ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters :

"Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! .
Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth."
Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, "My Captain,"
written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs Poems of the
little in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will
show:

"My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won.
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck, my captain lies
Fallen, cold and dead."

Civil War.

This is from "Drum Taps," a volume of poems of the Civil War. Whitman also wrote prose having much the same Prose writings. quality as his poetry: "Democratic Vistas," "Memoranda of the Civil War," and, more recently, "Specimen Days." His residence during his last years was at Camden, New Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 1876.

1. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT: "Thanatopsis"; "To a Waterfowl"; "Green River" "'; "Hymn to the North Star"; "A Forest Hymn"; "O Fairest of the Rural Maids" "June" ; "The Death of the Flowers"; "The Evening Wind" ; The Battle-Field"; "The Planting of

the Apple-tree"; "The Flood of Years."

2. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: "Cassandra Southwick"; "The New Wife and the Old"; "" The Virginia Slave Mother"; "Randolph of Roanoke"; "Barclay of Ury"; "The Witch of Wenham"; "" Skipper Ireson's Ride"; "Marguerite"; "Maud Muller"; "Telling the

Bees"; "My Playmate"; "Barbara Frietchie "; "Ichabod"; "Laus Deo"; "Snow-Bound."

66

[ocr errors]

3. EDGAR ALLAN POE: "The Raven " "" ; The Bells" ; "Israfel"; "Ulalume"; "To Helen"; "The City in the Sea" Annabel Lee"; "; "To One in Paradise"; The Sleeper"; "The Valley of Unrest" "The Fall of the House of Usher"; แ Ligeia" แ "William Wilson " ; ; 'The Cask of Amontillado"; "The Assignation"; "The Masque of the Red Death"; "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym."

4. N. P. WILLIS : "Select Prose Writings." New York: 1886.

5. MRS. H. B. STOWE: town Folks."

แ "Uncle Tom's Cabin" "'; Old

6. W. G. SIMMS: "The Partisan"; "The Yemassee." 7. BAYARD TAYLOR: "A Bacchic Ode"; "Hylas"; "Kubleh"; "The Soldier and the Pard"; "Sicilian Wine"; "Taurus"; "Serapion"; "The Metempsychosis of the Pine";" The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled"; "Bedouin Song"; "Euphorion"; "The Quaker Widow"; "John Reid"; "Lars"; แ "Views Afoot"; "Byways of Europe"; "The Story of Kennett"; "The Echo Club."

8. WALT WHITMAN: "My Captain"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; "Pioneers, O Pioneers"; "The Mystic Trumpeter"; "A Woman at Auction"; "Sea-shore Memoirs"; "" Passage to India"; Mannahatta"; "The WoundDresser '' ; "Longings for Home."

9. "Poets of America." By E. C. Stedman. Boston: 1885.

CHAPTER VII.

LITERATURE SINCE 1861.

Literature of the Civil War.

A GENERATION has passed since the outbreak of the Civil War, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern side, Horace Greeley's "American Conflict," 1864-66, Vicepresident Wilson's "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in Histories. America," and J. W. Draper's "American Civil War," 1868-70; on the southern side, Alexander H. Stephens's "" Confederate States of America," Jefferson Davis's "Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America,” and E. A. Pollard's "Lost Cause." These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of be

War lyrics.

"John Brown's Body."

ing the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan-in some instances passionately partisan. A storehouse of materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection, "The Rebellion Record"; in numerous regimental histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's "Army of the Potomac "; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the แ war papers," published in the Century Magazine, and reprinted in book form, as "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," 1887-89, and innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both sides.

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's southern ballad, “Maryland, My Maryland," sung to the old college air of "Lauriger Horatius"; and the grand martial chorus of "John Brown's Body," an old Methodist hymn, to which the northern armies beat time as they went "marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "northern scum," the cheap insults of the southern newspaper press. To furnish the "John Brown" chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," a noble poem, but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers.

Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings

and home-comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths,
in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who
had gone to the war; or which celebrated individual deeds
of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and
heart-breaks of the great conflict, by far the greater num-
ber were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the
hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were
Kate Putnam Osgood's "Driving Home the Cows," Mrs.
Ethel Lynn Beers's "All Quiet Along the Potomac," For-
ceythe Willson's "Old Sergeant," and John James Piatt's
"Riding to Vote." Of the poets whom the war brought
out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Tim-
rod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of
Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Con-
federate Army of the West, as correspondent for the
Charleston Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor
of the South Carolinian, at Columbia. Sherman's "march
to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to
Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was pub-
lished in 1873, six years after his death. The prettiest of
all Timrod's poems is "Katie," but more to our present pur-
pose are
"Charleston"-written in the time of blockade-
and "The Unknown Dead," which tells

"Of nameless graves on battle plains,
Wash'd by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest."

When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M.
Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful
Decoration Day lyric, "The Blue and the Gray," which
spoke the word of reconciliation and consecration for North
and South alike.

Brownell, whose "Lyrics of a Day" and "War Lyrics"

Henry Tim

rod's Confed

erate verse.

Finch's "The

Blue and the

Gray.”

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »