BOOKS.

MR. LO WELL'S POEMS.* No really original poet can be described by reference to any other, but Mr. Lowell's most conspicuous poetic ancestor,—at least if we judge him by his graver poems,—is Wordsworth, though the wonderful and buoyant humour which has made him most famous is a gift that is not only entirely without affinity to anything in Wordsworth, but has probably operated to diminish the intensity of that spiritualizing insight into Nature, in which Wordsworth's genius was concentrated. All true humour is a great diffuser of intellectual energy, and to a certain extent slackens the intensity of the spiritual gaze. It is hardly easy to conceive the true prophetic cast of mind combined with the highest humour,—simply because it would imply almost a higher range of human strength than the world has ever yet seen. Carlyle, it may be, comes nearest to the mark of a prophetic humourist ; but then his moral sympathy, though intense, is very narrow, and is well nigh limited to harping on three strings, those of sin cerity, strength, and thoroughness, and his poetic feeling is almost confined to a true feeling for the sublime. Mr. Lowell, on the contrary, as one would expect from a poet whose humour is so wide and playful, has a much less intensity of brooding passion than Wordsworth, and a much more iridescent light of fancy about his poems. His master-thoughts are far less masterful and potent than Wordsworth's ; but many of his moods are in the same key, and now and then the delicacy and sweetness of his thought give a charm to the more spiritual lights of his poetry such as is quite foreign to Wordsworth's austerer genius. There is something of shrinking tenderness, of shy grace, something of Hartley Coleridge, grafted on the lofty simplicity of Wordsworth. Take, for instance, the exquisite " Familiar Epistle to a Friend," which by its playfulness and ease, its elastic grace, its delicate reserves, its vivid vistas of unelaborated thought, show Mr.

Lowell at his farthest point from Wordsworth, and yet in some respects too, if not at his own highest, very near to his highest.

He has been playfully arguing the case of youth against that of age, and goes on thus :—

" Dear Friend, you're right and I am wrong ;

My quibbles are not worth a song, And I sophistically tease My fancy sad to tricks like these.

I could not cheat you if I would ; You know me and my jesting mood, Mere surface-foam, for pride concealing The purpose of my deeper feeling. I have not spilt one drop of joy Poured in the senses of the boy, Nor Nature fails my walks to bless With all her golden inwardness; And as blind nestlings, unafraid, Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade By which their downy dream is stirred, Taking it for the mother bird, So, when God's shadow which is light, Unheralded, by day or night, My wakening instincts falls across, Silent as sunbeams over moss, In my heart's nest half-conscious things Stir with a helpless sense of wings, Lift themselves up, and tremble long With premonitions sweet of song.

Be patient, and perhaps (who knows?) These may be winged one day like those ; If thrushes, close-embowered to sing, Pierced through with June's delicious sting ; If swallows, their half-hour to run Star-breasted in the setting sun. At first they're but the unfledged proem, Or songless schedule of a poem ; When from the shell they're hardly dry If some folks thrust them forth, must I?"

Here the two beautiful lines,

" Nor Nature fails my walks to bless With all her golden inwardness,"

might well have been Wordsworth's own, but the still more beautiful passage which follows, and which is of the purest essence of poetry, has a softness and delicacy of structure, a tenderness of sentiment, a ripple of gaiety across the spiritual depth of feeling, that no one could well mistake for Wordsworth's high rapture of single-hearted joy, which indulges in no side-glances, and seldom lets slip any feathery seed of quaint suggestion. The likening to the "blind nestlings, unafraid," stretching "wide-mouthed to every shade by which their downy dream is stirred," of those other half-conscious nestlings in the poet's own heart which, at every contact of the divine shadow,—

" Stir with a helpless sense of wings, Lift themselves up, and tremble long, With premonitions sweet of song."

succeeds in expressing the feebleness and sensitiveness which spring from the very consciousness of growing powers, from that tremulousness of the soul that is due to the very germ of divine life within it, with a finer art than we can remember in any other attempt to deal with the same region of feeling in the whole range of English poetry.

As a poet of nature, Mr. Lowell, we need scarcely say, is far beneath his great poetical ancestor, Wordsworth, if only on account of the comparative deficiency in that overmastering energy which in Wordsworth drew firmly to a focus the vast variety of spiritual suggestions in the rich play of nature's

life. Nothing could be more false than to speak of Wordsworth as a pantheist. The criticism to which he is far more open is that of regarding Nature as too subservient to the spiritual lessons which he himself now charmed out of her, now forced upon her from the

depth of his own mind. He found God in Nature, it is true, but he never merged God in Nature ; he never lost his firm grip of

the spiritual while studying the natural. Mr. Lowell seems to us to treat spiritual subjects, when he treats them directly, with more delicacy, tenderness, and truth than Wordsworth, who was apt to become didactic directly he ceased to be sublime. But in dealing

with purely natural effects, Mr. Lowell's personal grasp of the spiritual at the root of Nature is comparatively relaxed, and he is at times far more in danger of merging himself in the beauty of the outer world than ever was the hardy Cumbrian mountaineer. Here, for instance, is a beautiful passage,—in which Mr. Lowell seems " to become a part of all that he has met :"—

" This willow is as old to me as life ;

And under it full often have I stretched.

Feeling the warm earth like a thing alive,

And gathering virtue in at every pore Till it possessed me wholly, and thought ceased, Or was transfused in something to which thought Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost, Gone fron me like an ache, and what remained Become a part of the universal joy.

My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree, Danced in the leaves ; or, floating in the cloud, Saw its white double in the stream below ; Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy, Dilated in the broad blue over all.

I was the wind that dapples the lush grass, The tide that crept with coolness to its roots, The thin-winged swallow skating on the air ; The life that gladdened everything was mine.

Was I then truly all that I beheld ?

Or is this stream of being but a glass Where the mind sees its visionary self, As, when the kingfisher flits o'er his bay, Across the river's hollow heaven below His picture flits,—another, yet the same ?

But suddenly the sound of human voice Or footfall, like the drop a chemist pours, Both in opacons cloud precipitate The consciousness that seemed but now dissolved Into an essence rarer than its own, And I am narrowed to myself once more."

Compare that with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey,"—with which in other respects it is not uninstructive to compare " Under the Willows,"—and you see at once that Wordsworth's personality dominates his mystic sympathy with Nature far snore deeply than

Mr. Lowell's. Wordsworth never swoons away into Nature. Only,

" with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy," •

he " sees into the life of things." Nature enters into Wordsworth, where Mr. Lowell enters into Nature.

There is another poem of Mr. Lowell's which suggests a contrast with Wordsworth's well-known invitation to abandon study

for outward nature, " Up, up ! my friend, and quit your books." Mr. Lowell's is called " The Nightingale in the Study," and after giving us Wordsworth's argument in its own form,—in which, by the way, the argument loses little in beauty,—he gives a very fine and very un-Wordsworthian reply to it. Calderon, we may

observe parenthetically, is the book which keeps him from those other leaves,

" The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking;

Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies, Grew not so beautiful by thinking."

But the nightingale in the syringa thicket discourses on the superior beauty of these leaves in vain ; for the poet has this to say in selfdefence :—

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Hast poured from that syringe thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays To which I hold a season-ticket, "A season-ticket cheaply bought With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul host caught With morn and evening voluntaries, "Deem me not faithless, if all day Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

" A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,— And does not Dona Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush cif feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars,

And overhead a white hand flashing. r " 0 music of all moods and climes,

Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes, The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly !

"0 life borne lightly in the hand, For friend or foe with grace Castilian ! 0 valley safe in Fancy's land, Not tramped to mud yet by the million !

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale, My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

" Ah ! friend, these singers dead so long, And still, God knows, in purgatory, Give its best sweetness to all song, To Nature's self her better glory."

The fanciful humour of the first two verses here, and the exquisite description of the mixture of Moorish and Spanish,—of Mahometau and Christian,—in Calderon's verse, ' the Arab soul in Spanish feathers,' is as far removed from Wordsworth's manner as that of the first part of the poem is closely linked with it.

But we cannot leave Mr. Lowell's beautiful volume without quoting what is certainly the most original, and in some respects the finest thing it contains,—the passage in a noble Commemoration Ode recited at Harvard in the July after the close of the Civil War and the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, in which that most childlike and most sagacious of modern rulers is painted in colours that will, we may safely assert, last as long as the history of that great struggle, and be resorted to—till the American people ceases tobrood over its own greatest deeds—as the one locus classicus to generation after generation for a portrait of the greatest, simplest, and most characteristic figure of the conflict. Mr. Lowell has been saying, in the earlier part of his poem, that his test of a man of the old heroic kind' is that he should be able to " Stand self-poised on manhood's solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs."

And then he proceeds :

"Such was be, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom lath the Nation he had led, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief : Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honoured urn.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat df birth, But by his clear-grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity !

They knew that outward grace is dust ; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,,

Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bare, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapours blind ; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to Heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface ; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

I praise him not ; it were too late ; And some innative weakness there must be In him who condescends to victory Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, : Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he ; He knew to bide his time, And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Segaeious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American.

This is, indeed, a portrait, finer, we think, as well as more individual than Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior" itself. Lincoln did indeed recover for us the old historic meaning of a shepherd of the people,—a meaning degraded by numberless ecclesiastical pretensions—of one, namely, who " loved his charge, but never loved to lead," and yet whose power to lead consisted

"In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust."

There is something, too, in that metaphoric use of the wide prairie as opposed to the Alpine summits of Europe, for expressing the largeness, the unambitious lowliness, the fruitfulness and friendliness, of Lincoln's nature, a nature, nevertheless, that was also "nigh to Heaven and loved of loftiest stars,"—which, though it gives us a little glimpse into the American pride of nationality, and its jealousy of European standards, yet makes us feel the touch of the genuine poet, who, the deeper may be his insight into human nature at large, will only feel the more enthusiasm for those national and local virtues into which it has been his inheritance to gain a still fuller insight.

We do not say that the whole volume is on a level with even the least powerful of the passages we have quoted. But that it does contain much which is comparable to the most powerful, and nothing which is not in a true sense worthy of the only really original poet America has yet produced, we think we can truly say. Perhaps no really great humourist, like the author of the Bigelow Papers, ever before produced poetry of so ethereal and spiritual a type.