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STEDMAN. 1833

Edmund Clarence Stedman, son of a poetess (Mrs. E. C. Kinney), is a banker, a poet, and a critic. Some of his poems show a very high order of genius. Among the best are— The Doorstep, Pan in Wall Street, At Twilight, John Brown of Ossawatomie, The Blameless Prince, and Alice of Monmouth.

In his volume entitled The Victorian Poets, he has shown himself to be a critic of fine discrimination, and a writer of excellent prose.

EXTRACT.

O heart of Nature, beating still

With throbs her vernal passion taught her,
Even here, as on the vine-clad hill,

Or by the Arethusan water!

New forms may fold the speech, new lands
Arise within these ocean portals,
But Music waves eternal wands,-
Enchantress of the souls of mortals.

Pan in Wall Street.

HOLLAND. 1819-1881.

Dr. J. G. Holland, late editor of Scribner's Monthly, was one of the most popular, if not one of the greatest, of American writers. His poems, though condemned by many critics, have had an immense sale. The principal ones are Bitter-Sweet, Kathrina, and Mistress of the Manse. They are very faulty in construction, but contain many exquisite lines. On the whole, his prose works are better than his poems. Some of the best are Gold Foil, Lessons in Life, Plain Talks, Timothy Titcomb's Letters, Arthur Bonnicastle, and Sevenoaks. He died in 1881.

EXTRACTS.
I.

Life evermore is fed by death,

In earth and sea and sky,

And that a rose may breathe its braath,

Something must die.

Bitter-Sweet

II.

Thus it is over all the earth;
That which we call the fairest,
And prize for its surpassing worth,
Is always rarest.

III.

Bitter-Sweet.

Who can tell what a baby thinks?
Who can follow the gossamer links
By which the manikin feels his way
Out from the shore of the great unknown,
Blind and wailing and alone

Into the light of day?

Out from the shore of the unknown sea,
Tossing in pitiful agony;

Of the unknown sea that reels and rolls,
Specked with the barks of little souls,-
Barks that were launched on the other side,
And slipped from Heaven on an ebbing tide?
Cradle Song from Bitter-Sweet.

HARTE. 1837

Francis Bret Harte was born at Albany, N. Y., in 1837. At the age of seventeen he went to California, where he became successively a school-teacher, a miner, a printer, and an editor. He is now a resident of New York.

Mr. Harte won his great reputation by his poems and sketches descriptive of life among the California miners. Most of them are in the peculiar dialect of these miners, and represent the crime and the romance, the roughness and the tenderness, of this peculiar phase of American life, with a fidelity and skill which command universal admiration.

Of his dialect poems the following are excellent examples: The Heathen Chinee, The Society upon the Stanislaus, In the Tunnel, Fim, and Chiquita. Of those in pure English these are among the best: Dickens in Camp, The Mountain Heartsease, Concha, A Greyport Legend, and A Newport Romance.

Among the best of his prose sketches are- The I uck of Roaring Camp, The Idyl of Red Gulch, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and

Tennessee's Partner. He has since published some regular novels, among them Gabriel Conroy and The Ship of '49.

EXTRACT.

Which I wish to remark,

And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Plain Language from Truthful Fames.

MILLER. 1841

Cincinnatus Heine Miller, known as Joaquin Miller, was born in Indiana in 1841. When ten years old he went with his parents to Oregon. He spent three or four years on a farm, and then went to California. After fifteen years of wild and adventurous life among miners, Indians, and filibusters, he studied law and became a judge. In 1870 he went to London, where, after much difficulty in finding a publisher, he brought out a volume of poems, which made him famous on both continents. He now resides at Oakland, California.

His principal poems are contained in the volumes entitled Songs of the Sierras, Songs of the Sun-Lands, and The Ship in the Desert. Of individual poems probably The Arizonian, The Isles of the Amazons, and Burns and Byron are among the best.

Mr. Miller's poems are often unnatural and extravagant, but there is in them a certain wild freedom and passion in perfect keeping with the life and scenery from which he drew his inspiration, with a tropical richness of imagery, and an almost cloying sweetness of rhythm and rhyme.

EXTRACT.

In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,

I hesitate to draw a line

Between the two, where God has not.

Burns and Byron.

PAUL H. HAYNE. 1831-1886.

Paul Hamilton Hayne (nephew of Senator Hayne) was born in Charleston, S. C., in 1831. He came of an ancient and distinguished family, and shed new lustre by his character and genius on an already illustrious name. He died at " Copse Hill," near the city of Augusta, Georgia, in 1886.

Mr. Hayne published several volumes of poetry, of which the best, probably, is the one entitled Legends and Lyrics. Of his separate poems the following are worthy of special mention : Ode to Sleep, Avolio, Beyond the Potomac (a war-lyric), The Wife of Brittany, Daphles, and Pre-Existence. His poems show him to be possessed of a lively fancy, a fine perception of natural beauty, great delicacy of feeling, and grace and fluency of expression.

EXTRACT.

Ah me! how regally the heavens look down,
O'ershadowing beautiful autumnal woods,
And harvest-fields with hoarded incense brown,
And deep-toned majesty of golden floods,

That lift their solemn dirges to the sky,

To swell the purple pomp that floateth by !—October.

HENRY TIMROD. 1831-1867.

Henry Timrod was born in Charleston, S. C., in 1831, and died in 1867, at the early age of thirty-six. Some of his martial lyrics, such as A Cry to Arms and Carolina, are as terse and vehement as a Greek war-cry; but it is in his idyllic poems, such as Spring in Carolina and Katie, that his poetic genius appears in its finest form. He is exquisitely alive to the beauties of nature, and paints them with great delicacy and fine poetic ap preciation. His longest poem is A Vision of Poesy.

EXTRACT.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies;
There is no holier spot of ground

Than where defeated valor lies,

By mourning beauty crowned.—Decoration Ode.

OTHER POETS OF THIS AGE.

RICHARD H. DANA (1787-1879), author of The Buccaneer, a poem, and Lectures on Shakspeare.

JOHN PIERPONT (1785-1866), author of Airs of Palestine, Passing Away, E Pluribus Unum, and other lyrics.

JAMES G. PERCIVAL (1795-1856), a very learned man, author of three volumes of miscellanies entitled Clio. One of his most popular poems is To Seneca Lake.

JOHN HOWARD PAYNE (1792-1852), a dramatist; author of Brutus and other plays, and of Home, Sweet Home.

CHARLES SPRAGUE (1791-1875), a banker and poet, author of Ode on Shakspeare, The Family Meeting, The Winged Worshippers, etc.

GEORGE P. MORRIS (1802-1864), an excellent song writer, long editor of The Home Journal, author of My Mother's Bible, Woodman, Spare that Tree, etc.

N. P. WILLIS (1806-1867), editor, with Morris, of The Home Journal, and author of twenty-seven volumes of poetry and prose. Of his poetry The Death of Absalom, Hagar in the Wilderness, and other Scriptural Poems, are the best; of his prose, Letters from under a Bridge, People I have Met, Life Here and There, Famous Persons and Places, etc.

ALFRED B. STREET (1811-1881), of Albany, N. Y., author of Frontenac, The Gray Forest Eagle, and other poems; also of Forest Pictures in the Adirondacks, etc., in prose.

R. H. STODDARD (1825- ), a magazinist, and author of several volumes of poetry and prose. Among his well-known poems are Burial of Lincoln, A Hymn to the Beautiful, The Burden of Unrest, Never Again, On the Town, etc.

WALT WHITMAN (1819- ), by some regarded as a great poet; by others, as no poet at all. His so-called poems are without metre or rhyme. Author of Drum Taps, Leaves of Grass, and Two Rivulets.

II. PROSE WRITERS OF THE NATIONAL AGE.

IRVING. 1783-1859.

Washington Irving, the most popular of American prose writers, was born in New York in 1783; studied law, but did not practice it; engaged in mercantile pursuits, but without success; passed twenty-three years of his life in Europe, four of them as Minister

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