Fresh Hearts That Failed Three Thousand Years Ago; With Other Things
By the Author of “ The New Priest in Conception Bay.” Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1860, pp. 121.
IN noticing the “New Priest,” in a former number of the “ATLANTIC,” we had occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature, his comic power, and his original conception of character. At the same time we could not but feel that a certain tendency to multiplicity of detail, and a neglect of form or insensibility to it, hindered the book of that direct and vigorous effect which its power and variety of resource would otherwise have produced. Something of the same impression is made by the present volume. There are glimpses in it of real genius, but it shows itself generally here and there only, as the natural outcrop, seldom in the bars and ingots which give proof of patient mining and smelting at furnace-heat, still more seldom in the beautiful shapes of artistic elaboration. Here, again, we find the same unborrowed feeling for outward Nature and familiarity with her moods, the same poetic beauty of expression, and in many of the pieces the same over-crowdedness, as if the author would fain say all he could, instead of saying only what he could not help.
There are some of the poems that do more justice to the abilities of the author. In “ The Year is Gone ” there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression ; "Love Disposed of” is a prettyfancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which overcrests all the others like a decuman wave is “ The Brave Old Ship, the Orient.” It is a truly masculine poem, full of vigor and imagination, and giving evidence of true original power in the author. There is scarce a weak verse in it, and the measure has a swing, at once easy and stately, like that of the sea itself. We know not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name “Orient,” but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the finest of its kind. The writer’s heart seems more in the work here than in the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us particularly fine : —
“ We scanned her well, as we drifted by:
A strange old ship, with her poop built
high,
And with quarter-galleries wide,
And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are
builded now,
And carvings all strange, beside:
A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and
mark
Long years and generations ago;
Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing
hard
With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.
A strange old ship, with her poop built
high,
And with quarter-galleries wide,
And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are
builded now,
And carvings all strange, beside:
A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and
mark
Long years and generations ago;
Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing
hard
With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.
“ Down her old black side poured the water
in a tide,
As they toiled to got the better of a leak.
We had got a signal set in the shrouds,
And our men through the storm looked on
in crowds:
But for wind, we were near enough to speak.
It seemed her sea and sky were in times
long, long gone by,
That we read in winter-evens about;
As if to other stars
She had reared her old-world spars,
And her hull had kept an old-time ocean
out.”
in a tide,
As they toiled to got the better of a leak.
We had got a signal set in the shrouds,
And our men through the storm looked on
in crowds:
But for wind, we were near enough to speak.
It seemed her sea and sky were in times
long, long gone by,
That we read in winter-evens about;
As if to other stars
She had reared her old-world spars,
And her hull had kept an old-time ocean
out.”