Himself an open libertine in life, we regard his works as among the most monstrously absurd, and at the same time abominably pernicious, of the distorted and depraved pictures of fashionable description in European high life that we ever unsuccessfully attempted to endure to the end.
Greeley contributed to the New Yorker and to other periodicals of the day a number of poems over his initials. They were of varied merit, some of them showing quite as much of the poetic “fire” as do current poetical contributions of our own day. A single quotation — the last of some verses On the Death of William Wirt-must suffice:
Then take thy long repose
Beneath the shelter of the deep green sod;
Death but a brighter halo o'er thee throws-
Thy fame, thy soul alike have spurned the clod-
Rest thee in God.
But Greeley never considered himself a poet, and when, in 1869, Robert Bonner proposed to print a volume of poems not to be found in Dana's Household Handbook of Poetry, Greeley sent him a letter saying: “Be good enough-you must-to exclude me ”
