One fine summer's day we stood upon a little bridge thrown over the deep cutting of a newly constructed railway. It was an open country around us, a common English landscape—fields with their hedgerows, and their thin elm-trees stripped of their branches, with here and there a slight undulation of the soil, giving relief to, or partially concealing, the red and white cottage or the red-tiled barn. We were looking, however, into the deep cutting beneath us. Here the iron rails glistened in the sun, and still, as the eye pursued their track, four threads of glittering steel ran their parallel course, but apparently approximating in the far perspective, till they were lost by mere failure of the power of vision to follow them: the road itself was straight as an arrow. On the steep banks, fresh from the spade and pick-axe, not a shrub was seen, not a blade of grass. On the road itself there was nothing but clods of earth, or loose gravel, which lay in heaps by the side of the rails, or in hollows between them: it was enough that the iron bars lay there clear of all obstruction. No human foot, no foot of man or of beast, was ever intended to tread that road. It was for the engine only. From time to time the shrill whistle is heard—the train, upon its hundred iron wheels, shoots through the little bridge, and rolls like thunder along these level grooves. It is soon out of sight, and the country is not only again calm and solitary, but appears for the moment to be utterly abandoned and deserted. It has its old life, however, in it still.
Well, as we were standing thus upon the little bridge, in the open country, and looking down into this deep ravine of the engineer's making, we noticed, fluttering beneath us, a yellow butterfly, sometimes beating its wings against the barren sides, and sometimes perching on the glistering rails themselves. Clearly, most preposterously out of place was this same beautiful insect. What had it to do there? What food, what fragrance, what shelter could it find? Or who was to see and to admire? There was not a shrub, nor an herb, nor a flower, nor a playmate of any description. It is manifest, most beautiful butterfly, that you cannot live here. From these new highways of ours, from these iron thoroughfares, you must certainly depart. But it follows not that you must depart the world altogether. In yonder hollow at a distance there is a cottage, surrounded by its trees and its flowers, and there are little children whom you may sport with, and tease, and delight, taking care they do not catch you napping. There is still garden-ground in the world for you, and such as you.
Sometimes, when we have seen pretty little gilded volumes of song and poetry lying about in the great highways of our industrial world, we have recalled this scene to mind. There is garden-ground left for them also, and many a private haunt, solitary or domestic, where they will be welcome.
We have heard it objected against American poets, but chiefly by their own countrymen, that they are not sufficiently national. This surely is a most unreasonable complaint. The Americans inhabit what was once, and is still sometimes called, the New World, but they are children of the Old. Their religion grew, like ours, in Asia; they receive it, as we do, through the nations of the west of Europe; they are, like us, descendants of the Goth and the Roman, and are compounded of those elements which Rome and Palestine, and the forests of Germany, severally contributed towards the formation of what we call the Middle Ages. They have the same intellectual pedigree as ourselves. No Tintern Abbey, or Warwick Castle, stands on their rivers, to mark the lapse of time; but they must ever look back upon the days of the monk and of the knight, as the true era of romance. Proud as they may be of their Pilgrim Fathers, one would not limit them to this honourable paternity. It is very little poetry they would get out of the Mayflower—or philosophy either.
There are, it is true, subjects for poetry native to America—new aspects of nature and of humanity—the aboriginal forest, the aboriginal man, the prairie, the settler, and the savage. But even in these the American poet cannot keep a monopoly. Englishmen and Frenchmen have visited his forests; they have stolen his Red Indian; and have made the more interesting picture of him in proportion as they knew less of the original. Moreover, many of the peculiar aspects of human life which America presents may require the mellowing effect of time, the half obscurity of the past, to render them poetic. The savage is not the only person who requires to be viewed at a distance: there is much in the rude, adventurous, exciting life of the first settlers which to posterity may appear singularly attractive. They often seem to share the power and the skill of the civilised man, with the passions of the barbarian. What a scene—when viewed at a distance—must be one of their revivals! A camp-meeting is generally described by those who have witnessed it, in the language of ridicule or reproof. But let us ask ourselves this question—When St Francis assembled five thousand of his followers on the plains of Assisi, and held what has been called, in the history of the Franciscan order, "the Chapter of Mats," because the men had no other shelter than rude tents made of mats—on which occasion St Francis himself was obliged to moderate the excesses of fanaticism and fanatical penance in which his disciples indulged—what was this but a camp-meeting? In some future age, a revival in the "Far West," or a company of Millerites expecting their translation into heaven, will be quite as poetical as this Chapter of Mats. For ourselves, we think that any genuine exhibition of sentiment, by great numbers of our fellow-men, is a subject worthy of study, and demands a certain respect. Those, however, who can see nothing but absurdity and madness in a camp-meeting, would have walked through the five thousand followers of St Francis with the feeling only of intolerable disgust. Yet so it is, that merely from the lapse of time, or the obscurity it throws over certain parts of the picture, there are many who find something very affecting and sublime in the fanaticism of the thirteenth century, who treat the same fanaticism with pity or disdain when exhibited in the nineteenth.
"Miltons and Shakspeares," says an editor of one of the volumes before us, "have not yet sprung from the only half-tilled soil of the mighty continent; giants have not yet burst from its forests, with a grandeur equal to their own; but," &c. &c. Doubtless the giant will make his appearance in due course of time. But what if he should never manifest himself in the epic of twelve, or twenty-four books, or in any long poem whatever? A number of small poems, beautiful and perfect of their kind, will constitute as assuredly a great work, and found as great a reputation. We are far from thinking that the materials for poetry are exhausted or diminished in these latter days. As a general rule, in proportion as men think, do they feel,—more variously, if not more deeply, themselves—and more habitually through sympathy with others. Love and devotion, and all the more refined sentiments, are heightened in the cultivated mind; and speculative thought itself becomes a great and general source of emotion. As almost every man has felt, at one period of his life, the passion of love, so almost every cultivated mind has felt, at one period of his career, what Wordsworth describes as—
"The burden and the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world."
We are persuaded that both the materials and the readers of poetry will increase and multiply with the spread of education. But there is apparently a revolution of taste in favour of the lyric, and at the expense of the epic poet. A long narrative, in verse of any kind, is felt to be irksome and monotonous: it could be told so much better in prose. We do not speak of such narrations as The Paradise Lost, where religious feeling presides over every part, and where, in fact, the narrative is absorbed in the sentiment. If Milton were living at this day, there is no reason why he should not choose the same theme for his poem. But Tasso and Ariosto would think long before they would now select for their flowing stanzas the Jerusalem Delivered, or the Orlando Furioso. Such themes, they would probably conclude, might be far more effectively dealt with in prose.
Fiction, told as Sir Walter Scott tells it—history, as Macaulay narrates—such examples as these put the reading world, we think, quite out of patience with verse, when applied to the purpose of a lengthy narrative. They and others have shown that prose is so much the better vehicle. It may be rendered almost equally harmonious, and admits of far greater variety of cadence; it may be polished and refined, and yet adapt itself, in turns, to every topic that arises. No need here to omit the most curious incident, or the most descriptive detail, because it will not comport with the dignified march of the verse, or of the versified style. The language here rises and falls naturally with the subject, or may be made to do so; nor is it ever necessary to obscure the meaning, for the sake of sustaining a wearisome rhythm. If you have a long story to tell, by all means tell it in prose.
But the short poem—need we say it?—is not ephemeral because it is brief. The most enduring reputation may be built upon a few lyrics. They should, however, not only contain some beautiful verses—they should be beautiful throughout. And this brings us to the only real complaint which we, in our critical capacity, have to allege against the tuneful brethren in America. We find too much haste, far too much negligence, and a willingness to be content with what has first presented itself. Instead of recognising that the short poem ought to be almost perfect, they seem to proceed on the quite contrary idea, that because it is brief, it should therefore be hastily written, and that it would be a waste of time to bestow much revision upon it. We often, meet with a poem where the sentiment is natural and poetic, but where the effect is marred by this negligent and unequal execution. A verse of four lines shall have three that are good, and the fourth shall limp. Or a piece shall consist but of five verses, and two out of the number must be absolutely effaced if you would re-peruse the composition with any pleasure. Meanwhile there is sufficient merit in what remains to make us regret this haste and inequality. To our own countrymen, as well as to the American, we would suggest that the small poem may be a great work; but that, to become so, it should not only be informed by noble thought, it should exhibit no baser metal, no glaring inequalities of style, and, above all, no conflicting, obscure, or half-extricated meanings. We believe that it would be generally found, if we could penetrate the secret history of really beautiful compositions, that, however brief, and although they were written at first during some happy hour of inspiration, they had received again and again new touches, and the "fortunate erasures" of the poet. By this process only did they grow to be the completely beautiful productions which they are. Such exquisite lyrics are very rare, and we may depend upon it they are not produced without much thought and labour, joined, as we say, to that happy hour of inspiration.