Henry W. Halleck

“ But his literary career is identified with New York. He was associated with Drake in writing the Croaker Papers, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 to the Evening Post. These were of a merely local and temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, Marco Bozzaris—though declaimed until it has become hackneyed—gives him a sure title to a remembrance; and his Alnwick Castle, a monody, half serious and half playful on the contrasts between feudal associations and modern life, has {418} much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best vers de societé. ”

“ The picturesque, to be sure, is equally deficient in his chirography and in his poetical productions.
Mr. Halleck’s hand is strikingly indicative of his genius. We see in it some force, more grace, and little of the picturesque. There is a great deal of freedom about it, and his MSS. seem to be written currente calamo, but without hurry. His flourishes, which are not many, look as if thoughtfully planned, and deliberately, yet firmly executed. His paper is very good, and of a blueish tint—his seal of red wax. ”

“ Halleck is not one of the firm; and Halleck is a true poet. But his writings first came out anonymously; and it is the blaze of his genius which has betrayed him to the public eye. The darkness in which it shrouds itself, distinguishes it from all that shines only by reflected light. Men hunt for diamonds in the night.
Even in England, where the trade of literature embraces writers of a very high order, I am not sure that the very best minds are devoted to it. Some of the finest poetry in the language was found among the manuscripts of Judge Blackstone. ”

“ Earlier on the same day General Grant also telegraphed to General Halleck: "The main force of the enemy is at Corinth, with troops at different points east. Small garrisons are also at Bethel, Jackson, and Humboldt. The number at these places seems constantly to change. The number of the enemy at Corinth, and within supporting distance of it, cannot be far from eighty thousand men." General Halleck was preparing to leave St. Louis and come to the front to take immediate command of the combined army for the march on to Corinth. ”

“ The poems of Halleck are not only good in themselves, but they give an impression of greater powers than they embody. They seem to indicate a large, broad, vigorous mind, of which poetry has been the recreation rather than the vocation. A brilliant mischievousness, in which the serious and the ludicrous, the tender and the comic, the practical and the ideal, are brought rapidly together, is the leading characteristic of his muse. ”

“ When we reflect that, at this time, Halleck was the most popular poet in the country,—for Drake was dead and Bryant scarcely known,—and that no other American poet could be called his rival, we may well admire that unpretending modesty which always formed the chief charm in his character. Upon one occasion, in after-years, when he was invited to a brilliant party in New York, he declined the invitation, and said, quietly, to a friend, “I always avoided notoriety in my earlier days,—and I am too old a lion now to shake my mane in a lady’s drawing-room.” ”

“ It is gradually growing in the public estimation, and under your conduct, and with your contributions, must soon, if it is not already, be known all over the land.” Lastly, in regard to the disputed matter of Drake and Halleck, we have just received the following testimony from an individual second to no American author in the wide-spread popularity of his writings, and in their universal appreciation by men of letters, both in the United States and England. “You have given sufficient evidence on various occasions, not only of critical knowledge but of high independence ”

“ A few days after their meeting, the two came together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street, not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the Orestes and Pylades of American poets.
Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John-116- Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street by the waterside. ”

“ The expedition referred to by General Halleck in his parting conversation was composed of the Second Michigan and Second Iowa regiments of cavalry, formed into a brigade under command of Colonel Washington L. Elliott, of the Second Iowa. It was to start on the night of the 27th of May at 12 o'clock, and proceed by a circuitous route through Iuka, Miss., to Booneville, a station on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, about twenty-two miles below Corinth, and accomplish all it could in the way of destroying the enemy's supplies and cutting his railroad communications. ”

“ From Slidell, for whom the Spectator is for taking up the cudgels, we have yesterday heard in a similar strain and with a similar promise. From Prof. Anthon, ditto. Mrs. Sigourney, also lately reviewed, has just forwarded us her compliments and a communication. Halleck, since our abuse of his book, writes us thus: “There is no place where I shall be more desirous of seeing my humble writings than in the publication you so ably support and conduct. It is full of sound, good literature, and its frank, open, independent manliness of spirit, is characteristic of the land it hails from.” ”

“ In 1864 he published in the New York Ledger a poem of 300 lines entitled “Young America.” He died at Guilford, on the 19th of November 1867. The poems of Halleck are written with great care and finish, and manifest the possession of a fine sense of harmony and of genial and elevated sentiments. ”

“ Halleck, in the apparent public estimate, maintains a somewhat better position than that to which, on absolute grounds, he is entitled. There is something, too, in the bonhomie of certain of his compositions—something altogether distinct from poetic merit—which has aided to establish him; and much also must be admitted on the score of his personal popularity, which is deservedly great. With all these allowances, however, there will still be found a large amount of poetical fame to which he is fairly entitled.... Personally he is a man to be admired, respected, but more especially beloved. ”

“ Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of which is universally known:
"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days ”

“ But besides these daily contributions to the Post, Drake had written a poem, and Halleck had written another, for the National Advocate, a newspaper edited by Major Noah, and both poems were published within the time in which the Croakers appeared in the Post. I mean to say, that in six days Halleck and Drake had written ten poems; and in those six days they had made the most conspicuous mark in American poetry.
When we examine these light satires, we find them by no means trifling. They are like the Italian chain-mail, delicate in fabric, but impervious to assault. ”

“ Timothy Halleck himself, six feet two, large-boned, gaunt, hawk-nosed, with great brown eyes deep-socketed and thatched above with bristling brows, white-haired and gruff, ruled like a kindly tyrant in his chaotic kingdom. He was the town's one-man organized charity, a poverty-stricken philanthropist who denied himself so that he might help others; a widower, lonesome and fond of children. ”

“ Halleck is better qualified than you are to stand the buffets of intrigue and policy. Come out West; take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley; let us make it dead-sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk! We have done much; still much remains to be done. Time and time's influences are all with us; we could almost afford to sit still and let these influences work. Even in the seceded States your word now would go further than a President's proclamation, or an act of Congress. ”

“ Then came Chancellorsville with its sickening consequences. When the news came to Washington, the President, with streaming eyes, could only exclaim: "My God, my God! what will the country say?"
The next we hear of Hooker, he had not entered Richmond nor had he found the amusement of publishing the President's fatherly letter. He was chasing Lee in a northerly direction,—towards Philadelphia or New York. He became angry with Halleck who refused him something and summarily resigned. It was not, for the country, an opportune time for changing generals, but perhaps it was as well. ”

“ He mingles humor and pathos, realism and idealism, in a masterly way. No other author has had the necessary dramatic touch to endow those times with such a powerful romantic appeal to our imagination. No one else has rescued them from the oblivion which usually overtakes all transitory stages of human development.
Bret Harte's pages afford us the rare privilege of again communing with genuine primitive feeling, with eternal human qualities, not deflected or warped by convention. He gives us the literature of democracy. ”

“ My missis has sent me off here on the spur of the moment: and when she sends one out on an errand for herself one had best not linger, you know. Besides, I must get back to dress my ladies."
"Oh, must you," indifferently remarked Miss Hallet; who rarely evinced curiosity as to her neighbours' doings, or encouraged gossip upon trifles.
"They are all going off to a dinner party at Stilborough; and missis took it into her head just now that she'd use one of her new fine cambric han'kerchers," continued Harriet. ”

“ To show how delightful these joint labors were, to both these illustrious men, Halleck told me that, upon one occasion, Drake, after writing some stanzas and getting the proof from the printer, laid his cheek down upon the lines he had written, and looking at his fellow-poet, with beaming eyes, said, “O, Halleck, isn’t this happiness!”
Mr. Halleck rarely spoke of his own productions indeed, he seemed to think very lightly of them. Yet he had an unbounded admiration for Drake. Drake, on the other hand, did not think his own poems worth publishing or acknowledging. ”

“ Like a wild cat she slipped out from under the buffalo robes, wiggled along among the wet leaves and moss, then crawled to her feet and was off like a deer towards the Panther Glade, regardless of the howling of the wolves. Hugh Gibson’s quick sense of hearing told him she was coming, and he walked out so that he stood on the path before her, and clasped her white shapely arms in heartfelt congratulations. ”

“ B. Astor added to this a gift of ten thousand dollars. It was the first gift ever given by a wealthy man to a poet, in this country. It was certainly noble and generous. Opulence often pays thousands of dollars for a picture, to secrete in a private gallery; but the greater artist, the Poet, whose works ennoble mankind, is too often forgotten.
I asked Mr. Embury, one day, why it was that John Jacob Astor had left Halleck, his faithful clerk, only this trifling sum. “I think I can explain that,” he said. “Halleck often used to joke Mr. ”

“ The two young poets, hidden in an obscurity which they found very pleasant, were probably in great awe of the brilliant young Knickerbocker who had dared to ridicule the town, and who, in the glory of his local fame, was eager for fresh fields and a wider horizon. They found very excellent company and much pleasant talk in the city, and they hunted the joys of youth together. Halleck described Drake at this time as “perhaps the handsomest man in New York—a face like an angel, a form like an Apollo.” ”

“ Hackett to invite Mr. Halleck, Mr. Verplanck, and one or two other old friends to meet together, and have a good old-fashioned dinner. Halleck used to say, “Pretty much all my old friends are gone—except Bryant, Verplanck, and myself,—we are the last of the cocked hats.” But the projected dinner was unhappily interrupted by the decease of the poet, in whose honor it was intended to be given. I met Mr. Hackett and Mr. Verplanck, and agreed upon the day when I was to notify Halleck—and an hour after that meeting, I heard the sad news of his death. ”

“ Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature."
Henry James in his essay, The Art of Fiction, denies that the novelist is less concerned than the historian about the quest for truth. He says, "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. ”

“ Hartington looked down with an injured air, adding another to her list of grievances against her dear friend and neighbor, Eleanor Van Antwerp.
"I should never go to a common fortune-teller, my dear," she observed in a louder tone, for the benefit of the assembled company. "Yours was probably just an ignorant person. But I did go to ——, who, you know, charges a small fortune, and he told me the most extraordinary things. I have perfect confidence in him; every one I know thinks him quite infallible."
"Do they?" said Paul Halleck, suddenly turning from the piano. ”