In many of Cotter’s verses there is a sonorous flow which is evidence of poetic power made creative by passion. Didacticism and philosophy do not destroy the lyrical quality. In The Book’s Creed this teacher-poet makes an appeal to his generation to be as much alive and as creative as the creed makers of other days were. The slaves of the letter, the mummers of mere formulas, he thus addresses:
You are dead to all the Then,
You are dead to all the Now,
If you hold that former men
Wore the garland for your brow.
Time and tide were theirs to brave,
Time and tide are yours to stem.
Bow not o’er their open grave
Till you drop your diadem.
Honor all who strove and wrought,
Even to their tears and groans;
But slay not your honest thought
Through your reverence for their bones.
Cotter is a wizard at rhyming. His “Sequel to the Pied Piper of Hamelin” surpasses the original—Browning’s—in technique—that is, in rushing rhythms and ingenious rhymes. It is an incredible success, with no hint of a tour-de-force performance. Its content, too, is worthy of the metrical achievement. I will lay the proof before the competent reader in an extract or two from this remarkable accomplishment:
The last sweet notes the piper blew
Were heard by the people far and wide;
And one by one and two by two
They flocked to the mountain-side.
Some came, of course, intensely sad,
And some came looking fiercely mad,
And some came singing solemn hymns,
And some came showing shapely limbs,
And some came bearing the tops of yews,
And some came wearing wooden shoes,
And some came saying what they would do,
And some came praying (and loudly too),
And all for what? Can you not infer?
A-searching and lurching for the Pied Piper,
And the boys and girls he had taken away.
And all were ready now to pay
Any amount that he should say.
So begins the Sequel. Another passage, near the end, will indicate the trend of the story:
The years passed by, as years will do,
When trouble is the master,
And always strives to bring to view
A new and worse disaster;
And sorrow, like a sorcerer,
Spread out her melancholy pall,
So that its folds enveloped all,
And each became her worshipper.
And not a single child was born
Through all the years thereafter;
If words sprang from the lips of scorn
None came from those of laughter.
Finally, the inhabitants of Hamelin are passing through death’s portal, and when all had departed: