139 ALFRED B. STREET. [Born, 1811.] MR. STREET was born in Poughkeepsie, one of the most beautiful of the many large towns upon the Hudson, on the eighteenth of December, 1811. General RANDALL S. STREET, his father, was an officer in active service during our second war with England, and subsequently several years a representative in Congress; and his paternal grandfather was a direct and lineal descendant of the Reverend NICHOLAS STREET, who came to this country soon after the landing of JOHN CARVER, and was ordained minister of the first church in New Haven, in 1659. His mother's father was Major ANDREW BILLINGS, of the revolutionary army, who was connected by marriage with the influential and wealthy family of the LivINGSTONS, which has furnished for some two centuries so many eminent citizens of the State of New York. When the poet was about fourteen years of age his father removed to Monticello, in the county of Sullivan. Up to this period he had been in an academy at Poughkeepsie, and had already written verses in which is exhibited some of that peculiar taste, and talent for description, for which his later works are so much distinguished. Sullivan is what is called a "wild county," though it is extremely fertile where well cultivated. Its scenery is magnificent, and its deep forests, streams as clear as dew-drops, gorges of piled rock and black shade, mountains and valleys, could hardly fail to waken into life all the faculties that slumbered in the brain of a youthful poet. Mr. STREET studied law in the office of his father, and, in the first years after his admission to the bar, attended the courts of Sullivan county; but in the winter of 1839 he removed to Albany, and has since successfully practised his profession in that city. His "Nature," a poem read before the literary societies of the college at Geneva, appeared in 1840; «The Burning of Schenectady and other Poems," in 1843, and "Drawings and Tintings," a collection of pieces chiefly descriptive, in 1844. The last and most complete edition of his poems was published by Clark and Austin, of New York, in 1845. Mr. STREET, as has been intimated above, is a descriptive poet, and in his particular department he has, perhaps, no superior in this country. He has a hearty love of rural sports and pastimes, a quick perception of the grand and beautiful, and he writes with apparent ease and freedom, from the impulses of his own heart, and from actual observations of life and nature. The greatest merits of any style of writing are clearness, directness and condensation. Diffuse ness is even more objectionable in verse than in prose, and in either is avoided by men of taste. A needless word is worse than one ill chosen, and scarcely any thing is more offensive than a line, though never was other one so musical, which could be omitted without affecting the transparency or force of the attempted expression. The beauty of Mr. STREET'S poems would sometimes be greater but for the use of epithets which serve no other purpose than to fill his lines, and his singular minuteness, though the most extreme particularity is a fault in description only when it lessens the distinctness and fidelity of the general impression. Occasionally his pictures of still nature remind us of the daguerreotype, and quite as often of the masterly landscapes of our COLE and DOUGHTY. Some of his exhibitions of the ordinary phenomena of the seasons have rarely been equalled. What, for example, could be finer than these lines on a rain in June? Wafted up, The stealing cloud with soft gray blinds the sky, His works are full of passages not less picturesque and truthful. The remarkable fidelity of Mr. STREET's description and narrative is best appreciated by persons who are familiar with new settlements in our northern latitudes. To others he may seem always lashing himself into excitement, to be extravagant, and to exaggerate beyond the requirements of art. But within a rifle-shot of the little village where nearly all his life has been passed, are centurial woods, from which the howlings of wolves have disturbed his sleep, and in which he has tracked the bear and the deer, and roused from their nests their winged inhabitants. In the spring time he has looked from his window upon fallow fires, and in the summer upon fields of waving grain, spotted by undecayed stumps of forest giants, and on trees that stand, charred and black, in mournful observation of the settler's invasion. Scenes and incidents which the inhabitant of the city might regard as extraordinary have been to him common and familiar, and his writings are valuable as the 'fruits of a genuine American experience, to which the repose, of which it is complained that they are deficient, does not belong. They are on some accounts among the most peculiarly national works in our literature. 480 But the dark, gloomy gorge, where down plunges the foam Of the fierce, rock-lash'd torrent, he claims as his home: There he blends his keen shriek with the roar of the flood, And the many-voiced sounds of the blast-smitten wood; From the crag-grasping fir-top, where morn hangs He views the mad waters white writhing beneath: Now poised are those pinions and pointed that beak, With the rush of the wind-gust, the glancing of light, And as dives the free kingfisher, dart-like on high A fitful red glaring, a low, rumbling jar, And the bolt launches o'er with crash, rattle, and boom; The gray forest-eagle, where, where has he sped? Away, O, away, soars the fearless and free! The tempest sweeps o'er with its terrible train, The breeze bears the odour its flower-kiss has won There's a dark, floating spot by yon cloud's pearly wreath, With the speed of the arrow 't is shooting beneath! Down, nearer and nearer it draws to the gaze, Now over the rainbow, now blent with its blaze, To a shape it expands, still it plunges through air, A proud crest, a fierce eye, a broad wing are there; 'Tis the eagle—the gray forest-eagle-once more He sweeps to his eyrie: his journey is o'er! Time whirls round his circle, his years roll away, But the gray forest-eagle minds little his sway; The child spurns its buds for youth's thorn-hid den bloom, Seeks manhood's bright phantoms, finds But the eagle's eye dims not, his wing is unbow'd, But 'tis warm'd with heaven's sunshine, and ار He sees the green meadow-grass hiding the lair, By the low of the herd and the husbandman's song; But his flaming eye dims not, his wing is unbow'd, An emblem of Freedom, stern, haughty, and high, Deep terror, deep heart-shaking terror it brings; When lightnings gleam'd fiercely, and thunder bolts rung, How proud to the tempest those pinions were flung! With darkness and dread, still the eagle was there; He sees it with sunshine and joy on its head; And the fierce little bantam, that flies your attack, Then struts, flaps, and crows, with such airs, at your back; And the turkey, too, smoothing his plumes in your Then ruffling so proud, as you bound from the place; The rail-fence is leap'd, and the wood-boughs are And a moss-couch is spread for my foot on the ground: beneath. The hickory hardens, snow-white, in its burr, [fir; The cohosh displays its white balls and red stems, And the thistle yields stars to each air-breath that A quick, startling whirr now bursts loud on my ear, I see him! his brown, speckled breast is display'd mould, Where he wallow'd, till sounds his close danger foretold. On yon spray, the bright oriole dances and sings, And the robin comes warbling, then flutters away, No more will recall his stray'd mate with his song, Lie there, cruel Arab! the mocking-bird now The woods shrink away, and wide spreads the morass, With junipers cluster'd, and matted with grass; And hung with gray lichens, like age-whiten'd hair. Its boughs clothed with rich, star-like fringes of And clumps of dense laurels, and brown-headed And thick, slimy basins, black dotted with snags: No matter; our shy prey not lightly is found; Pleasant Pond gleams before me, a mirror of glass: From the keen-sighted duck my approaches to hide; A flock spots the lake; now crouch, Carlo, below! How graceful their dipping-how gliding their Are they not all too lovely to mark as a prey? stems, His yellow foot striking up bubbles, like gems, across To the grass, whose green points dot the mirror- But I pause in my toil; their wise leader, the drake, O, dear! What a diving, and screaming, and splashing are A FOREST WALK. A LOVELY sky, a cloudless sur, A wind that breathes of leaves and flowers O'er hill, through dale, my steps have won, To the cool forest's shadowy bowers; One of the paths all round that wind, Traced by the browsing herds, I choose, In nature's lone recesses lose; The spruce its green tent stretches wide, Where pine-cones dropp'd, leaves piled and dead, A thick, elastic carpet spread; By some fierce whirlwind circling past, One of the woodland kings is cast. Above, the forest-tops are bright The screening branches, and a glow With rich green grass, invites my tread; Whirrs to the sheltering branches near ; A FOREST On each side shrinks the bowery shade; Here stretch'd, the pleasant turf I press, Sun-streaks, and glancing wings, and sky, WINTER. A SABLE pall of sky-the billowy hills, Swathed in the snowy robe that winter throws So kindly over nature-skeleton trees, Fringed with rich silver drapery, and the stream Numb in its frosty chains. Yon rustic bridge Bristles with icicles; beneath it stand The cattle-group, long pausing while they drink From the ice-hollow'd pools, that skim in sheets Of delicate glass, and shivering as the air [trunks, Cuts with keen, stinging edge; and those gaunt Bending with ragged branches o'er the bank, Seem, with their mocking scarfs of chilling white, Mourning for the green grass and fragrant flowers, That summer mirrors in the rippling flow Of the bright stream beneath them. Shrub and rock Are carved in pearl, and the dense thicket shows Clusters of purest ivory. Comfortless The frozen scene, yet not all desolate. Where slopes, by tree and bush, the beaten track, The sleigh glides merrily with prancing steeds, And the low homestead, nestling by its grove, Clings to the leaning hill. The drenching rain Had fallen, and then the large, loose flakes had shower'd, Quick freezing where they lit; and thus the scene, By winter's alchymy, from gleaming steel Was changed to sparkling silver. Yet, though bright And rich, the landscape smiles with lovelier look When summer gladdens it. The fresh, blue sky Bends like Gon's blessing o'er; the scented air Echoes with bird-songs, and the emerald grass Is dappled with quick shadows; the light wing Of the soft west makes music in the leaves; The ripples murmur as they dance along; The thicket by the road-side casts its cool Black breadth of shade across the heated dust. The cattle seek the pools beneath the banks, Where sport the gnat-swarms, glancing in the sun, Gray, whirling specks, and darts the dragon-fly, A gold-green arrow; and the wandering flock Nibble the short, thick sward that clothes the brink, Down sloping to the waters. Kindly tones And happy faces make the homestead walls A paradise. Upon the mossy roof The tame dove coos and bows; beneath the eaves Shoots, with that flying harp, the honey-bee, A sentinel upon the steeps of heaven, THE SETTLER. His echoing axe the settler swung Amid the sea-like solitude, And, rushing, thundering, down were flung The Titans of the wood; Loud shriek'd the eagle, as he dash'd And the first sunlight, leaping, flash'd On the wolf's haunt below. Rude was the garb, and strong the frame Of him who plied his ceaseless toil: The soul that warm'd that frame disdain'd The paths which wound mid gorgeous trees, Through those sun-hiding bowers, Dark cave, and swampy lair: Mid the black logs green glow'd the grain, The smoke-wreath curling o'er the dell, Of deeds that wrought the change. The rose of summer spread its glow, |