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