LOWELL’S POEMS.[1]

LOWELL’S POEMS.^[1]

A NEW SCHOOL OF POETRY AT HAND.

We shall never forget our emotions when we inhaled, for the first time after a lingering illness, the fresh breezes of a September morning. Oh! the visions of dewy meadows, rustling forest trees, and silvery brooks which the delicious air called up before us. This little book has awakened much the same emotions in our bosom. It reminds us of the breezy lawns where we played when a child; of the old mossy forest trees beneath which we loved to sit and muse; of the silent, stately Brandywine that glided along at our feet, its clear waters sliding over the rocks or rippling against the long willow leaves that trembled in its current. There is a freshness about Lowell’s Poems which bewitches our fancy. They display a genius that has startled us. They breathe a healthy, honest, good old Saxon spirit, that opens our heart to them as by a sign of brotherhood. We feel that he is kin of our kin and blood of our blood, and we take his book to our bosom without suffering it to plead the exquisite petition which he has put into its mouth, for “charity in Christ’s dear name.” Lowell is a man after our own heart. We have a word or two to say of him in connection with the poetry of the day.

Every one must have perceived that a new school of poetry is at hand. No one who has thought on the subject can have failed to see that the fever for Byron, like all fevers, is both wearing itself out and exhausting the patient. With the death of the noble lord began the decline of the school to which he gave such popularity, and though he has had many imitators since, the phrenzy respecting his poetry is nearly over. We do not mean to depreciate Byron. Every great poet should be spoken of with reverence; for they all alike discourse in the language of the gods; and Byron was not only a great poet, but the greatest poet of his school. That school, however, was a bad one—the fierce, unholy offspring of an incestuous age. It was a school in which the restlessness of passion seems to have forced its votaries into poetry. They had none of the calm, enduring enthusiasm of the great poets of the past; they did not speak with the majesty of Jove, but with the fury of a Delphin priestess. They were essentially the poets of a crowd, expressing the emotions of men in a state of high excitement, and consequently whirling away their hearers with them in a phrenzy for the time unconquerable, but destined to subside with the first calm in the public mind. But the truly great poets—Milton, Shakspeare and Spencer—sit far away on a mountain by themselves, singing in calm enthusiasm to the stars of heaven, and startling the dweller on the plain as well as the shepherd on the hill-side with a melody that seems a part of heaven. The school of Byron is that of a generation; the school of the old masters is that of eternity. The one is a lurid planet, that blazes fitfully amid storm and darkness; the others are fixed stars, that shine around Milton, the greatest of all, in undimmed and undying lustre.

Ὡς δ’ οτ’ εν ουρανω αστρα φαεινην αμφι σεληνην Φαινετ’ αριπρεπεα.

We have said that a new school of poetry is at hand, and the remark may, at first sight, appear extravagant when we consider the stagnation which has been exhibited for years. But betwixt the decline of one school and the rise of another, there is always a pause. When Milton wrote, a lustrum had elapsed since Shakspeare died. After the decay of Pope, a half a century of barrenness ensued before Cowper brought in a more masculine verse. The poetic soil, during these interregnums, seems to be worn out, and to require to lie fallow until it can recruit its energies. Only a few sparse flowers bloom upon the waste. But these, although insignificant in themselves, serve to betray the changes in the soil. They are premonitory of the coming harvest. They give us a clue to the character of the approaching school, and although often vague and contradictory, they afford us hints for which we would in vain seek elsewhere. We do not say that, from such hints, the nature of a school can be certainly predicted. The public taste, to use a phrase from the geologists, is in a transition state, and what the result may be, will, in a measure, puzzle the acutest mind. But we can still approximate to the truth. And even now we may hazard a conjecture respecting the characteristics of the school which will supersede that of Byron. It will resemble, in many particulars, that of the old poets. It will have the same calm, enduring enthusiasm. It will be marked by a like earnestness of purpose, by the same comprehensive love for “suffering, sad humanity.” It will have none of the jaundiced views of Byron, and little of the petit maître style of Pope. It will be intellectual, and, we fear, pedantic also. It threatens to be disgraced by conceits. Circumstances, it is true, may occur to give a different turn to the character of the new school, or a Messiah may arise to do away by a single dispensation with all former types; but, so far as we can foresee now, the Tennysons, Longfellows, and poets of that cast of mind, will give the tone to the coming change in the public taste. Indeed they are already bringing about a revolution. Men are first acted on singly and then in masses, and the masses have even now begun to feel the influence of Longfellow and Tennyson. Wordsworth, too, is not to be disregarded in this revolution, but his influence, though powerful so far as it goes, will never be general. He is the poet of the few, not of the many. He is the priest of the metaphysicians, the seer of the refiners of fine gold. He writes poems, but his followers write twaddle. He cannot found a school. He cannot do this aside from his peculiarities. We will explain.

It is a common error to attribute the formation of a school of poetry to the influence of some one great mind, and we are pointed to Byron, Pope, Shakspeare and others, as instances to prove this creed. The theory is false and illegitimate, the offspring of shallow minds and conceited pedants. A popular poet, we grant, may have many imitators of his verbal style; but the spirit of his school, like the prophet’s inspiration, dies with him. If we look to the poets of our own language we shall find that the great masters usually followed rather than preceded their respective schools; and if we look abroad we shall, with few exceptions, discover the same fact. The school of Byron, for instance, was born of the atheism, scorn and fury of the French Revolution, and we can see foreshadowings of the spirit of Childe Harold in most of the minor poems of that day. Byron carried the school up to its culminating point, and since his death, if not before, it has been on the decline. Pope was the last of a school that had its origin as far back as the exile of Charles the Second, and the French style and sickly effeminacy of this most finished of our poets began to decline while Walpole still sat at the Treasury, when Lady Mary played the wit at Richmond, while clouded canes and full-bottomed wigs yet figured in the Mall. Milton belonged to no school but his own; he stands alone in unapproachable glory; but his genius was deeply influenced by the commotions of the civil wars. Shakspeare had few followers, but many predecessors, and as he was the last so he was the greatest of his school; while Spencer, standing as he did above the grave of chivalry and allegorical romance, only gave vent, in his immortal poem, to a requiem for the departed great. All these men embodied the characteristics of their age, and left them as a heritage to posterity. They were types of their times: they spoke the universal mind of their cotemporaries. It is the cant of the day to talk of men as being in advance of their age; but there never was and never will be such a man. Even Bacon, the giant of the modern world, and the reputed author of the inductive philosophy, was only its great high-priest; for even before he had written his advancement of learning, twenty minds, in every quarter of Europe, were stumbling on the same truths. We are not waiting, therefore, for the advent of a seer to found a new poetic school, for the school must come first, and then we may expect the seer. It will require a dozen Tennysons to make a Spencer. The days of the years of the sons of the prophets are not yet numbered—when they shall be, a new Messiah will appear in our midst.

The tendency of the age to a new school in poetry is strikingly evinced by the genius of Lowell. He was educated in the school of the older poets until his whole soul has become imbued with their spirit. Of these writers Spencer is clearly his favorite. The allusions to this fine old poet are frequent in his poems, and we often meet with expressions and turns of thought, reminding us strikingly of the Faery Queen. We do not mean to charge Lowell with plagiarism: far from it. But he has read Spencer so thoroughly that he is often guilty of unconscious imitation. His fondness for this enchanting writer, is indeed the greatest peril which threatens his poetical career. There is such a thing as being beguiled by a syren until you become her slave. We tell him to beware. Let our young countryman shake himself loose from his bewitching fetters, and be, as he is partially and can be wholly, original. Let him be his own master. Aut Cæsar, aut nihil.

This language, when applied to some, would be a satire. But Lowell has evinced the possession of powers, nearly, if not altogether equal to those of any cotemporary poet; and when, in connexion with this, we consider his youth, we feel justified in assigning to him a genius of the first rank. Let us not be misunderstood. We do not say that Lowell has written better poems than any American, but only that he has evinced a capacity, which in time, may enable him to do so. Indeed this volume of poems, although possessing high merit, is rather a proof of what he may do than of what he has done. There is scarcely a poem in the book which a critic might not prove to be full of faults; but then there would be passages scattered through it which, to an honest man, would redeem the whole. And since the publication of this volume, Lowell has written other poems evincing a progressive excellence and establishing his genius beyond cavil. In one faculty he is certainly equal to any cotemporary, and that faculty is the highest one a poet can possess—we mean IDEALITY. The imagination of Lowell is of the loftiest character. No one can read a ballad published in this Magazine for October, 1841, or a poem entitled “Rosaline,” published for February, 1842, without awarding to our young countryman the gift of this enviable faculty. Whether he is capable of conceiving and executing an extended poem remains to be seen; and we would not advise him to attempt the task until time has matured his taste and refined his powers. But if the Lycidas of Milton, or the Venus and Adonis of Shakspeare were any evidence of the intellect of these two masters, then are some of the poems of Lowell evidence that he has the power, which if properly cultivated, will enable him to write a great poem. The young eagle that flutters its wings on the mountain top may not yet be able to breast the tempest, yet it is an eagle still, and he must be deaf indeed who cannot distinguish its cry. We say that Lowell has an ideality of the loftiest order, and that no one can read his poems without discovering this. We say that ideality is the highest quality of a poet’s mind. So far forth, therefore, Lowell is entitled to rank among the foremost of our poets.

But this is not all. A poet may have the intellect of a god, and yet want the heart to make him truly great; for all true greatness is based on nobility of mind, without which mere intellect is but a tinkling cymbal. All the great old poets eminently possessed this quality. Their hearts kept time, in a majestic march, to noble sentiments. They loved their race, and in their writings showed they were in earnest. This love for his fellows is one of the finest characteristics of Lowell, and contrasts strikingly with the frippery of Pope, and the sneering misanthropy of Byron. We adore this feeling. It is the good old Saxon spirit, the sentiment of universal brotherhood. We are all the children of one father, fitted for sympathy, companionship, affection. We are not born to scorn our fellows. We have not been created to seclude ourselves from society, to dwell in caves, and cells, and lonely hermitages. We are made for nobler purposes. Our mission, like that of him of Nazareth, is to go about doing good. Nor let any man hate his fellows, thinking them regardless of his sorrows. The most unfortunate of us are not without friends, often loving us unknown and in spite of our faults. We have seen the criminal at the bar, when all others shrunk from him, cheered by the affection of the very wife or mother he had wronged; and even the houseless old beggar by the way-side finds a friend in every honest heart that sees his grey hairs tossing in the wind. All over this wide world, in hut, or cottage, or lordly hall, millions of hearts are beating with love towards each other, so that the whole human race is, as it were, interwoven together by innumerable fine threads of sympathy and affection. A word, a deed, or a kind look may make us a friend of whom we little think: and it may be that even now, some one whom we have never seen, is yearning towards us, because something that we may have written has found an echo in his bosom. God be thanked for this, the brightest gift in a poet’s mission! How many hearts have sympathised with the blind old Milton, and how many more will sympathise with him to the end of all time. And thus it is with the good of every age. They live again in the memory of posterity. The dying words of Algernon Sidney will thrill the freeman’s heart through untold centuries. The apostolic charity of Fenelon, Latimer, Bunyan, Augustine, and of all holy men, will endear them to noble hearts as long as time endures. The only immortality worth having is an immortality like this; and it matters not whether our names are known to those who bless us or not. Men have written noble sentiments and died and been forgotten, yet posterity has still yearned towards the poet when it read his lines. What comfort may not an author thus bring upon his fellows! Go out into the country and enter that lowly cottage,—you will find perhaps some mother weeping over little Nell, and drawing consolation from traits in the character which remind her of a darling child now in heaven. Thus by ten thousand links does an author bind himself to the hearts of his fellows, until at length he comes to be loved as we would love a brother. And often the precepts he instils awaken the dormant good in other hearts. Lowell has finely expressed this in one of his earliest poems⁠—

“Noble thoughts like thistle-seed,

Wing’d by nature, fall and breed

From their heedless parents far,

Where fit soil and culture are.”

This fellowship for his kind glows in every line of Lowell. Open his pages where you may, the eye lights on some kindly word, some noble thought, some sentiment overflowing with the milk of human kindness. There is a fine sonnet now before us which expresses the feeling of brotherhood in true Saxon words—

“Why should we ever weary of this life;

Our souls should widen ever, not contract,

Grow stronger, and not harder, in the strife,

Filling each moment with a noble act:

If we live thus, of vigor all compact,

Doing our duty to our fellow-men,

And striving rather to exalt our race

Than our poor selves, with earnest hand or pen,

We shall erect our names a dwelling-place

Which not all ages shall cast down agen;

Offspring of Time shall then be born each hour,

Which, as of old, earth lovingly shall guard,

To live forever in youth’s perfect flower,

And guide her future children Heavenward.”

And here is one, on the same theme, which many a brother poet would do well to emulate. How fitly this sonnet might have been read to Gray!

“Poet! who sittest in thy pleasant room,

Warming thy heart with idle thoughts of love,

And of a holy life that leads above,

Striving to keep life’s spring-flowers still in bloom,

And lingering to snuff their fresh perfume,⁠—

O, there were other duties meant for thee,

Than to sit down in peacefulness and be!

O, there are brother hearts that dwell in gloom,

Souls loathsome, foul, and black with daily sin,

So crusted o’er with baseness, that no ray

Of Heaven’s blessed light may enter in!

Come down, then, to this hot and dusty way,

And lead them back to hope and peace again,⁠—

For, save in Act, thy Love is all in vain.”

Here is the sentiment of our mission finely expressed⁠—

“We were not meant to plod along the earth,

Strange to ourselves and to our fellows strange.

We were not meant to struggle from our birth

To skulk and creep, and in mean pathways range;

Act! with stern truth, large faith, and loving will!

Up and be doing! God is with us still.”

The following lines will cheer many a lonely heart in its sore distress:

“Be of good courage, bear up to the end,

And on thine after way rejoicing go!

We all must suffer, if we aught would know;

Life is a teacher stern, and wisdom’s crown

Is oft a crown of thorns, whence, trickling down,

Blood, mix’d with tears, blinding our eyes doth flow;

But Time, a gentle nurse, shall wipe away

This bloody sweat—”

Here are three lines which deserve to pass into a proverb:

“Be noble! and the nobleness that lies

In other men, sleeping but never dead

Will rise in majesty to meet thine own;”

Lowell has a passion, if we may use the word, for images of quiet beauty. He seems to worship nature; he is evidently a dreamer. We venture to predict that he has spent many a day loitering through the summer woods, or lingering by the side of some silvery stream. He is a close observer—as what genius is not? There is a freshness about his writings which convinces you that he has not drawn his notions of the country, like many even of our rural poets, from books. He writes freely and therefore gracefully. His images of nature come to us with a delicious freshness, reminding us of forest nooks, sylvan retreats, and the fragrance of new mown hay. He seems to be peculiarly fond of water, and of the music which its dropping or its flow occasions, Thus:

“Thy voice is like a fountain

Leaping up in still starlight,

And I never weary counting

Its clear droppings lone or single,

Or when in one full gush they mingle,

Shooting in melodious light!”

“And thy light laughter rang as clear

As water drops I loved to hear

In days of boyhood as they fell

Tinkling far down the dim, still well.”

“Weary never, still thou trillest

Spring-gladsome lays,

As of moss-rimmed water brooks

Murmuring through pebbly nooks

In quiet summer days.”

“And like a moonbeam was her hair

That falls where flowing ripples are,

In summer evening, Isabel!”

Many of the poems in this volume as well as several pieces since given to the world, are love-poems, and breathe all the delicacy and exquisite tenderness of a first affection. Lowell’s conception of the female character is noble, chivalrous, pure and elevating. No poet in our language has a loftier idea of a true woman. Mere personal beauty does not appear to awaken his adoration, but every feeling of his soul kindles at a sweet voice or a lovely mind. We like him for this. A sweet voice is a talisman, and we question whether any true poet could love a woman whose voice was not low and musical. There is a witchery in a soft melodious accent that no language can describe. It seems to dissolve itself into the soul and steal us away unconsciously to ourselves. A lovely mind is the highest charm a woman can possess. How exquisitely has Lowell pictured in the following verses, the purity of a young maiden:

“Early and late, at her soul’s gate

Sits chastity in warderwise,

No thought unchallenged, small or great,

Goes thence into her eyes.”

“She is so gentle and so good

The very flowers in the wood

Do bless her with their sympathy.”

“Thou mad’st me happy with thine eyes,—

And gentle feelings long forgot

Looked up and oped their eyes,

Like violets—when they see a spot

Of summer in the skies.”

“Peace sits within thy eyes,

With white hands crost in joyful rest,

While through thy lips and face arise

The melodies from out thy breast.

She sits and sings

With folded wings.”

The poems entitled “My Love,” “Ianthe,” and “The Lover,” are peculiarly fraught with these elevated sentiments, and we recommend them, apart from their poetic merit, to all who love to contemplate true beauty in woman. The sonnets of Lowell are equally full of those delicate touches. Those on names are very fine—the one entitled “Anne” particularly so. Many others may be instanced as exquisite poems, full of tenderness and beauty.

With all this ideality, this calm enthusiasm, this love for his fellow men, this freshness and delicacy, Lowell would be entitled to rank already among the first poets of the country, if it were not for an occasional affectation, and a comparative want of artistical knowledge. His affectation is the result of his extravagant fondness for Spencer, and partakes, in a great measure, of the peculiarities of that fine poet. The most usual forms in which this affectation developes itself in Lowell, is in a tendency to push his metaphors to the verge of allegory, and in a quaintness that is as much out of place as a tie-wig on a beau of the present generation. The want of artistical knowledge is only comparative, for Lowell understands the rules of his art better than nine-tenths of the craft. Indeed we question whether the slovenliness of many of his poems, does not arise from carelessness as much as from ignorance. The writings of few men betray such rapidity of composition, evincing clearly to our mind, that the thoughts of the poet are thrown upon the paper as fast as they bubble up from his heart. Lowell seems to scorn revision. He strikes off his poems at a white heat, disdaining to polish the steel when it has grown cool. Such neglect always leads to the disbelief in an author’s artistical skill. The public will never give him the credit of being a good workman, while he shows so great an indifference to the finish of his wares.

This carelessness is not only evinced in an occasional false measure, but in other ways more detrimental. One of the slovenly habits of our poet, is in the use of the accent to lengthen a short syllable. We constantly meet with such words as “poisèd” “inspirèd,” and others of like false quantity. Against such liberties we protest. It is no argument to tell us that other poets have been guilty of the practice. Twenty wrongs do not constitute a right, nor will volumes of false quantity make a poem. An author is to take the language as he finds it and evince his skill by adapting it to his purpose. If every writer is allowed to beat a short syllable into a long one, there will soon be as many varieties of accent in our language, as there are gods in the Chinese theology. If words may be twisted as we please there will be no end to the fools who write poems. It is time that men stood up for the purity of our tongue. The affectations of Hunt, Lamb, and Hazlit, might have been forgiven: but the barbarous jargon of Carlyle deserves to be damned in the first act. There is a saint in the Brahmin calendar whom a legion of devils has been tormenting for a thousand years; and the good old manly English tongue seems to be in much the same predicament. Every lustrum or two a new onset is made at its purity. Each successive generation witnesses a mania for some foreign, illegitimate, unholy alliance. The rage in the days of Pope was for the French school, in the days of Johnson for the Latin school, and just now it is for the German school. If we live many years longer we shall expect to see men affecting the negro jargon from Coromantee.

The false accentuation of his words is not the only sin of Lowell against the purity of our tongue. His poems are disfigured, on almost every page, by the use of compound words, which he seems to fabricate, like an editor makes news, to fill out. We have “dreamy-winged,” “long-agone,” “grass-hid,” “spring-gladsome,” “moss-rimmed,” “study-withered,” “over-live,” “maiden-wise,” “rosy-white,” “full-sailed,” “deep-glowing,” “earth-forgetting,” “down-gushing,” “cross-folded,” and a host of like mongrel expressions, which no pure writer would use, and for which not even the genius of Lowell can obtain currency. The only redeeming feature in his case is that his later poems evince a decided improvement in this respect. They betray comparatively little of this carelessness. They show a wider command of words, a more sonorous and elevated verse. They are less disfigured by affectations from Spencer and others of the quaint old writers. They begin to be worthy of the genius of Lowell.

We have attributed these faults to carelessness; but they may be the result of affectation. Much of the unique appearance of the poetry of Lowell, is to be assigned unquestionably to these very things which we have denounced as errors. But if intentional the faults are only the more reprehensible. It is a very different thing whether a man commits a murder ignorantly or with malice aforethought. If the first he may be pardoned; if the second he should be hanged.

The earlier poems of Lowell are apt to be as much overrated by one set of readers, as they are to be depreciated by another set. The use of obsolete words, of arbitrary accents, of metaphors that verge on allegory, commend these poems to a certain school which seems to caress quaintness with the infatuation of Queen Titania in kissing the long ears of Bottom. But there is another school, which, possessing an honest contempt for any thing like affectation, is in danger of transferring its dislike from the errors to the author himself—of questioning his genius because of the faults of his style. We condemn each of these schools—both that which exaggerates and that which depreciates the poet. Lowell has many of the elements of a great poet inherent in his nature; while his faults are manifestly acquired, and can be corrected. His ideality, his enthusiasm, his nobility of sentiment, would enable him to produce even a great poem, if to these were added the capacity to grasp a series of incidents in one vast comprehensive whole. This capacity, or at least the elements of it, we believe him to possess, and if he adheres to a rigid course of study, and awaits the mature development of his powers, he will be enabled to prove this to the world. By that time his taste will be ameliorated and his artistical skill improved. He now writes rather as his feelings dictate than after any sustained plan. We must be understood however, as using this language only comparatively; for as we have before said, Lowell is already equal in these respects to most of his cotemporaries. But there is an empyrean to which none of them have yet attained. To that region of eternal day we would have our young countryman aspire.

We have spoken with frankness, because we love with discretion. The genius of Lowell is surpassed by no cotemporary and he has only to be known in order to be understood; but his countrymen have a right to interpose and save him from the errors into which a false taste, a pedantic clique, or indiscriminate flattery may plunge him. He cannot wholly resist the peculiarities of the approaching school, but there is no reason why he should not soften their errors and elevate their style. He can display the taste of Coleridge without his absurdities, he can be as intellectual as Shelley without his mysticism, he can emulate the ideality of Tennyson and Keats without the affectation of the one, or the redundancy of the other. He has high genius, susceptible of improvement, but capable of perversion. He is in that critical period of a poet’s life when the intoxication of success may lead to idleness, when the misguided silence of his friends may confirm him in his worst faults. The improvement which his later poems evince, fill us with high hopes for the future; but his task is not yet done, as his powers are still in the process of development. If we were his bosom friend we should speak as we have written, using that noble sentence as our apology, “strike, but hear me.”

We look forward to the future career of Lowell, with hope, not unmingled, however, with fear and trembling. To his hands, we fondly trust, has been committed the task of achieving a great original American poem, a work that shall silence the sneers of foreigners, and write his own name amid the stars of heaven. He has the dormant intellect which if rightly disciplined, will enable him to fulfil this mission. But let him bide his time. Let him husband his powers, and yet not let them rust in idleness; but gird up his loins for the work that is before him, so that when the day of his translation shall arrive he may lift up his eyes for the chariot of fire. If he does his mission aright the hour of his rejoicing will surely come. No power will be able to avert it. Against the revilings of the envious, against the sneers of the unbelieving, against the persecution of hostile powers he can bear himself proudly up, for the sight of the fiery chariot will swim before his eyes and the sounds of celestial harmonies entrance his soul.

We take leave of Lowell with a single word. He must not be discouraged if his genius should at first be questioned. Few prophets have honor in their own country.

C.