We have before had occasion to protest against Mr. Whittier’s carelessness in accents and rhymes, as in pronouncing “ly’ceum,” and joining in unhallowed matrimony such sounds as awn and orn, ents and ence.  We would not have the Muse emulate the unidiomatic preciseness of a normal school-mistress, but we cannot help thinking that, if Mr. Whittier writes thus on principle, as we begin to suspect, he errs in forgetting that thought so refined as his can be fitly matched only with an equal refinement of expression, and loses something of its charm when cheated of it.  We hope he will, at least, never mount Pega’sus, or water him in Heli’con, and that he will leave Mu’seum to the more vulgar sphere and obtuser sensibilities of Barnum.  Where Nature has sent genius, she has a right to expect that it shall be treated with a certain elegance of hospitality.

POETRY AND NATIONALITY[1]

[Footnote 1:  This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt.  The brief, concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.  Piatt died several years ago.  He was a great friend of William Dean Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.  A.M.]

One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned to our geographical pretensions.  Our rivers, forests, mountains, cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype and voice.  Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties, unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator breed.  By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung, the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time.  It was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its terms.  Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was impossible?  And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.

Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere outside of the life that lay immediately about him.  Life in its large sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is almost inappreciable.  Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it.  The Iliad and the Odyssey paint manners that are only