Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876

Among my Books. (Second Series.) By James Russell Lowell. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The essays in this volume have an advantage over the former series published under the same title in the greater homogeneousness of the subjects. These are all poets, and with one exception English poets. They are poets, too, so to speak, of one family, unequal in rank, but having that resemblance of character which marks the higher and lower peaks of the same mountain-chain. All are epic and lyric, none in a proper sense dramatic. All are poets de pur sang, endowed by nature with the special qualities which cannot be confounded with those of a different order, and which forbid all doubt as to a true "vocation." Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, differing as they do in intellectual greatness and imaginative power, have all, as a distinguishing characteristic, that magic mastery over the harmonies of language which renders them responsive to subtle thoughts and ethereal conceptions. We find, however, no intimation that it is from any view of this kind that these essays have been collected, in a single group. It seems indeed more probable that they have simply been reprinted, in the order in which they first appeared, on being found of sufficient bulk to fill a volume of the desired size. Nor is it to be supposed that they indicate a particular course of study pursued with reference to their production. Though the author has had the works on which he comments beside him while he wrote, his long and close familiarity with them, as well as with the range of literature to which they belong, and with the principles and necessary details which help to illustrate them, is apparent throughout. Seldom, indeed, except in the case of a specialist devoting himself to some single field, has a critical panoply been more complete than that with which Mr. Lowell has armed himself. He discusses with equal learning and enthusiasm the profoundest and the minutest questions, mysteries of consciousness and niceties of metre and accent. Yet this laboriousness is curiously conjoined with something of a sybaritic tone, as of a taste cultivated to hyper-fastidiousness and courting a languorous enjoyment of flavors rather than the satisfaction of a keen appetite. There are in this book some passages in which the thought is so attenuated in the process of elaboration and figurative adornment that we are tempted to regard the whole as a mere effort of fancy, not as the expression of a serious conviction. It might have been appropriate and suggestive to characterize the poetry of Spenser by some allusions to the splendors and bizarreries of Venetian art; but when it is asserted as a proposition logically formulated and supported that "he makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian, but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory; and again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture,"—we are rather reminded of Venetian filigree than struck by the force and truth of the analogy. The statement that Spenser's style is Venetian is a puzzling one, and we are not much helped by the explanation given in a foot note, where Mr. Lowell, citing from the Muiopotmos a description of the rape of Europa, asks, "Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example?" and then adds, "Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the 'Commonwealth and Government of Venice' (1599) with this beautiful verse,

Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight.

Perhaps we should read 'lost.'"

We fail to get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell's accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age—the "last," i.e., latest, world—as Babylon and Rome, with which he compares her, had been the marvels of antiquity, of worlds that were indeed lost.6 Slips of this kind are probably rare, but a prevailing tendency to put forward loose or fanciful conjectures as ex-cathedrâ rulings detracts from the pleasure and instruction to be derived from these essays.

Books Received

The Excavation of Olympia, by Ernst Curtius; and Ernst Curtius, by Prof. Robert P. Keep, Ph. D. Republished from International Review. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

History of the United States. By J.A. Doyle, with Maps by Francis A. Walker. (Freeman's Historical Course for Schools.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Our National Currency and the Money Problem. By Hon. Amasa Walker, LL.D. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

A Hundred Years Ago, and other Poems. By Charles W.E. Siegel, A.B. Lancaster: Daily and Weekly Examiner.

History of the United States. (Centenary Edition.) Vol.I. By George Bancroft. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

The Christ of Paul; or, The Enigmas of Christianity. By George Reber. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer. By Charles Sotheran. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

The Summerfield Imbroglio: A Tale. By Mortimer Collins. Boston: Loring.

Dear Lady Disdain. By Justin McCarthy. New York: Sheldon & Co.

1

The word "Middle" is used here as a geographical term. German philologists arrange the dialects into two main groups—High (South) and Low (North), and prefix to each the terms Old, Middle and New to distinguish epochs in the growth of each. According to this nomenclature, Old = Early, Middle = Late-Mediæval, New = Modern. The word Middle is unfortunate, as it may designate either age or locality. It designates both locality and age in the text above—i.e., the late-mediæval form of Middle Germany. In full, it should be "Middle-Middle." The Meissen dialect, it may be added, was the one adopted by Luther, and is the basis of all modern book-German. (See Rückert's Gesch. der neuhochd. Sprache, pp. 168-178.)

2

The Friederichsstadt and Dorotheenstadt are those parts of the town with which the tourist is most familiar as places of residence and shopping; Cöln is the island on which stand the castle and the two museums; Old Berlin is the part beyond the Spree.

3

A proposition has been recently made to the Fairmount Park Commissioners by Colonel Frank W. Etting, a Philadelphia lawyer of well-known taste and culture, to fit up the Mount Pleasant mansion in the fashion of Colonial times, he having at his command a sufficient quantity of furniture, pictures, china, etc. for the proper representation of a house of the best sort in those days. It is to be hoped that this generous offer may meet with the attention it deserves, as such a memorial could scarcely fail to prove a great attraction to our Centennial visitors. Mount Pleasant is fortunately associated with the memories of better men than Benedict Arnold. The brave Major Macpherson built the house for his own occupancy before the Revolutionary war, and General Baron Von Steuben passed a part of his honorable retirement there, dating his letters humorously from "Belisarius Hall, on the Schuylkill."

4

See Letters and Papers relating to the Provincial History of Pennsylvania, by Mr. Thomas Balch.

5

Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

6

Here is the sonnet, that the reader may judge for himself:

"The antique Babel, Empresse of the East,Upreard her buildinges to the threatned skie;And second Babell, Tyrant of the West,Her ayry towers upraised much more high.But, with the weight of their own surquedry,They both are fallen, that all the earth did feare,And buried now in their own ashes ly:Yet shewing, by their heapes, how great they were.But in their place doth now a third appeare,Fayre Venice, flower of the last world's delight;And next to them in beauty draweth neare,But far exceedes in policie of right.Yet not so fayre her buildinges to beholdAs Lewkenor's stile that hath her beautie told."