NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 90, 92, and 94 GRAND STREET.
1869.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by D. APPLETON & CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.
TO
HON. WILLIAM H. SEWARD,
THIS VOLUME
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
AS A SLIGHT TRIBUTE OF ADMIRATION
FOR HIS
CHARACTER AND GENIUS,
BY
JAMES GRANT WILSON.
PREFACE.
In this volume will be found all the poetical writings of the late Fitz-Greene Halleck, included in previous editions, together with a score of poems which the editor has succeeded in recovering from various sources, and which are marked by the characteristic grace and melody of his most admired compositions; also several translations from the French, German, and Italian, that now appear in print for the first time. Among the pieces never before published, are a number of juvenile productions, which may be recognized by the dates appended to them. Between the earliest poem contained in this collection and the latest, a period of three score and three years intervened. “The Tempest” was written by the handsome and happy schoolboy of fourteen, in the fourth year of the present century; a translation from the German was made by the gray-haired veteran who had passed, by seven summers, the allotted period of man’s life; while Mr. Halleck’s latest original poem—“Young America”—was written near the close of the year 1863, beneath the shadows of the same grand old Guilford elms under which the poet was born and buried.
“The Croakers,” that now appear for the first time with Halleck’s poetical writings, are the joint production of the attached friends Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The origin of these sprightly jeux d’esprit, as eagerly looked for each evening as were the war-bulletins of a later day, may not be without interest to the authors’ troops of admirers. Halleck and Drake were spending a Sunday morning with Dr. William Langstaff, an eccentric apothecary and an accomplished mineralogist, with whom they were both intimate (the two last mentioned were previously fellow-students in the study of medicine with Drs. Bruce and Romayne), when Drake, for his own and his friends’ amusement, wrote several burlesque stanzas “To Ennui,” Halleck answering them in some lines on the same subject. The young poets decided to send their productions, with others of the same character, to William Coleman, the editor of the Evening Post. If he published them, they would write more; if not, they would offer them to Major M. M. Noah, of the National Advocate; and if he declined their poetical progeny, they would light their pipes with them. Drake accordingly sent Coleman three pieces of his own, signed “Croaker,” a signature adopted from an amusing character in Goldsmith’s comedy of “The Good-natured Man.” To their astonishment, a paragraph appeared in the Post the day following, acknowledging their receipt, promising the insertion of the poems, pronouncing them to be the productions of superior taste and genius, and begging the honor of a personal acquaintance with the author. The lines “To Ennui” appeared March 10, 1819, and the others in almost daily succession; those written by Mr. Halleck being usually signed “Croaker Junior,” while those which were their joint composition generally bore the signature of “Croaker and Co.”
The remark made by Coleman had excited public attention, and “The Croakers” soon became a subject of conversation in drawing-rooms, book-stores, coffee-houses, on Broadway, and throughout the city; they were, in short, a town topic. The two friends contributed other pieces; and when the editor again expressed great anxiety to be acquainted with the writer, and used a style so mysterious as to excite their curiosity, the literary partners decided to call upon him. Halleck and Drake accordingly, one evening, went together, to Coleman’s residence in Hudson Street, and requested an interview. They were ushered into the parlor, the editor soon entered, the young poets expressed a desire for a few minutes’ strictly private conversation with him, and the door being closed and locked, Dr. Drake said—“I am Croaker, and this gentleman, sir, is Croaker Junior.” Coleman stared at the young men with indescribable and unaffected astonishment,—at length exclaiming: “My God, I had no idea that we had such talents in America!” Halleck, with his characteristic modesty, was disposed to give to Drake all the credit; but as it chanced that Coleman alluded in particularly glowing terms to one of the Croakers that was wholly his, he was forced to be silent, and the delighted editor continued in a strain of compliment and eulogy that put them both to the blush. Before taking their leave, the poets bound Coleman over to the most profound secrecy, and arranged a plan of sending him the MS., and of receiving the proofs, in a manner that would avoid the least possibility of the secret of their connection with “The Croakers” being discovered. The poems were copied from the originals by Langstaff, that their handwriting should not divulge the secret, and were either sent through the mail, or taken to the Evening Post office by Benjamin R. Winthrop, then a fellow-clerk with Mr. Halleck, in the counting-house of the well-known banker and merchant Jacob Barker, in Wall Street.
Hundreds of imitations of “The Croakers” were daily received by the different editors of New York, to all of which they gave publicly one general answer, that they lacked the genius, spirit, and beauty of the originals. On one occasion Coleman showed Halleck fifteen he had received in a single morning, all of which, with a solitary exception, were consigned to the waste-basket. The friends continued for several months to keep the city in a blaze of excitement; and it was observed by one of the editors, “that so great was the wincing and shrinking at ‘The Croakers,’ that every person was on tenter-hooks; neither knavery nor folly has slept quietly since our first commencement.” Of this series of satirical and quaint chronicles of New-York life half a century ago, Halleck, in 1866, said “that they were good-natured verses contributed anonymously to the columns of the New-York Evening Post, from March to June, 1819, and occasionally afterward.” The writers continued, like the author of Junius, the sole depositaries of their own secret, and apparently wished, with the Minstrel in Leyden’s “Scenes of Infancy,” to
“Save others’ names, but leave their own unsung.”
Among “The Croakers” will be found three hitherto unpublished pieces from the pen of Mr. Halleck, and, in lieu of the original signatures, the author of each poem is now for the first time made known by the letters H and D; when both letters occur, they indicate the joint authorship of the literary partners, or, to quote Halleck’s familiar words to a friend, “that we each had a finger in the pie.”
Fitz-Greene, a descendant of Peter Halleck or Hallock, one of thirteen Pilgrim Fathers who landed at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1640, and of the Rev. John Eliot, the “Apostle to the Indians,” who arrived at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1631, was one of the earliest, as he was among the most eminent, of American poets. He left no son to wear his honors, or to perpetuate his name, but, unlike his favorite Roi d’Yvetot, there is little danger of his being “peu connu dans l’histoire.” When all those whose privilege it was to know the genial poet, and to have been honored by his friendship, shall have passed away, and when the enduring granite obelisk which now marks his grave shall have crumbled to dust, the name and fame of the sweet singer who celebrated in immortal song the glories of the modern Epaminondas, will remain fresh and green, not only in the country of his birth, but in the land of Bozzaris. In England, his “Alnwick Castle,”
“Home of the Percy’s high-born race,”
will long preserve his name from oblivion; while in Scotland, the song he sang in praise of Burns will forever connect him with her greatest poet. “Nothing finer has been written about Robert than Mr. Halleck’s poem,” said Isabella, the youngest sister of the Ayrshire bard, as she gave the writer, in the summer of 1855, some rose-buds from her garden, and leaves of ivy plucked from her cottage door, near the banks of the bonny Doon, to carry back to his gifted friend. Neither will those exquisitely beautiful and tender lines, so familiar to all, in which the early death of his chosen companion and literary partner, Dr. Drake, was mourned by Mr. Halleck, be soon forgotten. They are, and will continue to be, an enduring monument to both the poets, wherever the English language is read or spoken. Like Thomas Campbell, whose poetical writings he so much admired, Fitz-Greene Halleck gave to the world but few poems—“heirlooms forever” to be prized and cherished by his countrymen through the coming ages and generations, with
“Earth’s and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers,
And all things rare.”
The arrangement of the poems, as made by the poet in the last edition of 1858, has been closely followed in this volume, without reference to their chronological order; and in other particulars the present publication has been made to conform to Mr. Halleck’s wishes, as expressed to the writer at their last interview, but a few weeks before
“He gave his honors to the world again,
His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.”
The share of the editor in this volume can scarcely be regarded too slightly. He cannot even claim the credit for the notes, as a portion of them were prepared by the poet himself. Among the notes to the Miscellaneous Poems, the first nine will be recognized as having appeared in all previous editions, while the notes to “Fanny” and “The Recorder” are, with a few slight alterations and additions, substantially Mr. Halleck’s; and to him, therefore, the editor trusts will be awarded the credit for whatever may be found among them worthy of praise.
