The Poetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck/The Recorder

by Fitz-Greene Halleck

THE RECORDER.

 

THE RECORDER.¹

A PETITION.

BY THOMAS CASTALY.

December 20, 1828.

“On they move
In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft Recorders.”

Milton.

“Live in Settle’s numbers one day more!”

Pope.

y dear Recorder, you and I
Have floated down life’s stream together,
And kept unharmed our friendship’s tie
Through every change of Fortune’s sky,
Her pleasant and her rainy weather.
Full sixty times since first we met,
Our birthday suns have risen and set,
And time has worn the baldness now
Of Julius Cæsar on your brow;
Your brow, like his, a field of thought,
With broad deep furrows spirit-wrought,

Whose laurel-harvests long have shown
As green and glorious as his own;
And proudly would the Cæsar claim
Companionship with Riker’s name,
His peer in forehead and in fame.

Both eloquent and learned and brave,
Born to command and skilled to rule,
One made the citizen a slave,
The other makes him more—a fool.
The Cæsar an imperial crown,
His slaves’ mad gift, refused to wear;
The Riker put his fool’s-cap on,
And found it fitted to a hair;
The Cæsar, though by birth and breeding,
Travel, the ladies, and light reading,
A gentleman in mien and mind,
And fond of Romans and their mothers,
Was heartless as the Arab’s wind,
And slew some millions of mankind,
Including enemies and others.
The Riker, like Bob Acres, stood
Edgewise upon a field of blood,
The where and wherefore Swartwout knows,
Pulled trigger, as a brave man should,
And shot—God bless them—his own toes!
The Cæsar passed the Rubicon
With helm, and shield, and breastplate on,
Dashing his war-horse through the waters;

The Riker would have built a barge
Or steamboat at the city’s charge,
And passed it with his wife and daughters.

But let that pass. As I have said,
There’s naught, save laurels, on your head,
And time has changed my clustering hair,
And showered the snow-flakes thickly there;
And though our lives have ever been
As different as their different scene;
Mine more renowned for rhymes than riches,
Yours less for scholarship than speeches;
Mine passed in low-roofed leafy bower,
Yours in high halls of pomp and power,
Yet are we, be the moral told,
Alike in one thing—growing old,
Ripened like summer’s cradled sheaf,
Faded like autumn’s falling leaf—
And nearing, sail and signal spread,
The quiet anchorage of the dead.
For such is human life, wherever
The voyage of its bark may be,
On home’s green-banked and gentle river,
Or the world’s shoreless, sleepless sea.

Yes, you have floated down the tide
Of time, a swan in grace and pride
And majesty and beauty, till
The law, the Ariel of your will,

Power’s best beloved, the law of libel
(A bright link in the legal chain)
Expounded, settled, and made plain,
By your own charge, the juror’s Bible,
Has clipped the venomed tongue of slander,
That dared to call you “Party’s gander,
The leader of the geese who make
Our city’s parks and ponds their home,
And keep her liberties awake
By cackling, as their sires saved Rome.
Gander of Party’s pond, wherein
Lizard, and toad, and terrapin,
Your ale-house patriots, are seen,
In Faction’s feverish sunshine basking:”
And now, to rend this veil of lies,
Word-woven by your enemies,
And keep your sainted memory free
From tarnish with posterity,
I take the liberty of asking
Permission, sir, to write your life,
With all its scenes of calm and strife,
And all its turnings and its windings,
A poem, in a quarto volume—
Verse, like the subject, blank and solemn,
With elegant appropriate bindings,
Of rat and mole skin the one half,
The other a part fox, part calf.
Your portrait, graven line for line,
From that immortal bust in plaster,

The master-piece of Art’s great master,
Mr. Praxiteles Browere,²
Whose trowel is a thing divine,
Shall smile and bow, and promise there,
And twenty-nine fine forms and faces
(The Corporation and the Mayor),
Linked hand in hand, like Loves and Graces,
Shall hover o’er it, grouped in air,
With wild pictorial dance and song;
The song of happy bees in bowers,
The dance of Guido’s graceful Hours,
All scattering Flushing’s garden flowers³
Round the dear head they’ve loved so long.

I know that you are modest, know
That when you hear your merit’s praise,
Your cheeks’ quick blushes come and go,
Lily and rose-leaf, sun and snow,
Like maidens’ on their bridal days.
I know that you would fain decline
To aid me and the sacred Nine,
In giving to the asking earth
The story of your wit and worth;
For if there be a fault to cloud
The brightness of your clear good sense,
It is, and be the fact allowed,
Your only failing—Diffidence!

An amiable weakness—given
To justify the sad reflection,

That in this vale of tears not even
A Riker is complete perfection,
A most romantic detestation
Of power and place, of pay and ration;
A strange unwillingness to carry
The weight of honor on your shoulders,
For which you have been named, the very
Sensitive-plant of office-holders,
A shrinking bashfulness, whose grace
Gives beauty to your manly face.
Thus shades the green and glowing vine
The rough bark of the mountain-pine,
Thus round her freedom’s waking steel
Harmodius wreathed his country’s myrtle:
And thus the golden lemon’s peel
Gives fragrance to a bowl of turtle.

True, “many a flower,” the poet sings,
“Is born to blush unseen;”
But you, although you blush, are not
The flower the poets mean.
In vain you wooed a lowlier lot;
In vain you clipped your eagle-wings—
Talents like yours are not forgot
And buried with earth’s common things.
No! my dear Riker, I would give
My laurels, living and to live,
Or as much cash as you could raise on
Their value, by hypothecation,

To be, for one enchanted hour,
In beauty, majesty, and power,
What you for forty years have been,
The Oberon of life’s fairy scene.

An anxious city sought and found you
In a blessed day of joy and pride,
Sceptred your jewelled hand, and crowned
Her chief, her guardian, and her guide.
Honors which weaker minds had wrought
In vain for years, and knelt and prayed for,
Are all your own, unpriced, unbought,
Or (which is the same thing) unpaid for.
Painfully great! against your will
Her hundred offices to hold,
Each chair with dignity to fill,
And your own pockets with her gold:
A sort of double duty, making
Your task a serious undertaking.
With what delight the eyes of all
Gaze on you, seated in your Hall,
Like Sancho in his island, reigning,
Loved leader of its motley hosts
Of lawyers and their bills of costs,
And all things thereto appertaining,
Such as crimes, constables, and juries,
Male pilferers and female furies,
The police and the polissons,
Illegal right and legal wrong,

Bribes, perjuries, law-craft, and cunning,
Judicial drollery and punning;
And all the et ceteras that grace
That genteel, gentlemanly place!
Or in the Council Chamber standing
With eloquence of eye and brow,
Your voice the music of commanding,
And fascination in your bow,
Arranging for the civic shows
Your “men in buckram,” as per list,
Your John Does and your Richard Roes,
Those Dummies of your games of whist.
The Council Chamber—where authority
Consists in two words—a majority.
For whose contractors’ jobs we pay
Our last dear sixpences for taxes,
As freely as in Sylla’s day
Rome bled beneath his lictors’ axes.
Where—on each magisterial nose
In colors of the rainbow linger,
Like sunset hues on Alpine snows,
The printmarks of your thumb and finger.
Where he, the wisest of wild-fowl,
Bird of Jove’s blue-eyed maid—the owl,
That feathered alderman, is heard
Nightly, by poet’s ear alone,
To other eyes and ears unknown,
Cheering your every look and word,
And making, room and gallery through,

The loud applauding echoes peal,
Of his “où pent on être mieux
Qu’au sien de sa famille?”⁴

Oh, for a herald’s skill to rank
Your titles in their due degrees!
At Sing Sing—at the Tradesman’s Bank,
In Courts, Committees, Caucuses:
At Albany, where those who knew
The last year’s secrets of the great,
Call you the golden handle to
The earthen Pitcher of the State.⁵
(Poor Pitcher! that Van Buren ceases
To want its service gives me pain,
’Twill break into as many pieces
As Kitty’s of Coleraine.)
At Bellevue, on her banquet-night,
Where Burgundy and business⁶ meet,
On others, at the heart’s delight,
The Pewter Mug⁷ in Frankfort Street;
From Harlem bridge to Whitehall dock,
From Bloomingdale to Blackwell’s Isles,
Forming, including road and rock,
A city of some twelve square miles,
O’er street and alley, square and block,
Towers, temples, telegraphs, and tiles,
O’er wharves whose stone and timbers mock
The ocean’s and its navies’ shock,
O’er all the fleets that float before her,

O’er all their banners waving o’er her,
Her sky and waters, earth and air—
You are lord, for who is her lord mayor?
Where is he? Echo answers, where?
And voices, like the sound of seas,
Breathe in sad chorus, on the breeze,
The Highland mourner’s melody—
Oh Hone⁸ a rie! Oh Hone a rie!
The hymn o’er happy days departed,
The Hope that such again may be,
When power was large and liberal-hearted,
And wealth was hospitality.

One more request, and I am lost,
If you its earnest prayer deny;
It is, that you preserve the most
Inviolable secrecy
As to my plan. Our fourteen wards
Contain some thirty-seven bards
Who, if my glorious theme were known,
Would make it, thought and word, their own,
My hopes and happiness destroy,
And trample with a rival’s joy
Upon the grave of my renown.
My younger brothers in the art,
Whose study is the human heart—
Minstrels, before whose spells have bowed
The learned, the lovely, and the proud,
Ere their life’s morning hours are gone—

Light hearts be theirs, the Muse’s boon,
And may their suns blaze bright at noon,
And set without a cloud!

Hillhouse,⁹ whose music, like his themes,
Lifts earth to heaven—whose poet-dreams
Are pure and holy as the hymn
Echoed from harps of seraphim,
By bards that drank at Zion’s fountains
When glory, peace, and hope, were hers,
And beautiful upon her mountains
The feet of angel messengers.
Bryant, whose songs are thoughts that bless
The heart, its teachers, and its joy,
As mothers blend with their caress
Lessons of truth and gentleness
And virtue for the listening boy
Spring’s lovelier flowers for many a day
Have blossomed on his wandering way.
Beings of beauty and decay,
They slumber in their autumn tomb;
But those that graced his own Green River,
And wreathed the lattice of his home,
Charmed by his song from mortal doom,
Bloom on, and will bloom on forever.
And Halleck—who has made thy roof,
St. Tammany! oblivion-proof—
Thy beer illustrious, and thee
A belted knight of chivalry!

And changed thy dome of painted bricks
And porter-casks and politics,
Into a green Arcadian vale,
With Stephen Allen¹⁰ for its lark,
Ben Bailey’s voice its watch-dog’s bark,
And John Targee its nightingale.

These, and the other thirty-four,
Will live a thousand years or more—
If the world lasts so long. For me,
I rhyme not for posterity,
Though pleasant to my heirs might be
The incense of its praise,
When I, their ancestor, have gone,
And paid the debt, the only one
A poet ever pays.
But many are my years, and few
Are left me ere night’s holy dew,
And sorrow’s holier tears, will keep
The grass green where in death I sleep.

And when that grass is green above me,
And those who bless me now and love me
Are sleeping by my side,
Will it avail me aught that men
Tell to the world with lip and pen
That once I lived and died?
No: if a garland for my brow
Is growing, let me have it now,

While I’m alive to wear it;
And if, in whispering my name,
There’s music in the voice of fame
Like Garcia’s,¹¹ let me hear it!

The Christmas holidays are nigh,
Therefore till New-Year’s Eve, good-by,
Then “revenons à nos moutons,”
Yourself and aldermen—meanwhile,
Look o’er this letter with a smile;
And keep the secret of its song
As faithfully, but not as long,
As you have guarded from the eyes
Of editorial Paul Prys,
And other meddling, murmuring claimants,
Those Eleusinian mysteries,
The city’s cash receipts and payments.
Yours ever,

T. C.