Mr. Lowell can overflow with American
humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry
he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's
verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought,
his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland."
Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says:
"American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an
exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of
reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want.
Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of
fancy gathered and gummed down in the _hortus siccus_ of an anthology.
American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected
volumes of their works. Like their audience they have been unable to
resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They
may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard
from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks
of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. ....In fact, they
have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and
are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as
readily as if they were English born. Americans themselves confess to
a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence
so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English
literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried
it forward and developed it with an independent energy.
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