This, I think, every one feels at once
to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
"Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us,
but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is
apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that
native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of
originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume
enchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part
of our daily lives.
REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES
HENRY JAMES
JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]
[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr.
Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
_Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]
Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
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