The regiments all pass by, "With a soldier's quiet pride "March on your last brave mile! And look on the kind, rough face. It never had known erewhile, "Close round him, hearts of pride! Our Father is not alone! For the Holy Right ye died, And Christ, the Crucified, Waits to welcome His own." III In the bead-roll of the makers of literature whom by birth or adoption the State of Connecticut may claim as her own, Henry Howard Brownell should have a sure and honored place. The list is neither short nor insignificant: Mrs. Sigourney, Percival, and Halleck, in the earlier century, Stedman, Warner, Clemens, Bushnell, and Mrs. Stowe, in later days, are a few of the names that spring to the mind. But in all the divisions of letters naught is rarer than the true poet; and such an one is to be recognized in Brownell, recognized not only by the partial eye of local pride, but also by the colder scrutiny of critical opinion at a time when the first magnetism of the singer's theme begins to lose its magic. His was not impeccable verse; lines that limp and figures that fail are by no means absent from his writing. But he had a great subject, it took hold on him, and he was consecrate to it; his were thought, elevation, invention, imagination, and an almost unique opportunity for realism, in the right meaning of that poor, distorted word. And, withal, he was a truth-loving, high-minded, fearless gentleman. As a result, he has left a slender sheath of lyrics which so faithfully transcribe certain aspects of the Civil War, and are so vital with its atmosphere and feeling, that it is hard to see how they will miss of a lodg ment in the native anthology. Certainly no one else has so well performed just this service. There rings through his song that love of country which makes the Horatian quotation, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," one of the hackneyed lines of Latin poetry. In his most largely conceived pieces one associates him instinctively (at least in spirit and quality) with the very few native singers Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, Lanier — who have chanted national issues with elevation and adequate voice. Mr. Stedman, who calls Brownell " that brave, free singer," points out with his customary keen perception the "halflikeness" of the poet to Ticknor, “sounding the war-cry of the South." They are, in sooth, kinsmen: each was born a poet; each saw his cause to be holy; and each grew impassioned and impressive with the burden of his utterance. And we, a generation later (since there is no sectionalism in genius), can love the song and the spirit of them both, burying their difference of belief under the tranquillizing years, while we drop upon their far-separated graves the memorial flowers of a united patriotism. |