oneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at Auction. Sea-shore Memoirs. Passage to India. Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings for Home. 9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. CHAPTER VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861. A GENERATION has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily coming forward to take their places. know it only by tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion, except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern side, Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper's American Civil War, 1868–70; on the southern side Alexander H. Stephens's Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, and E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause. These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan-in some instances passionately partisan. A storehouse of materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection, the Rebellion Record; in numerous regimental histories and histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's Army of the Potomac; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the "war papers," now publishing in the Century magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both sides. The war had its poetry, its humors and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others; and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's southern ballad, Maryland, My Maryland, sung to the old college air of Lauriger Horatius, and the grand martial chorus of John Brown's Body, an old Methodist hymn, to which the northern armies beat time as they went "marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "northern scum," the cheap insults of the southern newspaper press. To furnish the John Brown chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Battle Hymn of the Republic, a noble poem, but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and homecomings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who had gone to the war, or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and heart-breaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were Kate Putnam Osgood's Driving Home the Cows, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's All Quiet Along the Potomac, Forceythe Willson's Old Sergeant, and John James Piatt's Riding to Vote. Of the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent for the Charleston Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor of the South Carolinian, at Columbia. Sherman's "march to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is Katie, but more to our present purpose are Charleston-written in the time of blockade-and the Unknown Dead, which tells "Of nameless graves on battle plains, When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, The Blue and the Gray, which spoke the word of reconciliation and consecration for North and South alike. Brownell, whose Lyrics of a Day and War Lyrics were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on whose flag-ship, the Hartford, he was present at several great naval engagements, such as the "Passage of the Forts below New Orleans, and the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the Bay Fight. |