Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/255

Holmes's Familiar Verse 239 verse, " the lyric commingled of humour and pathos, brief and brilliant and buoyant, seemingly unaffected and unpremedi- tated, and yet — if we may judge by the infrequency of supreme success — undeniably difiBcvilt, despite its apparent ease. Dr. Johnson, who was himself quite incapable of it, too heavy- footed to achieve its lightness, too polysyllabic to attain its vernacular terseness, was yet shrewd enough to see that it is less difficult to write a volume of lines, swelled with epithets, brightened with figures, and stiflEened by transpositions, than to produce a few couplets, grand only by naked elegance and simple purity, which require so much care and skill that I doubt whether any of our authors have yet been able for twenty lines together nicely to observe the true definition of easy poetry. In this "easy poetry," which is the metrical equivalent of the essay in its charm, in its grace and in its colloquial liberty, Holmes has few rivals in our language. It was with strict justice that Locker-Lampson, in the preface to the first edi- tion of Lyra Elegantiarum (1867) — to this day the most satis- factory anthology of vers de sociStS, — declared that Holmes was "perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse." It may be recorded also that Locker-Lampson paid Holmes the even sincerer compliment of imitation, borrowing for two of his delightful lyrics not only the spirit but also the stanza Holmes had invented for The Last Leaf. With characteristic frankness the London lyrist once told an American admirer that this stanza might seem easy but it was difficult, so difficult that no one had handled it with complete success — except Holmes and himself. Locker-Lampson derived directly from Praed, whose verses have an electric and dazzling brilliance, whereas in Hohnes the radiance is more subdued and less blinding. Of aU the writers of familiar verse no one has ever surpassed Holmes in the delicate blending of pathos with humour, as exemplified most strikingly in The Last Leaf, in which fantasy plays hide and seek with sentiment. Scarcely less delightful in its eighteenth-century quaintness is the family portrait, Dorothy Q; and close to those two masterpieces are lesser lyrics like Contentment, Bill and Joe, and the lines On Lending a Punch Bowl and To an Insect: