hold Vicksburg and Gettysburg names of larger historic import than Waterloo or Sedan." If this be so, the significance of a literature of all kinds that led up to the "sudden making" of those "splendid names "is not to be gainsaid. Mr. Howells aptly has pointed out that war does not often add to great art or poetry, but the white heat of lyric utterance has preceded many a campaign, and never more effectively than in the years before our fight for what Mr. Archer calls "the preservation of the national idea.” Therefore an American does not seem to me a laudable reader who does not estimate the following presentation in the full light of all that his country has been, is, and is to be.

Time has not clouded, but cleared, the lenses through which our neophytes regard those distant movements so fully in accord with the modern spirit as Poe's renaissance of art for beauty's sake, and Whitman's revolt against social and literary traditions. The academic vantage no less held its own with Parsons and Holmes as maintainers,

the former our purest classicist, and a translator equalled

only by Bayard Taylor. The stately elegance of Parsons limited his audience, yet perfected the strength of his ode "On a Bust of Dante," than which no finer lyric ennobles this collection. Holmes's grace, humor, contemporaneousness, brought him into favor again and again, and the closing days of a sparkling career were the most zestful for the acknowledged master of new "architects of airy rhyme" on each side of the Atlantic. In Lowell, the many-sided, the best equipped, and withal the most spontaneous, of these worthies, their traits were combined. Never was there a singer at once so learned and so unstudied; no other American took the range that lies between the truth and feeling of his dialect verse and the height of his national odes.

This is not a critical Introduction, and the writer need not dwell upon the shortcomings of our still famous matin choir. These were discussed in commentaries that differ very little from what they would be if written now, though after this farther lapse of time I might not enter upon such judgments with the glow and interest of the earlier years, when those hoar and laurelled heads still shone benignantly above us.

Along the century's midway, a group of somewhat younger poets appeared, whose places of birth or settlement rendered them less subject to the homiletic mood which even Lowell recognized as his own besetting drawback. Taylor, Boker, Stoddard, Read, Story, and their allies, wrote poetry for the sheer love of it. They did much beautiful work, with a cosmopolitan and artistic bent, making

it a part of the varied industry of men of letters; in fact, they were creating a civic Arcadia of their own, - but then came the tempest that sent poets and preachers alike to the storm-cellars, and certainly made roundelays seem inapposite as the "pleasing of a lute." Yet my expositions of the then current writers, taken with the sheaf of popular war-songs, Northern and Southern, bound up in a single section, prove that the fury of the fight called forth inspiring strains. Some of these were as quickly caught up by the public as were the best known efforts of the laureate of Anglo-Saxon expansion in a recent day. On the whole, the stern and dreadful war for the Union produced its due share of the lays of heroism and endeavor. But then, as oftentimes, pieces that outrivalled others were wont to have the temporal quality that does not make for an abiding place among the little classics of absolute song.

As the country slowly emerged from the shadow, its elder bards hung up their clarions, and betook themselves to the music of contentment and peace. Their heirs apparent were few and scattered; encouragement was small during years of reconstruction, and without the stimulus of a literary "market;" yet the exhibit in the first division of the post-bellum period shows that song had a share in the awakening of new emotional and aesthetic expression. Fifteen or twenty years. more, and a resort to letters as a means of subsistence was well under way, — and like a late spring, vigorous when once it came. Poets, in spite of the proverb, sing best when fed by wage or inheritance. The progress of American journals, magazines, and the book-trade coincided with a wider extension of readers than we had known before. Such a condition may not foster the creative originality that comes at the price of blood and tears, but it has resulted in a hopeful prelude to whatsoever masterwork the next era has in store. The taste, charm, and not infrequent elevation of the verse contained in the three divisions of the second portion of this compilation render that portion, in its own way, a fit companion to the series preceding it. One must forego tradition to recognize this; in the Hall of Letters, as in Congress and wherever a levelling-up movement has prevailed, talent is less conspicuous by isolation than of old. The main distinction between the two Periods is a matter of dynamics; the second has had less to do with public tendencies and events. It has had none the less a force of its own: that of the beauty and enlightenment which shape the ground for larger offices hereafter, by devotees possibly no more gifted than their forbears, yet farther up the altar steps. In its consistency, tested by what went before, it stands comparison as reasonably

as the product of the later Victorian artificers, when gauged by that of Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, and their colleagues.

It is not my province to specify the chief writers of this Period, so many of whom are still with us. As the country has grown, the Eastern song-belt has widened, and other divisions have found voice. The middle West quickly had poets to depict its broad and plenteous security; and more lately very original notes have come from territory bordering upon the Western Lakes. The Pacific coast and the national steppes and ranges as yet scarcely have found adequate utterance, though not without a few open-air minstrels. Dialect and folk-lore verse represents the new South; its abundant talent has been concerned otherwise with prose romance; yet the song of one woman, in a border State, equals in beauty that of any recent lyrist. American poets still inherit longevity. Since the premature death of the thrice-lamented Taylor — at a moment when he was ready to begin the life of Goethe which none could doubt would be a consummate work-a few others have gone that should have died hereafter. Sill was a sweet and wise diviner, of a type with Clough and Arnold. O'Reilly is zealously remembered, both the poet and the man. In Emma Lazarus a star went out, the western beacon of her oriental race. When Sidney Lanier died, not only the

South that bore him, but the country and our English rhythm underwent the loss of a rare being —one who was seeking out the absolute harmony, and whose experiments, incipient as they were, were along the pathways of discovery. Eugene Field's departure lessened our laughter, wit, and tears. In the present year, Hovey, whom the new century seemed just ready to place among its choristers, was forbidden to outlive the completion of the intensely lyrical "Taliesin," his melodious swan-song.

To end this retrospect, it may be said that the imaginative faculty, of which both the metrical and the prose inventions alike were termed poetry by the ancients, has not lain dormant in the century's last quarter; although certain conditions, recognized in the opening chapter of "Victorian Poets" as close at hand, have obtained beyond doubt. The rhythm of verse is less essayed than that of prose - now the vehicle of our most favored craftsmen. Already books are written to show how an evolution of the novel has succeeded to that of the

poem, which is true- and in what wise prose fiction is the higher form of literaare, which is not yet proved. The novelist has outsped the poet in absorbing a new ideality conditioned by the advance of science; again, he has cleverly

adjusted his work to the facilities and drawbacks of modern journalism. It is not strange that there should be a distaste for poetic illusion in an era when economics, no longer the dismal science, becomes a more fascinating study than letters, while its teachers have their fill of undergraduate hero-worship. At last a change is perceptible at the universities, a strengthening in the faculties of English, a literary appetite that grows by what it feeds on. Letters, and that consensus of poetry and science foreseen by Wordsworth, may well be taken into account in any vaticination of the early future. Meanwhile, what do we have? Here as abroad and even if for the moment there appears no one of those excepted masters who of themselves re-create their age there continues an exercise of the poet's art by many whose trick of song persists under all conditions. Our afterglow is not discouraging. We have a twilight interval, with minor voices and their tentative modes and tones; still, the dusk is not silent, and rest and shadow with music between the dawns are a part of the liturgy of life, no less than passion and achievement.

The reader will hardly fail to observe special phases of the middle and later portions of this compilation. In my reviews of the home-school a tribute was paid to the high quality of the verse proffered by our countrywomen. This brought out a witticism to the effect that such recognition would savor less of gallantry if more than a page or two, in so large a volume, had been reserved for expatiation upon the tuneful sisterhood. That book was composed of essays upon a group of elder poets, among whom no woman chanced to figure. A single chapter embraced a swift characterization of the choir at large, and in this our female poets obtained proportional attention as aforesaid. The tribute was honest, and must be rendered by any one who knows the field. A succession of rarely endowed women-singers, that began - not to go back to the time of Maria Brooks -near the middle of the century, still continues unbroken. Much of their song has been exquisite, some of it strong as sweet; indeed, a notable portion of our treasure-trove would be missing if their space in the present volume were otherwise filled. Not that by force of numbers and excellence women bear off the chief trophies of poetry, prose fiction, and the other arts; thus far the sex's achievements, in a time half seriously styled "the woman's age," are still more evident elsewhere. It cannot yet be said of the Parnassian temple, as of the Church, that it would have no parishioners, and the service no participants, if it

were not for women.

The work of their brother poets is not emasculate, and will not be while grace and tenderness fail to make men cowards, and beauty remains the flower of strength. Yet for assurance of the fact that their contribution to the song of America is remarkable, and even more so than it has been - leaving out the work of Elizabeth Browning-to that of Great Britain, one need only examine its representation in this anthology. I am not so adventurous as to mention names, but am confident that none will be ungrateful for my liberal selections from the verse upon the quality of which the foregoing statement must stand or fall.

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Poetry being a rhythmical expression of emotion and ideality, its practice as a kind of artistic finesse is rightly deprecated, though even this may be approved in the young composer unconsciously gaining his mastery of technique. Our recent verse has been subjected to criticism as void of true passion, nice but fickle in expression, and having nothing compulsive to express. An international journal declares that " our poets are not thinking of what they shall say, for that lies close at hand, but of how they shall say it." On the whole, I suspect this to be more true abroad than here: our own metrists, if the less dexterous, are not without motive. There was said to be a lack of vigorous lyrics on the occasion of our war with Spain. The world-changing results of the war will find their artistic equivalent at sudden times when the observer, like Keats's watcher of the skies, sees the "new planet swim into his ken or at least finds this old planet made anew. Anglo-Saxon expansion or imperialism, call it as we will, has inspired one British poet, yet he is so much more racial than national that America claims a share in him. As for our poetry of the Spanish war, I think that sufficient will be found in my closing pages to indicate that our quickstep was enlivened by a reasonable measure of prosody. The Civil War was a different matter - preceded by years of excitement, and at last waged with gigantic conflicts and countless tragic interludes, until every home was desolate, North or South. Men and women still survive who—with Brownell, Willson, and others of the dead made songs and ballads that, as I have said, were known the world over. Why should these veteran celebrants decline upon lesser themes, or not stand aside and let the juniors have their chance? The latter had scarcely tuned their strings when the Spanish fight was over. Still more to the point is the fact that poets of all time have been on the side of revolt. Our own, however patriotic, when there was so little of tragedy and the tug of war to endure, felt no exultation in chanting a feeble enemy's deathsong.