The achievement of Bryant’s declining years was his translation of Homer. He had at various times amused himself with renderings of one or another passage that pleased him in foreign tongues. He was an ardent admirer of the Greek epics. He was dissatisfied with the versions of Cowper and Pope. It is possible that he was acquainted with the counsels of Matthew Arnold, called forth by the Homer of Francis Newman. The favour met by his attempts with the Odyssey encouraged him to try his hand at the Iliad. On the death of his wife, in 1866, he felt the need of some employment to distract his attention, and resolved to translate the Iliad entire. By 1869 he had finished the first twelve books, at the rate of from forty to seventy-five lines a day. These twelve books were published in February, 1870, the remainder of the Iliad in June. By the first of July he was engaged upon the Odyssey; on December 7, 1871, he sent his printers “the twenty-fourth and concluding book of [his] translation of Homer’s Odyssey, together with the table of contents for the second volume.” To misunderstand the repression of feeling in these simple words, with which the venerable Bryant takes leave of his final work, is to miss the hidden fire animating his whole existence. In a great poet there is little waste of energy in the outward expression. The moment feeling shows itself, it is transmuted into artistic form. The form is adequate, but it is something different from the sentiment that gives it life.
The excellence of Bryant’s blank-verse translation of Homer is not a theme for long discussion here. He aimed at simplicity and faithfulness. He rejected several of the customary ornaments of modern verse, choosing for his medium that rhythm which is most nearly related to the cadence of everyday speech. Tested by its effect on the layman of the present day, his attempt is more successful than other well-known metrical versions, less than the cadenced prose of translators, like Myers and Lang, who have profited by the advice of Arnold with respect to diction, but in avoiding the trammels of metre have followed the example set by the scholars of King James in the Authorised Version of the Scriptures. However, Bryant’s rendering is too noble a piece of imaginative scholarship to be passed over.
Bryant spent something like six years upon his Homer. He survived its completion by six years more, full of honours, rejoicing in a hale old age, still visited occasionally by poetical inspiration, still influential in the political thought of his nation, able at four score and four to make a public address in honour of the Italian patriot Mazzini. During this address, “his uncovered head was for a time exposed to the full glare of the sun. Shortly after, while entering a house, he fell backwards, striking his head upon the stone steps; concussion of the brain and paralysis followed.” He died in New York, June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, on Long Island Sound, near the beautiful country home where for thirty-five years his literary toils had been “sweetened to his taste.”
Owing to his artistic reserve, Bryant had the reputation of a temperamental coldness, a reputation that is belied both by the tenderness of his domestic ties and by his well chosen and enduring friendships. His patriotism also was unswerving. If he “let no empty gust of passion find an utterance in his lay,” nevertheless he knew and valued
... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the boundless deep.
He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant.
Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead, and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was “facile princeps” among American poets, this eminence arose from no merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a noble, well rounded, and representative human life.
Saxe, Melville, Alice and Phoebe Cary.—After Bryant it is convenient to speak of a few poets, very different from him, and for the most part from each other, whose contemporaneous presence in New York is almost the only thing that connects them. John G. Saxe (1816–87), a native of Vermont, in his time was counted a leader among satirists. He staggers now under the accusation of extreme superficiality; none the less is he lively and readable. He consciously imitated Hood; he could scarcely avoid imitating Wendell Holmes. Of himself he had a remarkable turn for epigram and for punning in rhyme. His burlesque adaptations of Ovid are smart and amusing. On the whole it may be said that Saxe was at his best in “The Proud Miss MacBride,” where he girds at an upstart aristocracy:
Of all the notable things on earth,
The queerest one is pride of birth,
Among our “fierce Democracie.”
Herman Melville (1819–91), who wrote a fascinating account (“Typee,” 1846) of his stay among the aborigines of the Marquesas, also published “Battle-Pieces” (1866) and other poems. His verse is less objective and sincere than his prose. Alice Cary (1820–71) and her sister, Phoebe (1824–71), were born in Ohio, where they were locally appreciated. Removing first to Philadelphia, then to New York, they supported themselves by their pens. The talents of Alice Cary were manifestly superior; yet for a time, yielding to her admiration of Poe, she allowed the element of harmonious sound in her poetry to overbalance that of meaning. Her hymns, one of which is almost a classic, are noble in their purity of sentiment.