All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.
"Dove vai, povera foglia frale?"
To oblivion, by the briefest route, we think; and we find a pensive satisfaction in speculating upon the incidents of the journey. Shall any one challenge the wanderers in their flight, and seek to stay them? Shall they all reach an utter forgetfulness, and be resolved again into elemental milk and water, or shall one of them lodge in a dusty library, here and there, and, having ceased to be literature, lead the idle life of a curiosity? We imagine another as finding a moment's pause upon the centre-table of a country parlor. Perhaps a third, hastily bought at a railway station as the train started, and abandoned by the purchaser, may at this hour have entered upon a series of railway journeys in company with the brakeman's lamps and oil-bottles, with a fair prospect of surviving many generations of short-lived railway travellers. We figure to ourselves the heart-breaking desolation of a village-tavern, where, on the bureau under the mirror, to which the public comb and brush are chained, a fourth might linger for a while.
But in all the world shall anybody read one of these books? We fancy not even a critic; for the race so vigilantly malign in other days has lost its bitterness, or has been broken of its courage by the myriad numbers of the versifiers once so exultingly destroyed. Indeed, that cruel slaughter was but a combat with Nature,—
"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life";
and from the exanimate dust of one crushed poetaster she bade a thousand rhymesters rise. Yet one cannot help thinking with a shudder of the hideous spectacle of "Eros" in the jaws of Blackwood or the mortal Quarterly, thirty years ago; or of how ruthlessly our own Raven would have plucked the poor trembling life from the "Patriotic Poems," or "The Contest," or the "Poems."
The world grows wiser and better-natured every day, and the tender statistician has long since stayed the hand of the critic. "Why strike," says the gentle sage, "when figures will do your work so much more effectually, and leave you the repose of a compassionate soul? Do you not know that but one book in a thousand survives the year of its publication?" etc., etc., etc. "And then as to the infinite reproduction of the species," adds Science, "is Nature,
"'So careful of the single type?' But no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"
Patience! the glyptodon and the dodo have been dead for ages. Perhaps in a million years the poetaster also shall pass.
There is not much variety in frontier life, it must be confessed, though there is abundant adventure. A family likeness runs through nearly all histories of bear-fights, and one Indian-fight might readily be mistaken for another. So also bear-fighters and Indian-fighters are akin in character, and the pioneers who appear in literature leave a sense of sameness upon the reader's mind. Nevertheless, one continues to read of them with considerable patience, and likes the stories because he liked their ancestral legends when a boy.
Colonel Marcy's book offers something more than the usual attractions of the class to which it belongs; for it contains the history of his own famous passage of the Rocky Mountains in mid-winter, and notices of many frontiersmen of original and striking character (like the immortal Captain Scott), as well as much shrewd observation of Indian nature and other wild-beast nature. All topics are treated with perfect common-sense; if our soldierly author sometimes philosophizes rather narrowly, he never sentimentalizes, though he is not without poetry; and he is thoroughly
