'Neath what Fourier nicknames, the Boreal crown;Only think what that infinite bore-pow'r could doIf applied with a utilitarian view;Suppose, for example, we shipped it with careTo 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 followThrough some more of his sketches our laughing Apollo:—"There comes Harry Franco, and, as he draws near,You find that's a smile which you took for a sneer;One half of him contradicts t'other, his wontIs to say very sharp things and do very blunt;His manner's as hard as his feelings are tender,And asortiehe'll make when he means to surrender;He's in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest,When he seems to be joking, be sure he's in earnest;He has common sense in a way that's uncommon,Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman,Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak,Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke,Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-outer,Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her,Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art,Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart,And though not a poet, yet all must admireIn his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar."There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres,Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,Who—but hey-day! What's this? Messieurs Mathews and Poe,You mustn't fling mud-balls at Longfellow so,Does it make a man worse that his character's suchAs to make his friends love him (as you think) too much?Why, there is not a bard at this moment aliveMore willing than he that his fellows should thrive,While you are abusing him thus, even nowHe would help either one of you out of a slough;You may say that he's smooth and all that till you're hoarse,But remember that elegance also is force;After polishing granite as much as you will,The heart keeps its tough old persistency still;Deduct all you can that still keeps you at bay,—Why, he'll live till men weary of Collins and Gray.I'm not over-fond of Greek metres in English,To me rhyme's a gain, so it be not too jinglish,And your modern hexameter verses are no moreLike Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer;As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is,So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes;I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o'tisThat 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 clovenTo its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven;But, set that aside, and 'tis truth that I speak,Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a lineIn that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline.That's not ancient nor modern, its place is apartWhere time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,'Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth's hubbub and strifeAs quiet and chaste as the author's own life."There comes Philothea, her face all a-glow,She has just been dividing some poor creature's woeAnd can't tell which pleases her most, to relieveHis want, or his story to hear and believe;No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood,So she'll listen with patience and let you unfoldYour 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,)muchedit,She has such a musical taste, she will goAny distance to hear one who draws a long bow;She will swallow a wonder by mere might and mainAnd thinks it geometry's fault if she's fainTo 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 aloeThat for thousands of years had looked spindling and sallow,And, though nursed by the fruitfullest powers of mud,Had never vouchsafed e'en so much as a bud,Till its owner remarked, (as a sailor, you know,Often will in a calm,) that it never would blow,For he wished to exhibit the plant, and designedThat its blowing should help him in raising the wind;At last it was told him that if he should waterIts roots with the blood of his unmarried daughter,(Who was born, as her mother, a Calvinist said,With a Baxter's effectual caul on her head,)It would blow as the obstinate breeze did when by aLike decree of her father died Iphigenia;At first he declared he himself would be blowedEre 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,Ifthiswere but done they would dun me no more;I told Philothea his struggles and doubts,And how he considered the ins and the outsOf the visions he had, and the dreadful dyspepsy,How he went to the seer that lives at Po'keepsie,How the seer advised him to sleep on it firstAnd to read his big volume in case of the worst,And further advised he should pay him five dollarsFor writingDum, Dum, on his wristbands and collars;Three years and ten days these dark words he had studiedWhen 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, tillI told how it bloomed, and discharging its pistilWith an aim the Eumenides dictated, shotThe 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 deedWhich the coroner kindly allowed me to read."Well, my friend took this story up just, to be sure,As one might a poor foundling that's laid at one's door;She combed it and washed it and clothed it and fed it,And as if 't were 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 declareI have read it all thrice, and, perhaps I am weak,But I found every time there were tears on my cheek."The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,And folks with a mission that nobody knows,Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose;She can fill up thecaretsin such, make their scopeConverge to some focus of rational hope,And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gallCan 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,Hast thou not found one shore where those tired drooping feetCould reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beatThe soothed head in silence reposing could hearThe chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?Ah, there's many a beam from the fountain of dayThat to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide opeTo the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;Yes, a great soul is hers, one that dares to go inTo the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,And to bring into each, or to find there some lineOf 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 plainOverflows with a second broad deluge of grain;What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sourCould they be as a Child but for one little hour!"What! Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain,You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain,And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were thereSince Cervantes met death in his gentle despair;Nay, don't be embarrassed, nor look so beseeching,—I shan'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,minusthe chill,With the whole of that partnership's stock and good will,Mix well, and while stirring, hum o'er, as a spell,The fineoldEnglish Gentleman, simmer it well,Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strainThat only the finest and clearest remain,Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receivesFrom the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves,And you'll find a choice nature, not wholly deservingA name either English or Yankee,—just Irving."There goes,—butstet nominis umbra,—his nameYou'll be glad enough, some day or other, to claim,And will all crowd about him and swear that you knew himIf some English hack-critic should chance to review him.The oldporcos ante ne projiciatisMargaritas, for him you have verified gratis;What matters his name? Why, it may be Sylvester,Judd, Junior, or Junius, Ulysses, or Nestor,For aughtIknow or care; 'tis enough that I lookOn the author of 'Margaret,' the first Yankee bookWith thesoulof Down East in 't, and things farther East,As far as the threshold of morning, at least,Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true,Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new.'T has a smack of pine woods, of bare field and bleak hillSuch 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 drouthIn brown hollows about the inhospitable mouth;With a soul full of poetry, though it has qualmsAbout finding a happiness out of the Psalms;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 pourMy heart out to my birthplace: O, loved more and moreDear Baystate, from whose rocky bosom thy sonsShould suck milk, strong-will-giving, brave, such as runsIn the veins of old Graylock,—who is it that daresCall thee peddler, a soul wrapt 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 dinOf her fast-flying shuttles, year out and year in,While from earth's farthest corner there comes not a breezeBut wafts her the buzz of her gold-gleaning bees:What tho' those horn hands have as yet found small timeFor painting and sculpture and music and rhyme?These will come in due order, the need that prest sorestWas to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest,To bridle and harness the rivers, the steam,Making that whirl her mill-wheels, this tug in her team,To vassalize old tyrant Winter, and makeHim delve surlily for her on river and lake;—When this New World was parted, she strove not to shirkHer lot in the heirdom, the tough, silent Work,The hero-share ever, from Herakles downTo Odin, the Earth's iron sceptre and crown;Yes, thou dear, noble Mother! if ever men's praiseCould be claimed for creating heroical lays,Thou hast won it; if ever the laurel divineCrowned the Maker and Builder, that glory is thine!Thy songs are right epic, they tell how this rudeRock-rib of our earth here was tamed and subdued;Thou hast written them plain on the face of the planetIn brave, deathless letters of iron and granite;Thou hast printed them deep for all time; they are setFrom the same runic type-fount and alphabetWith 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 grandWhereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand,And creating, through labors undaunted and long,The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song!"But my good mother Baystate wants no praise of mine,She learned fromhermother a precept divineAbout something that butters no parsnips, herforteIn 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 one Bunker's hill.)Dear, notable goodwife! by this time of night,Her hearth is swept clean, and her fire burning bright,And she sits in a chair (of home plan and make) rocking,Musing much, all the while, as she darns on a stocking,Whether turkeys will come pretty high next Thanksgiving,Whether flour'll be so dear, for, as sure as she's living,She will use rye-and-injun then, whether the pigBy this time ain't got pretty tolerable big,And whether to sell it outright will be best,Or to smoke hams and shoulders and salt down the rest,—At this minute, she'd swop all my verses, ah, cruel!For the last patent stove that is saving of fuel;So I'll just let Apollo go on, for his phizShows I've kept him awaiting too long as it is.""If our friend, there, who seems a reporter, is doneWith his burst of emotion, why,Iwill go on,"Said Apollo; some smiled, and, indeed, I must ownThere 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 flitThe electrical tingles of hit after hit;In long poems 'tis painful sometimes and invitesA thought of the way the new Telegraph writes,Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefullyAs if you got more than you'd title to rightfully,And you find yourself hoping its wild father LightningWould flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning.He has perfect sway of whatIcall 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 praiseAs the tribute of Holmes to the grandMarseillaise.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 lyricFull of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyricIn a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toesThat are trodden upon are your own or your foes'."There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climbWith a whole bale ofismstied 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 reachingTill he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem,At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem."There goes Halleck, whose Fanny's a pseudo Don Juan,With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one,He's a wit, though, I hear, of the very first order,And once made a pun on the words soft Recorder;More than this, he's a very great poet, I'm told,And has had his works published in crimson and gold,With something they call 'Illustrations,' to wit,Like those with which Chapman obscured Holy Writ,[E]Which are said to illustrate, because, as I view it,Likelucus a non, they precisely don't do it;Let a man who can write what himself understandsKeep 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 quitbadinage, 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 lovesIn a world of back-offices, ledgers, and stoves.When his heart breaks away from the brokers and banks,And kneels in its own private shrine to give thanks,There's a genial manliness in him that earnsOur 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 lotsThe American Disraelis, Bulwers, 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 profusionsOf all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,That while the Old World has produced barely eightOf 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 shantiesThat has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles,Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,—In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,He may feel pretty certain that one out of twainWill be some very great person over again.There is one inconvenience in all this which liesIn the fact that by contrast we estimate size,[F]And, where there are none except Titans, great statureIs only a simple proceeding of nature.What puff the strained sails of your praise shall you furl at, ifThe calmest degree that you know is superlative?At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must,As a matter of course, be wellissimused anderrimused,A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost,That his friends would take care he wasιστοςed andωτατοςed,And formerly we, as through graveyards we past,Thought the world went from bad to worse fearfully fast;Let us glance for a moment, 'tis well worth the pains,And note what an average graveyard contains.There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,Horizontally there lie upright politicians,Dose-a-dose with their patients sleep faultless physicians,There are slave-drivers quietly whipt underground,There bookbinders, done up in boards, are fast bound,There card-players wait till the last trump be played,There all the choice spirits get finally laid,There the babe that's unborn is supplied with a berth,There men without legs get their six feet of earth,There lawyers repose, each wrapt 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 youWill find in each yard every cardinal virtue;[G]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 hintIts 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 bredTheir sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,And their daughters for—faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi:Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual black eye:Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:Two dozen of Italy's exiles who shoot us hisKaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses,Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,[H]Mount serenely their country's funereal pile:Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers'Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars,Who shake their dread fists o'er the sea and all that,—As long as a copper drops into the hat:Nine hundred Teutonic republicans starkFrom Vaterland's battles just won—in the Park,Who the happy profession of martyrdom takeWhenever 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'sPoor memory too much to continue the list,Especially now they no longer exist;—I would merely observe that you've taken to givingThe puffs that belong to the dead to the living,And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom's tonesIs tuned after old dedications and tombstones."—Here the critic came in and a thistle presented[I]—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 longBut your godship respecting the lilies was wrong;I hunted the garden from one end to t' other,And got no reward but vexation and bother,Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither,This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither.""Did he think I had given him a book to review?I ought to have known what the fellow would do,"Muttered Phœbus aside, "for a thistle will passBeyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass;He has chosen in just the same way as he'd chooseHis 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 clearerThe heart of the poet to that of his hearer;Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and theyFelt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soulPre-created 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 moodsSave the spirit of silence that hovers and broodsO'er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woodsHe asked not earth's verdict, forgetting the clods,His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods.'Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,And shaped for their vision the perfect design,With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;Then a glory and greatness invested man's heart,The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,In the free individual moulded, was Art;Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desireFor something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,Eurydice stood—like a beacon unfired,Which, once touch'd with flame, will leap heav'nward inspired—;And waited with answering kindle to markThe first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.Then painting, song, sculpture, did more than relieveThe 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 signOf the grasp of the soul after things more divine;They were ladders the Artist erected to climbO'er the narrow horizon of space and of time,And we see there the footsteps by which men had gainedTo the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained,As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sodThe last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god."But now, on the poet's dis-privacied moodsWithdo thisanddo thatthe pert critic intrudes;While he thinks he's been barely fulfilling his dutyTo 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 offencesIn all kinds of moods, numbers, genders, and tenses;He's beenobandsubjective, 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 outTaboo!And while he is wondering what he shall do,Since each suggests opposite topics for song,They all shout togetheryou're right!andyou'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 hisPetty conceit and his pettier jealousies;Thus a lawyer's apprentice, just out of his teens,Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines;Having read Johnson's lives of the poets half through,There's nothing on earth he's not competent to;He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,—He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles,It matters not whether he blame or commend,If he's bad as a foe, he's far worse as a friend;Let an author but write what's above his poor scope,And he'll go to work gravely and twist up a rope,And, inviting the world to see punishment done,Hang himself up to bleach in the wind and the sun;'Tis delightful to see, when a man comes alongWho has anything in him peculiar and strong,Every cockboat that swims clear its fierce (pop) gundeck at himAnd 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.