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likely to rank as being, next to
Lowell's Ode, the most remarkable poem called out by the
Civil War. It is such writing as
Keats pronounced to be ‘next to fine doing, the top thing in the universe;’ and we must not forget that
Wolfe, before
Quebec, pronounced fine writing to be the greater thing of the two.
The crowning instances of high-water marks are in those poems which, like
Blanco White's sonnet, alone bear the writer's name down to posterity.
How completely the truculent
Poe fancied that he had extinguished for all time the poetry of my gifted and wayward kinsman,
Ellery Channing; and yet it is not at all certain that the one closing line of
Channing's ‘A Poet's Hope,’ —
If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea,
may not secure the immortality it predicts, and perhaps outlive everything of
Poe's.
Wasson's fine poem, ‘Bugle Notes,’ beginning,—
Sweet-voiced Hope, thy fine discourse
Foretold not half Life's good to me,
will be, unless I greatly mistake, as lasting as the seventeenth-century poems among which it