and fierily a Catholic, and a lover of the Franciscans. 10 During the height of the despoiling and plundering of the Missions, under the Secularization Act, she was for a few 5 years almost beside herself. More than once she journeyed alone, when the journey was by no means without danger, to Monterey, to stir up the Prefect of the Missions to more energetic action, to to implore the governmental authorities to interfere, and protect the Church's property. It was largely in consequence of her eloquent entreaties that Governor Micheltorena issued his bootless order, restoring to the Church all the Missions south of San Luis Obispo. But this order cost Micheltorena his political head, and General Moreno was severely wounded in one of the skirmishes of the 20 insurrection which drove Micheltorena out of the country. 15 In silence and bitter humiliation the Señora nursed her husband back to health again, and resolved to meddle no more in 25 the affairs of her unhappy country and still more unhappy Church. As year by year she saw the ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties relting away, like dew before the sun, 30 in the hands of dishonest administrators and politicians, the Church powerless to contend with the unprincipled greed in high places, her beloved Franciscan Fathers driven from the country or dying of starvation at their posts, she submitted herself to what, she was forced to admit, seemed to be the inscrutable will of God for the discipline and humiliation of the Church. In a sort of bewildered resigna- 40 tion she waited to see what farther sufferings were to come, to fill up the measure of the punishment which, for some mysterious purpose, the faithful must endure. But when close upon all this dis- 45 comfiture and humiliation of her Church followed the discomfiture and humiliation of her country in war, and the near and evident danger of an English-speaking people's possessing the land, all the smoth- 50 ered fire of the Señora's nature broke out afresh. With unfaltering hands she 'Would thou wert a man, Felipe,' she exclaimed again and again in tones the child never forgot. Would thou wert a man, that thou night go also to fight these foreigners!' Any race under the sun would have been to the Señora less hateful than the American. She had scorned them in her girlhood, when they came trading to post after post. She scorned them still. The idea of being forced to wage a war with peddlers was to her too monstrous to be believed. In the outset she had no doubt that the Mexicans would win in the contest. 'What!' she cried, 'shall we who won independence from Spain, be beaten by these traders? It is impossible!' When her husband was brought home to her dead, killed in the last fight the Mexican forces made, she said icily, 'He would have chosen to die rather than to have been forced to see his country in the hands of the enemy.' And she was almost frightened at herself to see how this thought, as it dwelt in her mind, slew the grief in her heart. She had believed she could not live if her husband were to be taken away from her; but she found herself often glad that he was dead,glad that he was spared the sight and the knowledge of the things which happened; and even the yearning tenderness with which her imagination pictured him among the saints, was often turned into a fierce wondering whether indignation. did not fill his soul, even in heaven, at the way things were going in the land for whose sake he had died. Out of such throes as these had been born the second nature which made Señora Moreno the silent, reserved, stern, implacable woman they knew, who knew her first when she was sixty. Of the gay, tender, sentimental girl, who danced and laughed with the officers, and prayed and confessed with the Fathers, forty years before, there was small trace left now, in the low-voiced, white-haired, aged woman, silent, unsmiling, placid-faced, who maneuvered with her son and her head shepherd alike, to bring it about that a handful of Indians might once more confess their sins to a Franciscan buckled on her husband's sword, and with Ramona, Chapter II, 1884. EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN (1833-1908) 1 Strictly speaking, Edmund Clarence Stedman was a New York business man who turned at times to literature for recreation. He was a native of Hartford, Connecticut; he attended Yale, but because of youthful pranks was not permitted to finish his course; and at the age of twenty was married without his guardian's consent. Necessity for securing a livelihood sent him to New York to engage in the manufacture of clocks. The company soon failing, he turned in 1855 to real estate business and brokerage. In the early days of the war he went to the front as a newspaper correspondent, reported brilliantly some of the early battles, and, returning in 1863, entered Wall Street as a broker and a little later as a member of the Stock Exchange. He had found his profession, and, though nearly ruined by the panic of the early seventies, and always in great financial anxiety, he maintained his place until 1900, when he resigned to devote himself wholly to literary work. From the first, poetry was to Stedman an avenue of escape from the distracting hurly-burly of business life. Like Taylor and Stoddard and Hayne and Timrod, he considered it something sacred and apart, to be approached with reverence. He translated Theocritus, made poems of Grecian beauty, and dreamed dreams in a world far from his own land and day. The war awakened him for a time, but he must be classed with the transition poets who, Janus-like, stand looking longingly backward and at the same time timidly forward into the future. He published enough poetry to make possible a Household Edition,' but of it all only a few virile war lyrics, written in the days when the war shook him out of his dreamy reveries, and two or three other lyrics that came from his heart. have survived him. In his later years he turned to prose, and wrote graceful studies of the Victorian poets and of the American poets. But he was a soul too poetic and sentimental to succeed as a critic. His flowing and ornate appreciations to-day seem lacking in force and breadth and philosophical insight. In spirit they are of the generalizing and gorgeous mid-century rather than of the more scientific and accurate later years. In his study of Poe he reached his highest point as a critic. 6 of an artist's life is that of his inspired moments. There were occasions when Poe was the master, when his criticism was true, when he composed such tales as Ligeia,' The Fall of the House of Usher,' poems like The Raven,' 'The Bells,' The City in the Sea.' It must be acknowledged, moreover and professional writers know what this impliesthat Poe, in his wanderings, after all, followed his market. It gradually drifted to the North, until New York afforded the surest recompense to authors not snugly housed in the leafy coverts of New England. Nor did he ever resort to any mercantile employment for a livelihood. As we look around and see how authors accept this or that method of support, there seems to be something chivalrous in the attitude of one who never earned a dollar except by his pen. From first to last he was simply a poet and man of letters, who rightly might claim to be judged by the literary product of his life. The life itself differed from that of any modern poet of equal genius, and partly because none other has found himself, in a new country, among such elements. Too much has been written about the man, too little of his times; and the memoir containing a judicial estimate of his writings has not yet appeared. His story has had a fascination for those who consider the infirmity of genius its natural outward sign. The peculiarity of his actions was their leaning toward what is called the melodramatic; of his work, that it aimed above the level of its time. What has been written of the former quite out of proportion to the analysis derivable from his literary remains frequently has been the output of those who, if unable to produce a stanza which he would have acknowledged, at least feel within themselves the possibilities of his errant career. Yet, as I observe the marvels of his handicraft, I seem unjust to these enthusiasts. It was the kind which most impresses the imagination of youth, and youth is a period at which the critical development of many biographers seems to be arrested. And who would not recall the zest with which he read, in schoolboy days, and by the stolen candle, a legend so fearful in its beauty and so beautiful in its fear as The Masque of the Red Death,' for example, found in some stray number of a the originals of The Sleeper,' 'A Dream within a Dream,' and 'Lenore'; while 'The Doomed City' and 'The Valley of Nis' reappear as The City in the Sea' and 'The Valley of Unrest." Others were less thoroughly rewritten. Possibly he thus remodeled his juvenile verse to show that, however inchoate, it contained something worth a master's handling. Mr. magazine, and making the printed trash that convoyed it seem so vapid and drear? Not long after, we had the collected series, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.' With what eagerness we caught them 5 from hand to hand until many of us knew them almost by heart. In the East, at that time, Hawthorne was shyly putting out his 'Mosses and Twice Told Tales,' and it was not an unfruitful period that 10 Stoddard thinks, and not without reason, fostered, among its brood of chattering and aimless sentimentalists, two such spirits at once, each original in his kind. To-day we have a more consummate, that he found it an easy way of making saleable 'copy.' The poet himself intimates that circumstances beyond his control restricted his lyrical product. realistic art. But where, now, the crea- 15 I scarcely remember another instance tive ardor, the power to touch the stops, In estimating him as a poet, the dates of these lyrics are of minor consequence. They make but a thin volume, smaller than one which might hold the verse of Collins or Gray. Their range is narrower still. It is a curious fact that Poe struck, in youth, the key-notes of a few themes, 40 and that some of his best pieces, as we now have them, are but variations upon their earlier treatment. His first collection, as we have seen, was made in his twentieth year, and re- 45 printed with changes and omissions, just after he left West Point. The form of the longer poems is copied from Byron. and Moore, while the spirit of the whole series vaguely reminds us of Shelley in 50 his obscurer lyrical mood. Poe's originality can be found in them, but they would be valueless except for his after career. They have unusual significance as the shapeless germs of much that was to grow 55 into form and beauty. Crude and wandering pieces, entitled 'Fairy Land' and 'Irene,' To,' 'A Pæan,' etc., were where a writer has so hoarded his early songs, and am in doubt whether to commend or deprecate their reproduction. It does not betoken affluence, but it was honest in Poe that he would not write in cold blood for the mere sake of composing. This he undoubtedly had the skill to do, and would have done, if his sole object had been creation of the beautiful, or art for art's sake. He used his lyrical gift mostly to express veritable feelings and moods I might almost say a single feeling or mood to which he could not otherwise give utterance, resorting to melody when prose was insufficient Herein he was true to the cardinal, antique conception of poesy, and in keeping it distinct from his main literary work he confirmed his own avowal that it was to him a passion, and neither a purpose nor a pursuit. A few poems, just as they stood in his early volume, are admirable in thought or finish. One is the sonnet, 'To Science,' which is striking, not as a sonnet, but for its premonition of attitudes which poetry and science have now more clearly assumed. Another is the exquisite lyric, 'To Helen,' which every critic longs to cite. Its confusion of imagery is wholly forgotten in the delight afforded by melody, lyrical perfection, sweet and classic grace. I do not understand why he omitted this charming trifle from the juvenile poems which he added to the collection of 1845. It is said that he wrote it when fourteen, and nothing more fresh and delicate came from his pen in maturer years. The instant success of 'The Raven and this was within a few years of his death first made him popular as a poet, and resulted in a new collection of his verses. The lyrics which it contained, and a few written afterward,—' Ulalume,' 'The Bells,'' For Annie,' etc.,- now comprise the whole of his poetry as retained in the standard editions. The most glaring faults of Al Aaraaf' and Tamerlane,' phrases such as the eternal condor years,' have been selected by eulogists for special praise. Turning from this practice-work to the poems which made his reputation, we come at once to the most widely known of all. Poe could not have written The Raven' in youth. It exhibits a method so positive as almost to compel us to accept, against the denial of his associates, 15 his own account of its building. The maker does keep a firm hand on it throughout, and for once seems to set his purpose above his passion. This appears in the gravely quaint diction, and in the 20 contrast between the reality of every-day manners and the profounder reality of a spiritual shadow upon the human heart. The grimness of fate is suggested by phrases which it requires a masterly hand 25 to subdue to the meaning of the poem. Sir,' said I, 'or madam,' this ungainly fowl,' and the like, sustain the air of grotesqueness, and become a foil to the pathos, an approach to the tragical climax, 30 of this unique production. Only genius can deal so closely with the grotesque and make it add to the solemn beauty of structure an effect like that of the gargoyles seen by moonlight on the façade of 35 Notre Dame. raven is the very genius of the Night's Plutonian shore, different from other ravens, entirely his own, and none other can take its place. It is an emblem of 5 the Irreparable, the guardian of pitiless memories, whose burden ever recalls to us the days that are no more. In no other lyric is Poe so selfpossessed. No other is so determinate in its repetends and alliterations. Hence I am far from deeming it his most poetical 40 poem. Its artificial qualities are those which catch the fancy of the general reader; and it is of all his ballads, if not the most imaginative, the most peculiar. His more ethereal productions seems to 45 me those in which there is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity, in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls. and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares. Literal 50 criticisms of The Raven' are of small account. If the shadow of the bird could not fall upon the mourner, the shadows of its evil presence could brood upon his soul; the seraphim whose foot-falls tinkle 55 upon the tufted floor may be regarded as seraphim of the Orient, their anklets hung with celestial bells. At all events, Poe's As a new creation, then, 'The Raven' is entitled to a place in literature, and keeps it. But how much more imaginative is such a poem as The City in the Sea'! As a picture, this reminds us of Turner, and, again, of that sublime madman, John Martin. Here is a strange city where Death has raised a throne. Its This poem, notwithstanding its somberness and terror, depends upon effects which made Poe the forerunner of our chief experts in form and sound, and both the language and the conception are suggestive in a high degree. 'The Sleeper' is even more poetic. It distills, like drops from the opiate vapor of the swooning moonlight night, all the melody, the fantasy, the exaltation, that befit the vision of a beautiful woman lying in her shroud, silent in her length of tress, waiting to exchange her death chamber |