res in no way
remarkable. His power, says a critic, reminds me of some of the short
poems of Longfellow, where things in themselves most prosaic are flooded
with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul."{49} It is quite
certain that one may go farther in looking back upon the development of
our literature and can claim that this simplicity was the precise
contribution needed at that early and formative period. Literature in a
new country naturally tends to the florid, and one needs only to turn to
the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, or even Bancroft's "History of the
United States," to see how eminently this was the case in America.
Whatever the genius of Poe, for instance, we can now see that he
represented, in this respect, a dangerous tendency, and Poe's followers
and admirers exemplified it in its most perilous form. Take, for
instance, such an example as that of Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers of
Georgia, author of "Eonchs of Ruby," a man of whom Bayard Taylor wrote
in 1871, speaking of that period thirty years earlier, "that something
wonderful would come out of Chivers."{50} It is certain that things
wonderful came out of him at the very beginning, for we owe to him the
statement that "as the irradiancy of a diamond depends upon its
diaphanous translucency, so does the beauty of a poem upon its
rhythmical crystallization of the Divine Idea." One cannot turn a page
of Chivers without recognizing that he at his best was very closely
allied to Poe at his worst. Such a verse as the following was not an
imitation, but a twin blossom:--

"On the beryl-rimmed rebecs of Ruby
Brought fresh from the hyaline streams,
She played on the banks of the Yuba
Such songs as she heard in her dreams,
Like the heavens when the stars from their eyries
Look down through the ebon night air,
Where the groves by the Ouphantic Fairies
Lit up for my Lily Adair,
For my child-like Lily Adair,
For my heaven-born Lily Adair,
For my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair."

It is easy to guess that Longfellow, in his "North American Review"
article, drew from Dr. Chivers and his kin his picture of those
"writers, turgid and extravagant," to be found in American literature.
He farther says of them: "Instead of ideas, they give us merely the
signs of ideas. They erect a great bridge of words, pompous and
imposing, where there is hardly a drop of thought to trickle beneath. Is
not he who thus apostrophizes the clouds,