It was the end of Brownell's service and travels. Four years later, on October 31, 1872, at the height of the Grant-Greeley campaign, he died at the family homestead after a long and distressing illness. He had been born in 1820. Seven years before his death Dr. Holmes, in a review in the "Atlantic" of one of his slim volumes of verse, had called him "Our Battle Laureate."

Uneven as his verse was, he was a true poet. A spark of the divine fire had fallen upon him. Other activities had been attempted, but for him there clearly was in them no satisfaction. As a youth he tried mercantile life in New York, but abandoned it after less than a year. Teaching seems to have been the practical—if poetry is not "practical"—pursuit which proved most congenial and it is singular that his first work as a teacher was in Mobile near which the great experience of his life later occurred. This short sojourn in the South came after his graduation in 1841 from Trinity College and was followed by study of the law in Hartford where he was admitted to the bar and for a short time practiced in partnership with his brother Charles.

But the law was not for him. The poetic muse was always whispering in his ear. He saw visions and dreamed dreams—witness his "Song of the Archangels." Yet he was rather a direct and rugged sort of poet. Subtlety and indirection, fine shadings, carefully wrought lines, had little place in his methods. He appears to have been impatient of revision. He felt deeply and the need of expression was instant. Often he wrote, as he states in the preface to "Lyrics of a Day," currente calamo, and most of his verses were seen first in the pages of the Hartford newspapers. In the light of modern technique many of them seem already a little old-fashioned. Perhaps the present-day undergraduate would call some of them "simple." Yet any of our young intellectuals might be proud of having written "In Articulo Mortis"; surely there is nothing very simple about "The Sphinx." And one is occasionally startled by lines that have the perfect, the inevitable phrase—as in these from "The Tomb of Columbus"—

It would be difficult to improve on that last line. Again—to most readers there will come a swift and dramatic vision from the two stanzas of "Qu'il Mourut"—

In all his early verse there is much that is haunting and memorable, together with much that is trivial and even flippant, It was the coming of the Civil War that made Henry Brownell known as a poet. Indeed he published little before that time.

In our own day we have had great moral issues in war and we have known what the response to them could be. These issues were, however, involved with many other peoples, their application was, in a way, diffused; to different races they presented different aspects. But the Civil War was our own war, its issues were concentrated; it not only involved national honor, it concerned, and vitally concerned, the question whether the nation should live.

To these portentous messages and alarms, borne on every breath of the wandering breezes of those tense days, the spirit of Henry Brownell responded with an intuitive instinct, a poetic eloquence, akin to that of the seers and the prophets.

In 1860, the Hartford papers were full of his "fiery lyrics" and the writer—was it Hawley or Warner?—of an appreciation of Brownell in the "Courant" shortly after his death tells how well he remembered the day in the anxious winter of 1860-61 when Brownell brought into the office of the old "Evening Press" the manuscript of "Annus Memorabilis"—verses breathing a resolution and exaltation of courage that brought a generous measure of fame. There is something about "Annus Memorabilis"—not only the meter which is the same—that suggests Macaulay's "Naseby," something, too, remotely suggestive of Kipling. Into this mood of exaltation there ran occasionally a vein of humor that only deserves mention in the case of the verses "Let Us Alone," inspired by Jefferson Davis's statement in his inaugural address, "All we want is to be left alone." Though of little poetic merit these lines caught the popular fancy and were long remembered and quoted.

And so the war came on, and the poet's vision, which had been laughed at by some readers, was justified by events. There came defeats, almost countless deaths, occasional victories, doubts of final victory—all the ebb and flow and waste of war—and to it all the sensitive but vigorous spirit responded in many chords. Of the gentler lays, the most winning to the writer are the verses called "The Battle Summers." Here are a few of the stanzas—

On the whole, however, it was the magnificence, the drama, of the struggle that possessed him—sometimes the realization of the tremendous stakes for which the game was played, sometimes the actual, objective romance of events, as in the beginning of the famous "River Fight"—

His own participation in the fighting came about in a strange way. He paraphrased in verse, first published in the "Evening Press," the rather dramatic general orders preparatory to the "River Fight." Poetically it was not a great performance, but in some way it came to the attention of Farragut who was greatly impressed. The acquaintance thus begun resulted in the unusual appointment of Brownell as master's mate on Farragut's staff and, shortly thereafter, as ensign, with the duties of secretary.

One can fancy the lift and glory in the heart of this rather retiring poet and teacher, with a hitherto unsatisfied thirst for action and drama, as he stood on the quarter-deck of the "Hartford" fighting her way up Mobile Bay on that early August morning in 1864. At last he was in the midst of great events. This was his crowded hour—and the gods gave him full measure. Even in plain prose it is a gallant story. What a life-time must have been lived in those moments when Craven's monitor "Tecumseh", off to port, making for the Confederate ram "Tennessee", struck a torpedo and went down; when the "Brooklyn", leading the column, just ahead of the "Hartford", backed down upon the flag-ship, in fear of more torpedoes; when Farragut, lashed in the rigging, saw his line doubling up in confusion close under the Confederate batteries! It was then occurred the famous colloquy and order. "What is the trouble?" was asked of the "Brooklyn" by the flag-ship and the answer—"Torpedoes." "Damn the torpedoes!" shouted the Admiral. "Captain Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed!" And the "Hartford," increasing speed rapidly, passed under the stern of the "Brooklyn" and took the lead, firing her starboard batteries as fast as the men could work. One did not need to be a poet to secure a thrill from such a situation, but what must it have meant to the creative imagination that till then had pictured such scenes only in fancy!

And this was only the early part of the fight. Through it all Brownell took notes, as he had been ordered, of the progress of the action and literally wrote at least one stanza of "The Bay Fight." During the battle he dropped one of his papers which was later found and returned to him with an expression of admiration that he could write so legibly in the midst of such excitement. "If I were killed," he replied, "I didn't want any of you to think I'd been afraid."

Probably "The Bay Fight" was Brownell's most famous poem, though "The River Fight" is generally classed with it. The ballad has its faults. It is too long and too detailed for modern taste. It is ragged in places—the poet made his own versification much of the time. But it has vigor, vividness and sincere emotion, and through it all runs the turmoil and thunder of the battle. "The Bay Fight" has been compared to the work of Campbell, Drayton and Tennyson—yet no one has suggested a special likeness in temper and methods, in its narrative portions, to "The Ballad of the Revenge" of which it reminded one reader. At the close, where the meter changes to a quieter rhythm, there are a tenderness and aspiration and felicity of phrasing that arrest even the casual reader—

The verse of the Great War and that of the Civil War show one marked contrast. The best poetry of the recent titanic struggle is individualistic. It reflects the re-actions of personality to the stress and tension, the long-drawn, desperate drudgery, the tragedy, and sometimes the humor, of the strange experience. It pictures the dreams of home and peace. Most of the best of it has been written by young soldiers, many of whom were novices in the poetic rÔle. On the whole the well-known poets did not come up to expectations. There were of course exceptions, but most of this recent verse, appealing and beautiful as it is, misses the higher vision, perhaps because the immediate scene and the personal experience were so overwhelming. The poets of our Civil War, however, were obsessed with the meaning of it all, with the hopes and fears for the country's future. Have we as yet anything in American verse about the Great War that we can place beside the best war poetry of Holmes and Whittier? Can we find sustained poetic inspiration that compares with Lowell's "Commemoration Ode"? Whereas to this recent conflict is the lyric power of the "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? And, coming down to mere narrative and descriptive verse, what incident of this modern Armageddon has found among us its immortal ballad, as the battle of Mobile Bay found its eloquent poetic record in "The Bay Fight"?

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