ance with the best of living and late poets | speak in unvarying tones of despondency will detect in greater or less abundance in and complaint, when we have every reason nearly every piece in this volume; and of to suppose him capable of enjoying the coninstances of a recklessness in the use of meta- tent which he affects to find only in others. physical and poetic terms which most read- Mr. Mulchinock's verses are gloomy, and ers will not fail to discover and condemn. we think their gloom studied and unnecesWe have no disposition to enter upon an sary. There are very few men of education exhibition of Mr. Mulchinock's rhythmical whose circumstances compel them to poverrors, which swarm throughout these poems erty and neglect; and when we hear such in unstinted profusion. For these, circum- men complaining of one or both of these stances may offer a partial apology. It is conditions of misery, we are apt to believe after all more of the spirit of Mr. Mulchi- that they are practising on our sympathies, nock's rhymes than of their mechanical and are either clinging to sorrow for the execution that we would complain. We melancholy pleasure it is sometimes said to should be somewhat disposed to excuse the afford, or are prating of its stings without slovenly measure and the bungling rhyme, if actually undergoing them. To the really they were the dress of really original, poetic deserving and unfortunate, the public ear is and healthy thoughts; but if we condemn seldom closed; but it is ever the case, as it the barren or the perverted sentiment, how should be, that public sympathy neither can we approve the verse in which it is goes out spontaneously nor strongly for the borne haltingly and wearily along? man who clings to a vocation for which he is indifferently fitted, and which, in return, yields him but an indifferent support, when other callings, equally honorable and more productive, lie open to his exertions.

We look in vain, then, through this volume for any traces of that genial and generous sentiment which should spring spontaneously from the heart of every man, and, most of all, from the heart of the man who Need we say we have reference to profesthinks himself specially commissioned to ad- sional verse-making-to that description of dress his fellow-men through the medium of verse-making which Mr. Mulchinock cultithe feelings and the imagination. A writer vates, and which he professes to find so unof verses, in addition to the necessary quali- profitable? It must strike every one at the fications of imagination, taste, and rhythmical first glance-without lingering long over power, should have a liberal and compre- certain obtrusive facts, the large number of hensive mind, capable of overlooking cir- writers, professional and unprofessional, who cumstances and of appreciating the good clamor for admission to the columns of every qualities to be found in every man and every magazine, the immense disadvantages under thing. It is no more necessary that he which our authors labor from reproductions should be an optimist than that he should of foreign and unpaid-for literature, the explunge into the midnight of a Byronic mis- cessive cheapness at which the home market anthropy. If his disposition is like that of for reading must be supplied-that nothing nine out of ten, it is hardly needful to cau- can be more unwise than for a man of any tion him against one or the other of these other than first-rate abilities to pursue a extremes. But as Nature produces a few career in which not more than one in a hunoptimists and misanthropes, and circum-dred can hope to earn more than a bare substances many more, so we find certain poets sistence, when easier and more lucrative whose verses are naturally optimistic or mel-paths lie before him. It is unwise for this ancholy, and a greater number-of a lesser reason, setting aside all others that will ocgrade, be it said-whose verses, purport-cur at a moment's contemplation-namely, ing to be results of their own experience, that a writer on broad and comprehensive are evidently studied pictures of the utmost of cheerfulness or Timonism that can be evolved from the material around them. We are always suspicious of the sincerity of any writer who claims to have a larger share of happiness or misery than his fellow-men, and we especially condemn the processes by which a writer of poetry brings himself to

topics, like those of poetry, ought to be thoroughly acquainted with all classes of society, and to have such a position as to be on easy and intimate terms with the great man as well as the laborer or the common citizen. He should possess an independence sufficient to raise him above all imputation of sycophancy or meanness; such an independence

1851.

Mulchinock's Poems.

mon books, and the great works of God, besides the
With these aids, if I cannot hope to match men to
lessons of daily life, have been my sole teachers.
whom many languages are as familiar as their own,
whose mornings, nights, and libraries are in the per-

only American but universal; I at least may claim an
audience on the merits of my dear mistress Nature,
whose beauty, like that of the gospel, though 'ever
ancient,' is also ‘ever new.”

as makes a man feel always light of heart,
and above those fretting circumstances which
assail him whose next dinner is for ever a
subject of uneasy contemplation. His means
should give him access to libraries and gal-petual presence of the arts; men whose fame is not
leries; they should allow him the necessary
stimulants of travel and public amusement;
in fine, having the world for his peculiar
study, the world should be in every way
open to him. To substantiate this, we must
leave great authors out of view: their genius
has at all times evoked fortune and worship-
pers, laboring at first no matter under how
great disadvantages. But for how many
men of second-rate abilities and unpromising
beginnings has competence prepared the
way for literary distinction! and how many
men of aspirations beyond their natural abil-
ities, of a thirst for fame beyond their power
to achieve greatness, has poverty happily
kept back from a career in which only the
most favored can run without faltering and
failure!

Now it is evident that the man who, without possessing sufficient ability to raise himself to the first rank in literature, sits down to gain his subsistence by writing verses, condemns himself to seclusion from the great world, and therefore to barrenness of sentiment and information. That many-sided knowledge which, in the present intensity of civilization, the writer who would reach the popular ear must possess, he will inevitably want. His writings will be capricious, onesided, and unfair. It will be strange if they do not fall into one unvarying strain, and that strain oftener melancholy and bitter than genial and warm. Living, it may be, in back streets; surrounded by a society whose manners are at best unattractive, and whose language breathes a harsh and disaffected spirit; he cannot hope to become acquainted with the ways of those who partake bountifully of the higher privileges of life, and from a secure position look comprehensively and unrepiningly on the world around them. No man of this day can approach to any thing like perfection in writing whose field of observation is as limited as Mr. Mulchinock's would appear to be, from what he says in the preface to his poemsan unsatisfactory apology for a very manifest want:

"From the stimulus of elegant society, from delightful leisure, or many-path'd cultivation, I have not obtained subjects or a style. A few good com

Shelley, with infinitely more genius, but
it must be owned, with less common sense,
for he was in no want of money, talked
somewhat like this, when he boasted of his
acquaintance with the Alps and the glaciers,
and his unsuitableness for the companion
ship of his fellow-Englishmen. And conse-
quently Shelley is read by nobody but poets, i
He loved the people well enough, but he
never learned how to write for them. He
let his great soul go out over mountains
and midnights, and his poems are one pro-
longed rhapsody. He is a good study, but
a bad model. But Mr. Mulchinock has
copied his error. Speaking of himself, he
says:-

"All his harpings caught from nature, lakes and
mountains for his schools,

Not in city smoke begotten among rod-directed
fools."

So much the worse for Mr. Mulchinock. If poets only draw their inspirations from mountains and lakes, they may be as grand and mystic as they please, but they may rest content with lakes and mountains for listeners. If they will ride Pegasus occa sionally on cross-roads and in cities, and lend their genius to "adorn common things," they will meet with the encouragement they deserve.

We are not surprised, therefore, at the tone of Mr. Mulchinock's verses, after learning the circumstances under which they were composed, and the sources of inspiration whence they were drawn; especially when we see that greater men have written vaguely, and unfairly, and bitterly, while refusing to look at all sides of life before making it the subject of poetical philosophizing. To be shut out from the higher and refined amenities of life; to be constantly vexed by the thought that men of inferior minds, possessing no sympathy for the beautiful in art or nature, are spending money without stint on useless and unelevated pleasures, which a better owner would employ in the gratification of the noblest

tastes of which our nature is capable; to be obliged, in the teeth of the intensest competition, to send hurried and incomplete verses to magazines for a nominal remuneration; and to live day by day without prospect of ever gaining more than a mere living, and with a dreary looking forward to sickness or failing powers; this condition of things surely cannot make the poet genial and comprehensive, and cannot give that mellow glow of hope and good-nature to his verses which, after all, is a large ingredient in the works of every successful poet whom the world has seen. What influence such cir

cumstances have, we may infer from the following verses-the like of which are profusely strewn through this volume of Mr. Mulchinock's. We are willing to believe them true, for we would not accuse their author of making untrue appeals to our sympathies in lines which he tells us are drops of his own heart's blood, and beats of his own quick pulse":

66

"Now for me the silent sorrow and the loneliness and gloom,

Entertaining this sense of unrequited merit, it is not strange that Mr. Mulchinock should extend his sympathy to the laboring classes, and endeavor to rouse them to an appreciation of their own rights, in a man

Phantom shapes of long-lost pleasures flit around ner which savors much more of the disaf

my lonely room:

fected anarchist than of the reasonable, pathink, however, that the poor will never be tient, and philanthropic reformer. We helped by such bitter outpourings as these:

"Woe to those in lordly places, sunk in lethargy supine,

With their feastings and their revels, with their music and their wine!

In your suits of homely broadcloth, though you take the shilling side,

Ye shall flout those silken rustlers prankt in purple and in pride.

When you winced beneath the tauntings of the rich and better-born,

I have taught you to repay them with intenser,

bitter scorn.

*

*

*

"Be but hopeful, be but trustful, be but loyal to

the cause:

Down with wrong and with injustice, down with tyrants and their laws."

And this in free America!

--

we may be pardoned for saying that we think he has mistaken his vocation, in setting up for a professional poet. To write verses as a pastime is one thing, and to make a business of writing verses is another; and between the two we should not hesitate long to choose. If Mr. Mulchinock will pause, he will see that

66

he is almost alone in the business he has
chosen, and which, to use his own words,
yields so poor and scant a pay." Among
our own foremost poets-names with whom
it is no light honor to be classed-we know
of none who depend on versifying for a live-
lihood. Longfellow is a college officer.
Holmes is in good practice as a physician.
Bryant and Willis are at the head of jour-
nals of wide circulation. Halleck's poems
were not written with a view to pecuniary
profit. Poe relied chiefly for support on his
prose compositions. Bayard Taylor is on.
the editorial staff of a daily paper. Our
poets of a generation or two back were in
established professions. Trumbull was an
eminent lawyer. Dwight was president of
a college. Hopkins was a physician, and
Humphries and Barlow enjoyed handsome
estates. Surely it is no abuse of instances
if we point Mr. Mulchinock to the fact that
the Muse is more pleasant and facile as a
companion than a slave; and that active
exertion in steady and practical employment,
by which one is brought daily in contact
with the world, is no hindrance to the growth
and triumph of the genuine poetic faculty.

If we apprehended any mischief from such effusions, which it would be charitable to attribute to a morning headache, or an overflow of bile, we should quote more of them, and devote a few moments to showing their unreasonableness and uselessness; but the common sense of the reader, we are sure, has forestalled us. Sentiments like these stand in the way of true reform, and are powerless to overturn the sober reason of the mass, which is happily strong enough to keep down, if not to destroy, the monstrous hydra of anarchical bitterness. But none the less strongly do we condemn them in a book of poems, where, in addition to The critic counselled poor Keats to desist their native deformity, they are most sadly from making verses, and return to his galliout of place. But Mr. Mulchinock has pots. We have no such advice to offer Mr. taken his cue, in this instance, from Whit- Mulchinock. If he enjoys poetry, we wish tier, whom he is pleased to term the "bold- that he may never cease to realize the pleaest Thinker of the Age;" and as he has over-sures which the Muse confers on her votadone Tennyson and others in their original peculiarities, so he has grossly outraged the example which that very clever versifier, Whittier, has unwittingly set him.

We give Mr. Mulchinock the credit of writing an occasional vigorous couplet, particularly on topics which make the most ordinary men talk strongly. We do not doubt that, in common with many other men of more reasonable ambition, he takes pleasure in reading and writing poetry. But

ries. We are afraid, however, that if he persists in rhyming as an occupation wherewith to earn bread for himself and his family, his tone will never become less austere and repulsive, nor his field of view less contracted; we greatly fear that his imitations will become more frequent, and that, pressed down by circumstances which he will not consent to escape from, he will never attain to that standard of perfection to which we will not refuse him the credit of aspiring.

VOL. VIII. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

A SKETCH

OF THE

ILLIAM

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF WILLIAM S. MOUNT.

great merit, evincing observation and study, full of character and expression, yet none of them can justly be compared, in point of equality, or with any fair pretensions to rivalry, with the comic designs of Mount.

Doctors of Law and Divinity, Judges and Bishops, can be easily created by conventions and councils, but a true humorist is worth a county of such dignitaries. What does the world know or care about the Dutch theologians or commentators, who carried their

THE classic comic painters of all countries | Edmonds, and Clonney, all of whom are are few in number. A score of masterly subsequent to him, in point of time; and artists in portraiture may be enumerated for although several of their paintings are of every single humorous genius in the art of design. The Flemish school, with Teniers, Ostade, Jan Steen, Gerard Douw, Brouwer, and Moëns, is undoubtedly the richest, both in number of artists and in variety of comic subjects. The Spanish sclfool, with Murillo at the head, comes next. And although, in respect to character, expression, thought, satire and dramatic power, no one master in this department can, for a moment, be compared with Hogarth, the English school has few others to boast of. Wilkie, who ap-heads high during the sixteenth and sevenproaches most nearly, was a Scotchman, as well as the great predecessor of Cruickshank, (the inimitable caricaturist of this cent ry,) Gilray, who was the Cruickshank in political caricature of his day. Maclise is, we believe, an Irishman; and Leslie, with Newton, (de-made them immortal, upon whom living licious humorists of the school of Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Irving,) delicate limners, graceful, spirited and Virgilian, displaying in their charming productions, the amenity, gentle beauties, and subtle refinements of those masters of authorship, we claim as American, partly from their early education here, and partly from their American illustrations of Irving.

The French pride themselves, and justly, on the possession of the genteel as well in painting as in style; but with all his courtly elegance, neither can Watteau be fairly considered a humorist, nor Coypel, though he has illustrated Don Quixote with so much vivacity and effect.

The paintings of W. S. Mount, one of the few American artists that deserve to be called painters, are of a strictly national character; the pride and boast, not only of his native Long Island, nor yet of the State of NewYork solely, but of the whole country. Of an inferior grade, in the same department, are the pictures of Bingham, Ranney, Woodville,

teenth centuries? But the Dutch school of art of that period is as well known as any thing in Holland, to all out of it. Those dull, learned Professors, who lecture on the genius of the very men, after death has

they would affect to look down, talk of comic pictures as of the Ethiopian farces, as the lowest phase of intellectual effort. But how many libraries of sermons, and controversial theology, and Church history, may be bought for the smallest collection of Teniers and Ostade!

Among those, too, who affect a liking for art in this walk, how few correctly appreciate it; placing the department of humorous description and comic satire below portrait and landscape, to say nothing of what passes under the style and title of history. In painting, however, as in literature, familiar history is in general far more valuable and directly interesting than the so-called heroic phases of art. Every thing depends on the artist and his mode of treatment of a subject. A great artist will make more of an ordinary scene than the inferior genius will be able to create out of the noblest materials. True, the grand style, in the hands of a Raphael, a Titian, a Rubens, is above any thing of Dutch or Flemish art. We are not institu