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[103] 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

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