I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines,
to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination,
and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that
feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the
splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted--both
poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run
their course--to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments--the
very pomp and dazzle of the sunset!
Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in
twilight--but 'tis the twilight of the dawn.
Notes:
[35] A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any
great poem?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some
university in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper and
made a note of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated
for a long season, the matter slipp'd away, and I have never been able
since to get hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of
the discussion, nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay
or discussion, nor can I now remember the place. It may have been
Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian
can give particulars. I think it was in 1872.
[36] In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of
William Cullen Bryant.
[37] Whatever may be said of the few principal poems--or their best
passages--it is certain that the overwhelming mass of poetic works,
as now absorb'd into human character, exerts a certain constipating,
repressing, indoor, and artificial influence, impossible to
elude--seldom or never that freeing, dilating, joyous one, with which
uncramp'd Nature works on every individual without exception.
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