Some of them did pastels in prose, and many edited transitory little periodicals like The Yellow Book, The Chap Book, The Lark, and Truth in Boston. Fourteen of these came into existence in the United States in the first two months of 1897, and almost none of them survived till the Fourth of July of that year. Probably the only lines in any of them recalled by the readers of to-day are Gelett Burgess’s quatrain on the purple cow. The burden of these young poets was many words fairly spoken of “organic growth,” “development,” “progress,” “liberalism,” “freedom of speech,” and “independent thought”; and the chief product of their thinking was a frank and free Bohemianism, an honest unconventionality much more real than the diluted thing about which Stedman and Aldrich had rimed thirty years before.
The most vigorous and enduring of the new group was Richard Hovey (1864–1900). He was Western-born, schooled at Washington, and a graduate of Dartmouth in 1885. His next years included study in the General Theological Seminary in New York, an assistantship in a New York ritualistic church, excursions into journalism and acting, and then, after some years as poet and dramatist, a professorship of English literature in Barnard College, Columbia University. Hovey grew perceptibly during his eager enjoyment of these various pursuits. For a while he seemed content to sing the praises of convivial comradeship:
For we know the world is glorious
And the goal a golden thing,
And that God is not censorious
When his children have their fling;
but he passed before long to the stage in which the good fellowship of youth was a symbol of something far larger than itself—nothing less than the promise of humankind. The ode delivered before his fraternity convention in 1896 quite transcends the sort of effusion usually evoked by such occasions. The spring in the air, in the world, and in the heart of youth culminate in the oft-sung “Stein Song”; and after it the poem goes on to “The first low stirring of that greater spring,”
Of something potent burning through the earth,
Of something vital in the procreant air.
This potent something is the “unceasing purpose” of Tennyson, but with a difference, for in Hovey’s mind it is not the purpose of a detached God who imposes his will benevolently on mankind from without, but the creative impulse which is inherent in life itself, the evidence of the divine spirit in the heart of man. Comradeship, then, became to Hovey a symbol of altruism, and he looked beyond this springtide of the year and of the youthful collegians to the time when science, art, and religion should emancipate men in the truth that should set them free and bring them, in spite of delays, in the fullness of time to “the greater to-morrow.”