Lines of Battle and Other Poems/Farragut's Poet

In the first year of the Civil War Hawthorne wrote to an English friend: "Ten thousand poetasters have tried, and tried in vain to give us a rousing 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.' If we fight no better than we sing, may the Lord have mercy upon us and upon the nation!" Hawthorne lived long enough to see that his countrymen, North and South, could fight. That they could also sing about fighting was perhaps less apparent until the war was past. Naturally the country was more occupied with shooting than with singing while the conflict lasted; and naturally the most enduring poetic memorials of the period sprang from "remembered emotion." Yet a few songs well worth the hearing were sung in the very glow of battle. One singer of them, Henry Howard Brownell, secured from Dr. Holmes the title of "Our Battle Laureate." In the "Atlantic" article ​which gave Brownell this name, Dr. Holmes was willing even to write: "If Drayton had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with the six hundred at Balaklava, each of these poets might possibly have pictured what he saw as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has painted the sea-fights in which he took part as a combatant." This is indeed unstinted praise, and cannot fairly be dismissed as due to the enthusiasm of a moment, when one places beside it the words which Dr. Holmes wrote in a private, unpublished letter more than ten years after Brownell's' death: "Mr. Henry H. Brownell was one of the most gifted men I have ever met. The grasp of his mind, the vigor of his imagination, the strength of his memory, and the way in which he used it in conversation, all made him a man to be remembered among the most highly endowed persons I have ever met, and I have known most of our own most distinguished persons, in this region at least." Again, of the ​man himself there is a winning picture drawn in the concluding lines of Mr. Aldrich's sonnet which has Brownell for its subject:—

To find another poem by Mr. Aldrich, devoted to the praise of Brownell's work as hearty as this praise of his personality; to find Lowell uttering words almost as enthusiastic as Dr. Holmes's about the "Norse-hearted poems" they both admired; and to note the present oblivion into which the poet and his poems have certainly fallen, is to ask one's self whether the best opinion of Brownell's contemporaries was entirely wrong, or whether it has been our mistake to permit fame to elude one whose hold upon it seemed for a time so secure. A better ​acquaintance with the man and his work may serve to throw some light upon the whole matter.

In the first place Henry Howard Brownell will be found to be one of the Americans who can best stand the difficult, well-known test of having their acquaintance made a century or two before their birth. Six of his lineal ancestors were Mayflower pilgrims. Between their day and Brownell's, Captain Benjamin Church, the conqueror of King Philip, and three soldiers of the Bunker Hill fight, transmitted their blood directly to him. If the martial vigor of his spirit is thus to be accounted for, it is no less easy to explain his passion for the sea through his mother's descent; for she was of the sea-faring Rhode Island family of De Wolf, which has learned to spell its name in almost as many ways as there are branches of the parent stock. The poet's mother, moreover, was not without poetic instincts and acquirements of her own. His father, Dr. Pardon Brownell, was a brother of Bishop Brownell of Connecticut, and practised his profession of medicine in ​East Hartford, whither the family removed about four years after the poet's birth at Providence, Rhode Island, on February 6, 1820.

When there is only one anecdote to be told of a poet's boyhood, it is well to have it record his walking two miles every day, at the age of six, to a neighbor's house, that he might read a translation of Homer, in the literal truthfulness of which he firmly believed. Brownell himself touches upon this reminiscence in some lines written in early manhood—lines which speak for a lifelong devotion and study:—

For the rest, his boyhood, in a family of spirited youths, does not appear to have been exceptional. A good element of adventure must have entered into their sports, if ​the later life of one of the brothers, Dr. Clarence Melville Brownell, grew naturally out of the East Hartford boyhood. It was he who in 1859 went to Peru, crossed the Andes, in the face of unspeakable difficulties, alone, and from the head waters of the Amazon followed the river to its mouth. In exploring the sources of the White Nile a few years later he met his death. Brownell's inheritance of a spirit that had much in common with his brother's is clearly evident in his poems. In the years that followed his brief clerkship in New York as a lad, and his graduation at Washington (now Trinity) College in 1841, it is impossible to ignore the combining influences which made him and his writings precisely what they were. His poetical expression of himself did not reach its fulness until the great provocation of the Civil Wararose to stab his spirit broad awake. For twenty years his pursuits and experiences were making him ready for what he was to do.

Brownell's service as a teacher in Mobile, Alabama, for some months immediately after ​leaving college, must have had its direct results, for in all of his later significant work a knowledge of the South and a sympathy with individual members of its society are clearly to be noticed. It was natural enough that this knowledge made him early and eagerly an abolitionist. When his convictions upon any subject were formed, they were strong. An outward gentleness, which won the love of his fellow-beings of every condition, is recorded as one of his most striking characteristics, but an inward vigor is plainly betokened in a few words from a foot-note to a poem,"The Famine," in Brownell's first and, be it said, not extraordinary volume of "Poems" (1847). The lines are a scathing denunciation of ease and content in lives of high place and common comfort while other lives, by the million, are starved. "Some very good people, (in their way,)" says the foot-note, "have objected to the ideas advanced in this piece that they are too strongly worded. I only regret that the insufficiency of our language, or my own insufficiency in using it, has prevented me ​from expressing them more forcibly." These are indeed the words of a man who must bring to a cause like that of anti-slavery all the vigor of his nature. But though he learned at the South to hate slavery, he learned also to love individual slave-holders. In the preface to his first volume of war poems, "Lyrics of a Day, or Newspaper Poetry, by a Volunteer in the U. S. Service" (1864), he drew a clear distinction between slave-holding and some holders of slaves; and when his complete "War Lyrics" were published in 1866, he reprinted this preface, justifying it by saying in an unpublished letter to James T. Fields, "I have had very dear friends, Southerners, whom I should like to see that I have not been actuated by malice or hatred." Uncompromising as many of his lines in condemnation of slavery must have seemed to them, they could yet hardly have failed to recognize the honest sadness of such a stanza as this, written in 1864:—

Returning early from Mobile to Hartford, Brownell set about the study of the law, was admitted to the bar in 1844, and practised his profession for several years in partnership with one of his brothers. With this brother also he was associated in the literary work which soon took so much of his time as his rather delicate health and his habit of general study would permit; and in this work one finds the influences which contributed to another element of his mature verse—its abundance of allusion to mythological and historical subjects. It was prosaic employment for a poet to write a "People's Book of Ancient and Modern History"; but the success with which Brownell did this in 1851 is said to have led to the introduction of subscription book-publishing in Hartford, where it flourished for many years. Immediately after this undertaking, he wrote and helped his brother to edit extensive works upon the pioneers and the native races of North and South America. Thus ​was his mind storing itself with a plentiful knowledge of many things in the past. That he was keenly alive at the same time to the concerns of the present, and that he was not forgetting to be a poet, became apparent by the publication in 1855 of a small volume which took its title from its longest poem, "Ephemeron," dealing intimately and vigorously with the condition of affairs in Europe which led to the Crimean War. The best of Brownell was still waiting for our own war to call it forth. The spirit, already present, which for its richer utterances needed but the touch of a more personal emotion, is suggested by a stanza from "Ephemeron":—

As Brownell came to be a singer, not only of warfare, but particularly of war by sea, it is worth while to note yet another of two influences which made him ready for his ​work. His inherited devotion to the sea was stimulated by frequent voyages, which served also to render him thrice familiar with ships and the deep waters. His precarious health took him more than once to Cuba, and his friendship with James D. Bulloch, the Southern sea-captain under whose agency the Alabama was subsequently secured for the Confederacy, gave him welcome opportunities for voyaging between New York and New Orleans. To Bulloch, sailing northward in 1859, the lines "At Sea," were addressed. Those who know something of sea-going for themselves must feel that the poem reveals Brownell infallibly as both a true son and a true singer of ships and the sea. "The Burial of the Dane," written a year earlier, makes the same revelation, and has, besides, a quality of human sympathy without which a poet is poor indeed.

Fitted as Brownell was from the beginning to sing a sailor's song of the Civil War, it was to the other elements of his preparedness that his first martial notes owed ​their quality. As early as in the Frémont campaign of 1856 he had sung as one who clearly foresees war. "The Battle of Charlestown"—scornful and, in its conclusion, ironically prophetic—celebrated the hanging of John Brown. Before the storm burst, the poet felt its inevitable approach, and, while the Congress of 1860—61 was in session, wrote his "Annus Mirabilis." When it was still nearer, in April of 1861, his voice rang clear in the poem "Coming." Sumter and the Baltimore 19th of April called forth eager lyrics in which the poetic deed hardly matched the patriotic will. As the war went on, battles, individual acts of valor and the broader martial and moral aspects of all that men were dying for, found in Brownell their ready singer. The Hartford newspapers gave his verses their first currency, and they passed quickly from place to place like coin of true metal. The homely rhyme of the "Old Cove" in a "dismal swamp" who flung a stick or a stone "at everybody as passed that road" became a byword in the mouths of men. The ​"Words that can be sung to the 'Hallelujah Chorus'" may not have been sung by the thousands of soldiers who marched to the music of "John Brown's Body," but it was not because Brownell failed to provide words which almost sang themselves.

These and many other of Brownell's lines are those of one who could see the broader strokes and more vivid colors in the picture of war; yet there is abundant proof in "The Battle Summers" that the finer lights and shadows of the conflict did not escape him; for here the aspects of nature, scanned by an eye sensitive to mark their subtlest changes, are interpreted in cunning and delicately poetic conjunction with the aspects of war.

Brownell, however, might have gone on to the end of the war-time producing poems that could bear no possible relation to his personal fortunes if he had not chanced one day to make and print anonymously in the Hartford "Evening Press" a skilfully rhymed version of Farragut's "General Orders" to his fleet before the attack upon New Orleans. By a happy chance the lines fell under ​Farragut's eye, and so delighted him that he wrote a cordial letter of appreciation to the unknown writer. From this a correspondence between the two men sprang up, and in the course of it Brownell expressed a strong desire to see a naval battle. The result of this wish was that Farragut asked Brownell to join his staff, and before the end of 1863 secured his appointment to the unusual post of master's mate in the Navy, a post from which he was soon advanced to that of ensign, with special duties on the Hartford as a secretary to its commander. Three years later, when Brownell asked the Admiral's permission to dedicate to him the volume of "War Lyrics," a portion of the hearty response, signed "Your affectionate friend, D. G. Farragut," was this: 'I have always esteemed it one of the happy events of my life that I was able to gratify your enthusiastic desire to witness one of the grandest as well as most terrible of all nautical events, a great sea-fight! And you were particularly fortunate in its being one in which all the ingenuity of our country ​had been employed to render it more terrible by the use of almost every implement of destruction known in the world, from the old-fashioned smooth-bore gun to the most diabolical contrivances for the destruction of human life. And permit me to assure you I have fully realized all my anticipations that your pen would faithfully delineate the scene and do justice to the subject." The rest of Farragut's letter speaks for the devoted friendship which came to exist between the admiral and his poet; and to appreciate the fulness of Brownell's opportunity one needs to remember not only that he sailed on the Hartford and shared in her triumphs, but also that his personal relations with Farragut were most intimate. The uses he made of this opportunity and, later, of his quickened powers, are clearly revealed in many a page of his verse.

Of the poems written actually on board the Hartford, the two which bear the earliest date, March, 1864, are "The River Fight" and "A War Study." Into "The River Fight," the "General Orders" which had ​first brought Brownell to Farragut's notice were woven. "The Bay Fight" which followed it by five months is of the same character, and has the palpable advantage of having been written from personal knowledge: yet the earlier poem tells of the naval attack upon New Orleans with uncommon spirit and power. The "War Study" may be read for its own high beauty and for all that it suggests of Farragut and of Brownell's relations with him.

Farragut had already passed through fierce sea-fights, and knew their full meaning, but his fiercest battle was yet to come, in the August following the March in which the "War Study" was written, and at Mobile Bay Brownell was to be with him. In minor engagements he had already taken part, so that in the memorable August of 1864, he was capable, it is reported, of aiming a "Sawyer" so true with his own hand and eye as to strike the edge of a parapet at Fort Powell. In the fight at Mobile Bay, Brownell was detailed to the special duty of taking notes of the action in all parts of ​the ship, "a duty," in the words of Farragut's report to the Navy Department, "which he performed with coolness and accuracy." The story is told that when Brownell's fellow officers wondered after the fight at the clearness and steadiness with which his notes were jotted down, he replied, "I did not want any of you picking up my manuscript in case I was shot, and saying I was afraid." On the same sheets with the official notes, he is said to have made lines of verse and poetical memoranda which found their way almost word for word into his great poem describing the fight, and written while he was still on the Hartford, almost before the air was cleared of the thunder and smoke of battle. The reader of "The Bay Fight"—entitled if only by the circumstances of its production to the place of honor in the following collection—may find for himself how much more it is than a mere poetic description of naval warfare as the vanishing generation knew it—how often, indeed, and how completely the poetry transcends the description.

​There is another long poem of Brownell's which, in spite of moments when one could wish it a little shorter, is worthy of perhaps even a higher regard than "The Bay Fight." This is "Abraham Lincoln," written at Bristol, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1865. With the few great threnodies for the great President it seems to those who know it that this one must be permanently ranked. "I am rather beginning to like it, and hope you will," Brownell wrote to James T. Fields before the poem was completed. The editor of the "Atlantic" evidently recognized its value, for thirteen pages of the October number of 1865 were devoted to its first publication. Its characterizations of Lincoln, its poignant echoings of the nation's grief, its lofty imaginative conclusion describing Lincoln's review on high of the troops who did not return with their living comrades to the Grand Review in Washington—these are enough to justify the claim which lovers of the noble poem are wont to make for Brownell's surpassing power.

​Brownell resigned from the navy soon after the fight at Mobile Bay, and most of the remainder of his life was spent quietly between East Hartford and Bristol, where he gave many summer days to sailing in his new catboat the Hartford, built for him by Herreshoff & Stone, and still remembered in Narragansett waters. Never married, he lived upon terms of devoted intimacy with his mother, working steadily at a long unfinished and unpublished poem "Æon." It has been my privilege to see this work which, from its character and contents, is never likely to be published as a whole. The poem deals with many themes, nature, philosophy, religion, slavery, civil war, love and death,—there is even a long disquisition and commentary on "Edwards on the Will." The complete truth of Dr. Holmes's words about Brownell's mental equipment is borne out by the remarkable work. Far too often, indeed, the poetry is overlaid with learning. But there are flashes of felicity throughout. One of them, which by good fortune can be published first in this place, ​shows how vividly in Brownell's mind lived the memory of his battle days and of Farragut:—

In all the field of martial verse it would be hard to find a finer image of a war-ship in action than

Farragut, living and dead, never ceased to hold an important place in Brownell's life and thought. When the great Admiral set out in 1867 on his triumphal European cruise on the Franklin he had Brownell reappointed to his staff, and for a year and a half the two men lived together in the closest relations of friendship. After their return and Farragut's death, Brownell made his last appearance in public at a Reunion of the "Society of the Army and Navy of the Gulf," at Newport in July of 1871, when he read a poem, "Gulf Weed." Most of it does not differ greatly from the usual afterdinner performance; but where it deals most directly with the memory of Farragut, as in the passage printed in this volume, the singer is stirred again to poetic achievement. A single stanza seems to carry with it even a sonorous premonition of Kipling:—

In the year after the reading of this poem, Brownell died at East Hartford, October 31, 1872. His disease was cancer of the face, and for the quiet courage with which he endured its pains it is enough to say that on one occasion he insisted upon watching the surgeon's operation upon him, by means of a mirror which he held in his own hand.

There has been no attempt, in writing these pages and choosing the selections which follow, to conceal a wish to show Brownell at his best. More poems not relating to the Civil War might have been brought forward, for there are conspicuous merits in some of these. But the merits of the poet are less frequent in his renderings of the themes of peace, and throughout the book which has chiefly represented him, no discriminating reader can fail to find and be discouraged by really inferior and careless work. If a rigorous sifting of his verses had ​been made before their publication in a book, perhaps even if the book itself had in the first instance received the title, "Lines of Battle," which Brownell urged strongly, but too late, upon his publisher, when the printing of "War Lyrics" was nearly finished, the continuance of his fame might have been surer. Small things sometimes determine the fate of books, and of reputations. The greater danger for Brownell from the first, however, must have come through the mixing of the dross with his gold. "To be recognized far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth," as Matthew Arnold so wisely said, "needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him." Brownell, in his own degree, has stood conspicuously in the same need. The contrasts between his worst and his best are of the strongest. To those who realize what his best could be, the wonder is that of its own force it has not more successfully disencumbered itself of its poetical baggage. That it will still succeed in doing so is the ​belief of those for whom Mr. Aldrich spoke when he spoke for himself in his "Threnody" for Brownell:—