his experience. He
can compose his verses while the battle is going on around him. During
the engagement with Fort Powell, he was actually pencilling down some
portions of the "Bay Fight," when he received a polite invitation to
step down to the gun-deck and "try a shot at 'em with the Sawyer." He
took minutes of everything as it happened during the contest, so that
the simple record and the poetical delineation run into each other. We
take the liberty to quote a few words from a note he kindly sent in
answer to some queries of our own.

"Some of the descriptions [in the 'Bay Fight'] might seem exaggerated,
but better authorities than I am say they are not. To be sure, blood and
powder are pretty freely mixed for the painting of it; but these were
the predominant elements of the scene,--the noise being almost
indescribable, and the ship, for all the forward half of her, being an
absolute 'slaughter-house.' Though we had only twenty-five killed and
twenty-eight wounded (some of whom afterwards died) on that day, yet
numbers were torn into fragments, (men with their muscles tense,
subjected to violent concussion, seem as _brittle as glass_,) causing
the deck and its surroundings to present a most strange spectacle."

We can understand better after this the lines--

"And now, as we looked ahead,
All for'ard, the long white deck
Was growing a strange dull red,...
Red from mainmast to bitts!
Red on bulwark and wale,--
Red by combing and hatch,--
Red o'er netting and rail!"

The two great battle-poems begin, each of them, with beautiful
descriptive lines, move on with gradually kindling fire, reach the
highest intensity of action, till the words themselves have the weight
and the rush of shot and shell, and the verses seem aflame with the
passion of the conflict,--then, as the strife calms itself after the
victory is won, the wild dithyrambic stanzas rock themselves into sweet,
even cadences. No one can fail to be struck with the freedom and
robustness of the language, the irregular strength of the rhythm, the
audacious felicities of the rhyme. There are hints which remind us of
many famous poets,--hints, not imitations. There can be no doubt that
these were either coincidences or unconscious tricks of memory. To us
they seem beauties, not defects, in poems of such originality, as in a
new musical composition a few notes in some well-remembered sequence
often seem to harmonize the cru