Letters from a Landscape Painter

LOUIS L. NOBLE.

You ask me to tell you who is Louis L. Noble, to whom I dedicated a volume of Essays some years ago? There is hardly a task in the wide world that I could enter upon with greater pleasure than the answering of this question. And why? Because he is one of my best friends, and a poet of rare genius and power.

To come directly to the point, then, he is a young clergyman of the Episcopal church, whose present field of ministerial labor is in North Carolina. He was born on the Susquehannah; but having spent his boyhood in the wilderness where I was born, there has ever been (since our acquaintance commenced) a delicate stream of sympathy flowing out of one heart into the other. His poetry (and this is perhaps the secret of my attachment to it) is the offspring of that wilderness country familiar to the world as Michigan, and his themes I look upon as my own. He has always been an admirer of the red man, and, like me, in times past has associated with him in the most intimate and familiar intercourse. Therefore, when their customs inspire his pen, you may depend upon the faithfulness of his descriptions. He is a creature of impulse, and whenever he strikes the lyre, it is because he cannot help it, or because it affords him an indescribable joy. He writes “with fury, and corrects with care;” and I am not sure but he sometimes weakens his conceptions by too much pruning and artificial arrangement. He is yet in the vigor of his days, and if his life is spared, we have reason to expect great things from his pen. In temper he is exceedingly amiable, and in disposition variable as the shade, but ever joyous as a strong-bodied and intellectual boy,—a feeling which his philosophy teaches him is a treasure beyond all price. In person he is rather slender, but well formed and sinewy, with dark complexion, hair like the raven’s wing, and an eye as black, as keen, and spirit-stirring as that of an Ottawa Chief. He is one who cannot but be loved by all who study his works, and to do this is the best literary advice I can offer you or any of my thinking friends.

And now, as an important portion of himself, let me characterize his poetry, and give you a few specimens. As yet, he has only occasionally published in our prominent periodicals; but a volume of his Poems is now in press, and I prophecy that its appearance will be a bright era in our Polite Literature. His principal efforts, up to this time, are entitled “Ni-ma-min,” “Tale of the Morning Wind,” “Lines to a Swan,” “Love and Beauty,” “The Cripple Boy,” the “Emigrant’s Burial,” the “Girl of the Sky-blue Lake,” and some fine songs and sonnets. A valuable and remarkable feature of his poetry, is its suggestive tendency. It is of a kind calculated to purify the public taste, to make more happy those who read it, to instil into the heart a love for the beautiful and true, and to make us at once conscious of our own littleness in the sight of God, and of the exalted attributes of the soul; or rather, makes a man feel that he is but a man, and yet a portion of the Invisible. It displays a consummate knowledge of the Indian character, an ardent attachment to the works of nature, and showing a remarkable mastery of language, and the writer to be possessed of a mind of refined poetical genius. You find nothing in it “long drawn out”; every sentence has a meaning. It contains no far-fetched conceptions and images; and every portion of each poem is closely cemented together, and pervaded by one spirit, one idea. Take away the rhyme, and it is poetry; take away the thought, and you will find much poetry in the versification alone. It breathes of the virgin wilderness, and of its brave, hardy, and noble children; and dearly, dearly do I love it, for it recalls to mind the living joys of my wild, free, and happy boyhood. I would rather have written his forthcoming volume, than to have been the author of all the fashionable novels of the present century. If it be true, that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” then must the poetry of Noble be as enduring as the English language, or the memory of the Indian race now withering from the land. A thousand blessings rest upon the poet of my boyhood’s home! As to the faults of his poetry, I confess that he has his share, because he is of “woman born.” So far as my sagacity goes, the most glaring ones are these. He is somewhat inclined to the mysticism of the German, and sometimes makes use of epithets that remind us of his favorite authors. In the next place, his stories are not as clearly defined as they should be; but what, after all, to the genuine lover of poetry, is the mere story of a poem? “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn,” are what delight him, and it will probably be only among kindred spirits that Noble will be popular. The mass of people will likely pass him by “as the idle wind, which they regard not.” And why? Because their minds are too narrow and weakly to enjoy anything superior to the horrid and disgusting trash continually teeming from the press. Noble’s poetry is possessed of the true spirit of the nine, and its gifted author need not doubt as to his reward, which is the only one he desires, namely, the approbation of sensible and refined minds.

And now, to back the foregoing opinions, I mean to quote three poems, neither of which shall be the longest and most ambitious he has written, viz.; “Lines to a Swan Flying in the Vale of the Huron,” “The Cripple Boy,” and the “Girl of the Sky-blue Lake.” The Huron, alluded to in the first, rises in the interior of Michigan, and empties into Lake Erie. Its clear waters gave it the name of its more mighty kinsman, Lake Huron. Now free your imagination and give it wings.

O, what a still, bright night! It is the sleep

Of beauteous Nature in her bridal hall.

See, while the groves shadow the shining lake,

How the full moon does bathe their melting green!

I hear the dew-drop twang upon the pool,—

Hark, hark, what music! from the rampart hills,

How like a far off bugle, sweet and clear,

It searches through the list’ning wilderness!—

A swan—I know it by the trumpet-tone—

Winging her pathless way in the cool heavens,

Piping her midnight melody, she comes.

Beautiful bird! upon the dark, still world

Thou fallest like an angel—like a lone

Sweet angel from some sphere of harmony.

Where art thou, where?—no speck upon the blue

My vision marks, from whence thy music ranges.

And why this hour—this voiceless hour is thine—

And thine alone, I cannot tell. Perchance,

While all is hushed and silent but the heart,

E’en thou hast human sympathies for heaven,

And singest yonder in the holy deep

Because thou hast a pinion. If it be,

O for a wing, upon the aerial tide

To sail with thee, a minstrel mariner!

When to a rarer height thou wheelest up,

Hast thou that awful thrill of an ascension—

The lone, lost feeling in the vasty vault?—

O, for thine ear, to hear the ascending tones

Range the ethereal chambers!—then to feel

A harmony, while from the eternal depth

Steals nought but the pure starlight evermore!—

And then to list the echoes, faint and mellow,

Far, far below, breathe from the hollow earth

For thee, soft, sweet petition, to return.

And hither, haply, thou wilt shape thy neck,

And settle, like a silvery cloud, to rest,

If thy wild image, flaring in the abyss,

Startle thee not aloft. Lone aeronaut,

That catchest, on thine airy looking-out,

Glassing the hollow darkness, many a lake,

Lay, for the night, thy lily bosom here,

There is the deep unsounded for thy bath,

The shallow for the shaking of thy plumes,

The dreamy cove, or cedar-wooded isle,

With galaxy of water-lilies, where,

Like mild Diana ’mong the quiet stars,

’Neath over-bending branches, thou wilt move,

Till early warblers shake the crystal shower,

And whistling pinions warn thee to thy voyage.

But where art thou!—lost—spirited away

To bowers of light by thy own dying whispers?

Or does some billow of the ocean air,

In its still roll around from zone to zone,

All breathless to the empyrean heave thee?—

There is a panting in the zenith—hush!—

The Swan—How strong her great wing times the silence!

She passes over high and quietly.

Now peals the living clarion anew,

One vocal shower falls in and fills the vale.

What witchery in the wilderness it plays!—

Shrill snort the affrighted deer; across the lake

The loon, sole sentinel, screams loud alarm;

The shy fox barks; tingling in every vein

I feel the wild enchantment;—hark! they come,

The dulcet echoes from the distant hills,

Like fainter horns responsive all the while,

From misty isles, soft-stealing symphonies.

The bright, swift river of the bark canoe,

Threading the prairie ponds of Washtenung,

Thy day of romance wanes. Few summers more,

And the long night will pass away unwaked,

Save by the house-dog, or the village bell;

And she, thy minstrel queen, her ermine dip

In lonelier waters.

Ah! thou wilt not stoop:

Old Huron, haply, glistens on thy sky.

The chasing moon-beams, glancing on thy plumes,

Reveal thee now, a little beating blot,

Into the pale aurora fading.

There!—

Sinks gently back upon her flowery couch

The startled night:—tinkle the damp wood-vaults,

While slip the dew-pearls from their leafy curtain.

That last soft whispering note, how spirit-like!

While vainly yet my ear another waits,

A sad, sweet longing lingers in my heart.

Is not that a magnificent production? How does it breathe of nature in her primitive loveliness, and how completely does it wean us from the world of flesh and blood into that other one of spiritual blessedness! How majestic, and yet how sweet is the flowing of its numbers!—reminding us of a strong but pleasant summer-evening wind, which is wont to make us strangely happy, even in our grief! Can anything be more completely exquisite than the few lines that I have marked? Is there anything in Dana, Bryant, or Longfellow, that can eclipse them? or even in the very best of England’s modern poets? There may be, but I have never been able to discover them, although I almost know by heart the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wilson, Cowper, Goldsmith, Beattie, Shelly, Scott, Rogers, Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans.

Now comes “The Cripple Boy,” of its kind, one of the sweetest and most affecting things I ever read; and I willingly acknowledge that it has often blinded my eyes with tears. Such poetry softens the heart, and prepares us to sympathize with the unfortunate, and look with kindly feeling upon our fellows. It smooths the rugged pathway of life, by telling us that it is not the whole of life to live, nor the whole of death to die. We read, and our hearts cannot but be made wiser, even as the story of the Ancient Mariner made the heart of the Wedding Guest, and caused him to renounce his anticipated pleasure. Read and see.

Upon an Indian rush-mat, spread

Where burr-oak boughs a coolness shed,

Alone he sat,—a cripple-child,—

With eyes so large, so dark and wild,

And fingers, thin and pale to see,

Locked upon his trembling knee.

A-gathering nuts so blithe and gay,

The children early tripped away;

And he his mother had besought

Under the oak to have him brought;—

It was ever his seat when black-birds sung

The wavy rustling tops among;—

They calmed his pain,—they cheered his loneliness—

The gales,—the music of the wilderness.

Upon a prairie, wide and wild,

Looked off that suffering cripple-child:

The hour was breezy, the hour was bright;—

O, ’twas a lively, a lovely sight!—

An eagle, sailing to and fro

Around a flitting cloud so white,

Across the billowy grass below

Darting swift their shadows’ light;

And mingled noises, sweet and clear,

Noises out of the ringing wood,

Were pleasing trouble in his ear,

A shock how pleasant to his blood.

O, happy world!—Beauty and Blessing slept

On everything but him—he felt, and wept.

Humming a lightsome tune of yore;

Beside the open log-house door,

Tears upon his sickly cheek

Saw his mother, and so did speak;—

“What makes his mother’s Henry weep?

You and I the cottage keep;

They hunt the nuts and clusters blue,

Weary lads, for me and you;

And yonder see the quiet sheep;—

Why now—I wonder why you weep!”—

“Mother, I wish that I could be

A sailor on the breezy sea!”

“A sailor on the stormy sea, my son!—

What ails the boy!—what have the breezes done!”

“I do!—I wish that I could be

A sailor on the rolling sea;

In the shadow of the sails

I would ride and rock all day,

Going whither blow the gales,

As I have heard a seaman say:

I would, I guess, come back again

For my mother, now and then,

And the curling fire so bright,

When the prairie burns at night;

And tell the wonders I had seen

Away upon the ocean green;”—

“Hush! hush! talk not about the ocean so;

Better at home a hunter hale to go.”

Between a tear and sigh he smiled;

And thus spake on the cripple-child:—

“I would I were a hunter hale,

Nimbler than the nimble doe,

Bounding lightly down the dale,—

But that will never be, I know!

Behind our house the woodlands lie;

A prairie wide and green before;

And I have seen them with my eye

A thousand times or more;

Yet in the woods I never strayed,

Or on the prairie-border played;

O, mother dear, that I could only be

A sailor-boy upon the rocking sea!”

You would have turned with a tear,

A tear upon your cheek;

She wept aloud, the woman dear,

And further could not speak;

The boy’s it was a bitter lot

She always felt, I trow;

Yet never till then its bitterness

At heart had grieved her so.

Nature had waked the eternal wish—

—Liberty, far and wide!

And now, to win him health, with joy,

She would that morn have died.

Till noon she kept the shady door-way chair,

But never a measure of that ancient air.

Piped the March-wind;—pinched and slow

The deer were trooping in the snow;

He saw them out of the cottage door,

The lame boy sitting upon the floor:

“Mother, mother, how long will it be

Till the prairie go like a waving sea?

Will the bare woods ever be green—and when?

O, will it ever be summer again?”—

She looked in silence on her child:

That large eye, ever so dark and wild,

Oh me, how bright!—it may have been

That he was grown so pale and thin.

It came, the emerald month, and sweetly shed

Beauty for grief, and garlands for the dead.

The Girl of the Sky-blue Lake, is a simple Indian ballad, teeming with pictures as fresh and exquisite to behold as a full-blown wild rose of the wilderness. Some of its versification is remarkably fine, and the idea of the story pleasing and mournful to the soul,—attributes which I fancy are indispensable to the perfection of any poetry; for there is no such thing as poetry without truth, and truth is ever a subject of solemn consideration.

PART I.

“Push off, push off the birch canoe,

The wave and the wood are still;

The screaming loon is fast asleep,

And so is the whip-poor-will.

The moonlight-blowing flowers I love—

On yon little isle they grow;—”

So said a black-eyed Ottawa girl,

In silvery accents low.

“Off, off with the bark canoe, my boy,

And tarry till I come back—”

“No, sister,” said the red-neck’d boy,

“The panther will smell my track.

Our boat upon the deep shall rock,

And in it the paddles three;

My little grey dog my bow shall watch,

But I will keep with thee.”

“Now, nay, across the lake I go

Alone to the flow’ry isle;

I’ll come e’er the big owl screams for day,

So tarry thou here the while.

Thou art a bounding hunter bold,

As the wolf and the panther know;

And thou shalt whoop at the water-stars

That flash in the skies below;

And when the still woods halloo back,

The braver wilt thou grow.”

Now half-way over the sky-blue lake

Hath paddled the wild red girl;

Kneeling, a wearied arm she rests,—

The waters round her curl.

Away she looks, with beating heart,

Away to the purple isle;

Beneath it swings a bright round moon;

She listeneth all the while,—

Heard she one far shrill whistle-sound,

Her sadness were a smile.

The lake was still as still could be,

And bright as a warrior’s blade;

And, save the dash of the leaping fish,

Not a waking sound was made.

The lovely bright-eyed Ottawa girl

Hath bent o’er the low canoe,

And smoothed anew her raven hair

In the glass of the shining blue.

And now is at the islet’s edge

The stem of her birchen bark:

And so is the bare, the springy foot

Of a hunter tall and dark.

“My deer-eyed dove,” the hunter breathed—

And the maid fell at his knee:

Along its lash a bright tear flashed,

And thus again spake he.

“My dark-eyed dove, the twisted shells,

With tints of the blood-red snow,

I’ve brought thee now, and scarlet bird,

And skin of the spotted doe.”

The red girl of the sky-blue lake,

She loves that chieftain bold:—

He loves again: but hatred lurks,

And ever by day and by night it works

In the heart of her father old.

And hither, when the swan leads off

Her brood on the sleeping swell,

Beneath a climbing vine they meet,

With tenderest words, in accents sweet,

The tale of their loves to tell.

PART II.

The Indian boy is fast asleep,

And dew on his wolf-skin gray,

Hath cried him weary long ago;

His little grey dog is moaning low,

And the big owl screams for day.

Poor lonely sleeping Indian boy,—

How wild are his fitful dreams?

—In mirth she comes; and sinking now

To the water-moon she seems.

A wolf is trotting in the brake,

All under the panthers’ limb;

But they have licked a fawn’s sweet blood,

And careless are grown of him.

Then darker grew the shadowy woods,

And bent with a crackling sound;

Shines through the dark the flashing foam

On the pebbled beach around.

Too late the warning loon has yell’d

To the shallow-wading crane;

For now the thunder blast is up,

And whirls the driving rain.

O, red girl of the sky-blue lake,

Look well to thy dancing bark;

The wind is loud, the wave is white,

And the breaking morn is dark;

The wind is loud, the wave is white,

Look well to thy slender oar:

The loon hath need of its wing of jet

To battle the might of the waves, that fret

Along to the foamy shore.

Alone, upon the frothy beach,

In the still and pleasant morn,

The Ottawa child is waiting yet,

But frightened and forlorn.

His eyes are red, his hair is wild;

He hath donned his wolf-skin gray;

His shivering dog is moaning low;

The child hath turned him round to go,—

He can no longer stay.

Yet once, with aching heart, he looks

To the isle of flowers again;

It seems a sleeping bank of green

Upon a silvery plain.

Within its shade, the voiceless swans

Are sailing two by two;

But never his eye can catch a glimpse

Of the maiden’s birch canoe;—

The bow-neck’d swans are all that move

Upon the silvery blue.

Turn home, heart-broken child! turn home;

That bark is in the deep;

And she has gone with the tinted shells

To their own green caves to sleep.

Her spirit owns a brighter isle

Than floats the moon below;

Where never the thunder-blast is heard,

She lists to the song of the scarlet bird,

And plays with the beautiful doe.

There! for this letter you owe me an oyster supper,—but if you will give me that beautiful engraving from Claude, hanging in your study, I will call the matter settled.

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