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, 290 If any poor devil but look at a laurel;— Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting (Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a Retreat to the shrine of a tranquil siesta), Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray, Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away; And if that wouldn't do, he was sure to succeed, If he took his review out and offered to read; Or, failing in plans of this milder description, 300 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, 310 Of 'A wandering Star's first impressions of Rome.' 'Stop! stop!' with their hands o'er their ears, screamed the Muses, 'He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses, 'Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying, 'Tis mere massacre now that the enemy's flying; If he's forced to 't again, and we happen to be there, Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether.'

I called this a 'Fable for Critics;' you think it's More like a display of my rhythmical trinkets; My plot, like an icicle's slender and slippery, 320 Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry, And the reader unwilling in loco desipere Is free to jump over as much of my frippery As he fancies, and, if he's a provident skipper, he May have like Odysseus control of the gales, And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails; Moreover, although 'tis a slender return For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn, And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me, You may e'en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me: 330 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; 340 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, 350 Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion: So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied, Just conceive how much harder your teeth you'd have gritted, An 'twere not for the dulness I've kindly omitted.

I'd apologize here for my many digressions. Were it not that I'm certain to trip into fresh ones ('Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once); Just reflect, if you please, how 'tis said by Horatius, That Maeonides nods now and then, and, my gracious! It certainly does look a little bit ominous 360 When he gets under way with ton d'apameibomenos. (Here a something occurs which I'll just clap a rhyme to, And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,— Any author a nap like Van Winkle's may take, If he only contrive to keep readers awake, But he'll very soon find himself laid on the shelf, If they fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)

Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I— When Phoebus expressed his desire for a lily, Our Hero, whose homoeopathic sagacity 370 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; 380 It should reach with one impulse the end of its course, And for one final blow collect all of its force; Not a verse should be salient, but each one should tend With a wave-like up-gathering to break at the end; So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink, He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. D——, At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses Went dodging about, muttering, 'Murderers! asses!' From out of his pocket a paper he'd take, With a proud look of martyrdom tied to its stake, 390 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 400 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, 410 He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner, And into each hole where a weasel might pass in, Expecting the knife of some critic assassin, Who stabs to the heart with a caricature. Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure, Yet done with a dagger-o'-type, whose vile portraits Disperse all one's good and condense all one's poor traits.

Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching, And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching,— 'Good day, Mr. D——, I'm happy to meet 420 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, 429 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 440 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, 450 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, 460 A place in the next Democratic Review.'

'The most thankless of gods you must surely have thought me, For this is the forty-fourth copy you've brought me; I have given them away, or at least I have tried, But I've forty-two left, standing all side by side (The man who accepted that one copy died),— From one end of a shelf to the other they reach, "With the author's respects" neatly written in each. The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum, When he hears of that order the British Museum 470 Has sent for one set of what books were first printed In America, little or big,—for 'tis hinted That this is the first truly tangible hope he Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy. I've thought very often 'twould be a good thing In all public collections of books, if a wing Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands, Marked Literature suited to desolate islands, And filled with such books as could never be read Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,— 480 Such books as one's wrecked on in small country taverns, Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns, Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented, As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented. Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe; And since the philanthropists just now are banging And gibbeting all who're in favor of hanging (Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter. 490 And that vital religion would dull and grow callous, Unrefreshed, now and then, with a sniff of the gallows),— And folks are beginning to think it looks odd, To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God; And that He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing his African children with slavery,— Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the Devil's own pillion, 500 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 511 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,— 520 That American Punch, like the English, no doubt,— Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.

'But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,— A loud-cackling swarm, in whose leathers warm drest, He goes for as perfect a—swan as the rest.

'There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr—— No, 'tis not even prose; 530 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, 540 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; 550 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, 560 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; 570 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; 580 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; 590 C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues, And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,— E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense; C. shows you how every-day matters unite With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,— While E., in a plain, preternatural way, Makes mysteries matters of mere every day; C. draws all his characters quite a la Fuseli,— Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, 600 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. 610

'He has imitators in scores, who omit No part of the man but his wisdom and wit,— Who go carefully o'er the sky-blue of his brain, And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again; If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities, As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute, While a cloud that floats o'er is reflected within it.

'There comes——, for instance; to see him's rare sport, Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short; 620 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; 630 When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try 'em, He never suspects how the sly rogues came by 'em; He wonders why 'tis there are none such his trees on, And thinks 'em the best he has tasted this season.

'Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o'er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato's when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, 640 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; 650 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 661 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. 670 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. 680

'There is Willis, all natty and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose, Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose! His prose had a natural grace of its own, And enough of it, too, if he'd let it alone; But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired, And is forced to forgive where one might have admired; 690 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: 700 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice; 'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz; It is Nature herself, and there's something in that, Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat. Few volumes I know to read under a tree, More truly delightful than his A l'Abri, With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book, Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook; With June coming softly your shoulder to look over, Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over, 710 And Nature to criticise still as you read,— The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.

'He's so innate a cockney, that had he been born Where plain bare-skin's the only full-dress that is worn, He'd have given his own such an air that you'd say 'T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway. His nature's a glass of champagne with the foam on 't, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont; So his best things are done in the flush of the moment; If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it and shake it, 720 But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it. He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness, If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness; And he ought to let Scripture alone—'tis self-slaughter, For nobody likes inspiration-and-water. He'd have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid, Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid, His wit running up as Canary ran down,— The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.

'Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man 730 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, 740 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 751 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; 760 So they first read him out of their church, and next minute Turned round and declared he had never been in it. But the ban was too small or the man was too big, For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig (He scarce looks like a man who would stay treated shabbily, Sophroniscus' son's head o'er the features of Rabelais);— He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutes With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots; His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced, And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht, 770 Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan, Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, that he's no faith in), Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson, Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson, Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis, Musaeus, Muretus, hem,—[Greek: m] Scorpionis, Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac—Mac—ah! Machiavelli, Condorcet, Count d'Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli, Orion, O'Connell, the Chevalier D'O, (See the Memoirs of Sully,) [Greek: to pan], the great toe 780 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, 791 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, 800 There's a background of god to each hard-working feature, Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest: There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest, If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least, His gestures all downright and same, if you will, As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill; But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke, Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak, You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet 810 With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street, And to hear, you're not over-particular whence, Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense.

'There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified, Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights. He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation (There's no doubt that he stands in supreme iceolation), Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, 820 But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,— He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on: Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em, But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm; If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul, Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

'He is very nice reading in summer, but inter Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter; Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is, When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices. 830 But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him, He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him; And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is, Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities— To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet? No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their limestone and granite. If you're one who in loco (add foco here) desipis, You will get out of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece; But you'd get deeper down if you came as a precipice, And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain, 840 If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain. Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning, Some scholar who's hourly expecting his learning, Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth. No, don't be absurd, he's an excellent Bryant; But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client, By attempting to stretch him up into a giant; If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per- -sons fit for a parallel—Thomson and Cowper;[2] 850 I don't mean exactly,—there's something of each, There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach; Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness, And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,— A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,— A brain which, without being slow or mechanic, Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic; 860 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; 870 'T would be well if your authors should all make a trial Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial, And measure their writings by Hesiod's staff, Which teaches that all has less value than half.

'There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing; 880 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, 890 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 900 For reform and whatever they call human rights, Both singing and striking in front of the war, And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor; Anne haec, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks, Vestis filii tui, O leather-clad Fox? Can that be thy son, in the battle's mid din, Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin, With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling? 910

'All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard, Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave When to look but a protest in silence was brave; All honor and praise to the women and men Who spoke out for the dumb and the down-trodden then! It needs not to name them, already for each I see History preparing the statue and niche; They were harsh, but shall you be so shocked at hard words Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords, 920 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, 930 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,— 940 Who is so well aware of how things should be done, That his own works displease him before they're begun,— Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows, That the best of his poems is written in prose; All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting, He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating; In a very grave question his soul was immersed,— Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first: And, while this point and that he judicially dwelt on, He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton, 950 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. 960

'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,— 970 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, 980 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; 990 He has used his own sinews himself to distress, And had done vastly more had he done vastly less; In letters, too soon is as bad as too late; Could he only have waited he might have been great; But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist, And muddied the stream ere he took his first taste.

'There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet, 1000 Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,— He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck; When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, 1010 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. 1020

'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. 1030 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). 1040 All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, The derniere chemise of a man in a fix (As a captain besieged, when his garrison's small, Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall); And the women he draws from one model don't vary. All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. When a character's wanted, he goes to the task As a cooper would do in composing a cask; He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful, Just hoops them together as tight as is needful, 1050 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. 1060

'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, 1070 Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

'There are truths you Americans need to be told, And it never'll refute them to swagger and scold; John Bull, looking o'er the Atlantic, in choler At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar; But to scorn such eye-dollar-try's what very few do, And John goes to that church as often as you do, No matter what John says, don't try to outcrow him, 'Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; 1080 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; 1090 The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves; Though you brag of your New World, you don't half believe in it; And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it; Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free, And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, 1100 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; 1110 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, 1120 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, 1130 Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks, And become my new race of more practical Greeks.— Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't, Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot.'

Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic More pepper than brains, shrieked, 'The man's a fanatic, I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers; 1140 But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason 't, Palaver before condemnation's but decent: So, through my humble person, Humanity begs Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.' But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth As when [Greek: aeie nukti eoikios], and so forth, And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,— 'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' 1150 'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,' Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, 'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.— But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to? She has such a penchant for bothering me too! She always keeps asking if I don't observe a Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva; 1160 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; 1170 And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. There is one thing she owns in her own single right, It is native and genuine—namely, her spite; Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose.'

Here Miranda came up, and said, 'Phoebus! you know That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe, As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl, Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul; 1180 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 1190 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 1200 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, 1210 For 'tis dotted as thick as a peacock's with I's), Apropos of Miranda, I'll rest on my oars And drift through a trifling digression on bores, For, though not wearing ear-rings in more majorum, Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore 'em. There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least, Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast, And of all quiet pleasures the very ne plus Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us. Archaeologians, I know, who have personal fears 1220 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:— 1230 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. 1240 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, 1250 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; 1260 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; 1270 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; 1280 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, 1290 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, 1300 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; 1310 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; 1320 As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is, So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes; I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o't is That I've heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies, And my ear with that music impregnate may be, Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea, Or as one can't bear Strauss when his nature is cloven To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven; But, set that aside, and 'tis truth that I speak, Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek, 1330 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; 1340 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; 1350 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, 1360 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 1370 Like decree of her father died Iphigenia; At first he declared he himself would be blowed Ere his conscience with such a foul crime he would load, But the thought, coming oft, grew less dark than before, And he mused, as each creditor knocked at his door, If this were but done they would dun me no more; I told Philothea his struggles and doubts, And how he considered the ins and the outs Of the visions he had, and the dreadful dyspepsy, How he went to the seer that lives at Po'keepsie, 1380 How the seer advised him to sleep on it first, And to read his big volume in case of the worst, And further advised he should pay him five dollars For writing [Old English: Hum Hum] on his wristbands and collars; Three years and ten days these dark words he had studied When the daughter was missed, and the aloe had budded; I told how he watched it grow large and more large, And wondered how much for the show he should charge,— She had listened with utter indifference to this, till I told how it bloomed, and, discharging its pistil 1390 With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot The botanical filicide dead on the spot; It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains, For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains, And the crime was blown also, because on the wad, Which was paper, was writ "Visitation of God," As well as a thrilling account of the deed Which the coroner kindly allowed me to read.

'Well, my friend took this story up just, to be sure, 1399 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, 1410 And folks with a mission that nobody knows Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose; She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope Converge to some focus of rational hope, And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall Can transmute into honey,—but this is not all; Not only for those she has solace, oh say, Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway, Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human, To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman, 1420 Hast thou not found one shore where those tired drooping feet Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat The soothed head in silence reposing could hear The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear? Ah, there's many a beam from the fountain of day That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way, Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope; Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin, 1430 And to bring into each, or to find there, some line Of the never completely out-trampled divine; If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 'Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen, As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain; What a wealth would it tiring to the narrow and sour Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!

'What! Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain, You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain, 1440 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, 1449 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, 1460 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, 1470 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; 1480 Full of tenderness, too, though it shrinks in the dark, Hamadryad-like, under the coarse, shaggy bark; That sees visions, knows wrestlings of God with the Will, And has its own Sinais and thunderings still.'

Here, 'Forgive me, Apollo,' I cried, 'while I pour My heart out to my birthplace: O loved more and more Dear Baystate, from whose rocky bosom thy sons Should suck milk, strong-will-giving, brave, such as runs In the veins of old Greylock—who is it that dares 1489 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: 1500 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, 1510 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; 1520 Thou hast printed them deep for all time; they are set From the same runic type-fount and alphabet With thy stout Berkshire hills and the arms of thy Bay,— They are staves from the burly old Mayflower lay. If the drones of the Old World, in querulous ease, Ask thy Art and thy Letters, point proudly to these, Or, if they deny these are Letters and Art, Toil on with the same old invincible heart; Thou art rearing the pedestal broad-based and grand Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand, 1530 And creating, through labors undaunted and long, The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song!

'But my good mother Baystate wants no praise of mine, She learned from her mother a precept divine About something that butters no parsnips, her forte In another direction lies, work is her sport (Though she'll curtsey and set her cap straight, that she will, If you talk about Plymouth and red Bunker's hill). Dear, notable goodwife! by this time of night, Her hearth is swept neatly, her fire burning bright, 1540 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; 1550 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 1560 A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes, Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully, And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning Would flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning. He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre, But many admire it, the English pentameter, And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse, With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse, Nor e'er achieved aught in't so worthy of praise 1570 As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise. You went crazy last year over Bulwer's New Timon;— Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on, Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes. His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are your own or your foes'.

'There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb 1580 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. 1589

'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 1600 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, 1610 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 1620 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; 1629 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 1640 Is only the normal proceeding of nature. What puff the strained sails of your praise will you furl at, if The calmest degree that you know is superlative? At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must, As a matter of course, be well issimust and errimust, A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost, That his friends would take care he was [Greek: istost] and [Greek: otatost], And formerly we, as through graveyards we past, Thought the world went from bad to worst fearfully fast; Let us glance for a moment, 'tis well worth the pains, 1650 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, 1660 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 1670 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 1680 Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head, And their daughters for—faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi: Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual blackeye: Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer: Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor: Two dozen of Italy's exiles who shoot us his Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses, Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,[7] Mount serenely their country's funereal pile: Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers 1690 'Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars, Who shake their dread fists o'er the sea and all that,— As long as a copper drops into the hat: Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark From Vaterland's battle just won—in the Park, Who the happy profession of martyrdom take Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak; Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jacksons: And so many everythings else that it racks one's Poor memory too much to continue the list, 1700 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, 1710 But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong; I hunted the garden from one end to t'other, And got no reward but vexation and bother, Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither, This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither.'

'Did he think I had given him a book to review? I ought to have known what the fellow would do,' Muttered Phoebus aside, 'for a thistle will pass Beyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass; He has chosen in just the same way as he'd choose 1720 His specimens out of the books he reviews; And now, as this offers an excellent text, I'll give 'em some brief hints on criticism next.' So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd, And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud:—

'My friends, in the happier days of the muse, We were luckily free from such things as reviews; Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer The heart of the poet to that of his hearer; Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they 1730 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; 1740 '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, 1750 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 1760 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 1770 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 subjective, what Kettle calls Pot, Precisely, at all events, what he ought not, You have done this, says one judge; done that, says another; You should have done this, grumbles one; that, says t'other; Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out Taboo! 1780 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, 1790 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 1800 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.



THE UNHAPPY LOT OF MR. KNOTT

PART I

SHOWING HOW HE BUILT HIS HOUSE AND HIS WIFE MOVED INTO IT

My worthy friend, A. Gordon Knott, From business snug withdrawn, Was much contented with a lot That would contain a Tudor cot 'Twixt twelve feet square of garden-plot, And twelve feet more of lawn.

He had laid business on the shelf To give his taste expansion, And, since no man, retired with pelf, The building mania can shun, 10 Knott, being middle-aged himself, Resolved to build (unhappy elf!) A mediaeval mansion.

He called an architect in counsel; 'I want,' said he, 'a—you know what, (You are a builder, I am Knott) A thing complete from chimney-pot Down to the very grounsel; Here's a half-acre of good land; Just have it nicely mapped and planned 20 And make your workmen drive on; Meadow there is, and upland too, And I should like a water-view, D'you think you could contrive one? (Perhaps the pump and trough would do, If painted a judicious blue?) The woodland I've attended to;' [He meant three pines stuck up askew, Two dead ones and a live one.] 'A pocket-full of rocks 'twould take 30 To build a house of freestone, But then it is not hard to make What nowadays is the stone; The cunning painter in a trice Your house's outside petrifies, And people think it very gneiss Without inquiring deeper; My money never shall be thrown Away on such a deal of stone, When stone of deal is cheaper.' 40

And so the greenest of antiques Was reared for Knott to dwell in: The architect worked hard for weeks In venting all his private peaks Upon the roof, whose crop of leaks Had satisfied Fluellen; Whatever anybody had Out of the common, good or bad, Knott had it all worked well in; A donjon-keep, where clothes might dry, 50 A porter's lodge that was a sty, A campanile slim and high, Too small to hang a bell in; All up and down and here and there, With Lord-knows-whats of round and square Stuck on at random everywhere,— It was a house to make one stare, All corners and all gables; Like dogs let loose upon a bear, Ten emulous styles staboyed with care, 60 The whole among them seemed to tear, And all the oddities to spare Were set upon the stables.

Knott was delighted with a pile Approved by fashion's leaders: (Only he made the builder smile, By asking every little while, Why that was called the Twodoor style, Which certainly had three doors?) Yet better for this luckless man 70 If he had put a downright ban Upon the thing in limine; For, though to quit affairs his plan, Ere many days, poor Knott began Perforce accepting draughts, that ran All ways—except up chimney; The house, though painted stone to mock, With nice white lines round every block, Some trepidation stood in, When tempests (with petrific shock, 80 So to speak,) made it really rock, Though not a whit less wooden; And painted stone, howe'er well done, Will not take in the prodigal sun Whose beams are never quite at one With our terrestrial lumber; So the wood shrank around the knots, And gaped in disconcerting spots, And there were lots of dots and rots And crannies without number, 90 Wherethrough, as you may well presume, The wind, like water through a flume, Came rushing in ecstatic, Leaving, in all three floors, no room That was not a rheumatic; And, what with points and squares and rounds Grown shaky on their poises, The house at nights was full of pounds, Thumps, bumps, creaks, scratchings, raps—till—'Zounds!' Cried Knott, 'this goes beyond all bounds; 100 I do not deal in tongues and sounds, Nor have I let my house and grounds To a family of Noyeses!'

But, though Knott's house was full of airs, He had but one,—a daughter; And, as he owned much stocks and shares, Many who wished to render theirs Such vain, unsatisfying cares, And needed wives to sew their tears, In matrimony sought her; 110 They vowed her gold they wanted not, Their faith would never falter, They longed to tie this single Knott In the Hymeneal halter; So daily at the door they rang, Cards for the belle delivering, Or in the choir at her they sang, Achieving such a rapturous twang As set her nerves ashivering.

Now Knott had quite made up his mind 120 That Colonel Jones should have her; No beauty he, but oft we find Sweet kernels 'neath a roughish rind, So hoped his Jenny'd be resigned And make no more palaver; Glanced at the fact that love was blind, That girls were ratherish inclined To pet their little crosses, Then nosologically defined The rate at which the system pined 130 In those unfortunates who dined Upon that metaphoric kind Of dish—their own proboscis.

But she, with many tears and moans, Besought him not to mock her. Said 'twas too much for flesh and bones To marry mortgages and loans, That fathers' hearts were stocks and stones. And that she'd go, when Mrs. Jones, To Davy Jones's locker; 140 Then gave her head a little toss That said as plain as ever was, If men are always at a loss Mere womankind to bridle— To try the thing on woman cross Were fifty times as idle; For she a strict resolve had made And registered in private, That either she would die a maid, Or else be Mrs. Doctor Slade, 150 If a woman could contrive it; And, though the wedding-day was set, Jenny was more so, rather, Declaring, in a pretty pet, That, howsoe'er they spread their net, She would out-Jennyral them yet, The colonel and her father.

Just at this time the Public's eyes Were keenly on the watch, a stir Beginning slowly to arise 160 About those questions and replies. Those raps that unwrapped mysteries So rapidly at Rochester, And Knott, already nervous grown By lying much awake alone. And listening, sometimes to a moan, And sometimes to a clatter, Whene'er the wind at night would rouse The gingerbread-work on his house, Or when some, hasty-tempered mouse, 170 Behind the plastering, made a towse About a family matter, Began to wonder if his wife, A paralytic half her life. Which made it more surprising, Might not, to rule him from her urn, Have taken a peripatetic turn For want of exorcising.

This thought, once nestled in his head, Erelong contagious grew, and spread 180 Infecting all his mind with dread, Until at last he lay in bed And heard his wife, with well-known tread, Entering the kitchen through the shed, (Or was't his fancy, mocking?) Opening the pantry, cutting bread, And then (she'd been some ten years dead) Closets and drawers unlocking; Or, in his room (his breath grew thick) 189 He heard the long-familiar click Of slender needles flying quick, As if she knit a stocking; For whom?—he prayed that years might flit With pains rheumatic shooting, Before those ghostly things she knit Upon his unfleshed sole might fit, He did not fancy it a bit, To stand upon that footing: At other times, his frightened hairs 199 Above the bedclothes trusting, He heard her, full of household cares, (No dream entrapped in supper's snares, The foal of horrible nightmares, But broad awake, as he declares), Go bustling up and down the stairs, Or setting back last evening's chairs, Or with the poker thrusting The raked-up sea-coal's hardened crust— And—what! impossible! it must! He knew she had returned to dust, 210 And yet could scarce his senses trust, Hearing her as she poked and fussed About the parlor, dusting!

Night after night he strove to sleep And take his ease in spite of it; But still his flesh would chill and creep, And, though two night-lamps he might keep, He could not so make light of it. At last, quite desperate, he goes And tells his neighbors all his woes, 220 Which did but their amount enhance; They made such mockery of his fears That soon his days were of all jeers. His nights of the rueful countenance; 'I thought most folks,' one neighbor said, 'Gave up the ghost when they were dead?' Another gravely shook his head, Adding, 'From all we hear, it's Quite plain poor Knott is going mad— For how can he at once be sad 230 And think he's full of spirits?' A third declared he knew a knife Would cut this Knott much quicker, 'The surest way to end all strife, And lay the spirit of a wife, Is just to take and lick her!' A temperance man caught up the word, 'Ah yes,' he groaned, 'I've always heard Our poor friend somewhat slanted 239 Tow'rd taking liquor overmuch; I fear these spirits may be Dutch, (A sort of gins, or something such,) With which his house is haunted; I see the thing as clear as light,— If Knott would give up getting tight, Naught farther would be wanted:' So all his neighbors stood aloof And, that the spirits 'neath his roof Were not entirely up to proof, Unanimously granted. 250

Knott knew that cocks and sprites were foes, And so bought up, Heaven only knows How many, for he wanted crows To give ghosts caws, as I suppose, To think that day was breaking; Moreover what he called his park, He turned into a kind of ark For dogs, because a little bark Is a good tonic in the dark, If one is given to waking; 260 But things went on from bad to worse, His curs were nothing but a curse, And, what was still more shocking, Foul ghosts of living fowl made scoff And would not think of going off In spite of all his cocking.

Shanghais, Bucks-counties, Dominiques, Malays (that didn't lay for weeks), Polanders, Bantams, Dorkings, (Waiving the cost, no trifling ill, Since each brought in his little bill,) 271 By day or night were never still, But every thought of rest would kill With cacklings and with quorkings; Henry the Eighth of wives got free By a way he had of axing; But poor Knott's Tudor henery Was not so fortunate, and he Still found his trouble waxing; As for the dogs, the rows they made, 280 And how they howled, snarled, barked and bayed, Beyond all human knowledge is; All night, as wide awake as gnats, The terriers rumpused after rats, Or, just for practice, taught their brats To worry cast-off shoes and hats, The bull-dogs settled private spats, All chased imaginary cats, Or raved behind the fence's slats At real ones, or, from their mats, With friends, miles off, held pleasant chats, 291 Or, like some folks in white cravats, Contemptuous of sharps and flats, Sat up and sang dogsologies. Meanwhile the cats set up a squall, And, safe upon the garden-wall, All night kept cat-a-walling, As if the feline race were all. In one wild cataleptic sprawl, Into love's tortures falling. 300

PART II

SHOWING WHAT IS MEANT BY A FLOW OF SPIRITS

At first the ghosts were somewhat shy, Coming when none but Knott was nigh, And people said 'twas all their eye, (Or rather his) a flam, the sly Digestion's machination: Some recommended a wet sheet, Some a nice broth of pounded peat, Some a cold flat-iron to the feet, Some a decoction of lamb's-bleat, Some a southwesterly grain of wheat; 310 Meat was by some pronounced unmeet, Others thought fish most indiscreet, And that 'twas worse than all to eat Of vegetables, sour or sweet, (Except, perhaps, the skin of beet,) In such a concatenation: One quack his button gently plucks And murmurs, 'Biliary ducks!' Says Knott, 'I never ate one;' But all, though brimming full of wrath, 320 Homoeo, Allo, Hydropath, Concurred in this—that t'other's path To death's door was the straight one. Still, spite of medical advice, The ghosts came thicker, and a spice Of mischief grew apparent; Nor did they only come at night, But seemed to fancy broad daylight, Till Knott, in horror and affright, His unoffending hair rent; 330 Whene'er with handkerchief on lap, He made his elbow-chair a trap, To catch an after-dinner nap, The spirits, always on the tap, Would make a sudden rap, rap, rap, The half-spun cord of sleep to snap, (And what is life without its nap But threadbareness and mere mishap?) 338 As 'twere with a percussion cap The trouble's climax capping; It seemed a party dried and grim Of mummies had come to visit him, Each getting off from every limb Its multitudinous wrapping; Scratchings sometimes the walls ran round, The merest penny-weights of sound; Sometimes 'twas only by the pound They carried on their dealing, A thumping 'neath the parlor floor, Thump-bump-thump-bumping o'er and o'er, 350 As if the vegetables in store (Quiet and orderly before) Were all together peeling; You would have thought the thing was done By the spirit of some son of a gun, And that a forty-two-pounder, Or that the ghost which made such sounds Could be none other than John Pounds, Of Ragged Schools the founder. Through three gradations of affright, 360 The awful noises reached their height; At first they knocked nocturnally, Then, for some reason, changing quite, (As mourners, after six months' flight, Turn suddenly from dark to light,) Began to knock diurnally, And last, combining all their stocks, (Scotland was ne'er so full of Knox,) Into one Chaos (father of Nox,) Nocte pluit—they showered knocks, 370 And knocked, knocked, knocked, eternally; Ever upon the go, like buoys, (Wooden sea-urchins,) all Knott's joys, They turned to troubles and a noise That preyed on him internally.

Soon they grew wider in their scope; Whenever Knott a door would ope, It would ope not, or else elope And fly back (curbless as a trope Once started down a stanza's slope 380 By a bard that gave it too much rope—) Like a clap of thunder slamming: And, when kind Jenny brought his hat, (She always, when he walked, did that,) Just as upon his heart it sat, Submitting to his settling pat, Some unseen hand would jam it flat, Or give it such a furious bat That eyes and nose went cramming Up out of sight, and consequently, 390 As when in life it paddled free, His beaver caused much damning; If these things seem o'erstrained to be, Read the account of Doctor Dee, 'Tis in our college library: Read Wesley's circumstantial plea, And Mrs. Crowe, more like a bee, Sucking the nightshade's honeyed fee, And Stilling's Pneumatology; Consult Scot, Glanvil, grave Wie- 400 rus and both Mathers; further see, Webster, Casaubon, James First's trea- tise, a right royal Q.E.D. Writ with the moon in perigee, Bodin de la Demonomanie— (Accent that last line gingerly) All full of learning as the sea Of fishes, and all disagree, Save in Sathanas apage! Or, what will surely put a flea 410 In unbelieving ears—with glee, Out of a paper (sent to me By some friend who forgot to P ... A ... Y ...—I use cryptography Lest I his vengeful pen should dree— His P ...O ...S ...T ...A ...G ...E ...) Things to the same effect I cut, About the tantrums of a ghost, Not more than three weeks since, at most, Near Stratford, in Connecticut. 420 Knott's Upas daily spread its roots, Sent up on all sides livelier shoots, And bore more pestilential fruits; The ghosts behaved like downright brutes, They snipped holes in his Sunday suits, Practised all night on octave flutes, Put peas (not peace) into his boots, Whereof grew corns in season, They scotched his sheets, and, what was worse, Stuck his silk nightcap full of burrs, 430 Till he, in language plain and terse, (But much unlike a Bible verse,) Swore he should lose his reason.

The tables took to spinning, too, Perpetual yarns, and arm-chairs grew To prophets and apostles; One footstool vowed that only he Of law and gospel held the key, That teachers of whate'er degree To whom opinion bows the knee 440 Weren't fit to teach Truth's a b c, And were (the whole lot) to a T Mere fogies all and fossils; A teapoy, late the property Of Knox's Aunt Keziah, (Whom Jenny most irreverently Had nicknamed her aunt-tipathy) With tips emphatic claimed to be The prophet Jeremiah; The tins upon the kitchen-wall, 450 Turned tintinnabulators all, And things that used to come to call For simple household services Began to hop and whirl and prance, Fit to put out of countenance The Commis and Grisettes of France Or Turkey's dancing Dervises.

Of course such doings, far and wide, With rumors filled the countryside, And (as it is our nation's pride 460 To think a Truth not verified Till with majorities allied) Parties sprung up, affirmed, denied, And candidates with questions plied, Who, like the circus-riders, tried At once both hobbies to bestride, And each with his opponent vied In being inexplicit. Earnest inquirers multiplied; Folks, whose tenth cousins lately died, 470 Wrote letters long, and Knott replied; All who could either walk or ride Gathered to wonder or deride, And paid the house a visit; Horses were to his pine-trees tied, Mourners in every corner sighed, Widows brought children there that cried. Swarms of lean Seekers, eager-eyed, (People Knott never could abide,) Into each hole and cranny pried 480 With strings of questions cut and dried From the Devout Inquirer's Guide, For the wise spirits to decide— As, for example, is it True that the damned are fried or boiled? Was the Earth's axis greased or oiled? Who cleaned the moon when it was soiled? How baldness might be cured or foiled? How heal diseased potatoes? Did spirits have the sense of smell? 490 Where would departed spinsters dwell? If the late Zenas Smith were well? If Earth were solid or a shell? Were spirits fond of Doctor Fell? Did the bull toll Cock-Robin's knell? What remedy would bugs expel? If Paine's invention were a sell? Did spirits by Webster's system spell? Was it a sin to be a belle? Did dancing sentence folks to hell? 500 If so, then where most torture fell? On little toes or great toes? If life's true seat were in the brain? Did Ensign mean to marry Jane? By whom, in fact, was Morgan slain? Could matter ever suffer pain? What would take out a cherry-stain? Who picked the pocket of Seth Crane, Of Waldo precinct, State, of Maine? Was Sir John Franklin sought in vain? 510 Did primitive Christians ever train? What was the family-name of Cain? Them spoons, were they by Betty ta'en? Would earth-worm poultice cure a sprain? Was Socrates so dreadful plain? What teamster guided Charles's wain? Was Uncle Ethan mad or sane, And could his will in force remain? If not, what counsel to retain? Did Le Sage steal Gil Blas from Spain? 520 Was Junius writ by Thomas Paine? Were ducks discomforted by rain? How did Britannia rule the main? Was Jonas coming back again? Was vital truth upon the wane? Did ghosts, to scare folks, drag a chain? Who was our Huldah's chosen swain? Did none have teeth pulled without payin', Ere ether was invented? Whether mankind would not agree, 530 If the universe were tuned in C? What was it ailed Lucindy's knee? Whether folks eat folks in Feejee? Whether his name would end with T? If Saturn's rings were two or three, And what bump in Phrenology They truly represented? These problems dark, wherein they groped, Wherewith man's reason vainly coped, Now that the spirit-world was oped, 540 In all humility they hoped Would be resolved instanter; Each of the miscellaneous rout Brought his, or her, own little doubt. And wished to pump the spirits out, Through his or her own private spout, Into his or her decanter.

PART III

WHEREIN IT IS SHOWN THAT THE MOST ARDENT SPIRITS ARE MORE ORNAMENTAL THAN USEFUL

Many a speculating wight Came by express-trains, day and night, To see if Knott would 'sell his right,' 550 Meaning to make the ghosts a sight— What they call a 'meenaygerie;' One threatened, if he would not 'trade,' His run of custom to invade, (He could not these sharp folks persuade That he was not, in some way, paid,) And stamp him as a plagiary, By coming down, at one fell swoop, With THE ORIGINAL KNOCKING TROUPE, Come recently from Hades, 560 Who (for a quarter-dollar heard) Would ne'er rap out a hasty word Whence any blame might be incurred From the most fastidious ladies; The late lamented Jesse Soule, To stir the ghosts up with a pole And be director of the whole, Who was engaged the rather For the rare merits he'd combine, Having been in the spirit line, 570 Which trade he only did resign, With general applause, to shine, Awful in mail of cotton fine, As ghost of Hamlet's father! Another a fair plan reveals Never yet hit on, which, he feels, To Knott's religious sense appeals— 'We'll have your house set up on wheels, A speculation pious; For music, we can shortly find 580 A barrel-organ that will grind Psalm-tunes—an instrument designed For the New England tour—refined From secular drosses, and inclined To an unworldly turn, (combined With no sectarian bias;) Then, travelling by stages slow, Under the style of Knott & Co., I would accompany the show As moral lecturer, the foe 590 Of Rationalism; while you could throw The rappings in, and make them go Strict Puritan principles, you know, (How do you make 'em? with your toe?) And the receipts which thence might flow, We could divide between us; Still more attractions to combine, Beside these services of mine, I will throw in a very fine (It would do nicely for a sign) 600 Original Titian's Venus.' Another offered handsome fees If Knott would get Demosthenes (Nay, his mere knuckles, for more ease) To rap a few short sentences; Or if, for want of proper keys, His Greek might make confusion, Then just to get a rap from Burke, To recommend a little work On Public Elocution. 610 Meanwhile, the spirits made replies To all the reverent whats and whys, Resolving doubts of every size, And giving seekers grave and wise, Who came to know their destinies, A rap-turous reception; When unbelievers void of grace Came to investigate the place, (Creatures of Sadducistic race, With grovelling intellects and base,) 620 They could not find the slightest trace To indicate deception; Indeed, it is declared by some That spirits (of this sort) are glum, Almost, or wholly, deaf and dumb, And (out of self-respect) quite mum To skeptic natures cold and numb Who of this kind of Kingdom Come Have not a just conception: True, there were people who demurred 630 That, though the raps no doubt were heard Both under them and o'er them, Yet, somehow, when a search they made, They found Miss Jenny sore afraid, Or Jenny's lover, Doctor Slade, Equally awestruck and dismayed, Or Deborah, the chambermaid, Whose terrors not to be gainsaid In laughs hysteric were displayed, Was always there before them; This had its due effect with some Who straight departed, muttering, Hum! 642 Transparent hoax! and Gammon! But these were few: believing souls, Came, day by day, in larger shoals, As the ancients to the windy holes 'Neath Delphi's tripod brought their doles, Or to the shrine of Ammon.