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By Root 16926 0

treated by the critics, and much injustice, in my opinion, was done to the poet. He seems to me to possess unusual vivacity of fancy and dexterity of expression, while his versification is remarkable for its accuracy, vigor, and even for its originality of effect. I might say, perhaps, rather more than all this, and maintain that he has imagination if he would only condescend to employ it, which he will not, or would not until lately — the word-compounders and quibble concoctors of Frogpondium [[Boston]] having inoculated him with preference for Imagination’s half sister, the Cinderella Fancy. Mr. Cranch has seldom contented himself with harmonious ­combinations of thought. There must always be, to afford him perfect satisfaction, a certain amount of the odd, of the whimsical, of the affected, of the bizarre. He is as full of absurd conceits as Cowley or Donne, with this difference, that the conceits of these latter are Euphuisms beyond redemption — flat, irremediable, self-contented nonsensicalities, and in so much are good of their kind; but the conceits of Mr. Cranch are, for the most part, conceits intentionally manufactured, for conceit’s sake, out of the material for properly imaginative, harmonious, proportionate, or poetical ideas. We see every moment that he has been at uncommon pains to make a fool of himself.

But perhaps I am wrong in supposing that I am at all in condition to decide on the merits of Mr. C.’s poetry, which is professedly addressed to the few. “Him we will seek,” says the poet —

Him we will seek, and none but him,

Whose inward sense hath not grown dim;

Whose soul is steeped in Nature’s tinct,

And to the Universal linked;

Who loves the beauteous Infinite

With deep and ever new delight,

And carrieth where’er he goes

The inborn sweetness of the rose,

The perfume as of Paradise —

The talisman above all price —

The optic glass that wins from far

The meaning of the utmost star —

The key that opes the golden doors

Where earth and heaven have piled their stores —

The magic ring, the enchanter’s wand —

The title-deed to Wonder-Land —

The wisdom that o’erlooketh sense,

The clairvoyance of Innocence.

This is all very well, fanciful, pretty and neatly turned — all with the exception of the two last lines, and it is a pity they were not left out. It is laughable to see that the transcendental poets, if beguiled for a minute or two into respectable English and common sense, are always sure to remember their cue just as they get to the end of their song, which, by way of salvo, they then round off with a bit of doggerel about “wisdom that o’erlooketh sense” and “the clairvoyance of Innocence.” It is especially observable that, in adopting the ­cant of thought, the cant of phraseology is adopted at the same instant. Can Mr. Cranch, or can anybody else, inform me why it is that, in the really sensible opening passages of what I have here quoted, he employs the modern, and only in the final couplet of goosetherumfoodle makes use of the obsolete terminations of verbs in the third person singular, present tense?

One of the best of Mr. Cranch’s compositions is undoubtedly his poem on Niagara. It has some natural thoughts, and grand ones, suiting the subject; but then they are more than half-divested of their nature by the attempt at adorning them with oddity of expression. Quaintness is an admissible and important adjunct to ideality — an adjunct whose value has been long misapprehended — but in picturing the sublime it is altogether out of place. What idea of power, of grandeur, for example, can any human being connect even with Niagara, when Niagara is described in language so trippingly fantastical, so palpably adapted to a purpose, as that which follows?

I stood upon a speck of ground;

Before me fell a stormy ocean.

I was like a captive bound;

And around

A universe of sound

Troubled the heavens with ever-quivering motion.

Down, down forever — down, down forever —

Something falling, falling, falling;

Up, up forever — up, up, forever,

Resting never,

Boiling up forever,

Steam-clouds