and its criticism emphasized the two youthful qualities which should have been most emphasized, simplicity and freshness. “These voices of the night breathe a sweet and gentle music, such as befits the time when the moon is up, and all the air is clear, and soft, and still. The original poems in the volume are characterized by the truest simplicity of thought and style; the thin veil of mysticism which is thrown over some of them adds only grace to the picture, without tantalizing the eye.” Longfellow’s second volume, the “Poems on Slavery” (1842), came as a shock to a society as yet not inured to anti-slavery doctrines. The editors of Graham’s Magazine wrote the author that the word “slavery” was never allowed to appear in a Philadelphia magazine, and that the publisher objected to have even the title of the book mentioned in his pages. Till a later date Harper’s in New York similarly objected to mention of the slavery question. But Bryant quoted “The Slave’s Dream” in full, and said of the sheaf: “They have all the characteristics of Longfellow’s later poems, adding to the grace and harmony of his earlier, a vein of deeper and stronger feeling, maturer thought, bolder imagery, and a more suggestive manner.”
Thus the successive issues of Longfellow’s verse were all hailed with kindly appreciation. When “Ballads and Other Poems” appeared, Bryant praised (Jan. 10, 1842) the “grace and melody” with which the author handled hexameters in a translation from Tegner, and the “noble and affecting simplicity” of the result, while he pronounced the miscellaneous poems beautiful. “Evangeline,” four years later, inspired the publication in the Post of an anonymous burlesque imitation, next the editorial columns, which it is almost certain is Bryant’s. He wrote such humorous trifles till his latest years, and he accompanied this with some remarks upon German hexametric verse, with which he was thoroughly familiar. Dated “in the ante-temperance period of our history,” it showed old Tom Robinson seated in his elbow chair:
Red was the old man’s nose, with frequent potations of cider,
Made still redder by walking that day in the teeth of the north wind.
Warmth from the blazing fire had heightened the tinge of its scarlet;
While at each broad red flash from the hearth it seemed to grow redder.
“Jemmy, my boy,” he said, and turned to a tow-headed urchin,
“Bring your poor uncle a mug of cider up from the cellar.”
Straightway rose from the chimney nook the obedient Jemmy ...
Took from the cupboard shelves a mug of mighty dimensions,
Opened the cellar door, and down the cellarway vanished.
Soon he came back with the mighty vessel brimming and sparkling,
Full and fresh, the old man took it and raised it with both hands,
Drained the whole at a draught, and handed it, dripping and empty,
Back to the boy, and winking hard with both eyes as he did it,
Stretched out his legs to the fire, while his nose grew redder and redder.
When “The Seaside and the Fireside” was published in 1850, Bryant gave especial praise to “The Building of the Ship,” in many ways the best poem Longfellow ever wrote. An unpoetical subject; but “the author treats it with as much grace of imagery as if it were a fairy tale, and finds in it ample matter suggestive of beautiful trains of thought.” He quoted the fervent closing apostrophe to the nation threatened by civil war, “Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”; and by accident, in the adjoining column, part of the Post’s Washington correspondence, lay a paragraph describing the sensation aroused by the secessionist manifesto of Clingman, a fire-eating North Carolina Congressman. Of “Hiawatha” in 1855 Bryant said:
A long poem, founded on the traditions of the American aborigines, and their modes of life, is a somewhat hazardous experiment. Longfellow, however, has acquitted himself quite as well as we had expected. The habits of the Indians are gracefully idealized in his verses, and we recognize the author of “Evangeline” in the tenderness of the thoughts, the richness of the imagery, and the flow of the numbers.... A love story is interwoven with the poem, and the narrative of Hiawatha’s wooing is beautifully and fancifully related. The canto of The Ghosts is wrought up with a fine supernatural effect, and the mysterious departure of Hiawatha, with which the poem closes, after the appearance of the first messenger of the Christian gospel among his countrymen, is well imagined.
Lowell’s first two volumes of poems were moderately commended. “There are fine veins of thought in Lowell’s verse, with frequently a fresh and vigorous expression,” Bryant remarked of the second (Feb. 12, 1848). For Emerson there was a more glowing word of praise. He is “a brilliant writer, both in prose and verse, though perhaps, as a poet, too reflective, too subjective, the modern metaphysician would call it, to suit the popular taste,” Bryant commented in the Post of Jan. 4, 1847, when Emerson’s first collection was issued. “His little address in verse to the humble bee is, however, one of the finest things of the sort—a better poem, in our estimation, than Anacreon’s famous ode to the cicada.” Whittier’s verse, he thought in 1843, writing of “Lays of My Home,” “grows better and better. With no abatement of poetic enthusiasm, his style becomes more manly, and his vein of thought richer and deeper.” References to Poe, anterior to the obituary of Oct. 9, 1849, which Bryant did not write, for he was then abroad, and which called him a “genius” and “an industrious, original, and brilliant writer,” are few. The Evening Post had remarked in 1845 that he was at least within a “t” of being a poet, and had followed his lectures that year at the Society Library. The Express on April 18 stated that he had discoursed at length upon the poets, and criticized his views. At this the Post professed amazement, for its reporter had distinctly heard Poe postpone the lecture; had he delivered it exclusively to the Express?
It is pleasant to record that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s genius was recognized and forcibly described. Not always promptly, but always emphatically, the Evening Post recommended “The Scarlet Letter,” “Twice-Told Tales,” “The House of Seven Gables,” and other books to its readers. It expressed the hope in 1851 that the success of the first-named “will awaken him to the consciousness of what he seems to have been writing in ignorance of, that the public is an important party, not only to the author’s fame, but to his usefulness.” It thought that much as he had accomplished, he had not yet done justice to his powers. Two years later it congratulated him upon the leisure that his appointment as consul at Liverpool should afford, and recalling that he was just at the age when Walter Scott first appeared as a novelist, said that it saw no reason why the latter half of Hawthorne’s life might not be equally brilliant. Unfortunately, the romancer had but eleven more years to live. To quote three short comments upon books by other great prose authors, one of which appeared in 1842, another in 1849, and the third in 1850, will show the general character of such notices, and illustrate how little criticism was given:
THE DEERSLAYER, or THE FIRST WAR PATH, Cooper’s last novel, is one of his finest productions. In the wild forest where the scene is laid, and in the wild life of the New York hunters of the last century and their savage neighbors, his genius finds the aliment of its finest strength. The work is, as he observes, the first act in the life of Leatherstocking, though written last, and it exhibits this singular being, one of the most strongly marked and most interesting creatures of fiction, in his early youth, fresh from his education among the Delawares, and now for the first time employing in war the weapon which had gained him a reputation as a hunter. The narrative is one of intense interest from beginning to close, and the characters of the various personages with whom the hero of the story is associated, are drawn with perhaps more skill, and a deeper knowledge of human nature, than in most of the author’s previous novels.
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THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL, by Francis Parkman, is a pleasant book relating adventures and wanderings in the western wilderness, and describing the life of the western hunters and the Indian tribes. It will give those who are about to make the journey across the Rocky Mountains a good idea of the country lying between us and the regions on the Pacific Coast, and of the savage people who roam over it.
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EMERSON’S REPRESENTATIVE MEN.—We have received from J. Wiley, of this city, Emerson’s Seven Lectures on Representative Men, just published by Phillips, Sampson, and Company, of Boston. The work is strongly marked by the characteristics of the author—brilliant coruscations of thought, instead of a quiet, steady blaze—an avoidance of everything like a coherent system of opinions—a large range of comparison and illustration, with an occasional haziness of metaphysical conception, in which the reader is apt to lose his way. These lectures are occupied with the delineation of the characters of half a dozen of the greatest men that ever lived, each of whom Mr. Emerson makes the representative and exponent of a certain class. One of these great men is Plato, on whose intellectual character the author expatiates like one who is truly in love with his subject.
It was deemed incumbent upon the Evening Post to print at least this much concerning every noteworthy American book, but it recognized no duty as regarded English works. Sometimes a volume, like Carlyle’s “Chartism,” would receive a column and a half, while sometimes important productions would get never a word. The Evening Post’s criticism of Dickens’s “American Notes” is given by Parke Godwin in his life of Bryant—a criticism praising some of the novelist’s fault-finding and taking exception chiefly to his remarks on American newspapers. “Martin Chuzzlewit” was reviewed in 1843, and the American scenes were pronounced a failure for two reasons. “In the first place, the author knows very little about us, and in the second place, the desire of being vehemently satirical seems to unfit him for what he wishes to do, and takes from him his wonted humor and invention.” But no later work by Dickens, up to the Civil War, seems to have been noticed.