with its fast horses, fast men, and fast women,—its whirl of fashionable equipages, its confused din of "hop" music, scandal, flirtation, serenades, and supreme voice of the sea breaking through the fog and dust. Not that the prevailing tone, however, is ironical. On the contrary, his own poetical habit of thought and feeling colours and warms every page, and sustains its predominance by frequent citations from his favourite minstrels. Thus we find him again and again quoting whole pieces from Herrick, and introducing Uhland's Rhine ballad, "Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee"—and Heine's tenderly-phrased legend of Lorelei—and tid-bits from Wordsworth's Yarrow, and Tennyson's Princess, and Longfellow's Waif, and Keats' Nightingale, and Waller's "Go, lovely Rose!" and Charles Lamb's "Gipsy's Malison," and George Herbert, and Shelley, and Browning, and Charles Kingsley,[1] and (for is not he also among the poets?) Thomas de Quincey. Being no longer on Eastern ground, the author's style is, appropriately enough, far more subdued and prosaic than when it was the exponent of a Howadji; yet of brilliant and rhapsodical passages there is no lack. His characteristic vein of reflection, too, pursues its course as of old—and the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, will repay extraction.[2] American as he is, to the core, he by no means contends that the home-scenery he depicts is entitled to "whip creation." Indeed, both implicitly and explicitly his creed in this respect is a little independent of the stars and stripes. He has been in Italy and Switzerland, and has not forgotten either. The Hudson is dear to him, but so is the Rhine. "The moment you travel in America," he says, "the victory of Europe is sure"—and he thinks it ill-advised to exhort a European to visit America for other reasons than social and political observation, or buffalo hunting—affirming the idea of the great American lakes, or of her magnificent monotony of grass and forest, to be as impressive and much less wearisome than the actual sight of them. In presence of
- ↑ The lines, namely, in "Alton Locke," beginningwhich certainly have a pictorial power and a wild suggestive music, all their own—and of which Mr. Curtis justly says: "Who that feels the penetrating pathos of the song but sees the rain-shroud, the straggling nets, and the loneliness of the beach? There is no modern verse of more tragic reality."
"O Mary, go and call the cattle home,"
- ↑ We are here too stinted for room to apply the lancet with effect. But in illustration of the aphoristic potentiality (ὡς ἐπος ἐιπειν) of the Lotos-eater, we may refer to his wise contempt for an indiscriminate eulogy of travelling, as though it involved an opus operatum grace and merit of its own—saying, "A mile horizontally on the surface of the earth does not carry you one inch towards its centre, and yet it is in the centre that the gold mines are. A man who truly knows Shakspeare only, is the master of a thousand who have squeezed the circulating libraries dry."
The following, again, has the true Emerson stamp: "Any great natural object—a cataract, an alp, a storm at sea—are seed too vast for any sudden flowering. They lie in experience moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood betray that in some happy hour of youth you have seen the Alps and Niagara."
One more, and a note-worthy excerpt: "He is a tyro in the observation of nature who does not know that, by the sea, it is the sky-cape, and not the landscape, in which enjoyment lies. If a man dwelt in the vicinity of beautiful inland scenery, yet near the sea, his horse's head would be turned daily to the ocean, for the sea and sky are exhaustless in interest as in beauty, while, in the comparison, you soon drink up the little drop of satisfaction in fields and trees."
