art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There
are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test
of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry,
both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending
with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental
spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in
Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo
and Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican
poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this
side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang
"Dixie" as well as in their antagonists who chanted "John Brown's Body"
and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic;" but this passion has not yet
lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the
sentiment of union was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons
and orations, even in a short story--Edward Everett Hale's "Man Without
a Country"--than by most of the poets who attempted to glorify that
theme.

Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and
sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no
adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music
of "The Star-Spangled Banner" fully express what we feel while we are
trying to sing it, as the "Marseillaise," for example, does express the
very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion
we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric
and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and
not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has
often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has
passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell,
Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe's
"Battle Hymn," scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no
other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical
glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it
with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving
in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's "Reply to Hayne"
thirty years before, the idea of union made "simple, sensuous,
passionate." No American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life
in t