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��A Down East Homer.
��of the schooner Armistice, Captain Douglass, on Cohasset rocks, August 31, 1815. ..bound from Portland for Baltimore... on which occasion five persons perished. By Thomas Shaw, Standish." This occasional poem, which its author calls "A Mournful Song," is in a somewhat more lively measure than is this poet's wont. There was this about the old Puritan heart, that it took a tremendous force to move it ; but when the emotions were once fully roused, the sluiceway by which as a flood they found escape was always regarded as necessarily a poetic vein of feeling. Elegaic poe- try afforded both the writer and read- er pastime and recreation. It was supposed to possess what was known in pulpic phrase as an improving" quality. Shaw evidently understood the market value of the article, and supplied the demand judiciously. People in that age had no dread of monopolies, and never dreamed of boycotting a poet.
This particular composition is some- what in the manner of the ballad. The movement of the narrative is, however, very unsteady. The moral- izing is done at inconvenient and un- expected intervals ; or, from another point of view, it may be said that the story is broken by reflections that are wholly out of season. The measure reminds the reader of The Ancient Mariner." It is, of course, not im- possible that so famous a ballad, printed nearly twenty years before, should be familiar to the poet. The
narrative is taken u[) at the seventh stanza :
" My mournful poii.n; cloth take along Douglass from I'orlland bay, For to sail fast in August last Upon the thirtieth day."
��This was as far as the author could get without indulging in some very sad, but we may hope profitable, reflec- tions. It is not until he reaches the twelfth stanza that he is able to com- plete the date of the sailing :
"So they did steer, the fifteenth year, Out into the wide main ; Perhaps a thought was to them brought, You can't come back again."
We see here the peculiarity of these early ballad- writers in America ; — they were web-footed, and so, instead of rising on pinions like the lark, they took to the floods of bathos, and there wailed their sorrows like loons.
But the master-piece of Shaw, so far as now appears, was a four-column broadside, fourteen by twenty inch- es. The occasion of this production was the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent in 1815. The subject was cal- culated to awaken more than ordinary joy, and here we shall expect to see the poet at his best. Indeed, he seems himself to have looked upon this performance with a good degree of complaisance, for some of the ideas of this reappear in pretty nearly the original language in his lines on La- fayette. The work is divided into two distinct parts after the manner of old-time sermons, the expository part of which was delivered in the morn- ing, while the improvement," as it used to be called, — in later phrase, the" application," — was "deferred till after intermission."
The first part is taken up with a re- cital of events preceding the peace. Quite as much space is given to the Revolution as to the War of 1812. The author is profuse in generalities, but rather chary of particulars. The exploits of the enemy, from 1812 to
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