"With Spanish yew so strong.
Arrows a cloth-yard long,
That like to serpents stung."
And Brownell,—
"Trust me, our berth was hot;
Ah, wickedly well they shot;
How their death-bolts howled and stung!"
A mere coincidence, in all probability, but the word one which none but a poet could have used. There are reminiscences of Cowper's grand and simple lines on the "Loss of the Royal George," of Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic," of Tennyson's "Charge of the Six Hundred," not one of which but has a pleasing effect in the midst of such vigorous pictures as the new poet has given us fresh from the terrible original. The most obvious criticism is one which applies to the "River Fight," and which is directed against what might be thought an overstraining of the singular power in the use of words which is one of Mr. Brownell's most remarkable characteristics. "General Orders," not essential to the poem, may be admired as a tour de force, but cannot be properly called poetry. It is a condensed, versified edict,—true, no doubt, to the prose original, but on the whole better printed by itself, if printed at all, than suffered to distract the reader from the main narration by its elaborate ingenuity.
These two poems—the "River Fight" and the "Bay Fight"—are better adapted for public reading and declamation than almost any in our literature. They hush any circle of listeners, and many cannot hear those exquisitely tender passages which are found toward the close of each without yielding them the tribute of their tears. They are to all the drawing-room battle-poems as the torn flags of our victorious armadas to the stately ensigns that dressed their ships in the harbor.
Such pictures, if they do not kill everything hung on the walls with them, make even a brilliant canvas look comparatively lustreless. Yet the first poem of Mr. Brownell's which ever attracted our attention, "The Fall of Al Accoub," is of great force, and shows much of the same red light and black shadow, much of the same Vulcanic power over words, as with blast and forge and hammer, which startle us in the two battle-pieces. The lines "Annus Memorabilis," dated Jan. 6th, 1861, read like prophecy in 1865. "Wood and Coal" (November, 1863) gives a presage of the fire which the flame of the conflict would kindle. "The Burial of the Dane" shows the true human sympathy of the writer, in its simple, pathetic narrative; and the story of the "Old Cove" had a wider circulation and a heartier reception than almost any prose effort which has been called forth by the "All we ask is to be let alone" of the arch traitor.
The "Lyrics of a Day" are too modestly named. Our literature cannot forget the masterpieces in this little volume in a day, a year, or an age. The War of Freedom against Slavery has created a devilish enginery of its own: iron for wood, steam for wind and muscle, "Swamp-Angels" and thousand-pounders in place of the armaments that gained the Battle of the Nile and toppled over the chimneys of Copenhagen. New modes of warfare thundered their demand for a new poet to describe them; and Nature has answered in the voice of our Battle-Laureate, Henry Howard Brownell.