Fitz-Greene Halleck to Mrs. Rush, November 21, 1861

Guilford, Conn., Nov. 21, 1861.

My DEar Mrs. Rush: I am very grateful for your continued kind remembrance of me, and for the courtesy of your promise to like my next war-song, notwithstanding the rejection of my last as one of the unlucky twelve hundred, and I think it my bounden duty, while generously declining to put your good-nature to so severe a test, to tell you frankly a melancholy truth. Sir Walter Scott once said to a clerical friend of his: “I am afraid that I am fast losing my memory, for I listened attentively to your yesterday's sermon, and to-day I have forgotten every word of it.” So in my case, I owe a like compliment to the poetry of Mrs. Browning and Mr. Tennyson; I have read many of them over and over, and have been told that they are all exceedingly beautiful, and yet I have not at this moment a single line of them by heart! I am certain, therefore, that you, whose endurance of my intoning of remembered rhymes won for you of old the reputation of being the most lady-like of listeners, will agree with me in admitting that my memory is gone, and that I cannot conscientiously hereafter ask others to remember my rhymes while confessing my inability to remember theirs. Moreover, sadly and seriously, is this Southern, this sin-born war of ours, worthy of a poet's consecration? a poet, whose art, whose attribute it is to make the dead on fields of battle, alike the victors and the vanquished, look beautiful in the sunbeams of his song. On the contrary, it is but a mutiny, a monster mutiny, whose ringleaders are a dozen crime-worn politicians, determined to keep themselves in power, and will sooner or later find its Nemesis in the blood and tears of a servile insurrection.

If, however (to end my letter cheerfully), the recent entrapping of my old acquaintance, John Slidell, should bring us a war with England, a foe “worthy of our steel” and stanzas, I will make the attempt you so flatteringly request; and, as Homer won his laurels by singing the wrath of Achilles for the loss of his sweetheart, I will strive to win mine by singing the wrath of John Bull for the captivity of John Slidell.

SOURCE: James Grant Wilson, The life and letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck, 523-5