Taste and
adroitness
can
no longer win by novelty.
no longer win by novelty.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 to v25 - Rab to Tur
Some of his poems
such as “How Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry,) (Pan in Wall Street,'
and "Wanted - A Man'- are among the most familiar productions of
American authorship. During the dark days of the war he devoted
many a well-remembered and fervently patriotic strain to the cause
of the Union. And since then, upon many a celebration of civic or
social interest, he has expressed the dominant ideas and emotions of
the occasion in rarely felicitous numbers. His voice has been raised
in behalf of many a noble cause; and we find him thirty years ago
pleading for both Crete and Cuba, then as now struggling to be free.
The quality of his genius is mainly lyrical, and his poetical utter-
ance that of an eager clear-sighted spirit, responsive to both natural
impressions and the appeal of culture, and finely attuned to all the
complex life of the modern world. As a critic, he is in the highest
degree suggestive and helpful. His sense of the beautiful in liter-
ature is almost unerring, and he stimulates the reader to share in his
own raptures. His three volumes of criticism constitute the most
important body of opinion that has yet been produced by any one
## p. 13859 (#37) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13859
man
on the subject of modern English poetry. Other critics have
given us purple patches of such discussion; Mr. Stedman alone has
woven a continuous web. And his critical writing combines, in nice
adjustment, the two elements that are usually represented by differ-
ent men. It is at once academic in its deference to the recognized
æsthetic standards, and subjective in its revelation of the play of
poetry upon a receptive and sympathetic mind, - thus escaping form-
alism upon the one hand, and inconclusiveness upon the other. It
need hardly be added that the mind thus trained in both the com-
position and the criticism of literature brings almost ideal qualifica-
tions to the tasks of editor and anthologist, and that Mr. Stedman's
work in these fields is no unimportant part of his great services to
literature.
A more indirect service to the same cause may be made the sub-
ject of this closing word. The younger generation of American writ-
ers owe Mr. Stedman a debt that is not wholly accounted for by the
enumeration of his books. Busy as the exigencies of his twofold life
have kept him, he has never been too busy to extend sympathy and
the helping hand of personal criticism and counsel to those who have
come to him for aid. He has thus given of himself so freely and so
generously that it must have proved in the aggregate a heavy tax
upon his energies. But he has the reward of knowing that the trib-
ute paid him as poet and critic by his readers is, to an exceptional
degree, mingled with the tribute of the personal gratitude that they
feel for him as counselor and friend.
(All the following poems are copyrighted, and are printed here by permission
of the author, and of Houghton, Miffin & Co. , publishers. ]
THE HAND OF LINCOLN
LOOK
OOK on this cast, and know the hand
That bore a nation in its hold;
From this mute witness understand
What Lincoln was, — how large of mold;
The man who sped the woodman's team,
And deepest sunk the plowman's share,
And pushed the laden raft astream,
Of fate before him unaware.
This was the hand that knew to swing
The axe,- since thus would Freedom train
## p. 13860 (#38) ###########################################
13860
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
Her son, – and made the forest ring,
And drove the wedge, and toiled amain.
Firm hand, that loftier office took,
A conscious leader's will obeyed,
And when men sought his word and look,
With steadfast might the gathering swayed.
No courtier's, toying with a sword,
Nor minstrel's, laid across a lute;
A chief's, uplifted to the Lord
When all the kings of earth were mute!
The hand of Anak, sinewed strong,
The fingers that on greatness clutch;
Yet, lo! the marks their lines along
Of one who strove and suffered much.
For here in knotted cord and vein
I trace the varying chart of years;
I know the troubled heart, the strain,
The weight of Atlas — and the tears.
Again I see the patient brow
That palm erewhile was wont to press;
And now 'tis furrowed deep, and now
Made smooth with hope and tenderness.
For something of a formless grace
This molded outline plays about;
A pitying flame, beyond our trace,
Breathes like a spirit, in and out, -
The love that cast an aureole
Round one who, longer to endure,
Called mirth to ease his ceaseless dole,
Yet kept his nobler purpose sure.
Lo, as I gaze, the statured man,
Built up from yon large hand, appears;
A type that Nature wills to plan
But once in all a people's years.
What better than this voiceless cast
To tell of such a one as he,
Since through its living semblance passed
The thought that bade a race be free!
## p. 13861 (#39) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13861
PROVENÇAL LOVERS – AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE
W"
THIN the garden of Beaucaire
He met her by a secret stair, —
The night was centuries ago.
Said Aucassin, “My love, my pet,
These old confessors vex me so!
They threaten all the pains of hell
Unless I give you up, ma belle,” –
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
“Now, who should there in heaven be
To fill your place, ma très-douce mie ?
To reach that spot I little care!
There all the droning priests are met;
All the old cripples, too, are there
That unto shrines and altars cling
To filch the Peter-pence we bring,”-
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
(There are the barefoot monks and friars
With gowns well tattered by the briars,
The saints who lift their eyes and whine:
I like them not- :- a starveling set!
Who'd care with folk like these to dine ?
The other road 'twere just as well
That you and I should take, ma belle! ” –
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
«To Purgatory I would go
With pleasant comrades whom we know:
Fair scholars, minstrels, lusty knights
Whose deeds the land will not forget,
The captains of a hundred fights,
The men of valor and degree,-
We'll join that gallant company,
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
>>
There, too, are jousts and joyance rare,
And beauteous ladies debonair,
The pretty dames, the merry brides,
Who with their wedded lords coquette
And have a friend or two besides, -
And all in gold and trappings gay,
With furs, and crests in vair and gray," —
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
## p. 13862 (#40) ###########################################
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EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
"Sweet players on the cithern strings,
And they who roam the world like kings,
Are gathered there, so blithe and free!
Pardie! I'd join them now, my pet,
If you went also, ma douce mie!
The joys of heaven I'd forego
To have you with me there below," —
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
ARIEL
IN MEMORY OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: BORN ON THE FOURTH OF
AUGUST, A. D. 1792
ERT thou -day,
WERT
W***How wouldst thou, in the starlight of thine eld.
The likeness of that morntide look upon
Which men beheld ?
How might it move thee, imaged in time's glass,
As when the tomb has kept
Unchanged the face of one who slept
Too soon, yet molders not, though seasons come and pass ?
Has Death a wont to stay the soul no less ?
And art thou still what SHELLEY was erewhile ? -
A feeling born of music's restlessness-
A child's swift smile
Between its sobs — a wandering mist that rose
At dawn a cloud that hung
The Euganean hills among;
Thy voice, a wind-harp's strain in some enchanted close ?
Thyself the wild west wind, O boy divine,
Thou fain wouldst be - the spirit which in its breath
Wooes yet the seaward ilex and the pine
That wept thy death?
Or art thou still the incarnate child of song
Who gazed, as if astray
From some uncharted stellar way,
With eyes of wonder at our world of grief and wrong ?
Yet thou wast Nature's prodigal; the last
Unto whose lips her beauteous mouth she bent
An instant, ere thy kinsmen, fading fast,
Their lorn way went.
## p. 13863 (#41) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13863
What though the faun and oread had fled ?
A tenantry thine own,
Peopling their leafy coverts lone,
With thee still dwelt as when sweet Fancy was not dead;
Not dead as now, when we the visionless,
In Nature's alchemy more woeful wise,
Say that no thought of us her depths possess, -
No love, her skies.
Not ours to parley with the whispering June,
The genii of the wood,
The shapes that lurk in solitude,
The cloud, the mounting lark, the wan and waning moon.
For thee the last time Hellas tipped her hills
With beauty; India breathed her midnight moan,
Her sigh, her ecstasy of passion's thrills,
To thee alone.
Such rapture thine, and the supremer gift
Which can the minstrel raise
Above the myrtle and the bays,
To watch the sea of pain whereon our galleys drift.
Therefrom arose with thee that lyric cry,
Sad cadence of the disillusioned soul
That asks of heaven and earth its destiny,-
Or joy or dole.
Wild requiem of the heart whose vibratings,
With laughter fraught, and tears,
Beat through the century's dying years, [wings.
While for one more dark round the old Earth plumes her
No answer came to thee; from ether fell
No voice, no radiant beam: and in thy youth
How were it else, when still the oracle
Withholds its truth?
We sit in judgment; we above thy page
Judge thee and such as thee, -
Pale heralds, sped too soon to see
The marvels of our late yet unanointed age!
The slaves of air and light obeyed afar
Thy summons, Ariel; their elf-horns wound
Strange notes which all uncapturable are
Of broken sound.
## p. 13864 (#42) ###########################################
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EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
That music thou alone couldst rightly hear
(O rare impressionist! )
And mimic. Therefore still we list
To its ethereal fall in this thy cyclic year.
Be then the poet's poet still! for none
Of them whose minstrelsy the stars have blessed
Has from expression's wonderland so won
The unexpressed, -
So wrought the charm of its elusive note
On us, who yearn in vain
To mock the pean and the plain
Of tides that rise and fall with sweet mysterious rote.
Was it not well that the prophetic few,
So long inheritors of that high verse,
Dwelt in the mount alone, and haply knew
What stars rehearse ?
But now with foolish cry the multitude
Awards at last the throne,
And claims thy cloudland for its own
With voices all untuned to thy melodious mood.
What joy it was to haunt some antique shade
Lone as thine echo, and to wreak my youth
Upon thy song, — to feel the throbs which made
Thy bliss, thy ruth, -
And thrill I knew not why, and dare to feel
Myself an heir unknown
To lands the poet treads alone
Ere to his soul the gods their presence quite reveal!
Even then, like thee, I vowed to dedicate
My powers to beauty; ay, but thou didst keep
The vow, whilst I knew not the afterweight
That poets weep,
The burthen under which one needs must bow,
The rude years envying
My voice the notes it fain would sing
For men belike to hear, as still they hear thee now.
Oh, the swift wind, the unrelenting sea!
They loved thee, yet they lured thee unaware
To be their spoil, lest alien skies to thee
Should seem more fair;
## p. 13865 (#43) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13865
They had their will of thee, yet aye forlorn
Mourned the lithe soul's escape,
And gave the strand thy mortal shape
To be resolved in flame whereof its life was born.
Afloat on tropic waves, I yield once more
In age that heart of youth unto thy spell.
The century wanes, - thy voice thrills as of yore
When first it fell.
Would that I too, so had I sung a lay
The least upborne of thine,
Had shared thy pain! Not so divine
Our light, as faith to chant the far auroral day.
MORS BENEFICA
G
IVE me to die unwitting of the day,
And stricken in Life's brave heat, with senses clear:
Not swathed and couched until the lines appear
Of Death's wan mask upon this withering clay,
But as that Old Man Eloquent made way
From Earth, a nation's conclave hushed anear;
Or as the chief whose fates, that he may hear
The victory, one glorious moment stay.
Or, if not thus, then with no cry in vain,
No ministrant beside to ward and weep,
Hand upon helm I would my quittance gain
In some wild turmoil of the waters deep,
And sink content into a dreamless sleep
(Spared grave and shroud) below the ancient main.
TOUJOURS AMOUR
PT
RITHEE tell me, Dimple-Chin,
At what age does love gin?
Your blue eyes have scarcely seen
Summers three, my fairy queen,
But a miracle of sweets,
Soft approaches, sly retreats,
Show the little archer there,
Hidden in your pretty hair :
When didst learn a heart to win ?
Prithee tell me, Dimple-Chin!
## p. 13866 (#44) ###########################################
13866
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
“Oh! the rosy lips reply,
"I can't tell you if I try.
'Tis so long I can't remember:
Ask some younger lass than I! »
Tell, oh tell me, Grizzled-Face,
Do your heart and head keep pace ?
When does hoary love expire,
When do frosts put out the fire ?
Can its embers burn below
All that chill December snow?
Care you still soft hands to press,
Bonny heads to smooth and bless ?
When does love give up the chase ?
Tell, oh tell me, Grizzled-Face!
“Ah! the wise old lips reply,
“ Youth may pass and strength may die;
But of love I can't foretoken:
Ask some older sage than I! )
PAN IN WALL STREET
Jº
Ust where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,-.
Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
Sound high above the modern clamor,
Above the cries of greed and gain,
The curbstone war, the auction's hammer;
And swift, on Music's misty ways,
It led, from all this strife for millions,
To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.
And as it stilled the multitude,
And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel, where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
## p. 13867 (#45) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13867
One hand a droning organ played,
The other held a Pan’s-pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made
The reeds give out that strain impassioned.
'Twas Pan himself had wandered here
A-strolling through this sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had crossed the seas,-
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times, — to these
Far shores and twenty centuries later.
A ragged cap was on his head;
But-hidden thus — there was no doubting
That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,
His gnarlèd horns were somewhere sprouting:
His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,
Were crossed, as on some frieze you see them,
And trousers, patched of divers hues,
Concealed his crooked shanks beneath them.
He filled the quivering reeds with sound,
And o'er his mouth their changes shifted,
And with his goat's-eyes looked around
Where'er the passing current drifted;
And soon, as on Trinacrian hills
The nymphs and herdsmen ran to hear him,
Even now the tradesmen from their tills,
With clerks and porters, crowded near him.
The bulls and bears together drew
From Jauncey Court and New Street Alley,
As erst, if pastorals be true,
Came beasts from every wooded valley;
The random passers stayed to list, —
A boxer Ægon, rough and merry,
A Broadway Daphnis, on his tryst
With Nais at the Brooklyn Ferry.
A one-eyed Cyciops halted long
In tattered cloak of army pattern;
And Galatea joined the throng. -
A blowsy, apple-vending slattern;
While old Silenus staggered out
From some new-fangled lunch-house handy,
## p. 13868 (#46) ###########################################
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EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
And bade the piper, with a shout,
To strike up Yankee Doodle Dandy!
A newsboy and a peanut girl
Like little fauns began to caper:
His hair was all in tangled curl,
Her tawny legs were bare and taper;
And still the gathering larger grew,
And gave its pence and crowded nigher,
While aye the shepherd-minstrel blew
His pipe, and struck the gamut higher.
O heart of Nature, beating still
With throbs her vernal passion taught her,-
Even here, as on the vine-clad hill,
Or by the Arethusan water!
New forms may fold the speech, new lands
Arise within these ocean-portals,
But Music waves eternal wands,-
Enchantress of the souls of mortals!
So thought I, – but among us trod
A man in blue, with legal baton,
And scoffed the vagrant demigod,
And pushed him from the step I sat on.
Doubting I mused upon the cry,
“Great Pan is dead! » — and all the people
Went on their ways; — and clear and high
The quarter sounded from the steeple.
THE DISCOVERER
I
HAVE a little kinsman
Whose earthly summers are but three,
And yet a voyager is he
Greater than Drake or Frobisher,
Than all their peers together!
He is a brave discoverer,
And, far beyond the tether
Of them who seek the frozen pole,
Has sailed where the noiseless surges roll.
Ay, he has traveled whither
A winged pilot steered his bark
Through the portals of the dark,
## p. 13869 (#47) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13869
Past hoary Mimir's well and tree,
Across the unknown sea.
Suddenly, in his fair young hour,
Came one who bore a flower,
And laid it in his dimpled hand
With this command:-
« Henceforth thou art a rover!
Thou must make a voyage far,
Sail beneath the evening star,
And a wondrous land discover. ”
With his sweet smile innocent
Our little kinsman went.
Since that time no word
From the absent has been heard.
Who can tell
How he fares, or answer well
What the little one has found
Since he left us, outward bound ?
Would that he might return!
Then should we learn
From the pricking of his chart
How the skyey roadways part.
Hush! does not the baby this way bring,
To lay beside this severed curl,
Some starry offering
Of chrysolite or pearl ?
Ah, no! not so!
We may follow on his track,
But he comes not back.
And yet I dare aver
He is a brave discoverer
Of climes his elders do not know.
He has more learning than appears
On the scroll of twice three thousand years,
More than in the groves is taught,
Or from furthest Indies brought;
He knows, perchance, how spirits fare,
What shapes the angels wear,
What is their guise and speech
In those lands beyond our reach;
And his eyes behold
Things that shall never, never be to mortal hearers told.
## p. 13870 (#48) ###########################################
13870
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
CAVALRY SONG
OR
UR good steeds snuff the evening air,
Our pulses with their purpose tingle:
The foeman's fires are twinkling there;
He leaps to hear our sabres jingle!
HALT!
Each carbine sends its whizzing ball:
Now, cling! clang! forward all,
Into the fight!
Dash on beneath the smoking dome,
Through level lightnings gallop nearer!
One look to Heaven! No thoughts of home:
The guidons that we bear are dearer.
CHARGE!
Cling! clang! forward all!
Heaven help those whose horses fall!
Cut left and right!
They fee before our fierce attack!
They fall, they spread in broken surges !
Now, comrades, bear our wounded back,
And leave the foeman to his dirges.
WHEEL!
The bugles sound the swift recall:
Cling! clang! backward all!
Home, and good-night!
THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POETRY
From 'Poets of America. )
Copyrighted 1885, by Edmund Clarence Stedman
This
HERE are questions that come home to one who would aid in
speeding the return of “the Muse, disgusted at the “age
and clime. ” Can I, he asks, be reckoned with the promot-
ers of her new reign? Yes, it will be answered, if your effort is
in earnest, and if you are in truth a poet. To doubt of this
is almost the doubt's own confirmation. The writer to whom
rhythmic phrases come as the natural utterance of his extremest
hope, regret, devotion, is a poet of some degree. At the rarest
crises he finds that, without and even beyond his will, life and
death and all things dear and sacred are made auxiliary to the
compulsive purpose of his art; just as in the passion for science,
as if to verify the terrible irony of Balzac and Wordsworth, the
## p. 13871 (#49) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13871
1
alchemist will analyze his wife's tears, the Linnæan will botanize
upon his mother's grave:-
“Alas, and hast thou then so soon forgot
The bond that with thy gift of song did go-
Severe as fate, fixed and unchangeable ?
Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot! ”
-
If when his brain is in working humor, its chambers filled
with imaged pageantry, the same form of utterance becomes his
ready servant, then he is a poet indeed. But if he has a dexter-
ous metrical faculty, and hunts for theme and motive,- or if his
verse does not say what otherwise cannot be said at all, — then
he is a mere artisan in words, and less than those whose thought
and feeling are too deep for speech. The true poet is haunted
by his gift, even in hours of drudgery and enforced prosaic life.
He cannot escape it. After spells of dejection and weariness,
when it has seemed to leave for ever, it always, always returns
again,- perishable only with himself.
Again he will ask, What are my opportunities ? What is the
final appraisement of the time and situation ? We have noted
those latter-day conditions that vex the poet's mind. Yet art is
the precious outcome of all conditions: there are none that may
not be transmuted in its crucible. Science, whose iconoclasm had
to be considered, first of all, in our study of the Victorian period,
has forced us to adjust ourselves to its dispensation. A scientific
conflict with tradition always has been in progress, though never
so determinedly as now. But the poet and artist keep pace with
it, even forestall it, so that each new wonder leads to greater
things, and the so-called doom of art is a victorious transition:-
“If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea. ”
As to material conditions, we find that the practical eagerness
of the age, and of our own people before all, has so nearly satis-
fied its motive as to beget the intellectual and æsthetic needs to
which beauty is the purveyor. As heretofore in Venice and other
commonwealths, first nationality, then riches, then the rise of
poetry and the arts. After materialism and the scientific stress,
the demands of journalism have been the chief counter-sway to
poetic activity. But our journals are now the adjuvants of imagi-
native effort in prose and verse: the best of them are conducted
by writers who have the literary spirit, and who make room for
ideal literature, even if it does not swell their lists so rapidly as
## p. 13872 (#50) ###########################################
13872
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
-
that of another kind. The poet can get a hearing; our Chatter-
tons need not starve in their garrets: there never was a better
market for the wares of Apollo; their tuneful venders need not
hope for wealth, but if one cannot make his genius something
more than its own exceeding great reward, it is because he mis-
takes the period, or scorns to address himself fitly to his readers.
Finally, criticism is at once more catholic and more discriminat-
ing than of old. Can it make a poet, or teach him his mission ?
Hardly; but it can spur him to his best, and point out the
heresies from which he must free himself or address the oracle
in vain.
Such being our opportunities, we have seen that the personal
requirements are coequal, and their summing-up may well be the
conclusion of the whole matter. Warmth, action, genuine human
interest, must vivify the minstrel's art: the world will receive
him if he in truth comes into his own.
Taste and adroitness can
no longer win by novelty. Natural emotion is the soul of poetry,
as melody is of music: the same faults are engendered by over-
study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible
impulse, in both the poet and the composer. The decorative
vogue has reached its lowest grade, - that of assumption for bur-
lesque and persiflage; just as Pre-Raphaelitism, at first a reform
in art, extended to poetry, to architecture, to wall decoration, to
stage-setting, finally to the dress of moonstruck blue-stockings
and literary dandies. What has been gained in new design will
survive. But henceforth the sense of beauty must have something
“far more deeply interfused,” — the ideal, which, though not made
with hands of artificers, is eternal on the earth as in the heavens,
because it is inherent in the soul. There is also one prerequisite,
upon which stress was laid by Dr. Storrs, in his application to
modern art of Goethe's reservation as to the worth of certain
engravings: "Still something is wanting in all these pictures, -
the Manly.
The pictures lack a certain urgent power,”
etc. Culture, I have said, will make a poet draw ahead of his un-
studious fellows; but the resolve born of conviction is needed
to sustain the advance. The lecturer rightly declared that only
courageous work will suit America, whose race is essentially
courageous and stoical.
Our keynote assuredly should be that
of freshness and joy; the sadness of declining races only, has the
beauty of natural pathos. There is no cause for morbidly intro-
spective verse - no need, I hope, for dilettanteism - in this brave
country of ours for centuries to come.
.
((
## p. 13873 (#51) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13873
I think, too, we may claim that there is no better ideal of
manhood than the American ideal, derived from an aggregation
of characteristic types. Our future verse should be more native
than that of the past, in having a flavor more plainly distinct
from the motherland. Not that our former contingent misrep-
resented the America of its time. Even Longfellow's work,
.
,
with so much of imported theme and treatment, conveyed a sen-
timent that came, say what we will, from no foreign source.
The reason that a decidedly autochthonous kind was not then
proffered, unless by Whitman, was that a distinction between the
conditions of England and America was not more strongly estab-
lished. Since the War our novitiate has ended. We welcome
home productions; our servility of foreign judgment has lessened,
and we apply with considerable self-poise our own standards of
criticism to things abroad. We have outlived the greed of child-
hood that depends on sustenance furnished by its elders; and are
far indeed from the senile atrophy which also must borrow to
recruit its wasting powers. Our debt to acute foreign critics is
none the less memorable. They, in truth, were the first to coun-
sel us that we should lean upon ourselves; to insist that we
ought at least to escape Old World limitations,—the first to rec-
ognize so heartily anything purely American, even our sectional
humor, as to bring about our discovery that it was not neces-
sarily "a poor thing,” although our own. ”
It is agreed that sectional types, which thus have lent their
raciness to various productions, are subsidiary to the formation
of one that shall be national. A character formed of mingling
components must undergo the phases of defective hybridity; our
own is just beginning to assume a coherence that is the promise
of a similar adjustment in art. As local types disappear there
may be special losses, yet a general gain. The lifting of the
Japanese embargo was harmful to the purity of the insular art,
but added something to the arts of the world at large. Even
now our English cousins, seeking for what they term American-
ism in our literature, begin to find its flavor stealthily added to
their own.
Our people have blundered from isolation: confront them with
the models of older lands and they quickly learn to choose the
fit and beautiful; and the time is now reached when the finest
models are widely attainable. Secondly, our inheritance is a lan-
guage that is relatively the greatest treasure-house of the world's
XXIV-868
## p. 13874 (#52) ###########################################
13874
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
literature: at once the most laconic and the most copious of
tongues, the sturdiest in its foundations of emotion and utility,
the most varied by appropriation of synonyms from all languages,
new and old; the youngest and most occidental of the great
modes of speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with no
possible supplanter or successor except itself at further stages
of maturity; finally, elastic and copious most of all in the land
which adds to it new idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated
from the dialects of many races that here contribute their diction
to its own: a language whose glory is that even corruptions
serve to speed its growth, and whose fine achievement long has
been to make the neologism, even the solecism, of one genera-
tion the classicism of the next. This is the potent and sonorous
instrument which our poet has at his command; and the genius
of his country, like Ariel, bids him
« — take
This slave of music, for my sake. ”
The twilight of the poets, succeeding to the brightness of
their first diurnal course, is a favorable interval at which to
review the careers of those whose work therewith is ended.
Although at such a time public interest may set in other direc-
tions, I have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinating to
the critical and poetic student. When the lustre of a still more
auspicious day shall yield in its turn to the recurring dusk, a new
chronicler will have the range of noble imaginations to consider,
heightened in significance by comparison with the field of these
prior excursions. But if I have not wholly erred in respect to
the lessons derivable from the past, he will not go far beyond
them. The canons are not subject to change; he, in turn, will
deduce the same elements appertaining to the chief of arts, and
test his poets and their bequests by the same unswerving laws.
And concerning the dawn which may soon break upon us un-
awares, as we make conjecture of the future of American song,
it is difficult to keep the level of restraint — to avoid “rising on
the wings of prophecy. ” Who can doubt that it will correspond
to the future of the land itself, — of America now wholly free and
interblending, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each an
emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus of energetic life,
ceaseless in action, radiant with the glow of beauty and creative
power?
## p. 13874 (#53) ###########################################
1
## p. 13874 (#54) ###########################################
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RICHARD STEELE.
## p. 13874 (#55) ###########################################
SIR PCHARD STEEIE
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## p. 13874 (#56) ###########################################
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## p. 13875 (#57) ###########################################
13875
SIR RICHARD STEELE
(1671-1729)
race.
t is entirely indicative of our opinions and feelings of the life
and writings of this British author of the eighteenth cen-
tury that we should think of Addison's friend and fellow-
essayist as Richard, or Dick, or Dicky Steele, rather than of Sir
Richard Steele, as he is known in the history of literature.
Dick or
Dicky Steele conveys to our minds the impression which the heavy-
limbed, square-jawed, dark-eyed, tender-hearted, awkward, careless,
wholly unselfish Irishman conveyed to his personal friends and ac-
quaintances.
Irish by birth,- for he was born in Dublin in 1671,- he was of
English parentage and descent, being the son of the secretary of the
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormond. Yet he had many
of the amiable, kindly, mirthful, genial traits attributed to the Irish
Through the Duke's influence he was sent to the Charter-
house, London, where he first met Addison, of the same age as him-
self; with whom he formed the closest intimacy, which, continuing
for many years, is one of the most memorable in literature. Steele
always looked up to Addison, cherishing for him a respect almost
reverential; and Addison's stronger, more stable, more serious char-
acter affected very favorably his own wayward, volatile nature,
without causing any permanent change in it. Notwithstanding that
he lived to be fifty eight, - dying at Llangunnor, Wales, September
ist, 1729,- he seemed never to have quite grown up. He preserved
through all his vicissitudes, and to the very last, the same gay, reck-
less, jovial, irregular, prodigal disposition; never intending to do ill,
but always getting into straits from which his friends were obliged
to extricate him so far as they could, until he fell into new ones.
His errors were ever human, ever committed without reflection; and
though they demand at times broad charity, it is impossible not to
forgive, on the whole, his shortcomings, and not to love him despite
his grave defects. If he constantly needed help, he was constantly
trying to help others; and to this cause are due most of his per-
plexities.
The two friends were together at Merton College, Oxford; where
Steele remained for three years, but left without taking a degree.
He had conceived a passion for the army; and unable to get a
## p. 13876 (#58) ###########################################
13876
SIR RICHARD STEELE
commission, he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards. A rich
kinsman in Ireland had menaced him with disinheritance should he
take such a step; but being naturally independent, he defied inter-
ference. He was liked in the army, and gained the rank of captain;
a promotion due to his colonel, Lord Cutts, to whom he had dedi-
cated his Christian Hero' (published in 1701), which was so moral
and pious as to displease his very worldly associates, and which was
written in those moods of contrition so frequent and so transient
with him. It was at this time that he made that intimate acquaint-
ance with the follies and vices of the era, and with human nature as
he saw it, which made him an acute delineator of manners when he
embraced literature as a profession.
As a man about town he frequented the London theatres, and be-
came intimately acquainted with the players and their companions.
This naturally turned his mind to the stage; and in 1702 he wrote
a comedy, "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode (in striking contrast
with the Christian Hero'), which met with marked favor at Drury
Lane. The next year he brought out “The Tender Husband'; and
two years later a third comedy, "The Lying Lover,' adapted from
Le Menteur' of Thomas Corneille. This was too staid, too solemn,
to suit his audience, who so energetically condemned it that he did
not attempt until 1722 another play, The Conscious Lovers' (based
on Terence's (Andria'), his most successful drama, and conspicuously
decorous.
Steele was now a popular and a fashionable man, having political
no less than social position. He was appointed gazetteer and gentle-
man usher to Prince George of Denmark. He had taken a wife, who
lived but a little while, leaving him a considerable estate in Barba-
does. His second wife (he was married again in 1707), born Molly
Scurlock, increased his fortune. His letters to this wife, some four
hundred of which have been preserved, form an extraordinary cor-
respondence. They reveal the author as he was,- full of faults and
weaknesses, of dissipations and repentance, of affection and tender-
ness, of ardent promises of reform and reckless promise-breaking.
They are wholly artless and confidential, written without premedita-
tion or second thought; mere talk on paper. They are dated from
jails, taverns, wine-shops, bailiffs' offices, under the influence of vinous
headaches, marital contritions, fresh impulses of devotion, and tearful
regrets for neglected duties. They afford a curious, rather melan-
choly, at the same time entertaining, history of a drinking, impul-
sive, vacillating, over-generous, spendthrift, loving husband's checkered
life.
To a man of Steele's temperament and habits, money was of lit-
tle benefit. He was always in debt, and always would have been,
whether his income were five hundred pounds or five thousand. He
## p. 13877 (#59) ###########################################
SIR RICHARD STEELE
13877
-
had neither order nor method; but in their stead numberless whims
and desires. He had not the slightest conception of business; he was.
entirely destitute of practicality: but no kind of adversity, no mis-
fortune, could depress his ever-buoyant spirit.
In 1709 a felicitous financial idea occurred to him; and oddly
enough, he acted on it. His office of gazetteer put him in control
of early foreign intelligence; and in imitation of Defoe's plan, he
organized the Tatler, issuing the first number April 12th. He secured
the assistance of Addison, who furnished many of the principal
articles, and who aided him in procuring the appointment of com-
missioner of the Stamp Office. When the Whigs were overthrown
in 1710, Steele, as a strong Whig, was deprived of his gazetteership,
and with it the means of supplying the items of official news which
were at the beginning important to the Tatler. This paper was
accordingly succeeded the next year by the Spectator, mostly writ-
ten by the two friends. The Tatler had appeared thrice a week,
price one penny; but the Spectator appeared daily at twopence,
issuing five hundred and fifty-five numbers, — the last December 6th,
1712. Many of Addison's most famous contributions were printed
in the two papers; though Steele furnished the larger number, and
stamped himself and his character on what he wrote. His object was
to expose what was false in life, manners, morals; to strip disguises
from vanity, selfishness, affectation; to recommend simplicity and sin-
cerity; to correct public taste, and urge the adoption of true English
sentiment and opinion. Steele and Addison co-operated also in the
Guardian: and Steele at different periods was interested in similar
periodicals, like the Englishman, the Lover, the Reader, the Plebeian;
but they were short-lived, and added nothing to his reputation. Few
of Steele's essays are remembered; nor is the fact that he was the
originator of the noted characters “Sir Roger de Coverley” and “Will
Honeycomb,” though Addison afterward adopted them, making them
virtually his own.
As an essayist he is admired for vivacity and ease, but not for
finish: he was often neglectful of his style. His charm is his per-
fect naturalness. He had great versatility, being a humorist, satirist,
critic, story-teller, and remarkable in each capacity. Political acri-
mony raged in 1713. Steele's patriotism triumphed over self-interest;
he resigned his office, and plunged headlong into political contro-
versy. He gained a seat in Parliament as a member for Stockbridge
in Hampshire; vehemently supported the Protestant succession, which
he believed in peril; and published a pamphlet, (The Crisis,' warn-
ing the kingdom against the danger of a Popish succession, for which
he was expelled from the House of Commons. The death of Queen
Anne mollified his opponents. In the new reign he received several
## p. 13878 (#60) ###########################################
13878
SIR RICHARD STEELE
profitable employments; was knighted, and elected to Parliament
from Boroughbridge. But, head over heels in debt again, he was
soon attacked with paralysis and rendered incapable of exertion. He
retired to a small estate (left him by his second wife), where he
passed away nearly forgotten by his contemporaries. He was dis-
tinguished, in an era that cherished slight respect for women, for his
high opinion of and chivalrous feeling for them. No loftier com-
pliment has ever been paid to woman than his to Lady Elizabeth
Hastings: “To love her was a liberal education. ”
ON BEHAVIOR AT CHURCH
From the Guardian
THE
HERE is not anywhere, I believe, so much talk about religion,
as among us in England; nor do I think it possible for the
wit of man to devise forms of address to the Almighty in
more ardent and forcible terms than are everywhere to be found
in our Book of Common Prayer; and yet I have heard it read
with such a negligence, affectation, and impatience, that the effi-
cacy of it has been apparently lost to all the congregation. For
my part, I make no scruple to own it, that I go sometimes to
a particular place in the city, far distant from my own home,
to hear a gentleman whose manner I admire, read the liturgy. I
am persuaded devotion is the greatest pleasure of his soul, and
there is none hears him read without the utmost reverence. I
have seen the young people who have been interchanging glances
of passion to each other's person, checked into an attention to
the service at the interruption which the authority of his voice
has given them.
But the other morning I happened to rise earlier than ordi-
nary, and thought I could not pass my time better than to go
upon the admonition of the morning bell, to the church prayers
at six of the clock. I was there the first of any in the congre-
gation, and had the opportunity (however I made use of it) to
look back on all my life, and contemplate the blessing and advan-
tage of such stated early hours for offering ourselves to our
Creator, and prepossessing ourselves with the love of him, and
the hopes we have from him, against the snares of business and
pleasure in the ensuing day. But whether it be that people think
## p. 13879 (#61) ###########################################
SIR RICHARD STEELE
13879
fit to indulge their own ease in some secret, pleasing fault, or
whatever it was, there was none at the confession but a set of
poor scrubs of us, who could sin only in our wills, whose per-
sons could be no temptation to one another, and might have,
without interruption from anybody else, humble, lowly hearts, in
frightful looks and dirty dresses, at our leisure.
When we poor souls had presented ourselves with a contrition
suitable to our worthlessness, some pretty young ladies in mobs
popped in here and there about the church, clattering the pew
door after them, and squatting into a whisper behind their fans.
Among others, one of Lady Lizard's daughters and her hopeful
maid made their entrance: the young lady did not omit the
ardent form behind the fan, while the maid immediately gaped
round her to look for some other devout person, whom I saw at
a distance, very well dressed; his air and habit a little military,
but in the pertness, not the true possession of the martial char-
acter. This jackanapes was fixed at the end of a pew, with the
utmost impudence declaring, by a fixed eye on that seat where
our beauty was placed, the object of his devotion. This obscene
sight gave me all the indignation imaginable, and I could attend
to nothing but the reflection that the greatest affronts imaginable
are such as no one can take notice of.
Before I was out of such vexatious inadvertencies to the busi-
ness of the place, there was a great deal of good company now
come in.
There was a good number of very jaunty slatterns,
us to understand that it is neither dress nor art to
which they were beholden for the town's admiration. Besides
these, there were also by this time arrived two or three sets of
whisperers, who carry on most of their calumnies by what they
entertain one another with in that place; and we were now
altogether very good company. There were indeed a few in
whose looks there appeared a heavenly joy and gladness upon
the entrance of a new day, as if they had gone to sleep with
expectation of it. For the sake of these it is worth while that
the Church keeps up such early matins throughout the cities
of London and Westminster; but the generality of those who
observe that hour perform it with so tasteless a behavior that
it appears a task rather than a voluntary act. But of all the
world, those familiar ducks who are, as it were, at home at the
church, and by frequently meeting there throw the time of prayer
very negligently into their common life, and make their coming
who gav
## p. 13880 (#62) ###########################################
13880
SIR RICHARD STEELE
together in that place as ordinary as any other action, and do
not turn their conversation upon any improvements suitable to
the true design of that house, but' on trifles below even their
worldly concerns and characters. These are little groups of
acquaintance dispersed in all parts of the town, who are forsooth
the only people of unspotted characters, and throw all the spots
that stick on those of other people.
Malice is the ordinary vice of those who live in the mode
of religion, without the spirit of it. The pleasurable world are
hurried by their passions above the consideration of what others
think of them, into a pursuit of irregular enjoyment; while these
who forbear the gratifications of flesh and blood, without having
won over the spirit to the interests of virtue, are implacable in
defamations on the errors of such who offend without respect
to fame. But the consideration of persons whom one cannot
but take notice of when one sees them in that place, has drawn
me out of my intended talk, which was to bewail that people do
not know the pleasure of early hours, and of dedicating the first
moments of the day, with joy and singleness of heart, to their
Creator. Experience should convince us that the earlier we left
our beds the seldomer should we be confined to them.
One great good which would also accrue from this, were it
become a fashion, would be, that it is possible our chief divines
would condescend to pray themselves, or at least those whom
they substitute would be better supplied than to be forced to
appear at those oraisons in a garb and attire which makes them
appear mortified with worldly want, and not abstracted from the
world by the contempt of it. How is it possible for a gentle-
man, under the income of fifty pounds a year, to be attentive
to sublime things ? He must rise and dress like a laborer for
sordid hire, instead of approaching his place of service with the
utmost pleasure and satisfaction that now he is going to be
mouth of a crowd of people who have laid aside all the distinc-
tions of this contemptible being, to beseech a protection under its
manifold pains and disadvantages, or a release from it by His
favor who sent them into it. He would, with decent superiority,
look upon himself as orator before the Throne of Grace, for a
crowd who hang upon his words while he asks for them all that
is necessary in a transitory life; from the assurance that a good
behavior, for a few moments in it, will purchase endless joy and
happy immortality.
## p.
such as “How Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry,) (Pan in Wall Street,'
and "Wanted - A Man'- are among the most familiar productions of
American authorship. During the dark days of the war he devoted
many a well-remembered and fervently patriotic strain to the cause
of the Union. And since then, upon many a celebration of civic or
social interest, he has expressed the dominant ideas and emotions of
the occasion in rarely felicitous numbers. His voice has been raised
in behalf of many a noble cause; and we find him thirty years ago
pleading for both Crete and Cuba, then as now struggling to be free.
The quality of his genius is mainly lyrical, and his poetical utter-
ance that of an eager clear-sighted spirit, responsive to both natural
impressions and the appeal of culture, and finely attuned to all the
complex life of the modern world. As a critic, he is in the highest
degree suggestive and helpful. His sense of the beautiful in liter-
ature is almost unerring, and he stimulates the reader to share in his
own raptures. His three volumes of criticism constitute the most
important body of opinion that has yet been produced by any one
## p. 13859 (#37) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13859
man
on the subject of modern English poetry. Other critics have
given us purple patches of such discussion; Mr. Stedman alone has
woven a continuous web. And his critical writing combines, in nice
adjustment, the two elements that are usually represented by differ-
ent men. It is at once academic in its deference to the recognized
æsthetic standards, and subjective in its revelation of the play of
poetry upon a receptive and sympathetic mind, - thus escaping form-
alism upon the one hand, and inconclusiveness upon the other. It
need hardly be added that the mind thus trained in both the com-
position and the criticism of literature brings almost ideal qualifica-
tions to the tasks of editor and anthologist, and that Mr. Stedman's
work in these fields is no unimportant part of his great services to
literature.
A more indirect service to the same cause may be made the sub-
ject of this closing word. The younger generation of American writ-
ers owe Mr. Stedman a debt that is not wholly accounted for by the
enumeration of his books. Busy as the exigencies of his twofold life
have kept him, he has never been too busy to extend sympathy and
the helping hand of personal criticism and counsel to those who have
come to him for aid. He has thus given of himself so freely and so
generously that it must have proved in the aggregate a heavy tax
upon his energies. But he has the reward of knowing that the trib-
ute paid him as poet and critic by his readers is, to an exceptional
degree, mingled with the tribute of the personal gratitude that they
feel for him as counselor and friend.
(All the following poems are copyrighted, and are printed here by permission
of the author, and of Houghton, Miffin & Co. , publishers. ]
THE HAND OF LINCOLN
LOOK
OOK on this cast, and know the hand
That bore a nation in its hold;
From this mute witness understand
What Lincoln was, — how large of mold;
The man who sped the woodman's team,
And deepest sunk the plowman's share,
And pushed the laden raft astream,
Of fate before him unaware.
This was the hand that knew to swing
The axe,- since thus would Freedom train
## p. 13860 (#38) ###########################################
13860
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
Her son, – and made the forest ring,
And drove the wedge, and toiled amain.
Firm hand, that loftier office took,
A conscious leader's will obeyed,
And when men sought his word and look,
With steadfast might the gathering swayed.
No courtier's, toying with a sword,
Nor minstrel's, laid across a lute;
A chief's, uplifted to the Lord
When all the kings of earth were mute!
The hand of Anak, sinewed strong,
The fingers that on greatness clutch;
Yet, lo! the marks their lines along
Of one who strove and suffered much.
For here in knotted cord and vein
I trace the varying chart of years;
I know the troubled heart, the strain,
The weight of Atlas — and the tears.
Again I see the patient brow
That palm erewhile was wont to press;
And now 'tis furrowed deep, and now
Made smooth with hope and tenderness.
For something of a formless grace
This molded outline plays about;
A pitying flame, beyond our trace,
Breathes like a spirit, in and out, -
The love that cast an aureole
Round one who, longer to endure,
Called mirth to ease his ceaseless dole,
Yet kept his nobler purpose sure.
Lo, as I gaze, the statured man,
Built up from yon large hand, appears;
A type that Nature wills to plan
But once in all a people's years.
What better than this voiceless cast
To tell of such a one as he,
Since through its living semblance passed
The thought that bade a race be free!
## p. 13861 (#39) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13861
PROVENÇAL LOVERS – AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE
W"
THIN the garden of Beaucaire
He met her by a secret stair, —
The night was centuries ago.
Said Aucassin, “My love, my pet,
These old confessors vex me so!
They threaten all the pains of hell
Unless I give you up, ma belle,” –
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
“Now, who should there in heaven be
To fill your place, ma très-douce mie ?
To reach that spot I little care!
There all the droning priests are met;
All the old cripples, too, are there
That unto shrines and altars cling
To filch the Peter-pence we bring,”-
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
(There are the barefoot monks and friars
With gowns well tattered by the briars,
The saints who lift their eyes and whine:
I like them not- :- a starveling set!
Who'd care with folk like these to dine ?
The other road 'twere just as well
That you and I should take, ma belle! ” –
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
«To Purgatory I would go
With pleasant comrades whom we know:
Fair scholars, minstrels, lusty knights
Whose deeds the land will not forget,
The captains of a hundred fights,
The men of valor and degree,-
We'll join that gallant company,
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
>>
There, too, are jousts and joyance rare,
And beauteous ladies debonair,
The pretty dames, the merry brides,
Who with their wedded lords coquette
And have a friend or two besides, -
And all in gold and trappings gay,
With furs, and crests in vair and gray," —
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
## p. 13862 (#40) ###########################################
13862
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
"Sweet players on the cithern strings,
And they who roam the world like kings,
Are gathered there, so blithe and free!
Pardie! I'd join them now, my pet,
If you went also, ma douce mie!
The joys of heaven I'd forego
To have you with me there below," —
Said Aucassin to Nicolette.
ARIEL
IN MEMORY OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: BORN ON THE FOURTH OF
AUGUST, A. D. 1792
ERT thou -day,
WERT
W***How wouldst thou, in the starlight of thine eld.
The likeness of that morntide look upon
Which men beheld ?
How might it move thee, imaged in time's glass,
As when the tomb has kept
Unchanged the face of one who slept
Too soon, yet molders not, though seasons come and pass ?
Has Death a wont to stay the soul no less ?
And art thou still what SHELLEY was erewhile ? -
A feeling born of music's restlessness-
A child's swift smile
Between its sobs — a wandering mist that rose
At dawn a cloud that hung
The Euganean hills among;
Thy voice, a wind-harp's strain in some enchanted close ?
Thyself the wild west wind, O boy divine,
Thou fain wouldst be - the spirit which in its breath
Wooes yet the seaward ilex and the pine
That wept thy death?
Or art thou still the incarnate child of song
Who gazed, as if astray
From some uncharted stellar way,
With eyes of wonder at our world of grief and wrong ?
Yet thou wast Nature's prodigal; the last
Unto whose lips her beauteous mouth she bent
An instant, ere thy kinsmen, fading fast,
Their lorn way went.
## p. 13863 (#41) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13863
What though the faun and oread had fled ?
A tenantry thine own,
Peopling their leafy coverts lone,
With thee still dwelt as when sweet Fancy was not dead;
Not dead as now, when we the visionless,
In Nature's alchemy more woeful wise,
Say that no thought of us her depths possess, -
No love, her skies.
Not ours to parley with the whispering June,
The genii of the wood,
The shapes that lurk in solitude,
The cloud, the mounting lark, the wan and waning moon.
For thee the last time Hellas tipped her hills
With beauty; India breathed her midnight moan,
Her sigh, her ecstasy of passion's thrills,
To thee alone.
Such rapture thine, and the supremer gift
Which can the minstrel raise
Above the myrtle and the bays,
To watch the sea of pain whereon our galleys drift.
Therefrom arose with thee that lyric cry,
Sad cadence of the disillusioned soul
That asks of heaven and earth its destiny,-
Or joy or dole.
Wild requiem of the heart whose vibratings,
With laughter fraught, and tears,
Beat through the century's dying years, [wings.
While for one more dark round the old Earth plumes her
No answer came to thee; from ether fell
No voice, no radiant beam: and in thy youth
How were it else, when still the oracle
Withholds its truth?
We sit in judgment; we above thy page
Judge thee and such as thee, -
Pale heralds, sped too soon to see
The marvels of our late yet unanointed age!
The slaves of air and light obeyed afar
Thy summons, Ariel; their elf-horns wound
Strange notes which all uncapturable are
Of broken sound.
## p. 13864 (#42) ###########################################
13864
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
That music thou alone couldst rightly hear
(O rare impressionist! )
And mimic. Therefore still we list
To its ethereal fall in this thy cyclic year.
Be then the poet's poet still! for none
Of them whose minstrelsy the stars have blessed
Has from expression's wonderland so won
The unexpressed, -
So wrought the charm of its elusive note
On us, who yearn in vain
To mock the pean and the plain
Of tides that rise and fall with sweet mysterious rote.
Was it not well that the prophetic few,
So long inheritors of that high verse,
Dwelt in the mount alone, and haply knew
What stars rehearse ?
But now with foolish cry the multitude
Awards at last the throne,
And claims thy cloudland for its own
With voices all untuned to thy melodious mood.
What joy it was to haunt some antique shade
Lone as thine echo, and to wreak my youth
Upon thy song, — to feel the throbs which made
Thy bliss, thy ruth, -
And thrill I knew not why, and dare to feel
Myself an heir unknown
To lands the poet treads alone
Ere to his soul the gods their presence quite reveal!
Even then, like thee, I vowed to dedicate
My powers to beauty; ay, but thou didst keep
The vow, whilst I knew not the afterweight
That poets weep,
The burthen under which one needs must bow,
The rude years envying
My voice the notes it fain would sing
For men belike to hear, as still they hear thee now.
Oh, the swift wind, the unrelenting sea!
They loved thee, yet they lured thee unaware
To be their spoil, lest alien skies to thee
Should seem more fair;
## p. 13865 (#43) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13865
They had their will of thee, yet aye forlorn
Mourned the lithe soul's escape,
And gave the strand thy mortal shape
To be resolved in flame whereof its life was born.
Afloat on tropic waves, I yield once more
In age that heart of youth unto thy spell.
The century wanes, - thy voice thrills as of yore
When first it fell.
Would that I too, so had I sung a lay
The least upborne of thine,
Had shared thy pain! Not so divine
Our light, as faith to chant the far auroral day.
MORS BENEFICA
G
IVE me to die unwitting of the day,
And stricken in Life's brave heat, with senses clear:
Not swathed and couched until the lines appear
Of Death's wan mask upon this withering clay,
But as that Old Man Eloquent made way
From Earth, a nation's conclave hushed anear;
Or as the chief whose fates, that he may hear
The victory, one glorious moment stay.
Or, if not thus, then with no cry in vain,
No ministrant beside to ward and weep,
Hand upon helm I would my quittance gain
In some wild turmoil of the waters deep,
And sink content into a dreamless sleep
(Spared grave and shroud) below the ancient main.
TOUJOURS AMOUR
PT
RITHEE tell me, Dimple-Chin,
At what age does love gin?
Your blue eyes have scarcely seen
Summers three, my fairy queen,
But a miracle of sweets,
Soft approaches, sly retreats,
Show the little archer there,
Hidden in your pretty hair :
When didst learn a heart to win ?
Prithee tell me, Dimple-Chin!
## p. 13866 (#44) ###########################################
13866
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
“Oh! the rosy lips reply,
"I can't tell you if I try.
'Tis so long I can't remember:
Ask some younger lass than I! »
Tell, oh tell me, Grizzled-Face,
Do your heart and head keep pace ?
When does hoary love expire,
When do frosts put out the fire ?
Can its embers burn below
All that chill December snow?
Care you still soft hands to press,
Bonny heads to smooth and bless ?
When does love give up the chase ?
Tell, oh tell me, Grizzled-Face!
“Ah! the wise old lips reply,
“ Youth may pass and strength may die;
But of love I can't foretoken:
Ask some older sage than I! )
PAN IN WALL STREET
Jº
Ust where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple,-.
Even there I heard a strange, wild strain
Sound high above the modern clamor,
Above the cries of greed and gain,
The curbstone war, the auction's hammer;
And swift, on Music's misty ways,
It led, from all this strife for millions,
To ancient, sweet-do-nothing days
Among the kirtle-robed Sicilians.
And as it stilled the multitude,
And yet more joyous rose, and shriller,
I saw the minstrel, where he stood
At ease against a Doric pillar:
## p. 13867 (#45) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13867
One hand a droning organ played,
The other held a Pan’s-pipe (fashioned
Like those of old) to lips that made
The reeds give out that strain impassioned.
'Twas Pan himself had wandered here
A-strolling through this sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had crossed the seas,-
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times, — to these
Far shores and twenty centuries later.
A ragged cap was on his head;
But-hidden thus — there was no doubting
That, all with crispy locks o'erspread,
His gnarlèd horns were somewhere sprouting:
His club-feet, cased in rusty shoes,
Were crossed, as on some frieze you see them,
And trousers, patched of divers hues,
Concealed his crooked shanks beneath them.
He filled the quivering reeds with sound,
And o'er his mouth their changes shifted,
And with his goat's-eyes looked around
Where'er the passing current drifted;
And soon, as on Trinacrian hills
The nymphs and herdsmen ran to hear him,
Even now the tradesmen from their tills,
With clerks and porters, crowded near him.
The bulls and bears together drew
From Jauncey Court and New Street Alley,
As erst, if pastorals be true,
Came beasts from every wooded valley;
The random passers stayed to list, —
A boxer Ægon, rough and merry,
A Broadway Daphnis, on his tryst
With Nais at the Brooklyn Ferry.
A one-eyed Cyciops halted long
In tattered cloak of army pattern;
And Galatea joined the throng. -
A blowsy, apple-vending slattern;
While old Silenus staggered out
From some new-fangled lunch-house handy,
## p. 13868 (#46) ###########################################
13868
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
And bade the piper, with a shout,
To strike up Yankee Doodle Dandy!
A newsboy and a peanut girl
Like little fauns began to caper:
His hair was all in tangled curl,
Her tawny legs were bare and taper;
And still the gathering larger grew,
And gave its pence and crowded nigher,
While aye the shepherd-minstrel blew
His pipe, and struck the gamut higher.
O heart of Nature, beating still
With throbs her vernal passion taught her,-
Even here, as on the vine-clad hill,
Or by the Arethusan water!
New forms may fold the speech, new lands
Arise within these ocean-portals,
But Music waves eternal wands,-
Enchantress of the souls of mortals!
So thought I, – but among us trod
A man in blue, with legal baton,
And scoffed the vagrant demigod,
And pushed him from the step I sat on.
Doubting I mused upon the cry,
“Great Pan is dead! » — and all the people
Went on their ways; — and clear and high
The quarter sounded from the steeple.
THE DISCOVERER
I
HAVE a little kinsman
Whose earthly summers are but three,
And yet a voyager is he
Greater than Drake or Frobisher,
Than all their peers together!
He is a brave discoverer,
And, far beyond the tether
Of them who seek the frozen pole,
Has sailed where the noiseless surges roll.
Ay, he has traveled whither
A winged pilot steered his bark
Through the portals of the dark,
## p. 13869 (#47) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13869
Past hoary Mimir's well and tree,
Across the unknown sea.
Suddenly, in his fair young hour,
Came one who bore a flower,
And laid it in his dimpled hand
With this command:-
« Henceforth thou art a rover!
Thou must make a voyage far,
Sail beneath the evening star,
And a wondrous land discover. ”
With his sweet smile innocent
Our little kinsman went.
Since that time no word
From the absent has been heard.
Who can tell
How he fares, or answer well
What the little one has found
Since he left us, outward bound ?
Would that he might return!
Then should we learn
From the pricking of his chart
How the skyey roadways part.
Hush! does not the baby this way bring,
To lay beside this severed curl,
Some starry offering
Of chrysolite or pearl ?
Ah, no! not so!
We may follow on his track,
But he comes not back.
And yet I dare aver
He is a brave discoverer
Of climes his elders do not know.
He has more learning than appears
On the scroll of twice three thousand years,
More than in the groves is taught,
Or from furthest Indies brought;
He knows, perchance, how spirits fare,
What shapes the angels wear,
What is their guise and speech
In those lands beyond our reach;
And his eyes behold
Things that shall never, never be to mortal hearers told.
## p. 13870 (#48) ###########################################
13870
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
CAVALRY SONG
OR
UR good steeds snuff the evening air,
Our pulses with their purpose tingle:
The foeman's fires are twinkling there;
He leaps to hear our sabres jingle!
HALT!
Each carbine sends its whizzing ball:
Now, cling! clang! forward all,
Into the fight!
Dash on beneath the smoking dome,
Through level lightnings gallop nearer!
One look to Heaven! No thoughts of home:
The guidons that we bear are dearer.
CHARGE!
Cling! clang! forward all!
Heaven help those whose horses fall!
Cut left and right!
They fee before our fierce attack!
They fall, they spread in broken surges !
Now, comrades, bear our wounded back,
And leave the foeman to his dirges.
WHEEL!
The bugles sound the swift recall:
Cling! clang! backward all!
Home, and good-night!
THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POETRY
From 'Poets of America. )
Copyrighted 1885, by Edmund Clarence Stedman
This
HERE are questions that come home to one who would aid in
speeding the return of “the Muse, disgusted at the “age
and clime. ” Can I, he asks, be reckoned with the promot-
ers of her new reign? Yes, it will be answered, if your effort is
in earnest, and if you are in truth a poet. To doubt of this
is almost the doubt's own confirmation. The writer to whom
rhythmic phrases come as the natural utterance of his extremest
hope, regret, devotion, is a poet of some degree. At the rarest
crises he finds that, without and even beyond his will, life and
death and all things dear and sacred are made auxiliary to the
compulsive purpose of his art; just as in the passion for science,
as if to verify the terrible irony of Balzac and Wordsworth, the
## p. 13871 (#49) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13871
1
alchemist will analyze his wife's tears, the Linnæan will botanize
upon his mother's grave:-
“Alas, and hast thou then so soon forgot
The bond that with thy gift of song did go-
Severe as fate, fixed and unchangeable ?
Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot! ”
-
If when his brain is in working humor, its chambers filled
with imaged pageantry, the same form of utterance becomes his
ready servant, then he is a poet indeed. But if he has a dexter-
ous metrical faculty, and hunts for theme and motive,- or if his
verse does not say what otherwise cannot be said at all, — then
he is a mere artisan in words, and less than those whose thought
and feeling are too deep for speech. The true poet is haunted
by his gift, even in hours of drudgery and enforced prosaic life.
He cannot escape it. After spells of dejection and weariness,
when it has seemed to leave for ever, it always, always returns
again,- perishable only with himself.
Again he will ask, What are my opportunities ? What is the
final appraisement of the time and situation ? We have noted
those latter-day conditions that vex the poet's mind. Yet art is
the precious outcome of all conditions: there are none that may
not be transmuted in its crucible. Science, whose iconoclasm had
to be considered, first of all, in our study of the Victorian period,
has forced us to adjust ourselves to its dispensation. A scientific
conflict with tradition always has been in progress, though never
so determinedly as now. But the poet and artist keep pace with
it, even forestall it, so that each new wonder leads to greater
things, and the so-called doom of art is a victorious transition:-
“If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea. ”
As to material conditions, we find that the practical eagerness
of the age, and of our own people before all, has so nearly satis-
fied its motive as to beget the intellectual and æsthetic needs to
which beauty is the purveyor. As heretofore in Venice and other
commonwealths, first nationality, then riches, then the rise of
poetry and the arts. After materialism and the scientific stress,
the demands of journalism have been the chief counter-sway to
poetic activity. But our journals are now the adjuvants of imagi-
native effort in prose and verse: the best of them are conducted
by writers who have the literary spirit, and who make room for
ideal literature, even if it does not swell their lists so rapidly as
## p. 13872 (#50) ###########################################
13872
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
-
that of another kind. The poet can get a hearing; our Chatter-
tons need not starve in their garrets: there never was a better
market for the wares of Apollo; their tuneful venders need not
hope for wealth, but if one cannot make his genius something
more than its own exceeding great reward, it is because he mis-
takes the period, or scorns to address himself fitly to his readers.
Finally, criticism is at once more catholic and more discriminat-
ing than of old. Can it make a poet, or teach him his mission ?
Hardly; but it can spur him to his best, and point out the
heresies from which he must free himself or address the oracle
in vain.
Such being our opportunities, we have seen that the personal
requirements are coequal, and their summing-up may well be the
conclusion of the whole matter. Warmth, action, genuine human
interest, must vivify the minstrel's art: the world will receive
him if he in truth comes into his own.
Taste and adroitness can
no longer win by novelty. Natural emotion is the soul of poetry,
as melody is of music: the same faults are engendered by over-
study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible
impulse, in both the poet and the composer. The decorative
vogue has reached its lowest grade, - that of assumption for bur-
lesque and persiflage; just as Pre-Raphaelitism, at first a reform
in art, extended to poetry, to architecture, to wall decoration, to
stage-setting, finally to the dress of moonstruck blue-stockings
and literary dandies. What has been gained in new design will
survive. But henceforth the sense of beauty must have something
“far more deeply interfused,” — the ideal, which, though not made
with hands of artificers, is eternal on the earth as in the heavens,
because it is inherent in the soul. There is also one prerequisite,
upon which stress was laid by Dr. Storrs, in his application to
modern art of Goethe's reservation as to the worth of certain
engravings: "Still something is wanting in all these pictures, -
the Manly.
The pictures lack a certain urgent power,”
etc. Culture, I have said, will make a poet draw ahead of his un-
studious fellows; but the resolve born of conviction is needed
to sustain the advance. The lecturer rightly declared that only
courageous work will suit America, whose race is essentially
courageous and stoical.
Our keynote assuredly should be that
of freshness and joy; the sadness of declining races only, has the
beauty of natural pathos. There is no cause for morbidly intro-
spective verse - no need, I hope, for dilettanteism - in this brave
country of ours for centuries to come.
.
((
## p. 13873 (#51) ###########################################
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
13873
I think, too, we may claim that there is no better ideal of
manhood than the American ideal, derived from an aggregation
of characteristic types. Our future verse should be more native
than that of the past, in having a flavor more plainly distinct
from the motherland. Not that our former contingent misrep-
resented the America of its time. Even Longfellow's work,
.
,
with so much of imported theme and treatment, conveyed a sen-
timent that came, say what we will, from no foreign source.
The reason that a decidedly autochthonous kind was not then
proffered, unless by Whitman, was that a distinction between the
conditions of England and America was not more strongly estab-
lished. Since the War our novitiate has ended. We welcome
home productions; our servility of foreign judgment has lessened,
and we apply with considerable self-poise our own standards of
criticism to things abroad. We have outlived the greed of child-
hood that depends on sustenance furnished by its elders; and are
far indeed from the senile atrophy which also must borrow to
recruit its wasting powers. Our debt to acute foreign critics is
none the less memorable. They, in truth, were the first to coun-
sel us that we should lean upon ourselves; to insist that we
ought at least to escape Old World limitations,—the first to rec-
ognize so heartily anything purely American, even our sectional
humor, as to bring about our discovery that it was not neces-
sarily "a poor thing,” although our own. ”
It is agreed that sectional types, which thus have lent their
raciness to various productions, are subsidiary to the formation
of one that shall be national. A character formed of mingling
components must undergo the phases of defective hybridity; our
own is just beginning to assume a coherence that is the promise
of a similar adjustment in art. As local types disappear there
may be special losses, yet a general gain. The lifting of the
Japanese embargo was harmful to the purity of the insular art,
but added something to the arts of the world at large. Even
now our English cousins, seeking for what they term American-
ism in our literature, begin to find its flavor stealthily added to
their own.
Our people have blundered from isolation: confront them with
the models of older lands and they quickly learn to choose the
fit and beautiful; and the time is now reached when the finest
models are widely attainable. Secondly, our inheritance is a lan-
guage that is relatively the greatest treasure-house of the world's
XXIV-868
## p. 13874 (#52) ###########################################
13874
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
literature: at once the most laconic and the most copious of
tongues, the sturdiest in its foundations of emotion and utility,
the most varied by appropriation of synonyms from all languages,
new and old; the youngest and most occidental of the great
modes of speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with no
possible supplanter or successor except itself at further stages
of maturity; finally, elastic and copious most of all in the land
which adds to it new idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated
from the dialects of many races that here contribute their diction
to its own: a language whose glory is that even corruptions
serve to speed its growth, and whose fine achievement long has
been to make the neologism, even the solecism, of one genera-
tion the classicism of the next. This is the potent and sonorous
instrument which our poet has at his command; and the genius
of his country, like Ariel, bids him
« — take
This slave of music, for my sake. ”
The twilight of the poets, succeeding to the brightness of
their first diurnal course, is a favorable interval at which to
review the careers of those whose work therewith is ended.
Although at such a time public interest may set in other direc-
tions, I have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinating to
the critical and poetic student. When the lustre of a still more
auspicious day shall yield in its turn to the recurring dusk, a new
chronicler will have the range of noble imaginations to consider,
heightened in significance by comparison with the field of these
prior excursions. But if I have not wholly erred in respect to
the lessons derivable from the past, he will not go far beyond
them. The canons are not subject to change; he, in turn, will
deduce the same elements appertaining to the chief of arts, and
test his poets and their bequests by the same unswerving laws.
And concerning the dawn which may soon break upon us un-
awares, as we make conjecture of the future of American song,
it is difficult to keep the level of restraint — to avoid “rising on
the wings of prophecy. ” Who can doubt that it will correspond
to the future of the land itself, — of America now wholly free and
interblending, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each an
emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus of energetic life,
ceaseless in action, radiant with the glow of beauty and creative
power?
## p. 13874 (#53) ###########################################
1
## p. 13874 (#54) ###########################################
Cecroll
RICHARD STEELE.
## p. 13874 (#55) ###########################################
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## p. 13874 (#56) ###########################################
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## p. 13875 (#57) ###########################################
13875
SIR RICHARD STEELE
(1671-1729)
race.
t is entirely indicative of our opinions and feelings of the life
and writings of this British author of the eighteenth cen-
tury that we should think of Addison's friend and fellow-
essayist as Richard, or Dick, or Dicky Steele, rather than of Sir
Richard Steele, as he is known in the history of literature.
Dick or
Dicky Steele conveys to our minds the impression which the heavy-
limbed, square-jawed, dark-eyed, tender-hearted, awkward, careless,
wholly unselfish Irishman conveyed to his personal friends and ac-
quaintances.
Irish by birth,- for he was born in Dublin in 1671,- he was of
English parentage and descent, being the son of the secretary of the
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormond. Yet he had many
of the amiable, kindly, mirthful, genial traits attributed to the Irish
Through the Duke's influence he was sent to the Charter-
house, London, where he first met Addison, of the same age as him-
self; with whom he formed the closest intimacy, which, continuing
for many years, is one of the most memorable in literature. Steele
always looked up to Addison, cherishing for him a respect almost
reverential; and Addison's stronger, more stable, more serious char-
acter affected very favorably his own wayward, volatile nature,
without causing any permanent change in it. Notwithstanding that
he lived to be fifty eight, - dying at Llangunnor, Wales, September
ist, 1729,- he seemed never to have quite grown up. He preserved
through all his vicissitudes, and to the very last, the same gay, reck-
less, jovial, irregular, prodigal disposition; never intending to do ill,
but always getting into straits from which his friends were obliged
to extricate him so far as they could, until he fell into new ones.
His errors were ever human, ever committed without reflection; and
though they demand at times broad charity, it is impossible not to
forgive, on the whole, his shortcomings, and not to love him despite
his grave defects. If he constantly needed help, he was constantly
trying to help others; and to this cause are due most of his per-
plexities.
The two friends were together at Merton College, Oxford; where
Steele remained for three years, but left without taking a degree.
He had conceived a passion for the army; and unable to get a
## p. 13876 (#58) ###########################################
13876
SIR RICHARD STEELE
commission, he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards. A rich
kinsman in Ireland had menaced him with disinheritance should he
take such a step; but being naturally independent, he defied inter-
ference. He was liked in the army, and gained the rank of captain;
a promotion due to his colonel, Lord Cutts, to whom he had dedi-
cated his Christian Hero' (published in 1701), which was so moral
and pious as to displease his very worldly associates, and which was
written in those moods of contrition so frequent and so transient
with him. It was at this time that he made that intimate acquaint-
ance with the follies and vices of the era, and with human nature as
he saw it, which made him an acute delineator of manners when he
embraced literature as a profession.
As a man about town he frequented the London theatres, and be-
came intimately acquainted with the players and their companions.
This naturally turned his mind to the stage; and in 1702 he wrote
a comedy, "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode (in striking contrast
with the Christian Hero'), which met with marked favor at Drury
Lane. The next year he brought out “The Tender Husband'; and
two years later a third comedy, "The Lying Lover,' adapted from
Le Menteur' of Thomas Corneille. This was too staid, too solemn,
to suit his audience, who so energetically condemned it that he did
not attempt until 1722 another play, The Conscious Lovers' (based
on Terence's (Andria'), his most successful drama, and conspicuously
decorous.
Steele was now a popular and a fashionable man, having political
no less than social position. He was appointed gazetteer and gentle-
man usher to Prince George of Denmark. He had taken a wife, who
lived but a little while, leaving him a considerable estate in Barba-
does. His second wife (he was married again in 1707), born Molly
Scurlock, increased his fortune. His letters to this wife, some four
hundred of which have been preserved, form an extraordinary cor-
respondence. They reveal the author as he was,- full of faults and
weaknesses, of dissipations and repentance, of affection and tender-
ness, of ardent promises of reform and reckless promise-breaking.
They are wholly artless and confidential, written without premedita-
tion or second thought; mere talk on paper. They are dated from
jails, taverns, wine-shops, bailiffs' offices, under the influence of vinous
headaches, marital contritions, fresh impulses of devotion, and tearful
regrets for neglected duties. They afford a curious, rather melan-
choly, at the same time entertaining, history of a drinking, impul-
sive, vacillating, over-generous, spendthrift, loving husband's checkered
life.
To a man of Steele's temperament and habits, money was of lit-
tle benefit. He was always in debt, and always would have been,
whether his income were five hundred pounds or five thousand. He
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SIR RICHARD STEELE
13877
-
had neither order nor method; but in their stead numberless whims
and desires. He had not the slightest conception of business; he was.
entirely destitute of practicality: but no kind of adversity, no mis-
fortune, could depress his ever-buoyant spirit.
In 1709 a felicitous financial idea occurred to him; and oddly
enough, he acted on it. His office of gazetteer put him in control
of early foreign intelligence; and in imitation of Defoe's plan, he
organized the Tatler, issuing the first number April 12th. He secured
the assistance of Addison, who furnished many of the principal
articles, and who aided him in procuring the appointment of com-
missioner of the Stamp Office. When the Whigs were overthrown
in 1710, Steele, as a strong Whig, was deprived of his gazetteership,
and with it the means of supplying the items of official news which
were at the beginning important to the Tatler. This paper was
accordingly succeeded the next year by the Spectator, mostly writ-
ten by the two friends. The Tatler had appeared thrice a week,
price one penny; but the Spectator appeared daily at twopence,
issuing five hundred and fifty-five numbers, — the last December 6th,
1712. Many of Addison's most famous contributions were printed
in the two papers; though Steele furnished the larger number, and
stamped himself and his character on what he wrote. His object was
to expose what was false in life, manners, morals; to strip disguises
from vanity, selfishness, affectation; to recommend simplicity and sin-
cerity; to correct public taste, and urge the adoption of true English
sentiment and opinion. Steele and Addison co-operated also in the
Guardian: and Steele at different periods was interested in similar
periodicals, like the Englishman, the Lover, the Reader, the Plebeian;
but they were short-lived, and added nothing to his reputation. Few
of Steele's essays are remembered; nor is the fact that he was the
originator of the noted characters “Sir Roger de Coverley” and “Will
Honeycomb,” though Addison afterward adopted them, making them
virtually his own.
As an essayist he is admired for vivacity and ease, but not for
finish: he was often neglectful of his style. His charm is his per-
fect naturalness. He had great versatility, being a humorist, satirist,
critic, story-teller, and remarkable in each capacity. Political acri-
mony raged in 1713. Steele's patriotism triumphed over self-interest;
he resigned his office, and plunged headlong into political contro-
versy. He gained a seat in Parliament as a member for Stockbridge
in Hampshire; vehemently supported the Protestant succession, which
he believed in peril; and published a pamphlet, (The Crisis,' warn-
ing the kingdom against the danger of a Popish succession, for which
he was expelled from the House of Commons. The death of Queen
Anne mollified his opponents. In the new reign he received several
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13878
SIR RICHARD STEELE
profitable employments; was knighted, and elected to Parliament
from Boroughbridge. But, head over heels in debt again, he was
soon attacked with paralysis and rendered incapable of exertion. He
retired to a small estate (left him by his second wife), where he
passed away nearly forgotten by his contemporaries. He was dis-
tinguished, in an era that cherished slight respect for women, for his
high opinion of and chivalrous feeling for them. No loftier com-
pliment has ever been paid to woman than his to Lady Elizabeth
Hastings: “To love her was a liberal education. ”
ON BEHAVIOR AT CHURCH
From the Guardian
THE
HERE is not anywhere, I believe, so much talk about religion,
as among us in England; nor do I think it possible for the
wit of man to devise forms of address to the Almighty in
more ardent and forcible terms than are everywhere to be found
in our Book of Common Prayer; and yet I have heard it read
with such a negligence, affectation, and impatience, that the effi-
cacy of it has been apparently lost to all the congregation. For
my part, I make no scruple to own it, that I go sometimes to
a particular place in the city, far distant from my own home,
to hear a gentleman whose manner I admire, read the liturgy. I
am persuaded devotion is the greatest pleasure of his soul, and
there is none hears him read without the utmost reverence. I
have seen the young people who have been interchanging glances
of passion to each other's person, checked into an attention to
the service at the interruption which the authority of his voice
has given them.
But the other morning I happened to rise earlier than ordi-
nary, and thought I could not pass my time better than to go
upon the admonition of the morning bell, to the church prayers
at six of the clock. I was there the first of any in the congre-
gation, and had the opportunity (however I made use of it) to
look back on all my life, and contemplate the blessing and advan-
tage of such stated early hours for offering ourselves to our
Creator, and prepossessing ourselves with the love of him, and
the hopes we have from him, against the snares of business and
pleasure in the ensuing day. But whether it be that people think
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SIR RICHARD STEELE
13879
fit to indulge their own ease in some secret, pleasing fault, or
whatever it was, there was none at the confession but a set of
poor scrubs of us, who could sin only in our wills, whose per-
sons could be no temptation to one another, and might have,
without interruption from anybody else, humble, lowly hearts, in
frightful looks and dirty dresses, at our leisure.
When we poor souls had presented ourselves with a contrition
suitable to our worthlessness, some pretty young ladies in mobs
popped in here and there about the church, clattering the pew
door after them, and squatting into a whisper behind their fans.
Among others, one of Lady Lizard's daughters and her hopeful
maid made their entrance: the young lady did not omit the
ardent form behind the fan, while the maid immediately gaped
round her to look for some other devout person, whom I saw at
a distance, very well dressed; his air and habit a little military,
but in the pertness, not the true possession of the martial char-
acter. This jackanapes was fixed at the end of a pew, with the
utmost impudence declaring, by a fixed eye on that seat where
our beauty was placed, the object of his devotion. This obscene
sight gave me all the indignation imaginable, and I could attend
to nothing but the reflection that the greatest affronts imaginable
are such as no one can take notice of.
Before I was out of such vexatious inadvertencies to the busi-
ness of the place, there was a great deal of good company now
come in.
There was a good number of very jaunty slatterns,
us to understand that it is neither dress nor art to
which they were beholden for the town's admiration. Besides
these, there were also by this time arrived two or three sets of
whisperers, who carry on most of their calumnies by what they
entertain one another with in that place; and we were now
altogether very good company. There were indeed a few in
whose looks there appeared a heavenly joy and gladness upon
the entrance of a new day, as if they had gone to sleep with
expectation of it. For the sake of these it is worth while that
the Church keeps up such early matins throughout the cities
of London and Westminster; but the generality of those who
observe that hour perform it with so tasteless a behavior that
it appears a task rather than a voluntary act. But of all the
world, those familiar ducks who are, as it were, at home at the
church, and by frequently meeting there throw the time of prayer
very negligently into their common life, and make their coming
who gav
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13880
SIR RICHARD STEELE
together in that place as ordinary as any other action, and do
not turn their conversation upon any improvements suitable to
the true design of that house, but' on trifles below even their
worldly concerns and characters. These are little groups of
acquaintance dispersed in all parts of the town, who are forsooth
the only people of unspotted characters, and throw all the spots
that stick on those of other people.
Malice is the ordinary vice of those who live in the mode
of religion, without the spirit of it. The pleasurable world are
hurried by their passions above the consideration of what others
think of them, into a pursuit of irregular enjoyment; while these
who forbear the gratifications of flesh and blood, without having
won over the spirit to the interests of virtue, are implacable in
defamations on the errors of such who offend without respect
to fame. But the consideration of persons whom one cannot
but take notice of when one sees them in that place, has drawn
me out of my intended talk, which was to bewail that people do
not know the pleasure of early hours, and of dedicating the first
moments of the day, with joy and singleness of heart, to their
Creator. Experience should convince us that the earlier we left
our beds the seldomer should we be confined to them.
One great good which would also accrue from this, were it
become a fashion, would be, that it is possible our chief divines
would condescend to pray themselves, or at least those whom
they substitute would be better supplied than to be forced to
appear at those oraisons in a garb and attire which makes them
appear mortified with worldly want, and not abstracted from the
world by the contempt of it. How is it possible for a gentle-
man, under the income of fifty pounds a year, to be attentive
to sublime things ? He must rise and dress like a laborer for
sordid hire, instead of approaching his place of service with the
utmost pleasure and satisfaction that now he is going to be
mouth of a crowd of people who have laid aside all the distinc-
tions of this contemptible being, to beseech a protection under its
manifold pains and disadvantages, or a release from it by His
favor who sent them into it. He would, with decent superiority,
look upon himself as orator before the Throne of Grace, for a
crowd who hang upon his words while he asks for them all that
is necessary in a transitory life; from the assurance that a good
behavior, for a few moments in it, will purchase endless joy and
happy immortality.
## p.
