Mr. Irving's opinion that in such delineations Bryant is equal to Cooper. The poet appears to be 'a man of milder mood' than the romancer, and of finer taste. But there is nothing in the whole volume comparable in original power to many descriptions in the Prairie and the Spy. . . His poetry overflows with natural religion-with what Wordsworth calls the 'religion of the woods.' This reverential awe of the Invisible pervades the verses entitled 'Thanatopsis' and 'Forest Hymn,' imparting to them a sweet solemnity which must affect all thinking hearts. There is little that is original either in the imagery of the 'Forest Hymn' or in its language; but the sentiment is simple, natural, and sustained, and the close is beautiful. Compare it with the 'Lines on revisiting the river Wye,' by that great poet whom Mr. Bryant wisely venerates, . . . . and it will be felt, perhaps, that Mr. Irving rashly says that his friend's poems are entitled to 'rank among the highest of their class in the best school of English poetry.' . . . . 'Thanatopsis' both in conception and execution is more original; and we quote it entire, as a noble example of true poetical enthusiasm. It alone would establish the author's claim to the honours of genius."-John Wilson, in Blackwood's Magazine, April, 1832. "Bryant is not a first-rate poet; but he has great power, and is original in his way.. A violet becomes, in his hands, a gem fit to be placed in an imperial diadem; a mountain leads his eyes to the canopy above it. The woods, the hills, the flowers-whatever, in short, is his subject, is brought before our eyes with a fidelity of delineation, and a brightness of coloring, which the actual pencil cannot rival. The picture is always finished to the minutest particular. . . . . To equal if not excel Thomson, in his own department of literature, would be distinction enough for any one man; but his excellence in descriptive poetry is not Mr. Bryant's chief merit. The bent of his mind is essentially contemplative. He loves to muse in solitude, in the depths of the forest, and on the high places of the hills. . . . . His thoughts are natural and simple, seldom commonplace, and often sublime; yet his great conceptions are never abrupt and startling. . . . . 'Thanatopsis' is the most generally known and esteemed of Bryant's poems, and perhaps deserves its reputation. It is sublime throughout. . . . . If there be anything within the whole compass of literature more delicate, more pure, more exquisitely sweet than this ["The Evening Wind"] it has not yet fallen under our observation."-The North American Review, April, 1832. "Mr. Bryant is not a literary meteor; he is not calculated to dazzle and astonish. The light he shines with is mild and pure, beneficent in its influence, and lending a tranquil beauty to that on which it falls. But it will be little attractive, except to sobered minds, which do not seek their intellectual pleasures in the racy draught of strong excitement. . . . . In poetry descriptive of the aspects of nature Mr. Bryant principally excels. He has evidently observed accurately, and with the eye of a genuine lover of natural scenery, and he describes eloquently and unaffectedly what he has seen, selecting happily, using no tumid exaggeration and vain pomp of words, not perplexing us with vague redundancies, but laying before us with graceful simplicity the best features of the individual scene which has been presented to his eye. He has much of the descriptive power of Thomson, divested of the mannerism which pervaded that period of our poetry; much of the pictur esqueness of touch which shines in the verse of Sir Walter Scott, but ennobled by associations which that great writer did not equally summon to his aid; much of the fidelity of Wordsworth, but without his minuteness and occasional overstrained and puerile simplicity, yet closely following him in that better characteristic, his power of elevating the humblest objects by connection with some moral truth. In this Mr. Bryant eminently shines. . . . . Mr. Bryant cannot, perhaps, be said to have a bad ear for metrical rhythm, but neither has he shown a very good one. . . . . His want of metrical polish is rendered very evident by comparison whenever he has adopted the measure of Moore. His blank verse is good, and more satisfactory to the ear than his other poetry. . . . . We do not consider him a first-rate poet but we would assign him an honourable station in the second class."-The Foreign Quarterly Review, August, 1832. "The editor presents us with no fewer than twenty specimens from his poems, several of which, such as his beautiful 'Lines to a Waterfowl,' 'After a Tempest,' and 'To the Evening Wind,' have already made their appearance in more than one of our British journals. All of them are pleasing, many of them exquisitely so; but certainly the epithet 'bold,' which the editor applies to his manner, appears to us singularly inapplicable to the mind of Bryant, which seems far more remarkable for tenderness and delicacy than power. . . . . Full of sweet sympathy with Nature's minutest beauties, as well as her more magnificent, are the lines, 'To the Fringed Gentian,' where the pure mind of the author draws a moral even from the flower." -The Edinburgh Review, April, 1835. "Mr. William Cullen Bryant is the best poet in America. . . . . From the library of English poets it would be difficult to select a more freshly pleasing volume than Mr. Bryant's. It administers welcome nurture to the contemplative mind. It contains but little to excite the joyous and merry-hearted to louder mirth, but much to soothe and soften the elated spirit into a quietude that more nearly approaches true happiness. 'Thanatopsis' is not so sublime as Coleridge's 'Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni,' but its effect on the imagination of the reader is scarcely less grand. It is not so perfect a production as the 'Elegy in a Country ChurchYard,' but its strains Æolian sweep through the mind with a power equally subduing, for it breathes the same 'sad, sweet music of humanity.' Its concluding lines fall upon the ear as if uttered by some warning angel. . . . . Next, scarcely inferior to this, comes the 'Hymn to the Evening Wind.' Either would of itself be enough to stamp its author as a man of high poetical genius. These two and the 'Song of Marion's Men' are as common and as popular in the United States as many of the oldest lyrics of the British bards."-The Southern Literary Messenger, September, 1839. "The Waterfowl' is very beautiful, but still not entitled to the admiration which it has occasionally elicited. There is a fidelity and force in the picture of the fowl as brought before the eye of the mind, and a fine sense of effect in throwing its figure on the background of the 'crimson sky,' amid 'falling dew,' 'while glow the heavens with the last steps of day.' But the merits which possibly have had most weight in the public estimation of the poem are the melody and strength of its versi fication (which is indeed excellent), and more particularly its completeness. Its rounded and didactic termination has done wonders. . . . . Judging Mr. B. in this manner, and by a general estimate of the volume before us, we should of course pause long before assigning him a place with the spiritual Shelleys or Coleridges or Wordsworths, or with Keats, or even Tennyson or Wilson or with some other burning lights of our own day, to be valued in a day to come."-Edgar A. Poe, in The Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1837. "Why his "Thanatopsis' has been so widely received and quoted as his finest production may be explained in part by what has been just now said respecting the negative merits of composition. It is quite devoid of fault, is undoubtedly beautiful; and in judging, absolutely, of the poems of Bryant, the public voice is not altogether wrong in its decision. But as affording evidence of the higher powers of the poet, . . . . he himself, if we do not greatly misunderstand him, would select some other portions of his works. Had he indeed, always written as in the annexed little ballad "Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids"], he might have justly assumed that rank among the poets of all time into which our national pride and partiality are so blindly disposed to thrust him as it is."-Edgar A. Poe, in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, May, 1840. .... "It has been the singular felicity of Mr. Bryant that he has done whatever he has done with consummate finish and completeness. If he has not, as the critics often tell us, the comprehensiveness or philosophic insight of Wordsworth, the weird fancy of Coleridge, the gorgeous diction of Keats, the exquisite subtlety of Tennyson, he is, nevertheless, the one among all our contemporaries who has written the fewest things carelessly and the most things well. . . . . It is admitted, we believe universally, that as a poet of Nature Mr. Bryant stands without a rival. No one has celebrated her as he has in all her changeful aspects of beauty and grandeur. . . . . He does not only depict her colors and shapes, giving us the landscape: he hears her mysterious voices, and he imparts to us some faint echo of those supernal melodies. . . . . In these ["Sella" and "The Little People of the Snow"], with a delicacy of fancy which is like the tracery of frost-crystal, and with a fineness of feeling that Tennyson has never surpassed, he leads us into wholly new realms of faery."-The Independent (as reprinted in Littell's Living Age, February 13, 1864). .... "Bryant, pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world-bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders-always lurkingly fond of threnodies-beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there, through all, poems or passages of poems touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties -morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus." -Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, April 16, 1881. EDGAR ALLAN POE "An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms and sounds and odours and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms and sounds and colours and odours and sentiments a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights and sounds and odours and colours and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind-he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us-but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry-or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods-we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not-as the Abbate Gravina supposes-through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. To recapitulate, then: I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth."-Poe, "The Poetic Principle," 1850. .... "A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite, sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness."-Poe, "Letter to B- —," prefixed to Poems, 1831. The text, with the exceptions noted, is from the 1845 edition. (209) SONNET-TO SCIENCE. Cf. Keats's Lamia, II. 229-38.: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. 14. tamarind tree: in 1831, "shrubbery." (209) SONG FROM "AL AARAAF." "Al Aaraaf," II. 68-150. The singer is the maiden Nesace, invoking "bright beings" of beauty and music. The preceding lines give the setting for the song: Young flowers were whispering in melody (211) 73, 74. “The wild bee will not sleep in the shade if there be moonlight." -Poe. (211) TO HELEN. Addressed to Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of Poe's schoolmates, at whose home he had visited. In a letter to Mrs. Helen Whitman (Harrison's edition of Poe, Vol. XVII, p. 294), the poet refers to the poem thus: "The lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely ideal love of my soul to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you." ¶ 9. 10. In 1831: To the beauty of fair Greece (212) ISRAFEL. "And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures."-Koran. In regard to this note by Poe, in the 1845 version, Professor Woodberry has pointed out that the statement does not occur in the Koran but in Sale's "Preliminary Discourse" (Section IV) to his translation of the Koran, and that the words "whose heart-strings are a lute" are not in Sale but were inserted by Poe. In fact, these words were not in the quotation in the 1831 version of the poem. In Sale, furthermore, the exact expression is, "The angel Israfil, who has the most melodious voice of all God's creatures." ¶ 12. levin = lightning. ¶ 26. Houri: "But all these glories will be eclipsed by the resplendent and ravishing girls of paradise, called, from their large black eyes, Hûr al oyûn."-Sale, "Preliminary Discourse" to the Koran, Section IV. (213) 40-51. Cf. Shelley's "To a Skylark" (1820), l. 81–90, 101-5: 145-51. In 1831: Waking or asleep Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.. Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know. Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. If I did dwell where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He would not sing one half as well, .... |