SOURCE: "Richard Henry Dana," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. LVIII, No. 347, April, 1879, pp. 769-76.

[In the following excerpt Stoddard provides a critical overview of Dana's literary career, noting especially the influence of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on "The Buccaneer."]

To rightly understand an author, and the place he occupies in the literature of his country, we must not only understand the events of his life and the order in which his works were written, we must also understand the literary conditions under which they were produced, and which conspired to make them what they were. To judge the authors of the last century by the standards of the present century is to judge them uncritically and unjustly: they wrote according to their light, and whether it was greater or lesser, it was certainly other than our light. They belonged to their day and generation, as we belong to ours, and if we cherish the hope of being appreciated by those who come after us, we should seek to appreciate those who came before us, and who made what we are possible. It is a fashion among young writers to sneer at their elders, as if they were unworthy of serious consideration. I have heard these confident gentlemen declare that the prose of Irving was poor, and the poetry of Bryant dull and monotonous. I have asked them if they were familiar with early American literature, if they had read the prose writers who preceded Irving and the poets who preceded Bryant, and they have generally admitted that they had not, thereby placing themselves out of court. If a crass ignorance prevails in regard to these writers, who are among the most distinguished that we have, what instrument yet invented can measure the ignorance which prevails in regard to others of less note—such men, for example, as Richard Henry Dana? That he wrote something once upon a time a well-informed reader might possibly recollect, but precisely what it was not one in a hundred could tell. And yet he ranked in his day (and justly) among the foremost writers in America. . . .

Richard Henry Dana was exceedingly delicate as a child, as was also William Cullen Bryant, and the two young poets were largely benefited by water—the latter by the enforced use of a cold spring which gushed from the under-world near the homestead of his father at Cummington, and the former by the fresh and briny air of the ocean at Newport, whither he was sent when he was about ten years old. Studiously inclined, he was not able to study much, so he passed his time mostly out-of-doors, rambling along the rock-bound coast, and listening to the roar of the breakers. The wind came to him with healing on its wings, and the tumultuous waves strengthened his love of solitude. No other American poet was ever so moulded by the ocean; which haunted him like a passion, insensibly blending with his thoughts and emotions. That he was a poet did not dawn upon him in childhood, as it did upon the young dreamer at Cummington, nor was there any thing in our literature to suggest the possibility of an American poet. Poets by courtesy there were, of course, for, like the poor, they are always with us. Dwight had published his "Conquest of Canaan," Barlow his "Vision of Columbus," and Freneau a collection of his patriotic poems. These swallows, however, no more made a summer than the little beach birds which Master Dana saw flitting before him in his daily rambles along the shore at Newport.

The traditions of the Dana family were scholarly, and in his seventeenth year, when his health was sufficiently restored, Richard Henry Dana was sent to Harvard College, as his father and grandfather were before him, where he pursued his studies until his twentieth year, when he became involved in a college rebellion, and was compelled to leave his course unfinished. He returned to Newport, where he devoted himself for the next two years to classical literature, and the little that was worth reading in American literature, which may be said to have begun with Salmagundi. An experiment in the shape of a periodical, the Monthly Anthology, languished until it reached ten volumes, and is worthy of remembrance if only on account of the zeal of the club which projected it (the Anthology Club), and which had the satisfaction, such as it was, of footing the bills for publishing it. Clearly the Monthly Anthology was not wanted, though the best pens in Boston wrote for it. What the little world of American readers wanted was not literature pure and simple, but literature with a purpose, which purpose at this time was a political one. Our fathers were bitter politicians, and their best writings were on political subjects. Their mania affected their children, one of whom, a boy of thirteen, perpetrated a volume of political verse which led the conductors of this luckless Monthly Anthology to question whether it could really have been the production of so young a person. "The Embargo" soon passed into a second edition, and the name of its author, William Cullen Bryant, was introduced to the attention of his admiring countrymen. It was read by the son of Judge Dana in the intervals of his classical studies at Newport, whence he soon removed to Baltimore, and to the study of law in the office of General Robert Goodloe Harper.

There was a marked literary element in Boston in the first decade of the century, as was shown by the persistent attempt to establish a periodical in that city, and notwithstanding its want of success, its projectors never lost heart or hope. Prominent among them were William Tudor, a graduate of Harvard and a travelled man, George Ticknor, the future historian of Spanish literature, and John Quincy Adams. They cultivated literature (not exactly on oatmeal) by giving suppers, at which they discussed their contributions to the Monthly Anthology, and to which they occasionally invited their friends, among others Richard Henry Dana and Washington Allston. A South Carolinian by birth, Allsten had spent his childhood at Newport, where he doubtless knew young Master Dana, and where he certainly knew Malbone, the miniature painter, whose influence determined him in his choice of the profession he adopted. He painted in oils before he was seventeen, at which age he entered Harvard College, where his attention was divided between his pencils and his books. Before he was invited to the suppers of the Anthology Club he had travelled in England, where he became a student of the Royal Academy, after which he proceeded to Rome. While at Rome he made the acquaintance of Coleridge, who was on his way back to England from Malta, where he had proved unsatisfactory as a secretary to Sir Alexander Bell. The young American painter was fascinated by the English poet, of whom he declared in later life that to no other man did he owe so much intellectually. "He used to call Rome the silent city," Allston wrote, "but I never could think of it as such while with him; for, meet him when or where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but, like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living stream seemed specially to flow for every classic ruin over which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I had once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy." To his talents as a painter, which were eminent, Allston added the dangerous talent of writing poetry, in which he was not eminent, though it was once the fashion to say that he was. He was the honored guest of the Anthology Club, at whose symposia his verses were read and admired, at least by his friend Richard Henry Dana, who reviewed them when they were published a few years later. They were connections, Allston having married a sister of Dr. Channing.

Though he had been admitted to the bar both in Boston and Baltimore, and was in a certain sense a lawmaker, having been elected to the Legislature of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Dana failed to sustain the legal reputation of his family. He followed his profession for a few years, and finally quitted it for literature, which was slowly but surely striking root in New England, watered, so to say, by the hopeful young arboriculturists of the defunct Monthly Anthology, headed by William Tudor, who, with a courage in keeping with his name, projected a periodical which should (and did) take its place. This was the North American Review, which appeared in May, 1815, and still survives in a green and flourishing old age. It was managed by a club, as its predecessor had been, who gave suppers as they had done, at which they read the papers that they had written, or that had been sent to them, and decided upon their merits and demerits. Richard Henry Dana was a member of this club, which was presided over by Tudor, who was the actual editor of the North American Review for upward of two years, and by far the largest contributor, three-fourths of the first four volumes coming from his facile pen. He was succeeded by Edward Tyrell Channing, a cousin of Richard Henry Dana, under whom its literary character was more assured. To this gentleman, or more exactly, perhaps, to the club of which he was president, there were sent two poems, which were read before the club, as the verses of Allston had been read before the Anthology Club, and which its members declared could not have been written by an American, they were so stately and well sustained. They were the productions of the young man whose youth had been questioned by the crities of the Monthly Anthology some seven or eight years before, and who had lately been admitted to the bar in Great Barrington. The longest and most important of these poems—a meditation upon the universality of death, was written when he was about eighteen, and left by him among his papers, where it was discovered by his father while he was at college, who thought it was worthy of publication, and accordingly sent it to the North American Review. The doubt which had been cast upon its paternity was apparently solved, but really increased, by the information which the manuscript appeared to convey, that the author, whose name was Bryant, was a member of the Massachusetts Senate. This intelligence excited the curiosity of Richard Henry Dana, who immediately walked from Cambridge to Boston, where the Senate was then in session, in order to obtain a sight of the eleventh Muse, lately sprung up in America, Mistress Anne Bradstreet having been considered in her day the tenth Muse. He went, he saw, and was not convinced. The plain middle-aged gentleman who was pointed out to him could not be the new poet whom he was seeking. He was right—he was not the poet, but he was the poet's father, Dr. Bryant, of Cummington. Such was the history of "Thanatopsis" in its exodus from manuscript to the pages of the North American Review.

Superficial students of literary history are often surprised at the disproportion between the reputation of certain writers and the intellectual value of their writings, and are consequently unjust in their judgments of both. Readers of to-day who are not familiar with our early literature—the literature of seventy years ago, for example—wonder, and not unnaturally, at the estimation in which their fathers held the fathers of our present race of writers. Contemporary critics were too favorable to them, they think, and they are not altogether in the wrong, but they forget that the contemporary critics were coguizant of literary conditions that no longer exist, the consideration of which materially influenceed their decisions. Our fathers were worthy people, but their sympathy with literature was slight; they tolerated rather than encouraged it. The young gentlemen who sustained the Monthly Anthology sustained it at their own cost, and were out of pocket for the frugal suppers upon which its continuance depended. The North American Review paid its contributors nothing for years, and when it did begin to pay them, the honorarium was ridiculously small. They wrote, not because they had any thing to gain, but because they had something to say, the saying of which was its own exceeding great reward. They wrote under many difficulties, not the least of which was an invidious comparison with English writers, who so habitually asserted their superiority that few Americans thought of disputing it. The disesteem with which authorship was then regarded was frankly stated by Richard Henry Dana in the North American Review (September, 1817), in a notice of the poems of his friend Allston, which were originally published in England. "One generation goes on after another as if we were here for no other purpose than to do business, as the phrase is. The spirit of gain has taught us to hold other pursuits as mere amusements, and to associate something unmanly and trivial with the character of their followers. If a work of taste comes out, it is made a cause of lament that so much talent should be thus thrown away; and the bright and ever-during radiance in which it is in mercy hiding our dull commonness is neither seen nor felt. We hold every thing lightly which is not perceived to go immediately to some practical good—to lessen labor, increase wealth, or add to some homely comfort. It must have an active, business-like air, or it is regarded as a dangerous symptom of the decay of industry amongst us. To be sure, we read English poetry; but for the same reason that we take a drive out of town, because we are tired down by business, and must amuse ourselves a little to be refreshed and strengthened for work to-morrow. And, besides, we say the English can afford to furnish us with poetry. They are an old, wealthy people, and have a good deal of waste material on hand. And so it comes about, naturally enough, that poets are set down as a sort of intellectual idlers, and sober citizens speak of them with a shake of the head, as they would talk of some clever idler about town, who might have been a useful member of society, but, as to any serious purpose, is now lost to the world." If it required courage to state thus plainly the conditions by which authorship was then surrounded, it required more courage to prosecute it under such conditions, and I for one honor the single-minded men who did so, chief among whom I place Richard Henry Dana.

His contributions to the North American Review were not numerous, but they marked, if they did not originate, an era in the history of criticism in America. One paper in particular—a review of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (March, 1819)—was too remarkable to be readily accepted. It was remarkable for the originality, not to say the audacity, of the writer, who did not hesitate to reverse the judgments of Hazlitt, but who gave substantial and convincing reasons for reversing them, and for the soundness of his own judgments. Here is one, the reader felt, who is not content to let the English critics think for him, but who is abundantly able to think for himself, and who, besides, is throughly equipped with scholarship. Reading has made him a full man, and a man, therefore, to be feared. He questioned the supremacy which had been conferred by common consent on Pope. He declared that his much-bepraised epistle of Eloisa to Abelard was a gross production: that it was hot with lust and cold with false sentiment, far-sought antithesis, forced apostrophes, and all sorts of artificialities in the place of natural feeling and plain truth. The justice of this criticism might have been, and no doubt was, controverted by those who had taken Pope upon trust, accepting him as a precious intellectual legacy from the past century; but they could not controvert the justice of the verbal criticism on Pope's poetry, his incorrect use of words, his fondness for stock phrases, the paucity of his rhymes, and the nearness to each other of couplets terminating with the same rhyme, his rhymes to the eye rather than to the ear, and other flagrant violations of the minor morals of verse, which, however, in his case could hardly be considered minor ones, since his verse consisted for the most part of little else than these. "He has a deal too much of what was wont to be called poetic language for no other reason than that it would make intolerable prose."

Not less independent were other critical estimates of this new Zoilus, who said, for example, that the diction of Thomson swarmed with words that should seldom be met with except in a dictionary or a court letter of compliment; who contended that Gray's "Elegy" was not his greatest poem, and remarked that he would rather have written "The Bard;" who thought but little of the poetry of Goldsmith, whose fame would rest upon his two plays, his Citizen of the World, and his Vicar of Wakefield; who preferred Campbell's "O'Connor's Child" to his "Pleasures of Hope," which abounded with that language of no definite meaning which is styled elegant; and who warned Hazlitt and his master, Leigh Hunt, that if they undertook to banish such gentlemen as Crabbe into the kitchen, they would soon have the parlor all to themselves. These singnlarities of opinion (to call them by no harsher name) were overshadowed by a monstrous heresy which dared to place Wordsworth among the great poets of England—Wordsworth, whose tendious "Excursion" the great Jeffrey had crushed five years before with his famous "This will never do." This will never do, echoed the readers of the North American Review, who might probably have overlooked the slight which had been put upon the little Queen Anne's man, but could never overlook the glorification of the puerile poet of the Lakes. The scholastic conscience of New England was shocked by this paper; a strong party rose up against its author, who had the whole influence of Cambridge and literary and fashionable Boston to coutend with. He was also in a minority in the club, who permitted him to write but one more paper for the North American Review, and upon the safe subject of Irving's Sketch-Book; which he could not easily have made offensive to their sensitive palates.

It is not easy to go back in thought sixty years, and put ourselves in the place of those who seriously objected to a dispassionate discussion of the relative merits of English poets in a publication devoted to just such discussions. We must try to do so, nevertheless, or we shall be unjust toward them, for, after all, they believed that the interests of literature were likely to suffer if such new-fangled opinions were permitted to pass unchallenged. We had no literature to speak of, and if we were to have any, it ought to begin in accordance with recognized modes of thought and forms of expression; in other words, it ought not to violate settled canons of taste. Their forefathers believed in Pope, therefore they believed in him; the English critics did not believe in Wordsworth, therefore they did not believe in him. This is what they meant, I think, by their opposition to this famous criticism, the writing of which demanded greater originality and intellectual fearlessness than the conductors of the North American Review were disposed to stand by. Disowned as it was, however, its critical influence was as distinctly felt as the poetic influence of "Thanatopsis," which was an outgrowth from Wordsworth. "I shall never forget," wrote Richard Henry Dana, after the storm which he had raised had subsided—"I shall never forget with what feeling my friend Bryant, some years ago, described to me the effect produced upon him by his meeting for the first time with Wordsworth's Ballads. He lived, when quite young, where few works of poetry were to be had—at a period, too, when Pope was the great idol of the Temple of Art. He said that upon opening Wordsworth a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once within his heart, and the face of nature of a sudden to change into a strange freshness and life. He felt the sympathetic touch from an according mind, and you see how instantly his powers and affections shot over the earth and through his kind."

The mention of Irving's Sketch-Book in a preceding paragraph affords a clew to the next work of Richard Henry Dana, which was undoubtedly suggested by it—The Idle Man. The American original of both was Salmagundi, which was the first successful attempt to transplant the essay literature of England in the New World, the last being The Lorgnette of "Ik Marvel." The author of The Idle Man was familiar with the writings of Irving, and admired them, though not so warmly as the uncritical majority of his countrymen. The style of the Sketch-Book was less to his taste than the style of Salmagundi and Knickerbocker's History of New York. It was conceived after some wrong notion of subdued elegance—a too elaborate elaboration, and was more noticeable for wit and humor than for sentiment or pathos. This judgment, added to the gravity of his genius, determined the composition of The Idle Man, which was issued in numbers in New York in 1821-22. It was so little read that the writer was warned by his publisher that he was writing himself into debt; so he abandoned it on the publication of the first number of the second volume, and with it all serious connection with the prose literature of his country, limiting himself thereafter to the occasional writing of critical papers.

The author of The Idle Man and the author of "Thanatopsis" contracted a friendship through that incomparable poem, which was of great intellectual advantage to both. If any thing could have relieved the sombreness of that unlucky work, it would have been the poems which the latter contributed to it. The retired lawyer at Cambridge and the active lawyer at Great Barrington corresponded with each other upon what was nearest to their hearts, which it hardly need be said was not law, but literature, of which they were the most earnest representatives in America. One of the most important results of their correspondence was an invitation to the poet to write a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard—an invitation which he wisely accepted, and which produced the best poem that was ever recited before a college society—"The Ages." This was in 1821, his twenty-seventh year. When he went to Cambridge to deliver the poem he lodged at the house of his friend, and while staying there prepared for the press a small collection of his poetical writings, making several changes in "Thanatopsis," and adding the beginning and end as we have them now, no doubt by the advice of his critical host. Four years later he abandoned the law, and went to New York, where he started the New York Review, which is notable in the history of our literature as containing the first poems that Richard Henry Dana is known to have written.

When Master Dana was dreaming beside the sea at Newport, a young English poet at Stowey, an inland town in England, was writing a mysterious poem, of which the sea was the background.

Left an orphan at an early age, he had been educated at Christ's Hospital, where he made the acquaintance of Charles Lamb, had enlisted in a cavalry regiment, where he had proved a very awkward recruit, had married one of three sisters who were milliners, had published a volume of poems of more promise than performance, and had betaken himself to the consumption of opium. The poem in question, "The Ancient Mariner," was probably composed while he was stimulated by this pernicious drug, which was the bane of his after-life. It was published in the same volume as the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth, which were such a revelation to the young Bryant, whose genius does not appear to have been touched by the imagination of Coleridge. Not so Richard Henry Dana, to whom Coleridge was made known by the admiration of their common friend A liston, and who read all that he had written in verse and prose, and assigned him a high place in his unlucky paper on the English poets. Whatever the select few who read the Lyrical Ballads may have thought of "The Ancient Mariner," it created no impression on the English public, and was accepted by no English poet, except, perhaps, Wordsworth, who occasionally liked the verse of others, though he always preferred his own. It germinated in America, however, in the mind of Richard Henry Dana, and by some association, which he himself could hardly have explained, inspired his longest and most important poem—"The Buccaneer."

"The Buccaneer" resembles "The Ancient Mariner" in that the supernatural is an element in both, and that they turn upon the commission and punishment of crime. The crime of the ancient mariner is trival, humanly speaking, and is followed by consequences in which others are more concerned than himself; the crime of the buccaneer is dreadful, and consequences fall upon him alone, and not on others who were equally guilty with him. There is an air of verisimilitude about both poems, in spite of the impossible incidents with which they deal, which gives them a high place among purely imaginative works. The facts upon which the American poet has grounded his story are well vouched for, he claimed in his preface, and few truths were so fully believed in as the events that he narrated, though he admitted that he had not hesitated to depart from the truth in order to heighten the poetical effect by putting his hero on horseback instead of allowing him to die quietly in his bed. In other words, he had taken a story out of the Pirate's Own Book, and saved it from being merely horrible by adding a supernatural element to it.

The conception of "The Buccaneer" is better than the execution, which is lacking in ease and fluency. It is simple and severe in its style, Bryant wrote, in the North American Review, and free from that perpetual desire to be glittering and imaginative which dresses up every idea which occurs in the same allowance of figures of speech. As to what is called ambition of style, the work does not contain a particle of it; if the sentiment or image presented to the reader's mind be of itself calculated to make an impression, it is allowed to do so by being given in the most direct and forcible language; if otherwise, no pains are taken to make it pass for more than it is worth. There is even an occasional homeliness of expression which does not strike us agreeably, and a few passages are liable to the charge of harshness and abruptness. Yet altogether there is power put forth in this little volume, strength of pathos, talent at description, and command of language. The power of the poem was warmly acknowledged by Wilson, in Blackwood's Magazine, but the style was thought by him to be colored by that of Crabbe, of Wordsworth, and of Coleridge. "He is no servile imitator of those great masters, but his genius has been inspired by theirs, and he almost places himself on the level on which they stand in such poems as the 'Old Grimes' of Crabbe, the 'Peter Bell' of Wordsworth, and 'The Ancient Mariner' of Coleridge. 'The Buccaneer' is not equal to any one of them, but it belongs to the same class, and shows much of the same power in the delineations of the mysterious workings of the passions and the imagination." The poem differs from most modern poems in that it contains no passage which can be enjoyed by itself, separate from the context, either as a piece of description or sentiment-no passage, for example, like that in "The Ancient Mariner" in which the unearthly music heard by that strange personage is compared to the noise of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June, and no statement of a moral fact which fixes itself in the memory, like

He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The general impression which the poetry of Richard Henry Dana leaves upon the mind is that he is not so much a poet as a man of vigorous intellect who had determined to be a poet, and that he reached this determination too late in life. He moves like one who is shackled by his measures, whether they are simple, as in "The Buccaneer," or of a higher order, as in "The Husband's and Wife's Grave" and "The Dying Raven."

The literary career of Richard Henry Dana may be said to have practically ended with the publication of the little volume containing "The Buccaneer" (1827), though he afterward added to it about as many more poems as were contained therein (nine in all), and brought out a collected edition of his works in two volumes. What he might have written if he had followed the example of his friend Bryant, with whom poetry was a life-long passion, can only be conjectured. That a greater measure of success than was meted out to him would have encouraged him is probable; for, as he wrote in the preface to "The Buccaneer" (and almost prophetically, it now seems), "the most self-dependent are stirred to livelier action by the hope of fame; and there are none who can go on with vigor without the sympathy of some few minds which they respect." He felt, with his master, Coleridge,

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object can not live.

Fortunately for himself, if not for literature, Richard Henry Dana never knew

What ills the scholar's life assail—
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Born a gentleman, like his father before him, he inherited a good estate at Cambridge, a portion of which he sold in order to build himself a house elsewhere. His early love of the sea led him to select a site on the south side of Cape Ann, where he could look out upon the broad billows of the Atlantic. The lawn upon which it is built stretches to the edge of a steep gravelly cliff, below which lies a sandy beach of semicircular shape, isolated on the right by a projecting ledge that runs out beyond it into the sea, and on the left by the base of a precipitous hill. The house faces the south, and is sheltered on the north by a wooded hill. A thrifty farmer, anxious to turn his acres to advantage, would not have chosen the spot for a residence, or, choosing it, would not have left it, as our scholar and poet did, in a state of nature, covered with ancient forestry, and tenanted by crows, hawks, with occasionally an eagle, and multitudes of little beach birds haunting the surges and calling along the sands. It has a noble outlook, for the light-houses of Salem, Boston, and Marblehead can be seen from its window, as well as the passing hulls of Atlantic steamers; and it has a poetic interest in the rocky headland already mentioned, which is nautically known as "Norman's Woe," and is celebrated by Longfellow in his "Wreck of the Hesperus." Here, in full sight of the sea, the author of "The Buccaneer" passed his summers among his books, and friends, and his grandchildren: for he married in his early manhood, and perpetuated his name in a son, who achieved as much reputation as his father, though not exactly in the pleasant walk of letters which their ancestress Mrs. Anne Bradstreet laid out nearly two hundred years before, but in the sterner and more beaten highway of the law. A delicate child, the health of Richard Henry Dana improved when he was past fifty, and the current of his years bore him slowly onward to a ripe old age.

The oldest writer in America, he lived through several dynasties of literature—the reigns of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; Byron, Moore, and Scott; Hazlitt, Lamb, and Macaulay; Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and other English worthies; and he saw at home the rise of American literature, and what of brightness has been shed over it by the genius of Irving, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and other lesser lights in their several orbits of glory. All this he saw—a grave, scholarly, reverend man whom Time seemed to have forgotten. But the graybeard travels in divers paces with divers persons, ambling with some, trotting with others, and galloping at last with all. He crept with our old poet, but finally overtook him, and cast over him the shadow which he will one day cast over all mankind, and which we in our ignorance call Death. He found him in his winter residence in Boston, on the 2d of February last, and he was gathered to his fathers in peace, the greatest of his name.