Ward, a very
cultivated
woman, was herself a poet of some
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles.
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
"
Dame Fortune plays me many a prank:
When she is kind, oh, how I go it!
But if again she's harsh, why, then
I am a very proper poet.
When favoring gales bring in my ships,
I hie to Rome and live in clover;
Elsewise I steer my skiff out here
And anchor till the storm blows over.
Compulsory virtue is the charm
Of life upon the Sabine Farm!
XIII-478
HORRIDA TEMPESTAS
THROU
HROUGH narrowed skies the tempest rages loud:
A vault low-hung and roofed with cloud
Bursts forth in rain and snow. The woods, the sea,
Echo the storm from Thracian Rhodope.
-
now:
Snatch we, my friends, the fitting moment -
While strong our knees, make smooth the wrinkled brow;
Bring forth the wine of ancient date
Pressed in Torquatus's consulate;
Of toil and danger speak no more:
Some god may yet our shattered state restore!
Perfume your hair with Achæmenian balm,
And bid Cyllene's lyre your troubled spirits calm.
-
'Twas thus the noble Centaur sung :-
"Unconquered youth, from Thetis sprung,
Thyself a mortal! The Dardanian land,
And cool Scamander rippling through the sand,
And gliding Simois, call thee to their side;
Nor shall thy mother o'er her azure tide
Lead thee in triumph to thy Phthian home:
Such the weird Fate's inexorable doom.
Grieve not, my son: in song and wassail find
A soothing converse and a solace kind. "
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
## p. 7634 (#444) ###########################################
7634
HORACE
SATIRE
CHANCED that I, the other day,
I
Was sauntering up the Sacred Way,
And musing, as my habit is,
Some trivial random fantasies,
That for the time absorbed me quite,-
When there comes running up a wight,
Whom only by his name I knew:
"Ha, my dear fellow, how d'ye do? »
Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why,
As times go, pretty well,” said I:
"And you, I trust, can say the same. "
But after me as still he came,
"Sir, is there anything," I cried,
"You want of me? " "Oh," he replied,
"I'm just the man you ought to know:
A scholar, author! "-"Is it so?
For this I'll like you all the more! "
Then, writhing to evade the bore,
I quicken now my pace, now stop,
And in my servant's ear let drop
Some words, and all the while I feel
Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel.
"Oh for a touch," I moaned in pain,
«< Bolanus, of thy slap-dash vein,
To put this incubus to rout! "
As he went chattering on about
Whatever he descries or meets,
The crowds, the beauty of the streets,
The city's growth, its splendor, size,
"You're dying to be off," he cries-
For all the while I'd been struck dumb:
"I've noticed it some time. But come,
Let's clearly understand each other:
It's no use making all this pother.
My mind's made up to stick by you;
So where you go, there I go too. "
"Don't put yourself," I answered, "pray,
So very far out of your way.
I'm on the road to see a friend,
Whom you don't know, that's near his end,
Away beyond the Tiber far,
Close by where Cæsar's gardens are. "
## p. 7635 (#445) ###########################################
HORACE
7635
"I've nothing in the world to do,
And what's a paltry mile or two?
I like it, so I'll follow you! "
Now we were close on Vesta's fane;
'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane,
Was bound to answer to his bail,
Or lose his cause if he should fail.
"Do, if you love me, step aside
One moment with me here," he cried
"Upon my life, indeed I can't:
Of law I'm wholly ignorant,
And you know where I'm hurrying to. "
"I'm fairly puzzled what to do:
Give you up, or my cause. ” — “Oh, me,
Me, by all means! "-"I won't," quoth he,
And stalks on, holding by me tight.
As with your conqueror to fight
Is hard, I follow. "How," anon
He rambles off-"How get you on,
You and Mæcenas? To so few
He keeps himself. So clever, too!
No man more dexterous to seize
And use his opportunities.
Just introduce me, and you'll see
We'll pull together famously;
And hang me then, if with my backing
You don't send all your rivals packing! "
"Things in that quarter, sir, proceed
In very different style indeed.
No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not if there I spy
Men richer, better read than I.
Each has his place! "- "Amazing tact!
Scarce credible! ». "But 'tis the fact. "
―
"You quicken my desire to get
An introduction to his set. "
We ran
At the next turn against the man
Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
"Ha, knave," he cried with loud uproar,
"Where are you off to? Will you here
Stand witness? " I present my ear.
To court he hustles him along;
High words are bandied, high and strong;
## p. 7636 (#446) ###########################################
7636
HORACE
HⓇ
ORACE
――
A mob collects, the fray to see:
So did Apollo rescue me.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
CONTENTMENT
What did you think, my friend, of far-famed Lesbos and
Chios?
-
How about Samos the dainty, and Croesus's capital, Sardis ?
Colophon, too, and Smyrna? Above their fame, or beneath it?
Tiber's stream and the Campus excel them far, do you tell me?
Have you been praying for one of Attalus's cities, I wonder?
Lebedos is it you praise, of the sea and your journeyings wearied?
Bullatius- Yes! You know what Lebedos is: more dead than
Fidenæ.
Ay, or than Gabii; yet I would gladly abide there, forgetting
Those I have loved, and expecting that they in their turn will forg
me.
There I would dwell, and gaze from the shore on the furious waters.
Horace If a man travel in mud and in rain from Capua Rome-
ward,
Drenched though he be, he will choose not to tarry for life in the
tavern.
Even when chilled to the bones, we praise not the bath and the
furnace,
Truly believing that they would make life full and successful;
Nor, if impetuous Auster has tossed you about on the billow,
Would you for that get rid of your vessel beyond the Ægean.
If you are perfectly sound, then Rhodes and fair Mitylene
Help you no more than a cloak in the dog-days, trunks in midwinter,
Or in December a plunge in the Tiber, a furnace in August.
Now that you may, and the face of Fortune is smiling upon you,
Here at Rome praise far-off Rhodes, and Chios, and Samos.
This one hour that a god has bestowed upon you in his bounty,
Take with a grateful hand, nor plan next year to be happy:
So that wherever your life may be spent, you will say you enjoyed it.
For if anxieties only by reason and foresight are banished,—
Not by a spot that commands some outlook wide on the waters. —
Never our nature, but only the sky do we change as we travel.
Toilsome idleness wears us out. On wagon and shipboard
Comfort it is that we seek; yet that which you seek, it is with you,
Even in Ulubræ, if you lack not contentment of spirit.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
## p. 7637 (#447) ###########################################
HORACE
7637
HORACE'S FARM
L
EST you may question me whether my farm, most excellent Quinc-
tius,
Feeds its master with grain, or makes him rich with its olives,
Or with its orchards and pastures, or vines that cover the elm-trees,
I, in colloquial fashion, will tell you its shape and position.
Only my shadowy valley indents the continuous mountains,
Lying so that the sun at his coming looks on the right side,
Then, with retreating chariot, warming the left as he leaves it.
Surely the temperature you would praise; and what if the bushes
Bear in profusion scarlet berries, the oak and the ilex
Plentiful food for the herd provide, and shade for the master?
You would say, with its verdure, Tarentum was hither transported.
There is a fountain, deserving to give its name to a streamlet.
Not more pure nor cooler in Thrace runs winding the Hebrus.
Helpful it is to an aching head or a stomach exhausted.
Such is my ingle: sweet, and, if you believe me, delightful;
Keeping me sound and safe for you even in days of September.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
TO HIS BOOK
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm, by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
vain self-conscious little book,
Companion of my happy days,
Now eagerly you seem to look
For wider fields to spread your lays;
My desk and locks cannot contain you,
Nor blush of modesty restrain you.
YOU
Well then, begone, fool that thou art!
But do not come to me and cry,
When critics strike you to the heart,
"Oh wretched little book am I! "
You know I tried to educate you
To shun the fate that must await you.
In youth you may encounter friends,
(Pray this prediction be not wrong! )
But wait until old age descends,
And thumbs have smeared your gentlest song:
## p. 7638 (#448) ###########################################
7638
HORACE
Then will the moths connive to eat you,
And rural libraries secrete you.
However, should a friend some word
Of my obscure career request,
Tell him how deeply I was stirred
To spread my wings beyond the nest;
Take from my years, which are before you,
To boom my merits, I implore you.
Tell him that I am short and fat,
Quick in my temper, soon appeased,
With locks of gray. but what of that?
Loving the sun, with nature pleased.
I'm more than four-and-forty, hark you-
But ready for a night off, mark you!
-
THE ART OF POETRY
SU
UPPOSE, by some wild freak of fancy led,
A painter were to join a human head
To neck of horse, cull here and there a limb,
And daub on feathers various as his whim,
So that a woman, lovely to a wish,
Went tailing off into a loathsome fish:
Could you, although the artist's self were there,
From laughter long and loud, my friends, forbear?
Well, trust me, Pisos, of that freak of art
The book would be the very counterpart,
Which with a medley of wild fancies teems,
Whirling in chaos like a sick man's dreams,
A maze of forms incongruous and base,
Where naught is of a piece, naught in its place.
To dare whate'er they please has always been
The painter's, poet's, privilege, I ween.
It is a boon that any one may plead -
Myself I claim it, and in turn concede;
But 'twill not do to urge the plea too far.
To join together things that clash and jar.
The savage with the gentle, were absurd,
Or couple lamb with tiger, snake with bird.
Mostly, when poems open with a grand
Inposing air, we may surmise at hand
## p. 7639 (#449) ###########################################
HORACE
7639
Some flashy fustian, here and there a patch
Of flaming scarlet, meant the eye to catch.
A grove shall be described, or Dian's shrine,
Or through delightsome plains for many a line
A brook shall wind, or the Rhine's rushing stream,
Or o'er the page the heavenly bow shall gleam.
All very fine, but wholly out of place!
You draw a cypress with consummate grace;
But what of that, if you have had your fee
To paint a wrecked man struggling in the sea?
A vase was meant: how comes it then about,
As the wheel turns, a common jug comes out?
Whate'er you write, by this great maxim run:
Let it be simple, homogeneous, one.
We poets, most of us, by the pretense,
Dear friends, are duped of seeming excellence.
We grow obscure in striving to be terse;
Aiming at ease, we enervate our verse;
For grandeur soaring, into bombast fall,
And, dreading that, like merest reptiles crawl:
Whilst he who seeks his readers to surprise
With common things shown in uncommon wise,
Will make his dolphins through the forests roam,
His wild boars ride upon the billows' foam.
So unskilled writers, in their haste to shun
One fault, are apt into a worse to run.
The humblest statuary, of those that nigh
The Emilian Circus their vocation ply,
A finger-nail will to a turn express,
And hit you off in bronze a flowing tress,-
Yet is his work a failure; for his soul
Can neither grasp nor mold a living whole.
In anything that I may ever write,
I would no more resemble such a wight
Than I would care to have dark hair, dark eyes,
If coupled with a nose of uncouth size.
All ye who labor in the Muses' bowers,
Select a theme proportioned to your powers,
And ponder long, and with the nicest care,
How much your shoulders can and cannot bear.
Once right in this, your words will freely flow,
And thought from thought in lucid order grow.
Now, if my judgment be not much amiss,
The charm and worth of order lie in this:
## p. 7640 (#450) ###########################################
7640
HORACE
In saying just what should just then be said,
And holding much that comes into the head
Deliberately back for future use,
When it may just the right effect produce.
In choice of words be cautious and select;
Dwell with delight on this, and that reject.
No slight success will be achieved, if you
By skillful setting make old phrases new.
Then, should new terms be wanted to explain
Things that till now in darkness hid have lain,
And you shall coin, now here, now there, a word
Which our bluff ancestors have never heard,
Due leave and license will not be refused,
If with good taste and sound discretion used.
Nay, such new words, if from a Grecian source,
Aptly applied, are welcomed as of course.
To Virgil and to Varius why forbid
What Plautus erewhile and Cæcilius did?
Or why to me begrudge a few words more,
If I can add them to my scanty score,
When Cato and old Ennius reveled each
In coining new words that enriched our speech?
A word that bears the impress of its day
As current coin will always find its way.
As forests change their foliage year by year,
Leaves that came first, first fall and disappear,-
So antique words die out, and in their room
Other spring up, of vigorous growth and bloom.
Ourselves, and all that's ours, to death are due;
And why should words not be as mortal too?
The landlocked port, a work well worthy kings,
That takes whole fleets within its sheltering wings;
Swamps, sterile long, all plashy, rank, and drear,
Groan 'neath the plow, and feed whole cities near;
The river, perilous to field and farm,
Its channel changed, can now no longer harm,-
These, and all earthly works, must pass away;
And words, shall they enjoy a longer day?
Some will revive that we no more allow,
And some die out that are in favor now,
If usage wills it so; for 'tis with her
The laws of language rest as sovereign arbiter.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
## p. 7641 (#451) ###########################################
7641
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
(1803-1884)
ICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE, English poet and essayist, au-
thor of more than twenty volumes of verse and prose, is
now chiefly remembered for his epic poem 'Orion. ' Three
large editions of this he published at a farthing a copy, "to show his
appreciation of the low esteem into which heroic poetry had fallen. "
The fourth edition commanded a shilling, and the fifth a half-crown.
Ten editions had been exhausted by 1874.
Horne's life was adventurous and interesting. He was born in
London January 1st, 1803, was educated at Sandhurst, and entered
as midshipman the Mexican navy, where he
served till the close of the War of Inde-
pendence. He then returned to London to
begin a literary career. To his early period
belong two tragedies, Cosmo de' Medici'
and The Death of Marlowe,' both of which
contain fine passages. A poem sent to him
for criticism by Elizabeth Barrett opened
the way to a cordial friendship and a cor-
respondence of seven years. These delight-
ful letters were published in 1877. Mrs.
Browning contributed to Horne's 'Poems of
Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized,' and wrote
several essays for his 'Spirit of the Age,'
a collection of criticisms published in 1844.
In 1852 Horne removed to Australia, and remained there until
1866; his book 'Australian Facts and Principles' was one outcome
of this residence. Again returning to England, he continued literary
work until his death at Margate, March 13th, 1884. His last works
were tragedies, including 'Judas Iscariot: A Miracle-Play,' and a
curious prose tract, Sithron the Star-Stricken' (1883), which he pre-
tended to take from the Arabian.
"
R. H. H. HORNE
Poe said that his 'Orion' might be called " a homily against
supineness and apathy in the cause of human progress, and in favor
of energetic action for the good of the race.
It is our delib-
erate opinion," he affirmed, "that in all that regards the loftiest and
holiest attributes of true poetry, 'Orion' has never been excelled. "
## p. 7642 (#452) ###########################################
7642
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
The narrative is drawn from a number of Greek and Roman fables.
It describes the giant hunter Orion, who is loved by Artemis (Diana),
Merope, and Eos (Aurora). The jealous Artemis pierces him with her
arrows; but Zeus, in answer to the prayers of Eos, places him among
the constellations, where he may enjoy her affection forever.
MORNING
From Orion'
L
EVEL with the summit of that eastern mount
By slow approach, and like a promontory
Which seems to glide and meet a coming ship,
The pale-gold platform of the morning came
Towards the gliding mount. Against a sky
Of delicate purple, snow-bright courts and halls
Touched with light silvery green, gleaming across,
Fronted by pillars vast, cloud-capitaled,
With shafts of changeful pearl, all reared upon
An isle of clear aerial gold, came floating;
And in the centre, clad in fleecy white,
With lucid lilies in her golden hair,
Eos, sweet Goddess of the Morning, stood.
From the bright peak of that surrounded mount,
One step sufficed to gain the tremulous floor
Whereon the Palace of the Morning shone,
Scarcely a bow-shot distant; but that step
Orion's humbled and still mortal feet
Dared not adventure. In the Goddess's face
Imploringly he gazed. "Advance! " she said,
In tones more sweet than when some heavenly bird,
Hid in a rosy cloud, its morning hymn
Warbles unseen, wet with delicious dews,
And to earth's flowers all looking up in prayer,
"Believe-advance! —
Tells of the coming bliss.
Or, as the spheres move onward with their song
That calls me to awaken other lands,
That moment will escape which ne'er returns! »
Forward Orion stepped: the platform bright
Shook like the reflex of a star in water
Moved by the breeze, throughout its whole expanse;
And even the palace glistened fitfully,
As with electric shiver it sent forth
Odors of flowers divine and all fresh life.
## p. 7643 (#453) ###########################################
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
7643
Still stood he where he stepped, nor to return
Attempted. To essay one pace beyond
He felt no power; yet onward he advanced
Safe to the Goddess, who, with hand outstretched,
Into the palace led him. Grace and strength,
With sense of happy change to finer earth,
Freshness of nature and belief in good,
Came flowing o'er his soul, and he was blest.
'Tis always morning somewhere in the world,
And Eos rises, circling constantly
The varied regions of mankind. No pause
Of renovation and of freshening rays
She knows; but evermore her love breathes forth
On field and forest, as on human hope,
Health, beauty, power, thought, action, and advance.
All this Orion witnessed, and rejoiced.
The turmoil he had known, the late distress
By loss of passion's object and of sight,
Were now exchanged for these serene delights
Of contemplation, as the influence
That Eos wrought around forever, dawned
Upon his vision and his inmost heart
In sweetness and success. All sympathy
With all fair things that in her circle lay,
She gave, and all received; nor knew of strife:
For from the Sun her cheek its bloom withdrew,
And ere intolerant noon, the floating realm
Of Eos-queen of the awakening earth
Was brightening other lands, wherefrom black Night
Her faded chariot down the sky had driven
Behind the sea. Thus from the earth upraised,
And over its tumultuous breast sustained
In peace and tranquil glory,- oh blest state!
Clear-browed Orion, full of thankfulness
And pure devotion to the goddess, dwelt
Within the glowing Palace of the Morn.
But these serene airs did not therefore bring
A death-sleep o'er the waves of memory,
Where all its clouds and colors, specks of sails,
Its car-borne gods, shipwrecks, and drowning men,
Passed full in view; yet with a mellowing sense
Ideal, and from pain sublimed. Thus came
Mirrors of nature to him, and full oft
Downward on Chios turned his happy eyes,
## p. 7644 (#454) ###########################################
7644
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
With grateful thoughts that o'er life's sorrows wove
The present texture of a sweet content,
Passing all wisdom, or its fairest flower.
He saw the woods, and blessed them for the sake
Of Artemis; the city, and rich gloom
That o'er the cedar forest ever hung,
He also blessed for Merope; the isle
And all that dwelt there, he with smiles beheld.
## p. 7645 (#455) ###########################################
7645
JULIA WARD HOWE
(1819? -)
B
Y BIRTH a member of a fashionable New York circle; by edu-
cation a cultivated and accomplished woman of society; by
marriage made one of a group of zealous and uncompromis-
ing philanthropists,-abolitionists, prison reformers, equal-suffragists,
coeducationists, - Mrs. Julia Ward Howe has turned her eclectic train-
ing only to generous uses. She has published verse, travels, and
essays; she has taught - if much serious and eloquent journalistic
work may be reckoned among the higher forms of teaching; she has
won much reputation as a public speaker
on social, educational, and political subjects;
and it is not impossible that even had she
written nothing, her brilliant fame as a con-
versationist, and as the most inspiring of
companions, might insure her that vague
though sure renown which belongs to the
famous French hostesses of the seventeenth
century.
JULIA WARD HOWE
The New York of her youth was still a
neighborly city, where the small set of cul-
tivated and leisurely families saw much not
only of each other, but of the agreeable
foreigners who came to this country. Her
father, Samuel Ward, was a well-known
banker, to whom all notable persons brought letters of introduction,
and in whose household the young people learned to be agreeable, to
be alert, and to adjust their mental vision to an ever-widening hori-
zon. Mrs.
Ward, a very cultivated woman, was herself a poet of some
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles. The clever second daughter took profit from all her experi-
ences, read everything that came in her way, attacked with energy
Latin and German,- a knowledge of languages being then generally
deemed superfluous if not disastrous in what was known as "female
education," and when still in short dresses wrote reams of verse.
Her wise elders, however, while encouraging her literary tastes, per-
mitted none of this intellectual green fruit to find a market.
She had been a New York belle for two or three seasons when her
marriage with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, of Boston, placed her in a
## p. 7646 (#456) ###########################################
7646
JULIA WARD HOWE
new world. This eminent philanthropist, then in the prime of middle
age, had devoted his whole life to the unfortunate. When hardly out
of college and medical school he had enlisted as a volunteer in the
cause of Greek Independence in the revolution of 1824,-the contest
to which Lord Byron gave his life; out of untrained material he had
created an excellent surgical corps for the insurgents; at the declara-
tion of peace he had established an industrial colony on the Isthmus
of Corinth; in 1830 he had served as president of a relief committee
in the Polish uprising, and been imprisoned in Prussia for his pains:
he had founded in South Boston the first American institution for the
instruction of the blind; and he was among the most efficient of the
antislavery crusaders. The friends who surrounded him took life and
themselves very seriously, and all sorts of causes came to the Howe
abode to be justified and adopted.
«<
Mrs. Howe's nature responded generously to these new demands.
She became the eager advocate of the oppressed, whether victims of
the law like the slave, of political tyranny like the Irish, the Poles,
or the Hungarians, or of public opinion,-as, to her thinking, were
all women. Her ready pen was always at service of her many
clients. But she found time to study French, Greek, and Italian, and
to devote herself to modern philosophy, working hard at Schelling,
Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, and Kant. She wrote philosophical lectures.
which she read at her own house, and she helped to establish philo-
sophical clubs. With her husband she edited an able antislavery
paper, the Boston Commonwealth, to which she contributed leaders,
essays, poems, letters, and witty comments. In the ten or twelve
years following 1854 she published three volumes of poems,-'Passion
Flowers,' 'Words for the Hour,' and 'Later Lyrics'; two books of
travel, 'A Trip to Cuba' and 'From the Oak to the Olive'; and a
drama, 'The World's Own'; having written also in the same period
hundreds of clever newspaper letters to the New York Tribune and
the Anti-Slavery Standard. Since 1881 she has published 'Modern
Society,' a 'Life of Margaret Fuller,' and a second volume of essays,
entitled 'Is Polite Society Polite? ' She has chosen to include within
covers only a small part of her writings, nor does even their whole
bulk represent the life work of this versatile and public-spirited
author. She inspired the prosperous New England Women's Club, the
pioneer of its kind in America. She was a delegate to the World's
Prison Reform Congress in London, in 1872, and helped to found the
Women's Peace Association. She was president of the women's
branch of the great New Orleans Exposition in 1884, and she has
presided over innumerable clubs, conventions, and congresses.
Notwithstanding this enormous activity and productiveness, her
own countrymen associate her name almost wholly with one poem,
## p. 7647 (#457) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7647
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'; a poem struck off at white heat
early in the Civil War, when, in the camps about Washington, Mrs.
Howe was thrilled by the marching of thousands of gallant young
soldiers to the martial air of John Brown's Body. ' The regiments
caught up with enthusiasm the new words which she set to the
familiar tune; and the 'Battle Hymn' was sung in camp and field,
from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. It became the Marseillaise of the
unemotional Yankee.
[All the following poems are taken from 'Later Lyrics,' copyright 1865, and
are reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston. ]
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC
INE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
M
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on. "
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
OUR ORDERS
´EAVE no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
WEA
## p. 7648 (#458) ###########################################
7648
JULIA WARD HOWE
Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o'er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread!
Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancer's restless feet;
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,
Or teach the lesson of the hour!
Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.
And if that destiny could fail,
The sun should darken in the sky,
The eternal bloom of Nature pale,
And God, and Truth, and Freedom die!
PARDON
PAIN
AINS the sharp sentence the breast in whose wrath it was uttered.
Now thou art cold;
Vengeance the headlong, and justice with purpose close muttered,
Loosen their hold.
Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,—
Murder accurst;
But, from the crisis of crime in which Satan did lose him,
Suffered the worst,
Harshly the red dawn arose on a deed of his doing,
Never to mend;
But harsher days he wore out in the bitter pursuing
And the wild end.
To lift the pale flag of truce, wrap those mysteries round him.
In whose avail
Madness that moved, and the swift retribution that found him,
Falter and fail.
## p. 7649 (#459) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7649
So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourning,
Willing to fall,
Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning
With wider pall.
Back to the cross, where the Savior, uplifted in dying,
Bade all souls live,
Turns the reft bosom of Nature, his mother, low sighing,
"Greatest, forgive! "
(HAMLET› AT THE BOSTON THEATRE
(EDWIN BOOTH)
VE SIT before the row of evening lamps,
Each in his chair,
W®
Forgetful of November dusks and damps,
And wintry air.
A little gulf of music intervenes,
A bridge of sighs,
Where still the cunning of the curtain screens
Art's paradise.
My thought transcends those viols' shrill delight,
The booming bass,
And towards the regions we shall view to-night
Makes hurried pace.
The painted castle, and the unneeded guard
That ready stand;
The harmless Ghost, that walks with helm unbarred
And beckoning hand;
And, beautiful as dreams of maidenhood,
That doubt defy,
Young Hamlet, with his forehead grief-subdued,
And visioning eye.
XIII-479
O fair dead world, that from thy grave awak'st
A little while,
And in our heart strange revolution mak'st
With thy brief smile!
O beauties vanished, fair lips magical,
Heroic braves!
## p. 7650 (#460) ###########################################
7650
JULIA WARD HOWE
O mighty hearts, that held the world in thrall!
Come from your graves!
The Poet sees you through a mist of tears,-
Such depths divide
Him, with the love and passion of his years,
From you, inside!
The Poet's heart attends your buskined feet,
Your lofty strains,
Till earth's rude touch dissolves that madness sweet,
And life remains:
Life that is something while the senses heed
The spirit's call,
Life that is nothing when our grosser need
Engulfs it all.
And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!
Wear'st thou those glories draped about thy soul
Thou dost present?
And art thou by their feeling and control
Thus eloquent?
'Tis with no feignèd power thou bind'st our sense,
No shallow art:
Sure lavish Nature gave thee heritance
Of Hamlet's heart!
Thou dost control our fancies with a might
So wild, so fond,
We quarrel, passed thy circle of delight,
With things beyond;
Returning to the pillows rough with care,
And vulgar food,
Sad from the breath of that diviner air,
That loftier mood.
And there we leave thee, in thy misty tent
Watching alone;
While foes about thee gather imminent,
To us scarce known.
## p. 7651 (#461) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7651
Oh, when the lights are quenched, the music hushed,
The plaudits still,
Heaven keep the fountain whence the fair stream gushed
From choking ill!
Let Shakespeare's soul, that wins the world from wrong,
For thee avail,
And not one holy maxim of his song
Before thee fail!
So get thee to thy couch as unreproved
As heroes blest;
And all good angels trusted in and loved
Attend thy rest!
Ο
A NEW SCUI OR
NCE to my Fancy's hall a stranger came,
Of mien unwonted,
And its pale shapes of glory without shame
Or speech confronted.
Fair was my hall,- a gallery of Gods
Smoothly appointed;
With Nymphs and Satyrs from the dewy sods
Freshly anointed.
Great Jove sat throned in state, with Hermes near,
And fiery Bacchus;
Pallas and Pluto, and those powers of Fear
Whose visions rack us.
Artemis wore her crescent free of stars,
The hunt just scented;
Glad Aphrodite met the warrior Mars,
The myriad-tented.
Rude was my visitant, of sturdy form,
Draped in such clothing
As the world's great, whom luxury makes warm,
Look on with loathing.
And yet, methought, his service-badge of soil
With honor wearing;
And in his dexter hand, embossed with toil,
A hammer bearing.
## p. 7652 (#462) ###########################################
7652
JULIA WARD HOWE
But while I waited till his eye should sink,
O'ercome of beauty,
With heart-impatience brimming to the brink
Of courteous duty,-
He smote my marbles many a murderous blow,
His weapon poising;
I, in my wrath and wonderment of woe,
No comment voicing.
"Come, sweep this rubbish from the workman's way,
Wreck of past ages;
Afford me here a lump of harmless clay,
Ye grooms and pages! "
Then from that voidness of our mother Earth
A frame he builded
Of a new feature, - with the power of birth
Fashioned and welded.
It had a might mine eyes had never seen,
A mien, a stature
As if the centuries that rolled between
Had greatened Nature.
It breathed, it moved; above Jove's classic sway
A place was won it:
The rustic sculptor motioned; then, "To-day »
He wrote upon it.
"What man art thou? " I cried, "and what this wrong
That thou hast wrought me?
My marbles lived on symmetry and song;
Why hast thou brought me
"A form of all necessities, that asks
Nurture and feeding?
Not this the burthen of my maidhood's tasks,
Nor my high breeding. "
"Behold," he said, "Life's great impersonate,
Nourished by Labor!
Thy gods are gone with old-time Faith and Fate;
Here is thy Neighbor. "
## p. 7652 (#463) ###########################################
## p. 7652 (#464) ###########################################
J
W. D. HOWELLS.
## p. 7652 (#465) ###########################################
1128
11,"
## p. 7652 (#466) ###########################################
WD HOWELLS.
## p. 7653 (#467) ###########################################
7653
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
(1837-)
OR the last twenty years William Dean Howells has occupied
a unique position among American men of letters.
It can
hardly be said that he is the leader of a school of fiction;
he is rather the exponent in this country of a school whose leaders
are the modern Russian novelists, and in which Tolstoy is the high-
est authority. The realism of 'Anna Karénina' is also the realism
of Silas Lapham. ' Both works- the one a tragedy, the other a seri-
ous comedy-are steeped in the atmosphere of fact; an atmosphere
in which there are no mists of idealism and no elusive distances.
Howells perceived early the rich field which American life offers to
the writer of realistic fiction. The American people are yet too young
for mellowed romance; they are still in the literal period of youth.
The painter of Silas Lapham and of Lemuel Barker embodies this
frank noonday spirit of average life in his novels; only in his essays
and poems does he allow himself occasional truancies from the school
of the actual. He was himself peculiarly fitted by birth, education,
and training, to obtain a firm hold upon the unromantic, humorous,
pathetic life of the every-day American man and woman; to under-
stand its gaucheries, its brave nonchalance, its splendid attempts and
prophetic failures. William Dean Howells is an American of Ameri-
cans. He was born in Ohio in 1837, of a family founded originally
by Welsh Quakers, but closely resembling the families of Transcend-
ental New England in its habits of religious and philosophical
thought; in its simplicity of living; in its simple and democratic
tastes. During the boyhood of the author, his father owned and pub-
lished daily papers in Hamilton and in Dayton, Ohio, successively.
The son learned the printer's trade, and gradually the whole business
of conducting a newspaper. In his latest published work, 'Impres-
sions and Experiences,' he has embodied his recollections of this
apprenticeship in an essay of great charm. At the age of nineteen
he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.
At twenty-two he was appointed news editor of the State Journal at
Columbus. About this time he published a volume of verse.
Although Howells is a realist in his literary methods, there have
always been imaginative elements in his prose work; and from the
day when as a young man he published a slim volume of lyrics with
## p. 7654 (#468) ###########################################
7654
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his friend Piatt, he has been a poet. The early verse was graceful,
musical, distinctive; the later, deeper work, gathered into the striking
volume 'Stops of Various Quills' (1895), shows Howells's intense inter-
est in the great modern social problems, and his yearning brotherli-
ness. The brooding minor note is constant in these haunting poems,
which are rich in suggestion, full of noble thought and feeling, and
in their simple, almost bald diction, at times both touching and
beautiful.
His consulship at Venice, 1861-65, prepared him by its liberalizing
influences for the more cosmopolitan demands of the essay and the
novel. His impressions of his sojourn were embodied in 'Venetian
Life,' a book which revealed the qualities of his literary talent: his
powers of minute and kindly observation; his sense of the pictur-
esque; his close adhesion to delicate particulars, to expressive details,
to significant facts.
His subsequent residence in New York City, as a writer for the
Tribune and the Nation, paved the way still further for his fiction
writing. It was not until 1871, when he had become the assistant
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that he ventured into this field. His
first novel, Their Wedding Journey,' was instantly recognized as
something more than a well-told story. It was a transcript of two
very human lives. Its spirit of actuality was new in American fiction.
Its homeliness, its pleasantry, its every-day character, at once secured
its popularity. It was followed by a long succession of well-written
novels. If he had had no other claims upon the allegiance of those
anxious to establish high literary standards in this country, Howells
would still deserve the approval of the most critical lovers of litera-
ture for his delicate and conscientious workmanship. He has set a
much-needed example of carefulness and thoughtfulness in style and
construction. He has the conscience, the instinct, and the taste of an
artist. Though a deliberate, he has however been a prolific writer.
Almost every year since 1871 has brought forth a novel. 'A Chance
Acquaintance' appeared in 1873; A Foregone Conclusion' in 1874:
'Out of the Question' in 1876, and 'A Counterfeit Presentment' in
1877,- both cast in drama form; The Lady of the Aroostook' in
1878; The Undiscovered Country' in 1880; 'A Fearful Responsibil-
ity in 1882; 'Dr. Breen's Practice' in 1883; A Modern Instance' in
1883; A Woman's Reason' in 1884; Three Villages' in 1885; and
later The Rise of Silas Lapham,' 'Annie Kilburn,' 'April Hopes,'
'A Hazard of New Fortunes,' The Shadow of a Dream,' and numer-
ous farces which have appeared from time to time in various maga-
zines. The Rise of Silas Lapham' is a finely representative novel
of what may be called the middle period of Howells's development.
It is a triumph of realism; it is thoroughly and broadly American in
## p. 7655 (#469) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7655
tone; it is instinct with kindly human sympathy. The novelist has
a true comprehension of the "common people," especially of the
common people as they are found in these United States: fixed mem-
bers of no class, endowed with many virtues, destitute of traditions,—
the First Man or the First Woman, for all practical purposes, in a
new world; God-fearing, money-making persons, acknowledging no
superiors in theory, but always awed by their "betters» in fact.
These types appear and reappear in Howells's stories; he is the Dick-
ens of the self-made man. Silas Lapham is born a poor boy, of hon-
est parents, without educational or social opportunities. He makes his
money in mineral paint. His daughters are
His daughters are as much in advance of
him and his crude successes as the second generation of the newly
rich usually is in this country. By a series of accidents this family
of American types is thrown with gentlefolk of Boston. The usual
little tragedies and comedies ensue. The story is told with consum-
mate skill. Its objectivity is heightened by the author's fidelity to the
facts of the case. Its humor is unmistakable. Moreover, it is writ-
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style. The author says what he means in unmistakable language.
He never sacrifices lucidity to effect. He never indulges in mere
word-painting. His essays are as satisfactory as his novels in this
respect.
Mr. Howells's latest phase, that in which he shows a deep desire
to understand and set forth the strenuous American social problems,
-the meaning of socialism, the relations of labor and capital, and,
more broadly, the mystery of poverty and of human suffering,—is
typified in a book like 'A Hazard of New Fortunes. It is American
in its scenes and characters, and all through it is a sense of the dra-
matic unrest of current conditions in a great city like New York,—
the stormy and pathetic episode quoted being the culmination of
causes which attract the most earnest thought of Howells, an ideal
statement thereof coming out in such a volume as the suggestive 'A
Traveler from Altruria. '
The absence of idealism in Howells's writings has been cited as
their gravest defect; but it is by no means true that he excludes the
ideal sides of life from treatment. In the main, however, it is enough
for him to present the lives of men without comment, after nature's
own fashion. The American world of letters owes him a lasting debt
of gratitude in that he has made his presentation with fidelity to a
high ideal of artistic excellence. Since the year 1881, when he re-
signed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he has lived first in
Boston and later in New York, devoting himself to the writing of
novels, essays, and miscellaneous sketches. In these novels and in
¡
## p. 7656 (#470) ###########################################
7656
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his occasional essays his hand preserves its cunning, and his writing
always has that indefinable charm which is the enduring note in
good literature. And to the charm is added the broad outlook and
the deep ethical interest which are typical of the man in the ripe
maturity of his powers.
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
WAS not asked if I should like to come.
I
I have not seen my host here since I came,
Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.
WR
HOPE
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
E SAILED and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, "Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps - perhaps - perhaps! "
## p. 7657 (#471) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7657
SOCIETY
Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
From Stops of Various Quills.
I
LOOKED, and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtsied to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid
In their delight; and all so high and proud
They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.
I looked again, and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man's head,
And now upon a baby's gasping face,
Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl's throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revelers above them thronged and prest.
ANOTHER DAY
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
A
NOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
## p. 7658 (#472) ###########################################
7658
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Nor better for them; only a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
―――
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed;
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away.
At any rate, it is another day!
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM
From Their Wedding Journey. Copyright 1871 and 1894, by W. D. Howells.
Reprinted by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ,
publishers.
Dame Fortune plays me many a prank:
When she is kind, oh, how I go it!
But if again she's harsh, why, then
I am a very proper poet.
When favoring gales bring in my ships,
I hie to Rome and live in clover;
Elsewise I steer my skiff out here
And anchor till the storm blows over.
Compulsory virtue is the charm
Of life upon the Sabine Farm!
XIII-478
HORRIDA TEMPESTAS
THROU
HROUGH narrowed skies the tempest rages loud:
A vault low-hung and roofed with cloud
Bursts forth in rain and snow. The woods, the sea,
Echo the storm from Thracian Rhodope.
-
now:
Snatch we, my friends, the fitting moment -
While strong our knees, make smooth the wrinkled brow;
Bring forth the wine of ancient date
Pressed in Torquatus's consulate;
Of toil and danger speak no more:
Some god may yet our shattered state restore!
Perfume your hair with Achæmenian balm,
And bid Cyllene's lyre your troubled spirits calm.
-
'Twas thus the noble Centaur sung :-
"Unconquered youth, from Thetis sprung,
Thyself a mortal! The Dardanian land,
And cool Scamander rippling through the sand,
And gliding Simois, call thee to their side;
Nor shall thy mother o'er her azure tide
Lead thee in triumph to thy Phthian home:
Such the weird Fate's inexorable doom.
Grieve not, my son: in song and wassail find
A soothing converse and a solace kind. "
Translation of Sir Stephen de Vere.
## p. 7634 (#444) ###########################################
7634
HORACE
SATIRE
CHANCED that I, the other day,
I
Was sauntering up the Sacred Way,
And musing, as my habit is,
Some trivial random fantasies,
That for the time absorbed me quite,-
When there comes running up a wight,
Whom only by his name I knew:
"Ha, my dear fellow, how d'ye do? »
Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why,
As times go, pretty well,” said I:
"And you, I trust, can say the same. "
But after me as still he came,
"Sir, is there anything," I cried,
"You want of me? " "Oh," he replied,
"I'm just the man you ought to know:
A scholar, author! "-"Is it so?
For this I'll like you all the more! "
Then, writhing to evade the bore,
I quicken now my pace, now stop,
And in my servant's ear let drop
Some words, and all the while I feel
Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel.
"Oh for a touch," I moaned in pain,
«< Bolanus, of thy slap-dash vein,
To put this incubus to rout! "
As he went chattering on about
Whatever he descries or meets,
The crowds, the beauty of the streets,
The city's growth, its splendor, size,
"You're dying to be off," he cries-
For all the while I'd been struck dumb:
"I've noticed it some time. But come,
Let's clearly understand each other:
It's no use making all this pother.
My mind's made up to stick by you;
So where you go, there I go too. "
"Don't put yourself," I answered, "pray,
So very far out of your way.
I'm on the road to see a friend,
Whom you don't know, that's near his end,
Away beyond the Tiber far,
Close by where Cæsar's gardens are. "
## p. 7635 (#445) ###########################################
HORACE
7635
"I've nothing in the world to do,
And what's a paltry mile or two?
I like it, so I'll follow you! "
Now we were close on Vesta's fane;
'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane,
Was bound to answer to his bail,
Or lose his cause if he should fail.
"Do, if you love me, step aside
One moment with me here," he cried
"Upon my life, indeed I can't:
Of law I'm wholly ignorant,
And you know where I'm hurrying to. "
"I'm fairly puzzled what to do:
Give you up, or my cause. ” — “Oh, me,
Me, by all means! "-"I won't," quoth he,
And stalks on, holding by me tight.
As with your conqueror to fight
Is hard, I follow. "How," anon
He rambles off-"How get you on,
You and Mæcenas? To so few
He keeps himself. So clever, too!
No man more dexterous to seize
And use his opportunities.
Just introduce me, and you'll see
We'll pull together famously;
And hang me then, if with my backing
You don't send all your rivals packing! "
"Things in that quarter, sir, proceed
In very different style indeed.
No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not if there I spy
Men richer, better read than I.
Each has his place! "- "Amazing tact!
Scarce credible! ». "But 'tis the fact. "
―
"You quicken my desire to get
An introduction to his set. "
We ran
At the next turn against the man
Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
"Ha, knave," he cried with loud uproar,
"Where are you off to? Will you here
Stand witness? " I present my ear.
To court he hustles him along;
High words are bandied, high and strong;
## p. 7636 (#446) ###########################################
7636
HORACE
HⓇ
ORACE
――
A mob collects, the fray to see:
So did Apollo rescue me.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
CONTENTMENT
What did you think, my friend, of far-famed Lesbos and
Chios?
-
How about Samos the dainty, and Croesus's capital, Sardis ?
Colophon, too, and Smyrna? Above their fame, or beneath it?
Tiber's stream and the Campus excel them far, do you tell me?
Have you been praying for one of Attalus's cities, I wonder?
Lebedos is it you praise, of the sea and your journeyings wearied?
Bullatius- Yes! You know what Lebedos is: more dead than
Fidenæ.
Ay, or than Gabii; yet I would gladly abide there, forgetting
Those I have loved, and expecting that they in their turn will forg
me.
There I would dwell, and gaze from the shore on the furious waters.
Horace If a man travel in mud and in rain from Capua Rome-
ward,
Drenched though he be, he will choose not to tarry for life in the
tavern.
Even when chilled to the bones, we praise not the bath and the
furnace,
Truly believing that they would make life full and successful;
Nor, if impetuous Auster has tossed you about on the billow,
Would you for that get rid of your vessel beyond the Ægean.
If you are perfectly sound, then Rhodes and fair Mitylene
Help you no more than a cloak in the dog-days, trunks in midwinter,
Or in December a plunge in the Tiber, a furnace in August.
Now that you may, and the face of Fortune is smiling upon you,
Here at Rome praise far-off Rhodes, and Chios, and Samos.
This one hour that a god has bestowed upon you in his bounty,
Take with a grateful hand, nor plan next year to be happy:
So that wherever your life may be spent, you will say you enjoyed it.
For if anxieties only by reason and foresight are banished,—
Not by a spot that commands some outlook wide on the waters. —
Never our nature, but only the sky do we change as we travel.
Toilsome idleness wears us out. On wagon and shipboard
Comfort it is that we seek; yet that which you seek, it is with you,
Even in Ulubræ, if you lack not contentment of spirit.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
## p. 7637 (#447) ###########################################
HORACE
7637
HORACE'S FARM
L
EST you may question me whether my farm, most excellent Quinc-
tius,
Feeds its master with grain, or makes him rich with its olives,
Or with its orchards and pastures, or vines that cover the elm-trees,
I, in colloquial fashion, will tell you its shape and position.
Only my shadowy valley indents the continuous mountains,
Lying so that the sun at his coming looks on the right side,
Then, with retreating chariot, warming the left as he leaves it.
Surely the temperature you would praise; and what if the bushes
Bear in profusion scarlet berries, the oak and the ilex
Plentiful food for the herd provide, and shade for the master?
You would say, with its verdure, Tarentum was hither transported.
There is a fountain, deserving to give its name to a streamlet.
Not more pure nor cooler in Thrace runs winding the Hebrus.
Helpful it is to an aching head or a stomach exhausted.
Such is my ingle: sweet, and, if you believe me, delightful;
Keeping me sound and safe for you even in days of September.
Translation of William C. Lawton.
TO HIS BOOK
Paraphrase from Echoes from the Sabine Farm, by E. and R. M. Field.
Copyright 1892, by A. C. McClurg & Co. ; 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons
vain self-conscious little book,
Companion of my happy days,
Now eagerly you seem to look
For wider fields to spread your lays;
My desk and locks cannot contain you,
Nor blush of modesty restrain you.
YOU
Well then, begone, fool that thou art!
But do not come to me and cry,
When critics strike you to the heart,
"Oh wretched little book am I! "
You know I tried to educate you
To shun the fate that must await you.
In youth you may encounter friends,
(Pray this prediction be not wrong! )
But wait until old age descends,
And thumbs have smeared your gentlest song:
## p. 7638 (#448) ###########################################
7638
HORACE
Then will the moths connive to eat you,
And rural libraries secrete you.
However, should a friend some word
Of my obscure career request,
Tell him how deeply I was stirred
To spread my wings beyond the nest;
Take from my years, which are before you,
To boom my merits, I implore you.
Tell him that I am short and fat,
Quick in my temper, soon appeased,
With locks of gray. but what of that?
Loving the sun, with nature pleased.
I'm more than four-and-forty, hark you-
But ready for a night off, mark you!
-
THE ART OF POETRY
SU
UPPOSE, by some wild freak of fancy led,
A painter were to join a human head
To neck of horse, cull here and there a limb,
And daub on feathers various as his whim,
So that a woman, lovely to a wish,
Went tailing off into a loathsome fish:
Could you, although the artist's self were there,
From laughter long and loud, my friends, forbear?
Well, trust me, Pisos, of that freak of art
The book would be the very counterpart,
Which with a medley of wild fancies teems,
Whirling in chaos like a sick man's dreams,
A maze of forms incongruous and base,
Where naught is of a piece, naught in its place.
To dare whate'er they please has always been
The painter's, poet's, privilege, I ween.
It is a boon that any one may plead -
Myself I claim it, and in turn concede;
But 'twill not do to urge the plea too far.
To join together things that clash and jar.
The savage with the gentle, were absurd,
Or couple lamb with tiger, snake with bird.
Mostly, when poems open with a grand
Inposing air, we may surmise at hand
## p. 7639 (#449) ###########################################
HORACE
7639
Some flashy fustian, here and there a patch
Of flaming scarlet, meant the eye to catch.
A grove shall be described, or Dian's shrine,
Or through delightsome plains for many a line
A brook shall wind, or the Rhine's rushing stream,
Or o'er the page the heavenly bow shall gleam.
All very fine, but wholly out of place!
You draw a cypress with consummate grace;
But what of that, if you have had your fee
To paint a wrecked man struggling in the sea?
A vase was meant: how comes it then about,
As the wheel turns, a common jug comes out?
Whate'er you write, by this great maxim run:
Let it be simple, homogeneous, one.
We poets, most of us, by the pretense,
Dear friends, are duped of seeming excellence.
We grow obscure in striving to be terse;
Aiming at ease, we enervate our verse;
For grandeur soaring, into bombast fall,
And, dreading that, like merest reptiles crawl:
Whilst he who seeks his readers to surprise
With common things shown in uncommon wise,
Will make his dolphins through the forests roam,
His wild boars ride upon the billows' foam.
So unskilled writers, in their haste to shun
One fault, are apt into a worse to run.
The humblest statuary, of those that nigh
The Emilian Circus their vocation ply,
A finger-nail will to a turn express,
And hit you off in bronze a flowing tress,-
Yet is his work a failure; for his soul
Can neither grasp nor mold a living whole.
In anything that I may ever write,
I would no more resemble such a wight
Than I would care to have dark hair, dark eyes,
If coupled with a nose of uncouth size.
All ye who labor in the Muses' bowers,
Select a theme proportioned to your powers,
And ponder long, and with the nicest care,
How much your shoulders can and cannot bear.
Once right in this, your words will freely flow,
And thought from thought in lucid order grow.
Now, if my judgment be not much amiss,
The charm and worth of order lie in this:
## p. 7640 (#450) ###########################################
7640
HORACE
In saying just what should just then be said,
And holding much that comes into the head
Deliberately back for future use,
When it may just the right effect produce.
In choice of words be cautious and select;
Dwell with delight on this, and that reject.
No slight success will be achieved, if you
By skillful setting make old phrases new.
Then, should new terms be wanted to explain
Things that till now in darkness hid have lain,
And you shall coin, now here, now there, a word
Which our bluff ancestors have never heard,
Due leave and license will not be refused,
If with good taste and sound discretion used.
Nay, such new words, if from a Grecian source,
Aptly applied, are welcomed as of course.
To Virgil and to Varius why forbid
What Plautus erewhile and Cæcilius did?
Or why to me begrudge a few words more,
If I can add them to my scanty score,
When Cato and old Ennius reveled each
In coining new words that enriched our speech?
A word that bears the impress of its day
As current coin will always find its way.
As forests change their foliage year by year,
Leaves that came first, first fall and disappear,-
So antique words die out, and in their room
Other spring up, of vigorous growth and bloom.
Ourselves, and all that's ours, to death are due;
And why should words not be as mortal too?
The landlocked port, a work well worthy kings,
That takes whole fleets within its sheltering wings;
Swamps, sterile long, all plashy, rank, and drear,
Groan 'neath the plow, and feed whole cities near;
The river, perilous to field and farm,
Its channel changed, can now no longer harm,-
These, and all earthly works, must pass away;
And words, shall they enjoy a longer day?
Some will revive that we no more allow,
And some die out that are in favor now,
If usage wills it so; for 'tis with her
The laws of language rest as sovereign arbiter.
Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.
## p. 7641 (#451) ###########################################
7641
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
(1803-1884)
ICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE, English poet and essayist, au-
thor of more than twenty volumes of verse and prose, is
now chiefly remembered for his epic poem 'Orion. ' Three
large editions of this he published at a farthing a copy, "to show his
appreciation of the low esteem into which heroic poetry had fallen. "
The fourth edition commanded a shilling, and the fifth a half-crown.
Ten editions had been exhausted by 1874.
Horne's life was adventurous and interesting. He was born in
London January 1st, 1803, was educated at Sandhurst, and entered
as midshipman the Mexican navy, where he
served till the close of the War of Inde-
pendence. He then returned to London to
begin a literary career. To his early period
belong two tragedies, Cosmo de' Medici'
and The Death of Marlowe,' both of which
contain fine passages. A poem sent to him
for criticism by Elizabeth Barrett opened
the way to a cordial friendship and a cor-
respondence of seven years. These delight-
ful letters were published in 1877. Mrs.
Browning contributed to Horne's 'Poems of
Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized,' and wrote
several essays for his 'Spirit of the Age,'
a collection of criticisms published in 1844.
In 1852 Horne removed to Australia, and remained there until
1866; his book 'Australian Facts and Principles' was one outcome
of this residence. Again returning to England, he continued literary
work until his death at Margate, March 13th, 1884. His last works
were tragedies, including 'Judas Iscariot: A Miracle-Play,' and a
curious prose tract, Sithron the Star-Stricken' (1883), which he pre-
tended to take from the Arabian.
"
R. H. H. HORNE
Poe said that his 'Orion' might be called " a homily against
supineness and apathy in the cause of human progress, and in favor
of energetic action for the good of the race.
It is our delib-
erate opinion," he affirmed, "that in all that regards the loftiest and
holiest attributes of true poetry, 'Orion' has never been excelled. "
## p. 7642 (#452) ###########################################
7642
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
The narrative is drawn from a number of Greek and Roman fables.
It describes the giant hunter Orion, who is loved by Artemis (Diana),
Merope, and Eos (Aurora). The jealous Artemis pierces him with her
arrows; but Zeus, in answer to the prayers of Eos, places him among
the constellations, where he may enjoy her affection forever.
MORNING
From Orion'
L
EVEL with the summit of that eastern mount
By slow approach, and like a promontory
Which seems to glide and meet a coming ship,
The pale-gold platform of the morning came
Towards the gliding mount. Against a sky
Of delicate purple, snow-bright courts and halls
Touched with light silvery green, gleaming across,
Fronted by pillars vast, cloud-capitaled,
With shafts of changeful pearl, all reared upon
An isle of clear aerial gold, came floating;
And in the centre, clad in fleecy white,
With lucid lilies in her golden hair,
Eos, sweet Goddess of the Morning, stood.
From the bright peak of that surrounded mount,
One step sufficed to gain the tremulous floor
Whereon the Palace of the Morning shone,
Scarcely a bow-shot distant; but that step
Orion's humbled and still mortal feet
Dared not adventure. In the Goddess's face
Imploringly he gazed. "Advance! " she said,
In tones more sweet than when some heavenly bird,
Hid in a rosy cloud, its morning hymn
Warbles unseen, wet with delicious dews,
And to earth's flowers all looking up in prayer,
"Believe-advance! —
Tells of the coming bliss.
Or, as the spheres move onward with their song
That calls me to awaken other lands,
That moment will escape which ne'er returns! »
Forward Orion stepped: the platform bright
Shook like the reflex of a star in water
Moved by the breeze, throughout its whole expanse;
And even the palace glistened fitfully,
As with electric shiver it sent forth
Odors of flowers divine and all fresh life.
## p. 7643 (#453) ###########################################
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
7643
Still stood he where he stepped, nor to return
Attempted. To essay one pace beyond
He felt no power; yet onward he advanced
Safe to the Goddess, who, with hand outstretched,
Into the palace led him. Grace and strength,
With sense of happy change to finer earth,
Freshness of nature and belief in good,
Came flowing o'er his soul, and he was blest.
'Tis always morning somewhere in the world,
And Eos rises, circling constantly
The varied regions of mankind. No pause
Of renovation and of freshening rays
She knows; but evermore her love breathes forth
On field and forest, as on human hope,
Health, beauty, power, thought, action, and advance.
All this Orion witnessed, and rejoiced.
The turmoil he had known, the late distress
By loss of passion's object and of sight,
Were now exchanged for these serene delights
Of contemplation, as the influence
That Eos wrought around forever, dawned
Upon his vision and his inmost heart
In sweetness and success. All sympathy
With all fair things that in her circle lay,
She gave, and all received; nor knew of strife:
For from the Sun her cheek its bloom withdrew,
And ere intolerant noon, the floating realm
Of Eos-queen of the awakening earth
Was brightening other lands, wherefrom black Night
Her faded chariot down the sky had driven
Behind the sea. Thus from the earth upraised,
And over its tumultuous breast sustained
In peace and tranquil glory,- oh blest state!
Clear-browed Orion, full of thankfulness
And pure devotion to the goddess, dwelt
Within the glowing Palace of the Morn.
But these serene airs did not therefore bring
A death-sleep o'er the waves of memory,
Where all its clouds and colors, specks of sails,
Its car-borne gods, shipwrecks, and drowning men,
Passed full in view; yet with a mellowing sense
Ideal, and from pain sublimed. Thus came
Mirrors of nature to him, and full oft
Downward on Chios turned his happy eyes,
## p. 7644 (#454) ###########################################
7644
RICHARD HENRY HENGIST HORNE
With grateful thoughts that o'er life's sorrows wove
The present texture of a sweet content,
Passing all wisdom, or its fairest flower.
He saw the woods, and blessed them for the sake
Of Artemis; the city, and rich gloom
That o'er the cedar forest ever hung,
He also blessed for Merope; the isle
And all that dwelt there, he with smiles beheld.
## p. 7645 (#455) ###########################################
7645
JULIA WARD HOWE
(1819? -)
B
Y BIRTH a member of a fashionable New York circle; by edu-
cation a cultivated and accomplished woman of society; by
marriage made one of a group of zealous and uncompromis-
ing philanthropists,-abolitionists, prison reformers, equal-suffragists,
coeducationists, - Mrs. Julia Ward Howe has turned her eclectic train-
ing only to generous uses. She has published verse, travels, and
essays; she has taught - if much serious and eloquent journalistic
work may be reckoned among the higher forms of teaching; she has
won much reputation as a public speaker
on social, educational, and political subjects;
and it is not impossible that even had she
written nothing, her brilliant fame as a con-
versationist, and as the most inspiring of
companions, might insure her that vague
though sure renown which belongs to the
famous French hostesses of the seventeenth
century.
JULIA WARD HOWE
The New York of her youth was still a
neighborly city, where the small set of cul-
tivated and leisurely families saw much not
only of each other, but of the agreeable
foreigners who came to this country. Her
father, Samuel Ward, was a well-known
banker, to whom all notable persons brought letters of introduction,
and in whose household the young people learned to be agreeable, to
be alert, and to adjust their mental vision to an ever-widening hori-
zon. Mrs.
Ward, a very cultivated woman, was herself a poet of some
merit, whose poems, never published, were greatly admired in private
circles. The clever second daughter took profit from all her experi-
ences, read everything that came in her way, attacked with energy
Latin and German,- a knowledge of languages being then generally
deemed superfluous if not disastrous in what was known as "female
education," and when still in short dresses wrote reams of verse.
Her wise elders, however, while encouraging her literary tastes, per-
mitted none of this intellectual green fruit to find a market.
She had been a New York belle for two or three seasons when her
marriage with Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, of Boston, placed her in a
## p. 7646 (#456) ###########################################
7646
JULIA WARD HOWE
new world. This eminent philanthropist, then in the prime of middle
age, had devoted his whole life to the unfortunate. When hardly out
of college and medical school he had enlisted as a volunteer in the
cause of Greek Independence in the revolution of 1824,-the contest
to which Lord Byron gave his life; out of untrained material he had
created an excellent surgical corps for the insurgents; at the declara-
tion of peace he had established an industrial colony on the Isthmus
of Corinth; in 1830 he had served as president of a relief committee
in the Polish uprising, and been imprisoned in Prussia for his pains:
he had founded in South Boston the first American institution for the
instruction of the blind; and he was among the most efficient of the
antislavery crusaders. The friends who surrounded him took life and
themselves very seriously, and all sorts of causes came to the Howe
abode to be justified and adopted.
«<
Mrs. Howe's nature responded generously to these new demands.
She became the eager advocate of the oppressed, whether victims of
the law like the slave, of political tyranny like the Irish, the Poles,
or the Hungarians, or of public opinion,-as, to her thinking, were
all women. Her ready pen was always at service of her many
clients. But she found time to study French, Greek, and Italian, and
to devote herself to modern philosophy, working hard at Schelling,
Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, and Kant. She wrote philosophical lectures.
which she read at her own house, and she helped to establish philo-
sophical clubs. With her husband she edited an able antislavery
paper, the Boston Commonwealth, to which she contributed leaders,
essays, poems, letters, and witty comments. In the ten or twelve
years following 1854 she published three volumes of poems,-'Passion
Flowers,' 'Words for the Hour,' and 'Later Lyrics'; two books of
travel, 'A Trip to Cuba' and 'From the Oak to the Olive'; and a
drama, 'The World's Own'; having written also in the same period
hundreds of clever newspaper letters to the New York Tribune and
the Anti-Slavery Standard. Since 1881 she has published 'Modern
Society,' a 'Life of Margaret Fuller,' and a second volume of essays,
entitled 'Is Polite Society Polite? ' She has chosen to include within
covers only a small part of her writings, nor does even their whole
bulk represent the life work of this versatile and public-spirited
author. She inspired the prosperous New England Women's Club, the
pioneer of its kind in America. She was a delegate to the World's
Prison Reform Congress in London, in 1872, and helped to found the
Women's Peace Association. She was president of the women's
branch of the great New Orleans Exposition in 1884, and she has
presided over innumerable clubs, conventions, and congresses.
Notwithstanding this enormous activity and productiveness, her
own countrymen associate her name almost wholly with one poem,
## p. 7647 (#457) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7647
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'; a poem struck off at white heat
early in the Civil War, when, in the camps about Washington, Mrs.
Howe was thrilled by the marching of thousands of gallant young
soldiers to the martial air of John Brown's Body. ' The regiments
caught up with enthusiasm the new words which she set to the
familiar tune; and the 'Battle Hymn' was sung in camp and field,
from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. It became the Marseillaise of the
unemotional Yankee.
[All the following poems are taken from 'Later Lyrics,' copyright 1865, and
are reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston. ]
BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC
INE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
M
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on. "
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
OUR ORDERS
´EAVE no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
WEA
## p. 7648 (#458) ###########################################
7648
JULIA WARD HOWE
Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o'er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread!
Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancer's restless feet;
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,
Or teach the lesson of the hour!
Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.
And if that destiny could fail,
The sun should darken in the sky,
The eternal bloom of Nature pale,
And God, and Truth, and Freedom die!
PARDON
PAIN
AINS the sharp sentence the breast in whose wrath it was uttered.
Now thou art cold;
Vengeance the headlong, and justice with purpose close muttered,
Loosen their hold.
Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,—
Murder accurst;
But, from the crisis of crime in which Satan did lose him,
Suffered the worst,
Harshly the red dawn arose on a deed of his doing,
Never to mend;
But harsher days he wore out in the bitter pursuing
And the wild end.
To lift the pale flag of truce, wrap those mysteries round him.
In whose avail
Madness that moved, and the swift retribution that found him,
Falter and fail.
## p. 7649 (#459) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7649
So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourning,
Willing to fall,
Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning
With wider pall.
Back to the cross, where the Savior, uplifted in dying,
Bade all souls live,
Turns the reft bosom of Nature, his mother, low sighing,
"Greatest, forgive! "
(HAMLET› AT THE BOSTON THEATRE
(EDWIN BOOTH)
VE SIT before the row of evening lamps,
Each in his chair,
W®
Forgetful of November dusks and damps,
And wintry air.
A little gulf of music intervenes,
A bridge of sighs,
Where still the cunning of the curtain screens
Art's paradise.
My thought transcends those viols' shrill delight,
The booming bass,
And towards the regions we shall view to-night
Makes hurried pace.
The painted castle, and the unneeded guard
That ready stand;
The harmless Ghost, that walks with helm unbarred
And beckoning hand;
And, beautiful as dreams of maidenhood,
That doubt defy,
Young Hamlet, with his forehead grief-subdued,
And visioning eye.
XIII-479
O fair dead world, that from thy grave awak'st
A little while,
And in our heart strange revolution mak'st
With thy brief smile!
O beauties vanished, fair lips magical,
Heroic braves!
## p. 7650 (#460) ###########################################
7650
JULIA WARD HOWE
O mighty hearts, that held the world in thrall!
Come from your graves!
The Poet sees you through a mist of tears,-
Such depths divide
Him, with the love and passion of his years,
From you, inside!
The Poet's heart attends your buskined feet,
Your lofty strains,
Till earth's rude touch dissolves that madness sweet,
And life remains:
Life that is something while the senses heed
The spirit's call,
Life that is nothing when our grosser need
Engulfs it all.
And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!
Wear'st thou those glories draped about thy soul
Thou dost present?
And art thou by their feeling and control
Thus eloquent?
'Tis with no feignèd power thou bind'st our sense,
No shallow art:
Sure lavish Nature gave thee heritance
Of Hamlet's heart!
Thou dost control our fancies with a might
So wild, so fond,
We quarrel, passed thy circle of delight,
With things beyond;
Returning to the pillows rough with care,
And vulgar food,
Sad from the breath of that diviner air,
That loftier mood.
And there we leave thee, in thy misty tent
Watching alone;
While foes about thee gather imminent,
To us scarce known.
## p. 7651 (#461) ###########################################
JULIA WARD HOWE
7651
Oh, when the lights are quenched, the music hushed,
The plaudits still,
Heaven keep the fountain whence the fair stream gushed
From choking ill!
Let Shakespeare's soul, that wins the world from wrong,
For thee avail,
And not one holy maxim of his song
Before thee fail!
So get thee to thy couch as unreproved
As heroes blest;
And all good angels trusted in and loved
Attend thy rest!
Ο
A NEW SCUI OR
NCE to my Fancy's hall a stranger came,
Of mien unwonted,
And its pale shapes of glory without shame
Or speech confronted.
Fair was my hall,- a gallery of Gods
Smoothly appointed;
With Nymphs and Satyrs from the dewy sods
Freshly anointed.
Great Jove sat throned in state, with Hermes near,
And fiery Bacchus;
Pallas and Pluto, and those powers of Fear
Whose visions rack us.
Artemis wore her crescent free of stars,
The hunt just scented;
Glad Aphrodite met the warrior Mars,
The myriad-tented.
Rude was my visitant, of sturdy form,
Draped in such clothing
As the world's great, whom luxury makes warm,
Look on with loathing.
And yet, methought, his service-badge of soil
With honor wearing;
And in his dexter hand, embossed with toil,
A hammer bearing.
## p. 7652 (#462) ###########################################
7652
JULIA WARD HOWE
But while I waited till his eye should sink,
O'ercome of beauty,
With heart-impatience brimming to the brink
Of courteous duty,-
He smote my marbles many a murderous blow,
His weapon poising;
I, in my wrath and wonderment of woe,
No comment voicing.
"Come, sweep this rubbish from the workman's way,
Wreck of past ages;
Afford me here a lump of harmless clay,
Ye grooms and pages! "
Then from that voidness of our mother Earth
A frame he builded
Of a new feature, - with the power of birth
Fashioned and welded.
It had a might mine eyes had never seen,
A mien, a stature
As if the centuries that rolled between
Had greatened Nature.
It breathed, it moved; above Jove's classic sway
A place was won it:
The rustic sculptor motioned; then, "To-day »
He wrote upon it.
"What man art thou? " I cried, "and what this wrong
That thou hast wrought me?
My marbles lived on symmetry and song;
Why hast thou brought me
"A form of all necessities, that asks
Nurture and feeding?
Not this the burthen of my maidhood's tasks,
Nor my high breeding. "
"Behold," he said, "Life's great impersonate,
Nourished by Labor!
Thy gods are gone with old-time Faith and Fate;
Here is thy Neighbor. "
## p. 7652 (#463) ###########################################
## p. 7652 (#464) ###########################################
J
W. D. HOWELLS.
## p. 7652 (#465) ###########################################
1128
11,"
## p. 7652 (#466) ###########################################
WD HOWELLS.
## p. 7653 (#467) ###########################################
7653
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
(1837-)
OR the last twenty years William Dean Howells has occupied
a unique position among American men of letters.
It can
hardly be said that he is the leader of a school of fiction;
he is rather the exponent in this country of a school whose leaders
are the modern Russian novelists, and in which Tolstoy is the high-
est authority. The realism of 'Anna Karénina' is also the realism
of Silas Lapham. ' Both works- the one a tragedy, the other a seri-
ous comedy-are steeped in the atmosphere of fact; an atmosphere
in which there are no mists of idealism and no elusive distances.
Howells perceived early the rich field which American life offers to
the writer of realistic fiction. The American people are yet too young
for mellowed romance; they are still in the literal period of youth.
The painter of Silas Lapham and of Lemuel Barker embodies this
frank noonday spirit of average life in his novels; only in his essays
and poems does he allow himself occasional truancies from the school
of the actual. He was himself peculiarly fitted by birth, education,
and training, to obtain a firm hold upon the unromantic, humorous,
pathetic life of the every-day American man and woman; to under-
stand its gaucheries, its brave nonchalance, its splendid attempts and
prophetic failures. William Dean Howells is an American of Ameri-
cans. He was born in Ohio in 1837, of a family founded originally
by Welsh Quakers, but closely resembling the families of Transcend-
ental New England in its habits of religious and philosophical
thought; in its simplicity of living; in its simple and democratic
tastes. During the boyhood of the author, his father owned and pub-
lished daily papers in Hamilton and in Dayton, Ohio, successively.
The son learned the printer's trade, and gradually the whole business
of conducting a newspaper. In his latest published work, 'Impres-
sions and Experiences,' he has embodied his recollections of this
apprenticeship in an essay of great charm. At the age of nineteen
he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.
At twenty-two he was appointed news editor of the State Journal at
Columbus. About this time he published a volume of verse.
Although Howells is a realist in his literary methods, there have
always been imaginative elements in his prose work; and from the
day when as a young man he published a slim volume of lyrics with
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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his friend Piatt, he has been a poet. The early verse was graceful,
musical, distinctive; the later, deeper work, gathered into the striking
volume 'Stops of Various Quills' (1895), shows Howells's intense inter-
est in the great modern social problems, and his yearning brotherli-
ness. The brooding minor note is constant in these haunting poems,
which are rich in suggestion, full of noble thought and feeling, and
in their simple, almost bald diction, at times both touching and
beautiful.
His consulship at Venice, 1861-65, prepared him by its liberalizing
influences for the more cosmopolitan demands of the essay and the
novel. His impressions of his sojourn were embodied in 'Venetian
Life,' a book which revealed the qualities of his literary talent: his
powers of minute and kindly observation; his sense of the pictur-
esque; his close adhesion to delicate particulars, to expressive details,
to significant facts.
His subsequent residence in New York City, as a writer for the
Tribune and the Nation, paved the way still further for his fiction
writing. It was not until 1871, when he had become the assistant
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that he ventured into this field. His
first novel, Their Wedding Journey,' was instantly recognized as
something more than a well-told story. It was a transcript of two
very human lives. Its spirit of actuality was new in American fiction.
Its homeliness, its pleasantry, its every-day character, at once secured
its popularity. It was followed by a long succession of well-written
novels. If he had had no other claims upon the allegiance of those
anxious to establish high literary standards in this country, Howells
would still deserve the approval of the most critical lovers of litera-
ture for his delicate and conscientious workmanship. He has set a
much-needed example of carefulness and thoughtfulness in style and
construction. He has the conscience, the instinct, and the taste of an
artist. Though a deliberate, he has however been a prolific writer.
Almost every year since 1871 has brought forth a novel. 'A Chance
Acquaintance' appeared in 1873; A Foregone Conclusion' in 1874:
'Out of the Question' in 1876, and 'A Counterfeit Presentment' in
1877,- both cast in drama form; The Lady of the Aroostook' in
1878; The Undiscovered Country' in 1880; 'A Fearful Responsibil-
ity in 1882; 'Dr. Breen's Practice' in 1883; A Modern Instance' in
1883; A Woman's Reason' in 1884; Three Villages' in 1885; and
later The Rise of Silas Lapham,' 'Annie Kilburn,' 'April Hopes,'
'A Hazard of New Fortunes,' The Shadow of a Dream,' and numer-
ous farces which have appeared from time to time in various maga-
zines. The Rise of Silas Lapham' is a finely representative novel
of what may be called the middle period of Howells's development.
It is a triumph of realism; it is thoroughly and broadly American in
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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7655
tone; it is instinct with kindly human sympathy. The novelist has
a true comprehension of the "common people," especially of the
common people as they are found in these United States: fixed mem-
bers of no class, endowed with many virtues, destitute of traditions,—
the First Man or the First Woman, for all practical purposes, in a
new world; God-fearing, money-making persons, acknowledging no
superiors in theory, but always awed by their "betters» in fact.
These types appear and reappear in Howells's stories; he is the Dick-
ens of the self-made man. Silas Lapham is born a poor boy, of hon-
est parents, without educational or social opportunities. He makes his
money in mineral paint. His daughters are
His daughters are as much in advance of
him and his crude successes as the second generation of the newly
rich usually is in this country. By a series of accidents this family
of American types is thrown with gentlefolk of Boston. The usual
little tragedies and comedies ensue. The story is told with consum-
mate skill. Its objectivity is heightened by the author's fidelity to the
facts of the case. Its humor is unmistakable. Moreover, it is writ-
ten with that marvelous clearness of diction, that easy command of
current idiom, which constitute Howells's strongest claim to a great
style. The author says what he means in unmistakable language.
He never sacrifices lucidity to effect. He never indulges in mere
word-painting. His essays are as satisfactory as his novels in this
respect.
Mr. Howells's latest phase, that in which he shows a deep desire
to understand and set forth the strenuous American social problems,
-the meaning of socialism, the relations of labor and capital, and,
more broadly, the mystery of poverty and of human suffering,—is
typified in a book like 'A Hazard of New Fortunes. It is American
in its scenes and characters, and all through it is a sense of the dra-
matic unrest of current conditions in a great city like New York,—
the stormy and pathetic episode quoted being the culmination of
causes which attract the most earnest thought of Howells, an ideal
statement thereof coming out in such a volume as the suggestive 'A
Traveler from Altruria. '
The absence of idealism in Howells's writings has been cited as
their gravest defect; but it is by no means true that he excludes the
ideal sides of life from treatment. In the main, however, it is enough
for him to present the lives of men without comment, after nature's
own fashion. The American world of letters owes him a lasting debt
of gratitude in that he has made his presentation with fidelity to a
high ideal of artistic excellence. Since the year 1881, when he re-
signed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he has lived first in
Boston and later in New York, devoting himself to the writing of
novels, essays, and miscellaneous sketches. In these novels and in
¡
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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
his occasional essays his hand preserves its cunning, and his writing
always has that indefinable charm which is the enduring note in
good literature. And to the charm is added the broad outlook and
the deep ethical interest which are typical of the man in the ripe
maturity of his powers.
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
WAS not asked if I should like to come.
I
I have not seen my host here since I came,
Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.
WR
HOPE
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
E SAILED and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, "Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps - perhaps - perhaps! "
## p. 7657 (#471) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7657
SOCIETY
Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
From Stops of Various Quills.
I
LOOKED, and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtsied to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid
In their delight; and all so high and proud
They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.
I looked again, and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man's head,
And now upon a baby's gasping face,
Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl's throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revelers above them thronged and prest.
ANOTHER DAY
From Stops of Various Quills. Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
A
NOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
## p. 7658 (#472) ###########################################
7658
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Nor better for them; only a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
―――
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed;
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away.
At any rate, it is another day!
A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM
From Their Wedding Journey. Copyright 1871 and 1894, by W. D. Howells.
Reprinted by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ,
publishers.
