CURRENT LITERATURE.

HEARTSEASE AND RUE.*-To the reader who is quick to apprehend, there is in each one of the works of a writer of genius a subtle flavor which marks the particular period in which it was written. One who can read between the lines, always finds his interest heightened as he detects the effects of the life-experiences of an author as they are displayed in each new volume. There is usually something about a first production, in any department of literature, however able it may be, which marks it as a maiden effort. Perhaps it may be only the careful precision of the style that gives it whatever of peculiar charm it may have. There is a flavor, also, which is found in the later productions of a writer, which belongs to the period when he has all his powers well in hand, when his experiences of life are fully rounded, and he handles his themes with the confidence of a veteran. All this is especially true of the works of a poet. In reading poetry there is a still further delight, if, in addition to the flavor of which we have spoken, the reader finds that the flowers, from which the poet has collected the material that he has distilled into sweetest honey, have grown in the familiar fields that he has himself long known. We may well be grateful to the poet who is able by his genius to invest evermore the scenes and characters, the thoughts and sentiments which are dear to us, with new interest and beauty.

There is a decided flavor, such as that of which we have spoken, which is to be found in the new volume of poems—“ Heartsease and Rue"-which Mr. James Russell Lowell has just given to the public. We owed much before to this veteran in so many departments of literature. We will not undertake to say that in this last book he has surpassed anything he has written before, but there are here such marks of ripeness of power, of genial mellowness of feeling, that we are sure the volume will be welcomed in thousands of our American homes as a friend. But in addition to this, the themes are thoroughly American, and are treated in a spirit that is so thoroughly American, that they will awaken a response in the heart of all who read his lines.

*Heartsease and Rue. By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston: 12mo, pp. 218.

The Poems are arranged under the following heads: I. Friendship. II. Sentiment.-III. Fancy.-IV. Humor and Satire.-V. Epigrams.

The themes of the Poems of "Friendship" are enough of themselves to attract attention. Among them are the carefully finished tributes of Mr. Lowell's appreciation and love of such men as Agassiz, Holmes, Jeffries Wyman, Whittier, and George William Curtis,―in every way worthy of the men. The poem written in Florence, in 1874, on hearing of the death of Agassiz, is so beautiful that we shall take the liberty of calling the attention of our readers to it.

The Poem opens with a brief reference to the ocean telegraph, and the rapidity with which it spreads over the whole world intelligence of all that happens.

The flame-winged feet

Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run
Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun,
Are mercilessly fleet.

We are then reminded that formerly the ocean gave a "short reprieve" to those on one side of it, who were to hear "ill news" from the other; and in this delay there was an advantage, for tidings, when they came by letter, were then announced less abruptly.

Surely ill news might wait,

And man be patient of delay to grieve:

Letters have sympathies

And tell-tale faces that reveal,

To senses finer than the eyes,

Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;
They wind a sorrow round with circumstance
To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace
The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance
The inexorable face:

But now Fate stuns as with a mace;

The savage of the skies, that men have caught,
And some scant use of language taught,

Tells only what he must,—

The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

Such were the poet's thoughts as he took up the morning paper in a far-off Italian city, and he describes the feelings with which he began to run over its columns.

Then

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,
I scanned the festering news we half despise
Yet scramble for no less,

And read of public scandal, private fraud,
Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,
Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,

And all the unwholesome mess

The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late
To teach the Old World how to wait,
When suddenly,

As happens if the brain, from overweight
Of blood, infect the eye,

Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,
And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead.

As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,
An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far,
Men listen and forebode, I hung my head,

And strove the present to recall,

As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall.

We quote a few lines here and there from his description of the thoughts that came to him.

Uprooted is our mountain oak,
That promised long security of shade.

He by the touch of men was best inspired,
And caught his native greatness at rebound
From generosities itself had fired;

Then how the heat through every fibre ran,
Felt in the gathering presence of the man,
While the apt word and gesture came unbid!
Virtues and faults it to one metal wrought,
Fined all his blood to thought,

And ran the molten man in all he said or did.
All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too
He by the light of listening faces knew,
And his rapt audience all unconscious lent
Their own roused force to make him eloquent ;
Persuasion fondled in his look and tone;

Our speech (with strangers prudish) he could bring
To find new charm in accents not her own;
Her coy constraints and icy hindrances

Melted upon his lips to natural ease,

As a brook's fetters swell the dance of spring.
Nor yet all sweetness: not in vain he wore,
Nor in the sheath of ceremony, controlled
By velvet courtesy or caution cold,
That sword of honest anger prized of old,
But, with two-handed wrath,

If baseness or pretension crossed his path,
Struck once nor needed to strike more.

At last, all is summed up in what may be considered to be the American idea of a gentleman.

His magic was not far to seek,—

He was so human! Whether strong or weak,
Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared,
But sate an equal guest at every board:
No beggar ever felt him condescend,
No prince presume; for still himself he bare
At manhood's simple level, and where'er
He meet a stranger, there he left a friend.
How large an aspect! nobly unsevere,
With freshness round him of Olympian cheer,
Like visits of those earthly gods he came ;
His look, wherever its good-fortune fell,
Doubled the feast without a miracle,

And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame;
Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign;
Amphitryon's gold-juice humanized to wine.

What we have quoted might well suffice to lead those who have not yet read the poem, to go to the book itself for the whole, yet we cannot persuade ourselves to omit some reference to the picture which he adds of the "Atlantic Club," of which Agassiz was a member. Of itself, this is a choice contribution to our American literature.

I see in vision the warm-lighted hall,
The living and the dead I see again,

And but my chair is empty; 'mid them all
'T is I that seem the dead: they all remain
Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain :
Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most,
Of sense or spirit, to the truly sane;
In this abstraction it were light to deem
Myself the figment of some stronger dream ;
They are the real things, and I the ghost
That glide unhindered through the solid door,
Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair,
And strive to speak and am but futile air,
As truly most of us are little more.

A description of the various members of this famous "club" follows: of Emerson, of Hawthorne, of Arthur Hugh Clough, of Cornelius Felton, of Whittier, and others, but we have room only for the lines in which reference is made to Agassiz himself.

Him most I see whom we most dearly miss,
The latest parted thence,

His features poised in genial armistice
And armed neutrality of self-defence

Beneath the forehead's walled preeminence,
While Tyro, plucking facts with careless reach,
Settles off-hand our human how and whence;
The long-trained veteran scarcely wincing hears
The infallible strategy of volunteers
Making through Nature's walls its easy breach,
And seems to learn where he alone could teach.
Ample and ruddy, the board's end he fills
As he our fireside were, our light and heat,
Centre where minds diverse and various skills
Find their warm nook and stretch unhampered feet;
I see the firm benignity of face,

Wide-smiling champaign, without tameness sweet,
The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace,

The eyes whose sunshine runs before the lips

While Holmes's rockets curve their long ellipse,
And burst in seeds of fire that burst again
To drop in scintillating rain.

As a fit close, we add the lines which describe the separation of the members of the "club," and the walk home of the poet with the distinguished naturalist.

Now forth into the darkness all are gone,
But memory, still unsated, follows on,
Retracing step by step our homeward walk,
With many a laugh among our serious talk,
Across the bridge where, on the dimpling tide,
The long red streamers from the windows glide,
Or the dim western moon

Rocks her skiff's image on the broad lagoon,
And Boston shows a soft Venetian side
In that Arcadian light when roof and tree,
Hard prose by daylight, dream in Italy;
Or haply in the sky's cold chambers wide
Shivered the winter stars, while all below,
As if an end were come of human ill,
The world was wrapt in innocence of snow
And the cast-iron bay was blind and still;