But the old three-cornered hat, "And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree Let them smile, as I do now, The second and fifth verses show us the humourist rather over-colouring the work of the poet. "The pruning-knife of Time," for instance, seems to be out of keeping with the quiet pathetic feeling of the greater part of the poem, which is just sufficiently charged with humour to keep it truly pathetic without being sentimental; it is, indeed, a very good example of that close interconnection of humour and pathos which is so often remarked, and to which it is, perhaps, that such writers as Charles Lamb owe their peculiar place in our affections. The too-pronounced presence of the humourist, although it may jar upon us in reading some of Holmes's pathetic poems, is yet only an occasional blemish; generally the humour is but like the glow of summer lightning, bringing what it illumines nearer to us, while at times the humourist is not present at all—no more than 1 Poems,.i., p. 3. the Thomas Hood of The Epping Hunt and The Tale of a Trumpet is visible in the Thomas Hood of The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirtwitness the short, sharp, defiant yet exultant ring of Old Ironsides. The fervour of the opening line "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down-"1 rings through the whole poem, making our pulses leap and our blood tingle as with a sudden blare of trumpet. Small wonder is it that this short impromptu 2 should have echoed and re-echoed throughout the States-serving effectually its object of saving the old frigate Constitution, popularly known as Old Ironsides, from proposed destruction. In another of these earlier poems also The Cambridge Churchyard-we have a sustained flight of "The lonely spirit of the mournful lay, Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray." 3 How truly Gray-like in both form and spirit, for instance, is this single stanza- -a stanza which embodies in itself the motif of the whole poem "Hast thou a tear for buried love? A sigh for transient power? All that a century left above 1 Poems, i., p. 2. 2 See ante, p. 8. 3 Poems, i., p. 41. 4 Ibid., i., p. 6. It is simple in expression, yet direct in meaning as Goldsmith himself might have written. 66 A In 1851 Mary Russell Mitford devoted a section (xxxi.) of her pleasant Recollections of a Literary Life to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and this she did mainly on the strength of one poem, Astræa,— a little book of less than forty pages "-that had been delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society the previous year. This instant recognition by Miss Mitford of the poet from over sea is especially noteworthy as taking place before the publication of the first English edition of. Holmes's poems. year later that first English edition appeared, and probably owed its appearance at that time to the unqualified welcome extended to it by a critic of such true instinct as Mary Russell Mitford. A glance at these words of welcome, in the light of the poet's later great success, may well interest us. In introducing those passages from Astrea which had especially attracted her, the critic says: "In these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood-relations (I had well-nigh called them our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and, to my mind, it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey-provided always it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought and clear of word, we could fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of Absalom and Achitophel, or of the Moral Epistles, if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted,1 and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name." Poetry has probably existed as long as human language, yet an adequate definition of what it really is that we mean by the word is yet to seek. It has been attempted numberless times by widely different persons; as often has it been sought, perhaps, as the true meaning of another word— wit. Yet, despite this, we are far from having a satisfactory definition of either of them. Indeed it is probable that when found it will be discovered that it embraces the two. I myself do not intend adding to the number of those who have sought to express in an axiom what poetry exactly is and what it is not, for, as quaint old Isaac Barrow expresses ' Whitman's first volume was not issued until four years later; while none of Lowell's "national" poetry had been issued. |