The Poetry of Places.

BY WILLOUGHBY WIGGIN.

"Places," observes the dramatist Pythagoras, "are often poetical, and poetry is sometimes local." Great hearts, like Spenser's, are frequently attached by cords which they cannot sever to a garret, a cellar, or a hovel; but their furniture and other valuables have sometimes been separated from them by a still stronger attachment. Poets seldom go to law; the law generally goes to them.

The poetry of places if often very charming, sometimes even more so than the places themselves. It may be divided into two general classes, namely, I-am-bic and the You-dam-bic. We will omit the consideration of the first for the present, and proceed to examine the second. You-dam-bic poetry was almost unknown to the ancients; and, though it may be found in a rudimentary form in other countries, it has been chiefly cultivated in the United States, where it may be found in its highest perfection. The extreme delicacy of this species of poetic composition admirably fits it for a place in the literature of a free county. So frail and tender is its constitution that it has never been known to flourish among the rigors of despotic governments like Great Britain and France. It droops and fades beneath the blighting shadows of oppression, but blossoms out in all its beauty and glory when caressed by the atmosphere of freedom, and nourished by the encouraging rays of the sun of republican liberty. Here, where great cities spring up as if by magic, there is a true local rivalry, never before equaled in intensity, that fires the heart of enthusiasm and arouses a poetic frenzy in the breast of the humblest inhabitants. Take, for example, the following pathetic lines, which we recently found in the columns of a St. Louis newspaper, the able "Cube-Courtier:"

There was a Miss Blank in Chicawgah
Who started a-courting, but maugre
She pleaded her cases
In satin and lace,
She couldn't earn pretzels and lawger.

Alfred Tennyson himself never gave us a verse like that, and we hazard the prediction that he never will. He has, perhaps, surpassed it in mere melodiousness; but poetry is more than bare music: it is sentiment rhythmically expressed. And the exquisite perfection of the verse before us culminates in a refined and tender human sympathy, which, like an atmosphere, envelops and permiates the entire stanza, but whose efflorescent bloom is completed in the closing line. Take another example, which I find in an Eastern paper, accredited to the Chicago "Nadir-Zenith:"

There was a young man in St. Louis
Whose doctor confined him to brewis:
He lived for a season,
But soon lost his reason,
And married a pawnbreaking Jewess.

This, though scarcely so delicate as the other verse, is remarkable for the intellectual grasp it displays, a grasp combined with subtle refinement of thought and unusual purity and depth of emotion. It evinces the classic serenity of Bryant united with the turbid grandeur of Bryon; the simplicity and repose of Longfellow with the abstruse profundity and even the inimitable punctuationality (there ought to be such a word) of Mrs. Piatt. The second line is, by far, the most affecting: the heartless decree of the unfeeling physician, and then, - the meagreness of the diet, and in such a country! But the logical necessity of the catastrophe and final denouement is not paralleled within the entire range of modern art. You can see the whole scene before you: the loan-office filled with all sorts of trumpery, the three gilded balls over the door, the anotely crowd hurrying by on the street, and, at the far extremity of establishment, the ghost-like figure, a mere shadow in the dim gloom of the apartment, leaning mysteriously forward ever the anoque desk in the very act of making out a ticket! Or again, what could be more touching than this from the "Daily Diary"?

Folks in Chicago
Try to make hog go
For vension, rabit, and beef:
But something they find
It's nothing but rind,-
And then the poor cats come to grief

Matthew Arnold says that Homer is noble, and, on the whole, perhaps he is right, with certain important qualifications; but genuine nobility was almost unknown to the ancients, and has been fully developed only by the lofty school of bards whom we are now considering. Has Mr. Arnold ever examined the poetry in question? The naivete with which he asserts that Homer is noble plainly indicates that he has not. He means, no doubt, - and so far he is correct, - that, if real nobility of style and thought had been known to the Greeks, Homer would probably have been noble. But just here we wish to caution Mr. Arnold, and the flippant English litterateurs who take him as a model, not to be rash in their assertions; for callow literary criticism is almost certain, sooner or later, like the unhappy felines of Chicago, to "come to grief." A man like Mr. Arnold cannot afford to lose his reputation by a slip, a mere lapsus pinguis* like the one to which we have just referred. But we digress. We quote the following from the "Weakly Weekly," which, save in critiques, admits verse to its columns only in those rare cases where extraordinary merit absolutely forbids exclusion:

Down in St. Louis
All they can do is
Make shoes for their girls' clumsy pedals;
Their feet are so large
As an updriven barge,
With ankles as slender as needles.

Note the temperate moderation of these lines. The true poet is always easy and natural. He never exaggerates, never strains a point. And observe how he condenses. A mere versifier would have thiamed out the tropical luxuriance of this passage into fifty or a hundred lines. The most skillful chiropodist could not treat this delicate theme with more tenderness, and the description of the ankles is Spenscrian, or rather, it is, by far, a finer simile than Spenser ever conceived. Spenser wrote tolerable English for his day, but he was too matter-of-fact for subtle and refined concepts. Still, he deserves our gratitude, for, like a true poet, he died of starvation in a garret. We sincerely hope the noble bards on whose writings we have been decanting may all speedily have an opportunity to imitate his example; and we will conclude by suggesting to all younge aspirants, like the poet of the "Weekly," that the female form divine is the best figure to begin with, for, in the words of the classic couplet of the gentle poet of Florence, Macchiavelli,-

"In the vast scope of lore, divine and human,
The noblest study of mankind is woman."

*Lapsus pinguis, a slip, or want of fulness, that is, knowledge. See Kikero, "De Senectati," MDCXL, 2, 3, 4, 5.