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Updated: June 3, 2025
It must, then, be a very noble love: Augustus, Pollio, Varius, Maecenas, the greatest statesmen of their day, they were verse-makers. Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker; Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt, all were verse-makers.
Verse-making did not retard no doubt the qualities essential to verse-making accelerated their race to the goal of fame. What great painters have been verse-makers! Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Rosa" and Heaven knows how may other great names Kenelm Chillingly might have proceeded to add to his list, if the minstrel had not here interposed.
Verse-making did not retard no doubt the qualities essential to verse-making accelerated their race to the goal of fame. What great painters have been verse-makers! Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Rosa" and Heaven knows how may other great names Kenelm Chillingly might have proceeded to add to his list, if the minstrel had not here interposed.
But these men were, at best, only graceful versifiers, and Bryant loomed so far above them and the other verse-makers of his time that he was hailed as a miracle of genius, a sort of Parnassan giant whose like had never before existed. We estimate him more correctly to-day as a poet of the second rank, whose powers were limited but genuine.
The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other!
And, of course, so far as any of them can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort. They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as well.
It must, then, be a very noble love: Augustus, Pollio, Varius, Maecenas, the greatest statesmen of their day, they were verse-makers. Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker; Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt, all were verse-makers.
Twenty years ago there were fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light literature consisted of Ellwood's Davideis and the selections of Lindley Murray's English Reader, it is not improbable that we were in a condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our village newspaper.
As with all new forms of life, the second stage was an imitative one, and the few outside the clergy who essayed writing at all copied the worst models of the Johnsonian period. Verse was still welcome, and the verse-makers of the colonial time were many. Even venerable clergymen like Peter Bulkley gave way to its influence.
A wild, sickening sense of what might have been struggled up: she thrust it down, she had kept it down all night; the old pain should not come back, it should not. She did not think of the love she had given up as a dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the reality of her life.
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