GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
or basic strata of the Parnassus mountain—the emotional (yet here it occurs to me that these crop out again near the apex, as in some lofty dramatic outburst, like
Grief fills the room up of my absent child!)
and this household poem, without the factitious aid of a popular air, holds a place by its own music and the associations which it conveys.
Indeed, I am not sure that the present article was not suggested by a visit made one day to the rooms where a painter has translated into his own form of expression this and another of our simplest primary lyrics. Multitudes are now buying the pretty chromolithographs of Jerome Thompson's paintings of "The Old Oaken Bucket," and "Home, Sweet Home"; nor do I hesitate to say that few more grateful and attractive pictures, within the means of the average country-dweller, can hang upon his walls, than these truthful representations of the birth-place of Samuel Woodworth, and the "Sweet Home" of John Howard Payne.[1]
The last-named ditty, though still more obviously depending upon a sentiment, has a world of help from the air to which it was composed. Looking at the
- ↑ This, without discussion of the merits of the paintings or the good and evil effects of distributing their lithographic copies among the people. It seems to me, however, that Mr. Thompson's pictures have the feeling and suggestiveness of the songs for which they are named; and the colored prints are the most carefully finished of those yet produced in this country.
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