Scottish Review 14
(July 1889), 212-13.
In this volume the author has gathered together a number of pieces both
in prose and verse, written at different periods extending over a considerable
number of years. The topics are varied, but chiefly of a literary, or biographical
kind. There are poems entitled 'Sands at Seventy,' and others with the
leading 'Fancies at Navesink.' Then there are prose essays, some of them
covering little more than a page, and others extending to several pages
on such topics Our Eminent Visitors, The Bible as Poetry, Burns as Poet
and Person, Tennyson, Shakespeare, English Books, Slang in America, Abraham
Lincoln, and a number of War Memoranda. But the most interesting as well
as the most important of the Essays is the one with which the volume opens,
'A Backward Glance o'er Travell'd Roads.' In this the author reviews himself
and his work, and notwithstanding all that has been said against his poetical
beliefs and methods, reiterates his persuasion of their truth and appeals
from the present to the future. Here also he repeats his demand that America
should possess a literature peculiarly and exclusively its own, saying,
'No law or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers
and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own as the land
and people and circumstances of our United States.' At the same time he
restates his belief that science instead of superseding poetry will only
open out fresh and more extensive fields to which the poetic imagination
must emigrate. 'Whatever,' he remarks, 'may have been the case in years
gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to
give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing
them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong
to every real thing, and to real things only.' The papers on Shakespeare
and Burns are suggestive, but there is little new in them. On such subjects
much that is new can scarcely be expected from anyone.