Fitz-Greene Halleck was born in Guilford, Conn., July 8, 1790. He received a common school education, and became clerk in a store in Guilford. From 1811 till 1832 he was employed in a banking-house in New York City. He then entered the service of John Jacob Astor, of whose business and estate he kept the accounts till Astor’s death, in 1848. Astor left him an annuity of $200. In 1849 he retired to Guilford, to live with an unmarried sister, and resided there during the remainder of his life. He never married. Halleck’s earliest poem which has been preserved is “Twilight,” which appeared originally in the New York “Evening Post,” in 1818. In March, 1819, he formed a literary partnership with Joseph Rodman Drake, and they wrote the papers which in that year appeared in the “Post” under the signature of “Croaker & Co.” Later in the year Halleck wrote his longest poem, “Fanny,” a satire, which was very popular in its day. The lines on Drake appeared originally in the “Evening Post.”… Halleck travelled in Europe in 1822–23, and in 1827 published anonymously a volume containing “Marco Bozzaris,” “Burns,” and “Alnwick Castle.” In 1832 he edited an edition of Byron, and in 1840 “Selections from the British Poets.” He died in Guilford, Nov. 17, 1867. A complete edition of his works has been prepared by James Grant Wilson, who has also written his life.

Personal

  Personally, he is a man to be admired, respected, but more especially beloved. His address has all the captivating bonhomie which is the leading feature of his poetry, and, indeed, of his whole moral nature. With his friends he is all ardor, enthusiasm, and cordiality; but to the world at large he is reserved, shunning society, into which he is seduced only with difficulty, and upon rare occasions. The love of solitude seems to have become with him a passion. He is a good modern linguist, and an excellent belles-lettres scholar; in general, has read a great deal, although very discursively. He is what the world calls ultra in most of his opinions, more particularly about literature and politics, and is fond of broaching and supporting paradoxes. He converses fluently, with animation and zeal; is choice and accurate in his language, exceedingly quick at repartee, and apt at anecdote. His manners are courteous, with dignity and a little tincture of Gallicism. His age is about fifty. In height he is probably five feet seven. He has been stout, but may now be called well-proportioned. His forehead is a noble one, broad, massive, and intellectual, a little bald, about the temples; eyes dark and brilliant, but not large; nose Grecian; chin prominent; mouth finely chiselled and full of expression, although the lips are thin; his smile is peculiarly sweet.

  I give to my friend Fitz-Greene Halleck an annuity of two hundred dollars, commencing at my decease, and payable half-yearly for his life, to be secured by setting apart so much of my personal estate as may be necessary; which I intend as a mark of regard for Mr. Halleck.

  With such advantages of physiognomy and manners, so winning a look and voice, how is it that Fitz-Greene Halleck has never let himself be known to audiences? With his well-won fame as the poet whom everybody is ready to admire, he retires to his remote home in Connecticut, coming to New York only as the most retiring of visitors to the most secluded of hotels—thus “biding his time,” while hundreds upon hundreds of those who appreciate and fervently admire him do not even know him by sight! Halleck’s genial countenance, and, still more, his full and genial cadences of voice, suited him especially for a lecturer. What a pity that so admirably-formed a creature should die (as he is likely to!) without the eye-and-ear homage for which Nature gifted him!

  Halleck was a bachelor, living in modest lodgings, and avoiding society, regular in his habits, even, it is said, to the stated number of glasses of brandy-and-water; but I have met few men who talked better, or who lighted up in conversation with a finer enthusiasm. A wit and a bon vivant, he was also deeply religious, and, though educated a Connecticut Puritan, was a zealous Roman Catholic, and maintained that every man who really thought upon the matter must come to the same conviction.

  Our friend is gone, and to those of us who knew him the world seems the dimmer for his departure.

  With the few whom Fitz-Greene Halleck liked, and with whom he associated on equal terms, he was genial, graceful, never wanton of speech, and always full of chat and pleasant humor; apt always and prompt at reply; with that spirit of repartee and easy wit which makes so much of the charm and spirit of the “Croaker” epistles. His geniality, with such a circle, was always active; and he relished nothing better than a snug and select party, “fit though few.” He was both socially and politically a natural aristocrat, and did not cheapen himself by any too easy entrance into society. He required to respect men, mentally, before associating with them, and seemed to me to revolt from all associations of trade, in spite of all his life-long connection with it, and, perhaps, because of that connection.

  Mr. Halleck never received any compensation for the poems he contributed to the Evening Post, National Advocate, and other journals and magazines, extending over a period of nearly twenty years—years during which his most admired productions were published. Halleck appears to have written with the most unselfish indifference to fame or pecuniary reward, for, up to the year 1839, neither on the title-pages of his published volumes, nor with his single contributions to the press, did his name appear…. The whole sum received by Mr. Halleck for the various editions of his poems, including his poetical contributions to periodicals, was sixteen thousand dollars. If to this are added one thousand for editing Byron’s works, and half that amount for making his selections from the British poets, we have a total of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars as the amount received by the poet for the literary labors of a lifetime.

  I used very often to see the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, but had not a personal acquaintance with him. He was stiff, angular, and clean-shaved; wore a high, standing shirt-collar, and in the finest weather carried a green cotton umbrella under his arm.

  His features were not handsome, but the clear, mellow manliness of his expression made them seem so. His forehead, however, was nobly arched, indicating a large and well-proportioned brain, and it was balanced by a finely formed chin. He was a little under the medium height, but his erect carriage, even as an old man, and his air of natural dignity, had the effect of adding somewhat to his stature. I have never seen a man who was so simply and inevitably courteous; he was an incarnate noblesse oblige.

  He was a great favorite in society; was constantly noticed by magazines and newspapers at home and abroad; was the recipient of frequent public honors; but he was so modest that he could hardly be persuaded to speak…. He was very happy in conversation, and could be infinitely satirical. Even out of his limited means, he was generous to a fault. In religion his toleration was supreme; and, though not a Catholic, he frequently attended the Catholic services.

  Something about him, I can scarcely say what, reminded me of Lamb, whose odd and fantastic tastes I sometimes fancied I detected in his whimsical talk. He was courtly and liberal in his literary opinions, except with regard to two English poets who then stood highest in popular favor, and who, for reasons which were incomprehensible to me, were his aversion. He had a conventional, last-century intellect, and found nothing to admire, but much to deride, in Tennyson and Browning. Campbell still possessed the early charm for him, and I shall never forget the warmth with which he defended the character of that poet from the aspersions which had been cast upon it by his whilom understrapper in the management of the New Monthly Magazine, Cyrus Redding, to which I somewhat injudiciously drew his attention…. He was fluent and animated in his conversation, which was rather in the vein of monologue than dialogue, but not so distinct in his enunciation as I could have wished. There was still a brightness in the eye over which age was beginning to draw its filmy curtain, and which sometimes seemed to emit sparks in the heat of talk. There was that within him which “o’er-informed this tenement of clay,” though it did not wear out his pygmy body. For Halleck, as I recall his figure through the lapse of years, was somewhat diminutive in stature and slight of build; and if at one time I was reminded of Lamb, I was reminded at another of Barry Cornwall, whose sensitive, delicately-chiselled features he appeared to possess.

Fanny, 1819

  I do not think much of the merits of the work, the plague of correcting the proof-sheets, etc., having put me out of conceit with it, and I fear that its localities will render it almost entirely uninteresting to you. The book-seller stated to me that I was the only writer in America, Irving excepted, whose works he would risk publishing. This opinion was founded, of course, upon the popularity of “The Croakers.” I do not anticipate the same popularity for this work. “The Croakers” cost the public nothing, this costs them fifty cents, which will have, no doubt, an effect in limiting the number of readers.

  Your pieces, if, as I suppose, you are the author of those signed “Croaker,” have been read in the newspapers with great interest, but “Fanny” is of a higher order, and for its easy conversational wit, and poetry of descriptions, must go alongside of Lord Byron’s and Mr. Rose’s productions in the same way. It is the admiration of your poetical talents which has led me to make this communication to you, and to request, if you feel inclined to give your pieces a circulation among your Eastern brethren, you would sometimes select the Club-Room as the medium of communication. I find no difficulty as the editor in obtaining compositions in prose, but it is otherwise in poetry, which, as it is not necessary to publish, we feel unwilling to publish unless it is particularly good, and I know of no source from which I could be so likely to obtain this as from the author of “Fanny.”

  If we except a certain gentlemanly ease and insouciance, with some fancy of illustration, there is really very little about this poem to be admired. There has been no positive avowal of its authorship, although there can be no doubt of its having been written by Halleck. He, I presume, does not esteem it very highly.

  “Fanny,” Halleck’s longest poem, and one which was the perpetual delight of John Randolph of Roanoke, was published anonymously in December, 1819, and, though suggested by the current topics, incidents, and public men of that day, still retains to a remarkable degree the popularity which it at once acquired on its first appearance…. It has frequently been called a parody or imitation of “Don Juan,” but Mr. Halleck assured me that it was written before he saw Lord Byron’s poem, published the same year. He adopted the versification of “Beppo,” one of Byron’s minor poems…. The popularity of “Fanny” was so great, that the publisher offered Halleck five hundred dollars for another canto, an offer which he accepted, and in 1821 a second edition appeared, enlarged by the addition of fifty stanzas. Before its appearance, the poem had become so scarce that it sold for fabulous prices—ten dollars having been frequently paid for a copy of the thin pamphlet of forty-nine pages, originally published at fifty cents. Its authorship was attributed to a number of prominent literary men, but, except in a few instances, suspicion never rested upon Mr. Halleck.

  I confess, to me it is the flattest, tamest, dreariest of comic poems that have won any note. It was thought by some to have been inspired by “Don Juan;” but the fine distinction has latterly been made that it resulted from a perusal of Byron’s “Beppo,” a poem in the same style and stanza. “Beppo,” however, has a plot, and therefore finishes itself; and Halleck failed to imitate it in this advantageous particular. The second part which he afterward provided does not remedy the defect. A more serious objection is that the wit is thin and scattered. Then the poem is so much taken up with wandering that it has no time for poetry. I find the intercalated song of the Horse-Boat a total enigma, when considered in the light of the praise it has received. Neither does the description of New York as seen from Weehawken appear to sustain the honors which have been bestowed upon it…. It was probably the surprise which people felt at seeing provincial Manhattan treated in verse of any sort that captivated the early readers of “Fanny.”

  There is no story in “Fanny,” or none to speak of; and the most that one can say of it is that it is an imaginary sketch of the social experiences of its heroine, the daughter of a shopkeeper in Chatham Street, who having amassed what was then considered a comfortable little fortune, proceeded to make a brilliant brief splurge in society, and concluded his career by going where the woodbine twineth. To depict the mortifying experiences of a parvenu’s daughter ought not to have been difficult, but it was more than the unpractised pen of Halleck could accomplish; for, flimsy in intention and feeble in execution, “Fanny” was dreary reading, because the author after writing what he probably considered a poetic passage immediately spoiled it by sticking his tongue in his cheek. A certain amount of antiquarian interest attaches to his pointless verse, and there is a pretty description of Weehawken, which was one of his favorite suburban resorts. What the subject-matter of such a poem as “Fanny” could be in the hands of a true poet was shown at a later period by Thomas Hood in “Miss Kilmansegg.”

Marco Bozzaris, 1827

  “Marco Bozzaris” has much lyrical without any great amount of ideal beauty. Force is its prevailing feature,—force resulting rather from well-ordered metre, vigorous rhythm, and a judicious disposal of the circumstances of the poem than from any of the truer lyric material. I should do my conscience great wrong were I to speak of “Marco Bozzaris” as it is the fashion to speak of it, at least in print. Even as a lyric or ode it is surpassed by many American and a multitude of foreign compositions of a similar character.

  The corner-stone of his glory.

  When Doctor Mott visited Europe, he met Rosa, the youngest daughter of Marco Bozzaris, justly styled “the Epaminondas of modern Greece,” who bore a striking resemblance to the hero. She was studying the English language, that she might read Halleck’s poems in the original, and with charming frankness and naïveté said she had an ardent desire to go to America expressly to see the poet who had immortalized her father.

  Halleck was so much an amateur that if he had not been so much more a real workman, he would have fallen into the third rank. It was amateurish, his failure to know at once, on finishing “Marco Bozzaris,” that he had written a great poem. He handed it to a business companion, asking, “Will that do?” But when we read it, we say, “Cannot this man do everything?” There is brilliant, perfect workmanship in it; there is splendid command of the sympathies. Is not the writer a master? One hour’s crowned session on the throne makes a king; but I do not think that one effort of power, even so impressive as this, gives a right to the title of master, in poetry. Halleck gives us too many blurred pages and broken staves.

General

  As a poet, Mr. Halleck ranks very high. He has not written much, but what he has written is almost faultless. If tenderness and warmth of feeling, playfulness of fancy, imagery, not abundant, but appropriate, and great copiousness and invariable euphony of language, constitute a claim to excellence, his effusions are excellent.

  The purest fountain of poetical inspiration, in the loftier strain of “Alnwick Castle,” tuned by a bard of our own native land.

  Sometimes in the midst of a strain of harmonious diction, and soft and tender imagery, he surprises by an irresistible stroke of ridicule, as if he took pleasure in showing the reader that the poetical vision he had raised was but a cheat. Sometimes, with that aërial facility which is his peculiar endowment, he accumulates graceful and agreeable images in a strain of irony so fine that, did not the subject compel the reader to receive it as irony, he would take it for a beautiful passage of serious poetry—so beautiful that he is tempted to regret that he is not in earnest, and that phrases so exquisitely chosen, and poetic coloring so brilliant, should be employed to embellish subjects to which they do not properly belong. At other times he produces the effect of wit by dexterous allusion to contemporaneous events, introduced as illustrations to the main subject, with all the unconscious gracefulness of the most animated and familiar conversation. He delights in ludicrous contrasts, produced by bringing the nobleness of the ideal world into comparison with the homeliness of the actual; the beauty and grace of Nature with the awkwardness of Art. He venerates the past, and laughs at the present. He looks at them through a medium which lends to the former the charm of romance, and exaggerates the deformity of the latter.

  Mr. Halleck is the only one of our poets who possesses a decided local popularity. With the subjects of “Fanny,” the “Croakers,” and some of his other pieces, every person in New York is in some degree acquainted, and his name is cherished in that city with fondness and enthusiasm. His humorous poems are marked with an uncommon ease of versification, a natural, unstudied flow of language, and a careless playfulness and felicity of jest…. Halleck’s serious poems are as admirable as his satirical. There are few finer martial lyrics than “Marco Bozzaris;” “Burns” and “Red Jacket” are distinguished for manly vigour of thought and language; and several of his shorter pieces have rarely been excelled in melodiousness of versification or quiet beauty of imagery.

  The name of Halleck is at least as well established in the poetical world as that of any American. Our principal poets are, perhaps, most frequently named in this order—Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Sprague, Longfellow, Willis, and so on—Halleck coming second in the series, but holding, in fact, a rank in the public opinion quite equal to that of Bryant. The accuracy of the arrangement as above made may, indeed, be questioned. For my own part I should have it thus—Longfellow, Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Sprague, Dana.

  My Dear Halleck: I must send you a line to report to you the substance of a delightful conversation I had with Rogers about you last week. He asked Lady Davy, at one of his breakfasts, if she had read your poems; she answered no. “Shame on you,” said he; “he has written some things which no poet living has surpassed, and you shall not be ignorant of him any longer.” The book was brought, and Rogers read in his best manner several passages from “Alnwick Castle,” the greater part of “Marco Bozzaris,” and a few of the shorter pieces. He then laid down the volume and entertained us with a beautiful tribute to your merit as a poet.

  The author of “Fanny” possesses many qualities calculated to make him a popular poet; he also has one or two which may, as time rolls on, peril his existence as part of the enduring national literature of America. He has fancy, versification, a keen eye for the incongruous, and a taste for the beautiful; but against these gifts must be set off his want of earnestness. We are never certain he feels his subject; he writes about it well and wittily; and in some of his poems he displays a truthfulness and depth worthy of any poet, but the mood seems to pass away, and he becomes the Mephistophelian jester at the various passions and pursuits of the world.

  In his serious poems he belongs to the same school as Campbell, and in his lighter pieces reminds us of “Beppo” and the best parts of “Don Juan.” “Fanny,” conceived in the latter vein, has the point of a fine local satire gracefully executed. “Burns,” and the lines on the death of Drake, have the beautiful impressiveness of the highest elegiac verse. “Marco Bozzaris” is perhaps the best martial lyric in the language, “Red Jacket” the most effective Indian portrait, and “Twilight” an apt piece of contemplative verse; while “Alnwick Castle” combines his grave and gay style with inimitable art and admirable effect. As a versifier, he was an adept in that relation of sound to sense which embalms thought in deathless melody. An unusual blending of the animal and intellectual with that full proportion essential to manhood, enables him to utter appeals that wake responses in the universal heart. An almost provoking mixture of irony and sentiment is characteristic of his genius.

  No American author, probably, has been more sedulously devoted to the pursuit of mental cultivation, or with better results to the public in the quality of his writings; yet he purchased the leisure of authorship by the surrender of a great portion of life to the uncongenial occupation of a banker’s clerk; summing up the enormous wealth of others, contenting himself with airy poetic numbers…. To the separate poems, which long composed the only acknowledged volume of Mr. Halleck’s writings, “Alnwick Castle,” “Marco Bozzaris,” and the rest, it is hardly necessary to allude. They are familiar to every school-boy and school-girl in the land. They were so well received that Halleck, like Campbell, for a time “afraid of the shadow of his reputation,” refused to add others to the number, lest he should fall short of his own standard. After a long silence, however, in 1864 he ventured before the public with a poem, or rather group of poems entitled “Young America;” which, if it did not increase, certainly did not diminish his fame. It was his last appearance in print.

  Became popular by his humorous poem “Fanny,” which is a clever copy of Byron’s style in “Don Juan;” and he became a still greater favourite by his battle-scene “Marco Bozzaris.” Next to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the master of irony, Halleck is considered the wittiest poet of America.

  One of the puzzles which arrest the attention of a historian of American literature is to account for the strange indifference of Halleck to exercise often the faculty which on occasions he showed he possessed in superabundance. All the subjects he attempted—the “Croaker Papers,” “Fanny,” “Burns,” “Red Jacket,” “Alnwick Castle,” “Connecticut,” the magnificent heroic ode, “Marco Bozzaris”—show a complete artistic mastery of the resources of poetic expression, whether his theme be gay or grave, or compounded of the two. His extravagant admiration of Campbell was founded on Campbell’s admirable power of compression. Halleck thought that Byron was a mere rhetorician in comparison with his favorite poet.

  On the 15th of May (1877) the first monumental statue of an American author was unveiled in the Central Park of New York. It is not a fortunate specimen of our native art. The posture is ungraceful, the face over-conscious to the verge of ostentation, and the general character of the figure is so theatrical that few of those who knew the poet will immediately recognize him…. Why should the first distinction fall upon Fitz-Greene Halleck, an author whose period of activity was so brief, whose good works are so few, and whose name has scarcely passed beyond his country’s borders?… After Drake’s death, Halleck’s trip to Europe and his ardent Philohellenic sympathies prolonged his poetic activity for a time; but the ten years, from 1817 to 1827, begin and complete his season of productiveness. Nothing that he wrote before or after that period possesses any vitality; and it is probable, in fact, that he will only be known to later generations by six poems, which I venture to name in the order of their excellence: “Marco Bozzaris,” “Burns,” “Red Jacket,” “Alnwick Castle,” “The Field of the Grounded Arms,” and “On the Death of Drake.” His “Fanny” may still be read with interest, but its original charm faded away with the surprise of its first appearance; some of the other brief lyrics and songs are unaffected, graceful, and either tender or mocking…. He certainly knew no imaginative or spiritual woes; he even seemed to be incapable of comprehending them in others. His faculty acted freely, soaring or sinking into silence at its own good-will, taking the facts of life as something inevitable, without prying into the mystery of Evil, or beating its wings bloody against that barrier of transparent adamant which separated it from so much possible Good. He never attempted to express anything higher than the principle of Manhood, and his verses sprang from the source of that principle in his own being.

  Whose verse is a mixture of serious thought and emotion with playful and careless fancies,—manly, clear, vivid, warm with feeling, or sparkling with wit.

  A natural lyrist whose pathos and eloquence were inborn, and whose sentiment, though he wrote in the prevailing English mode, was that of his own land. As we read those favorites of our schoolboy days, “Burns” and “Red Jacket” and “Marco Bozzaris,” we feel that Halleck was within his bounds, a national poet. Circumstances dulled his fire, and he lived to write drivel in his old age. But the early lyrics remain, nor was there anything of their kind in our home-poetry to compete with them until long after their first production.

  I still read Halleck, or portions of Halleck, with pleasure, and, while I am keenly alive to his faults, which are mainly technical, I wish that the vein of sterling sense which runs through his best work was one of our present excellencies. He had something to say, and he said it. That he was a poet in any large sense is not true, neither is it true that he was a poet in any recondite sense. He should be read, as I read him, with a regard to the time at which he wrote, and the then condition of American song.

  His own character may still better keep him a lasting name. He lacked, however, the intellectual independence and the creative genius which is unhindered by the wearing and destructive effect of drudgery…. Bryant, whose criticism of his intimates was sometimes less sure than friendly, has praised Halleck highly, but he is hardly read now. A few of his poems, however, such as “Burns,” are full of fine, manly passages; and of his nobility as a man his memorial exists in the reminiscences and in the biographies of him by his friends.

  Was for years probably the most popular American poet. His clear lucid style, easy diction and good-natured raillery, appealed at once to the public sentiment, and gave him a temporary prestige in literary circles hardly equalled in our history. His odes, lyrics, and satires were the most polished of their kind, written in a strain at once to catch the popular fancy. Even those of a transient character, with allusions now for the most part of little interest, show the same graceful, poetic spirit that enlivens the more important works. He had that excellent command of language that enabled him to express his meaning in the most felicitous terms, without the slightest apparent effort. It is certainly no rash prediction to assert that his more familiar lyrics, though few in number, will last as long as any short poems in our literature.