A Fable for Critics, par James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell

A Fable for Critics

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree’s shade,

Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,

For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,

She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;

Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,

And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;

And, though ’twas a step into which he had driven her,

He somehow or other had never forgiven her;

Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,

Something bitter to chew when he’d play the Byronic,

And I can’t count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over

By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.

‘My case is like Dido’s,' he sometimes remarked;

‘When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked

In a laurel, as _she_ thought-but (ah, how Fate mocks!)

She has found it by this time a very bad box;

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,-

You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.

Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!

What romance would be left?-who can flatter or kiss trees?

And, for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue

With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,-

Not to say that the thought would forever intrude

That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?

Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,

To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;

Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,

As they left me forever, each making its bough!

If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right,

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’

Now, Daphne—before she was happily treeified—

Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,

And when she expected the god on a visit

('Twas before he had made his intentions explicit),

Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,

To look as if artlessly twined in her hair,

Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,

Like the day breaking through, the long night of her tresses;

So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,

Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table

(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,

Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),-

He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,

As I shall at the—, when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I’ve been spinning,

I’ve got back at last to my story’s beginning:

Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,

As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,

Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,

We read of his verses—the Oracles, namely,—

(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,

For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,

They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,

And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors

Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,-)

First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is

Would induce a mustache, for you know he’s _imberbis;_

Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position

Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;

At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately,

And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;

‘Mehercle! I’d make such proceeding felonious,-

Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?

Look well to your seat, ’tis like taking an airing

On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;

It leads one, ’tis true, through the primitive forest,

Grand natural features, but then one has no rest;

You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,

When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,-

Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?’

—Here the laurel leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.

‘Oh, weep with me, Daphne,’ he sighed, 'for you know it’s

A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!

But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,

She never will cry till she’s out of the wood!

What wouldn’t I give if I never had known of her?

’Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over:

If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,

I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,

And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her.

One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,-

A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on;

What boots all your grist? it can never be ground

Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round;

(Or, if ’tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor,

And say it won’t stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,

Or lug in some stuff about water ‘so dreamily,’-

It is not a metaphor, though, ’tis a simile):

A lily, perhaps, would set _my_ mill a-going,

For just at this season, I think, they are blowing.

Here, somebody, fetch one; not very far hence

They’re in bloom by the score, ’tis but climbing a fence;

There’s a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his

Whole garden, from one end to t’other, with lilies;

A very good plan, were it not for satiety,

One longs for a weed here and there, for variety;

Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise,

Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.’

Now there happened to be among Phoebus’s followers,

A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers,

Who bolt every book that comes out of the press,

Without the least question of larger or less,

Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head,-

For reading new books is like eating new bread,

One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he

Is brought to death’s door of a mental dyspepsy.

On a previous stage of existence, our Hero

Had ridden outside, with the glass below zero;

He had been, ’tis a fact you may safely rely on,

Of a very old stock a most eminent scion,-

A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on,

Who stretch the new boots Earth’s unwilling to try on,

Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on,

Whose hair’s in the mortar of every new Zion,

Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one,

Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on,

Who hunt, if they e’er hunt at all, with the lion

(Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one),

Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one,

And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on,

Whose pedigree, traced to earth’s earliest years,

Is longer than anything else but their ears,-

In short, he was sent into life with the wrong key,

He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey.

Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters

Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters;

Far happier than many a literary hack,

He bore only paper-mill rags on his back

(For It makes a vast difference which side the mill

One expends on the paper his labor and skill):

So, when his soul waited a new transmigration,

And Destiny balanced 'twixt this and that station,

Not having much time to expend upon bothers,

Remembering he’d had some connection with authors,

And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,-

She set him on two, and he came forth a critic.

Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took

In any amusement but tearing a book;

For him there was no intermediate stage

From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age;

There were years when he didn’t wear coat-tails behind,

But a boy he could never be rightly defined;

like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span,

From the womb he came gravely, a little old man;

While other boys’ trousers demanded the toil

Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil,

Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy,

He sat in the corner and read Viri Romae.

He never was known to unbend or to revel once

In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once;

He was just one of those who excite the benevolence

Of your old prigs who sound the soul’s depths with a ledger,

And are on the lookout for some young men to ‘edger–

cate,’ as they call it, who won’t be too costly,

And who’ll afterward take to the ministry mostly;

Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious,

Always keep on good terms with each _mater-familias_

Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear

Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year:

Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions,

Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions.

In this way our Hero got safely to college,

Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge;

A reading-machine, always wound up and going,

He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing,

Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin,

To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin

That Tully could never have made out a word in it

(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it),

And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee

All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B.,

He was launched (life is always compared to a sea)

With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,

To prove he’d a brain, by forever confusing it.

So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning

With the holiest zeal against secular learning,

_Nesciensque scienter_, as writers express it,

_Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit_.

'Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew,

Each a separate fact, undeniably true,

But with him or each other they’d nothing to do;

No power of combining, arranging, discerning,

Digested the masses he learned into learning;

There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for

(And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),-

Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter,

Till he’d weighed its relations to plain bread and butter.

When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits

In compiling the journals’ historical bits,-

Of shops broken open, men falling in fits,

Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers,

And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,-

Then, rising by industry, knack, and address,

Got notices up for an unbiased press,

With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for

Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for:

From this point his progress was rapid and sure,

To the post of a regular heavy reviewer.

And here I must say he wrote excellent articles

On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles;

They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for,

And nobody read that which nobody cared for;

If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,

He could fill forty pages with safe erudition:

He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules,

And his very old nothings pleased very old fools;

But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart,

And you put him at sea without compass or chart,-

His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;

For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,

Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,

So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,

Carving new forms of truth out of Nature’s old granite,

New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier’s planet,

Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create

In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,

Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,

To compute their own judge, and assign him his place,

Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,

And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it,

Without the least malice,-his record would be

Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea,

Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print for our sakes,

Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,

Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a

Comprehensive account of the ruins at Denderah.

As I said, he was never precisely unkind.

The defect in his brain was just absence of mind;

If he boasted, ’twas simply that he was self-made,

A position which I, for one, never gainsaid,

My respect for my Maker supposing a skill

In his works which our Hero would answer but ill;

And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he,

Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery,

And set up a kind of a man—manufactory,—

An event which I shudder to think about, seeing

That Man is a moral, accountable being.

He meant well enough, but was still in the way,

As dunces still are, let them be where they may;

Indeed, they appear to come into existence

To impede other folks with their awkward assistance;

If you set up a dunce on the very North pole

All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,

He’d manage to get betwixt somebody’s shins,

And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins,

To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,

All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice;

Or, if he found nobody else there to pother,

Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,

For there’s nothing we read of in torture’s inventions,

Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

A terrible fellow to meet in society,

Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea;

There he’d sit at the table and stir in his sugar,

Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar;

Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights,

Of your time,-he’s as fond as an Arab of dates;

You’ll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,

Of something you’ve seen in the course of the day;

And, just as you’re tapering out the conclusion,

You venture an ill—fated classic allusion,—

The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!

The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back!

You had left out a comma,-your Greek’s put in joint,

And pointed at cost of your story’s whole point.

In the course of the evening, you find chance for certain

Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain:

You tell her your heart can be likened to _one_ flower,

‘And that, O most charming of women, ’s the sunflower,

Which turns’-here a clear nasal voice, to your terror,

From outside the curtain, says, 'That’s all an error.’

As for him, he’s-no matter, he never grew tender,

Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender,

Shaping somebody’s sweet features out of cigar smoke

(Though he’d willingly grant you that such doings are smoke):

All women he damns with _mutabile semper_,

And if ever he felt something like love’s distemper,

’Twas tow’rds a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican,

And assisted her father in making a lexicon;

Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious

About Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius,

Or something of that sort,-but, no more to bore ye

With character-painting, I’ll turn to my story.

Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes

To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes,

The _genus_, I think it is called, _irritabile_,

Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily,

And nurses a-what is it?-_immedicabile_,

Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel,

As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel,

If any poor devil but look at a laurel;-

Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting

(Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting

Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a

Retreat to the shrine of a tranquil siesta),

Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray,

Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away;

And if that wouldn’t do, he was sure to succeed,

If he took his review out and offered to read;

Or, failing in plans of this milder description,

He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription,

Considering that authorship wasn’t a rich craft,

To print the ‘American drama of Witchcraft.’

‘Stay, I’ll read you a scene,'-but he hardly began,

Ere Apollo shrieked ‘Help!’ and the authors all ran:

And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit,

And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate,

He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle

As calmly as if ’twere a nine-barrelled pistol,

And threatened them all with the judgment to come,

Of 'A wandering Star’s first impressions of Rome.’

‘Stop! stop!’ with their hands o’er their ears, screamed the Muses,

‘He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses,

’Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying,

’Tis mere massacre now that the enemy’s flying;

If he’s forced to ‘t again, and we happen to be there,

Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether.’

I called this a ‘Fable for Critics;’ you think it’s

More like a display of my rhythmical trinkets;

My plot, like an icicle’s slender and slippery,

Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry,

And the reader unwilling _in loco desipere_

Is free to jump over as much of my frippery

As he fancies, and, if he’s a provident skipper, he

May have like Odysseus control of the gales,

And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails;

Moreover, although ’tis a slender return

For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn,

And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me,

You may e’en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me:

If too angry for that, you can tear me in pieces,

And my _membra disjecta_ consign to the breezes,

A fate like great Ratzau’s, whom one of those bores,

Who beflead with bad verses poor Louis Quatorze,

Describes (the first verse somehow ends with _victoire_),

As _dispersant partout et ses membres et sa gloire;_

Or, if I were over-desirous of earning

A repute among noodles for classical learning,

I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis,

As new as the jests of _Didaskalos tis;_

Better still, I could make out a good solid list

From authors recondite who do not exist,-

But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist

Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries

After Milton’s prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris;

But, as Cicero says he won’t say this or that

(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat),

After saying whate’er he could possibly think of,-

I simply will state that I pause on the brink of

A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion,

Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion:

So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied,

Just conceive how much harder your teeth you’d have gritted,

An ’twere not for the dulness I’ve kindly omitted.

I’d apologize here for my many digressions.

Were it not that I’m certain to trip into fresh ones

('Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once):

Just reflect, if you please, how ’tis said by Horatius,

That Maeonides nods now and then, and, my gracious!

It certainly does look a little bit ominous

When he gets under way with _ton d’apameibomenos_.

(Here a something occurs which I’ll just clap a rhyme to,

And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,-

Any author a nap like Van Winkle’s may take,

If he only contrive to keep readers awake,

But he’ll very soon find himself laid on the shelf,

If _they_ fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)

Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I–

When Phoebus expressed his desire for a lily,

Our Hero, whose homoeopathic sagacity

With an ocean of zeal mixed his dropp of capacity,

Set off for the garden as fast as the wind

(Or, to take a comparison more to my mind,

As a sound politician leaves conscience behind).

And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps

O’er his principles, when something else turns up trumps.

He was gone a long time, and Apollo, meanwhile,

Went over some sonnets of his with a file,

For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet

Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it;

It should reach with one impulse the end of its course,

And for one final blow collect all of its force;

Not a verse should be salient, but each one should tend

With a wave-like up-gathering to break at the end;

So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink,

He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. D—,

At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses

Went dodging about, muttering, ‘Murderers! asses!’

From out of his pocket a paper he’d take,

With a proud look of martyrdom tied to its stake,

And, reading a squib at himself, he’d say, ‘Here I see

’Gainst American letters a bloody conspiracy,

They are all by my personal enemies written;

I must post an anonymous letter to Britain,

And show that this gall is the merest suggestion

Of spite at my zeal on the Copyright question,

For, on this side the water, ’tis prudent to pull

O’er the eyes of the public their national wool,

By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull

All American authors who have more or less

Of that anti-American humbug-success,

While in private we’re always embracing the knees

Of some twopenny editor over the seas,

And licking his critical shoes, for you know ’tis

The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice;

My American puffs I would willingly burn all

(They’re all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal)

To get but a kick from a transmarine journal!’

So, culling the gibes of each critical scorner

As if they were plums, and himself were Jack Horner,

He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner,

And into each hole where a weasel might pass in,

Expecting the knife of some critic assassin,

Who stabs to the heart with a caricature.

Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure,

Yet done with a dagger-o’-type, whose vile portraits

Disperse all one’s good and condense all one’s poor traits.

Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching,

And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching,-

‘Good day, Mr. D—, I’m happy to meet

With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat,

Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries;

What news from that suburb of London and Paris

Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize

The credit of being the New World’s metropolis?’

'Why, nothing of consequence, save this attack

On my friend there, behind, by some pitiful hack,

Who thinks every national author a poor one,

That isn’t a copy of something that’s foreign,

And assaults the American Dick-’

Nay, ’tis clear

That your Damon there’s fond of a flea in his ear,

And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick

He would buy some himself, just to hear the old click;

Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japan

Should turn up his nose at the ‘Poems on Man,’

(Which contain many verses as fine, by the bye,

As any that lately came under my eye,)

Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it,

Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it;

As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit

The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet;

Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column,

Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn,

By way of displaying his critical crosses,

And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis,

His broadsides resulting (this last there’s no doubt of)

In successively sinking the craft they’re fired out of.

Now nobody knows when an author is hit,

If he have not a public hysterical fit;

Let him only keep close in his snug garret’s dim ether,

And nobody’d think of his foes-or of him either;

If an author have any least fibre of worth in him,

Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him;

All the critics on earth cannot crush with their ban

One word that’s in tune with the nature of man.’

'Well, perhaps so; meanwhile I have brought you a book,

Into which if you’ll just have the goodness to look,

You may feel so delighted (when once you are through it)

As to deem it not unworth your while to review it,

And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do,

A place in the next Democratic Review.’

'The most thankless of gods you must surely have thought me,

For this is the forty-fourth copy you’ve brought me;

I have given them away, or at least I have tried,

But I’ve forty-two left, standing all side by side

(The man who accepted that one copy died),-

From one end of a shelf to the other they reach,

‘With the author’s respects’ neatly written in each.

The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum,

When he hears of that order the British Museum

Has sent for one set of what books were first printed

In America, little or big,-for ’tis hinted

That this is the first truly tangible hope he

Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy.

I’ve thought very often 'twould be a good thing

In all public collections of books, if a wing

Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands,

Marked _Literature suited to desolate islands_,

And filled with such books as could never be read

Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,-

Such books as one’s wrecked on in small country taverns,

Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns,

Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented,

As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented.

Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so

Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe;

And since the philanthropists just now are banging

And gibbeting all who’re in favor of hanging

(Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar

Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter.

And that vital religion would dull and grow callous,

Unrefreshed, now and then, with a sniff of the gallows),-

And folks are beginning to think it looks odd,

To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God;

And that He who esteems the Virginia reel

A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal,

And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery

Than crushing his African children with slavery,-

Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon

Are mounted for hell on the Devil’s own pillion,

Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows,

Approaches the heart through the door of the toes,-

That He, I was saying, whose judgments are stored

For such as take steps in despite of his word,

Should look with delight on the agonized prancing

Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing,

While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter

About offering to God on his favorite halter,

And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence,

Sells the clothes to a Jew, and the corpse to the surgeons;-

Now, instead of all this, I think I can direct you all

To a criminal code both humane and effectual;-

I propose to shut up every doer of wrong

With these desperate books, for such term, short or long,

As, by statute in such cases made and provided,

Shall be by your wise legislators decided:

Thus: Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler,

At hard labor for life on the works of Miss—;

Petty thieves, kept from flagranter crimes by their fears,

Shall peruse Yankee Doodle a blank term of years,-

That American Punch, like the English, no doubt,-

Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.

‘But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on

The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,-

A loud-cackling swarm, in whose leathers warm drest,

He goes for as perfect a-swan as the rest.

’There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,

Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,

Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,

Is some of it pr—No, ’tis not even prose;

I’m speaking of metres; some poems have welled

From those rare depths of soul that have ne’er been excelled;

They’re not epics, but that doesn’t matter a pin,

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin;

A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak;

If you’ve once found the way, you’ve achieved the grand stroke;

In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,

But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter;

Now it is not one thing nor another alone

Makes a poem, but rather the general tone,

The something pervading, uniting the whole,

The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,

So that just in removing this trifle or that, you

Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue;

Roots, wood, bark, and leaves singly perfect may be,

But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don’t make a tree.

'But, to come back to Emerson (whom, by the way,

I believe we left waiting),-his is, we may say,

A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range

Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange;

He seems, to my thinking (although I’m afraid

The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),

A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist

And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;

All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got

To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;

For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd

He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.

’Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me

To meet such a primitive Pagan as he,

In whose mind all creation is duly respected

As parts of himself-just a little projected;

And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun,

A convert to-nothing but Emerson.

So perfect a balance there is in his head,

That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead;

Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort,

He looks at as merely ideas; in short,

As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet,

Of such vast extent that our earth’s a mere dab in it;

Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,

Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer;

You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration,

Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion,

With the quiet precision of science he’ll sort 'em,

But you can’t help suspecting the whole a _post mortem_.

'There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,

Who insist on a likeness 'twixt him and Carlyle;

To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,

Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;

He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,

If C.'s as original, E.'s more peculiar;

That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,

Of the other he’s more of an Emerson;

C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,-

E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;

The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,

Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;

C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass,-

E.'s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;

C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues,

And rims common—sense things with mystical hues,—

E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,

And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;

C. shows you how every-day matters unite

With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,-

While E., in a plain, preternatural way,

Makes mysteries matters of mere every day;

C. draws all his characters quite _a la_ Fuseli,-

Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,

He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,

They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;

E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,

And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;-

To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords

The design of a white marble statue in words.

C. labors to get at the centre, and then

Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men;

E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,

And, given himself, has whatever is wanted.

'He has imitators in scores, who omit

No part of the man but his wisdom and wit,-

Who go carefully o’er the sky-blue of his brain,

And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again;

If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is

Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities,

As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute,

While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it.

'There comes—, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,

Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;

How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face.

To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!

He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,

His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.

Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,

Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?

Besides, ’tis no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,-

—has picked up all the windfalls before.

They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ‘em,

His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em;

When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try ‘em,

He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em;

He wonders why ’tis there are none such his trees on,

And thinks ‘em the best he has tasted this season.

’Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,

And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,

With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him,

And never a fact to perplex him or bore him,

With a snug room at Plato’s when night comes, to walk to,

And people from morning till midnight to talk to,

And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;-

So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,

For his highest conceit of a happiest state is

Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis;

And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better,-

Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter;

He seems piling words, but there’s royal dust hid

In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.

While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,

If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper;

Yet his fingers itch for 'em from morning till night,

And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;

In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,

He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

'Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very full

With attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;

Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goes

A stream of transparent and forcible prose;

He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound

That ’tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round,

And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind

That the weathercock rules and not follows the wind;

Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side,

With no doctrine pleased that’s not somewhere denied,

He lays the denier away on the shelf,

And then-down beside him lies gravely himself.

He’s the Salt River boatman, who always stands willing

To convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,

And so fond of the trip that, when leisure’s to spare,

He’ll row himself up, if he can’t get a fare.

The worst of it is, that his logic’s so strong,

That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;

If there is only one, why, he’ll split it in two,

And first pummel this half, then that, black and blue.

That white’s white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow

To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow.

He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,-

When it reaches your lips there’s naught left to believe

But a few silly-(syllo–, I mean,)-gisms that squat 'em

Like tadpoles, o’erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.

'There is Willis, all _natty_ and jaunty and gay,

Who says his best things in so foppish a way,

With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ‘em,

That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em;

Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,

Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!

His prose had a natural grace of its own,

And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone;

But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,

And is forced to forgive where one might have admired;

Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,

It runs like a stream with a musical waste,

And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;-

’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?

In a country where scarcely a village is found

That has not its author sublime and profound,

For some one to be slightly shallow’s a duty,

And Willis’s shallowness makes half his beauty.

His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,

And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror:

’Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;

’Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz;

It is Nature herself, and there’s something in that,

Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.

Few volumes I know to read under a tree,

More truly delightful than his A l’Abri,

With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,

Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;

With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,

Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,

And Nature to criticise still as you read,-

The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.

'He’s so innate a cockney, that had he been born

Where plain bare-skin’s the only full-dress that is worn,

He’d have given his own such an air that you’d say

‘T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.

His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on 't,

As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;

So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;

If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it and shake it,

But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it.

He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,

If he would not sometimes leave the _r_ out of sprightfulness;

And he ought to let Scripture alone-'tis self-slaughter,

For nobody likes inspiration-and-water.

He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,

Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid,

His wit running up as Canary ran down,-

The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.

'Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man

Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban

(The Church of Socinus, I mean),-his opinions

Being So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians:

They believed-faith, I’m puzzled-I think I may call

Their belief a believing in nothing at all,

Or something of that sort; I know they all went

For a general union of total dissent:

He went a step farther; without cough or hem,

He frankly avowed he believed not in them;

And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented,

From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.

There was heresy here, you perceive, for the right

Of privately judging means simply that light

Has been granted to _me_, for deciding on _you;_

And in happier times, before Atheism grew,

The deed contained clauses for cooking you too:

Now at Xerxes and Knut we all laugh, yet our foot

With the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,

And we all entertain a secure private notion,

That our _Thus far!_ will have a great weight with the ocean,

’Twas so with our liberal Christians: they bore

With sincerest conviction their chairs to the shore;

They brandished their worn theological birches,

Bade natural progress keep out of the Churches,

And expected the lines they had drawn to prevail

With the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;

They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,

And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;

But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,

And cared (shall I say?) not a d—for their damming;

So they first read him out of their church, and next minute

Turned round and declared he had never been in it.

But the ban was too small or the man was too big,

For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig

(He scarce looks like a man who would _stay_ treated shabbily,

Sophroniscus’ son’s head o’er the features of Rabelais):-

He bangs and bethwacks them,-their backs he salutes

With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;

His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,

And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht,

Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,

Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, _that_ he’s no faith in),

Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,

Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,

Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis,

Musaeus, Muretus, _hem_,-[Greek: m] Scorpionis,

Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac-Mac-ah! Machiavelli,

Condorcet, Count d’Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,

Orion, O’Connell, the Chevalier D’O,

(See the Memoirs of Sully,) [Greek: to pan], the great toe

Of the statue of Jupiter, now made to pass

For that of Jew Peter by good Romish brass,

(You may add for yourselves, for I find it a bore,

All the names you have ever, or not, heard before,

And when you’ve done that-why, invent a few more).

His hearers can’t tell you on Sunday beforehand,

If in that day’s discourse they’ll be Bibled or Koraned,

For he’s seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired)

That all men (not orthodox) _may be_ inspired;

Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,

He makes it quite clear what he _doesn’t_ believe in,

While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom Come

Is a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,

Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumb

Would be left, if we didn’t keep carefully mum,

And, to make a clean breast, that ’tis perfectly plain

That _all_ kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;

Now P.'s creed than this may be lighter or darker,

But in one thing, ’tis clear, he has faith, namely-Parker;

And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,

There’s a background of god to each hard-working feature,

Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced

In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest:

There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest,

If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least,

His gestures all downright and same, if you will,

As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;

But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,

Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak,

You forget the man wholly, you’re thankful to meet

With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,

And to hear, you’re not over-particular whence,

Almost Taylor’s profusion, quite Latimer’s sense.

'There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,

As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,

Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nights

With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.

He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation

(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme iceolation),

Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,

But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,-

He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:

Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ‘em,

But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;

If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,

Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

’He is very nice reading in summer, but _inter

Nos_, we don’t want _extra_ freezing in winter;

Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,

When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.

But, deduct all you can, there’s enough that’s right good in him,

He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;

And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where’er it is,

Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities–

To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?

No, to old Berkshire’s hills, with their limestone and granite.

If you’re one who _in loco_ (add _foco_ here) _desipis_,

You will get out of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;

But you’d get deeper down if you came as a precipice,

And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,

If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.

Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,

Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,

Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth

May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.

No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;

But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client,

By attempting to stretch him up into a giant;

If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per–

—sons fit for a parallel—Thomson and Cowper;

I don’t mean exactly,-there’s something of each,

There’s T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach;

Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness

Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness,

And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,

Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,-

A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on

The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,-

A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,

Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;

He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,

And the advantage that Wordsworth before him had written.

'But, my dear little bardlings, don’t prick up your ears

Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;

If I call him an iceberg, I don’t mean to say

There is nothing in that which is grand in its way;

He is almost the one of your poets that knows

How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;

If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar

His thought’s modest fulness by going too far;

‘T would be well if your authors should all make a trial

Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial,

And measure their writings by Hesiod’s staff,

Which teaches that all has less value than half.

'There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart

Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,

And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,

Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;

There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swing

Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;

And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)

From the very same cause that has made him a poet,-

A fervor of mind which knows no separation

‘Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,

As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing

If ’twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;

Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction

And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,

While, borne with the rush of the metre along,

The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,

Content with the whirl and delirium of song;

Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,

And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,

Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats

When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,

And can ne’er be repeated again any more

Than they could have been carefully plotted before:

Like old what’s-his-name there at the battle of Hastings

(Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings),

Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights

For reform and whatever they call human rights,

Both singing and striking in front of the war,

And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;

_Anne haec_, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,

_Vestis filii tui_, O leather-clad Fox?

Can that be thy son, in the battle’s mid din,

Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in

To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,

With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s spring

Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?

'All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard

Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard,

Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave

When to look but a protest in silence was brave;

All honor and praise to the women and men

Who spoke out for the dumb and the down-trodden then!

It needs not to name them, already for each

I see History preparing the statue and niche;

They were harsh, but shall _you_ be so shocked at hard words

Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords,

Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gain

By the reaping of men and of women than grain?

Why should _you_ stand aghast at their fierce wordy war, if

You scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?

Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day long

Doesn’t prove that the use of hard language is wrong;

While the World’s heart beats quicker to think of such men

As signed Tyranny’s doom with a bloody steel-pen,

While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright one

With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton,

You need not look shy at your sisters and brothers

Who stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;-

No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and true

Who, for sake of the many, dared stand with the few,

Not of blood-spattered laurel for enemies braved,

But of broad, peaceful oak-leaves for citizens saved!

'Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along,

Involved in a paulo-post-future of song,

Who’ll be going to write what’ll never be written

Till the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,-

Who is so well aware of how things should be done,

That his own works displease him before they’re begun,-

Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,

That the best of his poems is written in prose;

All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,

He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;

In a very grave question his soul was immersed,-

Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first:

And, while this point and that he judicially dwelt on,

He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton,

Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,

You’ll allow only genius could hit upon either.

That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,

But I fear he will never be anything more;

The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,

The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o’er him.

He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,

He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,

Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,

In learning to swim on his library table.

'There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine

The sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,

Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he

Preferred to believe that he was so already;

Too hasty to wait till Art’s ripe fruit should drop,

He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop;

Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it,

It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it;

A man who’s made less than he might have, because

He always has thought himself more than he was,-

Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,

Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,

And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,

Because song drew less instant attention than noise.

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,

That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,

And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.

No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;

His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;

’Tis the modest man ripens, ’tis he that achieves,

Just what’s needed of sunshine and shade he receives;

Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;

Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,

Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;

He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,

That he strips himself naked to prove he’s a poet,

And, to show he could leap Art’s wide ditch, if he tried,

Jumps clean o’er it, and into the hedge t’other side.

He has strength, but there’s nothing about him in keeping;

One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping;

He has used his own sinews himself to distress,

And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;

In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;

Could he only have waited he might have been great;

But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,

And muddied the stream ere he took his first taste.

'There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare

That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;

A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,

So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,

Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;

’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,

With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,

Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,

With a single anemone trembly and rathe;

His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,

That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,-

He’s a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck;

When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted

For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,

So, to fill out her model, a little she spared

From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,

And she could not have hit a more excellent plan

For making him fully and perfectly man.

The success of her scheme gave her so much delight,

That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight;

Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,

She sang to her work in her sweet childish way,

And found, when she’d put the last touch to his soul,

That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.

'Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to show

He’s as good as a lord: well, let’s grant that he’s so;

If a person prefer that description of praise,

Why, a coronet’s certainly cheaper than bays;

But he need take no pains to convince us he’s not

(As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud

That one of his novels of which he’s most proud,

And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quitting

Their box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting.

He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,

One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dew

Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince,

He has done naught but copy it ill ever since;

His Indians, with proper respect be it said,

Are just Natty Bumppo, daubed over with red,

And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat,

Rigged up in duck pants and a sou’wester hat

(Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found

To have slipped the old fellow away underground).

All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,

The _derniere chemise_ of a man in a fix

(As a captain besieged, when his garrison’s small,

Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o’er the wall):

And the women he draws from one model don’t vary.

All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.

When a character’s wanted, he goes to the task

As a cooper would do in composing a cask;

He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,

Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,

And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he

Has made at the most something wooden and empty.

'Don’t suppose I would underrate Cooper’s abilities;

If I thought you’d do that, I should feel very ill at ease;

The men who have given to _one_ character life

And objective existence are not very rife;

You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers,

Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers,

And Natty won’t go to oblivion quicker

Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.

'There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is

That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis;

Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity,

He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.

Now he may overcharge his American pictures,

But you’ll grant there’s a good deal of truth in his strictures;

And I honor the man who is willing to sink

Half his present repute for the freedom to think,

And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,

Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak,

Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,

Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

'There are truths you Americans need to be told,

And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold;

John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in choler

At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;

But to scorn such eye-dollar-try’s what very few do,

And John goes to that church as often as you do,

No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him,

’Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him;

Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One

Displacing himself in the mind of his son,

And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglected

When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected;

To love one another you’re too like by half;

If he is a bull, you’re a pretty stout calf,

And tear your own pasture for naught but to show

What a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.

'There are one or two things I should just like to hint,

For you don’t often get the truth told you in print;

The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)

Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;

Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,

You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;

Though you brag of your New World, you don’t half believe in it;

And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;

Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,

With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,

With eyes bold as Here’s, and hair floating free,

And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,

Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,

Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,

Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass,

Keeps glancing aside into Europe’s cracked glass.

Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist,

And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;

She loses her fresh country charm when she takes

Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

'You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean;

The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries

And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-

Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,

To which the dull current in hers is but mud:

Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,

In her voice there’s a tremble e’en now while she rails,

And your shore will soon be in the nature of things

Covered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings,

Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow’s Waif,

Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.

O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he

‘Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;

Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,

By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,

Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,

As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,

Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,

To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,

Keep your ears open wide to the Future’s first call,

Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,

Stand fronting the dawn on Toil’s heaven-scaling peaks,

And become my new race of more practical Greeks.-

Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o’t,

Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot.’

Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic

More pepper than brains, shrieked, 'The man’s a fanatic,

I’m a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers,

And will make him a suit that’ll serve in all weathers;

But we’ll argue the point first, I’m willing to reason 't,

Palaver before condemnation’s but decent:

So, through my humble person, Humanity begs

Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.’

But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth

As when [Greek: aeie nukti eoikios], and so forth,

And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way,

But, as he was going, gained courage to say,-

‘At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels,

I am as strongly opposed to ’t as any one else.’

‘Ay, no doubt, but whenever I’ve happened to meet

With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,’

Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us,

‘The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss

Is only in taking a great busy nation

For a part of their pitiful cotton—plantation.—

But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to?

She has such a penchant for bothering me too!

She always keeps asking if I don’t observe a

Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva;

She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-

She’s been travelling now, and will be worse than ever;

One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she’d be

Of all that’s worth mentioning over the sea,

For a woman must surely see well, if she try,

The whole of whose being’s a capital I:

She will take an old notion, and make it her own,

By saying it o’er in her Sibylline tone,

Or persuade you ’tis something tremendously deep,

By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;

And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,

When once she has mixed up her infinite _me_ through it.

There is one thing she owns in her own single right,

It is native and genuine-namely, her spite;

Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows

A censer of vanity ‘neath her own nose.’

Here Miranda came up, and said, 'Phoebus! you know

That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe,

As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl,

Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul;

I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,

To my Land’s better life authors solely my own,

Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,

Whose works sound a depth by Life’s quiet unshaken,

Such as Shakespeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon,

Not to mention my own works; Time’s nadir is fleet,

And, as for myself, I’m quite out of conceit’-

'Quite out of conceit! I’m enchanted to hear it,’

Cried Apollo aside. 'Who’d have thought she was near it?

To be sure, one is apt to exhaust those commodities

One uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is

As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings,

‘I’m as much out of salt as Miranda’s own writings’

(Which, as she in her own happy manner has said,

Sound a depth, for ’tis one of the functions of lead).

She often has asked me if I could not find

A place somewhere near me that suited her mind;

I know but a single one vacant, which she,

With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T.

And it would not imply any pause or cessation

In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,-

She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses,

And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses.’

Miranda meanwhile has succeeded in driving

Up into a corner, in spite of their striving,

A small flock of terrified victims, and there,

With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air

And a tone which, at least to _my_ fancy, appears

Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears,

Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise,

For ’tis dotted as thick as a peacock’s with I’s),

_Apropos_ of Miranda, I’ll rest on my oars

And drift through a trifling digression on bores,

For, though not wearing ear-rings _in more majorum_,

Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore 'em.

There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least,

Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast,

And of all quiet pleasures the very _ne plus_

Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us.

Archaeologians, I know, who have personal fears

Of this wise application of hounds and of spears,

Have tried to make out, with a zeal more than wonted,

’Twas a kind of wild swine that our ancestors hunted;

But I’ll never believe that the age which has strewn

Europe o’er with cathedrals, and otherwise shown

That it knew what was what, could by chance not have known

(Spending, too, its chief time with its buff on, no doubt)

Which beast 'twould improve the world most to thin out.

I divide bores myself, in the manner of rifles,

Into two great divisions, regardless of trifles:-

There’s your smooth-bore and screw-bore, who do not much vary

In the weight of cold lead they respectively carry.

The smooth-bore is one in whose essence the mind

Not a corner nor cranny to cling by can find;

You feel as in nightmares sometimes, when you slip

Down a steep slated roof, where there’s nothing to grip;

You slide and you slide, the blank horror increases,-

You had rather by far be at once smashed to pieces;

You fancy a whirlpool below white and frothing,

And finally dropp off and light upon-nothing.

The screw-bore has twists in him, faint predilections

For going just wrong in the tritest directions;

When he’s wrong he is flat, when he’s right he can’t show it,

He’ll tell you what Snooks said about the new poet,

Or how Fogrum was outraged by Tennyson’s Princess;

He has spent all his spare time and intellect since his

Birth in perusing, on each art and science,

Just the books in which no one puts any reliance,

And though _nemo_, we’re told, _horis omnibus sapit_,

The rule will not fit him, however you shape it,

For he has a perennial foison of sappiness;

He has just enough force to spoil half your day’s happiness,

And to make him a sort of mosquito to be with,

But just not enough to dispute or agree with.

These sketches I made (not to be too explicit)

From two honest fellows who made me a visit,

And broke, like the tale of the Bear and the Fiddle,

My reflections on Halleck short off by the middle;

I sha’n’t now go into the subject more deeply,

For I notice that some of my readers look sleep’ly;

I will barely remark that, 'mongst civilized nations,

There’s none that displays more exemplary patience

Under all sorts of boring, at all sorts of hours,

From all sorts of desperate persons, than ours.

Not to speak of our papers, our State legislatures,

And other such trials for sensitive natures,

Just look for a moment at Congress,-appalled,

My fancy shrinks back from the phantom it called;

Why, there’s scarcely a member unworthy to frown

‘Neath what Fourier nicknames the Boreal crown;

Only think what that infinite bore-pow’r could do

If applied with a utilitarian view;

Suppose, for example, we shipped it with care

To Sahara’s great desert and let it bore there;

If they held one short session and did nothing else,

They’d fill the whole waste with Artesian wells.

But ’tis time now with pen phonographic to follow

Through some more of his sketches our laughing Apollo:-

'There comes Harry Franco, and, as he draws near,

You find that’s a smile which you took for a sneer;

One half of him contradicts t’other; his wont

Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt;

His manner’s as hard as his feelings are tender,

And a _sortie_ he’ll make when he means to surrender;

He’s in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest,

When he seems to be joking, be sure he’s in earnest;

He has common sense in a way that’s uncommon,

Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman,

Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak,

Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke,

Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-outer,

Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her,

Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art,

Shuts you out of his secrets, and into his heart,

And though not a poet, yet all must admire

In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar.

'There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,

Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,

In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,

Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,

But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,

Who-But hey-day! What’s this? Messieurs Mathews and Poe,

You mustn’t fling mud-balls at Longfellow so,

Does it make a man worse that his character’s such

As to make his friends love him (as you think) too much?

Why, there is not a bard at this moment alive

More willing than he that his fellows should thrive;

While you are abusing him thus, even now

He would help either one of you out of a slough;

You may say that he’s smooth and all that till you’re hoarse,

But remember that elegance also is force;

After polishing granite as much as you will,

The heart keeps its tough old persistency still;

Deduct all you can, _that_ still keeps you at bay;

Why, he’ll live till men weary of Collins and Gray.

I’m not over-fond of Greek metres in English,

To me rhyme’s a gain, so it be not too jinglish,

And your modern hexameter verses are no more

Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer;

As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is,

So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes;

I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o’t is

That I’ve heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies,

And my ear with that music impregnate may be,

Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea,

Or as one can’t bear Strauss when his nature is cloven

To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven;

But, set that aside, and ’tis truth that I speak,

Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,

I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line

In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline.

That’s not ancient nor modern, its place is apart

Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,

’Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth’s hubbub and strife

As quiet and chaste as the author’s own life.

There comes Philothea, her face all aglow,

She has just been dividing some poor creature’s woe,

And can’t tell which pleases her most, to relieve

His want, or his story to hear and believe;

No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,

For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;

She knows well that silence is sorrow’s best food,

And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood,

So she’ll listen with patience and let you unfold

Your bundle of rags as ’twere pure cloth of gold,

Which, indeed, it all turns to as soon as she’s touched it,

And (to borrow a phrase from the nursery) _muched_ it;

She has such a musical taste, she will go

Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow;

She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main,

And thinks it Geometry’s fault if she’s fain

To consider things flat, inasmuch as they’re plain;

Facts with her are accomplished, as Frenchmen would say–

They will prove all she wishes them to either way,-

And, as fact lies on this side or that, we must try,

If we’re seeking the truth, to find where it don’t lie;

I was telling her once of a marvellous aloe

That for thousands of years had looked spindling and sallow,

And, though nursed by the fruitfullest powers of mud,

Had never vouchsafed e’en so much as a bud,

Till its owner remarked (as a sailor, you know,

Often will in a calm) that it never would blow,

For he wished to exhibit the plant, and designed

That its blowing should help him in raising the wind;

At last it was told him that if he should water

Its roots with the blood of his unmarried daughter

(Who was born, as her mother, a Calvinist, said,

With William Law’s serious caul on her head),

It would blow as the obstinate breeze did when by a

Like decree of her father died Iphigenia;

At first he declared he himself would be blowed

Ere his conscience with such a foul crime he would load,

But the thought, coming oft, grew less dark than before,

And he mused, as each creditor knocked at his door,

If _this_ were but done they would dun me no more;

I told Philothea his struggles and doubts,

And how he considered the ins and the outs

Of the visions he had, and the dreadful dyspepsy,

How he went to the seer that lives at Po’keepsie,

How the seer advised him to sleep on it first,

And to read his big volume in case of the worst,

And further advised he should pay him five dollars

For writing [Old English: Hum Hum] on his wristbands and collars;

Three years and ten days these dark words he had studied

When the daughter was missed, and the aloe had budded;

I told how he watched it grow large and more large,

And wondered how much for the show he should charge,-

She had listened with utter indifference to this, till

I told how it bloomed, and, discharging its pistil

With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot

The botanical filicide dead on the spot;

It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains,

For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains,

And the crime was blown also, because on the wad,

Which was paper, was writ ‘Visitation of God,’

As well as a thrilling account of the deed

Which the coroner kindly allowed me to read.

'Well, my friend took this story up just, to be sure,

As one might a poor foundling that’s laid at one’s door;

She combed it and washed it and clothed it and fed it,

And as if ’twere her own child most tenderly bred it,

Laid the scene (of the legend, I mean) far away a–

—mong the green vales underneath Himalaya,

And by artist-like touches, laid on here and there,

Made the whole thing so touching, I frankly declare

I have read it all thrice, and, perhaps I am weak,

But I found every time there were tears on my cheek.

'The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,

But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,

And folks with a mission that nobody knows

Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose;

She can fill up the _carets_ in such, make their scope

Converge to some focus of rational hope,

And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall

Can transmute into honey,-but this is not all;

Not only for those she has solace, oh say,

Vice’s desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,

Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,

To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,

Hast thou not found one shore where those tired drooping feet

Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat

The soothed head in silence reposing could hear

The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?

Ah, there’s many a beam from the fountain of day

That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,

Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope

To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;

Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in

To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,

And to bring into each, or to find there, some line

Of the never completely out-trampled divine;

If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,

’Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen,

As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain

Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;

What a wealth would it tiring to the narrow and sour

Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!

'What! Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain,

You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain,

And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there

Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair;

Nay, don’t be embarrassed, nor look so beseeching,

I sha’n’t run directly against my own preaching,

And, having just laughed at their Raphaels and Dantes,

Go to setting you up beside matchless Cervantes;

But allow me to speak what I honestly feel,-

To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele,

Throw in all of Addison, _minus_ the chill,

With the whole of that partnership’s stock and good-will,

Mix well, and while stirring, hum o’er, as a spell,

The fine _old_ English Gentleman, simmer it well,

Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain,

That only the finest and clearest remain,

Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives

From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves,

And you’ll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving

A name either English or Yankee,-just Irving.

'There goes,-but _stet nominis umbra_,-his name

You’ll be glad enough, some day or other, to claim,

And will all crowd about him and swear that you knew him

If some English critic should chance to review him.

The old _porcos ante ne projiciatis_

MARGARITAS, for him you have verified gratis;

What matters his name? Why, it may be Sylvester,

Judd, Junior, or Junius, Ulysses, or Nestor,

For aught _I_ know or care; ’tis enough that I look

On the author of ‘Margaret,’ the first Yankee book

With the _soul_ of Down East in ‘t, and things farther East,

As far as the threshold of morning, at least,

Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true,

Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new.

’T has a smack of pine woods, of bare field and bleak hill,

Such as only the breed of the Mayflower could till;

The Puritan’s shown in it, tough to the core,

Such as prayed, smiting Agag on red Marston Moor:

With an unwilling humor, half choked by the drouth

In brown hollows about the inhospitable mouth;

With a soul full of poetry, though it has qualms

About finding a happiness out of the Psalms;

Full of tenderness, too, though it shrinks in the dark,

Hamadryad-like, under the coarse, shaggy bark;

That sees visions, knows wrestlings of God with the Will,

And has its own Sinais and thunderings still.’

Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, 'while I pour

My heart out to my birthplace: O loved more and more

Dear Baystate, from whose rocky bosom thy sons

Should suck milk, strong-will-giving, brave, such as runs

In the veins of old Greylock-who is it that dares

Call thee pedler, a soul wrapped in bank-books and shares?

It is false! She’s a Poet! I see, as I write,

Along the far railroad the steam-snake glide white,

The cataract-throb of her mill-hearts, I hear,

The swift strokes of trip-hammers weary my ear,

Sledges ring upon anvils, through logs the saw screams,

Blocks swing to their place, beetles drive home the beams:-

It is songs such as these that she croons to the din

Of her fast-flying shuttles, year out and year in,

While from earth’s farthest corner there comes not a breeze

But wafts her the buzz of her gold-gleaning bees:

What though those horn hands have as yet found small time

For painting and sculpture and music and rhyme?

These will come in due order; the need that pressed sorest

Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest,

To bridle and harness the rivers, the steam,

Making those whirl her mill-wheels, this tug in her team,

To vassalize old tyrant Winter, and make

Him delve surlily for her on river and lake;-

When this New World was parted, she strove not to shirk

Her lot in the heirdom, the tough, silent Work,

The hero-share ever from Herakles down

To Odin, the Earth’s iron sceptre and crown:

Yes, thou dear, noble Mother! if ever men’s praise

Could be claimed for creating heroical lays,

Thou hast won it; if ever the laurel divine

Crowned the Maker and Builder, that glory is thine!

Thy songs are right epic, they tell how this rude

Rock-rib of our earth here was tamed and subdued;

Thou hast written them plain on the face of the planet

In brave, deathless letters of iron and granite;

Thou hast printed them deep for all time; they are set

From the same runic type-fount and alphabet

With thy stout Berkshire hills and the arms of thy Bay,-

They are staves from the burly old Mayflower lay.

If the drones of the Old World, in querulous ease,

Ask thy Art and thy Letters, point proudly to these,

Or, if they deny these are Letters and Art,

Toil on with the same old invincible heart;

Thou art rearing the pedestal broad-based and grand

Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand,

And creating, through labors undaunted and long,

The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song!

'But my good mother Baystate wants no praise of mine,

She learned from _her_ mother a precept divine

About something that butters no parsnips, her _forte_

In another direction lies, work is her sport

(Though she’ll curtsey and set her cap straight, that she will,

If you talk about Plymouth and red Bunker’s hill).

Dear, notable goodwife! by this time of night,

Her hearth is swept neatly, her fire burning bright,

And she sits in a chair (of home plan and make) rocking,

Musing much, all the while, as she darns on a stocking,

Whether turkeys will come pretty high next Thanksgiving,

Whether flour’ll be so dear, for, as sure as she’s living,

She will use rye-and-injun then, whether the pig

By this time ain’t got pretty tolerable big,

And whether to sell it outright will be best,

Or to smoke hams and shoulders and salt down the rest,-

At this minute, she’d swop all my verses, ah, cruel!

For the last patent stove that is saving of fuel;

So I’ll just let Apollo go on, for his phiz

Shows I’ve kept him awaiting too long as it is.’

‘If our friend, there, who seems a reporter, is done

With his burst of emotion, why, I will go on,’

Said Apollo; some smiled, and, indeed, I must own

There was something sarcastic, perhaps, in his tone;-

'There’s Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit;

A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit

The electrical tingles of hit after hit;

In long poems ’tis painful sometimes, and invites

A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes,

Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully

As if you got more than you’d title to rightfully,

And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning

Would flame in for a second and give you a fright’ning.

He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre,

But many admire it, the English pentameter,

And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse,

With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse,

Nor e’er achieved aught in’t so worthy of praise

As the tribute of Holmes to the grand _Marseillaise_.

You went crazy last year over Bulwer’s New Timon;-

Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on,

Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,

He could ne’er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes.

His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric

Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric

In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes

That are trodden upon are your own or your foes’.

'There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of _isms_ tied together with rhyme,

He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,

But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders,

The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching

Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;

His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,

But he’d rather by half make a drum of the shell,

And rattle away till he’s old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.

'There goes Halleck, whose Fanny’s a pseudo Don Juan,

With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one,

He’s a wit, though, I hear, of the very first order,

And once made a pun on the words soft Recorder;

More than this, he’s a very great poet, I’m told,

And has had his works published in crimson and gold,

With something they call ‘Illustrations,’ to wit,

Like those with which Chapman obscured Holy Writ,

Which are said to illustrate, because, as I view it,

Like _lucus a non_, they precisely don’t do it;

Let a man who can write what himself understands

Keep clear, if he can, of designing men’s hands,

Who bury the sense, if there’s any worth having,

And then very honestly call it engraving,

But, to quit _badinage_, which there isn’t much wit in,

Halleck’s better, I doubt not, than all he has written;

In his verse a clear glimpse you will frequently find,

If not of a great, of a fortunate mind,

Which contrives to be true to its natural loves

In a world of back-offices, ledgers, and stoves.

When his heart breaks away from the brokers and banks,

And kneels in his own private shrine to give thanks,

There’s a genial manliness in him that earns

Our sincerest respect (read, for instance, his 'Burns’),

And we can’t but regret (seek excuse where we may)

That so much of a man has been peddled away.

'But what’s that? a mass-meeting? No, there come in lots

The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts,

And in short the American everything elses,

Each charging the others with envies and jealousies;-

By the way, ’tis a fact that displays what profusions

Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,

That while the Old World has produced barely eight

Of such poets as all men agree to call great,

And of other great characters hardly a score

(One might safely say less than that rather than more),

With you every year a whole crop is begotten,

They’re as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton;

Why, there’s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties

That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;

I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,

Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles,

Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,

One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,

A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,-

In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,

He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain

Will be some very great person over again.

There is one inconvenience in all this, which lies

In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,

And, where there are none except Titans, great stature

Is only the normal proceeding of nature.

What puff the strained sails of your praise will you furl at, if

The calmest degree that you know is superlative?

At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must,

As a matter of course, be well _issimust_ and _errimust_,

A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost,

That his friends would take care he was [Greek: istost] and

[Greek: otatost],

And formerly we, as through graveyards we past,

Thought the world went from bad to worst fearfully fast;

Let us glance for a moment, ’tis well worth the pains,

And note what an average graveyard contains;

There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,

There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,

Horizontally there lie upright politicians,

Dose-a-dose with their patients sleep faultless physicians,

There are slave-drivers quietly whipped under ground,

There bookbinders, done up in boards, are fast bound,

There card-players wait till the last trump be played,

There all the choice spirits get finally laid,

There the babe that’s unborn is supplied with a berth,

There men without legs get their six feet of earth,

There lawyers repose, each wrapped up in his case,

There seekers of office are sure of a place,

There defendant and plaintiff get equally cast,

There shoemakers quietly stick to the last,

There brokers at length become silent as stocks,

There stage-drivers sleep without quitting their box,

And so forth and so forth and so forth and so on,

With this kind of stuff one might endlessly go on;

To come to the point, I may safely assert you

Will find in each yard every cardinal virtue;

Each has six truest patriots: four discoverers of ether,

Who never had thought on 't nor mentioned it either;

Ten poets, the greatest who ever wrote rhyme:

Two hundred and forty first men of their time:

One person whose portrait just gave the least hint

Its original had a most horrible squint:

One critic, most (what do they call it?) reflective,

Who never had used the phrase ob-or subjective:

Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred

Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,

And their daughters for-faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi:

Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual blackeye:

Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:

Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:

Two dozen of Italy’s exiles who shoot us his

Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses,

Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,

Mount serenely their country’s funereal pile:

Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers

‘Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars,

Who shake their dread fists o’er the sea and all that,-

As long as a copper drops into the hat:

Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark

From Vaterland’s battle just won-in the Park,

Who the happy profession of martyrdom take

Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak;

Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jacksons:

And so many everythings else that it racks one’s

Poor memory too much to continue the list,

Especially now they no longer exist;-

I would merely observe that you’ve taken to giving

The puffs that belong to the dead to the living,

And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom’s tones

Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.’

Here the critic came in and a thistle presented–

From a frown to a smile the god’s features relented,

As he stared at his envoy, who, swelling with pride,

To the god’s asking look, nothing daunted, replied,-

‘You’re surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long,

But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong;

I hunted the garden from one end to t’other,

And got no reward but vexation and bother,

Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither,

This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither.’

‘Did he think I had given him a book to review?

I ought to have known what the fellow would do,’

Muttered Phoebus aside, 'for a thistle will pass

Beyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass;

He has chosen in just the same way as he’d choose

His specimens out of the books he reviews;

And now, as this offers an excellent text,

I’ll give ‘em some brief hints on criticism next.’

So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd,

And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud:-

'My friends, in the happier days of the muse,

We were luckily free from such things as reviews;

Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer

The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;

Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they

Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;

Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul

Precreated the future, both parts of one whole;

Then for him there was nothing too great or too small,

For one natural deity sanctified all;

Then the bard owned no clipper and meter of moods

Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods

O’er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods;

He asked not earth’s verdict, forgetting the clods,

His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods;

’Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,

And shaped for their vision the perfect design,

With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,

As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;

Then a glory and greatness invested man’s heart,

The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,

In the free individual moulded, was Art;

Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire

For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,

As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,

And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,

Eurydice stood-like a beacon unfired,

Which, once touched with flame, will leap heav’nward inspired–

And waited with answering kindle to mark

The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.

Then painting, song, sculpture did more than relieve

The need that men feel to create and believe,

And as, in all beauty, who listens with love

Hears these words oft repeated-'beyond and above,’

So these seemed to be but the visible sign

Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;

They were ladders the Artist erected to climb

O’er the narrow horizon of space and of time,

And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained

To the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained,

As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod

The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god.

'But now, on the poet’s dis-privacied moods

With _do this_ and _do that_ the pert critic intrudes;

While he thinks he’s been barely fulfilling his duty

To interpret 'twixt men and their own sense of beauty.

And has striven, while others sought honor or pelf,

To make his kind happy as he was himself,

He finds he’s been guilty of horrid offences

In all kinds of moods, numbers, genders, and tenses;

He’s been _ob_ and _sub_jective, what Kettle calls Pot,

Precisely, at all events, what he ought not,

_You have done this,_ says one judge; _done that,_ says another;

_You should have done this,_ grumbles one; _that,_ says t’other;

Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out _Taboo!_

And while he is wondering what he shall do,

Since each suggests opposite topics for song,

They all shout together _you’re right!_ and _you’re wrong!_

'Nature fits all her children with something to do,

He who would write and can’t write can surely review,

Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his

Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies;

Thus a lawyer’s apprentice, just out of his teens,

Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines;

Having read Johnson’s lives of the poets half through,

There’s nothing on earth he’s not competent to;

He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,-

He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles;

It matters not whether he blame or commend,

If he’s bad as a foe, he’s far worse as a friend:

Let an author but write what’s above his poor scope,

He goes to work gravely and twists up a rope,

And, inviting the world to see punishment done,

Hangs himself up to bleach in the wind and the sun;

’Tis delightful to see, when a man comes along

Who has anything in him peculiar and strong,

Every cockboat that swims clear its fierce (pop) gundeck at him,

And make as he passes its ludicrous Peck at him-’

Here Miranda came up and began, ‘As to that-’

Apollo at once seized his gloves, cane, and hat,

And, seeing the place getting rapidly cleared,

I too snatched my notes and forthwith disappeared.

#AmericanWriters

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James Russell Lowell