not to be a word which, decaying and waxing old, is ready to vanish away.
In sweeping chords of pathos, the poet's right hand is not without its cunning. There is tenderness, and unforced feeling, in several of his pieces—a "Requiem," for instance, and "The Forlorn," and "Extreme Unction." In descriptive passages, and sketches of Nature, he proves himself gifted with an open eye and open ear. "Rhœcus" is a graceful voluntary on this thema—a legend of old Greece, set in a key worthy of Christendom and Christian Wordsworth. "An Indian-summer Reverie" is full of bits of the picturesque—some of them not so original as they are graphic: for example—
The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,
Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits—
sounds like an expansion[1] of Wordsworth's homely but exquisite line, on the antiphonies of our barn-door cocks
Echoed by faintly answering farms remote.
There is fresh and pleasant painting too in the verses to the Dandelion, to the Oak, and "Beaver Brook"—to which may be added the address to a Pine-tree, with its swaying, rocking metre, as though borne on the breeze from the old German forests. It is not in his longer and more laboured efforts that Mr. Lowell is seen to most advantage: he is apt to be diffuse, and to dilute by over- amplification his ideas and his diction. But there are some vivid stanzas in "A Legend of Brittany," recalling the manner of Keats—a tale of Templar's crime and cancerous remorse;—"Prometheus," worn as the subject is, contains some vigorous declamation;—"A Glance behind the Curtain" reveals the seer's philosophy—approving him a man of meditative power and clearness of insight, while it shows his republican bias with suitable emphasis, expressed in terms not quite so characteristic of Oliver Cromwell (the chief speaker) in the seventeenth, as of James Russell Lowell in the nineteenth century;—and "Columbus," another poem of some length, is an animated presentment of the noble voyager—also from a nineteenth century point of view and façon de parler, for there are sentences by which the imaginary soliloquist would perhaps be almost as "fixed," as were the gentry he once gravelled in the instance of an egg. In sooth, the poet's language would admit of an occasional revise in various respects. As it is sometimes gnarled and knotty in structure, affecting
- ↑ As another example of Mr. Lowell's expanding process, may perhaps be cited the following variation of Tennyson's "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay:"—the speaker is Cromwell, who thus opposes Hampden's solicitations to quit the excitements and oppressions of England for transatlantic seclusion:
"We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour
Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea
Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck
Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream,
Than in a cycle of New England sloth,
Broke only by some petty Indian war," &c.
A Glance behind the Curtain.
