Never has Lilly Larnard been more than thirty miles away from the village of her birth. She has read of cities, and the busy multitudes that throng them; of armies and navies; of politics and war; but all these things to her are but as the visions of a dream. She is ignorant of the real condition and character of the great world, for nought but the echo of its din has ever fallen upon her ear. She listens with wonder to the deeds of which I sometimes tell her I have been an unwilling witness in the wilderness of men. She thinks it strange, that the inhabitants of cities think so much of the present life, and so little of the future. Her days have been spent in innocence beneath the blue dome of the illimitable sky, inhaling the pure unadulterated air of the country, now sporting in the sunshine, and now sprinkled by a refreshing shower; while the loveliest of flowers and birds, and holy and tender affections, have been her hourly companions; and her nights have passed away in pleasant dreams of that bright world beyond the stars.
LOUIS L. NOBLE.
You ask me to tell you who is Louis L. Noble, to whom I dedicated a volume of Essays some years ago? There is hardly a task in the wide world that I could enter upon with greater pleasure than the answering of this question. And why? Because he is one of my best friends, and a poet of rare genius and power.
To come directly to the point, then, he is a young clergyman of the Episcopal church, whose present field of ministerial labor is in North Carolina. He was born on the Susquehannah; but having spent his boyhood in the wilderness where I was born, there has ever been (since our acquaintance commenced) a delicate stream of sympathy flowing out of one heart into the other. His poetry (and this is perhaps the secret of my attachment to it) is the offspring of that wilderness country familiar to the world as Michigan, and his themes I look upon as my own. He has always been an admirer of the red man, and, like me, in times past has associated with him in the most intimate and familiar intercourse. Therefore, when their customs inspire his pen, you may depend upon the faithfulness of his descriptions. He is a creature of impulse, and whenever he strikes the lyre, it is because he cannot help it, or because it affords him an indescribable joy. He writes “with fury, and corrects with care;” and I am not sure but he sometimes weakens his conceptions by too much pruning and artificial arrangement. He is yet in the vigor of his days, and if his life is spared, we have reason to expect great things from his pen. In temper he is exceedingly amiable, and in disposition variable as the shade, but ever joyous as a strong-bodied and intellectual boy,—a feeling which his philosophy teaches him is a treasure beyond all price. In person he is rather slender, but well formed and sinewy, with dark complexion, hair like the raven’s wing, and an eye as black, as keen, and spirit-stirring as that of an Ottawa Chief. He is one who cannot but be loved by all who study his works, and to do this is the best literary advice I can offer you or any of my thinking friends.
And now, as an important portion of himself, let me characterize his poetry, and give you a few specimens. As yet, he has only occasionally published in our prominent periodicals; but a volume of his Poems is now in press, and I prophecy that its appearance will be a bright era in our Polite Literature. His principal efforts, up to this time, are entitled “Ni-ma-min,” “Tale of the Morning Wind,” “Lines to a Swan,” “Love and Beauty,” “The Cripple Boy,” the “Emigrant’s Burial,” the “Girl of the Sky-blue Lake,” and some fine songs and sonnets. A valuable and remarkable feature of his poetry, is its suggestive tendency. It is of a kind calculated to purify the public taste, to make more happy those who read it, to instil into the heart a love for the beautiful and true, and to make us at once conscious of our own littleness in the sight of God, and of the exalted attributes of the soul; or rather, makes a man feel that he is but a man, and yet a portion of the Invisible. It displays a consummate knowledge of the Indian character, an ardent attachment to the works of nature, and showing a remarkable mastery of language, and the writer to be possessed of a mind of refined poetical genius. You find nothing in it “long drawn out”; every sentence has a meaning. It contains no far-fetched conceptions and images; and every portion of each poem is closely cemented together, and pervaded by one spirit, one idea. Take away the rhyme, and it is poetry; take away the thought, and you will find much poetry in the versification alone. It breathes of the virgin wilderness, and of its brave, hardy, and noble children; and dearly, dearly do I love it, for it recalls to mind the living joys of my wild, free, and happy boyhood. I would rather have written his forthcoming volume, than to have been the author of all the fashionable novels of the present century. If it be true, that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” then must the poetry of Noble be as enduring as the English language, or the memory of the Indian race now withering from the land. A thousand blessings rest upon the poet of my boyhood’s home! As to the faults of his poetry, I confess that he has his share, because he is of “woman born.” So far as my sagacity goes, the most glaring ones are these. He is somewhat inclined to the mysticism of the German, and sometimes makes use of epithets that remind us of his favorite authors. In the next place, his stories are not as clearly defined as they should be; but what, after all, to the genuine lover of poetry, is the mere story of a poem? “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn,” are what delight him, and it will probably be only among kindred spirits that Noble will be popular. The mass of people will likely pass him by “as the idle wind, which they regard not.” And why? Because their minds are too narrow and weakly to enjoy anything superior to the horrid and disgusting trash continually teeming from the press. Noble’s poetry is possessed of the true spirit of the nine, and its gifted author need not doubt as to his reward, which is the only one he desires, namely, the approbation of sensible and refined minds.
And now, to back the foregoing opinions, I mean to quote three poems, neither of which shall be the longest and most ambitious he has written, viz.; “Lines to a Swan Flying in the Vale of the Huron,” “The Cripple Boy,” and the “Girl of the Sky-blue Lake.” The Huron, alluded to in the first, rises in the interior of Michigan, and empties into Lake Erie. Its clear waters gave it the name of its more mighty kinsman, Lake Huron. Now free your imagination and give it wings.
O, what a still, bright night! It is the sleep
Of beauteous Nature in her bridal hall.
See, while the groves shadow the shining lake,
How the full moon does bathe their melting green!