The Poets and Poetry of America

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PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE.

[Born 1816. Died 1850.]

PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE was born in Martinsburg, Berkeley county, Virginia, on the twentyHis father, Mr. JOHN sixth of October, 1816. R. COOKE, was honourably distinguished at the bar, and his mother was of that family of PENDLETONS which has furnished so many eminent names to that part of the Union.

At fifteen he entered Princeton College, where he had a reputation for parts, though he did not distinguish himself, or take an honour, and could never tell how it happened that he obtained a degree, as he was not examined with his class. He liked fishing and hunting better than the books, and CHAUCER and SPENSER much more than the He had dull volumes in the "course of study." already made rhymes before he became a freshman, and the appearance of the early numbers of the "Knickerbocker Magazine" prompted him to new efforts in this way; he wrote for the Knickerbocker," in his seventeenth year, "The Song of the Sioux Lover," and "The Consumptive," and in a village paper, about the same time, other humourous and sentimental verses.

When he left college his father was living at Winchester, and there he himself pursued the study of the law. He wrote pieces in verse and Virginian," and "The Southern prose for the Literary Messenger," (then just started,) and projected novels and an extensive work in literary criticism. Before he was twenty-one he was married, admitted to the bar, and had a fair prospect of practice in Frederick, Jefferson, and Berkeley counties. "I am blessed by my fireside," he wrote, "here on the banks of the Shenandoah, in view and within a mile of the Blue Ridge; I go to county towns at the sessions of the courts, and hunt and fish, and make myself as happy with "So," he writes to my companions as I can." me in 1846, "have passed five, six, seven, eight years, and now I am striving, after long disuse of my literary veins, to get the rubbish of idle habits away, and work them again. My fruittrees, rose-bushes, poultry, guns, fishing-tackle, good, hard-riding friends, a long-necked bottle on my sideboard, an occasional client, &c. &c., make it a little difficult to get from the real into the clouds again. It requires a resolute habit of selfconcentration to enable a man to shut out these and all such real concerns, and give himself warmly to the nobler or more tender sort of writing and I am slowly acquiring it."

The atmosphere in which he lived was not, it seems, altogether congenial-so far as literature was concerned-and I find in one of his letters: What do you think of a good friend of mine, a most valuable and worthy and hard-riding one, saying gravely to me a short time ago, I would n't waste time on a damned thing like poetry; you

might make yourself, with all your sense and judg
ment, a useful man in settling neighbourhood dis-
putes and difficulties.' You have as much chance
with such people, as a dolphin would have if in
one of his darts he pitched in amongst the ma-
Philosophy would clip an
chinery of a mill.
angel's wings,' KEATS says, and pompous dulness
But these very persons I
would do the same.
have been talking about are always ready, when
the world generally has awarded the honours of
successful authorship to any of our mad tribe, to
come in and confirm the award, and buy, if not
But wo
read, the popular book. And so they are not
wholly without their uses in this world.
to him who seeks to climb amongst them!
author must avoid them until he is already mounted
on the platform, and can look down on them, and
make them ashamed to show their dulness by keep-
ing their hands in their breeches pockets, while
the rest of the world are taking theirs out to give
money or to applaud with. I am wasting my let-
ter with these people, but for fear you may think
I am chagrined or cut by what I abuse them for,
I must say that they suit one-half of my charac-
ter, moods, and pursuits, in being good, kindly men,
rare table companions, many of them great in
field sports, and most of them rather deficient in
letters than mind; and that, in an every-day sense
of the words, I love and am beloved by them."

Soon afterwards he wrote: "Mr. KENNEDY'S assurance that you would find a publisher for my poems leaves me without any further excuse for not collecting them. If not the most devoted, truly you are the most serviceable, of my friends, but it is because Mr. KENNEDY has overpraised me to you. Your letter makes me feel as if I had always known you intimately, and I have a presentiment that you will counteract my idleness and good-for-nothingness, and that, hoisted on your shoulders I shall not be lost under the feet of the crowd, nor left behind in a fence corner. I am profoundly grateful for the kindness which dictated what you have done, and to show you that I will avail myself of it, I enclose a proem to the pieces of which I wrote you in my last."

The proem referred to was so beautiful that I asked and obtained permission to print it in a magazine of which I was at that time editor. The author's name was not given, and it excited much curiosity, as but two or three of our poets were thought capable of such a performance, and there was no reason why one of them should print any It was most commonly, thing anonymously. however, attributed to Mr. WILLIS, at which Mr. COOKE was highly gratified. The piece, which was entitled "Emily," contained about three hundred lines, and was a feigned history of the composition of tales designed to follow it, exquisitely

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told, and sprinkled all along with gems that could have come from only a mine of surpassing richness. It was a good while before the promised contents of the book were sent to me, and COOKE wrote of the delay to a friend: «Procrastination is a poison of my very marrow. Moreover, since the first wisping of the leaf,' my whole heart has been in the woods and on the waters-every rising sun that could be seen, I have seen, and I never came in from my sport until too much used up to do more than adopt this epitaph of Sardanapalus: Eat, drink,' &c. Moreover, (second,) Mr. KENNEDY and others were poking me in the ribs eternally about my poems; and I was driven to the labour of finishing them. I groaned and did it, and sent them to GRISWOLD, and have left the task of carrying them through the press to him; and only lie passive, saying with Don Juan, (in the slave-market of Adrianople, or some other place,) Would to God somebody would buy me.'"

At length through his cousin and friend, JOHN P. KENNEDY, (a name that makes one in charity with all mankind,) the MS. of all the poems was sent to me. It makes a book about the size of the printed volume, written with a regular elegance to match that of the old copyists. In an accompanying letter he says, "They are certainly not in the high key of a man warm with his subject, and doing the thing finely; I wrote them with the reluctance of a turkey-hunter kept from his sport, -only Mr. KENNEDY'S urgent entreaty and remonstrance whipped me up to the labour. You will hardly perceive how they should be called Ballads.' You are somewhat responsible for I designed (originally) to make them short poems of the old understood ballad cast. I sent you the proem, which you published as a preface to the Froissart Ballads.' Words in print bore a look of perpetuity (or rather of fixedness) about thein, and what I would have changed if only my pen and portfolio had been concerned, your type deterred me from changing. The term Froissart Ballads,' however, is, after all, correct, even with the poems as they are. The Master

the name.

of Bolton' is as much a song as the Lay of the Last Minstrel,' although I have no prologue, interludes, &c., to show how it was sung; and as for Orthone,' &c., Sir John Froissart may as easily be imagined chanting them as talking them."

In reply to some comments of mine upon these productions he remarks: "You will find them beneath your sanguine prognostic. They are mere narrative poems, designed for the crowd. Poetic speculation, bold inroads upon the debatable land, the wild weird clime, out of space, out of time,' I have not here attempted. I will hereafter merge myself in the nobler atmosphere; in the mean time I have stuck to the ordinary level, and endeavoured to write interesting stories in verse, with grace and spirit. I repeat my fear that in writing for the cold, I have failed to touch the quick and warm that in writing for a dozen hunting comrades, who have been in the habit of making my

verse a post prandium entertainment, and never endured an audacity of thought or word, I have tamed myself out of your approbation."

The book was finally published, but though reveiwed very favourably by the late Judge BEVERLY TUCKER, in the "Southern Literary Messenger," and by Mr. PoE, in the " American Review," and much quoted and praised elsewhere, it was, on the whole, not received according to its merits or my expectations. Yet the result aroused the author's ambition, and after a few weeks he remarked in a letter to me: «My literary life opens now. If the world manifest any disposition to hear my utterances,' it will be abundantly gratified. I am thirty: until forty literature shall be my calling-avoiding however to rely upon it pecuniarily,

then (after forty) politics will be a sequitur. It has occurred to me to turn my passion for hunting, and my crowding experiences' (gathered in fifteen or sixteen years of life in the merriest Virginia country society) of hunting, fishing, country races, character and want of character, woods, mountains, fields, waters, and the devil knows what, into a rambling book. Years ago I used to devour the Spirit of the Times.' Indeed, much of my passion for sports of all kinds grew out of reading the Spirit.' Like Albert Pike's poet, in " Fantasms,' I

'Had not known the bent of my own mind,
Until the mighty spell of" Porter" woke
Its hidden passions:"

only Albert Pike, says Coleridge' and 'powers'
for Porter' and 'passions.' Then I have a half-
written novel in my MS. piles, with poems, tales,
sketches, histories, commenced or arranged in my
mind ready to be put in writing, to order. In a
word, I am cocked and primed for authorship.
My life here invites me urgently to literary em-
ployments. My house, servants, &c. &c.,-all
that a country gentleman really wants of the
goods of life,-
-are in sure possession to me and
mine. I want honours, and some little more mo-
ney. Be good enough, my dear sir, to let me
know how I am to go about acquiring them."

I wrote with frankness what I thought was true, of possible pecuniary advantages from the course he proposed, and was answered: "What you say about the returns in money for an author's labours is dispiriting enough, and I at once give over an earnest purpose which I had formed of writing books. Thank God, I am not dependent on the booksellers, but have a moderate and sure support for my family, apart from the crowding hopes and fears which dependence on them would no doubt generate. But I must add (or forego some gratifications) two or three hundred dollars per annum to my ordinary means. I might easily make this by my profession, which I have deserted and neglected, but it would be as bad as the treadmill to me: I detest the law. On the other hand, I love the fever-fits of composition. The music of rhythm, coming from God knows where, like the airy melody in the Tempest, tingles pleasantly in my veins and fingers; I like to build the verse, cautiously, but with the excitement of a rapid

PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE.

writer, which I rein in and check; and then, we both know how glorious it is to make the gallant dash, and round off the stanza with the sonorous couplet, or with some rhyme as natural to its place as a leaf on a tree, but separated from its mate that peeps down to it over the inky ends of That unepistolary many intervening lines.... sentence has considerably fatigued me. I was saying, or about to say, that I would be obliged to you for information as to the profitableness of writing for periodicals."

From this time Mr. COOKE wrote much, but in a desultory way, and seemed in a growing devotion to a few friends and in the happiness that was in his home to forget almost the dreams of ambition. Of this home he dwelt with a tender enthusiasm in his correspondence, and we have glimpses of it in some beautiful verses to his daughter, in which he has written with charming simplicity an interesting portion of his biography:

"TO MY DAUGHTER LILY.
"SIX changeful years are gone, LLZY,
Since you were born to be

A darling to your mother good,
A happiness to me;

A little, shivering, feeble thing
You were to touch and view,
But we could see a promise in
Your baby eyes of blue.

"You fastened on our hearts, LILY,

As day by day wore by,
And beauty grew upon your cheeks,
And deepened in your eye;
A year made dimples in your hands,
And plumped your little feet.
And you had learned some merry ways
Which we thought very sweet.

And when the first sweet word, LILY,
Your wee mouth learned to say,
Your mother kissed it fifty times,
And marked the famous day.

I know not even now, my dear,
If it were quite a word,
But your proud mother surely knew,
For she the sound bad heard.

"When you were four years old, LILY.
You were my little friend,
And we had walks and nightly plays,
And talks without an end.
You little ones are sometimes wise,
For you are undefiled;

A grave grown man will start to hear
The strange words of a child.

. When care pressed on our house, LILY,
Pressed with an iron hand-

I hated mankind for the wrong
Which festered in the land;

But when I read your young frank face,—
Its meanings, sweet and good,
My charities grew clear again,
I felt my brotherhood.

"And sometimes it would be, LILY,
My faith in God grew cold,
For I saw virtue go in rags,

And vice in cloth of gold;
But in your innocence, my child.
And in your mother's love.

I learned those lessons of the heart
Which fasten it above.

"At last our cares are gone, LILY,

And peace is back again,

As you have seen the sun shine out
After the gloomy rain;

In the good land where we were born,
We may be happy still,

A life of love will bless our home-
The house upon the hill.
"Thanks to your gentle face, LILY!
Its innocence was strong

To keep me constant to the right,
When tempted by the wrong.
The litle ones were dear to Him
Who died upon the rood-

I ask his gentle care for you,

And for your mother good.

He commenced a historical novel to be called "Maurice Weterbern," in which the great battle of Lutzen was to end the adventures of his hero. "What it is you will some time or other see," he wrote to me; and, as if doubtful whether this were a safe prediction, added, "I am bestowing This he great care, but little labor, upon it." threw aside, and his love for that age appeared in "The Chevalier Merlin," suggested by the beautiful story of CHARLES the Twelfth, as given by VOLTAIRE, several chapters of which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger." In the same magazine he printed "John Carpe," "The Two Country Houses," and other tales: parts of a series in which he intended to dramatize the life and manners of Virginia. He also contributed to the "Literary Messenger" a few pieces of criticism, one of which was a reviewal of the poems of the late EDGAR A. POE. As for any applause these might win for him, he wrote to his friend JOHN R. THOMPSON: "I look upon these matters serenely, and will treat renown as Sir THOMAS MORE advises concerning guests: welcome its coming when it cometh, hinder not with oppressive eagerness its going, when it goeth. Furthermore I am of the temper to look placidly upon the profile of this same renown, if, instead of stopping, it went by to take up with another; therefore it would not ruffle me to see you win the honours of southern letters away from me."

Renewing his devotion to poetry, near the close of the year 1849, he wrote fragments of "The Women of Shakspeare," "The Chariot Race," and a political and literary satire. He projected works enough, in prose and verse, to occupy an industrious life of twenty years. In one of his letters he remarked, "I have lately spurred myself again into continuous composition, and mean to finish books." But in the midst of his reawakened activity and ambition, he suddenly died, on the twentieth of January, 1850, at the age of thirtythree.

Undoubtedly PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE was one of the truest poets of our country, and what he has left us was full of promise that he would vindicate, in other works, the rank with which he was accredited, by those admiring friends who estimated his abilities from his conversation more than from anything he had printed. His mind bloomed early, though it was late in maturing. Many of his most pleasing poems were written at col

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