor's low and dying gleam, 
 This radiant life that burns all else away, 
 Consuming its own star; a moment, where 
 About my feet morning and evening flare, 
 My spirit gazes, still a stranger there, 
 On this dear human home, so szveet, so fair, 
 Nor yet unfolds aloft eternal wings. 
 Then slowly lapsing into sensuous things, 
 Once more do I inhale this glorious light, 
 Breathe the soft air and feel the flowering earth, 
 And on me comes the everlasting sea, 
 Purple horizons, emerald-hanging woods, 
 The rose bower, and love's blissful solitudes, 
 Where voices of eternity 
 Have wandered from my birth, 
 And nothing save love's mystery 
 Shines with immortal worth. 
 V. 
 
 Beside The North Shore Watch, Agathon, the Wild 
 Eden lyrics and the two others which have been 
 quoted, the volume under consideration contains a 
 number of miscellaneous poems, some of which were 
 written for occasions such as the Emerson Centenary 
 Service, and the memorial to the author's friend, 
 Edwin Booth. Many of these particularly the patri- 
 otic sonnets are very fine, but some seem rather 
 perfunctory and uninspired. None need detain us 
 here. Mr. Woodberry is a poet of the inspirational 
 type; the effectiveness of his work is largely de- 
 
 [31]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 pendent upon the complete fusion of the emotional 
 and intellectual elements that are in him, and upon the 
 apparent spontaneity with which he sets down what 
 an inner necessity seems to compel him to express ; 
 when the fusion is less than perfect or when expres- 
 sion is compelled by an external rather than an inward 
 necessity the resulting product loses in poetic quality. 
 He would have made a poor laureate. 
 
 Up to this period of his career, Mr. Woodberry 
 was of the nineteenth century; his work, at least in 
 externals, being a last, late bloom of that summer 
 which had produced Tennyson, Arnold and Swin- 
 burne, though in his habits of mind he seemed more 
 nearly akin, among English poets, to Wordsworth and 
 Shelley. The publication of the collected volume of 
 1903 was followed by some years of poetic silence and 
 when Mr. Woodberry spoke again he used a new 
 language. The thought in his earlier work has de- 
 veloped rather than changed its direction, the emo- 
 tional element has merely grown more intense, but 
 in externals his later poetry is as distinctly of the 
 twentieth century as the earlier is of the century that 
 has passed. That which is of importance in the work 
 of any poet, all that gives it its essential value, is inde- 
 pendent of time and place, as true to New York as 
 to Athens, to the twentieth century as to the first; 
 and it does not matter when or where or how a poem 
 was written ; only the garment of poetry changes, only 
 the fashion and semblance of it ; and this is a fact 
 which must never be forgotten. The essential human 
 problems and experiences are what they were two 
 thousand years ago, and the sea comes to the shore 
 exactly as it did when Homer knew it. The manner 
 of a poem may be of the twentieth century or of the 
 renaissance, the matter of it, if it be a good poem, 
 is eternal. 
 
 [32]
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Flight and Other Poems, a collection of about 
 fifty new pieces, none of which is very long, was pub- 
 lished in 1914 after an interval of eleven years. The 
 intellectual content of many of these poems, and Mr. 
 Woodberry delivers his message with earnest convic- 
 tion of its truth, is based not on reason but in faith, 
 and apparently is derived from a series of intuitive 
 glimpses into the heart of the universe that are like 
 the moments of illumination with which the records of 
 mysticism abound. He likewise shows himself en- 
 dowed with a faculty which might be called "cosmic 
 consciousness," a perception through feeling or intui- 
 tion of the intimate unity of life in all its manifesta- 
 tions and without regard to sequence in time. If we 
 read him correctly, each personal soul is merely a 
 manifestation of the race-soul, and consequently all 
 are essentially equal. It is the poignant realization 
 of this absolute equality and brotherhood of men, 
 whatever may be the accidents of time and circum- 
 stance, that kindles many of these poems ; and as 
 the life-spirit itself is eternal the message of the book 
 is one of passionate hope and joy. We can afford to 
 forget our mistakes, to forget the actual pathos and 
 tragedy of life, for we are only at the beginning; 
 eternity is before us, we must spend no time in mourn- 
 ing or repentance, but must look forward; and the 
 poet is raised to ecstasy in contemplation of the youth 
 and hope with which the universe is instinct. The 
 stars above the desert sing to him : 
 
 [33]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 "We sit in our burning spheres 
 
 inimitably hung; 
 
 By the speed of light we measure the years 
 On purple ether flung; 
 
 Without a shadow time appears, 
 A calendar of echoing lights 
 That flame and dusk from depths and heights, 
 And all our years are young. 
 
 "We gaze on the far flood flowing 
 
 Unimaginably free, 
 Multitudinous, mystical, glowing, 
 But all we do not see; 
 
 And a rapture is all our knowing, 
 That on fiery nerves comes stealing, 
 An intimate revealing 
 That all is yet to be." 
 
 Much of Mr. Woodberry's poetry, as was suggested 
 above, is the record of a passionate search of the soul 
 for satisfaction, and in the book now under considera- 
 tion there are many descriptions of the quest. For- 
 tunately, the author's utterances are nothing if not dis- 
 tinct, and we can summarize briefly : The pursuit of 
 beauty leads nowhere, and duty, which is ordinary 
 morality, fails to give satisfaction; these things are 
 of the earth, earthy. Learning and wealth, as the 
 Poverello of Assisi taught long ago, are the fetters 
 of the soul and must be set aside with all other 
 conventional standards, for complete spiritual free- 
 dom is essential to self-realization. It is only by mak- 
 ing the brotherhood of man a standard of action 
 rather than a merely theoretic creed ; by feeling pas- 
 sionately the absolute equality of all men as sharers 
 in the race-spirit; by forgetting our conventional 
 
 [341
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 values and going as their peer among the lowly and 
 the outcast, as St. Francis did, that we can satisfy 
 the soul by bringing it once more into harmony with 
 that which is eternal and essential. There are many 
 lyrics about children, for children are spiritually free. 
 
 By no means all of the poems in the collection are 
 burdened with the meanings that have been outlined 
 above. Many present their moods simply ; but even 
 the ones most heavily freighted with philosophic or 
 humanitarian ideas are saved from the slightest ap- 
 pearance of didacticism by the close fusion of the 
 intellectual element with that strong emotion which 
 is the basis of each and all. The settings are of the 
 Mediterranean world, in Greece or Italy, Sicily or 
 North Africa, and many of the poems have that glow 
 of color which is characteristic of their author's work. 
 
 As poetry the simpler pieces are perhaps the more 
 successful, for in some of the others the author is 
 so filled with what he wishes to express that he occa- 
 sionally forgets his artistry ; such poems lack the ex- 
 ternal poetic graces and impress the reader rather as 
 spontaneous outpourings than as the expression of ar- 
 tistically controlled emotion as Dionysiac rather than 
 Apollonian forms of art but there is a strange power 
 in them all, a vividness of imagination and intensity 
 of emotion that make the book, whether one likes it 
 or not, unique. The volume is divided into three sec- 
 tions, the third of which, though it contains much 
 charming verse, need not concern us greatly, the first 
 two being of far more importance to such a study 
 as this. 
 
 II. 
 
 The first part of the 1914 volume contains, beside 
 the poems descriptive of North Africa many of which 
 are based on that perception which has been spoken 
 
 [35]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 of as "cosmic consciousness," and some of which are 
 certainly as fine as anything in the book, the philo- 
 sophic poems, a general idea of which has already 
 been given. From these the tone of the whole volume 
 is derived and to them the golden thread which we 
 have followed leads. They give further record of 
 that quest, that search for a realization of the eternal 
 in the temporal, to which the poet has devoted him- 
 self, but they seem also to record an actual attainment. 
 In his earlier work he was to use a wholly irrelevant 
 image like a man who being lost at night desires 
 very earnestly to reach home but has no idea of how 
 to get there ; now he has found the way. It is not 
 a New England lane ; nor is it a path liable to 
 grow dusty with much travel, for he who would walk 
 therein must first set aside all conventions, deny aes- 
 thetic and moral values, Hebraism and Hellenism 
 the appreciation of beauty in the ordinary meanings 
 of the word, and that sense of duty which is a tradi- 
 tional inheritance and frequently has no basis in rea- 
 son. To him who has discarded all these and finds 
 himself without trammels, both mentally and spirit- 
 ually free, the path is short and leads to that "King- 
 dom of All-Souls" where men are realized to be in 
 absolute equality, and democracy reaches its logical 
 conclusion. Although to the few this path is a way of 
 salvation, it is one that it might be unwise for many 
 to follow ; but the philosophic conception, which is 
 somewhat Nietzchean as well as somewhat Franciscan, 
 is, in a man of Mr. Woodberry's preeminent spirit- 
 uality, one of peculiar nobility and loftiness. The au- 
 thor's command of technique is illustrated by the fact 
 that he has expressed his ideas in lyrical stanzas of 
 perfect lucidity that contain many elements of pic- 
 torial and poetic value. 
 
 [361
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 We were past the good and the evil, 
 
 In the spirit's uttermost dark; 
 He is neither god nor devil 
 
 For whom my heart-beats hark ; 
 And I leaned my cheek to my horse's neck, 
 
 And I sang to his ear in the dark: 
 "There is neither good nor evil, 
 There is neither god nor devil, 
 
 And our way lies on through the dark. 
 
 "I have never heard it or learnt it, 
 
 It is in me like my soul, 
 And the sights of this world have burnt it 
 
 In me to a living coal, 
 The soul of man is a masterless thing 
 
 And bides not another's control; 
 And gypsy-broods of bandit-loins 
 Shall teach what the lawless life enjoins 
 
 Upon the lawless soul. 
 
 "When we dare neither to loose nor to bind, 
 
 However to us things appear; 
 When whatsoever in -others we find, 
 
 We shall feel neither shame nor fear; 
 When we learn that to love the lowliest 
 
 We must first salute him our peer; 
 When the basest is most our brother, 
 And we neither look down on nor up to another, 
 
 The end of our ride shall be near." 
 
 There can be little doubt of the fact that vast revo- 
 lutionary forces are at work casting the race in some 
 new social mould and it is the coming of this new 
 order for him the entrance into that Kingdom of All- 
 Souls which is beyond the realm of the sensual and 
 
 [371
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 above that of the moral law that Mr. Woodberry 
 hails in stanzas which seem based on passionate, pro- 
 phetic conviction rather than on that vague hope of an 
 unvisualized millenium which has given a subject to 
 so many poets. The motive is one long familiar to 
 poetry; but the method of its working out in the 
 intellect and the characteristic intensity of its treat- 
 ment are peculiar to Mr. Woodberry. The Way, and 
 Beyond Good and Evil are more successful in the 
 poetic presentation of these ideas than is the poem 
 entitled The Kingdom of All-Souls, which is printed 
 first in the volume. All grew out of New England, 
 much as the French Revolution grew out of the ancien 
 regime, or Wilde's comedies from the conservatism of 
 the Victorian era ; but they could not have been writ- 
 ten by a poet who had spent his days looking out on 
 Beverly from his study window, or by one who had 
 come into less intimate contact than has Mr. Wood- 
 berry with other lives in other lands. It is the human 
 touch, the humanity in him, that turns a theory of life 
 into a living force. 
 
 III. 
 
 The North African pieces in this section of the 
 book take their rise in the poet's Mediterranean wan- 
 derings which brought to his native New Englandism, 
 with the color of the South, the background of a world 
 older in experience. They illustrate better than any 
 others what has been said regarding his deepening 
 sense of the impermanence of the individual, the con- 
 tinuity of life. There are mysterious elements in man 
 weird traces of atavism, perceptions of age-old wis- 
 dom to which some are sensitive and most are not. 
 Seldom has this shadowland on the borders of con- 
 sciousness, with its strange landscapes, been painted 
 as Mr. Woodberry paints it here, and one must turn 
 
 [38]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 to his prose book on North Africa to find again the 
 mystery of the desert-world so subtly rendered and 
 interpreted. 
 
 These poems also show a persistent sense of dual 
 personality, though not in the ordinary meaning of the 
 term ; it is as though the soul itself had a double ex- 
 istence, as a separate entity young and inexperienced 
 and as an emanation of the race-soul, endowed with 
 race consciousness and memories, and at home in a 
 world that is not subject to change though it expresses 
 itself in transitory manifestations. Looked at from 
 another point of view, this duality is that of the better 
 and the lower natures in man, the untrammeled spirit 
 and the part that is fettered by sense again the horses 
 of the Phaedrus. More will be said of this in connec- 
 tion with The Roamer; but it is now clear that the 
 golden thread we started to follow, however it may 
 have changed its direction, has led on unbroken. A 
 poem called The Riding is, unfortunately, too long to 
 quote, and another must be made to do service in its 
 place, though choice is difficult, as each of the shorter 
 ones illustrates only a part of what has been said. 
 
 THE REVENANT. 
 It was at Tunis, in the shop 
 I told you of, where women stop, 
 And falls the perfume, drop by drop, 
 
 That first he came, 
 Who in my own flesh dotheth him, 
 And drugs my soul with memories dim, 
 And fills my body to the brim, 
 
 A perfumed flame. 
 
 I know new meanings in the rose, 
 Old channels in my sense unclose, 
 
 [391
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 Along my nerves the music goes 
 
 Of ancient time; 
 
 And I am changed to what has been, 
 Silk-robed, and turbaned with the green, 
 I try the thin edge damascene 
 
 Of secret crime. 
 
 To leaner sheaths my spirit shrinks, 
 And long-forbidden pleasures drinks; 
 The mindless life that never thinks, 
 
 Crumbles my soul; 
 And o'er the ruined yellow wall 
 Of zvhat I was, there groweth tall 
 A flower, ivhose incense like a pall 
 
 Doth round me roll. 
 
 I hear a padding on the stones, 
 There comes a terror in my bones, 
 A throttling stills my crumpled moans 
 
 And little cries; 
 And who is he sits in my place, 
 A lither soul, a softer grace, 
 A lore of ages in his face, 
 
 And world-wise eyesf 
 
 The Revenant! in every clime 
 He uses me to be the mime 
 Of weird things acted in the time 
 
 Of long ago; 
 
 What mysteries of heart and brain, 
 What forms of beauty, forms of pain, 
 The sun shall never see again, 
 
 Revive and glow! 
 
 [40
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 A thousand years has he been clay 
 Who from me takes the soul away, 
 And in my body makes his play, 
 
 Do what I can; 
 
 Strange visitant, in myriad shapes, 
 Who in myself my being apes! 
 Ah, nowhere now my soul escapes 
 
 The Ghost of Man. 
 
 It is impossible to close this section without referring 
 to Comrades, a poem which has perhaps been liked by 
 more people than any other of Mr. Woodberry's re- 
 cent pieces. It has the sadness inevitable to retro- 
 spection and advancing age, for many comrades have 
 departed and of those who survive each is absorbed 
 by his own life, the close intimacies of youth being no 
 longer possible in later years ; but it is a very human 
 poem and as direct in its appeal as anything in the 
 book. 
 
 O love that passes the love of woman! 
 
 Who that hath felt it shall ever forget, 
 When the breath of life with a throb turns human, 
 
 And a lad's heart is to a lad's heart set? 
 
 Mr. Woodberry has a native talent for writing 
 lyrics. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The second division of the volume takes us again 
 to the Mediterranean world, but here instead of pic- 
 turing the dancing girl of the desert, seen while 
 
 With lids that doze in panther sleep 
 Bedouins upon her motions keep 
 Their couchant eyes . . . 
 
 Mr. Woodberry shows us Italy and Sicily lands of 
 [411
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 sunlight peopled with singing youths and maidens 
 and Greece where sometimes children seen against 
 gray ruins have the sadness of ages in their eyes. On 
 the whole, however, it is a light-hearted part of the 
 book ; the passion has burned itself out, the poet being 
 contented to rest for a little in the sunlight, enjoying 
 quietly what nature gives him, but ready to answer 
 with quick response to any contact with her children. 
 One feels in these poems the quality that has made 
 the heart of youth turn to Mr. Woodberry himself 
 with such unusual devotion a quality that has made 
 him, entirely apart from his writings, a power in the 
 lancj and fortunately for the critic most of them 
 are of a kind about which nothing need be said in 
 description or elucidation. In some the beautiful 
 stanzas on Proserpine, for example the poet strikes 
 a deeper note, but even in these the thought has the 
 mellowness, the genial warmth of an October noon- 
 tide, the author seeming to be in a mood of quiet 
 acquiescence, accepting life as it is and willing to be 
 warmed by the autumn sunlight, without revolt against 
 the recognized imperfections of the order in which we 
 live and without the tumult of unsatisfied aspiration. 
 The poet in the land he loves and keenly responsive 
 to all the beauty of it, 
 
 From the silver tips of the olive tops 
 To the silver edge of the sea, 
 
 has come to accept impermanence, to see in decay 
 evolution, in transitoriness the passing on of the 
 "torch," even to accept Death as something beautiful 
 in itself and the possible opening of a doorway to new 
 beauty, new things to be loved, fresh objects of desire. 
 Mr. Woodberry has always been a great lover ; he has 
 loved the sky and the sea, the Italian hillsides and 
 
 [42]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 the Northern Shore, but most of all he has loved the 
 heart of youth with its aspirations and its glimpses 
 of the eternal. 
 
 There is nothing, as was said above, in the third 
 part of the 1914 collection which requires comment. 
 
 43]
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 I. 
 
 The main part of this volume would end here were 
 it not for The First Book of The Roamer, a fragment 
 nearly one thousand lines long which was published 
 in a magazine called "East and West," October, 1900. 
 A few copies of this first book with a second added 
 were privately printed in 1903, just as Mr. Wood- 
 berry's years of silence commenced ; but the first alone 
 can be considered here, as the second has not yet been 
 made public, and the remaining ones, if they have 
 been written, exist only in manuscript. The first book, 
 however, demands a chapter by itself ; for beside the 
 fact that probably upon The Roamer, if it is finished, 
 a large part of the author's fame will ultimately rest; 
 he seems to have concentrated in the part we have of 
 it the finest of his thought, and to have put there cer- 
 tainly as fine poetry as any that he has yet written. 
 
 The poem, if the whole may be judged from a part, 
 is an epic of the soul of man ; the epic conflict being 
 between the higher and the lower natures. Apart from 
 the machinery of the piece and its imaginary land- 
 scape, The Roamer -and it must be clearly understood 
 that only the first book is before us might be called 
 an autobiography of the spirit. It is a reasoned, or- 
 derly account of the spiritual experiences that have 
 been the motive of Mr. Woodberry's work from the 
 beginning; it describes the early vision of an ideal, 
 eternal world ; the consecration of the young soul to a 
 realization of this in daily experience ; the boy knight 
 setting out upon his quest; the gathering of the 
 powers of darkness bringing him the perception of his 
 
 [441
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 own lower nature and of the evil of the world; his 
 wounds and wavering and final determination to 
 cleave to the ideal, though the cost may be the only 
 life we actually know, and though half the object of 
 the quest the desire to realize the eternal beauty so 
 clearly that it can be brought to others as an element 
 of vital significance in their lives can never be at- 
 tained. In its action the poem is of the "Alastor" 
 type, but there is a stern gravity about it that suggests, 
 rather, Lucretius or Dante ; and Mr. Woodberry has 
 put into the piece his own passionate earnestness. It 
 is tempting to forecast from the introductory book the 
 remaining course of the poem, but the part we have 
 holds enough for our present attention; for beside 
 the poetry the splendid rhetoric of the pages the 
 thoughts suggested in it are of value as throwing much 
 light upon a phase of human experience that is beyond 
 the reach of most and has seldom been treated in Eng- 
 lish poetry with so keen an intellectual appreciation. 
 The poetic reactions of Wordsworth, to whom such 
 experiences were familiar life-long, usually issued in 
 quiet emotion ; the intellectual element was seldom 
 present and in the few poems where it does appear 
 there is nothing of the penetrating, intense light of 
 The Roamer. 
 
 II. 
 
 The difficulty of finding an old copy of a bygone 
 magazine is considerable, and as most will be unable 
 to read The Roamer for themselves until it is finished 
 and published in some more accessible form, it be- 
 comes necessary to follow the poem through in detail 
 and to give ample quotations. 
 
 The Roamer or rather the fragment we have of it 
 is compact and therefore somewhat difficult to epito- 
 mize, but it starts out clearly enough with the an- 
 
 [45]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 nouncement of a double duality, that of the higher and 
 lower natures, and that duality referred to above which 
 makes the individual soul perceive that beside its own 
 separate existence it lives as part of the race-soul 
 a vessel into which are poured for transmission race- 
 ideals and racial traditions. It is through separate 
 manifestations of the race-soul that the "torch" of 
 Mr. Woodberry's prose works is handed on from gen- 
 eration to generation and from one civilization to the 
 next. The glowing invocation with which the poem 
 opens is chiefly concerned with the race and the pos- 
 sible realization of its long-delayed ideals through 
 American democracy an idea that was part of the 
 purely American patriotism characteristic of this 
 period of the author's development. The Roamer him- 
 self the protagonist of the poem is imaged some- 
 times as the higher nature the eternal element in man 
 doomed to wander for awhile, an exile, in the desert 
 of the world, and sometimes as the race-soul prisoned 
 in the individual and fettered by the earthly elements 
 with which it has been compounded. The distinctions 
 between these two and the whole human entity as ordi- 
 narily known to sense, are liable to confuse the in- 
 attentive reader, and were it not for the extreme elo- 
 quence of the poem the persistent beauty of line and 
 phrase so much subtlety and metaphysics would keep 
 the piece from being what it is a delight to read, a 
 genuine and unquestioned work of art. With the boy's 
 first sense of the eternal element in him comes, if he 
 be that way gifted, the creative instinct: 
 
 Then as from shadowy pines, before light comes, 
 A solitary wood-note bursts too soon 
 Some bird hath waked, and feels his darkened wings 
 Low in the hollow of the sea-blown wood 
 
 [46]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 / set my fingers to the unknown stops, 
 
 And blew; and fresh as over quiet fields 
 
 Rises the burden of the bough and briar, 
 
 New music, wild and sweet, blown through the world, 
 
 So rose my idyl; all the valley -side 
 
 Was hushed, and clinging to my lips the reed 
 
 Felt the first tremor of immortal breath; 
 
 And like an angel singing in his birth, 
 
 Aloft the lone and mounting melody 
 
 Moved, darkling, to the bosom of the dawn. 
 
 But the ideal self "All I could never be," to use 
 Browning's phrase comes to be imaged as a fair 
 youth thinking noble thoughts, a visible form that can- 
 not be approached, but summing in himself all aspira- 
 tion, must remain perpetually an object of desire: 
 
 Aive came upon me seeing in his face 
 
 The lineaments of my own all sweetly changed 
 
 To that ideal I hope to wear in heaven. 
 
 So with his passion blending more and more, 
 
 As the dark earth when sinks the starry west, 
 
 Mortal I moved to meet eternal light; 
 
 And, moving, dreamed how that young soul should be 
 
 The flaming of a torch across the years, 
 
 And through the world the rising of a star. 
 
 Ay me! but what avails to nurse the soul, 
 And will the better world, that heaven delays? 
 When hath it come? Soon gathered round his heart 
 O, too familiar to this clouded breast 
 Immortal dread, awe of the alien powers 
 In this dark sphere, these vague infinities 
 Of matter round the solitude of mind 
 With menace, this dull crush of monstrous force 
 Crumbling the dense compact, this far-strown world, 
 
 [47]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 Abysmal being without mete or bound, 
 
 With endless shadows roved; whence thought, alarmed, 
 
 Strains in its orbit and its casing frame, 
 
 Ranges the vast, and calls from star to star, 
 
 With question of this cold eternity. 
 
 O striving Stress, O everlasting Might, 
 
 In every atom spawning energy 
 
 And cradling life in every blowing germ, 
 
 Storm of the world, swift drift and surge of time 
 
 That lifts the swimmer to the rushing flood 
 
 One moment's space, and thrusts him down to hell, 
 
 And rolls the next aloft, zvhile, age on age, 
 
 Millions of men innumerably spread, 
 
 Faces along the illimitable wave, 
 
 Float up, and look, and sink, O star-cold Space, 
 
 When hast thou answered, unto whom, or where! 
 
 Soon youth gains an equally clear perception of the 
 evils that are in life, and when this comes, the reality 
 and immanence of the ideal seem lost 
 
 Too mortal is he born whom God doth choose! 
 
 This part of the poem is carried forward through a 
 superb succession of wild landscape pictures, until 
 finally when the shock of surprise has worn away, 
 good and evil, beauty and deformity, are seen together, 
 forces eternally in conflict ; and youth consecrates it- 
 self to the quest of the ideal, knowing well that the 
 pathway will be hard but not yet quite realizing what 
 terrors material and immaterial infest it. 
 
 There, by the slope, and worming o'er the edge, 
 The narrow track of noble peril ran; 
 And, thinly springing, many a lonely sheaf 
 Of beamy blades and starry-dipping points 
 
 [481
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 Flashed back the battle of the dying world. 
 He saw he sprang he heard the challenge peal, 
 Caught like the mighty blast of Roland dead 
 Far-blown from standards of the fallen Christ; 
 And light o'erflowed within him,, light long sought, 
 From the old sources gushing, light divine, 
 Whose piercing revelation nought obstructs, 
 Created or imagined or devised, 
 The masks of mimicry or vestures true, 
 Earth's massy mould or the dark breast of man. 
 
 Except for the exquisite lyrical interludes which have 
 the reflective function of the Greek chorus and com- 
 ment on the action, the remainder of the book is taken 
 up with the description of successive phases of evil that 
 become apparent to the young soul, sometimes wound- 
 ing it and sometimes causing it to waver in the bitter- 
 ness of growing despair; for ever as it follows on, 
 mounting higher and higher on its lonely way, it sees 
 more of the evil that is in the life of the present and 
 grows able, with accumulated knowledge, to vision 
 more clearly universal decay, the transitoriness of all 
 things, the worm eternally feeding on the heart of 
 beauty. 
 
 And ever where the far horizons flung 
 Round him with mightier folds the starry robe, 
 He read the man-myth on the shining hem, 
 Iran, Chaldea, Egypt, and more late, 
 Divinely springing from the Olympian mount, 
 The torch-race of the ever-dying gods, 
 Orb after orb of throneless deity; 
 And spectral o'er him broke in that frore air 
 The burnt-out hopes, and ghosts of prophecy, 
 That once from holy hearts rose charioted, 
 
 [491
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 And in the zenith hung their mighty faiths, 
 
 Visions of old, by every mastering race 
 
 Set in the blazing zodiac of time; 
 
 The fiery pillar that brought Israel forth 
 
 Rose like an exhalation; flaming stood 
 
 The Cross that went before imperial Rome; 
 
 Pale swam the moon of Islam dropping blood; 
 
 And out they flickered, brief as shooting stars; 
 
 Then dark the slow recovery of his sight, 
 
 Weary of all that never ceasing death, 
 
 Saw Lethe roll against a purple dawn, . . . 
 
 The close of the book leaves the Roamer apparently 
 overcome by the forces of evil and, like Roland at 
 Roncesvalles, consoled only by the sense of his own 
 loyalty : 
 
 And in his ears faint rang the dying blast 
 Of Roland dead with all his chivalry. 
 
 The Roamer is a very noble poem, and its connection 
 with the rest of Mr. Woodberry's work is obvious. 
 
 50
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Intense spirituality ; a passionate loyalty to the ideal 
 with an almost equal devotion to the world of sense, 
 the two being seen oftenest as forces in conflict, or 
 the one as a lure winning the spirit from its consecra- 
 tion to the other; a growing breadth of interest and 
 sympathy issuing in an increased externality and lack 
 of self-centredness ; the love of children ; an unusually 
 keen appreciation of color and light; a growing per- 
 ception of the complete inter-relation of all manifesta- 
 tions of the life-spirit; these are the leading charac- 
 teristics of Mr. Woodberry as a poet. He is of the 
 great Platonic tradition which has been handed down 
 in English poetry by Shelley and Wordsworth, and 
 Shelleyean is his insistence upon love as the means 
 of race-salvation, and upon the complete realization of 
 democracy as the essential step in social progress. His 
 New Englandism, from certain traditional phases of 
 which he subsequently revolted, has been sufficiently 
 pointed out, and there is no need of dwelling further 
 upon that glow of color which came to his poetry 
 from the Mediterranean years ; but the thought has 
 not been more than suggested that the poet's develop- 
 ment from the subjectivity and localization of interest 
 shown in his early work to that all-embracing sym- 
 pathy and sense of kinship which make his later poems 
 what they are, may also have been a gift of that older 
 world, where the individual is seen against a back- 
 ground of the ages, and the continuity of life, through 
 perpetual recurrence of bloom and decay, leaves its 
 impress upon the least sensitive mind. Greece is not 
 dead nor Italy and bountiful Demeter still pours 
 
 [51]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 upon her Mediterranean lands an inexhaustible gift 
 to mortals. Had it not been for Greece, for the affinity 
 between the author's mind and the great traditions of 
 European culture, his poetry would have been a dif- 
 ferent, a less intensely living thing than it is. 
 
 One as familiar as Mr. Woodberry must be with 
 the imaginative literature of the world one with the 
 scholar's perspective can only create genuine poetry 
 of his own if he is of the few who being driven on- 
 ward by a sort of inner necessity, are actually called 
 to do so. A poet, for example, who had never heard 
 of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, the ingenious Mrs. Behn, 
 "Paul and Virginia," or "Daphnis and Chloe," might 
 invent for himself the theory of the return to nature 
 and express it with passionate sincerity; but one to 
 whom the idea was familiar as an element in the cul- 
 ture of the race would have to bring to his annuncia- 
 tion of it something new and peculiarly his own to 
 make his message seem of importance either to him- 
 self or to a reader similarly endowed. It is the pas- 
 sion in Mr. Woodberry, the intensity of his spirit- 
 uality, the persistence and conviction with which he 
 clings to the ideal that, with the peculiar iridescence 
 of his style, give to his poetry its distinctive value. 
 
 In the work of poets of Mr. Woodberry's type there 
 are over-tones, the glow of reflected lights which bring 
 to their creations an added wealth of beauty. The 
 reader whose mind is sufficiently stocked, who is sensi- 
 tively receptive of these impressions, in reading such 
 poems reads also Sophocles and Virgil, Dante and 
 Petrarch; he whose ear is attuned to catch the over- 
 tones perceives subconsciously it may be that each 
 poem has a beauty added to its own beauty, a duality 
 of existence, like that which has been referred to in 
 another connection, each being seen as a thing having 
 
 [52]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 life and beauty of its own and seen at the same time 
 as a new manifestation of the race-mind, a new blos- 
 soming of the human spirit. The glamor brought to 
 a poem by its overtones, by the perception of its flow- 
 ering from a stalk which is rooted deep in race-con- 
 sciousness and brings forth blooms of beauty in per- 
 petual succession, gives it a double power of appeal, 
 an effectiveness that depends on what the reader is 
 able to read into it to the prepared ground on which 
 it falls. This theory, like some others that have been 
 referred to in the more general considerations of the 
 present volume, has been developed by Mr. Woodberry 
 himself in his prose works and only a very minor 
 aspect of it can be illustrated here. Thomas Hardy 
 has a poem which commences, 
 
 "When I set out for Lyonesse" ; 
 
 and the phrase has all the romance of the Arthurian 
 stories back of it ; if the author's destination had been 
 Casterbridge the line would produce in a reader fa- 
 miliar with Mr. Hardy's novels an entirely different 
 set of reactions, it would call to his mind new and 
 equally distinct images ; but if the word Liverpool 
 should be substituted for the word Lyonesse, the line 
 would have no overtones at all, no meaning other than 
 geographical except to the few who happen to have 
 intimate associations with that place. Either substitu- 
 tion would alter and limit the appeal. A word like 
 Lyonesse has its overtones, but ideas and ideals which 
 have lived on from generation to generation, in gather- 
 ing to themselves an accretion of spiritual significance, 
 have gained an existence more real than that of any 
 transient reality. The perception of these things 
 counts in art and in life; and one cannot justly ap- 
 preciate a poem unless he knows whereof the author 
 
 [53]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 speaks. Mr. Woodberry's poetry presupposes the ex- 
 istence of things of the spirit and some of it demands 
 from the reader an openness to spiritual contacts. The 
 poet's practical idealism is his own by right of personal 
 possession ; it is also a part of the inherited traditions 
 of European culture with which he is familiar, and 
 the reader who is able to see in it the glamor of famil- 
 iar things, old aspirations, old strivings of the spirit, 
 will not only get more out of it than one who is not, 
 but will also be able to appreciate more justly and 
 more keenly those elements of beauty in the author's 
 work which are peculiarly his own. 
 
 Superficially, Mr. Woodberry with his idealism, is 
 somewhat of a poet's poet, his appeal coming most 
 strongly to those who find the air he breathes native, 
 or at least, not wholly unfamiliar. Looking more 
 deeply than this, he is the poet of youth, giving, as he 
 does, voice to those usually evanescent ideals and as- 
 pirations whose flowering is of the springtime ; but 
 pursuing the inquiry still further, we find that mood of 
 longing which he has made distinctively his own, that 
 passionate craving for permanence, the ideal, in a 
 world of impermanence, which is the spiritual burden 
 of his message, to be one that lies deep in the general 
 heart of man and is a universal phase of human ex- 
 perience. Youth can follow most easily at least in 
 imagination Mr. Woodberry's starry flight ; but there 
 is hardly anyone who does not find at one time or an- 
 other welling up through buried strata of consciousness 
 that mood of aspiration which the poet has given his 
 years to express ; and a writer of verse whose char- 
 acteristic view of life, whose message, is of general 
 human significance has in his subject matter the sub- 
 stance of poetry whose value is enduring, and has 
 at least one characteristic of a major rather than of 
 
 [541
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 a minor poet. 
 
 No attempt to estimate Mr. Woodberry's position 
 as a vital force in American life and letters and this 
 is an attempt which the present writer does not feel 
 called upon to make can afford to forget for a mo- 
 ment that while his poetry may be the final distillation 
 of what he has in him, the writing of verse is only 
 one of the ways in which he has found means of self- 
 expression. He is best known to the world at large 
 as a writer of prose, a constructive thinker whose 
 sympathetic, interpretative criticisms of art and of life 
 have won him a place of distinction among his con- 
 temporaries ; but beside this, there is that peculiar 
 power of his personality which has affected strongly 
 the young men who have come into contact with him 
 in his classrooms or elsewhere, and is a fact recognized 
 even by those who are entirely out of sympathy with 
 the man and with his work. He has a strange ability 
 to evoke loyalty in the most curiously diverse kinds of 
 people poets and business men, leaders of fashion 
 and outcasts, intellectuals and Calabrian peasants and 
 the fact of his having this power even over some who 
 probably never have read anything he has written, or 
 who read it only because it is his, is a sufficient 
 comment upon the genuineness of that sympathetic 
 understanding and idealism which are traits of his 
 work. Poetry is an expression of personality and it 
 may well be that that passionate sincerity, that un- 
 worldly and unwavering insistence upon spiritual 
 values which we have noted in the one may be in 
 the other what has drawn men to him. Whether or 
 not that ideal world of which most catch fleeting 
 glimpses and which to some seems home, be only an- 
 other illusion of the senses, the enduring perception of 
 it made Wordsworth what he was, and in Mr. Wood- 
 
 [55]
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 berry's case has drawn to him, through his life as 
 through his art, the heart of youth. 
 
 Poetry is a shadow, the imperfect representation of 
 something else; it is also the opening of a door, and 
 the function of criticism is to show what door has been 
 opened and to help eyes that are unaccustomed to all 
 but objects of common familiarity see the beauty that 
 is beyond. If a poet lifts only a corner of the painted 
 veil, if he brings to us even a little of the white radi- 
 ance, his mission is accomplished ; and the peculiarity 
 of Mr. Woodberry's poetry is that what it preserves 
 of the light beyond is comparatively unstained by 
 transmission. 
 
 Since the publication of the 1914 volume, the occa- 
 sional appearance in the magazines of poems by Mr. 
 Woodberry has given evidence of his continued cre- 
 ative activity, and at the close of such a study as this 
 it is pleasant to look forward. The war must have 
 stirred him deeply, and whether his next publication 
 be the completed Roamer or a collection of new and 
 shorter pieces it will be interesting to see how his 
 belief in the coming of a new age, his faith in the 
 realization of brotherhood may have changed or de- 
 veloped. Mr. Woodberry is a profound thinker as 
 well as a poet; and his message of idealism, of 
 spirituality and brotherhood is one that 'America, 
 should ponder.* 
 
 *Since these lines were sent to the printer the Woodberry 
 Society has announced the immediate publication of a volume 
 of sonnets written by Mr. Woodberry and entitled Ideal 
 Passion. 
 
 56]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 I. 
 
 1871-72. 
 
 ""Contributions to The Voice, written at Exeter. 
 
 The Voice was a country weekly newspaper, published (an 
 Exeter classmate says) in New Hampshire. The editor of- 
 fered two columns to the Exeter school boys, in connection 
 with his contribution to the new Academy building. Mr. 
 Woodberry was one of the six school editors. In this paper 
 appeared his first printed poem The Greek Beggar(?) and 
 other things. No copy known. 
 
 II. 
 1873. 
 
 The Magenta, Harvard, Vol. I, No. 9, p. 101. Sonnet, "O 
 Love, whom I in early dreams have seen." 
 
 III. 
 
 1873-76. 
 
 Contributions (verse and prose) to the Harvard Advocate. 
 
 Vol. XV., No. 1-March 11, 1873-Forebodings. 
 
 Vol. XV., No. 3 April 1, 1873 Horace. 
 
 Vol. XV., No. 6 May 2, 1873 Blushes. 
 
 Vol. XV., No. 7 May 14, 1873 Three Songs: Flowers, 
 Fruits, Twilight. 
 
 Vol. XVI., No. 4 Oct. 31, 1873 Sea Mists. 
 
 Vol. XVI., No. 6 Nov. 28, 1873 To a Star. 
 
 Vol. XVI., No. 9 Jan. 23, 1874 Semper Resurgens. 
 
 Vol. XVII., No. 1 Feb. 20, 1874 An Elective in Art 
 (Prose). Signed "H. N. D.," which was his pseudonym. 
 
 Vol. XVII., No. 1 Feb. 20, 1874 Sonnet. Shelley. 
 
 Vol. XVII., No. 6 May 1, 1874 Desecration. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Vol. XVII. 
 
 Vol. XVIII., Supplement Oct. 3, 1874 Sonnet on Reading 
 Spenser. 
 
 Vol. XVIII., Supplement Oct. 3, 1874 Cigarette Ash. 
 
 Vol. XVIII., No. 2 Oct. 6, 1874 The Violet Crown. (See 
 Lowell's comment on this poem quoted Nebraska Literary 
 Magazine, Vol. I., No. 1.) 
 
 Vol. XVIIL, No. 5 Nov. 27, 1874-Sonnet. By the Night 
 Sea. 
 
 Vol. XVIIL, No. 6-Dec. 11, 1874-Paul at Athens. A 
 Cynic Philosopher and his Scholar Lycius. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was not an editor of Vol. XVIIL, being 
 absent from college. 
 
 The compiler regrets that he has been obliged to leave to the 
 industry or good fortune of some future bibliographer the details 
 which should have been given under numbers I, VI, VIII and XVIII. 
 
 [571
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 2 March 5, 1875 Lydian Airs (Three 
 poems). 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 2 March 5, 1875 The Life and Death of 
 Pietro, A. D. 1348. 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 3-March 19, 1875 Lydian Airs (Two 
 poems). 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 4 April 2, 1875-The Philosophical De- 
 partment (Prose). 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 5 April 16, 1875 The Wanderer's Refrain. 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 5 April 16, 1875 Sonnet on an Easter 
 Sunrise. 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 5 April 16, 1875 Sonnet. Unnoticed Love. 
 
 Vol. XIX., No. 9 June 16, 1875 The Study of Ideas 
 (Prose). 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Vol. XIX. 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 1 Oct. 1, 1875 Aristophanes Apology (Re- 
 view). 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 2 Oct. 8, 1875 In May Days. 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 4 Nov. 5, 1875 The Antigone at Harvard 
 (Prose). 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 5 Nov. 19, 1875 An Evolutionist's Idea of 
 Harvard (Prose). 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 6 Dec. 3, 1875 The Culture of our Stu- 
 dents (Prose). 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 8 Jan. 10, 1876 Victorian Poets (Review). 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 10 Feb. 4, 1876 Song. 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 10 Feb. 4, 1876 Ode to a Forest Rose. 
 
 Vol. XX., No. 10 Feb. 4, 1876 Dansville Hills. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Volume XX. 
 
 Vol. XXL, No. 1 Feb. 18, 1876 After Sunset. 
 
 Vol. XXL, No. 1 Feb. 18, 1876 Serenade. 
 
 Vol. XXL, No. 3 March 17, 1876 Parting Song. 
 
 Vol. XXL, No. 6 April 28, 1876 The Phi Beta Kappa Sup- 
 per (?) (Prose). 
 
 Vol. XXL, No. 10 June 23, 1876 The Harvard Decalogue. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Volume XXI. 
 
 IV. 
 1876. 
 
 Verses from the Harvard Advocate. Hurd & Houghton. 
 New York. 1876. 
 
 This volume contains fourteen poems by G. E. W., re- 
 printed from the Advocate. 
 
 V. 
 October, 1876-June, 1878. 
 
 Contributions (verse and prose) to the Harvard Advocate. 
 Among Mr. Woodberry's contributions, many were unsigned 
 
 [58]
 
 BIBLIOGR AP H Y 
 
 editorials, etc. Those known to be by him are : 
 
 Vol. XXII., No. 9 Jan. 26, 1877 Arachne's Spinning. 
 
 Vol. XXII., No. 10 Feb. 2, 1877 Prosit Neujahr. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry was an editor of Vol. XXII. 
 
 Vol. XXIII., No. 3 March 16, 1877 Lines Upon Hearing 
 Some Music. 
 
 Vol. XXIII., No. 5 April 10, 1877 Sonnet. After read- 
 ing Keats' letters. (The reference is to Lord Houghton's 
 Life.) 
 
 Vol. XXIII., No. 8 The Senior Petitions. 
 
 Vol. XXIV., No. 5 Nov. 16, 1877 Lines in Autumn. 
 
 VI. 
 1876-1891. 
 
 Reviews in Atlantic. Boston. The great bulk of these were 
 1880-1891. The Atlantic index, 1889, lists seventy-three titles. 
 
 VII. 
 
 1877. 
 
 The Relation of Pallas Athene to Athens. Oratio a Georgio 
 Edvardo Woodberry. Written for the Harvard Commence- 
 ment, 1877. Privately printed for the Signet Society of Har- 
 vard University, 1877. Paper. Eleven pages. Thirty copies 
 printed. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 1878-1903. 
 
 Reviews in The Nation. New York. 
 
 The great bulk of these were 1878-79 and 1884-91. They 
 are unsigned, but there is said to be an index giving the au- 
 thors of all unsigned articles in the vaults at the office of 
 The Nation. 
 
 IX. 
 1879. 
 
 History of Wood-Engraving (two articles), in Harper's 
 Magazine. 
 
 X. 
 
 1881. 
 
 The Fortunes of Literature under the American Republic. 
 Fortnightly Review. May. Reprinted in Eclectic Magazine. 
 
 XI. 
 1882. 
 
 The Real Issues in the University. A public letter by Pro- 
 fessors Church, Emerson, and Woodberry. Written by G. E. 
 
 [59]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 W. Issued February, 1882. Appeared also translated into 
 German in the Nebraska Stoats- Anzeiger. 
 
 XII. 
 1883. 
 
 Trial printing of The North Shore Watch. July 22. One 
 proof. Lincoln, Nebraska. 
 
 XIII. 
 1883. 
 
 The North Shore Watch. 
 
 Boards, vel. back, 200 copies, Privately Printed (by sub- 
 scription). With engraved frontispiece. 
 
 XIV. 
 1883. 
 
 A History of Wood Engraving. Illustrated. 
 Harper & Brothers, New York 
 
 XV. 
 
 1885. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. With portrait. 
 In American Men of Letters Series. 
 
 XVI. 
 1886. 
 
 Second Series. New verses from the Harvard Advocate, 
 1876-1886. Privately printed by Kilbourne Tompkins, No. 79 
 Cedar Street, New York. Contains four poems by G. E. W. 
 that appeared in the Advocate between October, 1876, and 
 June, 1878. 
 
 XVII. 
 1887. 
 
 My Country: An Ode. 
 
 Privately printed, 50 copies. Blue paper covers. Published 
 in Atlantic Monthly, July, 1887. 
 
 XVIII. 
 1888. The Boston Post. 
 
 G. E. W. was Literary Editor for a year and wrote a great 
 deal for it. 
 
 XIX. 
 1888. 
 
 Song of Promise. Words by George Edward Woodberry. 
 Composed by John Knowles Paine, Op. 43, for the Cincinnati 
 
 [60]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Musical Festival of May, 1888. Published by the John Church 
 Co. of Cincinnati. Paper covers. (Words from "My Country.") 
 
 XX. 
 
 1889. 
 
 Authors at Home. Edited by J. L. and J. B. Gilder. Cas- 
 sell Publishing Co. New York. 
 
 Article, James Russell Lowell (republished from the Critic). 
 
 XXI. 
 1889. 
 
 Notes on the MS. Volume of Shelley's Poems in the Library 
 of Harvard College. Bibliographical Contributions No. 35. 
 Cambridge, Mass. Issued by the Library of Harvard Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 XXII. 
 1889. 
 Agathon. 
 Trial printing. Two or three copies printed. Unbound. 
 
 XXIII. 
 1890. 
 
 The North Shore Watch and Other Poems. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. 
 
 XXIV. 
 1890. 
 
 Studies in Letters and Life. 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. 
 
 Reprints, with revision, from the Atlantic and The Nation. 
 Red cloth. 
 
 Same in blue cloth. 
 
 XXV. 
 1891. 
 Literature in the Market-place. The Forum. August. 
 
 XXVI. 
 1892. 
 
 The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley; 
 The Text newly Collated and Revised and Edited, with a 
 Memoir and Notes by George Edward Woodberry. Centen- 
 ary edition in four volumes. 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. With portrait. 
 
 Same. Large paper. In eight parts. 250 sets printed. 
 
 [61]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 XXVII. 
 1892. 
 
 The Essays of Elia, with an introduction by G. E. W. 
 Published by Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 2 Vols. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 1893. 
 
 Memorial Celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the 
 Birth of Edwin Booth. Held in the Madison Square Garden 
 Concert Hall, November 13, 1893, by The Players. Contains 
 Elegy by G. E. W., pp. 44-52. 
 
 The Players' Elegy on the Death of Edwin Booth : Read at 
 the Memorial Service, held under the direction of The Play- 
 ers, in the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, November 
 13, 1893. Privately printed, New York, 1893. Thirty-five copies 
 numbered and signed. The De Vinne Press. Blue paper 
 covers. The poem was first published in The Evening Post 
 (New York), November 13, 1893. 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 1893. 
 
 The English Drama: Its Rise and Development to 1640. 
 By Thomas R. Price, G. E. Woodberry and A. V. W. Jackson. 
 Syllabus (20). Albany. Regents University Extension De- 
 partment. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 1894. 
 
 The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Newly Collected and 
 Edited, with a Memoir, Critical Introductions, and Notes, by 
 E. C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry. 10 Vols. Illus- 
 trated. Stone & Kimball. Chicago. 
 
 (1) Ordinary edition. (2) Large paper. (3) In vellum 
 with drawings by Beardsley." 
 
 The Same. Special issue. The Colonial Company, Pitts- 
 burgh, 1903. (1) Ordinary edition. (2) Autograph edition. 
 (3) Bibliophile edition. 
 
 The Same. Duffield and Company, New York, 1907. Single 
 volume, The Poems, etc., 1907. 
 
 The Same. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York. 1914. 
 Pocket edition, in cloth and flexible leather. 
 
 The Same. 1914. From new plates in large and handsome 
 type. 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 1894. 
 
 Selections from the Poems of Aubrey de Vere, edited, with 
 a Preface, by G. E. W. 
 
 [621
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. With a portrait. 
 G. E. W. also wrote a brief introductory note to Aubrey 
 de Vere's Recollections in the Century. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 1895. 
 
 Memories. Nebraska Literary Magazine, Vol. I., No. 1. 
 May. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 1895. 
 
 To A. V. W. J . 
 
 Twenty copies printed without title-page. De Vinne Press. 
 Blue paper covers. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 1895. 
 
 Household Waifs from many Years, by Known and Un- 
 known Poets. Arranged by G. E. W. (with introductory 
 quatrain by G. E. W.). Privately printed, New York, Christ- 
 mas, 1895. De Vinne Press. 20 Copies. Blue paper covers. 
 
 XXXV. 
 189- ? 
 
 The Roamer, Book I. 6 copies. Privately printed. De 
 Vinne Press. Blue paper covers. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 1896-98. 
 
 Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Mod- 
 ern. Edited by Charles Dudley Warner. R. S. Peale & Co. 
 New York. 
 
 Articles, Arnold, Coleridge, Shelley. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 1896-99. 
 
 Columbia College. 
 
 English XIII. Parts i., ii. Notes for students, on English 
 Poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a brief 
 bibliography for dramatic reading. Two pamphlets. 
 1899. 
 
 English II. Book of the Course, Sect. 1. Red paper. 42 
 pages. A re-print of Rough Notes, 1896-97, and Guide Notes, 
 1898-99, a pamphlet and five leaflets for student use, together 
 with bibliographical lists. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 1897. 
 A School Hymn. Harper's Round Table. June 29. 
 
 [63]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 XXXIX. 
 1898. 
 
 The Islands of the Sea. 
 Privately printed. One sheet. July 4, 1898. 
 
 XL. 
 1898. 
 
 Essex Regiment March. 
 Privately printed. One sheet. 
 
 XLI. 
 1899. 
 
 Rhymes, The Morningside, Columbia University, January 1, 
 1899. 
 
 XLII. 
 1899. 
 
 A Christmas Greeting, Columbia Spectator, December 21, 
 1899. 
 
 XLIII. 
 1899. 
 
 Wild Eden. 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 XLIV. 
 1899. 
 
 Warner Classics. (Matthew Arnold, pp. 97-125.) R. S. 
 Peale & Co. New York. 
 
 XLV. 
 1899. 
 
 Heart of Man. (With dedicatory quatrain.) 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 XLVI. 
 1899. 
 Mrs. Ward and the Brontes. Harper's Bazar, 
 
 XLVII. 
 1900. 
 
 The Roamer. Book I. 
 
 In East and West, Vol. I., No. 12. New York. 
 
 This "Monthly Magazine of Letters/' which was discon- 
 tinued with No. 12, was "edited and published by William 
 Aspenwall Bradley and George Sidney Hellman," both mem- 
 bers of Columbia '99. 
 
 [641
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 XLVIII. 
 
 1900. 
 
 Essays of Bacon. With an Introduction by G. E. W. (The 
 Century Classics.) 
 
 The Century Co. New York. With portrait. 
 
 XLIX. 
 1900. 
 
 The Century of Achievement in Literature. Harper's 
 Weekly. 
 
 L. 
 1900. 
 
 Makers of Literature. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 A reprint of "Studies in Letters and Life," together with 
 later prefaces, articles, etc. The essay on The Promise of 
 Keats was accidentally omitted. The essay on Whittier was 
 reprinted, Boston Evening Transcript, Dec. 14, 1907. (Essays 
 on Shelley, Landor, Browning, Byron, Arnold, Coleridge, 
 Lowell, Whittier, and others.) 
 
 LI. 
 
 1901. 
 
 The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
 Cambridge edition. (One Vol.) Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 Boston. Newly and completely annotated. With a portrait. 
 
 LII. 
 1902. 
 
 One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature, with 
 Facsimiles of the Title Pages, and an introduction by George 
 Edward Woodberry. The Grolier Club of the City of New 
 York. 305 copies printed. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 1902. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
 American Men of Letters Series. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 Boston. Dark red cloth. With portrait. 
 
 Same. Light red cloth. Uncut. Paper label. 
 
 Same. Large paper. 600 copies printed. 
 
 LIV. 
 1903. 
 
 Journal of Comparative Literature. Quarterly. 
 
 New York, McClure, Phillips & Co. Edited by G. E. W. 
 Four numbers issued. No. 1 has editorial by G. E. W., also 
 separately issued as a leaflet. This is all he wrote for the 
 Journal. 
 
 [65]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 LV. 
 1903. 
 
 Ode read at the Emerson Centenary Services, Boston, May 
 24, 1903. Privately printed leaflet, 12 pages. Published At- 
 lantic Monthly, June, 1903. 
 
 LVI. 
 1903. 
 
 To Nineteen Three, Columbia. The Nineteen Hundred and 
 Three Class Book. Published by the Class in June, 1903. Also 
 privately printed as a leaflet. Four pages. 
 
 LVII. 
 1903. 
 
 Representative English comedies, with introductory essays, 
 etc., by various writers, under the general editorship of 
 Charles Mills Gayley. The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 (Robert Green: his place in comedy, pp. 385-394.) 
 
 LVIII. 
 1903. 
 
 Exeter Ode. Read at the dedication of Alumni Hall, Phil- 
 lips Exeter Academy, June 17, 1903. Privately printed leaflet 
 eight pages. 
 
 Published in Exercises incident to the General Reunion of 
 the Alumni of Phillips Exeter Academy on the occasion of 
 the opening of the new Alumni Hall, 1903. pp. 31-35. 1904. 
 
 LIX. 
 1903. 
 
 Requiem. Thomas Randolph Price. 
 Privately printed one sheet. 
 
 LX. 
 
 Privately printed. De Vinne Press. New York. Blue 
 paper covers. Six copies printed. 
 The First Two Books of The Roamer. 
 
 LXI. 
 1903. 
 
 Poems of the House and Other Poems, by Elizabeth M. 
 Olmsted. Privately printed. De Vinne Press. 200 numbered 
 copies. Contains editorial note and Sonnet: To the Author 
 on her Golden Wedding, by G. E. W. ; and Sonnet to G. E. W., 
 on his Twentieth Birthday. With portrait. 
 
 66]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 LXII. 
 1903. 
 
 Poems : My Country, Wild Eden, The Players' Elegy, The 
 North Shore Watch, Odes and Sonnets. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 This is a nearly complete collection of previous poems, with 
 new poems (except The Roamer). 
 
 LXIII. 
 1903. 
 
 America in Literature. 
 Harper & Brothers. New York. 
 Collected from Harper's Magazine. 
 
 LXIV. 
 1904. 
 New International Encyclopaedia. Article, Shelley. 
 
 LXV. 
 1904. 
 
 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By Samuel Taylor Cole- 
 ridge. Edited with Introduction. 
 American Book Co. New York. The Gateway Series. 
 
 LXVI. 
 1904. 
 Chamber's Cyclopaedia of English Literature. 3 Vols. 
 
 The general article on American Colonial Literature and a 
 few notes on its authors are by G. E. W. 
 
 LXVII. 
 1905. 
 
 The Torch. Eight lectures on Race Power in Literature, 
 delivered before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1903. 
 
 (Man and the Race, The Language of all the World, The 
 Titan Myth, I. and II., Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley.) 
 McClure, Phillips & Co. New York. 
 
 Reissued. The Macmillan Co. New York. 1912. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 1905. 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
 McClure, Phillips & Co. New York. 
 
 Contemporary Men of Letters Series. 
 
 Reissued. The Macmillan Co. New York 1912. 
 
 English edition by Heinemann. 
 
 LXIX. 
 1907. 
 
 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited, etc., 
 by Sidney Lee. Vol. VI. A Midsummer Night's Dream, with 
 a Special Introduction by G. E. W. George D. Sproul, New 
 
 [67]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 York. Illustrated. 
 The same. Vol. III. The Harper Edition. New York. 
 
 LXX. 
 1907. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 English Men of Letters Series. 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 1907. 
 
 The Appreciation of Literature. 
 The Baker & Taylor Co. New York. 
 Reissued by Doubleday, Page and Co. 
 
 LXXII. 
 1907. 
 
 Great Writers. (Cervantes, Scott, Milton, Virgil, Mon- 
 taigne, Shakespere.) 
 
 The McClure Co. New York. 
 
 Shortened forms of some of these essays had appeared 
 in McClure's Magazine. 
 
 Reissued, The Macmillan Co. 1912. New York. 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 1907. 
 
 Salem Atheneum. Address of G. E. W., Litt.D., LL.D., at 
 the formal opening of Plummer Hall, Oct. 2, 1907. Salem, 
 Mass., Salem Atheneum, 1907. Green paper covers. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 1908. 
 
 Select Poems of Shelley. Edited with Introduction and 
 Notes. (The essay on Shelley's Poetry is new.) 
 
 D. C Heath & Co., Boston. Belles-Lettres Series. 
 
 LXXV. 
 1908. 
 
 The Defence of Poesie, etc., by Sir Philip Sidney, edited 
 with Introduction by G. E. W. 
 
 The Merrymount Press, Boston. The Humanists' Library. 
 303 copies. 
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 1909. 
 
 The Old Farmer's Almanac by Robert B. Thomas. Boston, 
 William Ware & Co., No. 117. Paper covers. Contains Son- 
 net : Etna. 
 
 [68]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 LXXVII. 
 1909. 
 
 Tennyson's The Pftncess. Edited with Notes and an In- 
 troduction by G. E. W. 
 
 Longmans, Green & Co. New York. 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 1909. 
 
 L'Amerique Litteraire et ses Ecrivains. 
 
 Ouvrage adapte de 1'Anglais par Achille Laurent. J. Du- 
 moulin. Paris. Blue paper covers. A translation of America 
 in Literature, with simple biographical and bibliographical 
 notes by G. E. W. not in the American edition. 
 
 LXXIX. 
 1909. 
 
 Life of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 Vols. (A new work not a 
 reprint). 
 
 Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. Illustrated. 
 
 Same. Large paper. Paper label. 150 copies printed. 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 1909. 
 
 The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by G. E. W. 
 (with introduction, notes, appendix, and bibliographies). 
 
 Belles Lettres Series. D. C. Heath & Co. Boston. 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 1910. 
 
 The Inspiration of Poetry. Eight lectures on Poetic Energy 
 delivered before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1906. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 (Poetic Madness, Marlowe, Camoens, Byron, Gray, Tasso, 
 Lucretius, Inspiration.) 
 
 LXXXII. 
 1910. 
 
 Transactions of the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. 
 Vol. I., Part II. Poe Cententary Exercises, Jan. 19, 1909. 
 New York. Published for the Society, May, 1910. Contains 
 brief address by G. E. W., who presided. 
 
 LXXXIII. 
 1911. 
 Encyclopedia Britannica. Article, American Literature. 
 
 [69]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 LXXXIV. 
 
 1911. 
 
 European Years. 
 
 Edited with Introduction by G. E. W. 
 Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. 
 
 LXXXV. 
 1912. 
 
 *Wendell Phillips. The Faith of an American. 300 copies, 
 100 numbered and signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 1912. 
 
 *A Day at Castrogiovanni. 300 copies, 75 numbered and 
 signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 1912. 
 
 *The Kingdom of All-Souls and Two Other Poems for 
 Christmas. 300 copies, 100 numbered and signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 1913. 
 
 New Letters of an Idle Man, by Hermann Jackson Warner, 
 author of European Years. Edited by G. E. W. London. 
 Constable & Co. This contains a brief note by the editor. 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 1913. 
 
 Proceedings at the opening of the new Library Building, 
 June 20, 1913, Beverly, Mass. Printed for the Trustees, 1913. 
 Pamphlet, pp. 18. Blue covers. The principal address was 
 made by G. E. W. 
 
 XC. 
 1913. 
 
 The Phi Beta Kappa Poem. In Memoriam Charles Eliot 
 Norton. Boston Evening Transcript, June 21, 1913. 
 
 Issued also as a leaflet. 
 
 XCI. 
 1914. 
 
 The Flight and Other Poems. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. 
 
 One hundred copies signed by the author, numbered and 
 specially bound, were issued for members of the Woodberry 
 Society. 
 
 * The Publications of the Woodberry Society can be obtained through 
 the book stores by application to William B. Symmes, Jr., Secretary, 
 55 Liberty Street, New York City. 
 
 [70]
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 XCII. 
 
 1914. 
 
 North Africa and the Desert 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 XCIII. 
 1914. 
 
 *Two Phases of Criticism: Historical and Aesthetic. 
 
 Lectures delivered on The Larwill Foundation of Kenyon 
 College, May Seventh and Eighth, 1913. 400 copies, 100 num- 
 bered and signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 XCIV. 
 1915. 
 
 The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. 
 
 With an introduction by George Edward Woodberry and a 
 biographical note by Margaret Lavington. With portrait 
 
 John Lane Company. New York. 
 
 One hundred copies of the first edition were specially 
 bound for the Woodberry Society, and contained a supple- 
 mentary note, an extra portrait, and facsimile. 
 
 XCV. 
 1915. 
 
 Peace. Words by George Edward Woodberry. Music by 
 Louis Adolphe Coern. Op. 81. (Copyright, 1915.) 
 
 Clayton F. Summy Co., Chicago. 
 
 XCVI. 
 1916. 
 
 *Shakespeare : An Address. (Brown University, April 26.) 
 300 copies, 75 numbered and signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 XCVII. 
 1917. 
 
 *Ideal Passion : Sonnets. (Announced for publication in 
 March.) 400 copies, 100 numbered and signed. 
 
 The Woodberry Society. New York. 
 
 The Publications of the Woodberry Society can be obtained through 
 the book stores, or by application to William H. Symmes, Jr., Secretary, 
 55 Liberty Street, New York City. 
 
 [71]
 
 ADDENDA. 
 A. 
 
 General Editor National Studies in American Letters. The 
 Macmillan Co., New York. Four Vols. No writing by 
 G. E. W. The titles in the series are : 
 
 Old Cambridge. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1899. 
 
 Brook Farm. By Lindsay Swift, 1900. 
 
 The Clergy in American Life and Letters. By Daniel Du- 
 lany Addison, 1900. 
 
 The Hoosiers. By Meredith Nicholson, 1900. 
 
 B. 
 
 General Editor Columbia Studies in Comparative Literature. 
 The Macmillan Co. New York. Eight Vols. No writing 
 by G. E. W. The titles in the series are : 
 
 Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. By Joel Elias Spin- 
 gam, 1899. 
 
 Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors. By John 
 Garrett Underbill, 1899. 
 
 Romances of Roguery. By Frank Wadleigh Chandler, 1899. 
 
 The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages. By Henry 
 Osborn Taylor, 1901. 
 
 The Italian Renaissance in England. By Lewis Einstein, 
 1902. Illustrated. 
 
 Platonism in English Poetry. By John Smith Harrison, 
 1903. 
 
 Irish Life in Irish Fiction. By Horatio Sheafe Krans, 1903. 
 
 The English Heroic Play. By Lewis Nathaniel Chase, 1903. 
 
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