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of its value as simply "an addition to that old school of English lyrical poetry of which gentleness is the soul and simplicity the garment."
In 1888 he collected all of his poems which he still wished to preserve and published them in a little volume called "Wanderers." In his preface to this collection he says that "most of his poems have drifted into life of their own accord, and therefore, and because their frail existence must be so doubtful, he has ever viewed them as Wanderers and so describes them here to be. It has seemed to the author of these poems that they are the expression of various representative aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly possess the inherent right to exist."
As we take up the little book and read the poems he has given us there we find a great many which certainly do possess that essential "inherit right to exist."
Refinement in thought and beauty of expression are qualities common throughout. Sometimes a stanza has a finish and polish that reminds us of Tennyson, as in "Dream Thoughts" where he speaks of the sunset as
"The last, sad light, so loath to pass
It weeps upon the golden grass."
And again, in the same poem,
"Slow pales the light; the day declines;
The night-wind murmurs in the pines;
The stars come out, and, far away,
Across the sweetly sleeping bay
One snow white sail, by sunset kist.
Fades slowly in the ocean mist."
The musical element in his verse is more rarely found. There is never any suggestion of Poe's studied harmonies nor even of Longfellow's simple melodies. And yet we find here and there a certain kind of musical expression which the last stanza of "Love's Refuge" will perhaps illustrate more clearly than any other. In it the rhythmical flow of words makes us almost hear the "low lament:"
"Set your face to the stars, fond lover.—
"Set your face to the stars, fond lover.— Calm, and silent; and bright, and true!— They will pity you, they will hover Tenderly over the deep for you. Winds of heaven will sigh their dirges, Tears of heaven for you be spent, And sweet, for you, will the murmuring surges Pour the wail of their low lament."
This is also a good example of the retrospective sadness which is a very noticeable feature of every one of the poems. Whatever the subject that has inspired him, William Winter always sees the sorrowful side of it. His love sonnets are never bright and cheerful. Always as in the little poem "Relics" he seems to feel that
"He grandly loves who loves in vain:"
In "Love's Requiem," he says
"Bring withered autumn leaves,
Call everything that grieves,
Call everything that grieves,
And build a funeral pyre above his head!
Heap there all golden promise that deceives
Beauty that wins the heart and then bereaves,
For Love is dead."
"At the Ebb Tide" seems to contain his conclusion to the whole matter, especially the last verse of this stanza:
"Gaunt sorrow claims her, heart and brain;
She bears the burden of the cross;
She hears the solemn dirge of pain,
The sad, old song of love and loss."
Not only love but every phase of human life is touched with melancholy:
"One lesson comes to all that live,
One final truth their lives declare,—
That earth has nought but toil to give.
And nought to teach but how to bear."
No message could be more helpless than this, and again in "The Undertone" he seems to sound the very keynote of despair—
"It sobs far up the lonely sky,
It faints in regions of the blest—
The endless, bitter, human cry.
—And only God could tell the rest."
With Winter, death is only the "dreamless sleep." He can not look beyond it with cheerful hope, but, like Bryant, he questions the future and asks
"But is it rest to vanish hence,
To mix with earth, or sea, or air?
Is death indeed a full defense
Is death indeed a full defense
Against the tyranny of care?
Against the tyranny of
Or is it cruellest pretence ? "
And again in the "Night Watch" he asks
"When will this night of death be o'er? When will the morning break?"
At best, what follows our present life is to him only "some mysterious better land."
"He cannot tell us,—none can tell What waits beyond the mystic veil."
Naturally his elegies contain some of his best stanzas, as the one spoken in Washington on Decoration Day 1880, which is also one of his longest poems. The graves of the dead soldiers of our civil war was just the subject to inspire Winter to write in his tenderest and noblest vein, and this "Elegy" seems to me to be the choicest of all his poems both in expression and sentiment. He there speaks feelingly of our lost heroes: