Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His translations of Uhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time, either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer and a literary man.”
Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however, considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.” But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could, any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some of literati of New York (possibly Poe) could not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:
The star of love now shines above,
Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;
Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves
Its serenade for thee.
Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.
These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than it was forty years gone by, but he has the immortality of a classic. Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.
As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past, and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no Sherman Act can suppress.
Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with the world down the ringing grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then, but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.