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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0d8f4e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #66213 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66213) diff --git a/old/66213-0.txt b/old/66213-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index df443b4..0000000 --- a/old/66213-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2780 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Fable for Critics, by James Russell Lowell - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: A Fable for Critics - -Author: James Russell Lowell - -Release Date: September 3, 2021 [eBook #66213] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was - produced from images generously made available by The Internet - Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FABLE FOR CRITICS *** - - - ARIEL BOOKLETS. - - - A series of productions complete in small compass, which have been - accepted as classics of their kind. - - For full list see end of this volume. - - [Illustration] - - - - - A Fable for Critics - - by - - James Russell Lowell - - [Illustration] - - New York and London - G. P. Putnam’s Sons - The Knickerbocker Press - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1848 - BY GEORGE P. PUTNAM - - COPYRIGHT, 1890 - BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. - - - NOTE.--This edition is printed under the authorization of - Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the publishers of the complete works - of James Russell Lowell. - - - The Knickerbocker Press, New York - - READER! _walk up at once (it will soon be too late) and - buy at a perfectly ruinous rate_ - - A - FABLE FOR CRITICS; - OR, BETTER, - - (_I like, as a thing that the reader’s first fancy may strike, - an old-fashioned title-page, - such as presents a tabular view of the volume’s contents_) - - A GLANCE - AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES - - (_Mrs Malaprop’s word_) - - FROM - - THE TUB OF DIOGENES: - - A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY - - THAT IS, - - A SERIES OF JOKES - - By A Wonderful Quiz, - -_who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace, - on the top of the tub_. - - SET FORTH IN - - _October, the 21st day, in the year ’48_ - - G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY - - - - -PREFATORY NOTE - - -This _jeu d’esprit_ was extemporized, I may fairly say, so rapidly -was it written, purely for my own amusement, and with no thought of -publication. I sent daily instalments of it to a friend in New York, -the late CHAS F. BRIGGS. He urged me to let it be printed and -I at last consented to its anonymous publication. The secret was kept -till after several persons had laid claim to its authorship. - -[Illustration] - - - - -It being the commonest mode of procedure, I premise a few candid remarks - -TO THE READER: - -This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own private fancy, was -laid on the shelf. But some friends, who had seen it, induced me, by -dint of saying they liked it, to put it in print. That is, having come -to that very conclusion, I asked their advice when ’t would make no -confusion. For though (in the gentlest of ways) they had hinted it was -scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it. - -I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhyme-ywinged, -with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and alterings not previously -planned, digressions chance-hatched, like birds’ eggs in the sand, and -dawdlings to suit every whimsey’s demand (always freeing the bird which -I held in my hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the -tree),--it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the -old woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, no doubt, -wonder and laugh; and when, my strained arms with their grown burthen -full, I call it my Fable, they call it a bull. - -Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that -is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody -knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than -it is becoming to be, but I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure -in following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more -than a young author’s lawful ease and laugh in a queer way so like -Mephistopheles, that the Public will doubt, as they grope through my -rhythm, if in truth I am making fun _of_ them or _with_ them. - -So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is -already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land -but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation -of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. -Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like -ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the -Review and Magazine critics call _lofty_ and _true_, and about thirty -thousand (_this_ tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed _full -of promise and pleasing_. The Public will see by a glance at this -schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting -_them_, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling -my pot. - -As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my -pages, with praises or blames, let them SEND IN THEIR CARDS, without -further DELAY, to my friend G. P. PUTNAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where -a list will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour -of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time -(that is if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly -give each his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR to each NEW -EDITION. Thus a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently HIGH (as the magazines -say when they tell their best lie) to induce bards to CLUB their -resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of -them fairly been run through the mill. - -One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with -something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there -are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters -sketched in this slight _jeu d’esprit_, though it may be they seem, -here and there, rather free and drawn from a somewhat too cynical -standpoint, are _meant_ to be faithful, for that is the grand point, -and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells -you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes’ tub. - -[Illustration] - -[Illustration] - - - - -A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION - - -Though it well may be reckoned, of all composition, the species at once -most delightful and healthy, is a thing which an author, unless he be -wealthy and willing to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all -instances, called on to write, though there are, it is said, who, their -spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times a year, and in -this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the -popular favor,--much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat -Ugolino inside to a picture of meat. - -You remember (if not, pray turn backward and look) that, in writing the -preface which ushered my book, I treated you, excellent Public, not -merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not -take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter -both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught -to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I -have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are -those with whom _your_ verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the -higher court sitting within. - -But I wander from what I intended to say,--that you have, namely, shown -such a liberal way of thinking and so much æsthetic perception of -anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite -of some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely -two weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of -yours most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical -section was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or ’twixt that and a -quarter. - -You have watched a child playing--in those wondrous years when belief -is not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so -clear and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? -Give a knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little -mud-puddle over the street his fancy, in purest good faith, will make -sail round the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, -in barely ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds -of times. Or, suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from -that Bible of childhood “The Arabian Nights,” he will turn to a crony -and cry, “Jack, let’s play that I am a Genius!” Jacky straightway -makes Aladdin’s Lamp out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each -his own supernatural powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but -then suppose our two urchins have grown into men, and both have turned -authors,--one says to his brother, “Let’s play we’re the American -somethings or other,--say Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only -let them be big enough no matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or -Pope, which you choose: I’ll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual -reviews.” So they both (as mere strangers) before many days send each -other a cord of anonymous bays. Each, piling his epithets, smiles in -his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, reading -the other’s unbiased review, thinks--Here’s pretty high praise, but no -more than my due. Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great -fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, -scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear -Public’s critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke -sooth when he said that the Public _sometimes_ hit the truth. - -In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty -good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary -edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down -(by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any -faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, -while I am writing,--I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment -be just on the brink of it,--Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has -begun a critique,--am I not to be pitied?[1] - -Now I shall not crush _them_, since, indeed, for that matter, no -pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither nor scorn -them,--no action of fire could make either them or their articles -drier; nor waste time in putting them down--I am thinking not their -own self-inflation will keep them from sinking; for there’s this -contradiction about the whole bevy,--though without the least weight, -they are awfully heavy. No, my dear honest bore, _surdo fabulam -narras_, they are no more to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk -with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish -quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, -to think that they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up -on the waste-paper shelves and forgotten by all but their half-dozen -selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole -pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to -the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get _fou_ with O’Shanter, -and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare -Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher -wax tender, o’er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine -poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas -welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward -again, down by mystical Browne’s Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that -spiritual Pepys (Cotton’s version) Montaigne; find a new depth in -Wordsworth, undreamed of before,--that marvel, a poet divine who can -bore. Or, out of my study the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up -her shield ’gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever -consoling and kind pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the -mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove -of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight; the -pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern’s intrudes, -where pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by recall to September -the blue of June’s sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave -me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but--pish! I’ve -buried the hatchet; I’m twisting an allumette out of one of you now, -and relighting my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you -please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece. - -As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book to take a fond -author’s first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the -_errata_, sprawled in as birds’ tracks are in some kinds of strata -(only these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father -had seen born well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, -club-footed, squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, -from a pride become an aversion,--my case was yet worse. A club-foot -(by way of a change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an _o’s_ being -wry, a limp in an _e_, or a cock in an _i_,--but to have the sweet babe -served in _pi_! I am not queasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet -as that was quite out of the question. - -In the edition now issued, no pains are neglected, and my verses, as -orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the Public’s -own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, -a character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in -one, has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of -mine, whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking -together, would not be _my_ way. I can hardly tell whether a question -will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree -but meanwhile, my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not -the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and -why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found -so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t’ -other. - -From my other _anonymi_, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a -caricature, and what by a portrait. There _are_ those who think it is -capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, -but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see -something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women -nor men for their gender, nor own any sex in a pen. I choose just to -hint to some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are -always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two -parties also to every good laugh. - -[Illustration] - -[Illustration] - - - - -A FABLE FOR CRITICS - - - Phœbus, 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 Christabel),-- - 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. - - “O, 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 Phœbus’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 Romæ. - 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 _materfamilias_ - 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 æsthetic 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 of 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 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 wondering 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 of 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 flippery - 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 Mæonides 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 Phœbus expressed his desire for a lily, - Our Hero, whose homœopathic sagacity - With an ocean of zeal mixed his drop 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 oneshould 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 vileportraits - 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 surelyhave 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 ber ead - Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,-- - Such books as one’s wrecked on in small countryt averns, - 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 cotillion - 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 feathers 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 theblues, - 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 _à 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 andobscurities, - 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 an act 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 himfor 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 genuinehearty 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 andshake it, - But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake 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 candlesa 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 nofaith in), - Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson, - Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson, - Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Mouis, - Musæus, Muretus, _hem_,--μ 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,) το παν, 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 hardworking 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 ignified, - 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 ice-olation), - Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, - But no warm applauses come, peal following eal 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, orwhere ’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 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--Thompson and Cowper[2]; - I don’t mean exactly,--there’s something of each, - There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to Justch; - 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 straight-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; - ’Twould 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 straight-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 hæc_, 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 downtrodden 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 judiciously 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 muddled 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 Fouqué, 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 _dernière 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, - ’T is 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 Heré’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 hisattic - 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 ἥϊε νὐκτι ἐ οικώς, 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 Phœbus 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, “Phœbus!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. - Archæologians, 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 drop 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,[3] - 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 ’tis - 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 dispepsy, - How he went to the seër that lives at Po’keepsie, - How the seër 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 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 toread. - - “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, O 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 - Can 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 bring 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 bank; - 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 Graylock--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-font 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 courtesy 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 ofpraise - 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 satyric - 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,[4] - 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,[5] - 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 ιστοςt and ωτατοςt, - 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[6]; - 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 black-eye: - 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,[7] - 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 battles 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[8]-- - 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 Phœbus 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 thing 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 ’tother; - 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. - - - - -Ariel Booklets - - - 1. =The Gold Bug.= By Edgar Allan Poe. - - 2. =Rab and his Friends= and =Marjorie Fleming=. By John - Brown, M.D. - - 3. =The Culprit Fay.= By Joseph Rodman Drake. - - 4. =Our Best Society.= By George William Curtis. - - 5. =Sonnets from the Portuguese.= By Elizabeth Barrett - Browning. - - 6. =The School for Scandal.= By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. - - 7. =The Rivals.= By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. - - 8. =The Good-Natured Man.= By Oliver Goldsmith. - - 9. =Sweetness and Light.= By Matthew Arnold. - - 10. =Lyrics.= By Robert Browning. - - 11. =L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.= By John Milton. - - 12. =Thanatopsis, Flood of Years, etc.= By William Cullen - Bryant. - - 13. =Charity and Humor, and Nil Nisi Bonum.= By William M. - Thackeray. - - 14. =She Stoops to Conquer.= By Oliver Goldsmith. - - 15. =Nothing to Wear.= By William Allen Butler. - - 16. =Rime of the Ancient Mariner.= By Samuel T. Coleridge. - - 17. =Elegy in a Country Churchyard, etc.= By Thomas Gray. - - 18. =The House of Life.= By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. - - 19. =Lays of Ancient Rome.= By Lord Macaulay. - - 20. =Epictetus, Selections from.= - - 21. =Marcus Aurelius. Thoughts.= - - 22. =Sesame and Lilies.= By John Ruskin. - - 23. =The Rose and the Ring.= By William M. Thackeray. - - 24. =The Nibelungen Lied.= By Thomas Carlyle. - - 25. =Ideas of Truth.= By John Ruskin. - - 26. =Eve of St. Agnes.= By John Keats. - - 27. =King of the Golden River.= By John Ruskin. - - 28. =The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.= By Washington Irving. - - 29. =Rip Van Winkle.= By Washington Irving. - - 30. =Ideals of the Republic.= - - 31. =Verses and Flyleaves.= By Charles S. Calverley. - - 32. =Novels by Eminent Hands.= By W. M. Thackeray. - - 33. =Cranford.= By Mrs. Gaskell. - - 34. =Vicar of Wakefield.= By Oliver Goldsmith. - - 35. =Tales by Heinrich Zschokke.= - - 36. =Rasselas.= By Samuel Johnson. - - 37. =Shakespeare’s Sonnets.= - - 38. =Wit and Humour of Charles Lamb.= - - 39. =The Travels of Baron Munchausen.= - - 40. =The Fables of Æsop.= - - 41. =The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.= - - 42. =The Sayings of Poor Richard.= By Benjamin Franklin. - - 43. =A Christmas Carol.= By Charles Dickens. - - 44. =The Cricket on the Hearth.= By Charles Dickens. - - 45. =The Blessed Damozel.= By D. G. Rossetti. - - 46. =The Story without an End.= By F. W. Carové. - - 47. =The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.= - - 48. =Father Tom and the Pope.= By Samuel Ferguson. - - 49. =Love and Skates.= By Theodore Winthrop. - - 50. =The Princess.= By Alfred Tennyson. - - 51. =The Child in the House.= By Walter Pater. - - 52. =The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.= - - 53. =The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti.= - - 54. =On Friendship.= By R. W. Emerson and Marcus Tullius - Cicero. - - 55-56. =The Sketch-Book.= By Washington Irving. 2 vols. - - 57. =Robert Louis Stevenson.= By Leslie Stephen. - - 58. =Some of the Essays of Francis Bacon.= - - 59. =The Apology of Socrates together with the Crito, as recorded - by Plato.= - - 60. =The Phaedo: The Death of Socrates, as recorded by Plato.= - - 61-62. =Essays of Elia.= By Charles Lamb. - - 63. =Three Essays.= By Thomas De Quincey. - - 64. =The Battle of Dorking.= By Major-General George Chesney. - - 65. =Select Tales from the Gesta Romanorum.= Translated by - Rev. C. Swan. - - 66. =Letters and Maxims.= By Lord Chesterfield. - - 67. =Peter Schlemihl.= By Adelbert Chamisso. - - With plates by George Cruikshank. - - 68. =A Fable for Critics.= By James Russell Lowell. - - 69. =Virginibus Puerisque.= By Robert Louis Stevenson. - - 70. =True Americanism.= Four Essays. By Theodore Roosevelt. - - 71. =The Word for the Day.= Compiled by A. R. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the -queer-looking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to -hint to the world the hot water they always get into. - -[2] - - To demonstrate quickly and easily how per- - Versely absurd ’tis to sound this name _Cowper_, - As people in general call him named _super_, - I remark that he rhymes it himself with horse-trooper. - - -[3] - - (If you call Snooks an owl, he will show by his looks - That he’s morally certain you’re jealous of Snooks.) - - -[4] (Cuts rightly called wooden, as all must admit.) - -[5] - - That, is in most cases we do, but not all, - Past a doubt, there are men who are innately small, - Such as Blank, who, without being ’minished a tittle, - Might stand for a type of the Absolute Little. - - -[6] - - (And at this just conclusion will surely arrive, - That the goodness of earth is more dead than alive.) - - -[7] Not forgetting their tea, and their toast, though, the while. - -[8] - - Turn back now to page--goodness only knows what, - And take a fresh hold on the thread of my plot. - - - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FABLE FOR CRITICS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: A Fable for Critics</p> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: James Russell Lowell</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 3, 2021 [eBook #66213]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FABLE FOR CRITICS ***</div> -<hr class="full" /> - -<div class="c"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="309" height="550" alt="" /> -</div> - -<div class="bbox"> - -<p class="c"><big>ARIEL BOOKLETS.</big></p> - -<p class="c">———</p> - -<p>A series of productions complete in small compass, which have been -accepted as classics of their kind.</p> - -<p class="c">———</p> - -<p class="c"><a href="#Ariel_Booklets">For full list see end of this volume.</a></p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i">{i}</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 426px;"> - -<a href="images/frontis.jpg"> -<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="426" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -</div> - -<h1>A Fable for Critics</h1> - -<p class="c">by<br /> -<br /><span class="eng"> -<span class="redd">James Russell Lowell</span><br /><br /><br /> -<img src="images/colophon.png" -width="130" -alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -<br /><br /> -<br /> -New York and London<br /> -<span class="redd">G. P. Putnam’s Sons</span><br /> -The Knickerbocker Press<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span> -<br /><br /><br /> -<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1848<br /> -By</span> GEORGE P. PUTNAM<br /> -<br /> -<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1890<br /> -By</span> HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.<br /> -</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Note.</span>—This edition is printed under the authorization of Messrs. -Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the publishers of the complete works of James -Russell Lowell.</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="eng">The Knickerbocker Press, New York</span> -<br /><br /><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span> -<br /><br /> - -<span class="redd"><span class="smcap">Reader!</span> <i>walk up at once (it will soon be too late) and<br /> -buy at a perfectly ruinous rate</i></span><br /> -<br /> -A<br /> -<b>FABLE FOR CRITICS;</b><br /> -<b><small>OR, BETTER</small></b>,<br /> -<br /> -<span class="redd">(<i>I like, as a thing that the reader’s first fancy may strike,<br /> -an old-fashioned title-page,<br /> -such as presents a tabular view of the volume’s contents</i>)</span><br /> -<br /> -<b>A GLANCE<br /> - -AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES</b><br /> -<br /> -<span class="redd">(<i>Mrs Malaprop’s word</i>)</span><br /> -<br /> -<b><small>FROM</small><br /> -<br /> -THE TUB OF DIOGENES:<br /> -<br /> -A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY</b><br /> -<br /> -<span class="redd">THAT IS,<br /> -<br /> -A SERIES OF JOKES</span><br /> -<br /> -<span class="eng"><b>B y A W o n d e rf u l Q u i z,</b></span><br /> -<br /> -<span class="redd"><i>who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace,<br /> -on the top of the tub</i>.</span><br /> -<br /><br /> -<span class="redd"><small>SET FORTH IN</small></span><br /> -<br /> -<span class="redd"><i>October, the 21st day, in the year ’48</i></span><br /> -<br /><b> -G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY</b><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v">{v}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="PREFATORY_NOTE" id="PREFATORY_NOTE"></a>PREFATORY NOTE</h2> - -<p>This <i>jeu d’esprit</i> was extemporized, I may fairly say, so rapidly was -it written, purely for my own amusement, and with no thought of -publication. I sent daily instalments of it to a friend in New York, the -late <span class="smcap">Chas F. Briggs</span>. He urged me to let it be printed and I at last -consented to its anonymous publication. The secret was kept till after -several persons had laid claim to its authorship.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/image-vii.png" width="450" height="111" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -</div> - -<p><span class="smcap">It</span> being the commonest mode of procedure, I premise a few candid remarks</p> - -<p class="nind"> -TO THE READER:<br /> -</p> - -<p>This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own private fancy, was -laid on the shelf. But some friends, who had seen it, induced me, by -dint of saying they liked it, to put it in print. That is, having come -to that very conclusion, I asked their advice when ’t would make no -confusion. For though (in the gentlest of ways) they had hinted it was -scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it.</p> - -<p>I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhyme-ywinged, -with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii">{viii}</a></span> alterings not previously -planned, digressions chance-hatched, like birds’ eggs in the sand, and -dawdlings to suit every whimsey’s demand (always freeing the bird which -I held in my hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the -tree),—it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the old -woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, no doubt, -wonder and laugh; and when, my strained arms with their grown burthen -full, I call it my Fable, they call it a bull.</p> - -<p>Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is -neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody knows, -some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is -becoming to be, but I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in -following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more -than a young author’s lawful ease and laugh in a queer way so like -Mephistopheles, that the Public will doubt, as they grope<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span> through my -rhythm, if in truth I am making fun <i>of</i> them or <i>with</i> them.</p> - -<p>So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is -already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land but -will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of -being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, -I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten -thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review -and Magazine critics call <i>lofty</i> and <i>true</i>, and about thirty thousand -(<i>this</i> tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed <i>full of -promise and pleasing</i>. The Public will see by a glance at this schedule, -that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting <i>them</i>, -since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot.</p> - -<p>As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my -pages, with praises or blames, let them <small>SEND IN THEIR CARDS</small>, without -further <small>DELAY</small>, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x">{x}</a></span> my friend <span class="smcap">G. P. Putnam</span>, Esquire, in Broadway, where a -list will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of -receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that -is if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each -his <small>PROPER POSITION</small>, at the rate of <small>ONE AUTHOR</small> to each <small>NEW EDITION</small>. Thus -a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently <small>HIGH</small> (as the magazines say when they -tell their best lie) to induce bards to <small>CLUB</small> their resources and buy the -balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run -through the mill.</p> - -<p>One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with -something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there -are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters -sketched in this slight <i>jeu d’esprit</i>, though it may be they seem, here -and there, rather free and drawn from a somewhat too cynical standpoint, -are <i>meant</i> to be faithful, for that is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xi" id="page_xi">{xi}</a></span> grand point, and none but -an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you, without any -subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes’ tub.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"> -<img src="images/image-xi.png" width="250" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiii" id="page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xii" id="page_xii">{xii}</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/image-xiii.png" width="450" height="113" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -</div> - -<h2><a name="A_PRELIMINARY_NOTE_TO_THE_SECOND_EDITION" id="A_PRELIMINARY_NOTE_TO_THE_SECOND_EDITION"></a>A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION</h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Though</span> it well may be reckoned, of all composition, the species at once -most delightful and healthy, is a thing which an author, unless he be -wealthy and willing to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all -instances, called on to write, though there are, it is said, who, their -spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times a year, and in -this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the -popular favor,—much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat -Ugolino inside to a picture of meat.</p> - -<p>You remember (if not, pray turn backward and look) that, in writing the -preface which ushered my book, I treated<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiv" id="page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> you, excellent Public, not -merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not -take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter -both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught -to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I -have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are -those with whom <i>your</i> verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the -higher court sitting within.</p> - -<p>But I wander from what I intended to say,—that you have, namely, shown -such a liberal way of thinking and so much æsthetic perception of -anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of -some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two -weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours -most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section -was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or ’twixt that and a quarter.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xv" id="page_xv">{xv}</a></span></p> - -<p>You have watched a child playing—in those wondrous years when belief is -not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear -and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a -knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle -over the street his fancy, in purest good faith, will make sail round -the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely -ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds of times. Or, -suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of -childhood “The Arabian Nights,” he will turn to a crony and cry, “Jack, -let’s play that I am a Genius!” Jacky straightway makes Aladdin’s Lamp -out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural -powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two -urchins have grown into men, and both have turned authors,—one says to -his brother, “Let’s play we’re the American somethings or other,—say<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xvi" id="page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span> -Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough no -matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I’ll -be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews.” So they both (as -mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous -bays. Each, piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his -friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other’s unbiased -review, thinks—Here’s pretty high praise, but no more than my due. -Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same -farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, scarce a month -since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public’s -critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when -he said that the Public <i>sometimes</i> hit the truth.</p> - -<p>In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty -good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary -edition, I have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xvii" id="page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span> crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down -(by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any -faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, -while I am writing,—I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment -be just on the brink of it,—Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has -begun a critique,—am I not to be pitied?<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p> - -<p>Now I shall not crush <i>them</i>, since, indeed, for that matter, no -pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither nor scorn -them,—no action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; -nor waste time in putting them down—I am thinking not their own -self-inflation will keep them from sinking; for there’s this -contradiction about the whole bevy,—though without the least weight, -they are awfully heavy. No, my dear honest<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xviii" id="page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span> bore, <i>surdo fabulam -narras</i>, they are no more to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk with -the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence -of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, to think that -they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper -shelves and forgotten by all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in -my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack of them outside the -door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas -or barbaric Cathay; get <i>fou</i> with O’Shanter, and sober me then with -that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy -as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o’er Chapman grow -brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew -of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with -Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne’s -Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xix" id="page_xix">{xix}</a></span> Pepys (Cotton’s version) -Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before,—that -marvel, a poet divine who can bore. Or, out of my study the scholar -thrown off, Nature holds up her shield ’gainst the sneer and the scoff; -the landscape, forever consoling and kind pours her wine and her oil on -the smarts of the mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; -the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of -sunlight; the pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the -bittern’s intrudes, where pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by -recall to September the blue of June’s sky; these are all my kind -neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor -critics, but—pish! I’ve buried the hatchet; I’m twisting an allumette -out of one of you now, and relighting my calumet. In your private -capacities, come when you please, I will give you my hand and a fresh -pipe apiece.</p> - -<p>As I ran through the leaves of my poor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xx" id="page_xx">{xx}</a></span> little book to take a fond -author’s first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the -<i>errata</i>, sprawled in as birds’ tracks are in some kinds of strata (only -these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born -well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed, -squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride -become an aversion,—my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a -change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an <i>o’s</i> being wry, a limp in -an <i>e</i>, or a cock in an <i>i</i>,—but to have the sweet babe served in <i>pi</i>! -I am not queasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet as that was -quite out of the question.</p> - -<p>In the edition now issued, no pains are neglected, and my verses, as -orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the Public’s -own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a -character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one, -has been, as I hear, by some persons<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xxi" id="page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span> applied to a good friend of mine, -whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking -together, would not be <i>my</i> way. I can hardly tell whether a question -will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree -but meanwhile, my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not -the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and -why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found -so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t’ -other.</p> - -<p>From my other <i>anonymi</i>, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a -caricature, and what by a portrait. There <i>are</i> those who think it is -capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, but -the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see -something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women -nor men for their gender, nor own any sex in a pen. I choose just to -hint to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xxii" id="page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span> some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are -always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two -parties also to every good laugh.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"> -<img src="images/image-xxii.png" width="250" height="120" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/image001.png" width="450" height="117" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /> -</div> - -<h2><a name="A_FABLE_FOR_CRITICS" id="A_FABLE_FOR_CRITICS"></a>A FABLE FOR CRITICS</h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="ig"><span class="letra">P</span>HŒBUS, sitting one day in a laurel-tree’s shade,<br /></span> -<span class="ih">Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, though ’twas a step into which he had driven her,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He somehow or other had never forgiven her;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Something bitter to chew when he’d play the Byronic,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I can’t count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“My case is like Dido’s,” he sometimes remarked;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a laurel, as <i>she</i> thought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She has found it by this time a very bad box;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What romance would be left?—who can flatter or kiss trees?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not to say that the thought would forever intrude<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As they left me forever, each making its bough!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If her tongue <i>had</i> a tang sometimes more than was right,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Now, Daphne—before she was happily treeified—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And when she expected the god on a visit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(’Twas before he had made his intentions explicit),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To look as if artlessly twined in her hair,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like the day breaking through the long night of her tresses;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Christabel),—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As I shall at the——, when they cut up my book in it.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I’ve been spinning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’ve got back at last to my story’s beginning:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">We read of his verses—the Oracles, namely,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,—)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Would induce a mustache, for you know he’s <i>imberbis</i>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Mehercle! I’d make such proceeding felonious,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Look well to your seat, ’tis like taking an airing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It leads one, ’tis true, through the primitive forest,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Grand natural features, but then one has no rest;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">—Here the laurel-leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“O, weep with me, Daphne,” he sighed, “for you know it’s<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She never will cry till she’s out of the wood!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">What wouldn’t I give if I never had known of her?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What boots all your grist? it can never be ground<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Or, if ’tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And say it won’t stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or lug in some stuff about water “so dreamily,”—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is not a metaphor, though, ’tis a simile);<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A lily, perhaps, would set <i>my</i> mill a-going,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">For just at this season, I think, they are blowing.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Here, somebody, fetch one; not very far hence<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They’re in bloom by the score, ’tis but climbing a fence,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whole garden, from one end to t’other, with lilies;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A very good plan, were it not for satiety,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One longs for a weed here and there, for variety;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Now there happened to be among Phœbus’s followers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who bolt every book that comes out of the press,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Without the least question of larger or less,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For reading new books is like eating new bread,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is brought to death’s door of a mental dyspepsy.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On a previous stage of existence, our Hero<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Had ridden outside, with the glass below zero;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He had been, ’tis a fact you may safely rely on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of a very old stock a most eminent scion,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who stretch the new boots Earth’s unwilling to try on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose hair’s in the mortar of every new Zion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who hunt, if they e’er hunt at all, with the lion<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose pedigree, traced to earth’s earliest years,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is longer than anything else but their ears;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In short, he was sent into life with the wrong key,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Far happier than many a literary hack,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He bore only paper-mill rags on his back<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(For it makes a vast difference which side the mill<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One expends on the paper his labor and skill);<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, when his soul waited a new transmigration,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Destiny balanced ’twixt this and that station,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not having much time to expend upon bothers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Remembering he’d had some connection with authors;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She set him on two, and he came forth a critic.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In any amusement but tearing a book;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For him there was no intermediate stage<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There were years when he didn’t wear coat-tails behind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But a boy he could never be rightly defined;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the womb he came gravely, a little old man;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While other boys’ trousers demanded the toil<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He sat in the corner and read Viri Romæ.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He never was known to unbend or to revel once<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He was just one of those who excite the benevolence<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of your old prigs who sound the soul’s depths with a ledger,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And are on the lookout for some young men to “edger-<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cate,” as they call it, who won’t be too costly,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And who’ll afterward take to the ministry mostly;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Always keep on good terms with each <i>materfamilias</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">In this way our Hero got safely to college,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">A reading-machine, always wound up and going<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That Tully could never have made out a word in it<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B.,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He was launched (life is always compared to a sea),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To prove he’d a brain, by forever confusing it.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the holiest zeal against secular learning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Nesciensque scienter</i>, as writers express it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">’Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each a separate fact, undeniably true,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But with him or each other they’d nothing to do;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No power of combining, arranging, discerning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Digested the masses he learned into learning;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till he’d weighed its relations to plain bread and butter.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In compiling the journals’ historical bits,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of shops broken open, men falling in fits,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then, rising by industry, knack, and address,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Got notices up for an unbiased press,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From this point his progress was rapid and sure,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the post of a regular heavy reviewer.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">And here I must say he wrote excellent articles<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And nobody read that which nobody cared for;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He could fill forty pages with safe erudition:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And his very old nothings pleased very old fools;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And you put him at sea without compass or chart,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Carving new forms of truth out of Nature’s old granite,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier’s planet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To compute their own judge, and assign him his place,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Without the least malice,—his record would be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Profoundly æsthetic as that of a flea,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Comprehensive account of the ruins of Denderah.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">As I said, he was never precisely unkind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The defect in his brain was just absence of mind;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he boasted, ’twas simply that he was self-made,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A position which I, for one, never gainsaid,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My respect for my Maker supposing a skill<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In His works which our Hero would answer but ill;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And set up a kind of a man-manufactory,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">An event which I shudder to think about, seeing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That Man is a moral, accountable being.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">He meant well enough, but was still in the way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As dunces still are, let them be where they may;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Indeed, they appear to come into existence<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To impede other folks with their awkward assistance;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you set up a dunce on the very North Pole<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’d manage to get betwixt somebody’s shins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or, if he found nobody else there to pother,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For there’s nothing we read of in torture’s inventions,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like a well-meaning dunce with the best of intentions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">A terrible fellow to meet in society,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There he’d sit at the table and stir in his sugar,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of your time,—he’s as fond as an Arab of dates;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You’ll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of something you’ve seen in the course of the day;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, just as you’re tapering out the conclusion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You venture an ill-fated classic allusion,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You had left out a comma,—your Greek’s put in joint,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And pointed at cost of your story’s whole point.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the course of the evening you find chance for certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You tell her your heart can be likened to <i>one</i> flower,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“And that, O most charming of women ’s the sunflower,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which turns”—here a clear nasal voice, to your terror,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From outside the curtain, says, “That’s all an error.”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As for him, he’s—no matter, he never grew tender,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shaping somebody’s sweet features out of cigar smoke<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though he’d willingly grant you that such doings are smoke);<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All women he damns with <i>mutabile semper</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And if ever he felt something like love’s distemper,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twas tow’rds a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And assisted her father in making a lexicon;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious<br /></span> -<span class="i0">About Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or something of that sort,—but, no more to bore ye<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With character-painting, I’ll turn to my story.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The <i>genus</i>, I think it is called, <i>irritabile</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And nurses a—what is it?—<i>immedicabile</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If any poor devil but look at a laurel;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Retreat to the shrine of tranquil siesta),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And if that wouldn’t do, he was sure to succeed,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he took his review out and offered to read;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or, failing in plans of this milder description,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Considering that authorship wasn’t a rich craft,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To print the “American drama of Witchcraft.”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Stay, I’ll read you a scene,”—but he hardly began,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ere Apollo shrieked “Help!” and the authors all ran:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As calmly as if ’twere a nine-barrelled pistol,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And threatened them all with the judgment to come,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of “A wondering Star’s first impressions of Rome.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span>”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Stop! stop!” with their hands o’er their ears, screamed the Muses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis mere massacre now that the enemy’s flying;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he’s forced to ’t again, and we happen to be there,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">I called this a “Fable for Critics”; you think it’s<br /></span> -<span class="i0">More of a display of my rhythmical trinkets;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My plot, like an icicle, ’s slender and slippery,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the reader unwilling <i>in loco desipere</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is free to jump over as much of my flippery<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As he fancies, and, if he’s a provident skipper, he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">May have like Odysseus control of the gales,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Moreover, although ’tis a slender return<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You may e’en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If too angry for that, you can tear me in pieces,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And my <i>membra disjecta</i> consign to the breezes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A fate like great Ratzau’s, whom one of those bores<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who beflead with bad verses poor Louis Quatorze<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Describes (the first verse somehow ends with <i>victoire</i>),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As <i>dispersant partout et ses membres et sa gloire</i>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or, if I were over-desirous of earning<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A repute among noodles for classical learning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As new as the jests of <i>Didaskalos tis</i>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Better still, I could make out a good solid list<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From authors recondite who do not exist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries<br /></span> -<span class="i0">After Milton’s prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, as Cicero says he won’t say this or that<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">After saying whate’er he could possibly think of,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I simply will state that I pause on the brink of<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just conceive how much harder your teeth you’d have gritted,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">An ’twere not for the dulness I’ve kindly omitted.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">I’d apologize here for my many digressions,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Were it not that I’m certain to trip into fresh ones<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">(’Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once;)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just reflect, if you please, how ’tis said by Horatius,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That Mæonides nods now and then, and, my gracious!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It certainly does look a little bit ominous<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he gets under way with <i>ton d’apameibomenos</i>.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Here a something occurs which I’ll just clap a rhyme to,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Any author a nap like Van Winkle’s may take,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he only contrive to keep readers awake,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he’ll very soon find himself laid on the shelf,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If <i>they</i> fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When Phœbus expressed his desire for a lily,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our Hero, whose homœopathic sagacity<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With an ocean of zeal mixed his drop of capacity,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Set off for the garden as fast as the wind<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Or, to take a comparison more to my mind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a sound politician leaves conscience behind),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O’er his principles, when something else turns up trumps.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">He was gone a long time, and Apollo, meanwhile,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Went over some sonnets of his with a file,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It should reach with one impulse the end of its course,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And for one final blow collect all of its force;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not a verse should be salient, but each oneshould tend<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a wave-like up-gathering to break at the end;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. D——;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Went dodging about, muttering, “Murderers! asses!”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From out of his pocket a paper he’d take,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a proud look of martyrdom tied to its stake,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, reading a squib at himself, he’d say, “Here I see<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Gainst American letters a bloody conspiracy,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They are all by my personal enemies written;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I must post an anonymous letter to Britain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And show that this gall is the merest suggestion<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of spite at my zeal on the Copyright question;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For, on this side the water, ’tis prudent to pull<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O’er the eyes of the public their national wool,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All American authors who have more or less<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of that anti-American humbug—success,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While in private we’re always embracing the knees<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of some twopenny editor over the seas,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And licking his critical shoes, for you know ’tis<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My American puffs I would willingly burn all<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(They’re all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To get but a kick from a transmarine journal!”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">So, culling the gibes of each critical scorner<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As if they were plums, and himself were Jack Horner,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And into each hole where a weasel might pass in,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Expecting the knife of some critic assassin,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who stabs to the heart with a caricature,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet done with a dagger-o’-type, whose vileportraits<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Disperse all one’s good and condense all one’s poor traits.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Good day, Mr. D——, I’m happy to meet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What news from that suburb of London and Paris<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The credit of being the New World’s metropolis?”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Why, nothing of consequence, save this attack<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On my friend there, behind, by some pitiful hack,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who thinks every national author a poor one<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That isn’t a copy of something that’s foreign,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And assaults the American Dick—— ”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i28">“Nay, ’tis clear<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That your Damon there’s fond of a flea in his ear,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He would buy some himself, just to hear the old click;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japan<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Should turn up his nose at the ‘Poems on Man’<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Which contain many verses as fine, by the bye,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As any that lately came under my eye),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By way of displaying his critical crosses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His broadsides resulting (this last there’s no doubt of)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">In successively sinking the craft they’re fired out of.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now nobody knows when an author is hit,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he have not a public hysterical fit;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let him only keep close in his snug garret’s dim ether,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And nobody’d think of his foes—or of him either;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If an author have any least fibre of worth in him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All the critics on earth cannot crush with their ban<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One word that’s in tune with the nature of man.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Well, perhaps so; meanwhile I have brought you a book,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Into which if you’ll just have the goodness to look,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You may feel so delighted (when once you are through it)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As to deem it not unworth your while to review it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A place in the next Democratic Review.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“The most thankless of gods you must surelyhave thought me,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For this is the forty-fourth copy you’ve brought me,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I have given them away, or at least I have tried,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But I’ve forty-two left, standing all side by side<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(The man who accepted that one copy died),—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From one end of a shelf to the other they reach<br /></span> -<span class="i0">‘With the author’s respects’ neatly written in each.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he hears of that order the British Museum<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has sent for one set of what books were first printed<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In America, little or big,—for ’tis hinted<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That this is the first truly tangible hope he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’ve thought very often ’twould be a good thing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In all public collections of books, if a wing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Marked <i>Literature suited to desolate islands</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And filled with such books as could never ber ead<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such books as one’s wrecked on in small countryt averns,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And since the philanthropists just now are banging<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And gibbeting all who’re in favor of hanging<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And that vital religion would dull and grow callous,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Unrefreshed, now and then, with a sniff of the gallows),—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And folks are beginning to think it looks odd,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And that He who esteems the Virginia reel<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Than crushing His African children with slavery,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillion<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are mounted for hell on the Devil’s own pillion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Approaches the heart through the door of the toes,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That He, I was saying, whose judgments are stored<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For such as take steps in despite of His word,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Should look with delight on the agonized prancing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter<br /></span> -<span class="i0">About offering to God on his favorite halter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sells the clothes to a Jew, and the corpse to the surgeons;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now, instead of all this, I think I can direct you all<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To a criminal code both humane and effectual;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I propose to shut up every doer of wrong<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With these desperate books, for such term, short or long,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As by statute in such cases made and provided,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shall be by your wise legislators decided:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thus: Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At hard labor for life on the works of Miss——;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Petty thieves, kept from flagranter crimes by their fears,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shall peruse Yankee Doodle a blank term of years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That American Punch, like the English, no doubt,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A loud-cackling swarm, in whose feathers warm-drest,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He goes for as perfect a—swan as the rest.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is some of it pr—No, ’tis not even prose;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’m speaking of metres; some poems have welled<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From those rare depths of soul that have ne’er been excelled;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">They’re not epics, but that doesn’t matter a pin,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you’ve once found the way, you’ve achieved the grand stroke;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now it is not one thing nor another alone<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Makes a poem, but rather the general tone,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The something pervading, uniting the whole,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So that just in removing this trifle or that, you<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Roots, wood, bark, and leaves singly perfect may be,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But clapt hodge-podge together, they don’t make a tree.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i1">“But, to come back to Emerson (whom, by the way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I believe we left waiting),—his is, we may say,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He seems, to my thinking (although I’m afraid<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To meet such a primitive Pagan as he,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In whose mind all creation is duly respected<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As parts of himself—just a little projected;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A convert to—nothing but Emerson.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So perfect a balance there is in his head,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He looks at as merely ideas; in short,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of such vast extent that our earth’s a mere dab in it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each figure, word, gesture just fits the occasion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the quiet precision of science he’ll sort’em,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But you can’t help suspecting the whole a <i>post mortem</i>.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the other, he’s more of an Emerson;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C. gives nature and God his own fits of theblues,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C. shows you how every-day matters unite<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While E., in a plain, preternatural way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Makes mysteries matters of mere every day;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C. draws all his characters quite <i>à la</i> Fuseli,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The design of a white marble statue in words.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">C. labors to get at the centre, and then<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, given himself, has whatever is wanted.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“He has imitators in scores, who omit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No part of the man but his wisdom and wit,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who go carefully o’er the sky-blue of his brain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Because their shoals mirror his mists andobscurities,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a mud-puddle seems deep as Heaven for a minute,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There comes——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Besides, ’tis no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">—— has picked up all the windfalls before.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try ’em,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He wonders why ’tis there are none such his trees on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And never an act to perplex him or bore him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a snug room at Plato’s when night comes, to walk to,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And people from morning till midnight to talk to,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For his highest conceit of a happiest state is<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He seems piling words, but there’s royal dust hid<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very full<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A stream of transparent and forcible prose;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That ’tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That the weathercock rules and not follows the wind;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With no doctrine pleased that’s not somewhere denied,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He lays the denier away on the shelf,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And then—down beside him lies gravely himself.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s the Salt River boatman, who always stands willing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">To convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And so fond of the trip that, when leisure’s to spare,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’ll row himself up, if he can’t get a fare.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The worst of it is, that his logic’s so strong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If there <i>is</i> only one, why, he’ll split it in two,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And first pummel this half, then that, black and blue.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That white’s white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When it reaches your lips there’s naught left to believe<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean)-gisms that squat ’em<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like tadpoles, o’erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“There is Willis, all <i>natty</i> and jaunty and gay,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who says his best things in so foppish a way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That one hardly knows whether to thank himfor saying ’em;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His prose had a natural grace of its own,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And enough of it too, if he’d let it alone;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And is forced to forgive where one might have admired;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It runs like a stream with a musical waste,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a country where scarcely a village is found<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That has not its author sublime and profound,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For some one to be slightly shallow’s a duty,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Willis’s shallowness makes half his beauty.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuinehearty phiz;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is Nature herself, and there’s something in that,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Few volumes I know to read under a tree,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">More truly delightful than his A l’Abri,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Nature to criticise still as you read,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“He’s so innate a cockney, that had he been born<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where plain bare skin’s the only full-dress that is worn,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’d have given his own such an air that you’d say<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it andshake it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he would not sometimes leave the <i>r</i> out of sprightfulness;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And he ought to let Scripture alone—’tis self-slaughter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For nobody likes inspiration-and-water.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His wit running up as Canary ran down,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(The Church of Socinus, I mean),—his opinions<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Being So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They believed—faith, I’m puzzled—I think I may call<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Their belief a believing in nothing at all,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or something of that sort; I know they all went<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For a general union of total dissent:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He went a step farther; without cough or hem,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He frankly avowed he believed not in them;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was heresy here, you perceive, for the right<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of privately judging means simply that light<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has been granted to me for deciding on <i>you</i>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And in happier times, before Atheism grew,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The deed contained clauses for cooking you too:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now at Xerxes and Knut we all laugh, yet our foot<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And we all entertain a secure private notion,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That our <i>Thus far!</i> will have a great weight with the ocean.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twas so with our liberal Christians: they bore<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With sincerest conviction their chairs to the shore;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They brandished their worn theological birches,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Bade natural progress keep out of the Churches,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And expected the lines they had drawn to prevail<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And cared (shall I say?) not a d—— for their damming;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So they first read him out of their church, and next minute<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Turned round and declared he had never been in it.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But the ban was too small or the man was too big,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For he recks not their bells, books, and candlesa fig<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(He scarce looks like a man who would <i>stay</i> treated shabbily,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sophroniscus’ son’s head o’er the features of Rabelais);<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, <i>that</i> he’s nofaith in),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Mouis,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Musæus, Muretus, <i>hem</i>,—μ Scorpionis,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac—Mac—ah! Machiavelli,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Condorcet, Count d’Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Orion, O’Connell, the Chevalier D’O,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(See the Memoirs of Sully,) το παν, the great toe<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the statue of Jupiter, now made to pass<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For that of Jew Peter by good Romish brass.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(You may add for yourselves, for I find it a bore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">All the names you have ever, or not, heard before,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And when you’ve done that—why, invent a few more.)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His hearers can’t tell you on Sunday beforehand,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If in that day’s discourse they’ll be Bibled or Koraned,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For he’s seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That all men (not orthodox) <i>may be</i> inspired;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He makes it quite clear what he <i>doesn’t</i> believe in,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom Come<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumb<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Would be left, if we didn’t keep carefully mum,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, to make a clean breast, that ’tis perfectly plain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That <i>all</i> kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now P.’s creed than this may be lighter or darker,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But in one thing, ’tis clear, he has faith, namely—Parker,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s a background of god to each hardworking feature,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His gestures all downright and same, if you will,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You forget the man wholly, you’re thankful to meet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And to hear, you’re not over-particular whence,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Almost Taylor’s profusion, quite Latimer’s sense.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as ignified,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nights<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But no warm applauses come, peal following eal on,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ’em,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“He is very nice reading in summer, but <i>inter</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Nos</i>, we don’t want <i>extra</i> freezing in winter;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, deduct all you can, there’s enough that’s right good in him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, orwhere ’er it is,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No, to old Berkshire’s hills, with their limestone and granite.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you’re one who <i>in loco</i> (add <i>foco</i> here) <i>desipis</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But you’d get deeper down if you came as a precipice,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth<br /></span> -<span class="i0">May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to Justch;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of craziness<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put on<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Does more than a larger, less drilled, more volcanic;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the advantage that Wordsworth before<br /></span> -<span class="i0">him had written.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“But my dear little bardlings, don’t prick up your ears<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If I call him an iceberg, I don’t mean to say<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There is nothing in that which is grand in its way:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He is almost the one of your poets that knows<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His thought’s modest fulness by going too far;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twould be well if your authors should all make a trial<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And measure their writings by Hesiod’s staff,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which teaches that all has less value than half.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Strains the straight-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the very same cause that has made him a poet,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A fervor of mind which knows no separation<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If ’twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While, borne with the rush of the metre along,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Content with the whirl and delirium of song;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And can ne’er be repeated again any more<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Than they could have been carefully plotted before:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like old what’s-his-name there at the battle of Hastings<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For reform and whatever they call human rights,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Both singing and striking in front of the war,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Anne hæc</i>, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Vestis filii tui</i>, O leather-clad Fox?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Can that be thy son, in the battle’s mid din,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s spring<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Impressed on his hard moral sense with a<br /></span> -<span class="i0">sling?<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When to look but a protest in silence was brave;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All honor and praise to the women and men<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who spoke out for the dumb and the downtrodden then!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It needs not to name them, already for each<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I see History preparing the statue and niche;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">They were harsh, but shall <i>you</i> be so shocked at hard words<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By the reaping of men and of women than grain?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why should <i>you</i> stand aghast at their fierce wordy war, if<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day long<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Doesn’t prove that the use of hard language is wrong;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While the World’s heart beats quicker to think of such men<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As signed Tyranny’s doom with a bloody steel-pen,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright one<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You need not look shy at your sisters and brothers<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and true<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, for sake of the many, dared stand with the few,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not of blood-spattered laurel for enemies braved,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But of broad, peaceful oak-leaves for citizens saved!<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Involved in a paulo-post-future of song,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who’ll be going to write what’ll never be written<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who is so well aware of how things should be done,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That his own works displease him before they’re begun,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That the best of his poems is written in prose;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a very grave question his soul was immersed,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, while this point and that he judiciously dwelt on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You’ll allow only genius could hit upon either.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But I fear he will never be anything more;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o’er him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In learning to swim on his library-table.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Preferred to believe that he was so already;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Too hasty to wait till Art’s ripe fruit should drop,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A man who’s made less than he might have, because<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He always has thought himself more than he was,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Because song drew less instant attention than noise.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis the modest man ripens, ’tis he that achieves,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just what’s needed of sunshine and shade he receives;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he strips himself naked to prove he’s a poet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, to show he could leap Art’s wide ditch, if he tried,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Jumps clean o’er it, and into the hedge t’ other side.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has strength, but there’s nothing about him in keeping;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has used his own sinews himself to distress,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could he only have waited he might have been great;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And muddled the stream ere he took his first taste.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a single anemone trembly and rathe;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, to fill out her model, a little she spared<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And she could not have hit a more excellent plan<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For making him fully and perfectly man.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The success of her scheme gave her so much delight,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She sang to her work in her sweet childish way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And found, when she’d put the last touch to<br /></span> -<span class="i0">his soul,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to show<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s as good as a lord: well, let’s grant that he’s so;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If a person prefer that description of praise,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, a coronet’s certainly cheaper than bays;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he need take no pains to convince us he’s not<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(As his enemies say) the American Scott.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That one of his novels of which he’s most proud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quitting<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Their box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dew<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has done naught but copy it ill ever since:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His Indians, with proper respect be it said,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are just Natty Bumppo, daubed over with red,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Rigged up in duck pants and a sou’wester hat<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though once in a coffin, a good chance was found<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To have slipped the old fellow away underground).<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The <i>dernière chemise</i> of a man in a fix<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(As a captain besieged, when his garrison’s small,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o’er the wall);<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the women he draws from one model don’t vary,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When a character’s wanted, he goes to the task<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a cooper would do in composing a cask;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has made at the most something wooden and empty.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Don’t suppose I would underrate Cooper’s abilities;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If I thought you’d do that, I should feel very ill at ease;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The men who have given to <i>one</i> character life<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And objective existence are not very rife;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Natty won’t go to oblivion quicker<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now he may overcharge his American pictures,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But you’ll grant there’s a good deal of truth in his strictures;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I honor the man who is willing to sink<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Half his present repute for the freedom to think,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There are truths you Americans need to be told,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in choler<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But to scorn such eye-dollar-try’s what very few do,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And John goes to that church as often as you do.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’T is enough to go quietly on and outgrow him;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Displacing himself in the mind of his son,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglected<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To love one another you’re too like by half;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he is a bull, you’re a pretty stout calf,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And tear your own pasture for naught but to show<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There are one or two things I should just like to hint,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For you don’t often get the truth told you in print;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though you brag of your New World, you don’t<br /></span> -<span class="i0">half believe in it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With eyes bold as Heré’s, and hair floating free,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who can drive home the cows with a song<br /></span> -<span class="i0">through the grass,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Keeps glancing aside into Europe’s cracked glass,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She loses her fresh country charm when she takes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your literature suits its each whisper and motion<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To what will be thought of it over the ocean;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To which the dull current in hers is but mud;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In her voice there’s a tremble e’en now while she rails,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And your shore will soon be in the nature of things<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Covered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow’s Waif<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Keep your ears open wide to the Future’s first call,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Stand fronting the dawn on Toil’s heaven-scaling peaks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And become my new race of more practical Greeks.—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o’t,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek<br /></span> -<span class="i0">had his helot.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Here a gentleman present, who had in hisattic<br /></span> -<span class="i0">More pepper than brains, shrieked,—“The man’s a fanatic,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’m a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And will make him a suit that’ll serve in all weathers;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But we’ll argue the point first, I’m willing to reason ’t,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Palaver before condemnation’s but decent;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, through my humble person, Humanity begs<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">As when ἥϊε νὐκτι ἐ οικώς, and so forth,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, as he was going, gained courage to say,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I am as strongly opposed to ’t as any one else.”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Ay, no doubt, but whenever I’ve happened to meet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Answered Phœbus severely; then turning to us,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is only in taking a great busy nation<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She has such a penchant for bothering me too!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She always keeps asking if I don’t observe a<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Particular likeness ’twixt her and Minerva;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She’s been travelling now, and will be worse than ever;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she’d be<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of all that’s worth mentioning over the sea,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For a woman must surely see well, if she try,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The whole of whose being’s a capital I:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will take an old notion, and make it her own,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By saying it o’er in her Sibylline tone,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or persuade you ’tis something tremendously deep,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There is one thing she owns in her own single right,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is native and genuine—namely, her spite;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A censer of vanity ’neath her own nose.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Here Miranda came up, and said, “Phœbus!you know<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To my Land’s better life authors solely my own,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose works sound a depth by Life’s quiet unshaken,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as Shakespeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not to mention my own works; Time’s nadir is fleet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, as for myself, I’m quite out of conceit”—<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Quite out of conceit! I’m enchanted to hear it,”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cried Apollo aside. “Who’d have thought she was near it?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To be sure, one is apt to exhaust those commodities<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">One uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">‘I’m as much out of salt as Miranda’s own writings’<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Which, as she in her own happy manner has said,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sound a depth, for ’tis one of the functions of lead).<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She often has asked me if I could not find<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A place somewhere near me that suited her mind;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I know but a single one vacant, which she,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And it would not imply any pause or cessation<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Miranda meanwhile has succeeded in driving<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Up into a corner, in spite of their striving,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A small flock of terrified victims, and there,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And a tone which, at least to <i>my</i> fancy, appears<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For ’tis dotted as thick as a peacock’s with I’s).<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Apropos</i> of Miranda, I’ll rest on my oars<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And drift through a trifling digression on bores,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For, though not wearing ear-rings <i>in more majorum</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore ’em.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And of all quiet pleasures the very <i>ne plus</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Archæologians, I know, who have personal fears<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of this wise application of hounds and of spears,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Have tried to make out, with a zeal more than wonted,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twas a kind of wild swine that our ancestors hunted;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But I’ll never believe that the age which has strewn<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Europe o’er with cathedrals, and otherwise shown<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That it knew what was what, could by chance not have known<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Spending, too, its chief time with its buff on, no doubt),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which beast ’twould improve the world most to thin out.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I divide bores myself, in the manner of rifles,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Into two great divisions, regardless of trifles;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s your smooth-bore and screw-bore, who do not much vary<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the weight of cold lead they respectively carry.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The smooth-bore is one in whose essence the mind<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not a corner nor cranny to cling by can find;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">You feel as in nightmares sometimes, when you slip<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Down a steep slated roof, where there’s nothing to grip;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You slide and you slide, the blank horror increases,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You had rather by far be at once smashed to pieces;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You fancy a whirlpool below white and frothing,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And finally drop off and light upon—nothing.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The screw-bore has twists in him, faint predilections<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For going just wrong in the tritest directions;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he’s wrong he is flat, when he’s right he can’t show it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’ll tell you what Snooks said about the new poet,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or how Fogrum was outraged by Tennyson’s Princess;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has spent all his spare time and intellect since his<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Birth in perusing, on each art and science,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just the books in which no one puts any reliance,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And though <i>nemo</i> we’re told, <i>horis omnibus sapit</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The rule will not fit him, however you shape it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For he has a perennial foison of sappiness;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has just enough force to spoil half your day’s happiness,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And to make him a sort of mosquito to be with,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But just not enough to dispute or agree with.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">These sketches I made (not to be too explicit)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From two honest fellows who made me a visit,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And broke, like the tale of the Bear and the Fiddle,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My reflections on Halleck short off by the middle;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I sha’n’t now go into the subject more deeply,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For I notice that some of my readers look sleep’ly;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I will barely remark that, ’mongst civilized nations,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s none that displays more exemplary patience<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Under all sorts of boring, at all sorts of hours,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From all sorts of desperate persons, than ours.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not to speak of our papers, our State legislatures,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And other such trials for sensitive natures,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Just look for a moment at Congress,—appalled,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My fancy shrinks back from the phantom it called;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, there’s scarcely a member unworthy to frown<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Neath what Fourier nicknames the Boreal crown;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Only think what that infinite bore-pow’r could do<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If applied with a utilitarian view;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Suppose, for example, we shipped it with care<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To Sahara’s great desert and let it bore there;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If they held one short session and did nothing else,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They’d fill the whole waste with Artesian wells.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But ’tis time now with pen phonographic to follow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Through some more of his sketches our laughing Apollo:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span>—<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There comes Harry Franco, and, as he draws near,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You find that’s a smile which you took for a sneer;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One half of him contradicts t’other; his wont<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His manner’s as hard as his feelings are tender,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And a <i>sortie</i> he’ll make when he means to surrender;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When he seems to be joking, be sure he’s in earnest;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has common sense in a way that’s uncommon,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-outer,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And though not a poet, yet all must admire<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a way to make people of common sense damn metres;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who—But hey-day! What’s this? Messieurs Mathews and Poe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You mustn’t fling mud-balls at Longfellow so,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Does it make a man worse that his character’s such<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As to make his friends love him (as you think) too much?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, there is not a bard at this moment alive<br /></span> -<span class="i0">More willing than he that his fellows should thrive;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While you are abusing him thus, even now<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He would help either one of you out of a slough;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You may say that he’s smooth and all that till you’re hoarse,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But remember that elegance also is force;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">After polishing granite as much as you will,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The heart keeps its tough old persistency still;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Deduct all you can, <i>that</i> still keeps you at bay;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, he’ll live till men weary of Collins and Gray.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’m not over-fond of Greek metres in English,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To me rhyme’s a gain, so it be not too jinglish,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And your modern hexameter verses are no more<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, compared to your moderns, sounds old<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Melesigenes;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span> ’tis<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That I’ve heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And my ear with that music impregnate may be,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or as one can’t bear Strauss when his nature is cloven<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, set that aside, and ’tis truth that I speak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral, Evangeline.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That’s not ancient nor modern, its place is apart<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth’s hubbub and strife<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As quiet and chaste as the author’s own life.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There comes Philothea, her face all aglow,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She has just been dividing some poor creature’s woe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And can’t tell which pleases her most, to relieve<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His want, or his story to hear and believe;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She knows well that silence is sorrow’s best food,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So she’ll listen with patience and let you unfold<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Your bundle of rags as ’twere pure cloth of gold,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which, indeed, it all turns to as soon as she’s touched it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And (to borrow a phrase from the nursery) <i>muched</i> it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She has such a musical taste, she will go<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And thinks it Geometry’s fault if she’s fain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To consider things flat, inasmuch as they’re plain;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Facts with her are accomplished, as Frenchmen would say,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They will prove all she wishes them to either way,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, as fact lies on this side or that, we must try,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If we’re seeking the truth, to find where it don’t lie;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I was telling her once of a marvellous aloe<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That for thousands of years had looked spindling and sallow,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, though nursed by the fruitfullest powers of mud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Had never vouchsafed e’en so much as a bud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till its owner remarked (as a sailor, you know,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Often will in a calm) that it never would blow,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For he wished to exhibit the plant, and designed<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That its blowing should help him in raising the wind;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At last it was told him that if he should water<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Its roots with the blood of his unmarried daughter<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Who was born, as her mother, a Calvinist, said,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">With William Law’s serious caul on her head),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It would blow as the obstinate breeze did when by a<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like decree of her father died Iphigenia;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At first he declared he himself would be blowed<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ere his conscience with such a foul crime he would load,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But the thought, coming oft, grew less dark than before,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And he mused, as each creditor knocked at his door,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If <i>this</i> were but done they would dun me no more;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I told Philothea his struggles and doubts,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And how he considered the ins and the outs<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the visions he had, and the dreadful dispepsy,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How he went to the seër that lives at Po’keepsie,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How the seër advised him to sleep on it first,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And to read his big volume in case of the worst,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And further advised he should pay him five dollars<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For writing <span class="eng">Hum, Hum</span>, on his wristbands and collars;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Three years and ten days these dark words he had studied<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When the daughter was missed, and the aloe had budded;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I told how he watched it grow large and more large,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And wondered how much for the show he should charge,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She had listened with utter indifference to this, till<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I told how it bloomed, and, discharging its pistil<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The botanical filicide dead on the spot;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the crime was blown also, because on the wad,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which was paper, was writ ‘Visitation of God,’<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As well as a thrilling account of the deed<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which the coroner kindly allowed me toread.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Well, my friend took this story up just, to be sure,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As one might a poor foundling that’s laid at one’s door;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She combed it and washed it and clothed it and fed it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And as if ’twere her own child most tenderly bred it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Laid the scene (of the legend, I mean) far away a-<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mong the green vales underneath Himalaya,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And by artist-like touches, laid on here and there,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Made the whole thing so touching, I frankly declare<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I have read it all thrice, and, perhaps I am weak,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But I found every time there were tears on my cheek.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And folks with a mission that nobody knows,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">She can fill up the <i>carets</i> in such, make their scope<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Converge to some focus of rational hope,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Can transmute into honey,—but this is not all;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not only for those she has solace, O say,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Vice’s desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hast thou not found one shore where those tired drooping feet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Can reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The soothed head in silence reposing could hear<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ah, there’s many a beam from the fountain of day<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And to bring into each, or to find there, some line<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the never completely out-trampled divine;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“What! Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nay, don’t be embarrassed, nor look so beseeching,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I sha’n’t run directly against my own preaching,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And having just laughed at their Raphaels and Dantes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Go to setting you up beside matchless Cervantes;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But allow me to speak what I honestly feel,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Throw in all of Addison, <i>minus</i> the chill,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the whole of that partnership’s stock and good-will,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mix well, and while stirring, hum o’er, as a spell,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The fine <i>old</i> English Gentleman, simmer it well,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That only the finest and clearest remain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let it stand out-of-doors till a soul it receives<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And you’ll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A name either English or Yankee,—just Irving.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There goes,—but <i>stet nominis umbra</i>,—his name<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You’ll be glad enough, some day or other, to claim,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And will all crowd about him and swear that you knew him<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If some English critic should chance to review him.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The old <i>porcos ante ne projiciatis</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Margaritas</span>, for him you have verified gratis;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What matters his name? Why, it may be Sylvester,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Judd, Junior, or Junius, Ulysses, or Nestor,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For aught I know or care; ’tis enough that I look<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On the author of <i>Margaret</i>, the first Yankee book<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the <i>soul</i> of Down East in’t, and things farther East,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As far as the threshold of morning, at least,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’T has a smack of pine woods, of bare field and bleak hill,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as only the breed of the <i>Mayflower</i> could till;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Puritan’s shown in it, tough to the core,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as prayed, smiting Agag on red Marston Moor:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With an unwilling humor, half choked by the drouth<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In brown hollows about the inhospitable mouth;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a soul full of poetry, though it has qualms<br /></span> -<span class="i0">About finding a happiness out of the Psalms;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Full of tenderness, too, though it shrinks in the dark,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hamadryad-like, under the coarse, shaggy bank;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That sees visions, knows wrestlings of God with the Will,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And has its own Sinais and thunderings still.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span>”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Here, “Forgive me, Apollo,” I cried, “while I pour<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My heart out to my birthplace: O loved more and more<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Dear Baystate, from whose rocky bosom thy sons<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Should suck milk, strong-will-giving, brave, such as runs<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the veins of old Graylock—who is it that dares<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Call thee pedler, a soul wrapped in bank-books and shares?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is false! She’s a Poet! I see, as I write,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Along the far railroad the steam-snake glide white,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The cataract-throb of her mill-hearts I hear,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The swift strokes of trip-hammers weary my ear,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sledges ring upon anvils, through logs the saw screams,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Blocks swing to their place, beetles drive home the beams:—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is songs such as these that she croons to the din<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of her fast-flying shuttles, year out and year in,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While from earth’s farthest corner there comes not a breeze<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But wafts her the buzz of her gold-gleaning bees:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What though those horn hands have as yet found small time<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For painting and sculpture and music and rhyme?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">These will come in due order; the need that pressed sorest<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To bridle and harness the rivers, the steam,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Making those whirl her mill-wheels, this tug in her team,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To vassalize old tyrant Winter, and make<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Him delve surlily for her on river and lake;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When this New World was parted, she strove not to shirk<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Her lot in the heirdom, the tough, silent Work,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The hero-share ever, from Herakles down<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To Odin, the Earth’s iron sceptre and crown:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yes, thou dear, noble Mother! if ever men’s praise<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could be claimed for creating heroical lays,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thou hast won it; if ever the laurel divine<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Crowned the Maker and Builder, that glory is thine!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thy songs are right epic, they tell how this rude<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Rock-rib of our earth here was tamed and subdued;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thou hast written them plain on the face of the planet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In brave, deathless letters of iron and granite;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thou hast printed them deep for all time; they are set<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the same runic type-font and alphabet<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With thy stout Berkshire hills and the arms of thy Bay,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They are staves from the burly old Mayflower lay.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If the drones of the Old World, in querulous ease,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ask thy Art and thy Letters, point proudly to these,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or, if they deny these are Letters and Art,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Toil on with the same old invincible heart;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thou art rearing the pedestal broad-based and grand<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And creating, through labors undaunted and long,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song!<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“But my good mother Baystate wants no praise of mine,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She learned from <i>her</i> mother a precept divine<br /></span> -<span class="i0">About something that butters no parsnips, her <i>forte</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">In another direction lies, work is her sport<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(Though she’ll courtesy and set her cap straight, that she will,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If you talk about Plymouth and red Bunker’s Hill).<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Dear, notable goodwife! by this time of night<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Her hearth is swept neatly, her fire burning bright,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And she sits in a chair (of home plan and make) rocking,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Musing much, all the while, as she darns on a stocking,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whether turkeys will come pretty high next Thanksgiving,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whether flour’ll be so dear, for, as sure as she’s living,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will use rye-and-injun then; whether the pig<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By this time ain’t got pretty tolerable big,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And whether to sell it outright will be best,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or to smoke hams and shoulders and salt down the rest,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At this minute, she’d swop all my verses, ah, cruel!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For the last patent stove that is saving of fuel;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So I’ll just let Apollo go on, for his phiz<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shows I’ve kept him awaiting too long as it is.”<br /></span> -<span class="i2">“If our friend, there, who seems a reporter, is done<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With his burst of emotion, why, <i>I</i> will go on,”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Said Apollo; some smiled, and, indeed, I must own<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was something sarcastic, perhaps, in his tone;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span>—<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There’s Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The electrical tingles of hit after hit;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In long poems ’tis painful sometimes, and invites<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As if you got more than you’d title to rightfully,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Would flame in for a second and give you a fright’ning.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has perfect sway of what <i>I</i> call a sham metre,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But many admire it, the English pentameter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor e’er achieved aught in’t so worthy ofpraise<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">As the tribute of Holmes to the grand <i>Marseillaise</i>.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You went crazy last year over Bulwer’s New Timon;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He could ne’er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That are trodden Upon are your own or your foes’.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a whole bale of <i>isms</i> tied together with rhyme,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he can’t with that bundle he has on his<br /></span> -<span class="i0">shoulders, The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But he’d rather by half make a drum of the shell,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And rattle away till he’s old as Methusalem,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“There goes Halleck, whose Fanny’s a pseudo Don Juan,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s a wit, though, I hear, of the very first order,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And once made a pun on the words soft Recorder;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">More than this, he’s a very great poet, I’m told,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And has had his works published in crimson and gold,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With something they call ‘Illustrations,’ to wit,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like those with which Chapman obscured Holy Writ,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which are said to illustrate, because, as I view it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like <i>lucus a non</i>, they precisely don’t do it;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let a man who can write what himself understands<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Keep clear, if he can, of designing men’s hands,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who bury the sense, if there’s any worth having,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And then very honestly call it engraving.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But, to quit <i>badinage</i>, which there isn’t much wit in,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Halleck’s better, I doubt not, than all he has written;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In his verse a clear glimpse you will frequently find,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If not of a great, of a fortunate mind,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which contrives to be true to its natural loves<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In a world of back-offices, ledgers, and stoves.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When his heart breaks away from the brokers and banks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And kneels in his own private shrine to give thanks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s a genial manliness in him that earns<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our sincerest respect (read, for instance, his ‘Burns’),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And we can’t but regret (seek excuse where we may)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That so much of a man has been peddled away.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“But what’s that? a mass-meeting? No, there come in lots,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And in short the American everything-elses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each charging the others with envies and jealousies;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By the way, ’tis a fact that displays what profusions<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That while the Old World has produced barely eight<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of such poets as all men agree to call great,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And of other great characters hardly a score<br /></span> -<span class="i0">(One might safely say less than that rather than more),<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With you every year a whole crop is begotten,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They’re as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Why, there’s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Will be some very great person over again.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">There is one inconvenience in all this, which lies<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And where there are none except Titans, great stature<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is only the normal proceeding of nature.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">What puff the strained sails of your praise will you furl at, if<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The calmest degree that you know is superlative?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As a matter of course, be well <i>issimust</i> and <i>errimust</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That his friends would take care he was ιστοςt and ωτατοςt,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And formerly we, as through graveyards we<br /></span> -<span class="i0">past,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thought the world went from bad to worst fearfully fast;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let us glance for a moment, ’tis well worth the pains,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And note what an average graveyard contains;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Horizontally there lie upright politicians,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Dose-a-dose with their patients sleep faultless physicians,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There are slave-drivers quietly whipped under ground,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There bookbinders, done up in boards, are fast bound,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There card-players wait till the last trump be played,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There all the choice spirits get finally laid,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There the babe that’s unborn is supplied with a berth,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There men without legs get their six feet of earth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">There lawyers repose, each wrapped up in his case,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There seekers of office are sure of a place,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There defendant and plaintiff get equally cast,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There shoemakers quietly stick to the last,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There brokers at length become silent as stocks,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There stage-drivers sleep without quitting their box,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And so forth and so forth and so forth and so on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With this kind of stuff one might endlessly go on;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To come to the point, I may safely assert you<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Will find in each yard every cardinal virtue<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each has six truest patriots: four discoverers of ether,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who never had thought on ’t nor mentioned it either;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ten poets, the greatest who ever wrote rhyme:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Two hundred and forty first men of their time:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">One person whose portrait just gave the least hint<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Its original had a most horrible squint:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">One critic, most (what do they call it?) reflective,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who never had used the phrase ob-or subjective:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And their daughters for—faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual black-eye:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Two dozen of Italy’s exiles who shoot us his<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mount serenely their country’s funereal pile:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who shake their dread fists o’er the sea and all that,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As long as a copper drops into the hat:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From Vaterland’s battles just won—in the Park,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who the happy profession of martyrdom take<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jacksons:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And so many everythings-else that it racks one’s<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Poor memory too much to continue the list,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Especially now they no longer exist;—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I would merely observe that you’ve taken to giving<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The puffs that belong to the dead to the living,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom’s tones<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Here the critic came in and a thistle presented<a name="FNanchor_8_8" -id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> - -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span>—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From a frown to a smile the god’s features relented,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As he stared at his envoy, who, swelling with pride,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the god’s asking look, nothing daunted, replied,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“You’re surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I hunted the garden from one end to t’other,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And got no reward but vexation and bother,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither.”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Did he think I had given him a book to review?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I ought to have known what the fellow would do,”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Muttered Phœbus aside, “for a thistle will pass<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Beyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">He has chosen in just the same way as he’d choose<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His specimens out of the books he reviews;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And now, as this offers an excellent text,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’ll give ’em some brief hints on criticism next.”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud:—<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“My friends, in the happier days of the muse,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">We were luckily free from such thing as reviews;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Precreated the future, both parts of one whole;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then for him there was nothing too great or too small,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For one natural deity sanctified all;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then the bard owned no clipper and meter of moods<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O’er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He asked not earth’s verdict, forgetting the clods,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And shaped for their vision the perfect design,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then a glory and greatness invested man’s heart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the free individual moulded, was Art;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Eurydice stood—like a beacon unfired,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which, once touched with flame, will leap heav’nward inspired—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And waited with answering kindle to mark<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then painting, song, sculpture did more than relieve<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The need that men feel to create and believe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And as, in all beauty, who listens with love<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hears these words oft repeated—‘beyond and above,’<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So these seemed to be but the visible sign<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They were ladders the Artist erected to climb<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O’er the narrow horizon of space and of time,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“But now, on the poet’s dis-privacied moods<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With <i>do this</i> and <i>do that</i> the pert critic intrudes;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While he thinks he’s been barely fulfilling his duty<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To interpret ’twixt men and their own sense of beauty,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And has striven, while others sought honor or pelf,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To make his kind happy as he was himself,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He finds he’s been guilty of horrid offences<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In all kinds of moods, numbers, genders, and tenses;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He’s been <i>ob</i>-and <i>sub</i>jective, what Kettle calls Pot,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Precisely, at all events, what he ought not;<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>You have done this</i>, says one judge; <i>done that</i> says another;<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>You should have done this</i>, grumbles one; <i>that</i>, says ’tother;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out <i>Taboo!</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And while he is wondering what he shall do,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Since each suggests opposite topics for song,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They all shout together <i>you’re right!</i> and <i>you’re wrong!</i><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">“Nature fits all her children with something to do,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He who would write and can’t write can surely review,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thus a lawyer’s apprentice, just out of his teens,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Having read Johnson’s lives of the poets half through,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s nothing on earth he’s not competent to;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">It matters not whether he blame or commend,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">If he’s bad as a foe, he’s far worse as a friend:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let an author but write what’s above his poor scope,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He goes to work gravely and twists up a rope,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And, inviting the world to see punishment done,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hangs himself up to bleach in the wind and the sun;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis delightful to see, when a man comes along<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who has anything in him peculiar and strong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Every cockboat that swims clear its fierce (pop) gundeck at him,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And make as he passes its ludicrous Peck at him”——<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">Here Miranda came up and began, “As to that”——<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Apollo at once seized his gloves, cane, and hat,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And seeing the place getting rapidly cleared,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I too snatched my notes and forthwith disappeared.<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span></div></div> -</div> - -<hr /> - -<h2><a name="Ariel_Booklets" id="Ariel_Booklets"></a>Ariel Booklets</h2> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>1. <b>The Gold Bug.</b><br /> By Edgar Allan Poe.</p> - -<p>2. <b>Rab and his Friends</b> and <b>Marjorie Fleming</b>.<br /> By John Brown, M.D.</p> - -<p>3. <b>The Culprit Fay.</b><br /> By Joseph Rodman Drake.</p> - -<p>4. <b>Our Best Society.</b><br /> By George William Curtis.</p> - -<p>5. <b>Sonnets from the Portuguese.</b><br /> By Elizabeth Barrett Browning.</p> - -<p>6. <b>The School for Scandal.</b><br /> By Richard Brinsley Sheridan.</p> - -<p>7. <b>The Rivals.</b><br /> By Richard Brinsley Sheridan.</p> - -<p>8. <b>The Good-Natured Man.</b><br /> By Oliver Goldsmith.</p> - -<p>9. <b>Sweetness and Light.</b><br /> By Matthew Arnold.</p> - -<p>10. <b>Lyrics.</b><br /> By Robert Browning.</p> - -<p>11. <b>L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.</b><br /> By John Milton.</p> - -<p>12. <b>Thanatopsis, Flood of Years, etc.</b><br /> By William Cullen Bryant.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span></p> - -<p>13. <b>Charity and Humor, and Nil Nisi Bonum.</b><br /> By William M. Thackeray.</p> - -<p>14. <b>She Stoops to Conquer.</b><br /> By Oliver Goldsmith.</p> - -<p>15. <b>Nothing to Wear.</b><br /> By William Allen Butler.</p> - -<p>16. <b>Rime of the Ancient Mariner.</b><br /> By Samuel T. Coleridge.</p> - -<p>17. <b>Elegy in a Country Churchyard, etc.</b><br /> By Thomas Gray.</p> - -<p>18. <b>The House of Life.</b><br /> By Dante Gabriel Rossetti.</p> - -<p>19. <b>Lays of Ancient Rome.</b><br /> By Lord Macaulay.</p> - -<p>20. <b>Epictetus, Selections from.</b></p> - -<p>21. <b>Marcus Aurelius. Thoughts.</b></p> - -<p>22. <b>Sesame and Lilies.</b><br /> By John Ruskin.</p> - -<p>23. <b>The Rose and the Ring.</b><br /> By William M. Thackeray.</p> - -<p>24. <b>The Nibelungen Lied.</b><br /> By Thomas Carlyle.</p> - -<p>25. <b>Ideas of Truth.</b><br /> By John Ruskin.</p> - -<p>26. <b>Eve of St. Agnes.</b><br /> By John Keats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span></p> - -<p>27. <b>King of the Golden River.</b><br /> By John Ruskin.</p> - -<p>28. <b>The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.</b><br /> By Washington Irving.</p> - -<p>29. <b>Rip Van Winkle.</b><br /> By Washington Irving.</p> - -<p>30. <b>Ideals of the Republic.</b></p> - -<p>31. <b>Verses and Flyleaves.</b><br /> By Charles S. Calverley.</p> - -<p>32. <b>Novels by Eminent Hands.</b><br /> By W. M. Thackeray.</p> - -<p>33. <b>Cranford.</b><br /> By Mrs. Gaskell.</p> - -<p>34. <b>Vicar of Wakefield.</b><br /> By Oliver Goldsmith.</p> - -<p>35. <b>Tales by Heinrich Zschokke.</b></p> - -<p>36. <b>Rasselas.</b><br /> By Samuel Johnson.</p> - -<p>37. <b>Shakespeare’s Sonnets.</b></p> - -<p>38. <b>Wit and Humour of Charles Lamb.</b></p> - -<p>39. <b>The Travels of Baron Munchausen.</b></p> - -<p>40. <b>The Fables of Æsop.</b></p> - -<p>41. <b>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.</b><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span></p> - -<p>42. <b>The Sayings of Poor Richard.</b><br /> By Benjamin Franklin.</p> - -<p>43. <b>A Christmas Carol.</b><br /> By Charles Dickens.</p> - -<p>44. <b>The Cricket on the Hearth.</b><br /> By Charles Dickens.</p> - -<p>45. <b>The Blessed Damozel.</b><br /> By D. G. Rossetti.</p> - -<p>46. <b>The Story without an End.</b><br /> By F. W. Carové.</p> - -<p>47. <b>The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.</b></p> - -<p>48. <b>Father Tom and the Pope.</b><br /> By Samuel Ferguson.</p> - -<p>49. <b>Love and Skates.</b><br /> By Theodore Winthrop.</p> - -<p>50. <b>The Princess.</b><br /> By Alfred Tennyson.</p> - -<p>51. <b>The Child in the House.</b><br /> By Walter Pater.</p> - -<p>52. <b>The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.</b></p> - -<p>53. <b>The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti.</b></p> - -<p>54. <b>On Friendship.</b><br /> By R. W. Emerson and Marcus Tullius Cicero.</p> - -<p>55-56. <b>The Sketch-Book.</b><br /> By Washington Irving. 2 vols.</p> - -<p>57. <b>Robert Louis Stevenson.</b><br /> By Leslie Stephen.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span></p> - -<p>58. <b>Some of the Essays of Francis Bacon.</b></p> - -<p>59. <b>The Apology of Socrates together with the Crito, as recorded by -Plato.</b></p> - -<p>60. <b>The Phaedo: The Death of Socrates, as recorded by Plato.</b></p> - -<p>61-62. <b>Essays of Elia.</b><br /> By Charles Lamb.</p> - -<p>63. <b>Three Essays.</b><br /> By Thomas De Quincey.</p> - -<p>64. <b>The Battle of Dorking.</b><br /> By Major-General George Chesney.</p> - -<p>65. <b>Select Tales from the Gesta Romanorum.</b> Translated by Rev. C. -Swan.</p> - -<p>66. <b>Letters and Maxims.</b><br /> By Lord Chesterfield.</p> - -<p>67. <b>Peter Schlemihl.</b><br /> By Adelbert Chamisso.</p> - -<p>With plates by George Cruikshank.</p> - -<p>68. <b>A Fable for Critics.</b><br /> By James Russell Lowell.</p> - -<p>69. <b>Virginibus Puerisque.</b><br /> By Robert Louis Stevenson.</p> - -<p>70. <b>True Americanism.</b> Four Essays. By Theodore Roosevelt.</p> - -<p>71. <b>The Word for the Day.</b> Compiled by A. R.</p></div> - -<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb">FOOTNOTES:</p> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the -queer-looking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to -hint to the world the hot water they always get into.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">To demonstrate quickly and easily how per-<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Versely absurd ’tis to sound this name <i>Cowper</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">As people in general call him named <i>super</i>,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I remark that he rhymes it himself with horse-trooper.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">(If you call Snooks an owl, he will show by his looks<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That he’s morally certain you’re jealous of Snooks.)<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> (Cuts rightly called wooden, as all must admit.)</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">That, is in most cases we do, but not all,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Past a doubt, there are men who are innately small,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such as Blank, who, without being ’minished a tittle,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Might stand for a type of the Absolute Little.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">(And at this just conclusion will surely arrive,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That the goodness of earth is more dead than alive.)<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Not forgetting their tea, and their toast, though, the -while.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Turn back now to page—goodness only knows what,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And take a fresh hold on the thread of my plot.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -</div> - -</div> -<hr class="full" /> -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FABLE FOR CRITICS ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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