Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors

[45] trembling on the lips, yet forbear to tell them; and others, on a larger scale, which have a grander rhythmical movement than most of our poets have dared even to attempt. Of these the finest, to my ear, is “Resurgam;” but I remember that Charlotte Cushman preferred the “Funeral March,” and loved to read it in public. Those who heard her can never forget the solemnity with which she recited those stately cadences, or the grandeur of her half-glance over the shoulder as she named first among the hero's funeral attendants

“Majestic death, his freedman, following.”

“H. H.” reaches the popular heart best in a class of poems easy to comprehend, thoroughly human in sympathy; poems of love, of motherhood, of bereavement; poems such as are repeated and preserved in many a Western cabin, cheering and strengthening many a heart. Other women have exerted a similar power; but in the hands of a writer like Alice Cary, for instance, the influence is shallow, though pure and wholesome; she sounds no depths as this later poet sounds them. The highest type of this class of Helen Jackson's verses may be found in the noble poem entitled “Spinning,” which begins:--