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A Mixed Bag from the Bookman of New York by Arthur Sherbo
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A Mixed Bag from the Bookman of New York
by
Arthur Sherbo

The editors of the Literary History of the United States write that "One of the most distinguished literary and critical journals during the first quarter of the twentieth century was the Bookman (1895-1933)."[1] In A History of American Magazines, Frank Luther Mott devotes ten pages to his account of the Bookman; I quote the one sentence pertinent to this article: "There were some articles in these early years by English critics—Clement K. Shorter, George Saintsbury, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang—and much attention to British books and writers."[2] Despite the articles by the English critics named and by others not named, and despite the great attention to British books and other writers, a great deal of the matter pertaining to these writers and their works, or writings about them, lies buried and forgotten. I intend to resurrect some of this forgotten matter, confessing at the same time that I have not exhausted all the possibilities offered in these volumes. I should add that I have also gleaned some Henry James items that will appear in The Henry James Review. And while my primary concern is with matters British, I reprint poems by John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant and letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ellen Glasgow, all also forgotten. As with others of my forays in the periodicals, I offer but little comment and proceed seriatim.

The first number of the Bookman (February 1895) contained an item with the title "From an Unpublished French Essay of Charlotte Brontë" (pp. 30-32) with the following headnote: "We are enabled to give the following extracts from an essay written by Charlotte Brontë, in French, on The Death of Moses. The essay, an exercise given her by M. Héger during her stay in Brussels, has not hitherto been published. After telling how Moses at the end of his life received the command of God to climb Mount Nebo, and how he blessed one by one the twelve tribes, the narrative proceeds:—" (1:30). One long paragraph in French is quoted, followed by this interpolation: "There comes an excursion into biblical criticism. Are we to interpret the narrative literally, and believe Moses to have been actually face to face with God, or as an allegory? Her answer is decisive," i.e. the account is not an allegory. The rest of the French is quoted and then there is an English "Translation of the Extracts." What is of more interest than the "unpublished French essay" is the light it throws on the regime in the Maison d' Èducation Pour


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les Jeunes Demoiselles sous la direction de Madame Heger-Parent, Rue d' Isabelle à Bruxelles where Charlotte and Emily were enrolled in 1842 and where Charlotte fell in love with Constantin Heger, Madame Heger's husband.[3] There is one other work by Charlotte which attests to her fluency in French, a translation into English verse of the first book of Voltaire's Henriade.[4]

The fairly recent (1983) Twayne Publishers' George du Maurier, written by Richard Kelly, does not list Shirley Brooks, editor of Punch, in the index, nor any others named in the following letter, except for a passing reference to William Frith. The letter has du Maurier's sketch of Calderon, Destouches, and himself on the third page. All three originals are on one page of the November 1896 number.

The following letter was written by George Du Maurier to Shirley Brooks when he was editor of Punch, in which he mentions the artists Frith, Calderon, and Destoches, Edmund Yates, and Bellew, the fashionable preacher of the day.

1 Albion Place, Ramsgate. Wednesday. Dear Shirley:

Ave! I have been a long time answering the last, but for the first few days I felt seedy and out of sorts, the usual effect of the first week of the seaside on me.

We are having a very jolly time with Frith, Calderon, Destoches et quibusdam aliis; and the sooner (the) Shirleys come the better; there are to be Yates and elle, and Bellew shall be hot i' the mouth, too. You and I will leave the giddy throng and retire to some solitary place where we can see the bathers; I have no doubt Frith will join us and Bellew (with an opera glass, which he will keep all to himself, with the usual selfishness of his cloth).

I congratulate you on your lines about Faraday. I am going to devote the rest of my leisure here to a black-edge poem about myself, and if you like I will put in a word for you.

I suppose that this will find you somewhere in Cornwall. Give my kind regards to the Cuddleips if you are with them. I am much afraid that your arrival here will be after our departure, from what Mr. Frith said. We stay here W. P. and D. V. for another fortnight.

I have been working hard all day and am more than usually idiotic, or I should write you a longer letter and paint the fascination of Ramsgate more glowingly.

illustration

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illustration
Leonée Ormond, in her definitive biography, George du Maurier (4:183) (1969), lists Calderon and Frith in her index, but not Destouches, Bellew, and the Cuddleips. The letter to Brooks may be dated August 1867, Ormond describing the Ramsgate holiday as of that date (pp. 191-192). There are four letters from Brooks to du Maurier quoted in George S. Layard, Shirley Brooks of Punch. His Life, Letters, and Diaries (1907); none from du Maurier to Brooks. Du Maurier had illustrated some of Brooks's works, the "Nursery Rhymes" in Punch being among those. I could not discover who the Cuddleips were. Should not a future biographer identify them?

James C. Johnson of Langley, Fairfax County, Virginia, wrote to the Bookman to make known that he had in his possession "the manuscript of a poem written by Thomas Moore during his visit to this country, which has never been published." Moore was hospitably treated by William Wischam, "a prominent figure in the State capitol of Virginia," and wrote the verses in Wischam's house. Johnson received the manuscript "from a grandchild of Mr. Wischam." He provided a facsimile of the manuscript and concluded his headnote by stating that the poem was now printed for the first time. The text of the facsimile is faithfully reprinted in the July 1898 number, and I have not found any subsequent printing of the poem.

Yes! I did say on the pine barren view,
As weary I journeyed the wild road along,
Virginia's rude soil I would glad bid adieu
And never remember Virginia in song.
I had passed through her towns and no converse had met,
Though in converse my heart knew its fondest delight.
And so firm in my breast had dear friendship been set,
That of friendship I thought I might challenge the right.
But soon was the change when to Richmond I came,
For the stranger here met with a heart like his own,
And he sighs that his verse will ne'er equal its fame,
And give it for friendship the highest renown.
In the house on the hill a free welcome he found,
The welcome that told him its friendship was true,

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And long shall the praise of its master resound,
While gratitude claims from his heart the just due.
O woman, here too both in beauty and sense
Thou are blest with the boon which art can not improve,
Thy looks and thy smiles such sweet favours dispense
That the heart of the stranger is tempted to love.
Then, Richmond, accept a stranger's farewell!
If the tear of regret of his love be the proof,
Long, long in his heart shall thy memory dwell,
And in age be the theme of the days of his youth.
(7:386-387)
Nine poems in the known canon of Moore's poems begin with the word "Yes." The account of Moore's visit to Virginia in 1803 in Terence de Vere White's Tom Moore, The Irish Poet (1977) makes no mention of the Wischams or, of course, of these verses. Indeed, his account (pp. 40-41) does not gibe with Moore's poem or with Johnson's headnote which contains a reference to the cold reception accorded Moore in Norfolk.

The next two pieces are letters by Robert Browning and by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first, in the June 1899 number, is reprinted from Moscheles's Fragments 1899 (pp. 217-218) and has escaped the notice of Browning scholars, despite the fact that Moscheles, a very well-known portrait painter, had painted a portrait of Browning. I quote the headnote as well as the letter.

Mr. Felix Moscheles's Fragments of an Autobiography, reviewed on another page, contains a number of fine photogravures of his well-known portraits. One of these is his excellent painting of Robert Browning. It was Browning, by the way, who gave him the only letter of introduction, which he has carefully kept, at the time of the painter's visit to America in 1883. "To this day," he says, "when I read it, it seems more like music than like epistolary prose to me." The letter was characteristic of the "best and kindest of men"; and ran thus:

19 Warwick Crescent, W.,
11th August, 1884.

To whomsoever it may concern: I have received such extraordinary kindness from Americans, and number so many of them among my friends, that it would seem invidious if I selected those whom I ventured to believe would oblige me were it possible. I shall therefore say, in the simplest of words, that should my dear friend, the Painter Moscheles, meet with any individual whose sympathy I have been privileged to obtain, whatever favour and assistance may be rendered to him, or his charming wife, will constitute one more claim to the gratitude of (9:309)[5]

Since Moscheles went to the United States in 1883, the date of Browning's letter should be 1883. Mrs. Browning's letter to Cornelius Matthews, editor of Graham's Illustrated Magazine, is one of a number of manuscript letters in the collection of William Harris Arnold, bibliophile and writer on bibliography.

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Mrs. Browning's letter, writes the editor of the Bookman in the April 1901 issue, "is of especial interest, as in it she expresses her great admiration for Tennyson. It is believed to be unpublished."

For the future you shall have a better correspondent, if indeed my writing to you oftener can appear to you a better thing—and your indulgence will help you to understand, in the meantime, how a very weak hand, such as mine is, may be overworked in the preparation for the printing of a book, until it is forced to deny itself to the claims of private letters. Also from the latter part of January to April I am apt to be more shaken than usual by the visitations of our English climate and the influence of the east winds.—I have a heart which runs like a racehorse, leaps like a hunter, & stands still like a mule, all in the course of one morning—so that I am sometimes forced to be quiet, & think of life, death & the wind. Upon the whole, my health does improve, I think, and two summers now together might renew me, I fancy. But I live upon a point,—a spire of a church—liable to precipitation every instant—which is no reason, however, that I shd write so much about it.

Yes,—I will explain how impossible it was for me to escape the mortification of refusing to see your friend Mr. Belford. He wrote a very courteous letter to me when he found that I cd not see him, & amused me exceedingly by inquiring into the personal history of my relation Mr. Tennyson. Leigh Hunt, he said, had intimated somewhere that he was my relation!—Now I remember that Leigh Hunt in his 'Last of the Violets' (which, by the way, has just been republished by Moxon, together with his other collected poems) had the goodness to say of me

'I took her at first for a sister of Tennyson's,' and that poetical relationship which after all I have no better claim to, I fear, than lies in Mr. Hunt's 'gentilnesse,' is the only one existing between us. Indeed I never saw Mr. Tennyson in my life. So far in reply to your question—which made me smile again. And I have thanks upon thanks for you besides, for your kind words added to the mistake. As to the mistake, if I could make out a hundred & ninety-ninth cousinship a hundred & ninety-nine times removed from Alfred Tennyson, I would snatch at it, and frame my pedigree. (13:153)

Mrs. Browning wrote at least three other letters to Matthews, on August 28, 1843, and on October 1 and November 14, 1844.[6] The reference to Leigh Hunt's collected poems "republished by Moxon" makes it possible to date the letter in the Bookman as sometime in 1844, the year Edward Moxon republished Hunt's Poetical Works.

While there is much material for literary biographers in the pages of the Bookman—interviews, letters to periodicals, reminiscences—I have limited myself to extracts from two pages (326-327) on Wilkie Collins from the December 1901 number.

A short paper entitled "Reminiscences of Wilkie Collins," by Olive Logan, was recently submitted to THE BOOKMAN, and with the writer's consent we are reprinting extracts from it here, because they seem to be especially adapted to this department of our magazine. Mrs. Logan met the novelist at a London luncheon party, and led him to talk of his impressions of the United States and his methods in the making of his books. While there is biographical ephemera students of Collins may find of interest, what is of more general importance are his views on some aspects of novel writing and on Emile Zola and some other novelists.

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An extract from Mrs. Logan's account then follows:

The novelist was asked if he approved of beginning a story with a sensation.

"Yes, if the sensation be a good one, and one which belongs naturally at the beginning of the story. Then, too, however uncertain an author may be concerning the exact conduct of the middle of the tale, he should always know how it is going to finish; and steadily working toward a prearranged termination, should always keep the action moving; that should never lag. Another thing: when you have interested your readers in one set of characters, it is most unwise to drop them and begin another chapter with 'We must now return to,' etc. The reader is disappointed at losing the people in whose fate he has become interested, and only by an effort takes up the thread of the new peoples' destinies, again to feel the same rebuff when he is forced to quit these new friends with 'We must now go back to,' etc. Another characteristic I deem essential to good novel writing is always to introduce a poetical side in the midst of every-day practicalities. It does not do to grovel in the dirt too much."

"Zola?"

"True; but the taste is ephemeral. Victor Hugo, whom I esteem the greatest poet France ever produced, though not its greatest novelist, will be read a hundred years hence, when all the race of Zolas is forgotten."

"Do you read Daudet?"

"A little—not much. He is not so dreadful as Zola, but he is very bad. Both, and all their followers, are only imitators of the very worst features of Balzac, not one line of whose exquisite poetry and pathos they are capable of producing, however. I should like to see either Zola or Daudet try to write anything as beautiful as the death of Père Goriot, for instance. Oh, we have had these coarse writers in our English fiction, and they have had their day of success, too. Look at Smollett and Sterne; there is not a publisher in England who would risk the reproduction of their works, for they are dead, and nothing on earth can revive them, while edition after edition of The Vicar of Wakefield pours through the presses, and no novel of the day, even, is more widely read." (14:326-327)

Biographies of Collins would have been enriched by these reminiscences of Mrs. Logan's, actress and writer and lecturer on the theater. While Balzac is quite properly mentioned as Collins's hero, and Victor Hugo, another French writer whom Collins admired greatly, is also accorded mention, there is nothing in the biographies about Zola and Sterne. Collins's views of the dullness of Daudet's novels and the excellence of The Vicar of Wakefield are corroborated in Kenneth Robinson's Wilkie Collins: A Biography (1952), pp. 289 and 293-294. And then, of course, of much greater importance than these critical opinions, is Wilkie Collins on his methods of composing fiction.

One article in the October 1903 Bookman bears the eye-catching title "Confessions of a Literary Quill-Driver." The piece is an autobiographical sketch by Eugene Lemoine Didier (1838-1913), author, publisher, critic, bibliophile, and editor. Didier, not one to hide his light under a bushel, made the most of the occasion, being afforded some fourteen long columns of the periodical (pp. 135-142). What is germane, however, is the answer Oliver Wendell Holmes gave to Didier's youthful letter, "telling him [Holmes] with easy assurance, that I was well-fitted by my tastes, education and accomplishments —(I was a college-bred shorthand writer with literary aspirations) for the


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position of amanuensis to a literary man, and suggested that, perhaps, he might require my services; but, if he did not, would he be so kind as to recommend me to some one who did; also to use his influence to open a way for me to some good magazine that paid well," adding that he "did not expect to be treated with cold indifference, but with kindness and sympathy" (p. 135). He had the good grace to characterize Holmes's answer as "very kind." Holmes wrote,

Boston, December 6, 18—. Dear Sir:

—I regret that it is not in my power to direct you to any place of employment such as you desire. In a city like this the crowding to all such employments is very great and there are a very few situations to be divided among a great number of applicants. As for myself, I am not (as I am often supposed to be) an editor, and have no writing to do which I am not competent to do myself with a little occasional aid from members of my own family. I regret not to be able to give you encouragement as to employment in Boston, but the truth is there is next to none of the kind you mention, as most of our writers are as poor as rats themselves and no more able to keep an amanuensis than they are to set up a coach and six.

I do not even know how to advise you beyond this simple counsel which I have occasionally given to young aspirants:

If you think you have literary talents, write something for the best paper or magazine you can get into, keep to one signature, and you will be found out by a public which is ready to pay the highest price for almost every kind of literary ability. If you do not think you can make a reputation, why not become a reporter for a newspaper? At any rate you stand a much better chance of finding occupation at home, where you are known, than among strangers. I do not "turn from your petition with cold indifference," but it is utterly out of my power to do more than give you these few words of friendly advice.

Yours very truly,
O. W. Holmes. (18:135-136)

"As the good Doctor did not suggest the probability of getting an opening for me in any 'magazine that paid well,'" wrote Didier, quoting himself, "as I had requested him to do, I had to do the best I could for myself, which was what others have done before and since" (p. 136). He concluded his article by listing the periodical articles he had written and the sums he had earned for each ((pp. 141-142).

The August 1904 Bookman posed a number of questions to authors and to illustrators "about the value of illustrating novels" as "illustrators have in many cases been severely criticized because they do not seem to have read the text of the stories which they illustrate, and in consequence have made some queer 'breaks'" (p. 348). One of the authors asked to reply to the four questions posed to them was Ellen Glasgow. Her answer was brief and to the point, briefer than the answers of Winston Churchill, George Barr McCutcheon, Josephine Daskam Bacon, and Nancy Huston Banks:

To the Editors of The Bookman:

Gentlemen: In reply to the questions you ask in your letter of April the 6th, I would say that I care very little for illustrations in my books—or, for that matter, in any of my favourite books by other writers. The only novel I can recall which seemed to me perfectly interpreted by the pictures was the English edition of "Resurrection."


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Whether or not illustrations add to the popularity of a book I am in no way able to judge. This is a question for a publisher. No, I have never found that an artist was able to reproduce my own mental image of a character, but it seems unreasonable to expect this since, of course, the same words convey totally different impressions to two different minds. To the last question I can answer "yes." So far as my experience permits me to express an opinion, I believe that the artist generally reads the book very carefully. Where he differs from the author is, after all, in a distinct—one may say diverging point of vision. Very truly yours,

Ellen Glasgow. (19:349-350)

Resurrection is, of course, the novel by Tolstoi, a writer for whose works Miss Glasgow had the highest admiration. E. Stanley Godbold, Jr. writes that "before 1900 she [Miss Glasgow] discovered Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book she quickly decided was the greatest novel ever written."[7] An illustrated edition of Resurrection was published by T. Y. Crowell of New York in 1899. I have not seen a copy.

The Complete Verse of Hilaire Belloc (1970) includes a poem simply titled "The Author" (pp. 224-226), which, bare of any comment, loses the cream of the jest. Part of a disparaging discussion of the American Who's Who in the July 1904 Bookman is the following, necessary for an appreciation of the joke.

In England also there is a tendency to take the people in Who's Who a little too seriously, and Mr. Belloc has hit them off in the following:

"DONE INTO VERSE."
A Suggestion for a Rhymed "Who's Who."

Keanes, Herbert. B. 1846. The son of Lady Jane O'Hone and Henry Keanes, Esq., of 328, St. James's Square, and "The Nook," Albury. Clubs: Beagles, Blues, Pitt, Palmerston, the Walnut Box, the Two-and-Two's, etc. Education: Private tuition, Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Has sat for Putticombe, in Kent, 1885-1892. Nephew and heir of the Right Hon. the Earl of Ballycairn. Occupation: Literature, political work, management of estate, etc. Has written: "Problems of the Poor," "What, indeed, is Man?" "Flowers and Fruit" (a book of verse), "Is there a Clifford?" "The Future of Japan," "Musings by Killarney's Shore," "The Ethics of Jean-Paul," and "Nero." Is a strong Protectionist and a broad Churchman. Recreations: Social. (19:444)

The poem follows, the text the same as that in the Complete Verse, but with marginal notations imitating the various sections of a typical Who's Who entry. Thus, the fifth stanza is labelled "Parentage"; the sixth, seventh and eighth, "Education"; the ninth, "Clubs"; the tenth, "Career"; the eleventh, "Occupation"; the twelfth, "Works"; and the last, "Recreations, etc." Only now can the poem be enjoyed as it was meant to be.

Walter Jerrold, who wrote on and edited much English literature (some fourteen columns in NUC), including literature of the eighteenth century, offered "A New Found Poem of Oliver Goldsmith's" to the editors of the Bookman who reprinted it in the November 1914 number. The article is not listed in the bibliography of secondary works on Goldsmith; the poem, Goldsmith's


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or not, was either not known to Arthur Friedman, editor of Goldsmith's works, or rejected by him. I quote Jerrold's explanatory paragraph, the poem, and Jerrold's concluding remarks.

The following lines have been found in an old close-packed scrap-book. This scrap-book—the completion of which is noted as having been made on November 21, 1812—consists of an extraordinary medley of three or four thousand cuttings from newspapers and magazines of the preceding sixty or seventy years, but the Goldsmith item has no indication of the place or date of its appearance. It runs as follows:

VERSES
Written by the late Dr. Goldsmith
Addressed to A Friend
O Firm in virtue, as of soul sincere,
Lov'd by the muse, to friendship ever dear!
Amongst the thousand ills of thousand
climes,
To name the worst that loads the worst of
times,
Is sure a task unpleasing to pursue,
Trackless the maze, uncertain is the clue;
The Ruling Passion still by all confess'd,
The master key that opes each private breast
Here fails; this darling child of nature's
school
Submits to custom's more resistless rule.
Should I recount the vast unnumber'd train,
Subjects or Vice of Folly's motley reign;
A heedless multitude, a giddy throng,
The theme of satire, and the scorn of song!
To scan their wild excesses, or to name
Their crimes would put the modest must to
shame.
What if we rove where rigid winter reigns,
O'er Zembla's wastes or Lapland's dreary
plains;
Where Lux'ry yet has no soft art displayed,
Where yet Refinement never raised her head;
Where no choice stores the steril lands afford,
But rear alike the reindeer and his lord;
O'er moss-grown deserts these content to
stray,
Those wait in caves the wish'd return of
day;
Yet Nature feeds them, yet alike they prove
The gracious hand of all sustaining love:
How high joy sparkles on each savage face
When bright'ning ether calls them to the
chase,
Well may their hearts with purest transports
glow,

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Few are their wants and small their source
of woe;
Yet may her pow'r endeavour to controul
That leading vice which animates the whole.
While chief amongst the dissipated train,
The soft-ey'd Lux'ry holds her magic reign;
Alas! what refuge can fair Virtue find
The soul corrupt, what laws, what ties can
[bind?]
Us'd to deceive and tutor'd to beguile,
Death in her charms and ruin in her smile;
Like some trim harlot, while the idle stands
And binds our youth in Philistean bands.
'Tis she that bids enervate arts arise,
That swells the dome to emulate the skies,
That fills the city and the crowded port,
That bids ten thousands to the mart resort;
While Want, that meagre looking fiend, invades
The rural seats and hospitable shades;
While the poor peasant the sad change deplores,
In secret pines, or quits his native shores,
Seeks better seats in other climes to gain
Or sink at once beneath the whelming main.
Is not Refinement still the source of care,
Ev'n to the best that breathe the vital air?
Ev'n Learning's self corrupted by her art,
The mind enlarging oft depraves the heart;
How small the gain improvement can bestow,
When taste refin'd but brings refined woe.
O sweet Simplicity, celestial maid,
Still at thy shrine my artless vows are paid,
Do thou and Nature still direct my way,
Who follow Nature cannot go astray;
Nor let the great, nor let the grave despise
The humbler blessings from thy reign that
rise:
No joys like thine from pomp or learning
springs,
The boast of schoolmen, or the pride of
kings!
Whilst our soft sons an hapless race remain,
In Lux'ry's lap condemned to every pain;
Ev'n in enjoyment pine their hours away,
And fall at last to anxious cares a prey.

Four rows of asterisks follow in the cutting from which this is copied, indicating either that the "Verses" ended thus abruptly or that but a portion of the whole is given. Further search may reveal the periodical in which the lines appeared and the date of their appearance. The scrap-book maker has trimmed his cuttings so close to the type that he has rarely left any means by which bibliographical facts can be ascertained. From the paper on which they are printed it can be gathered that the


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"Verses" were published shortly after Goldsmith's death, and there seems no reason to doubt their genuineness. (40:253-254)

While there can be no certainty about the authorship of the poem, comparison with works, both poetry and prose, of the accepted canon make it highly probable that the poem is Goldsmith's. His views on luxury were somewhat ambiguous, but not in The Deserted Village, where he fiercely inveighed against it. In Verses, lines 19-36 paint the grimmest picture of luxury which, as in The Deserted Village, forces peasants to emigrate. Lines 37-42, condemnatory of Refinement, echo Goldsmith's views, as recourse to the index in volume five of Arthur Friedman's edition of Goldsmith's works clearly demonstrates. The following portion of the Verses, those on Simplicity (ll. 43-50), stress, as does Goldsmith in other works, the difference between it and Refinement. Indeed, the movement from refinement to simplicity is seen in the twenty-fifth letter of The Citizen of the World: "the inhabitants of the country, from primitive simplicity soon began to aim at elegance, and from elegance proceeded to refinement." The opening sentence of "The History of Carolan, the last Irish Bard" reads, "There can be perhaps no greater entertainment than to compare the rude Celtic simplicity with modern refinement" (Works, II. 105 and III. 118). Line 45 of Verses, "Do thou [Simplicity] and Nature still direct my way," is close to words in one of Goldsmith's Prefaces, "it finds nature in almost every instance acting with her usual simplicity" (Works, V. 231). The praise of the rigors of a northern existence (hard primitivism) of the last 18 lines of Verses finds its counterpart in lines 165-198 of The Traveller. Line 55 of Verses, "Where no choice stores the steril lands afford," is close to line 169 of The Traveller, "No product here the barren hills afford."

Much of the diction in the Verses, or what I have termed poetic diction, with all its perjorative connotation, is common to scores, even hundreds, of eighteenth-century poets and poetasters and cannot, therefore, be offered in evidence. The absence of some of the words in the Verses, among them "enervate," "emulate," "dissipated," "whelming," "trackless," from the canon of Goldsmith's poetry, while it should be mentioned, is of no real significance. The poetic canon is slight, some 2700 lines (about the number of lines in the first three Books of Paradise Lost). And a reading of Goldsmith's prose reveals his use of most of those words.[8]

Finally, for I arbitrarily limited myself to the first fifty volumes of the periodical, here are the unpublished poems by John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant in the February 1917 number. The title of the article in which they appear is "A Literary Discovery. Unpublished Poems by Bryant, Whittier, Holmes and Gerrit Smith." The author, Charles T. White, wrote much on Lincoln, and his Bookman piece is listed in the NUC by virtue of the fact that one copy is enclosed in a slipcase in the Stanford University Library. As the poems are not in the collected poems of Whittier or Bryant,


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I reprint them now with a brief extract from White's explanatory headnote.

A relative of John Pierpont submitted "unpublished poems by William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Gerrit Smith sent to John Pierpont, poet, Unitarian clergyman, anti-slavery and temperance reformer, on his eightieth birthday anniversary, April 6, 1865, in the city of Washington."

TO JOHN PIERPONT
Health to thee, Pierpont, tried and honest,
In Freedom's fight among the soonest,
Who still as Freedom's minstrel croonest
Her triumph lays,
And like some hoary harper tunest
Thy hymns of praise!
Where's now the ban ecclesiastic?
Where they who played their first and last trick
To clog thy Christian steps elastic
And drown thy word
So keen, so trenchant and sarcastic,
A two-edged sword!
Where now are all the "unco' good,"
The Canaan-cursing "Brotherhood"?
The mobs they raised, the storms they brewed,
And pulpit thunder?
Sheer sunk like Pharaoh's multitude,
They've all "gone under"!
And thou, our noblest and our oldest,
Our Priest and Poet first and boldest,
Crowned with thy fourscore years beholdest
Thy country free.
O, sight to warm a heart the coldest,
How much more thee!
All blessings from the bounteous Giver
Be thine, on either side the river;
And when thy sum of life forever
The angels foot up,
Not vain shall seem thy long endeavour
All wrong to root up!
John G. Whittier.
Amesbury, 3d mo., 1865
TO THE REVD. DR. JOHN PIERPONT, ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY, APRIL 6, 1865
The mightiest of the Hebrew seers,
Clear-eyed and hale at eighty years,
From Pisgah saw the hills and plains
Of Canaan, green with brooks and rains.
Our poet, strong in frame and mind,
Leaves eighty well-spent years behind,

344

Page 344
And forward looks to fields more bright
Than Moses saw from Pisgah's height.
Yet be our Pierpont's voice and pen
Long potent with the sons of men,
And late his summons to the shore
Where he shall meet his youth once more.
April, 1865. William Cullen Bryant.
(44:633-634)
As a boy Whittier read Pierpont's Airs of Palestine; later he wished to see Pierpont run for governor of Massachusetts and for Congress; he wrote an earlier poem, "To J.P.," in 1883; and he was asked by Pierpont's widow to write her husband's biography.[9] Charles H. Brown's William Cullen Bryant (1971) does not mentoin Pierpont.

While it is admittedly anticlimactic, bibliographers, among them those of the old and new CBEL, would have done well to have included a number of articles in the Bookman. I list a very few: Chesterton on Matthew Arnold (16:116, 374), J.W. Hammerton on Barrie (6:116-123); Arthur Symons on Austin Dobson's poems (5:195), Arthur Waugh on Edmund Gosse (4:205-208), Edith Warton on Stephen Phillips's Ulysses (15:168-170); W.J. Dawson on Robert Louis Stevenson (4:35-39)—six among hundreds.

Notes

 
[1]

Fourth ed., rev. (1974), 2:62.

[2]

A History of American Magazines, vol. 4 (1885-1905) (1957), p. 433.

[3]

See Clement Shorter, The Brontës, Life and Letters, 2 vols. (1908), I, Chapter 11, "The Pensionnat Héger, Brussels," for this episode in Charlotte's life.

[4]

Published in 1917 with an introduction by Clement Shorter.

[5]

NCBEL does not list Moschelles's work in the entry for Robert Browning, although there are eight letters from Browning to him in New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. William Clyde deVane and Kenneth Leslie Knickerbocker (1950) and a number of references to Browning in the Fragments.

[6]

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols., ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (1899), 1:132-135, 198-200, 213-215.

[7]

Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within (1972), p. 43. See also Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction (1960), p. 201, for Miss Glasgow on Tolstoy.

[8]

Martin Furey, doctoral candidate in English at Michigan State University, is completing a computer analysis of the "Goldsmith" poem.

[9]

See Roland H. Woodwell, John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography (1985), pp. 10, 136, 141, 147, and 344 respectively. The poem "To J.P." is on p. 177 of the Cambridge edition of the Complete Poetical Works.