“There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle;To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,Of the other, he’s more of an Emerson;C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;C. gives nature and God his own fits of theblues,And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;C. shows you how every-day matters uniteWith 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 quiteà laFuseli,—Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;—To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accordsThe design of a white marble statue in words.C. labors to get at the centre, and thenTake a reckoning from there of his actions and men;E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,And, given himself, has whatever is wanted.“He has imitators in scores, who omitNo 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 isBecause their shoals mirror his mists andobscurities,As a mud-puddle seems deep as Heaven for a minute,While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it.“There comes——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?Besides, ’tis no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,——— has picked up all the windfalls before.They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em,His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em;When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try ’em,He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em,He wonders why ’tis there are none such his trees on,And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season.“Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him,And never an act to perplex him or bore him,With a snug room at Plato’s when night comes, to walk to,And people from morning till midnight to talk to,And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;—So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,For his highest conceit of a happiest state isWhere 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 hidIn the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper;Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night,And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.“Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very fullWith attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goesA stream of transparent and forcible prose;He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expoundThat ’tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns roundAnd wishes it clearly impressed on your mindThat 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 willingTo convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,And so fond of the trip that, when leisure’s to spare,He’ll row himself up, if he can’t get a fare.The worst of it is, that his logic’s so strong,That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;If thereisonly 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 fellowTo 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 believeBut a few silly-(syllo-, I mean)-gisms that squat ’emLike tadpoles, o’erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.“There is Willis, allnattyand jaunty and gay,Who says his best things in so foppish a way,With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,That one hardly knows whether to thank himfor saying ’em;Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!His prose had a natural grace of its own,And enough of it too, if he’d let it alone;But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,And is forced to forgive where one might have admired;Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,It runs like a stream with a musical waste,And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;—’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?In a country where scarcely a village is foundThat has not its author sublime and profound,For some one to be slightly shallow’s a duty,And Willis’s shallowness makes half his beauty.His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror:’Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;’Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuinehearty phiz;It is Nature herself, and there’s something in that,Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.Few volumes I know to read under a tree,More truly delightful than his A l’Abri,With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,And Nature to criticise still as you read,—The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.“He’s so innate a cockney, that had he been bornWhere plain bare skin’s the only full-dress that is worn,He’d have given his own such an air that you’d say’T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it andshake it,But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,If he would not sometimes leave therout 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 manWhom the Church undertook to put under her ban(The Church of Socinus, I mean),—his opinionsBeing So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians;They believed—faith, I’m puzzled—I think I may callTheir belief a believing in nothing at all,Or something of that sort; I know they all wentFor a general union of total dissent:He went a step farther; without cough or hem,He frankly avowed he believed not in them;And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented,From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.There was heresy here, you perceive, for the rightOf privately judging means simply that lightHas been granted to me for deciding onyou;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 footWith the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,And we all entertain a secure private notion,That ourThus far!will have a great weight with the ocean.’Twas so with our liberal Christians: they boreWith 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 prevailWith the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,And cared (shall I say?) not a d—— for their damming;So they first read him out of their church, and next minuteTurned round and declared he had never been in it.But the ban was too small or the man was too big,For he recks not their bells, books, and candlesa fig(He scarce looks like a man who wouldstaytreated shabbily,Sophroniscus’ son’s head o’er the features of Rabelais);He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutesWith the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht,Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless,thathe’s nofaith in),Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Mouis,Musæus, Muretus,hem,—μ Scorpionis,Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac—Mac—ah! Machiavelli,Condorcet, Count d’Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,Orion, O’Connell, the Chevalier D’O,(See the Memoirs of Sully,) το παν, the great toeOf the statue of Jupiter, now made to passFor 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 beinspired;Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,He makes it quite clear what hedoesn’tbelieve in,While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom ComeIs a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumbWould be left, if we didn’t keep carefully mum,And, to make a clean breast, that ’tis perfectly plainThatallkinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;Now P.’s creed than this may be lighter or darker,But in one thing, ’tis clear, he has faith, namely—Parker,And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,There’s a background of god to each hardworking feature,Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnacedIn 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 meetWith a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,And to hear, you’re not over-particular whence,Almost Taylor’s profusion, quite Latimer’s sense.“There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as ignified,As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nightsWith a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,But no warm applauses come, peal following eal on,—He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ’em,But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.“He is very nice reading in summer, butinterNos, we don’t wantextrafreezing in winter;Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.But, deduct all you can, there’s enough that’s right good in him,He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, orwhere ’er it is,Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?No, to old Berkshire’s hills, with their limestone and granite.If you’re one whoin loco(addfocohere)desipis,You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;But you’d get deeper down if you came as a precipice,And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but WordsworthMay be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client,By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per-Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper[2];I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to Justch;Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of crazinessShall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put onThe heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,Does more than a larger, less drilled, more volcanic;He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,And the advantage that Wordsworth beforehim had written.“But my dear little bardlings, don’t prick up your earsNor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;If I call him an iceberg, I don’t mean to sayThere is nothing in that which is grand in its way:He is almost the one of your poets that knowsHow much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to marHis thought’s modest fulness by going too far;’Twould be well if your authors should all make a trialOf 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 heartStrains the straight-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swingOf the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)From the very same cause that has made him a poet,—A fervor of mind which knows no separation’Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowingIf ’twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;Let his mind once get head in its favorite directionAnd the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,While, borne with the rush of the metre along,The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,Content with the whirl and delirium of song;Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heatsWhen the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,And can ne’er be repeated again any moreThan 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 fightsFor reform and whatever they call human rights,Both singing and striking in front of the war,And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;Anne hæc, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,Vestis filii tui, O leather-clad Fox?Can that be thy son, in the battle’s mid din,Preaching brotherly love and then driving it inTo the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s springImpressed on his hard moral sense with asling?“All honor and praise to the right-hearted bardWho was true to The Voice when such service was hard,Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slaveWhen to look but a protest in silence was brave;All honor and praise to the women and menWho spoke out for the dumb and the downtrodden then!It needs not to name them, already for eachI see History preparing the statue and niche;They were harsh, but shallyoube so shocked at hard wordsWho have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords,Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gainBy the reaping of men and of women than grain?Why shouldyoustand aghast at their fierce wordy war, ifYou scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day longDoesn’t prove that the use of hard language is wrong;While the World’s heart beats quicker to think of such menAs signed Tyranny’s doom with a bloody steel-pen,While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright oneWith hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton,You need not look shy at your sisters and brothersWho stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;—No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and trueWho, 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 writtenTill the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,—Who is so well aware of how things should be done,That his own works displease him before they’re begun,—Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,That the best of his poems is written in prose;All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;In a very grave question his soul was immersed,—Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first;And, while this point and that he judiciously dwelt on,He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton,Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,You’ll allow only genius could hit upon either.That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,But I fear he will never be anything more;The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o’er him,He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,In learning to swim on his library-table.“There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in MaineThe sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, hePreferred 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, becauseHe always has thought himself more than he was,—Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,Because song drew less instant attention than noise.Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;’Tis the modest man ripens, ’tis he that achieves,Just what’s needed of sunshine and shade he receives;Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,That he strips himself naked to prove he’s a poet,And, to show he could leap Art’s wide ditch, if he tried,Jumps clean o’er it, and into the hedge t’ other side.He has strength, but there’s nothing about him in keeping;One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping;He has used his own sinews himself to distress,And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;Could he only have waited he might have been great;But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,And muddled the stream ere he took his first taste.“There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rareThat you hardly at first see the strength that is there;A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet,Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,With a single anemone trembly and rathe;His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;When Nature was shaping him, clay was not grantedFor making so full-sized a man as she wanted,So, to fill out her model, a little she sparedFrom some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,And she could not have hit a more excellent planFor 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 tohis soul,That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.“Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to showHe’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 aloudThat one of his novels of which he’s most proud,And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quittingTheir box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting.He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dewOf 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 foundTo have slipped the old fellow away underground).All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,Thedernière chemiseof 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 taskAs a cooper would do in composing a cask;He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, heHas 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 toonecharacter lifeAnd 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 quickerThan Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.“There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that isThat 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 sinkHalf his present repute for the freedom to think,And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak,Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.“There are truths you Americans need to be told,And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold;John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in cholerAt your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;But to scorn such eye-dollar-try’s what very few do,And John goes to that church as often as you do.No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him,’T is enough to go quietly on and outgrow him;Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number OneDisplacing himself in the mind of his son,And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglectedWhen 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 showWhat a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.“There are one or two things I should just like to hint,For you don’t often get the truth told you in print;The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;Though you brag of your New World, you don’thalf believe in it;And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,With eyes bold as Heré’s, and hair floating free,And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,Who can drive home the cows with a songthrough 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 takesAny mirror except her own rivers and lakes.“You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;Your literature suits its each whisper and motionTo what will be thought of it over the ocean;The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship triesAnd 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 thingsCovered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings,Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow’s WaifHer fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs;Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,Keep your ears open wide to the Future’s first call,Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,Stand fronting the dawn on Toil’s heaven-scaling peaks,And become my new race of more practical Greeks.—Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o’t,Is that you have your slaves, and the Greekhad his helot.”
“There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle;To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,Of the other, he’s more of an Emerson;C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;C. gives nature and God his own fits of theblues,And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;C. shows you how every-day matters uniteWith 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 quiteà laFuseli,—Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;—To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accordsThe design of a white marble statue in words.C. labors to get at the centre, and thenTake a reckoning from there of his actions and men;E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,And, given himself, has whatever is wanted.“He has imitators in scores, who omitNo 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 isBecause their shoals mirror his mists andobscurities,As a mud-puddle seems deep as Heaven for a minute,While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it.“There comes——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?Besides, ’tis no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,——— has picked up all the windfalls before.They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em,His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em;When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try ’em,He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em,He wonders why ’tis there are none such his trees on,And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season.“Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him,And never an act to perplex him or bore him,With a snug room at Plato’s when night comes, to walk to,And people from morning till midnight to talk to,And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;—So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,For his highest conceit of a happiest state isWhere 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 hidIn the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper;Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night,And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.“Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very fullWith attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goesA stream of transparent and forcible prose;He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expoundThat ’tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns roundAnd wishes it clearly impressed on your mindThat 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 willingTo convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,And so fond of the trip that, when leisure’s to spare,He’ll row himself up, if he can’t get a fare.The worst of it is, that his logic’s so strong,That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;If thereisonly 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 fellowTo 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 believeBut a few silly-(syllo-, I mean)-gisms that squat ’emLike tadpoles, o’erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.“There is Willis, allnattyand jaunty and gay,Who says his best things in so foppish a way,With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,That one hardly knows whether to thank himfor saying ’em;Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!His prose had a natural grace of its own,And enough of it too, if he’d let it alone;But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,And is forced to forgive where one might have admired;Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,It runs like a stream with a musical waste,And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;—’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?In a country where scarcely a village is foundThat has not its author sublime and profound,For some one to be slightly shallow’s a duty,And Willis’s shallowness makes half his beauty.His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror:’Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;’Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuinehearty phiz;It is Nature herself, and there’s something in that,Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.Few volumes I know to read under a tree,More truly delightful than his A l’Abri,With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,And Nature to criticise still as you read,—The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.“He’s so innate a cockney, that had he been bornWhere plain bare skin’s the only full-dress that is worn,He’d have given his own such an air that you’d say’T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it andshake it,But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,If he would not sometimes leave therout 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 manWhom the Church undertook to put under her ban(The Church of Socinus, I mean),—his opinionsBeing So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians;They believed—faith, I’m puzzled—I think I may callTheir belief a believing in nothing at all,Or something of that sort; I know they all wentFor a general union of total dissent:He went a step farther; without cough or hem,He frankly avowed he believed not in them;And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented,From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.There was heresy here, you perceive, for the rightOf privately judging means simply that lightHas been granted to me for deciding onyou;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 footWith the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,And we all entertain a secure private notion,That ourThus far!will have a great weight with the ocean.’Twas so with our liberal Christians: they boreWith 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 prevailWith the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,And cared (shall I say?) not a d—— for their damming;So they first read him out of their church, and next minuteTurned round and declared he had never been in it.But the ban was too small or the man was too big,For he recks not their bells, books, and candlesa fig(He scarce looks like a man who wouldstaytreated shabbily,Sophroniscus’ son’s head o’er the features of Rabelais);He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutesWith the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht,Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless,thathe’s nofaith in),Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Mouis,Musæus, Muretus,hem,—μ Scorpionis,Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac—Mac—ah! Machiavelli,Condorcet, Count d’Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,Orion, O’Connell, the Chevalier D’O,(See the Memoirs of Sully,) το παν, the great toeOf the statue of Jupiter, now made to passFor 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 beinspired;Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,He makes it quite clear what hedoesn’tbelieve in,While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom ComeIs a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumbWould be left, if we didn’t keep carefully mum,And, to make a clean breast, that ’tis perfectly plainThatallkinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;Now P.’s creed than this may be lighter or darker,But in one thing, ’tis clear, he has faith, namely—Parker,And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,There’s a background of god to each hardworking feature,Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnacedIn 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 meetWith a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,And to hear, you’re not over-particular whence,Almost Taylor’s profusion, quite Latimer’s sense.“There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as ignified,As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nightsWith a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,But no warm applauses come, peal following eal on,—He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ’em,But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.“He is very nice reading in summer, butinterNos, we don’t wantextrafreezing in winter;Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.But, deduct all you can, there’s enough that’s right good in him,He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, orwhere ’er it is,Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?No, to old Berkshire’s hills, with their limestone and granite.If you’re one whoin loco(addfocohere)desipis,You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;But you’d get deeper down if you came as a precipice,And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but WordsworthMay be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client,By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per-Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper[2];I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to Justch;Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of crazinessShall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put onThe heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,Does more than a larger, less drilled, more volcanic;He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,And the advantage that Wordsworth beforehim had written.“But my dear little bardlings, don’t prick up your earsNor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;If I call him an iceberg, I don’t mean to sayThere is nothing in that which is grand in its way:He is almost the one of your poets that knowsHow much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to marHis thought’s modest fulness by going too far;’Twould be well if your authors should all make a trialOf 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 heartStrains the straight-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swingOf the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)From the very same cause that has made him a poet,—A fervor of mind which knows no separation’Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowingIf ’twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;Let his mind once get head in its favorite directionAnd the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,While, borne with the rush of the metre along,The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,Content with the whirl and delirium of song;Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heatsWhen the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,And can ne’er be repeated again any moreThan 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 fightsFor reform and whatever they call human rights,Both singing and striking in front of the war,And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;Anne hæc, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,Vestis filii tui, O leather-clad Fox?Can that be thy son, in the battle’s mid din,Preaching brotherly love and then driving it inTo the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s springImpressed on his hard moral sense with asling?“All honor and praise to the right-hearted bardWho was true to The Voice when such service was hard,Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slaveWhen to look but a protest in silence was brave;All honor and praise to the women and menWho spoke out for the dumb and the downtrodden then!It needs not to name them, already for eachI see History preparing the statue and niche;They were harsh, but shallyoube so shocked at hard wordsWho have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords,Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gainBy the reaping of men and of women than grain?Why shouldyoustand aghast at their fierce wordy war, ifYou scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day longDoesn’t prove that the use of hard language is wrong;While the World’s heart beats quicker to think of such menAs signed Tyranny’s doom with a bloody steel-pen,While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright oneWith hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton,You need not look shy at your sisters and brothersWho stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;—No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and trueWho, 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 writtenTill the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,—Who is so well aware of how things should be done,That his own works displease him before they’re begun,—Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,That the best of his poems is written in prose;All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;In a very grave question his soul was immersed,—Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first;And, while this point and that he judiciously dwelt on,He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton,Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,You’ll allow only genius could hit upon either.That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,But I fear he will never be anything more;The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o’er him,He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,In learning to swim on his library-table.“There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in MaineThe sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, hePreferred 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, becauseHe always has thought himself more than he was,—Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,Because song drew less instant attention than noise.Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;’Tis the modest man ripens, ’tis he that achieves,Just what’s needed of sunshine and shade he receives;Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,That he strips himself naked to prove he’s a poet,And, to show he could leap Art’s wide ditch, if he tried,Jumps clean o’er it, and into the hedge t’ other side.He has strength, but there’s nothing about him in keeping;One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping;He has used his own sinews himself to distress,And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;Could he only have waited he might have been great;But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,And muddled the stream ere he took his first taste.“There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rareThat you hardly at first see the strength that is there;A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet,Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,With a single anemone trembly and rathe;His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;When Nature was shaping him, clay was not grantedFor making so full-sized a man as she wanted,So, to fill out her model, a little she sparedFrom some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,And she could not have hit a more excellent planFor 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 tohis soul,That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.“Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to showHe’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 aloudThat one of his novels of which he’s most proud,And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quittingTheir box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting.He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dewOf 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 foundTo have slipped the old fellow away underground).All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,Thedernière chemiseof 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 taskAs a cooper would do in composing a cask;He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, heHas 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 toonecharacter lifeAnd 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 quickerThan Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.“There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that isThat 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 sinkHalf his present repute for the freedom to think,And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak,Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.“There are truths you Americans need to be told,And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold;John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in cholerAt your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;But to scorn such eye-dollar-try’s what very few do,And John goes to that church as often as you do.No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him,’T is enough to go quietly on and outgrow him;Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number OneDisplacing himself in the mind of his son,And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglectedWhen 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 showWhat a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.“There are one or two things I should just like to hint,For you don’t often get the truth told you in print;The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;Though you brag of your New World, you don’thalf believe in it;And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,With eyes bold as Heré’s, and hair floating free,And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,Who can drive home the cows with a songthrough 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 takesAny mirror except her own rivers and lakes.“You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;Your literature suits its each whisper and motionTo what will be thought of it over the ocean;The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship triesAnd 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 thingsCovered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings,Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow’s WaifHer fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs;Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,Keep your ears open wide to the Future’s first call,Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,Stand fronting the dawn on Toil’s heaven-scaling peaks,And become my new race of more practical Greeks.—Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o’t,Is that you have your slaves, and the Greekhad his helot.”
“There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle;To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,Of the other, he’s more of an Emerson;C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;C. gives nature and God his own fits of theblues,And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;C. shows you how every-day matters uniteWith 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 quiteà laFuseli,—Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews;E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe,And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear;—To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accordsThe design of a white marble statue in words.C. labors to get at the centre, and thenTake a reckoning from there of his actions and men;E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted,And, given himself, has whatever is wanted.
“He has imitators in scores, who omitNo 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 isBecause their shoals mirror his mists andobscurities,As a mud-puddle seems deep as Heaven for a minute,While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it.
“There comes——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?Besides, ’tis no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,——— has picked up all the windfalls before.They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em,His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em;When they send him a dishful, and ask him to try ’em,He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em,He wonders why ’tis there are none such his trees on,And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season.
“Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream,And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe,With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him,And never an act to perplex him or bore him,With a snug room at Plato’s when night comes, to walk to,And people from morning till midnight to talk to,And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;—So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening,For his highest conceit of a happiest state isWhere 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 hidIn the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper,If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper;Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night,And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;In this, as in all things, a lamb among men,He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.
“Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very fullWith attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull;Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goesA stream of transparent and forcible prose;He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expoundThat ’tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns roundAnd wishes it clearly impressed on your mindThat 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 willingTo convey friend or foe without charging a shilling,And so fond of the trip that, when leisure’s to spare,He’ll row himself up, if he can’t get a fare.The worst of it is, that his logic’s so strong,That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;If thereisonly 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 fellowTo 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 believeBut a few silly-(syllo-, I mean)-gisms that squat ’emLike tadpoles, o’erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.
“There is Willis, allnattyand jaunty and gay,Who says his best things in so foppish a way,With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,That one hardly knows whether to thank himfor saying ’em;Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!His prose had a natural grace of its own,And enough of it too, if he’d let it alone;But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired,And is forced to forgive where one might have admired;Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced,It runs like a stream with a musical waste,And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;—’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?In a country where scarcely a village is foundThat has not its author sublime and profound,For some one to be slightly shallow’s a duty,And Willis’s shallowness makes half his beauty.His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error,And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror:’Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice;’Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuinehearty phiz;It is Nature herself, and there’s something in that,Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.Few volumes I know to read under a tree,More truly delightful than his A l’Abri,With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,And Nature to criticise still as you read,—The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.
“He’s so innate a cockney, that had he been bornWhere plain bare skin’s the only full-dress that is worn,He’d have given his own such an air that you’d say’T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;So his best things are done in the flush of the moment;If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it andshake it,But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness,If he would not sometimes leave therout 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 manWhom the Church undertook to put under her ban(The Church of Socinus, I mean),—his opinionsBeing So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians;They believed—faith, I’m puzzled—I think I may callTheir belief a believing in nothing at all,Or something of that sort; I know they all wentFor a general union of total dissent:He went a step farther; without cough or hem,He frankly avowed he believed not in them;And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented,From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.There was heresy here, you perceive, for the rightOf privately judging means simply that lightHas been granted to me for deciding onyou;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 footWith the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut,And we all entertain a secure private notion,That ourThus far!will have a great weight with the ocean.’Twas so with our liberal Christians: they boreWith 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 prevailWith the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale;They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See,And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;But he turned up his nose at their mumming and shamming,And cared (shall I say?) not a d—— for their damming;So they first read him out of their church, and next minuteTurned round and declared he had never been in it.But the ban was too small or the man was too big,For he recks not their bells, books, and candlesa fig(He scarce looks like a man who wouldstaytreated shabbily,Sophroniscus’ son’s head o’er the features of Rabelais);He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutesWith the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots;His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced,And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht,Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan,Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless,thathe’s nofaith in),Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson,Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson,Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Mouis,Musæus, Muretus,hem,—μ Scorpionis,Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac—Mac—ah! Machiavelli,Condorcet, Count d’Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli,Orion, O’Connell, the Chevalier D’O,(See the Memoirs of Sully,) το παν, the great toeOf the statue of Jupiter, now made to passFor 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 beinspired;Yet though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in,He makes it quite clear what hedoesn’tbelieve in,While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom ComeIs a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum,Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumbWould be left, if we didn’t keep carefully mum,And, to make a clean breast, that ’tis perfectly plainThatallkinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;Now P.’s creed than this may be lighter or darker,But in one thing, ’tis clear, he has faith, namely—Parker,And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher,There’s a background of god to each hardworking feature,Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnacedIn 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 meetWith a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,And to hear, you’re not over-particular whence,Almost Taylor’s profusion, quite Latimer’s sense.
“There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as ignified,As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,Save when by reflection ’tis kindled o’ nightsWith a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation(There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,But no warm applauses come, peal following eal on,—He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:Unqualified merits, I’ll grant, if you choose, he has ’em,But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.
“He is very nice reading in summer, butinterNos, we don’t wantextrafreezing in winter;Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.But, deduct all you can, there’s enough that’s right good in him,He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, orwhere ’er it is,Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?No, to old Berkshire’s hills, with their limestone and granite.If you’re one whoin loco(addfocohere)desipis,You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;But you’d get deeper down if you came as a precipice,And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,Some scholar who’s hourly expecting his learning,Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but WordsworthMay be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd’s worth.No, don’t be absurd, he’s an excellent Bryant;But, my friends, you’ll endanger the life of your client,By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per-Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper[2];I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to Justch;Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of crazinessShall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put onThe heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,Does more than a larger, less drilled, more volcanic;He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,And the advantage that Wordsworth beforehim had written.
“But my dear little bardlings, don’t prick up your earsNor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers;If I call him an iceberg, I don’t mean to sayThere is nothing in that which is grand in its way:He is almost the one of your poets that knowsHow much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose;If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to marHis thought’s modest fulness by going too far;’Twould be well if your authors should all make a trialOf 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 heartStrains the straight-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swingOf the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)From the very same cause that has made him a poet,—A fervor of mind which knows no separation’Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration,As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowingIf ’twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;Let his mind once get head in its favorite directionAnd the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection,While, borne with the rush of the metre along,The poet may chance to go right or go wrong,Content with the whirl and delirium of song;Then his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes,And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes,Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heatsWhen the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats,And can ne’er be repeated again any moreThan 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 fightsFor reform and whatever they call human rights,Both singing and striking in front of the war,And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;Anne hæc, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,Vestis filii tui, O leather-clad Fox?Can that be thy son, in the battle’s mid din,Preaching brotherly love and then driving it inTo the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly’s springImpressed on his hard moral sense with asling?
“All honor and praise to the right-hearted bardWho was true to The Voice when such service was hard,Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slaveWhen to look but a protest in silence was brave;All honor and praise to the women and menWho spoke out for the dumb and the downtrodden then!It needs not to name them, already for eachI see History preparing the statue and niche;They were harsh, but shallyoube so shocked at hard wordsWho have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords,Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gainBy the reaping of men and of women than grain?Why shouldyoustand aghast at their fierce wordy war, ifYou scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day longDoesn’t prove that the use of hard language is wrong;While the World’s heart beats quicker to think of such menAs signed Tyranny’s doom with a bloody steel-pen,While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright oneWith hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton,You need not look shy at your sisters and brothersWho stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;—No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and trueWho, 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 writtenTill the Muse, ere he think of it, gives him the mitten,—Who is so well aware of how things should be done,That his own works displease him before they’re begun,—Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows,That the best of his poems is written in prose;All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting,He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating;In a very grave question his soul was immersed,—Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first;And, while this point and that he judiciously dwelt on,He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton,Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there,You’ll allow only genius could hit upon either.That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore,But I fear he will never be anything more;The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him,The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o’er him,He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart,He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart,Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,In learning to swim on his library-table.
“There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in MaineThe sinews and cords of his pugilist brain,Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, hePreferred 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, becauseHe always has thought himself more than he was,—Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard,Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard,And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice,Because song drew less instant attention than noise.Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise,That he goes the farthest who goes far enough,And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;’Tis the modest man ripens, ’tis he that achieves,Just what’s needed of sunshine and shade he receives;Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star;He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,That he strips himself naked to prove he’s a poet,And, to show he could leap Art’s wide ditch, if he tried,Jumps clean o’er it, and into the hedge t’ other side.He has strength, but there’s nothing about him in keeping;One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping;He has used his own sinews himself to distress,And had done vastly more had he done vastly less;In letters, too soon is as bad as too late;Could he only have waited he might have been great;But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist,And muddled the stream ere he took his first taste.
“There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rareThat you hardly at first see the strength that is there;A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet,Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,With a single anemone trembly and rathe;His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;When Nature was shaping him, clay was not grantedFor making so full-sized a man as she wanted,So, to fill out her model, a little she sparedFrom some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,And she could not have hit a more excellent planFor 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 tohis soul,That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.
“Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to showHe’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 aloudThat one of his novels of which he’s most proud,And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quittingTheir box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting.He has drawn you one character, though, that is new,One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dewOf 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 foundTo have slipped the old fellow away underground).All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,Thedernière chemiseof 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 taskAs a cooper would do in composing a cask;He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful,Just hoops them together as tight as is needful,And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, heHas 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 toonecharacter lifeAnd 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 quickerThan Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.
“There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that isThat 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 sinkHalf his present repute for the freedom to think,And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak,Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.
“There are truths you Americans need to be told,And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold;John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in cholerAt your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;But to scorn such eye-dollar-try’s what very few do,And John goes to that church as often as you do.No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him,’T is enough to go quietly on and outgrow him;Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number OneDisplacing himself in the mind of his son,And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglectedWhen 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 showWhat a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.
“There are one or two things I should just like to hint,For you don’t often get the truth told you in print;The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;Though you brag of your New World, you don’thalf believe in it;And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,With eyes bold as Heré’s, and hair floating free,And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,Who can drive home the cows with a songthrough 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 takesAny mirror except her own rivers and lakes.
“You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;Your literature suits its each whisper and motionTo what will be thought of it over the ocean;The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship triesAnd 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 thingsCovered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings,Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow’s WaifHer fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs;Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new,To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,Keep your ears open wide to the Future’s first call,Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all,Stand fronting the dawn on Toil’s heaven-scaling peaks,And become my new race of more practical Greeks.—Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o’t,Is that you have your slaves, and the Greekhad his helot.”