FOOTNOTES:
[D] Franklin's Works, Vol. IX. p. 284, Sparks's edition.
[E] I cannot deny myself the pleasure of referring in this connection to Mr. Carey's admirable exposition of this fact in his "Principles of Political Science."
[F] In all, eighteen millions as a loan, and nine millions as a free gift.
OUR BATTLE-LAUREATE.
"How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut?" This was the question of a writer in the "Atlantic Monthly" last February, whose history of the "Pleiades" of that State we read with a pleasure which we doubt not was shared by all who saw it, except perhaps a few who did not relish the familiar way in which the feather duster was whisked about the statuettes of the seven dii minorum gentium who once reigned in Hartford and New Haven.
"There still remain inventive machinists, acute money-changers, acutest peddlers; but the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades at Hartford."
In the July number of our elder brother, the "North American," one of the ablest of American critic's said of an author who had just published a small volume, "In him the nation has found a new poet, vigorous, original, and thoroughly native." "We have had no such war-poetry, nor anything like it. His 'River-Fight' is the finest lyric of the kind since Drayton's 'Battle of Agincourt.'"
The author of this volume, which is entitled "Lyrics of a Day, or Newspaper Poetry, by a Volunteer in the U. S. Service," and of which a second edition has just been issued by Carleton in New York, is Mr. Henry Howard Brownell of East Hartford, taught in a school at that place, a graduate of Trinity College, a nephew of the late Bishop Brownell of Connecticut. The good which came out of Nazareth, as all remember, claimed another birthplace. If the author of the "Pleiades" asks Nathanael's question, putting Hartford for Nazareth, and we tell him to come and see, we shall have to say that Providence was our new poet's birthplace, and that his lineage divides itself between Rhode Island and Massachusetts. But the good has come to us from the Connecticut Nazareth.
If Drayton had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with the Six Hundred at Balaklava, each of these poets might possibly have pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has painted the sea-fights in which he took part as a combatant. But no man can tell a story at second hand with the truth of incident which belongs to an eye-witness who was part of what he saw. As a mere relator, therefore, of the sights and sounds of great naval battles, Mr. Brownell has a fresh story to tell. Not only so, but these naval battles are not like any the Old World ever saw. One or two "Monitors" would have settled in half an hour the fight which Aeschylus shared at Salamis. The galleys "rammed" each other at Actium; but there was no Dahlgren or Sawyer to thunder from their decks or turrets. The artillery roared at Trafalgar; but there were no iron-clads to tilt at each other, meeting with a shock as of ten thousand knights in armor moulded into one mailed Centaur and crashing against such another monster.
But, again, a man may see a fight and be able to describe it truthfully, yet he may be unable to describe it dramatically. He must have the impressibility of the poetical nature to take in all its scenes, and the vocabulary of an artist to reproduce them. But, for some reason or other, poets are not very often found under fire, unless it be that of the critics. The temperament which makes men insensible to danger is rarely the gift of those who are so organized as to be sensitive to the more ethereal skyey influences. The violet end of the spectrum and the invisible rays beyond it belong to the poet, farthest from the red, which is the light that shines round the soldier.
It happens rarely that poets put their delicate-fibred brains in the paths of bullets, but it does happen. Körner fell with his last song on his lips. Fitz-James O'Brien gave his life as well as his chants to our cause. Mr. Brownell has weathered the great battle-storms on the same deck with Farragut, and has told their story as nobly as his leader made the story for him to tell. We cannot find any such descriptions as his, if for no other reason than that already mentioned, that there have been no such scenes to describe.
But Mr. Brownell's genius is exceptional, as well as his experience. He can compose his verses while the battle is going on around him. During the engagement with Fort Powell, he was actually pencilling down some portions of the "Bay Fight," when he received a polite invitation to step down to the gun-deck and "try a shot at 'em with the Sawyer." He took minutes of everything as it happened during the contest, so that the simple record and the poetical delineation run into each other. We take the liberty to quote a few words from a note he kindly sent in answer to some queries of our own.
"Some of the descriptions [in the 'Bay Fight'] might seem exaggerated, but better authorities than I am say they are not. To be sure, blood and powder are pretty freely mixed for the painting of it; but these were the predominant elements of the scene,—the noise being almost indescribable, and the ship, for all the forward half of her, being an absolute 'slaughter-house.' Though we had only twenty-five killed and twenty-eight wounded (some of whom afterwards died) on that day, yet numbers were torn into fragments, (men with their muscles tense, subjected to violent concussion, seem as brittle as glass,) causing the deck and its surroundings to present a most strange spectacle."
We can understand better after this the lines—
"And now, as we looked ahead,
All for'ard, the long white deck
Was growing a strange dull red,...
Red from mainmast to bitts!
Red on bulwark and wale,—
Red by combing and hatch,—
Red o'er netting and rail!"
The two great battle-poems begin, each of them, with beautiful descriptive lines, move on with gradually kindling fire, reach the highest intensity of action, till the words themselves have the weight and the rush of shot and shell, and the verses seem aflame with the passion of the conflict,—then, as the strife calms itself after the victory is won, the wild dithyrambic stanzas rock themselves into sweet, even cadences. No one can fail to be struck with the freedom and robustness of the language, the irregular strength of the rhythm, the audacious felicities of the rhyme. There are hints which remind us of many famous poets,—hints, not imitations. There can be no doubt that these were either coincidences or unconscious tricks of memory. To us they seem beauties, not defects, in poems of such originality, as in a new musical composition a few notes in some well-remembered sequence often seem to harmonize the crudeness of the newer strain,—as in many flowers and fruits Nature herself repeats a streak of color or a dash of flavor belonging to some alien growth.
Thus, Drayton says,—
"With Spanish yew so strong.
Arrows a cloth-yard long,
That like to serpents stung."
And Brownell,—
"Trust me, our berth was hot;
Ah, wickedly well they shot;
How their death-bolts howled and stung!"
A mere coincidence, in all probability, but the word one which none but a poet could have used. There are reminiscences of Cowper's grand and simple lines on the "Loss of the Royal George," of Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic," of Tennyson's "Charge of the Six Hundred," not one of which but has a pleasing effect in the midst of such vigorous pictures as the new poet has given us fresh from the terrible original. The most obvious criticism is one which applies to the "River Fight," and which is directed against what might be thought an overstraining of the singular power in the use of words which is one of Mr. Brownell's most remarkable characteristics. "General Orders," not essential to the poem, may be admired as a tour de force, but cannot be properly called poetry. It is a condensed, versified edict,—true, no doubt, to the prose original, but on the whole better printed by itself, if printed at all, than suffered to distract the reader from the main narration by its elaborate ingenuity.
These two poems—the "River Fight" and the "Bay Fight"—are better adapted for public reading and declamation than almost any in our literature. They hush any circle of listeners, and many cannot hear those exquisitely tender passages which are found toward the close of each without yielding them the tribute of their tears. They are to all the drawing-room battle-poems as the torn flags of our victorious armadas to the stately ensigns that dressed their ships in the harbor.
Such pictures, if they do not kill everything hung on the walls with them, make even a brilliant canvas look comparatively lustreless. Yet the first poem of Mr. Brownell's which ever attracted our attention, "The Fall of Al Accoub," is of great force, and shows much of the same red light and black shadow, much of the same Vulcanic power over words, as with blast and forge and hammer, which startle us in the two battle-pieces. The lines "Annus Memorabilis," dated Jan. 6th, 1861, read like prophecy in 1865. "Wood and Coal" (November, 1863) gives a presage of the fire which the flame of the conflict would kindle. "The Burial of the Dane" shows the true human sympathy of the writer, in its simple, pathetic narrative; and the story of the "Old Cove" had a wider circulation and a heartier reception than almost any prose effort which has been called forth by the "All we ask is to be let alone" of the arch traitor.
The "Lyrics of a Day" are too modestly named. Our literature cannot forget the masterpieces in this little volume in a day, a year, or an age. The War of Freedom against Slavery has created a devilish enginery of its own: iron for wood, steam for wind and muscle, "Swamp-Angels" and thousand-pounders in place of the armaments that gained the Battle of the Nile and toppled over the chimneys of Copenhagen. New modes of warfare thundered their demand for a new poet to describe them; and Nature has answered in the voice of our Battle-Laureate, Henry Howard Brownell.