Into the arctic regions of our lives,
Where little else than life itself survives.
Measured by this test of creative power and its persistency, how variable is the duration of human life! Sometimes the creative power appears in early youth; but when that happens there is generally an early surcease. Sometimes the power comes late and remains long. Sometimes it flashes forth in the early morning and remains in the after twilight. Estimated by years this productive power (which goes by the name of genius) sometimes reaches only to a few score moons. Sometimes it reaches to a score of years. Sometimes, though rarely, it extends to three-score years or more.
Thomas Chatterton went to a suicide’s grave in Potter’s Field when he was only seventeen years, nine months, and four days of age. I know of no other case of so great precocity; it is beyond belief. His mind had been productive for about three years. Byron’s productive period covered sixteen years—no more. Pope began at twelve and ended at fifty-six.
In our own age, Tennyson has done well. Making an early effort to begin, he, like Dryden, did not really reach the creative epoch until he was fully thirty. His creative period covers about fifty-nine years. It extends from “A Dream of Fair Women,” in 1833, to “Crossing the Bar,” in 1892.
The best example, however, in the history of the human mind, is that of William Cullen Bryant; that is, Bryant has real creations that lie further apart in time than can be paralleled, so far as I know, in the case of any other of the sons of men. The date of “Thanatopsis” is not precisely known. It belongs, however, to the years 1812-13. Bryant was then eighteen—in his nineteenth year. Add to 1812 sixty-four years and we have 1876, the date of the publication of the “Flood of Years.” The two poems in question lie apart in production by the space of fully three-score and four years. It is a marvel! And why not?
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms,
why should not life, productive life, enthusiastic fruitful life, be extended until its last acts of creation, shot through with the sunshine of experience and wisdom, shall flash in great bars of haze and glory over the landscape of the twilight days?
Kaboto.