Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead, and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was “_facile princeps_” among American poets, this eminence arose from no merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a noble, well rounded, and representative human life.
_Saxe_, _Melville_, _Alice and Phoebe Cary.--_After Bryant it is convenient to speak of a few poets, very different from him, and for the most part from each other, whose contemporaneous presence in New York is almost the only thing that connects them. John G. Saxe (1816-87), a native of Vermont, in his time was counted a leader among satirists. He staggers now under the accusation of extreme superficiality; none the less is he lively and readable. He consciously imitated Hood; he could scarcely avoid imitating Wendell Holmes. Of himself he had a remarkable turn for epigram and for punning in rhyme. His burlesque adaptations of Ovid are smart and amusing. On the whole it may be said that Saxe was at his best in “The Proud Miss MacBride,” where he girds at an upstart aristocracy:
Of all the notable things on earth, The queerest one is pride of birth, Among our “fierce Democracie.”
Herman Melville (1819-91), who wrote a fascinating account (“Typee,” 1846) of his stay among the aborigines of the Marquesas, also published “Battle-Pieces” (1866) and other poems. His verse is less objective and sincere than his prose. Alice Cary (1820-71) and her sister, Phoebe (1824-71), were born in Ohio, where they were locally appreciated. Removing first to Philadelphia, then to New York, they supported themselves by their pens. The talents of Alice Cary were manifestly superior; yet for a time, yielding to her admiration of Poe, she allowed the element of harmonious sound in her poetry to overbalance that of meaning. Her hymns, one of which is almost a classic, are noble in their purity of sentiment.