His vows are broke,
Even while his parting kiss is warm;
But woman's love all change will mock,
And, like the ivy round the oak,
Cling closest in the storm.
Here, for the purpose of a vivid contrast, there is a sacrifice of poetic truth. The same piece closes with asserting that the smiles and tears of woman,
Alone keep bright, through Time's long hour,
That frailer thing than leaf or flower,
A poet's immortality.
Here the thought, redeemed as it is by beautiful expression, is worthy only of a sentimental poetaster of the Della Cruscan school; and we can easily imagine what a mocking twinkle would light the eye of its author, if some one should tell him that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton were "kept bright" by the smiles and tears of woman. These, and one or two other passages in Halleck, are unworthy of his manly and cant-hating mind; and it is wonderful how they could have escaped his brilliant good sense.
Fanny, and the Croaker Epistles are the most brilliant things of their kind in American literature, full of wit, fancy, and feeling, and in all their rapid transitions, characterized by an ethereal lightness of movement, a glancing felicity of expression, which betray a poet's plastic touch equally in the sentiment and the merriment. No American poems have been more eagerly sought after, and more provokingly concealed, than these. Three editions of Fanny have been published, but the difficulty of obtaining a copy has always been great. Many who were smitten with a love for it have been compelled to transcribe it from the copy of a more fortunate collector. The Croaker Epistles have been even more cunningly suppressed. Now we have both in a form which will endure with the stereotype plates. They evince the most brilliant characteristics of Halleck's genius, and continually suggest the thought, that if the mind of the author be so powerful and various in its almost extempore sport and play, it must have still greater capacity in itself.
Fanny, and the Croaker Epistles swarm with local and personal allusions which a New-Yorker alone can fully appreciate. Van Buren, Webster, Clinton, the politicians and authors generally of the period when the poems were written, are all touched with a light and graceful pencil. Fanny is conceived and executed after the manner of Byron's Beppo and Don Juan. It is full of brilliant rogueries, produced by bringing sentiment and satire together with a shock. For instance,
Dear to the exile is his native land,
In memory's twilight beauty seen afar:
Dear to the broker is a note of hand
Collaterally secured—the polar star
Is dear at midnight to the sailor's eyes,
And dear are Bristed's volumes at half price.
The sun is loveliest as he sinks to rest;
The leaves of Autumn smile when fading fast;
The swan's last song is sweetest—and the best
Of Meigs's speeches, doubtless, was his last.
In a mocking attempt to prove that New York exceeded Greece in the Fine Arts, we have the following convincing arguments:
In sculpture we've a grace the Grecian master,
Blushing, had owned his purest model lacks;
We've Mr. Bogart in the best of plaster,
The Witch of Endor in the best of wax,
Beside the head of Franklin on the roof
Of Mr. Lang, both jest and weather-proof.