Bryant's poem on the Emancipation. America ever become monarchical it will be due to the influence of cities and those bred in them. Bryant's regard for law, for the inheritance of just political and social systems, was unquestionable. He might have been a constitutionalist in France; here, though bred a Federalist, he was sure to oppose undue centralization. After all, he was of no party further than he conceived it to be right. Witness his contest with slavery and his desertion of a Democracy which finally, he thought, belied its name. That he did not, with Lowell and Whittier, summon his muse to oppose the greatest wrong of our history was owing to two causes : First, it was his lyrical habit to observe and idealize general principles, the abstract rather than the concrete. Whittier's poems are alive with incident, and burn with personal feeling. Once, only, Bryant wrote a mighty poem on Slavery: when it had received its death-blow, when the struggle ended and the right prevailed. Jehovah had conquered, His children were free, and Bryant raised a chant like that of Miriam, "O thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years, Didst hold thy millions fettered; "Go, now, accursed of God, and take thy place "Lo! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom This swelling poem, "The Death of Slavery," was not needed to assure us that the cause of freedom touched his heart. For, secondly, his true counterpart to Whittier's work was to be found in the vigorous antislavery assaults he made for years in the journal of which he died the editor. There it was that he exercised his influence and mental power upon "the THE CLOSING SCENE. 93 rebuke of fraud and oppression of whatever clime or race." labors. His prose labors were an outlet, constantly afforded His prose in his journalism, through which much of that energy escaped which otherwise would have varied the motives and increased the body of his song. On the whole, though he was without a philologist's equipment, there were few better writers of simple, nervous English. He made it for half a century the instrument of his every-day thought and purpose; as a leader-writer, a traveller and correspondent, an essayist and orator, a political disputant. His polemic vigor and acerbity were worked off in his middle-life editorials, and in defence of what he thought to be right. There he was, indeed, unyielding, and other pens recall the traditions of his political controversies. He never confused the distinct provinces of prose and verse. Refer to any thing written by him, of the former kind, and you find plainness, well-constructed syntax, free from any cheap gloss of rhetoric or the "jingle of an effeminate rhythm." civic his As in written prose and verse, so in speech and public offices. The long series of addresses on occasions closed with one which brought him to his death. Mastering his work to the very end, it was lot at last to bow, as became a poet of Nature, before her own life-nurturing, life-destroying forces, and thus submit to her kindest universal law. The question of a passage in "An Evening Revery" was answered, and the prophecy fulfilled: : "O thou great Movement of the Universe, Or Change, or Flight of Time - for ye are one! That bearest, silently, this visible scene Into night's shadow and the streaming rays Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me? w. C. B. died in New York, N. Y., June 12, 1878. I feel the mighty current sweep me on, He knows when they shall darken or grow bright; A CHAPTER IV. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. I. cans of his own time. PLEASANT story, that went the round shortly | His stand after the close of our Civil War, shows the char- ing with typical acter of Whittier's hold upon his countrymen. It was Amerisaid that one among a group of prominent men, when conversation on politics and finance began to lag, asked the question, Who is the best American poet? Horace Greeley, who was of the party, replied with the name of Whittier, and his judgment was instantly approved by all present. These active, practical Americans, patriots or demagogues, some of them, doubtless, of the "heated barbarian" type, - for once found their individual preferences thus expressed and in accord. At that climacteric time the Pleiad of our elder poets was complete and shining, not a star was lost. But the instinct of these stern, hard-headed men was in favor of the Quaker bard, the celibate and prophetic recluse; he alone appealed to the poetic side of their natures. We do not hold a press item to absolute exactness in its report of words. The epithet "best" may not have been employed by the questioner on that occasion; were it not for the likelihood that those to whom he spoke would not have laid much stress upon verbal distinctions, one might guess that he said the most national, or representative, or inborn, of our poets. The value of the incident remains; it was discovered English opinion: "Pall Mall Gazette," Jan. 30, 1882. How far a national poet. that Whittier most nearly satisfied the various poetic needs of the typical, resolute Americans, men of his own historic generation, who composed that assemblage. With this may be considered the fact that it is the habit of compilers and brief reviewers, whose work is that of generalization, to speak of him as a "thoroughly American" poet. An English critic, in a notice marked by comprehension of our home-spirit, and with the honest effort of a delicate mind to get at the secret of Whittier's unstudied verse, and gain the best that can be gained from it, finds him to be the "most national " of our writers, and the most characteristic through his extraordinary fluency, narrow experience, and wide sympathy, -language which implies a not unfriendly recognition of traits which have been thought to be American,- loquacity, provincialism, and generosity of heart. In sentiments thus spoken and written there is a good deal of significance. But the words of the foreign verdict cannot be taken precisely as they stand. Has there been a time, as yet, when any writer could be thoroughly American? What is the meaning of the phrase, the most limited meaning which a citizen, true to our notion of this country's future, will entertain for a moment? Assuredly not a quality which is collegiate, like Longfellow's, or of a section, like Whittier's, or of a special and cultured class, which alone can enjoy Whitman's sturdy attempt to create a new song for the people before the accepted and accepting time. During the period of these men America scarcely has been more homogeneous in popular See pp. 5- characteristics than in climate and topography. I have discussed the perplexing topic of our nationalism, and am willing to believe that these States are blending 10. |