A Hartford journalist whose “Poems” were published first in 1825, and reissued as “Literary Remains” in 1832 in an enlarged edition, with Memoir by his friend Whittier. His verse was temporarily popular, but his chief claim to present remembrance is the fine poem beginning, “I saw two clouds at morning.”
Personal
In private life, Brainard was most highly esteemed. He was fond of social intercourse; and superior powers of conversation, and a fund of cheerful humor, often rendered him the delight of the circle. His feelings were peculiarly sensitive—a circumstance which often proved a source of uneasiness to his friends. His character through life was marked at times by a shade of melancholy, and his verse is often imbued with a spirit of pleasing sadness. As an editor he seemed little better adapted to the rougher tasks of political partizanship than to the abstractions of law. Aside from a constitutional aversion to such duties as would bring him into a bold and public intercourse with his fellow men, he ever manifested a reluctance to engage in high and continued effort. Thus his taste and feelings inclined him rather to the literary than the political department of his paper, and in this character consisted its chief charm.
He was a small man, and sensitive on that score. His friends noticed the fine expression of his countenance when animated. He was negligent of his dress and somewhat abstracted. He wrote rapidly, and was ready in conversation, with playful repartee.
General
Niagara marks an epoch in my history. Its thunders will always rise in my recollection when sublimity is mentioned. I have said, and like to say little about it, because I find all words which I can use utterly inadequate to convey my ideas. I have seen many drawings and read many descriptions of Niagara, but nothing produces any thing like the true impression, except a little morceau of poetry you once sent me, and the description by Howison in a back volume of Blackwood.
He seldom aims at more than he can accomplish; the chief misfortune with him is, that he should be contented sometimes to accomplish so little, and this little in so imperfect a manner. That he possesses much of the genuine spirit and power of poetry, no one can doubt, who reads some of the pieces in this volume, yet there are others, which, if not absolutely below mediocrity, would never be suspected as coming from a soil that had been watered with Castalian dews. They might pass off very well as exercises in rhyme of an incipient poet, the first efforts at pluming the wing for a bolder flight, and they might hold for a day an honorable place in the corner of a gazette, but to a higher service, or more conspicuous station, they could not wisely be called. In short, if we take all the author’s compositions in this volume together, nothing is more remarkable concerning them than their inequality; the high poetical beauty and strength, both in thought and language, of some parts, and the want of good taste and the extreme negligence of others…. The author will do wisely to forsake his humorous strain, and make poetry more of a task, and less of a pastime, than seems to have been his habit. It was a maxim with the ancients, which the moderns have never called in question, that nothing good is brought to pass without labor. No proof exists, that poets are exempt from this common fatality of the human condition. Mr. Brainard’s graver pieces are much superior to his lighter and more playful, and his blank verse to his rhyme.
It [“The Tree Toad”] seems to have been hurriedly constructed, as if its author had felt ashamed of his light labor. But that in his heart there was a secret exultation over these verses for which his reason found it difficult to account, we know; and there is not a really imaginative man within sound of our voice to-day, who, upon perusal of this little “Tree Toad,” will not admit it to be one of the truest poems ever written by Brainard.
Brainard lacked the mental discipline and strong self-command which alone confer true power. He never could have produced a great work. His poems were nearly all written during the six years in which he edited the Mirror, and they bear marks of haste and carelessness, though some of them are very beautiful. He failed only in his humorous pieces; in all the rest his language is appropriate and pure, his diction free and harmonious, and his sentiments natural and sincere. His serious poems are characterized by deep feeling and delicate fancy; and if we had no records of his history, they would show us that he was a man of great gentleness, simplicity, and purity.
His genius lay in the amiable walks of the belles-lettres, where the delicacy of his temperament, the correspondence of the sensitive mind to the weak physical frame, found its appropriate home and nourishment. His country needed results of this kind more than it did law or politics; and in his short life Brainard honored his native land. His genius is a flower plucked from the banks of the river which he loved, and preserved for posterity.
Another crude Connecticut poet, J. G. C. Brainard, was writing hasty lines similarly lacking in greatness but similarly marked by occasional genuineness. Now the seabird was his theme…. Again, he wrote of some local stream, or of the autumn woods he well knew…. Less true and more bombastic was Brainard’s once famous extemporization on Niagara, which he never saw.
An early friend of Whittier,—died young, leaving a few pieces which show that his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little cultivation.
