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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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