Rushes glance, In fluttering dance On the lowlands, quivering, gleaming, Embower'd there Picture fair! With its garden-plat and welling Like a dome O'er the foam, Gnarled oaks blind the mountain river, Round the lone Druid stone, In the whispering elm-grove, wannish Elfin wonders come and vanish. On the main Doth sunlight wane; Dies away the magic glory From the Waldburg ruins hoary. Moonlight floods, The waving woods; Hush!-dim spirits' sighings, ruing, Olden knighthood's long undoing. A beautiful picture, this,-and wonderfully real, as anyone familiar with coast scenery will understand; yet its pathetic quality is very elusive. The quivering in the poplars, the whispering elms,the dying down of the sunlight give an impression of pensiveness beyond themselves. The poet lies in the grass where he can gaze on land and sea. He watches the fishing boats slowly gathering in to shore, the glitter of the rushes, the calm of the silver strand. He notes the screaming of the sea-birds, the one sharp note of the whole melody; but even this only heightens by contrast the general peacefulness. Then into the singer's soul comes a piteous regret for the ancient past,--for the spirit of chivalry, long since dead among men. To quote Schiller again: "Who, in reading this poem, does not experience sensations analogous to those inspired by a beautiful sonata? We must not be understood as saying that its musical effect is entirely owing to the happy structure of the verse; for although its metrical harmony sustains and heightens that effect, it is not the sole cause of it. It is the happy grouping of the images, their lovely continuous succession; it is the modulation and beautiful unison of the whole which make it not only the expression of a positive feeling, but a soul-painting." This is high praise, coming from such a source, yet Matthisson has fairly earned it. The poet in dealing with landscape has two advantages over the artist. The latter can only depict the present moment, its pathos or its unrest, its sunset grandeur or its pitiless sea-surges; but its changes, infinite and incessant, of color and imagery are the property of the singer. Matthisson knows this and so gives us an ever-unrolling panorama, a series of beautiful impressions. The second advantage he also avails himself of, without stint, which is the power the poet has of expressing those associated ideas that nature awakens within us. The landscape painter gives us a wondrous sky, and the gazer upon it-if he has done his work well-says at once "Heaven!" But the poet can do more; he can roll away the burning clouds and give us, in fiery words, soul-visions of God's Paradise and the elect therein. The landscape painter indicates much in dumb show, in silent pantomime; but the poet, voicing his thought, weds art to music. Salis, who, like Matthisson, was a poet of the romantic school, appeared as one of his contemporaries, being born in 1762 and dying in 1834. His verse has much of the same delicate, ærial fancy, mingled with a tender seriousness. Madame de Stael says of him "The penetrating charm of the poesy of Salis makes one love its author, as though he were a friend." The following exquisite lines will permit the poet to speak for himself, though through the poor medium of translation, where much grace is lost: TWILIGHT SADNESS. Softly o'er the mountains, the star of evening glimmered; In ruddy tints of closing day, melted into shade The quivering aspens, by the pool's still brink, sighed softly. Disembodied spirits rose and sadly floated round me, Shades of friends once beloved, nay, still, still dear!-whispering kindly. Lonely and sorrowful, I said, "No lovely summer evening, now, O blessed happy spirits, shall e'er again unite us all!" The evening star was set,—the quivering aspens sighed sadly. There are times and moods of mind when some plain ballad, or a simple poem like this, are very grateful to our hearts. But, now, let us turn away for a few moments to something loftier. The following Hymn, from the German of Gluck, will be a noble and fitting close for this "Meditation" on the lyrics of the Fatherland. A high authority says of it:-"Nothing could be more sweet and touching. Like Sir Walter Raleigh's 'Address to his soul' or the beautiful Spanish coplas of Don Jorge Manrique" -familiar to all through Longfellow's version,-"it breathes the very soul of poetry and religion." TO DEATH. Methinks it were no pain to die To gaze my fill on your calm deep On earth, my mother's breast. There's peace and welcome in yon sea Those clouds are living things! Their soft and fleecy wings, These be the angels that convey Life's tedious nothings o'er Where neither passions come, nor woes, On Death's majestic shore. No darkness there divides the sway Are the interminable plains: I cannot doff all human fear; I know thy greeting is severe I would I were away. CAROLINE D. SWAN DURWARD'S EPIC OF COLUMBUS. CHRISTOFORO COLUMBO, AN AMERICAN EPIC. EDITED BY SEÑORITA C. DEALCALA. PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR, B. I. DURWARD. In writing a notice of this book I had intended also to give a brief sketch of the author and to quote various short poems from his Wild Flowers of Wisconsin, a little volume published many years ago. Space, however, does not at present admit of a biographical sketch, and the unity of this little tribute to a gifted man and an excellent piece of work might be somewhat marred by the bringing in of matter other than that found in the epic before us. For the sake of those readers of THE GLOBE, however, who may not, up to this time, have made the acquaintance of Mr. Durward or his work, I am moved to say that he is by birth a Scotchman, that his main inheritance seems to have been poverty, and that quick but intense love of nature so characteristic of his race, together with an undying ambition to interpret the same in some work of art or poetry in a manner and in a spirit at once sincere, reverent and beautiful. So it happened that Bernard I. Durward while yet a boy, and while the necessities of bread-earning were severely upon him, turned his attention to art sketches of nature, and to portrait painting, almost without instruction, and was so apt in this art that he found little or no trouble in earning a living by the early and clever work of his own hands. Later the Durwards, following the tides of time, emigrated to America, and Bernard, one of numerous family, settled in Wisconsin, farmed and painted portraits, and wrote poems by turns, until the domestic roof-tree grew apace, shed some of its branches, yet always served as sheltering cover for the meditation, prayer and beautiful work of the subject of these words. Following the lines of their native latitude, the Durwards remained in the West, and so it has happened, I suppose, that the work of Bernard Durward has never attracted the attention in America that precisely the same work would have attracted had the author been born or reared in New England, and had his work been published and puffed in the Boston papers and gossipped about among the mutual admiration societies of that sharpwitted but very provincial town. In speaking thus of Mr. Durward, and by implication, of his earlier work, it is due THE GLOBE and myself to say that I clearly detect the imperfections of that earlier work, and see why, though often replete with beautiful poetic thought and feeling, it has not generally won its way to critical and popular recognition. Mr. Durward is much more of a poet than either Lowell or Holmes, but never having had the earlier educational advantages of those excellent gentlemen, he has never been able to master all the laws of correct, appropriate and measured speech to the same extent that they have done; and now and then the wrong word, the word with the wrong emphasis, the word less poetic than another word that might have been chosen, spoils or seriously deteriorates the value and beauty of poems otherwise far superior to most of the work of the New England school of poets. In the epic before us, however, these imperfections, or infelicities, seldom occur, and the poem as it stands is certainly the best original and extended epic yet written in this land. What is singular and remarkable about Mr. Durward's work is that, though a Scotchman by birth, and an American by choice, hence, personally the inheritor and lover of the poetic genius and productions of the English speaking races, the spirit and manner of Goethe are far more noticeable in his work than the spirit and manner of any one of the great poets of his mother tongue. Like Mr. Egan, Mr. Durward has plainly been a severe, a loving and a constant student of Shakespeare. But in reading Durward's Epic of Columbus I have been far more constantly reminded of Faust than of any poem originally written in the English language. I will add but one more thought before quoting at length from this really great American poem of the day. The thought is this, that though there have been during the past two years almost legions of epic and other poems on Columbus, many of which I have read as in duty bound, this work of Mr. Durward's is the only one which seems to me, in any respectable degree, to have risen into the true spirit of Columbus and his great enterprise, and the only one that in any measure holds to the depth of meaning and the dignity of that enterprise to the end of the story. And it is for these reasons, not for any personal reason, much less on account of any sectional feeling, that I have been moved to give the poem unusual attention in THE GLOBE. With these words as introduction I now quote the first eight pages of Mr. Durward's epic that they may speak for themselves: |