REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
The Poetical Works of Fitz Greene Halleck. New Edition. Redfield: Clinton Hall, New York.
This is a new and very beautiful edition, the most beautiful that has ever been published, of one of the sweetest, most elaborately finished, most expressive and original poets of America. No one can read Halleck, without being at once impressed with the sense that he is a writer entirely sui generis and most peculiar; not merely imitating no one, but resembling no one, and—
“Si liceat magnis componere parva”—
Like the notorious Andrew Jackson Allen, himself alone.
Mr. Bryant we have never heard accused of imitation; yet it is notorious that his style, elaborate, didactic, stately, sometimes magniloquent, sometimes magnificent, always as brightly polished and always as cold as a Toledo rapier’s blade, always arousing admiration, and at times awe, but rarely awakening sympathy, but never calling forth a tear, closely resembles that of many English poets, none of them his inferior, the most remarkable of whom are Thompson of the Seasons, and Young of the Night Thoughts; and Wordsworth; and although I acquit him wholly of any premeditated design to follow in any of their footsteps, I still hold it as an undoubted truth, that unless those three great didacticians had written before him, Bryant would not have written, at least as he has written. Not that I design or desire to underrate his talent, or detract from his well-earned laurels; for I admire him as a grand, calm, pure, and at times almost sublime, English writer; but that no passage ever caused me a thrill in the veins, a tear in the eye, or a flush on the cheek; and that his want of honest human sympathies renders the report of his fame greater than the reality of his popularity.
Longfellow, again, principally I believe from mere base malignity on the part of his would-be critics, and vile envy of his superiority, has been falsely accused of plagiarism, and most unjustly charged with copying Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, with the former two of whom he has nothing whatever in common, while he resembles the latter only in the perfect flow of his inimitable rhythm, and the really artificial, but most seemingly inartificial, structure of his smooth versification; in all of which he as far excels his supposed model, as he does in expression, simplicity and force, not of diction only but of thought, and in the fire of his quick and vivid fancy.
Of Halleck, on the contrary, though he alone has successfully followed Byron in the half-lyric, half-comic vein of Don Juan and Fanny; even as Byron alone followed that of Whistlecraft—though in the fineness of his fancy, in the neat finish and epigrammatic turn of his antithetical verses, in his playful wit, and felicitous turns of natural pathos, he rivals if not equals Moore—it has never been said, never could be said, that he resembles, much less copies, either Moore or Byron, or any other poet of ancient times or modern.
The most observable characteristics of Halleck are the exquisite grace with which he glides from the purest and sweetest sentiments into the most delicate, yet most pungent wit; in the playfulness of his fancy; the truth of his humanity; and the epigrammatic terseness of his smaller compositions. Such as—
Green be the turf above thee