Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar
Shakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car,
Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird
Fast in its place each many-angled word.
In his own "Poetry: a Metrical Essay" he marks how
The proud heroic, with its pulse-like beat,
Kings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;
The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,
Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,
Where waves on waves in long succession pour,
Till the ninth billow melts along the shore.
His management of the "proud heroic," in serious and sustained efforts reminds us more of Campbell than any other poet we can name. But it is in that school of graceful badinage and piquant satire, represented
among ourselves by such writers as Frere, and Spencer, and Mackworth Praed, that Dr. Holmes is most efficient. Too earnest not to be sometimes a grave censor, too thoughtful not to introduce occasionally didactic passages, too humane and genial a spirit to indulge in the satirist's scowl, and sneer, and snappish moroseness, he has the power to be pungent and mordant in sarcasm to an alarming degree, while his will is to temper his irony with so much good-humour, fun, mercurial fancy, and generous feeling, that the more gentle hearts of the more gentle sex pronounce him excellent, and wish only he would leave physic for song.
In some of his poems the Doctor is not without considerable pomp and pretension—we use the terms in no slighting tone. "Poetry: a Metrical Essay," parts of "Terpsichore," "Urania," and "Astræa," "Pittsfield Cemetery," "The Ploughman," and various pieces among the lyrical effusions, are marked by a dignity, precision, and sonorous elevation, often highly effective. The diction occasionally becomes almost too ambitious—verging on the efflorescence of a certain English M.D. yclept Erasmus Darwin—so that we now and then pause to make sure that it is not the satirist in his bravura, instead of the bard in his solemnity, that we hear. Such passages as the following come without stint:
If passion's hectic in thy stanzas glow,
Thy heart's best life-blood ebbing as they flow;
If with thy verse thy strength and bloom distil,
Drained by the pulses of the fevered thrill;
If sound's sweet effluence polarise thy brain,
And thoughts turn crystals in thy fluid strain—
Nor rolling ocean, nor the prairie's bloom,
Nor streaming cliffs, nor rayless cavern's gloom,
Need'st thou, young poet, to inform thy line;
Thy own broad signet stamps thy song divine![1]
Fragments of the Lichfield physician's "Botanic Garden," and "Loves of the Plants," seem recalled—revised and corrected, if you will—in lines where the Boston physician so picturesquely discriminates
The sickle's harvest with its velvet flush;
- ↑ Urania.
