"It is too soon to assign Tennyson to his permanent place in literature. He may yet do things greater than any that he has done. And besides, we are too near to judge his work, except tentatively. You remember Solon's dictum--'Call no man happy until death.' It is especially unsafe to attempt a final judgment upon the works of a poet while the glamor of them is still upon us. Moreover, I have never been a critic. I should distrust any critical judgment of my own."
That reminded me that I had never heard Mr. Bryant express his opinion with regard to the work of any modern poet, living or dead. The nearest approach to anything of the kind that I can recall was in a little talk I had with him when I was about leaving for Boston to attend the breakfast given in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth year. The subject of Holmes's work arose naturally, and in talking of it Mr. Bryant said:
"After all, it is as a novelist chiefly that I think of him."
"You are thinking of 'Elsie Venner'?" I asked.
"No,--of 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,'" he answered. "Few persons care for anything in that except the witty wisdom of it, and I suppose Dr. Holmes wrote it for the sake of that. But there is a sweet love story in the book--hidden like a bird in a clump of obtrusively flowering bushes. It is a sweet, wholesome story, and the heroine of it is a very natural and very lovable young woman."
The coincidence referred to above was this. Almost exactly at the time of the publication of Tennyson's "Harold," some American whose name I have forgotten, to my regret, brought out a dramatic poem on the same subject, with the same hero, and in a closely similar form. It was entitled "The Son of Godwin," and, unless my memory plays me a trick, it was a work of no little merit. It was completely overshadowed, of course, by Tennyson's greater performance, but it had enough of virility and poetic quality in it to tempt me to write a carefully studied comparison of the two works.
While Mr. Bryant shrank from the delivery of opinions concerning the moderns, his judgments of the older writers of English literature were fully formed and very positive. He knew the classic literature of our language--and especially its poetic literature--more minutely, more critically, and more appreciatively than any other person I have ever known, and he often talked instructively and inspiringly on the subject.