Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=542310" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Fable For Critics</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,<br>Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,<br>For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,<br>She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;<br>Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,<br>And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;<br>And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her,<br>He somehow or other had never forgiven her;<br>Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,<br>Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic, <br>And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over<br>By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.<br>'My case is like Dido's,' he sometimes remarked;<br>'When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked<br>In a laurel, as _she_ thought-but (ah, how Fate mocks!)<br>She has found it by this time a very bad box;<br>Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,-<br>You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.<br>Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!<br>What romance would be left?-who can flatter or kiss trees? <br>And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue<br>With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,-<br>Not to say that the thought would forever intrude<br>That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood?<br>Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,<br>To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;<br>Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,<br>As they left me forever, each making its bough!<br>If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right,<br>Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.' </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Now, Daphne-before she was happily treeified-<br>Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,<br>And when she expected the god on a visit<br>('Twas before he had made his intentions explicit),<br>Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,<br>To look as if artlessly twined in her hair,<br>Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,<br>Like the day breaking through, the long night of her tresses;<br>So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,<br>Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table <br>(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,<br>Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),-<br>He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,<br>As I shall at the--, when they cut up my book in it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I've been spinning,<br>I've got back at last to my story's beginning:<br>Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,<br>As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,<br>Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,<br>We read of his verses-the Oracles, namely,- <br>(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,<br>For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,<br>They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,<br>And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors<br>Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,-)<br>First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is<br>Would induce a mustache, for you know he's _imberbis;_<br>Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position<br>Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;<br>At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately, <br>And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;<br>'Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding felonious,-<br>Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?<br>Look well to your seat, 'tis like taking an airing<br>On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;<br>It leads one, 'tis true, through the primitive forest,<br>Grand natural features, but then one has no rest;<br>You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,<br>When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,-<br>Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?' <br>-Here the laurel leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Oh, weep with me, Daphne,' he sighed, 'for you know it's<br>A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!<br>But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,<br>She never will cry till she's out of the wood!<br>What wouldn't I give if I never had known of her?<br>'Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over:<br>If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,<br>I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,<br>And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. <br>One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,-<br>A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on;<br>What boots all your grist? it can never be ground<br>Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round;<br>(Or, if 'tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor,<br>And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,<br>Or lug in some stuff about water 'so dreamily,'-<br>It is not a metaphor, though, 'tis a simile):<br>A lily, perhaps, would set _my_ mill a-going,<br>For just at this season, I think, they are blowing. <br>Here, somebody, fetch one; not very far hence<br>They're in bloom by the score, 'tis but climbing a fence;<br>There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his<br>Whole garden, from one end to t'other, with lilies;<br>A very good plan, were it not for satiety,<br>One longs for a weed here and there, for variety;<br>Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise,<br>Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Now there happened to be among Phoebus's followers,<br>A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers, <br>Who bolt every book that comes out of the press,<br>Without the least question of larger or less,<br>Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head,-<br>For reading new books is like eating new bread,<br>One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he<br>Is brought to death's door of a mental dyspepsy.<br>On a previous stage of existence, our Hero<br>Had ridden outside, with the glass below zero;<br>He had been, 'tis a fact you may safely rely on,<br>Of a very old stock a most eminent scion,- <br>A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on,<br>Who stretch the new boots Earth's unwilling to try on,<br>Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on,<br>Whose hair's in the mortar of every new Zion,<br>Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one,<br>Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on,<br>Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, with the lion<br>(Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one),<br>Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one,<br>And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on, <br>Whose pedigree, traced to earth's earliest years,<br>Is longer than anything else but their ears,-<br>In short, he was sent into life with the wrong key,<br>He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey.<br>Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters<br>Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters;<br>Far happier than many a literary hack,<br>He bore only paper-mill rags on his back<br>(For It makes a vast difference which side the mill<br>One expends on the paper his labor and skill): <br>So, when his soul waited a new transmigration,<br>And Destiny balanced 'twixt this and that station,<br>Not having much time to expend upon bothers,<br>Remembering he'd had some connection with authors,<br>And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,-<br>She set him on two, and he came forth a critic.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took<br>In any amusement but tearing a book;<br>For him there was no intermediate stage<br>From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age; <br>There were years when he didn't wear coat-tails behind,<br>But a boy he could never be rightly defined;<br>like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span,<br>From the womb he came gravely, a little old man;<br>While other boys' trousers demanded the toil<br>Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil,<br>Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy,<br>He sat in the corner and read Viri Romae.<br>He never was known to unbend or to revel once<br>In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once; <br>He was just one of those who excite the benevolence<br>Of your old prigs who sound the soul's depths with a ledger,<br>And are on the lookout for some young men to 'edger-<br>cate,' as they call it, who won't be too costly,<br>And who'll afterward take to the ministry mostly;<br>Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious,<br>Always keep on good terms with each _mater-familias_<br>Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear<br>Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year:<br>Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions, <br>Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In this way our Hero got safely to college,<br>Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge;<br>A reading-machine, always wound up and going,<br>He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing,<br>Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin,<br>To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin<br>That Tully could never have made out a word in it<br>(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it),<br>And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee <br>All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B.,<br>He was launched (life is always compared to a sea)<br>With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,<br>To prove he'd a brain, by forever confusing it.<br>So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning<br>With the holiest zeal against secular learning,<br>_Nesciensque scienter_, as writers express it,<br>_Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit_.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew,<br>Each a separate fact, undeniably true, <br>But with him or each other they'd nothing to do;<br>No power of combining, arranging, discerning,<br>Digested the masses he learned into learning;<br>There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for<br>(And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),-<br>Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter,<br>Till he'd weighed its relations to plain bread and butter.<br>When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits<br>In compiling the journals' historical bits,-<br>Of shops broken open, men falling in fits, <br>Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers,<br>And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,-<br>Then, rising by industry, knack, and address,<br>Got notices up for an unbiased press,<br>With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for<br>Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for:<br>From this point his progress was rapid and sure,<br>To the post of a regular heavy reviewer.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> And here I must say he wrote excellent articles<br>On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles; <br>They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for,<br>And nobody read that which nobody cared for;<br>If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,<br>He could fill forty pages with safe erudition:<br>He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules,<br>And his very old nothings pleased very old fools;<br>But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart,<br>And you put him at sea without compass or chart,-<br>His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;<br>For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, <br>Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,<br>So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,<br>Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite,<br>New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet,<br>Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create<br>In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,<br>Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,<br>To compute their own judge, and assign him his place,<br>Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,<br>And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it, <br>Without the least malice,-his record would be<br>Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea,<br>Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print for our sakes,<br>Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,<br>Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a<br>Comprehensive account of the ruins at Denderah.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> As I said, he was never precisely unkind.<br>The defect in his brain was just absence of mind;<br>If he boasted, 'twas simply that he was self-made,<br>A position which I, for one, never gainsaid, <br>My respect for my Maker supposing a skill<br>In his works which our Hero would answer but ill;<br>And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he,<br>Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery,<br>And set up a kind of a man-manufactory,-<br>An event which I shudder to think about, seeing<br>That Man is a moral, accountable being.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> He meant well enough, but was still in the way,<br>As dunces still are, let them be where they may;<br>Indeed, they appear to come into existence <br>To impede other folks with their awkward assistance;<br>If you set up a dunce on the very North pole<br>All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,<br>He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins,<br>And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins,<br>To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,<br>All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice;<br>Or, if he found nobody else there to pother,<br>Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,<br>For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, <br>Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> A terrible fellow to meet in society,<br>Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea;<br>There he'd sit at the table and stir in his sugar,<br>Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar;<br>Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights,<br>Of your time,-he's as fond as an Arab of dates;<br>You'll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,<br>Of something you've seen in the course of the day;<br>And, just as you're tapering out the conclusion, <br>You venture an ill-fated classic allusion,-<br>The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!<br>The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back!<br>You had left out a comma,-your Greek's put in joint,<br>And pointed at cost of your story's whole point.<br>In the course of the evening, you find chance for certain<br>Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain:<br>You tell her your heart can be likened to _one_ flower,<br>'And that, O most charming of women, 's the sunflower,<br>Which turns'-here a clear nasal voice, to your terror, <br>From outside the curtain, says, 'That's all an error.'<br>As for him, he's-no matter, he never grew tender,<br>Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender,<br>Shaping somebody's sweet features out of cigar smoke<br>(Though he'd willingly grant you that such doings are smoke):<br>All women he damns with _mutabile semper_,<br>And if ever he felt something like love's distemper,<br>'Twas tow'rds a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican,<br>And assisted her father in making a lexicon;<br>Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious <br>About Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius,<br>Or something of that sort,-but, no more to bore ye<br>With character-painting, I'll turn to my story.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes<br>To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes,<br>The _genus_, I think it is called, _irritabile_,<br>Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily,<br>And nurses a-what is it?-_immedicabile_,<br>Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel,<br>As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel, <br>If any poor devil but look at a laurel;-<br>Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting<br>(Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting<br>Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a<br>Retreat to the shrine of a tranquil siesta),<br>Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray,<br>Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away;<br>And if that wouldn't do, he was sure to succeed,<br>If he took his review out and offered to read;<br>Or, failing in plans of this milder description, <br>He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription,<br>Considering that authorship wasn't a rich craft,<br>To print the 'American drama of Witchcraft.'<br>'Stay, I'll read you a scene,'-but he hardly began,<br>Ere Apollo shrieked 'Help!' and the authors all ran:<br>And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit,<br>And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate,<br>He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle<br>As calmly as if 'twere a nine-barrelled pistol,<br>And threatened them all with the judgment to come, <br>Of 'A wandering Star's first impressions of Rome.'<br>'Stop! stop!' with their hands o'er their ears, screamed the Muses,<br>'He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses,<br>'Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying,<br>'Tis mere massacre now that the enemy's flying;<br>If he's forced to 't again, and we happen to be there,<br>Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I called this a 'Fable for Critics;' you think it's<br>More like a display of my rhythmical trinkets;<br>My plot, like an icicle's slender and slippery, <br>Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry,<br>And the reader unwilling _in loco desipere_<br>Is free to jump over as much of my frippery<br>As he fancies, and, if he's a provident skipper, he<br>May have like Odysseus control of the gales,<br>And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails;<br>Moreover, although 'tis a slender return<br>For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn,<br>And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me,<br>You may e'en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me: <br>If too angry for that, you can tear me in pieces,<br>And my _membra disjecta_ consign to the breezes,<br>A fate like great Ratzau's, whom one of those bores,<br>Who beflead with bad verses poor Louis Quatorze,<br>Describes (the first verse somehow ends with _victoire_),<br>As _dispersant partout et ses membres et sa gloire;_<br>Or, if I were over-desirous of earning<br>A repute among noodles for classical learning,<br>I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis,<br>As new as the jests of _Didaskalos tis;_ <br>Better still, I could make out a good solid list<br>From authors recondite who do not exist,-<br>But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist<br>Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries<br>After Milton's prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris;<br>But, as Cicero says he won't say this or that<br>(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat),<br>After saying whate'er he could possibly think of,-<br>I simply will state that I pause on the brink of<br>A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion, <br>Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion:<br>So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied,<br>Just conceive how much harder your teeth you'd have gritted,<br>An 'twere not for the dulness I've kindly omitted.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I'd apologize here for my many digressions.<br>Were it not that I'm certain to trip into fresh ones<br>('Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once):<br>Just reflect, if you please, how 'tis said by Horatius,<br>That Maeonides nods now and then, and, my gracious!<br>It certainly does look a little bit ominous <br>When he gets under way with _ton d'apameibomenos_.<br>(Here a something occurs which I'll just clap a rhyme to,<br>And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,-<br>Any author a nap like Van Winkle's may take,<br>If he only contrive to keep readers awake,<br>But he'll very soon find himself laid on the shelf,<br>If _they_ fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I-<br>When Phoebus expressed his desire for a lily,<br>Our Hero, whose homoeopathic sagacity <br>With an ocean of zeal mixed his dropp of capacity,<br>Set off for the garden as fast as the wind<br>(Or, to take a comparison more to my mind,<br>As a sound politician leaves conscience behind).<br>And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps<br>O'er his principles, when something else turns up trumps.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> He was gone a long time, and Apollo, meanwhile,<br>Went over some sonnets of his with a file,<br>For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet<br>Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it; <br>It should reach with one impulse the end of its course,<br>And for one final blow collect all of its force;<br>Not a verse should be salient, but each one should tend<br>With a wave-like up-gathering to break at the end;<br>So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink,<br>He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. D--,<br>At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses<br>Went dodging about, muttering, 'Murderers! asses!'<br>From out of his pocket a paper he'd take,<br>With a proud look of martyrdom tied to its stake, <br>And, reading a squib at himself, he'd say, 'Here I see<br>'Gainst American letters a bloody conspiracy,<br>They are all by my personal enemies written;<br>I must post an anonymous letter to Britain,<br>And show that this gall is the merest suggestion<br>Of spite at my zeal on the Copyright question,<br>For, on this side the water, 'tis prudent to pull<br>O'er the eyes of the public their national wool,<br>By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull<br>All American authors who have more or less <br>Of that anti-American humbug-success,<br>While in private we're always embracing the knees<br>Of some twopenny editor over the seas,<br>And licking his critical shoes, for you know 'tis<br>The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice;<br>My American puffs I would willingly burn all<br>(They're all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal)<br>To get but a kick from a transmarine journal!'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> So, culling the gibes of each critical scorner<br>As if they were plums, and himself were Jack Horner, <br>He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner,<br>And into each hole where a weasel might pass in,<br>Expecting the knife of some critic assassin,<br>Who stabs to the heart with a caricature.<br>Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure,<br>Yet done with a dagger-o'-type, whose vile portraits<br>Disperse all one's good and condense all one's poor traits.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching,<br>And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching,-<br>'Good day, Mr. D--, I'm happy to meet <br>With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat,<br>Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries;<br>What news from that suburb of London and Paris<br>Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize<br>The credit of being the New World's metropolis?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Why, nothing of consequence, save this attack<br>On my friend there, behind, by some pitiful hack,<br>Who thinks every national author a poor one,<br>That isn't a copy of something that's foreign, <br>And assaults the American Dick-'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">  Nay, 'tis clear<br>That your Damon there's fond of a flea in his ear,<br>And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick<br>He would buy some himself, just to hear the old click;<br>Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japan<br>Should turn up his nose at the 'Poems on Man,'<br>(Which contain many verses as fine, by the bye,<br>As any that lately came under my eye,)<br>Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it,<br>Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it;<br>As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit <br>The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet;<br>Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column,<br>Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn,<br>By way of displaying his critical crosses,<br>And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis,<br>His broadsides resulting (this last there's no doubt of)<br>In successively sinking the craft they're fired out of.<br>Now nobody knows when an author is hit,<br>If he have not a public hysterical fit;<br>Let him only keep close in his snug garret's dim ether, <br>And nobody'd think of his foes-or of him either;<br>If an author have any least fibre of worth in him,<br>Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him;<br>All the critics on earth cannot crush with their ban<br>One word that's in tune with the nature of man.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Well, perhaps so; meanwhile I have brought you a book,<br>Into which if you'll just have the goodness to look,<br>You may feel so delighted (when once you are through it)<br>As to deem it not unworth your while to review it,<br>And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do, <br>A place in the next Democratic Review.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'The most thankless of gods you must surely have thought me,<br>For this is the forty-fourth copy you've brought me;<br>I have given them away, or at least I have tried,<br>But I've forty-two left, standing all side by side<br>(The man who accepted that one copy died),-<br>From one end of a shelf to the other they reach,<br>'With the author's respects' neatly written in each.<br>The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum,<br>When he hears of that order the British Museum <br>Has sent for one set of what books were first printed<br>In America, little or big,-for 'tis hinted<br>That this is the first truly tangible hope he<br>Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy.<br>I've thought very often 'twould be a good thing<br>In all public collections of books, if a wing<br>Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands,<br>Marked _Literature suited to desolate islands_,<br>And filled with such books as could never be read<br>Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,- <br>Such books as one's wrecked on in small country taverns,<br>Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns,<br>Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented,<br>As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented.<br>Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so<br>Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe;<br>And since the philanthropists just now are banging<br>And gibbeting all who're in favor of hanging<br>(Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar<br>Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter. <br>And that vital religion would dull and grow callous,<br>Unrefreshed, now and then, with a sniff of the gallows),-<br>And folks are beginning to think it looks odd,<br>To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God;<br>And that He who esteems the Virginia reel<br>A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal,<br>And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery<br>Than crushing his African children with slavery,-<br>Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon<br>Are mounted for hell on the Devil's own pillion, <br>Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows,<br>Approaches the heart through the door of the toes,-<br>That He, I was saying, whose judgments are stored<br>For such as take steps in despite of his word,<br>Should look with delight on the agonized prancing<br>Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing,<br>While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter<br>About offering to God on his favorite halter,<br>And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence,<br>Sells the clothes to a Jew, and the corpse to the surgeons;-<br>Now, instead of all this, I think I can direct you all <br>To a criminal code both humane and effectual;-<br>I propose to shut up every doer of wrong<br>With these desperate books, for such term, short or long,<br>As, by statute in such cases made and provided,<br>Shall be by your wise legislators decided:<br>Thus: Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler,<br>At hard labor for life on the works of Miss--;<br>Petty thieves, kept from flagranter crimes by their fears,<br>Shall peruse Yankee Doodle a blank term of years,- <br>That American Punch, like the English, no doubt,-<br>Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on<br>The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,-<br>A loud-cackling swarm, in whose leathers warm drest,<br>He goes for as perfect a-swan as the rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,<br>Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,<br>Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,<br>Is some of it pr-- No, 'tis not even prose; <br>I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled<br>From those rare depths of soul that have ne'er been excelled;<br>They're not epics, but that doesn't matter a pin,<br>In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;<br>A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak;<br>If you've once found the way, you've achieved the grand stroke;<br>In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,<br>But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter;<br>Now it is not one thing nor another alone<br>Makes a poem, but rather the general tone, <br>The something pervading, uniting the whole,<br>The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,<br>So that just in removing this trifle or that, you<br>Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue;<br>Roots, wood, bark, and leaves singly perfect may be,<br>But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don't make a tree.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'But, to come back to Emerson (whom, by the way,<br>I believe we left waiting),-his is, we may say,<br>A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range<br>Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange; <br>He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid<br>The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),<br>A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist<br>And the Gascon's shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;<br>All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got<br>To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what;<br>For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd<br>He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.<br>'Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me<br>To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, <br>In whose mind all creation is duly respected<br>As parts of himself-just a little projected;<br>And who's willing to worship the stars and the sun,<br>A convert to-nothing but Emerson.<br>So perfect a balance there is in his head,<br>That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead;<br>Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort,<br>He looks at as merely ideas; in short,<br>As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet,<br>Of such vast extent that our earth's a mere dab in it; <br>Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,<br>Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer;<br>You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration,<br>Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion,<br>With the quiet precision of science he'll sort 'em,<br>But you can't help suspecting the whole a _post mortem_.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There are persons, mole-blind to the soul's make and style,<br>Who insist on a likeness 'twixt him and Carlyle;<br>To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,<br>Carlyle's the more burly, but E. is the rarer; <br>He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,<br>If C.'s as original, E.'s more peculiar;<br>That he's more of a man you might say of the one,<br>Of the other he's more of an Emerson;<br>C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,-<br>E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;<br>The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,<br>Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek;<br>C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass,-<br>E.'s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; <br>C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues,<br>And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,-<br>E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,<br>And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;<br>C. shows you how every-day matters unite<br>With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,-<br>While E., in a plain, preternatural way,<br>Makes mysteries matters of mere every day;<br>C. draws all his characters quite _a la_ Fuseli,-<br>Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, <br>He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,<br>They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;<br>E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,<br>And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;-<br>To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords<br>The design of a white marble statue in words.<br>C. labors to get at the centre, and then<br>Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men;<br>E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,<br>And, given himself, has whatever is wanted. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'He has imitators in scores, who omit<br>No part of the man but his wisdom and wit,-<br>Who go carefully o'er the sky-blue of his brain,<br>And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again;<br>If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is<br>Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities,<br>As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute,<br>While a cloud that floats o'er is reflected within it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There comes--, for instance; to see him's rare sport,<br>Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short; <br>How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face.<br>To keep step with the mystagogue's natural pace!<br>He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,<br>His fingers exploring the prophet's each pocket.<br>Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,<br>Can't you let Neighbor Emerson's orchards alone?<br>Besides, 'tis no use, you'll not find e'en a core,-<br>-- has picked up all the windfalls before.<br>They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch 'em,<br>His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch 'em; <br>When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try 'em,<br>He never suspects how the sly rogues came by 'em;<br>He wonders why 'tis there are none such his trees on,<br>And thinks 'em the best he has tasted this season.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,<br>And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,<br>With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o'er him,<br>And never a fact to perplex him or bore him,<br>With a snug room at Plato's when night comes, to walk to,<br>And people from morning till midnight to talk to, <br>And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;-<br>So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,<br>For his highest conceit of a happiest state is<br>Where they'd live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis;<br>And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better,-<br>Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter;<br>He seems piling words, but there's royal dust hid<br>In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.<br>While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,<br>If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; <br>Yet his fingers itch for 'em from morning till night,<br>And he thinks he does wrong if he don't always write;<br>In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,<br>He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very full<br>With attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;<br>Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goes<br>A stream of transparent and forcible prose;<br>He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound<br>That 'tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round,<br>And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind <br>That the weathercock rules and not follows the wind;<br>Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side,<br>With no doctrine pleased that's not somewhere denied,<br>He lays the denier away on the shelf,<br>And then-down beside him lies gravely himself.<br>He's the Salt River boatman, who always stands willing<br>To convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,<br>And so fond of the trip that, when leisure's to spare,<br>He'll row himself up, if he can't get a fare. <br>The worst of it is, that his logic's so strong,<br>That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;<br>If there is only one, why, he'll split it in two,<br>And first pummel this half, then that, black and blue.<br>That white's white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow<br>To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow.<br>He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,-<br>When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe<br>But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean,)-gisms that squat 'em<br>Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the mud at the bottom. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There is Willis, all _natty_ and jaunty and gay,<br>Who says his best things in so foppish a way,<br>With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em,<br>That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em;<br>Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,<br>Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!<br>His prose had a natural grace of its own,<br>And enough of it, too, if he'd let it alone;<br>But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,<br>And is forced to forgive where one might have admired; <br>Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,<br>It runs like a stream with a musical waste,<br>And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;-<br>'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep?<br>In a country where scarcely a village is found<br>That has not its author sublime and profound,<br>For some one to be slightly shallow's a duty,<br>And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty.<br>His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,<br>And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror: <br>'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;<br>'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz;<br>It is Nature herself, and there's something in that,<br>Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.<br>Few volumes I know to read under a tree,<br>More truly delightful than his A l'Abri,<br>With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,<br>Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;<br>With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,<br>Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over, <br>And Nature to criticise still as you read,-<br>The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'He's so innate a cockney, that had he been born<br>Where plain bare-skin's the only full-dress that is worn,<br>He'd have given his own such an air that you'd say<br>'T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.<br>His nature's a glass of champagne with the foam on 't,<br>As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;<br>So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;<br>If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it and shake it, <br>But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it.<br>He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,<br>If he would not sometimes leave the _r_ out of sprightfulness;<br>And he ought to let Scripture alone-'tis self-slaughter,<br>For nobody likes inspiration-and-water.<br>He'd have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,<br>Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid,<br>His wit running up as Canary ran down,-<br>The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man <br>Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban<br>(The Church of Socinus, I mean),-his opinions<br>Being So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians:<br>They believed-faith, I'm puzzled-I think I may call<br>Their belief a believing in nothing at all,<br>Or something of that sort; I know they all went<br>For a general union of total dissent:<br>He went a step farther; without cough or hem,<br>He frankly avowed he believed not in them;<br>And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented, <br>From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.<br>There was heresy here, you perceive, for the right<br>Of privately judging means simply that light<br>Has been granted to _me_, for deciding on _you;_<br>And in happier times, before Atheism grew,<br>The deed contained clauses for cooking you too:<br>Now at Xerxes and Knut we all laugh, yet our foot<br>With the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,<br>And we all entertain a secure private notion,<br>That our _Thus far!_ will have a great weight with the ocean,<br>'Twas so with our liberal Christians: they bore <br>With sincerest conviction their chairs to the shore;<br>They brandished their worn theological birches,<br>Bade natural progress keep out of the Churches,<br>And expected the lines they had drawn to prevail<br>With the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;<br>They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,<br>And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;<br>But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,<br>And cared (shall I say?) not a d-- for their damming; <br>So they first read him out of their church, and next minute<br>Turned round and declared he had never been in it.<br>But the ban was too small or the man was too big,<br>For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig<br>(He scarce looks like a man who would _stay_ treated shabbily,<br>Sophroniscus' son's head o'er the features of Rabelais):-<br>He bangs and bethwacks them,-their backs he salutes<br>With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;<br>His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,<br>And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht, <br>Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,<br>Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, _that_ he's no faith in),<br>Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,<br>Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,<br>Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis,<br>Musaeus, Muretus, _hem_,-[Greek: m] Scorpionis,<br>Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac-Mac-ah! Machiavelli,<br>Condorcet, Count d'Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,<br>Orion, O'Connell, the Chevalier D'O,<br>(See the Memoirs of Sully,) [Greek: to pan], the great toe <br>Of the statue of Jupiter, now made to pass<br>For that of Jew Peter by good Romish brass,<br>(You may add for yourselves, for I find it a bore,<br>All the names you have ever, or not, heard before,<br>And when you've done that-why, invent a few more).<br>His hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand,<br>If in that day's discourse they'll be Bibled or Koraned,<br>For he's seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired)<br>That all men (not orthodox) _may be_ inspired;<br>Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,<br>He makes it quite clear what he _doesn't_ believe in, <br>While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom Come<br>Is a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,<br>Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumb<br>Would be left, if we didn't keep carefully mum,<br>And, to make a clean breast, that 'tis perfectly plain<br>That _all_ kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;<br>Now P.'s creed than this may be lighter or darker,<br>But in one thing, 'tis clear, he has faith, namely-Parker;<br>And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher, <br>There's a background of god to each hard-working feature,<br>Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced<br>In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest:<br>There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest,<br>If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least,<br>His gestures all downright and same, if you will,<br>As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;<br>But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,<br>Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak,<br>You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet <br>With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,<br>And to hear, you're not over-particular whence,<br>Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,<br>As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,<br>Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights<br>With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.<br>He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation<br>(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme iceolation),<br>Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, <br>But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,-<br>He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:<br>Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,<br>But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;<br>If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,<br>Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'He is very nice reading in summer, but _inter<br>Nos_, we don't want _extra_ freezing in winter;<br>Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,<br>When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices. <br>But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him,<br>He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;<br>And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is,<br>Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities-<br>To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?<br>No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their limestone and granite.<br>If you're one who _in loco_ (add _foco_ here) _desipis_,<br>You will get out of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;<br>But you'd get deeper down if you came as a precipice,<br>And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain, <br>If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.<br>Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,<br>Some scholar who's hourly expecting his learning,<br>Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth<br>May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth.<br>No, don't be absurd, he's an excellent Bryant;<br>But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client,<br>By attempting to stretch him up into a giant;<br>If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per-<br>-sons fit for a parallel-Thomson and Cowper; <br>I don't mean exactly,-there's something of each,<br>There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach;<br>Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness<br>Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness,<br>And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,<br>Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,-<br>A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on<br>The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,-<br>A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,<br>Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic; <br>He's a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,<br>And the advantage that Wordsworth before him had written.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'But, my dear little bardlings, don't prick up your ears<br>Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;<br>If I call him an iceberg, I don't mean to say<br>There is nothing in that which is grand in its way;<br>He is almost the one of your poets that knows<br>How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;<br>If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar<br>His thought's modest fulness by going too far; <br>'T would be well if your authors should all make a trial<br>Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial,<br>And measure their writings by Hesiod's staff,<br>Which teaches that all has less value than half.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart<br>Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,<br>And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,<br>Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;<br>There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing<br>Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing; <br>And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)<br>From the very same cause that has made him a poet,-<br>A fervor of mind which knows no separation<br>'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,<br>As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing<br>If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;<br>Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction<br>And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,<br>While, borne with the rush of the metre along,<br>The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, <br>Content with the whirl and delirium of song;<br>Then his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,<br>And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,<br>Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats<br>When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,<br>And can ne'er be repeated again any more<br>Than they could have been carefully plotted before:<br>Like old what's-his-name there at the battle of Hastings<br>(Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings),<br>Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights <br>For reform and whatever they call human rights,<br>Both singing and striking in front of the war,<br>And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;<br>_Anne haec_, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,<br>_Vestis filii tui_, O leather-clad Fox?<br>Can that be thy son, in the battle's mid din,<br>Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in<br>To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,<br>With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring<br>Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling? </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard<br>Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard,<br>Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave<br>When to look but a protest in silence was brave;<br>All honor and praise to the women and men<br>Who spoke out for the dumb and the down-trodden then!<br>It needs not to name them, already for each<br>I see History preparing the statue and niche;<br>They were harsh, but shall _you_ be so shocked at hard words<br>Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords, <br>Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gain<br>By the reaping of men and of women than grain?<br>Why should _you_ stand aghast at their fierce wordy war, if<br>You scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?<br>Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day long<br>Doesn't prove that the use of hard language is wrong;<br>While the World's heart beats quicker to think of such men<br>As signed Tyranny's doom with a bloody steel-pen,<br>While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright one<br>With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton, <br>You need not look shy at your sisters and brothers<br>Who stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;-<br>No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and true<br>Who, for sake of the many, dared stand with the few,<br>Not of blood-spattered laurel for enemies braved,<br>But of broad, peaceful oak-leaves for citizens saved!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along,<br>Involved in a paulo-post-future of song,<br>Who'll be going to write what'll never be written<br>Till the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,- <br>Who is so well aware of how things should be done,<br>That his own works displease him before they're begun,-<br>Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,<br>That the best of his poems is written in prose;<br>All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,<br>He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;<br>In a very grave question his soul was immersed,-<br>Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first:<br>And, while this point and that he judicially dwelt on,<br>He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton, <br>Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,<br>You'll allow only genius could hit upon either.<br>That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,<br>But I fear he will never be anything more;<br>The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,<br>The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o'er him.<br>He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,<br>He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,<br>Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,<br>In learning to swim on his library table. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine<br>The sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,<br>Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he<br>Preferred to believe that he was so already;<br>Too hasty to wait till Art's ripe fruit should drop,<br>He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop;<br>Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it,<br>It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it;<br>A man who's made less than he might have, because<br>He always has thought himself more than he was,- <br>Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,<br>Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,<br>And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,<br>Because song drew less instant attention than noise.<br>Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,<br>That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,<br>And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.<br>No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;<br>His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;<br>'Tis the modest man ripens, 'tis he that achieves, <br>Just what's needed of sunshine and shade he receives;<br>Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;<br>Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,<br>Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;<br>He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,<br>That he strips himself naked to prove he's a poet,<br>And, to show he could leap Art's wide ditch, if he tried,<br>Jumps clean o'er it, and into the hedge t'other side.<br>He has strength, but there's nothing about him in keeping;<br>One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping; <br>He has used his own sinews himself to distress,<br>And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;<br>In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;<br>Could he only have waited he might have been great;<br>But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,<br>And muddied the stream ere he took his first taste.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare<br>That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;<br>A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,<br>So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet, <br>Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;<br>'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,<br>With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,<br>Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,<br>With a single anemone trembly and rathe;<br>His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,<br>That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,-<br>He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck;<br>When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted<br>For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, <br>So, to fill out her model, a little she spared<br>From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,<br>And she could not have hit a more excellent plan<br>For making him fully and perfectly man.<br>The success of her scheme gave her so much delight,<br>That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight;<br>Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,<br>She sang to her work in her sweet childish way,<br>And found, when she'd put the last touch to his soul,<br>That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show<br>He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;<br>If a person prefer that description of praise,<br>Why, a coronet's certainly cheaper than bays;<br>But he need take no pains to convince us he's not<br>(As his enemies say) the American Scott.<br>Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud<br>That one of his novels of which he's most proud,<br>And I'd lay any bet that, without ever quitting<br>Their box, they'd be all, to a man, for acquitting. <br>He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,<br>One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew<br>Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince,<br>He has done naught but copy it ill ever since;<br>His Indians, with proper respect be it said,<br>Are just Natty Bumppo, daubed over with red,<br>And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat,<br>Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'wester hat<br>(Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found<br>To have slipped the old fellow away underground). <br>All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,<br>The _derniere chemise_ of a man in a fix<br>(As a captain besieged, when his garrison's small,<br>Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall):<br>And the women he draws from one model don't vary.<br>All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.<br>When a character's wanted, he goes to the task<br>As a cooper would do in composing a cask;<br>He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,<br>Just hoops them together as tight as is needful, <br>And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he<br>Has made at the most something wooden and empty.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Don't suppose I would underrate Cooper's abilities;<br>If I thought you'd do that, I should feel very ill at ease;<br>The men who have given to _one_ character life<br>And objective existence are not very rife;<br>You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers,<br>Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers,<br>And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker<br>Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is<br>That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis;<br>Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity,<br>He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.<br>Now he may overcharge his American pictures,<br>But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his strictures;<br>And I honor the man who is willing to sink<br>Half his present repute for the freedom to think,<br>And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,<br>Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, <br>Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,<br>Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There are truths you Americans need to be told,<br>And it never'll refute them to swagger and scold;<br>John Bull, looking o'er the Atlantic, in choler<br>At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;<br>But to scorn such eye-dollar-try's what very few do,<br>And John goes to that church as often as you do,<br>No matter what John says, don't try to outcrow him,<br>'Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; <br>Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One<br>Displacing himself in the mind of his son,<br>And detests the same faults in himself he'd neglected<br>When he sees them again in his child's glass reflected;<br>To love one another you're too like by half;<br>If he is a bull, you're a pretty stout calf,<br>And tear your own pasture for naught but to show<br>What a nice pair of horns you're beginning to grow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There are one or two things I should just like to hint,<br>For you don't often get the truth told you in print; <br>The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)<br>Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;<br>Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,<br>You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;<br>Though you brag of your New World, you don't half believe in it;<br>And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;<br>Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,<br>With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,<br>With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free,<br>And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, <br>Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,<br>Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,<br>Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass,<br>Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked glass.<br>Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist,<br>And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;<br>She loses her fresh country charm when she takes<br>Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought,<br>With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught; <br>Your literature suits its each whisper and motion<br>To what will be thought of it over the ocean;<br>The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries<br>And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-<br>Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,<br>To which the dull current in hers is but mud:<br>Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,<br>In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she rails,<br>And your shore will soon be in the nature of things<br>Covered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings, <br>Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif,<br>Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.<br>O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he<br>'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;<br>Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,<br>By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,<br>Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,<br>As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,<br>Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,<br>To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true, <br>Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call,<br>Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,<br>Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks,<br>And become my new race of more practical Greeks.-<br>Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't,<br>Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic<br>More pepper than brains, shrieked, 'The man's a fanatic,<br>I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers,<br>And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers; <br>But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason 't,<br>Palaver before condemnation's but decent:<br>So, through my humble person, Humanity begs<br>Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.'<br>But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth<br>As when [Greek: aeie nukti eoikios], and so forth,<br>And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way,<br>But, as he was going, gained courage to say,-<br>'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels,<br>I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' <br>'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet<br>With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,'<br>Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us,<br>'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss<br>Is only in taking a great busy nation<br>For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.-<br>But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to?<br>She has such a penchant for bothering me too!<br>She always keeps asking if I don't observe a<br>Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva; <br>She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-<br>She's been travelling now, and will be worse than ever;<br>One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be<br>Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea,<br>For a woman must surely see well, if she try,<br>The whole of whose</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=James+Russell+Lowell">James Russell Lowell</a><div class=q>
<img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share">
<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=542310" data-title="A Fable For Critics de James Russell Lowell" data-description="Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;
Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,
..."></div>
</div>
</div>