"Not a sob, not a tear be spent
For those who fell at his side—
But a moan and a long lament
For him—who might have died!
"Who might have lain, as Harold lay,
A King, and in state enow—
Or slept with his peers, like Roland
In the Straits of Roncesvaux."
In all his early verse there is much that is haunting and memorable, together with much that is trivial and even flippant, It was the coming of the Civil War that made Henry Brownell known as a poet. Indeed he published little before that time.
In our own day we have had great moral issues in war and we have known what the response to them could be. These issues were, however, involved with many other peoples, their application was, in a way, diffused; to different races they presented different aspects. But the Civil War was our own war, its issues were concentrated; it not only involved national honor, it concerned, and vitally concerned, the question whether the nation should live.
To these portentous messages and alarms, borne on every breath of the wandering breezes of those tense days, the spirit of Henry Brownell responded with an intuitive instinct, a poetic eloquence, akin to that of the seers and the prophets.
"World, art thou 'ware of a storm?
Hark to the ominous sound,
How the far-off gales their battle form,
And the great sea swells feel ground!"
In 1860, the Hartford papers were full of his "fiery lyrics" and the writer—was it Hawley or Warner?—of an appreciation of Brownell in the "Courant" shortly after his death tells how well he remembered the day in the anxious winter of 1860-61 when Brownell brought into the office of the old "Evening Press" the manuscript of "Annus Memorabilis"—verses breathing a resolution and exaltation of courage that brought a generous measure of fame. There is something about "Annus Memorabilis"—not only the meter which is the same—that suggests Macaulay's "Naseby," something, too, remotely suggestive of Kipling. Into this mood of exaltation there ran occasionally a vein of humor that only deserves mention in the case of the verses "Let Us Alone," inspired by Jefferson Davis's statement in his inaugural address, "All we want is to be left alone." Though of little poetic merit these lines caught the popular fancy and were long remembered and quoted.
And so the war came on, and the poet's vision, which had been laughed at by some readers, was justified by events. There came defeats, almost countless deaths, occasional victories, doubts of final victory—all the ebb and flow and waste of war—and to it all the sensitive but vigorous spirit responded in many chords. Of the gentler lays, the most winning to the writer are the verses called "The Battle Summers." Here are a few of the stanzas—
"All vain—Fair Oaks and Seven Pines!
A deeper hue than dying Fall
May lend, is yours!—yet over all
The mild Virginian autumn smiles,
. . . . .
"We pass—we sink like summer's snow—
Yet on the mighty Cause shall move,
Though every field a Cannae prove,
And every pass a Roncesvaux.
"Through every summer burn anew
A battle summer,—though each day
We name a new Aceldema,
Or some dry Golgotha re-dew."