TllO-MAS HAY.NESFOKD LOrNSHlKY. Ki7 



about Browning as about wliat critics thought of him. And Louns- 

 bury's unfinished study of Tennyson leaves on your mind more <\\s- 

 tinct notions of Enghsh reviewing before 1850 than of either the 

 poetry or the poets with wliom the reviewers concenKvl themselves. 

 Your notions of Tennyson himself meanwhile grow rather hazier than 

 clearer, and in the end you are not eager to clear them up. 



On the whole, The Yale Book of American Verse gives one the best 

 notion of how admiral)le the critical sense of Lounsbury really was. 

 There are some thirty-five pages of discursive introduction, nowhere 

 more sturdily his own than where he touches on our national hymns, 

 the Star-Spangled Banner and America (pp. xlii-xliv). There 

 are some five hundred and fifty pages of selections from American 

 verse, beginning with a hymn by Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) and 

 ending with two longish poems by William Vaughn Moody (1869- 

 1910). The pages are admirably printed and widely spaced. As 

 should always be the case with poetry, they tempt the eye to linger 

 and the mind to read at leisure; and, as there are extracts, sometimes 

 rather long, from the work of fifty-two nineteenth century poets, there 

 is not too much of anvbodv. The Aerv mention of our national 

 hymns, and of the names which open and close the selections, is enough 

 to remind us that these range widely in point both of quality and of 

 renown. The two sure things about the book are first that whoever 

 knows our national characteristics cannot help feeling it admirably 

 and comprehensively American, and secondly that it demonstrates as 

 hardly e\er before the merit of poetry in nineteenth century America. 

 Thus dealing directly with literature, Lounsbury could surely make 

 others know afresh what literature is. 



His disdain of conventional rhetoric somewhat obscures this power. 

 Professor Cross, in his pious introduction to the posthumous Aolume 

 on Tennyson, draws a touching picture of Lounsbury, in his later years 

 and with sadly weakened eyes, writing in the dark, and carefully 

 considering the turn of his phrase. Except for incessant clearness, 

 one would hardly suspect from his published work that he could ever 

 have been haunted by any such artistic conscience as is here implied. 

 In general his style seems carelessly diffuse; and his passion for the 

 neuter pronoun was almost unholy. To take a casual example of 

 this, he was capable of writing and of lea^'ing unchanged in his proof 

 such a sentence as "It is equally evident that it is Shakespeare's 

 practice which is the one followed upon the modern stage" (Shake- 

 speare as a Dramatic Artist, p. 13). Amid the very pages blurred 

 with these rhetorical inadvertences, howe^-er, you will constantly 



