Is about that time. It is, in the main, a satire ¦ Robert Sedgwick, Esq., and remember being upon those who, finding themselves in the struck with the brightness of his eye, which possession of wealth suddenly acquired, every now and then glittered with mirth, rush into extravagant habits of living, give and with the graceful courtesy of his manexpensive entertainments, and as a natural | ners. Something was said of the length consequence sink suddenly into the obscur- of time that he had lived in New York: ity from which they rose. But the satire You are not from New England?” said takes a wider range. The poet jests at our host. "I certainly am," was Halleck's everything that comes in his way; authors, reply, "I am from Connecticut." politicians, men of science, each is booked it possible ?" exclaimed Mr. Sedgwick. for a pleasantry; all are made to contribute Well, you are the only New Englander to the expense of the entertainment set be- that I ever saw in whom the tokens of his fore the reader. The sting of his witticisms origin were not as plain as the mark set was not unfelt, and I think was in some upon the forehead of Cain.” cases resented. People do not like to be laughed at, however pleasant it may be to those who laugh. At a later period Halleck saw the truth of what Pope says of ridicule "The muse may give thee but the gods must guide" and be published an edition of his Fanny with notes in which he took care to make a generous reparation to those whom he had offended. But Fanny is not all satire, and here and there in the poems are bursts of true lyrical enthusiasm. Some comparison has been made between the Fanny of Halleck and the satirical poems of Byron. But Halleck was never cynical in his satire, and Byron always was. I remember reading a remark made by Voltaire on the Dunciad of Pope. It wants gayety, said the French critic. Gayety is the predominating quality of Halleck's satire as hatred is that of the satire of Pope and Byron. Byron delighted in thinking how his victim would writhe under the blows he gave him. Halleck's satire is the overflow of a mirthful temperament. He sees things in a ludicrous light, and laughs without reflecting that the object of his ridicule might not like the sport as well as himself. In 1822 Halleck visited England and the Continent of Europe. Of what he saw there I do not know that there is any record remaining except his noble poem entitled Burns, and the spirited and playful verses on Alnwick Castle. It was in 1825, before Halleck's reputation as a poet had reached its full growth, that I took up my residence in New York. I first met him at the hospitable board of 66 I was at that time one of the editors of a monthly magazine, the New York Review, which was soon gathered to the limbo of extinct periodicals. Halleck brought to it his poem of Marco Bozzaris, and in 1826 the lines entitled Connecticut. The first of these poems became immediately a favorite, and was read by everybody who cared to read verses. I remember that at an evening party, at the house, I think, of Mr. Henry D. Sedgwick, it was recited by Mrs. Nichols; the same who not long afterward gave the public an English translation of Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. She had a voice of great sweetness and power, capable of expressing every variety of emotion. She was in the midst of the poem, her thrilling voice the only sound in the room, and every ear intently listening to her accents, when suddenly she faltered; her memory had lost one of the lines. At that instant a clear and distinct voice, supplying the forgotten passage, was heard from a group in a corner of the room; it was the voice of the poet. With this aid she took up the recitation and went on triumphantly to the close, surrounded by an audience almost too deeply interested to applaud. The poem entitled Burns, of which let me say I am not sure that the verses are not the finest in which one poet ever celebrated another, was contributed by Halleck in 1827 to the United States Review, which I bore a part in conducting. Halleck had been led by his admiration of the poetry of Campbell to pay a visit to the charming valley celebrated by that poet in his Gertrude of Wyoming. In memory of this he wrote the lines entitled Wyoming, which he handed me for publication in the same magazine. Before the United States Review shared the fate of its predecessor there appeared the first printed collection of Halleck's poetical writings with the title of "Alnwick Castle and other Poems," published by G. Carvill & Company, in 1827. I had the pleasure of saying to the readers of the Review how greatly I admired it. form important public services; Robert C. Sands, a man of abounding wit, prematurely lost to the world of letters; and myself as the third contributor. For the volume which appeared in 1828 Halleck offered us one of his most remarkable poems, “Red Jacket," and I need not say how delighted we were to grace our collection by anything so vigorous, spirited and original. It was illustrated by an engraving from a striking full-length portrait of the old Indian chief, by the elder Wier, then in the early maturity of his powers as an artist. At that time the Recorder of our city was appointed by the Governor of the state. Those who are not familiar with the judicial system of this state, need, perhaps, to be told that the Recorder is not the keeper of the city archives, but the judge of an im- After the publication of these poems there portant criminal court. In 1828, and for followed an interval of thirty-five years some years before and afterward, the office which is almost a blank in Halleck's literary was held by Mr. Richard Riker, a man of history. Between 1828 and 1863 he seems great practical shrewdness and the blandest to have produced nothing worthy of note manners, who was accused by some of ad- except the additions which he made to his justing his political opinions to the humors poem of Connecticut in an edition published of the day, and was, therefore, deemed a by Redfield in 1852, and these are fully proper subject of satire. One day I met worthy of his reputation. It is almost unHalleck, who said to me: "I have an epis- accountable that an author, still in the hightle in verse from an old gentleman to the est strength of his faculties, who had writRecorder, which, if you please, I will send ten to such acceptance, should not have been to you for the Evening Post. It is all in tempted to write more for a public which he my head and you shall have it as soon as I knew was eager to read whatever came from have written it out." I should mention here his pen. "When an author begins to be that Halleck was in the habit of composing quoted," said Halleck once to me, he is verses without the aid of pen and ink, keep-already famous." Halleck found that he ing them in his memory, and retouching was quoted, but he was not a man to go on them at his leisure. In due time the "Epis-writing because the world seemed to expect tle to the Recorder, by Thomas Castaly, it. It was only in 1863, when he was alEsq.," came to hand, was published in the ready seventy-three years of age, that he Evening Post, and was immediately read wrote for the New York Ledger his " Young by the whole town. It seems to me one of America," a poem, which, though not by the happiest of Halleck's satirical poems. any means to be placed among his best, conThe man in office, who was the subject of it, tains, as Mr. Cozzens, in a paper read bemust have hardly known whether to laugh fore this society, justly remarks, passages or be angry, and it was impossible, one which remind us of his earlier vigor and would think, to be perfectly at ease when grace. thus made the plaything of a poet and pelted Yet, if in that interval he did not occupy with all manner of gibes, sly allusions, and himself with poetic composition, he gave ironical compliments, for the amusement of much of his leisure to the poetry of others. the public. Among its strokes of satire the I have never known any one, I think, who epistle has passages of graceful poetry. seemed to take so deep a delight in the poeHalleck, after the manner of the ancients, try that perfectly suited his taste. He tranin leading his victim to the sacrifice had scribed it; he read it over and over; he hung its horns with garlands of flowers. dwelt upon it until every word of it became The Recorder, however, is said to have engraven upon his memory; he recited it borne this somewhat disrespectful but by no with glistening eyes and a voice and frame means ill-natured assault with the same ap-tremulous with emotion. Mr. F. S. Cozparent composure as he endured the coarser attacks of the newspapers. 66 zens has sent me a scrap of paper on which he had copied a passage of eight lines of In 1827 and the two following years Dr. verse; and under them had written these Bliss, a liberal minded bookseller of this sentences: I find these verses in an alcity, published annually, at the season of bum. Do you know the writer? I would the winter holidays, a small volume of mis- give a hundred pounds sterling payable out cellanies entitled the "Talisman." They of any money in my treasury not otherwise were written almost exclusively by three appropriated, to be capable of writing the authors; Mr. Verplanck, eminent in our lit-two last lines." erature and still fortunately spared to per- I was most agreeably surprised as well as flattered, the other day, to receive from General Wilson, who has collected the poetical writings of Halleck, and is engaged in preparing his Life and Letters for the press, a copy of the poet's handwriting of some verses of mine entitled "The Planting of the Appletree," which he had taken the pains to transcribe, and which General Wilson had heard him repeat from memory in his own fine manner. Halleck loved to ramble in the country, for the most part, I believe, alone. Once he did me the favor to make me his companion. It was while the region from Hoboken to Fort Lee was yet but thinly sprinkled with habitations, and the cliffs which overlook the river on its western bank had lain in forest from the time that Hendrick Hudson entered the great stream which bears his name, We were on a slow-going steamer, which we left at the landing of Bull's Ferry. "Do you not go on with us, Mr. Halleck?" asked the Captain. "No," was the answer; "I am in a hurry." We walked on to Fort Lee, where we made a short stop at the house of a publican named Reynolds, who is mentioned in Duyckinck's memoir -an English radical, a man of no little mother wit, and a deep strong voice which he greatly loved to hear. Halleck had known him when he exercised his vocation in town, and took pleasure, I think, in hearing his ready rejoinders to the poet's praises of a monarchy and an established church; and Reynolds, proud of the acquaintance of so eminent a man as Halleck, received him with demonstrations of delight. We returned over the heights of Weehawken to look at the magnificent view so finely celebrated by Halleck in his Fanny, with its glorious bay, its beautiful isles, its grand headlands and its busy cities, the murmur of which was heard blending with the dash of waves at the foot of the cliff. dence. Perhaps the habit of exactness in this vocation led to exactness in his dealings with all men. His example is an encouraging one for poets and wits, since it teaches that a lively fancy and practical good sense do not necessarily stand in each other's way. Somebody has called prudence a rascally virtue, and I have heard Halleck himself rail at it, and refer to Benjamin Franklin as a man who had acquired a false reputation by his dexterity in taking care of his own interests. But Halleck did not disdain to practise the virtue which he decried, and he knew, as well as Franklin himself, that prudence, in the proper sense of the term, is wisdom applied to the ordinary affairs of life; that it includes forecast, one of the highest operations of the intellect, and the due adjustment of means to ends, without which a man is useless both to himself and to society, except as a blunderer by whose example others may be warned. I think it was some time after he had given up his clerkship that Mr. Astor left him a small legacy, to which the son, Mr. William B. Astor, made a liberal addition. Halleck then withdrew from the city in which he had passed forty years of his life to Guilford, his native place, in which the Eliots, his ancestors on the mother's side, had dwelt for nearly two centuries. Here in the household of an unmarried sister, older than himself and now living, he passed his later years among his books, with some infirmities of body, but with intellectual faculties still vigorous, his wit as keen and lively as when he wrote his Epistle to the Recorder, and his delight in the verses of his favorite poets and in the happy expression of generous sentiments as deeply felt and easily awakened as when he wrote his noble poem on Woman. It was not far from the time of which I I have mentioned that Halleck was early speak that some of Halleck's personal and a clerk in the office of Mr. Barker. He literary friends gave him a dinner at the was afterwards employed in the same ca- rooms of the Club called the Century. It pacity by John Jacob Astor, the richest fell to me to preside, and in toasting our man of his day in New York, and exceed- guest I first spoke, in such terms as I was ingly sagacious and fortunate in his enter- able to command, of the merits of his poeprises. His term of employment by Mr. try, as occupying a place in our literature Astor came, however, to an end; and I like the poetry of Horace in the literature think that he was then compelled by the of ancient Rome. I dwelt upon the playnarrowness of his means, to practise a rigid fulness and grace of his satire and the economy. He was of too independent a sweetness and fervor of his lyrical vein. spirit to allow himself to be drawn into a Halleck answered very happily. "I do situation which would incline him to keep not rise to speak," he said, "for if I were out of the way of a creditor. He was an to stand up I could say nothing. I must excellent accountant: I have a letter from keep my seat and talk to you without cereone of his friends, speaking of his skill in mony." And then he went on, speaking difficult and intricate computations, in modestly and charmingly of his own writwhich Mr. Astor employed him with confi-ings. I cannot, at this distance of time, recollect how he treated the subject, but I well remember that he spoke so well that we could willingly have listened to him the whole evening. It is now five and thirty years, the life of one of the generations of mankind, that I contributed to a weekly periodical published in this city, an estimate of the poetical genius of Halleck. Of course nobody now remembers having read it; and, as it was written after his most remarkable poems had been given to the public, and as I could say nothing different of them now, I will, with the leave of the audience, make it a part of this paper. are attributed to him by general consent, since, without them, we might miss some of the characteristies of his genius. "Halleck's humorous poems are marked by an uncommon ease of versification, a natural flow and sweetness of language, and a careless, Horatian playfulness and felicity of jest, not, however, imitated from Horace or any other writer. He finds abundant matter for mirth in the peculiar state of our society, in the heterogeneous population of the city "As if himself he did disdain, "Of every race the mingled swarm.' in the affectations of newly assumed gen"Halleck is one of the most generally tility, the ostentation of wealth, the pretenadmired of all our poets, and he possesses, sions of successful quackery, and the awkwhat no other does, a decided local popu- ward attempt to blend with the habits of larity. He is the favorite poet of the city trade an imitation of the manners of the of New York, where his name is cherished most luxurious and fastidious nobility in the with a peculiar fondness and enthusiasm. world-the nobility of England. SomeIt furnishes a standing and ever-ready times in the midst of a strain of harmoniallusion to all who would speak of Ameri- ous diction and soft and tender imagerycan literature, and is familiar in the mouths so soft and tender that you willingly yield of hundreds who would be seriously puz- yourself up to the feeling of pathos, or to zled if asked to name any other American the sense of beauty it inspires-he surpoet. The verses of others may be found prises you with an irresistible stroke of in the hands of persons who possess some ridicule, tincture of polite literature young men pursuing their studies, or young ladies with whom the age of romance is not past; but those of Halleck are read by people of the humblest degree of literary pretension, and are equally admired in Bond street and the Bowery. There are numbers who regularly attribute to his pen every anonymous poem in the newspapers in which an attempt at humor is evident, who know him by his style,' and whose delight at the supposed wit is heightened almost to transport by the self-complacency of having made the discovery. His reputation, however, is not injured by these mistakes, for the verses by which they are occasioned are soon forgotten, and his fame rests firmly on the compositions which are known to be his. And mock the form he did but feign;' as if he looked with no regard upon the fair poetical vision he had raised, and took pleasure in showing the reader that it was but a cheat. Sometimes, the poet, with that aerial facility which is his peculiar endowment, accumulates graceful and agreeable images in a strain of irony so fine, that did not the subject compel you to receive it as irony, you would take it for a beautiful passage of serious poetry -so beautiful, that you are tempted to regret that he is not in earnest, and that phrases so exquisitely chosen, and poetic coloring so brilliant, should be employed to embellish subjects to which they do not properly belong. At other "This high degree of local popularity times he produces the effect of wit by dexhas for one of its causes the peculiar sub-trous allusions to contemporaneous events, jects of many of the poems of Halleck, re-introduced as illustrations of the main sublating as they do to persons and things and ject with all the unconscious gracefulness events with which everybody in New York of the most animated and familiar converis more or less acquainted; objects which sation. He delights in ludicrous contrasts, are constantly before the eyes, and matters that are the talk of every fireside. The poems written by him, in conjunction with his friend, Doctor Drake, for the Evening Post, in the year 1819, under the signature of Croaker & Co., and the satirical poem of Fanny, are examples of this happy use of the familiar topics of the day. He will pardon this allusion to works which he has never publicly acknowledged, but which produced by bringing the nobleness of the ideal world into comparison with the homeliness of the actual; the beauty and grace of Nature with the awkwardness of Art. He venerates the past and laughs at the present. He looks at them through a medium which lends to the former the charm of romance, and exaggerates the deformity of the latter. Halleck's poetry, whether serious or 666 we read sprightly, is remarkable for the melody of poetic numbers. We think, as the numbers. It is not the melody of mo- it, of notonous and strictly regular measurement. - The large utterance of the early Gods.' His verse is constructed to please an ear naturally fine, and accustomed to a wide "If an example is wanted of Halleck's range of metrical modulation. It is as dif- capacity for subjects of a gentler nature, ferent from that painfully-balanced versifi- let the reader turn to the verses written cation, that uniform succession of iambics, in the album of an unknown lady, entitled closing the sense with the couplet, which Woman.' In a few brief lines he has some writers practise, and some critics gathered around the name of woman a praise, as the note of the thrush is unlike crowd of delightful associations - all the that of the cuckoo. Halleck is familiar graces of sex, delightful pictures of dowith those general rules and principles mestic happiness and domestic virtues, genwhich are the basis of metrical harmony; tle affections, pious cares, smiles and tears, and his own unerring taste has taught him that bless and heal, the exceptions which a proper attention to variety demands. He understands that the rivulet is made musical by obstructions in its channel. You will find in no poet passages which flow with a more sweet and liquid smoothness; but he knows very well that to make this smoothness perceived and to prevent it from degenerating into monotony occasional roughness must be interposed. "But it is not only in humorous or playful poetry that Halleck excels. He has fire and tenderness, and manly vigor, and his serious poems are equally admirable with his satirical. What martial lyric can be finer than the verses on the death of Marco Bozzaris! We are made spectators of the slumbers of the Turkish oppressor, dreaming of victory in his guarded tent;' we see the Greek warrior ranging his truehearted band of Suliotes in the forest shades; we behold them throwing themselves into the camp; we hear the shout, the groan, the sabre stroke, the death shot falling thick and fast, and in the midst of all, the voice of Bozzaris bidding them to strike boldly for God and their native land. The struggle is long and fierce; the ground is piled with Moslem slain; the Greeks are at length victorious; and as the brave chief falls bleeding from every vein, he hears the proud huzza of his surviving comrades, announcing that the field is won, and be closes his eyes in death, 666 Calmly, as to a night's repose.' "This picture of the battle is followed by a dirge over the slain hero a glorious outpouring of lyrical eloquence, worthy to have been chanted by Pindar or Tyrtous over one of his ancestors. There is in this poem a freedom, a daring, a fervency, a rapidity, an affluence of thick-coming fancies, that make it seem like an inspired improvisation, as if the thoughts had been divinely breathed into the mind of the poet, and uttered themselves, voluntarily, in 666 "And earth's lost paradise restored, Red Red Jacket' is a poem of a yet different kind; a poem of manly vigor of sentiment, noble versification, strong expression, and great power in the delineation of character-the whole dashed off with a great appearance of freedom and delightfully tempered with the satirical vein of the author. Some British periodical lately published contains a criticism on American literature, in which it is arrogantly asserted that our poets have made nothing of the Indian character, and that Campbell's 'Outalissi is altogether the best portraiture of the mind and manners of an American savage which is to be found in English verse. The critic must have spoken without much knowledge of his subject. He certainly could never have read Halleck's Jacket.' Campbell's Outalissi' is very well. He is a stoic of the woods,' and nothing more- an Epictetus, put into a blanket and leggins and translated to the forests of Pennsylvania, but he is no Indian. Red Jacket' is the very savage of our wilderness. Outalissi' is a fancy sketch of few lineaments. He is brave, faithful and affectionate, concealing these qualities under an exterior of insensibility. Red Jacket' has the spirit and variety of a portrait from nature. He has all the savage vices, and the rude and strong qualities of mind which belong to a warrior, a chief, and an orator of the aboriginal stock. He is set before us with sinewy limbs, gentle voice, motions graceful as a bird's in air, an air of command, inspiring deference; brave, cunning, cruel, vindictive, eloquent, skilful to dissemble, and terrible when the moment of dissembling is past, as the wild beasts or the tempests of his own wilderness. "A poem which, without being the best he has written, unites many of the different qualities of Halleck's manner, is that enti |