“The next number we will do far better. I want to open it with your article. You said you might wish to make some alterations if we kept it — do you wish to have it sent you, the first part is left in type; they had printed a good deal before finding it would be too long. E. H.’s ‘Poet,’ some of C.’s best, Ellery, and ‘The Bard born out of Time,’ we must have for that.”[1]
The poem described in these last words will readily be recognized as Emerson’s since celebrated “Wood-Notes.” The “Ellery” is an article by Emerson entitled “New Poetry” and made up chiefly of extracts from Ellery Channing’s poems — an essay received with mingled admiration and rage by the critics, and with especial wrath by Edgar Poe. “E. H.’s ‘Poet’” was a strong poem, also contained in the second number of the “Dial,” by Mrs. Ellen Hooper, wife of Dr. R. W. Hooper, — a woman of genius, who gave our literature a classic in the lines beginning, —
“I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty.”
Margaret Fuller wrote of her long afterwards from Rome, “I have seen in Europe no woman more gifted by nature than she.” Another of the “Dial” poets was the sister of this lady, Miss Caroline Sturgis, afterwards Mrs. William Tappan, “some of whose best” are contained in this same second number of the “Dial,” where her contributions are signed “Z.” The opening paper of this second number, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” by Emerson, still yields to the
- ↑ MS.
