Just as I found him then, I find
him any evening now, in the same chair, in the same corner of the study,
"under the evening lamp." We still talk of the same themes; his jests
are as frequent as ever, but the black hair is silvered and the active
movements are less alert. I then had never known a mind so stored with
bookish lore, so intimate with the lives of rare poets gone by, yet to
what it then possessed he, with his wonderful memory, has been adding
ever since.
If his early verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable
style of his own--to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical,
most melancholy"--"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again,
to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and
Charon"--to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell,"
to the feeling, wisdom--above all, to the imagination--of his loftier
odes, among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. This is not the
place to eulogize such work. But one thing may be noted in the progress
of what in Berkeley's phrase may be called the planting of arts and
letters in America. Mr. Stoddard and his group were the first after Poe
to make poetry--whatever else it might be--the rhythmical creation of
beauty. As an outcome of this, and in distinction from the poetry of
conviction to which the New England group were so addicted, look at the
"Songs of Summer" which our own poet brought out in 1857.
Pages:
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353