By fugitive poetry we mean the work of those usually classed as song-writers and lyrists, leaving out the big guns, if we have had any of the latter tribe since Milton, who was himself strongest in short poems. Most modern poets have made their début in the periodical press, and those who did not have shown a painful tendency to run to epic. The age respectfully declines epics.
We should not despair of the suggested revival. Ours is not the first period that has suffered under the dealers in concetti. They have had things somewhat their own way before—in the century which included Spenser and Donne, for instance. Our euphuists may pass away like those of the Elizabethan era, or, like the best of them, live in spite of faults with which they were gratuitously trammelled.
E. B.
[page 262]
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Bits of Travel at Home. By H. H. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The author's present home we should incline to fix in Colorado, but she includes New England and California in her travels, and finds something beautiful to describe wherever she goes within those broad limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees, the Mormons, the Chinese, the snow-sheds, drawing-room cars, agates, prairie-and mountain-flowers, New Hampshire life and scenery, and an infinity of like material, are readably, and not incongruously, presented in her little book. Population is so sparse and Nature so redundant in the scene of most of her descriptions as to render them sometimes a little lifeless, and oblige her to depend too solely upon her powers of landscape painting with the pen. We miss the human element, as we do in the vast, however luxuriant, pictures of Bierstadt and Moran—artists who preceded her on the same sketching-ground. Not that she fails to make the most of what Nature places before her. Rather, she makes too much of it, and lavishes whole pages on truthful, minute and vivid, but bewildering, detail of mountain, river, rock, plain, plants and sea. She is enraptured, for example, with Lake Tahoe and with the wild flowers of California and Colorado, and enables us to understand why she is so; but the raptures are not shared by the reader, partly for the very reason that they are so elaborately explained. Printer's ink, when used as a pigment or pencil, should be used sparingly, with a few, sharp, clear, bold touches, and without painful finish or niggling. What amplification would not weaken instead of heightening the effect of "the copse-wood gray that waved and wept on Loch Achray"? Breadth, distance and atmosphere are obscured by H. H.'s carefully itemized foregrounds. But the itemizing is done admirably and con amore by one who is a botanist, a poet and an observer. The Great Desert is no desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have plenty of meaning to her.
A traveller between Omaha and San Francisco might well carry this pocket volume as a lorgnette. It will show him what he might otherwise miss, and make more visible to him what he sees. It belongs to a high class of railroad literature, and is in style and matter so full of movement as to suggest the railway to readers by the fireside.