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Henry B. Hirst.
 Mr. HENRY B. HIRST,
of Philadelphia, has, undoubtedly, some merit as a poet. His sense of
Beauty
is keen, although indiscriminative; and his versification would be
unusually
effective but for the spirit of hyperism, or exaggeration, which seems
to be the ruling feature of the man. He is always sure to overdo a good
thing; and, in especial, he insists upon rhythmical effects until they
cease to have any effect at all — or until they give to his
compositions
an air of mere oddity. His principal defect, however, is a want
of constructive ability: — he can never put together a story
intelligibly.
His chief sin is imitativeness. He never writes anything which
does
not immediately put us in mind of something that we have seen better
written
before. Not to do him injustice, however, I here quote two stanzas from
a little poem of his, called "The Owl". The passages italicized are
highly
imaginative:
When twilight fades and evening
falls
Alike on tree and tower,
And Silence, like a pensive maid,
Walks round each slumbering bower:
When fragrant flowerets fold their leaves,
And all is still in sleep,
The hornéd owl on moonlit wing
Flies from the donjon keep.
And he calls aloud — "too-whit! too-whoo!"
And the nightingale is still,
And the pattering step of the hurrying hare
Is hushed upon the hill ;
And he crouches low in the dewy grass
As the lord of the night goes by,
Not with a loudly whirring wing
But like a lady's sigh. |
No one, save a poet at heart, could have conceived
these
images; and they are embodied with much skill. In the "pattering step"
&c., we have an admirable "echo of sound to sense"; and the title,
"lord of the night", applied to the owl, does Mr Hirst infinite credit
— if the idea be original with Mr. Hirst. Upon the whole, the
poems
of this author are eloquent (or perhaps elocutionary) rather than
poetic
— but he has poetical merit, beyond a doubt — merit which his
enemies
need not attempt to smother by any mere ridicule thrown upon the man.
To my face, and in the presence of my
friends,
Mr.
H. has always made a point of praising my own poetical efforts; and,
for
this reason, I should forgive him, perhaps, the amiable weakness of
abusing
them anonymously. In a late number of "The Philadelphia Saturday
Courier,
" he does me the honor of attributing to my pen a ballad called
"Ulalume"
which has been going the rounds of the press, sometimes with my
name to it, sometimes with Mr. Willis's, and sometimes with no name at
all. Mr. Hirst insists upon it that I wrote it, and >it is
just
possible that he< >>I presume<< knows more about the
matter than
I do myself. Speaking of a particular passage, he says:
[[Poe draws a line beside the following text, with
the
note:
"smaller
type"]]
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"We have spoken of
the mystical
appearance of
Astarte as a fine touch of Art. This is borrowed, and from the first
canto
of Hirst's Endymion" — [The reader will observe that the anonymous
critic
has no personal acquaintance whatever with Mr. Hirst
>>(and in fact
Mr H. pays no attention to the xxxx xxxxxx [[last two words illegible,
possibly "said review"]]<< ) — but takes care to call him "Hirst"
simply, just as we say "Homer".] — "from Hirst's 'Endymion,' published
years since in 'The Southern Literary Messenger': —
Slowly Endymion bent, the
light
Elysian
Flooding his figure. Kneeling on one knee,
He loosed his sandals, lea
And lake and woodland glittering on his vision —
A fairy landscape, bright and beautiful,
With Venus at her full. |
Astarte is another
name for Venus ; and when we
remember
that Diana is about to descend to Endymion — that the scene which is
about
to follow is one of love — that Venus is the star of love — and that
Hirst,
by introducing it as he does, shadows out his story exactly as Mr. Poe
introduces his Astarte — the plagiarism of idea becomes evident." |
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[[End of the bracketed text]]
Now I really feel ashamed to say
that, as yet, I
have not perused "Endymion" — for Mr. Hirst will retort at once — "That
is no fault of mine — you should have read it — <I gave you
a
copy — > and, besides, you had no business to fall asleep when I did
you
the honor of reading it to you." Without a word of excuse,
therefore,
I will merely copy the passage in "Ulalume" which the author of
"Endymion"
says I purloined from the lines quoted above:
And now, as
the night was
senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn —
As the star-dials hinted of morn —
At the end of my path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn —
Astarte's bediamonded crescent,
Distinct with its duplicate horn. |
Now, I may be permitted to regret — really to regret
— that I can find no resemblance between the two passages in question;
for malo cum Platone errare &c. and to be a good imitator
of
Henry B. Hirst, is quite honor enough for me.
In the meantime, here is a passage
from another
little
ballad of mine, called "Lenore"; first published in 1830: —
How shall the
ritual,
then, be read —
the requiem how be
sung
By you — by yours, the evil eye — by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died,
[[ending text missing: and
died so young ?]] |
And here is a passage from "The Penance of Roland"
by Henry B. Hirst, published in "Graham's Magazine" for January 1848:
Mine the tongue that wrought this
evil —
mine the false
and slanderous tongue
That done to death the Lady Gwineth — Oh, my
soul
is sadly
wrung
!
"Demon ! devil," groaned the warrior, "devil of the evil eye ! " |
Now my objection to all this is not that Mr Hirst
has appropriated my property — (I am fond of a nice
phrase)
—
but that he has not done it so cleverly as I could wish. Many a
lecture,
on literary topics, have I given Mr. H.; and I confess that, in
general,
he has adopted my advice so implicitly that his poems, upon the whole,
are >little more than< >>merely<< our
conversations done
into verse.
"Steal, dear Endymion," I used to say
to him —
"for
very well do I know you can't help it; and the more you put in your
book
that is not your own, why the better your book will be: — but be
cautious
and steal with an air. In regard to myself — you need give
yourself
no trouble about me. I shall always feel honored in being of
use
to you; and provided you purloin my poetry in a reputable manner,
you are quite welcome to just as much of it as you (who are a very
weak little man) can conveniently carry away."
So far — let me confess — Mr Hirst
has behaved
remarkably
well in largely availing himself of the privilege thus accorded: — but,
in the case now at issue, he stands in need of some gentle rebuke. I do
not object to his stealing my verses; but I do
object to
his stealing them in bad grammar. My quarrel with him is not,
in
short, that he did this thing, but that he has went and
done
did it. |
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