f 
 
READER ! walk up at once (it will soon be too late) and 
 buy at a perfectly ruinous rate 
 
 , FABLE FOE CEITICS ; 
 
 OR, BETTER, 
 
 like, as a thing that the reader s jirst fancy may strike, 
 
 an old-fashioned title-page, 
 such as presents a tabular view of the volume s contents): . 
 
 A GLANCE 
 
 AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES 
 (Mrs. Malapropos word) 
 
 FROM. 
 
 THE TUB OF DIOGENES; 
 A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY. 
 
 THAT IS, 
 
 A SERIES OF JOKES 
 
 who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace, 
 on the top of the tub. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TIOKNOR AND FIELDS. 
 
 M DCCC LVI. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1848, by 
 
 ^o Xjfcp 
 GEORGE P. PUTNAM, 
 
 in the Clerk s Office of the District Court for the Southern District of 
 New-York. 
 
- 
 
 IT being the commonest mode of procedure, I premise a few 
 
 candid remarks 
 To THE READER : 
 
 This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own 
 private fancy, was laid on >l the shelf. But some friends, who 
 had seen it, induced me, by dint of saying they liked it, to put 
 it in print. That is, having come to that very conclusion, I 
 consulted them when it could make no confusion. For, 
 (though in the gentlest of ways,) they had hinted it was 
 scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it. 
 
 I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhyme- 
 y winged, with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and 
 alterings not previously planned, digressions chance-hatched, 
 like birds eggs in the sand, and dawdlings to suit every 
 whimsy s demand, (always freeing the bird which I held in my 
 hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the tree,) 
 it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the 
 
 old woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, 
 
 a 
 
-; iv 
 
 no doubt, wonder and laugh, and when, my strained arms with 
 their grown burthen full, I call it my Fable, they call it a 
 bull. 
 
 Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a 
 style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a 
 person whom nobody knows, some people will say I am rather 
 more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, thai 
 I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following 
 wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more 
 than a young author s lawful ease, and laugh in a queer way 
 so like Mephistopheles, that the public will doubt, as they grope 
 through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun at them or 
 with them. 
 
 So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of 
 my book is already secured. For there is not a poet through 
 out the whole land, but will purchase a copy or two out of 
 hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing 
 his betters cut-up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty 
 exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards 
 in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and 
 Magazine critics call lofty and true, and about thirty thousand 
 (this tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed full of 
 promise and pleasing. The Public will see by a glance at this 
 schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous aboul 
 
courting them, since it seems I have got enough fuel made 
 sure of for boiling my pot. 
 
 As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned,, 
 once in my pages, with praises or blames, let them SEND IN 
 THEIR CARDS, without further DELAY, to my friend G. P. PUT 
 NAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where a LIST will be kept with 
 the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the 
 card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time, (that 
 is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme,) I will honestly 
 give each his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR 
 to each NEW EDITION. Thus a PREMIUM is offered suffi 
 ciently HIGH (as the magazines say when they tell their best 
 lie) to induce bards to CLUB their resources and buy the 
 balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly 
 been run through the mill. 
 
 One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read 
 books with something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the 
 country, perhaps, there are two, including myself, gentle 
 reader, and you. All the characters sketched in this slight 
 jeu d esprit, though, it may be, they seem, here and there, 
 rather free, and drawn from a Mephistophelian stand-point, 
 are meant to be faithful, and that is the grand point, and none 
 but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells 
 you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes tub. 
 
A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 though it well may be reckoned, of all composition, 
 the species at once most delightful and healthy, is a 
 thing which an author, unless he be wealthy and willing 
 to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all instances, 
 called on to write. Though there are, it is said, who, 
 their spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times 
 a year, and in this way snuff up an imaginary savor of 
 that sweetest of dishes, the popular favor, much as if a 
 starved painter should fall to and treat the Ugolino inside 
 to a picture of meat. 
 
 You remember (if not, pray turn over and look) that, 
 in writing the preface which ushered my book, I treated 
 you, excellent Public,. not merely with a cool disregard, 
 but downright cavalierly. Now I would not take back 
 the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter 
 both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an 
 author owed aught to the people he solaced, diverted, or 
 taught ; and, as for mere fame, I have long ago learned that 
 the persons by whom it is finally earned, are those with 
 whom your verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by 
 
 the higher court sitting within. 
 
 (1) 1 
 
But I wander from what I intended to say that you 
 have, namely, shown such a liberal way of thinking, andi 
 so much aesthetic perception of anonymous worth in the ] 
 handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of some 
 private piques, (having bought the first thousand in barely 
 two weeks,) that I think, past a doubt, if you measured I 
 the phiz of your s most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, youi 
 would find that its vertical section was shorter, by an i 
 inch and two tenths, or twixt that and a quarter. 
 
 You have watched a child playing in those won 
 drous years when belief is not bound to the eyes and the 
 ears, and the vision divine is so clear and unmarred, 
 that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a 
 knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little 
 mudpuddle over the street, his invention, in purest good 
 faith, will make sail round the globe with a puff of his 
 breath for a gale, will visit, in barely ten minutes, all 
 climes, and find Northwestern passages hundreds of 
 times. Or, suppose the young Poet fresh stored with de 
 lights from that Bible of childhood the Arabian Nights, he 
 will turn to a crony and cry, " Jack, let s play that I am 
 a Genius !" Jacky straightway makes Aladdin s lamp 
 out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own 
 supernatural powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, 
 but then suppose our two urchins have grown into men, 
 and both have turned authors, one says to his brother, 
 " Let s play we re the American somethings or other, 
 (only let them be big enough, no matter what.) Come 
 
you shall be Goethe or Pope, which you choose ; I ll be 
 Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews." So 
 hey both (as mere strangers) before many days, send 
 each other a cord of anonymous bays. Each, in piling 
 lis epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend 
 can be made to believe ; each, in reading the other s un 
 biassed review, thinks Here s pretty high praise, but no 
 nore than is true. Well, we laugh at them both, and 
 yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to 
 benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, scarce a month since, 
 what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear 
 Public s critical judgment, begin to think sharpwitted 
 Horace spoke sooth when he said, that the Public some- 
 imes hit the truth. 
 
 In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of 
 a person in pretty good health and condition, and yet, 
 since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, 
 scorched, withered, used up and put down, (by Smith 
 with the cordial assistance of Brown,) in all, if you put 
 any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five 
 several times, and, while I am writing I tremble to 
 think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink 
 of it Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun 
 a critique, am I not to be pitied ?* 
 
 Now I shall not crush them since, indeed, for that 
 
 * The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the queer- 
 iooking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to hint to the world 
 the hot water they always get into. 
 
matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter 
 nor wither, nor scorch them, no action of fire couk 
 make either them or their articles drier; nor waste time 
 in putting them down I am thinking not their own self 
 inflation will keep them from sinking; for there s this 
 contradiction about the whole bevy though without the 
 least weight, they are awfully heavy. No, my dea: 
 honest bore, surdo fabulam narras, they are no more tc 
 me than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor 
 get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintes 
 sence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic 
 sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrov 
 tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and for 
 gotten by all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug ii 
 my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack oi 
 them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas 
 wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric 
 Cathay ; get fou with O Shanter, and sober me thei 
 with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben 
 snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave ; wit! 
 Fletcher wax tender, o er Chapman grow brave ; wit! 
 Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave ; in Very, mos 
 Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter or 
 vext Irish seas ; with Webster grow wild, and climl 
 earthward again, down by mystical Browne s Jacob s 
 ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton s ver 
 sion) Montaigne ; find a new depth in Wordsworth 
 undreamed of before, that divinely-inspired, wise, deep \ 
 
tender, grand, bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar 
 thrown off, nature holds up her shield gainst the sneer 
 and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and 
 ;kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the 
 | mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems ; the 
 tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like 
 plashes of sunlight; the pond in the woods, where no 
 foot but mine and the bittern s intrudes ; these are all my 
 kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to 
 you all, my poor critics, but pish ! I have buried the 
 hatchet ; I am twisting an allumette out of one of you 
 now, and relighting my calumet. In your private ca 
 pacities, come when you please, I will give you my 
 hand and a fresh pipe a-piece. 
 
 As I ran through the leaves of my poor litttle book, 
 to take a fond author s first tremulous look, it was quite 
 an excitement to hunt the errata, sprawled in as birds 
 tracks are in some kinds of strata (only these made 
 things crookeder.) Fancy an heir, that a father had seen 
 born well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, 
 club-footed, squint-eyed, hare-lipped, wapper-jawed, car 
 rot-haired, from a pride become an aversion, my case was 
 yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a change) in a verse, 
 I might have forgiven, an o s being wry, a botch in an e, 
 or a cock in an i, but to have the sweet babe of my brain 
 served in pi ! I am not queasy-stomached, but such a 
 Thyestean banquet as that was quite out of the ques 
 tion. 
 
In the edition now issued, no pains are neglected; 
 and my verses, as orators say, stand corrected. Yet 
 some blunders remain of the public s own make, which 
 I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a 
 character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits 
 of a dozen in one, has been, as I hear by some persons 
 applied to a good friend of mine, whom to stab in the 
 side, as we walked along chatting and joking together, 
 would not be my way. I can hardly tell whether a 
 question will ever arise in which he and I should by 
 any strange fortune agree, but meanwhile my esteem for 
 him grows as I know him, and, though not the best judge 
 upon earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying 
 and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points 
 which I have not found so rife I can easily smother my 
 love for them, whether on my side or tother. 
 
 For my other anonymi, you may be sure that I know 
 what is meant by a caricature, and what by a portrait. 
 There are those who think it is capital fun to be spattering 
 their ink on quiet unquarrelsome folk, but the minute the 
 game changes sides and the others begin it, they see 
 something savage and horrible in it. As for me I re 
 spect neither women or men for their gender, nor own 
 any sex in a pen. I choose just to hint to some causeless 
 unfriends that, as far as I know, there are always two 
 ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff] and two 
 parties also to every good laugh. 
 
A FABLE FOE THE CRITICS. 
 
 PHCEBUS, sitting one day in a laurel-tree s shade, 
 Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made, 
 For the god being one day too warm in his wooing, 
 She took to the tree to escape his pursuing ; 
 Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk, 
 And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk ; 
 And, though twas a step into which he had driven her, 
 He somehow or other had never forgiven her ; 
 Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic, 
 Something bitter to chew when he d play the Byronic, 
 And I can t count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over, 
 By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of hei. 
 " My case is like Dido s," he sometimes remark d, 
 " When I last saw my love, she was fairly embark d ; 
 
8 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it, 
 
 You re not always sure of your game when you ve tree d it. 
 
 Just conceive such a change taking place in one s mistress ! 
 
 What romance would be left ? who can flatter or kiss trees ? 
 
 And for mercy s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue 
 
 With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log, 
 
 Not to say that the thought would forever intrude 
 
 That you ve less chance to win her the more she is wood ? 
 
 Ah ! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves, 
 
 To see those loved graces all taking their leaves ; 
 
 Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now, 
 
 As they left me forever, each making its bough ! 
 
 If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right, 
 
 Her new bark is worse than ten times her old-bite." 
 
 Now, Daphne, before she was happily treeified, 
 Over all other flowers the lily had deified, 
 And when she expected the god on a visit, 
 ( Twas before he had made his intentions explicit,) 
 Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care, 
 To look as if artlessly twined in her hair, 
 Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses, 
 Like the day breaking through the long night of her tresses ; 
 So, whenever he wished to be quite irresistible, 
 Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table, 
 (I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable, 
 
Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel,) 
 
 He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it, 
 
 As I shall at the , when they cut up my book in it. 
 
 Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I ve been spinning, 
 I ve got back at last to my story s beginning : 
 Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress, 
 As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries, 
 Or as those puzzling specimens, which, in old histories, 
 We read of his verses the Oracles, namely, 
 (I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely, 
 For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk, 
 They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk, 
 And so dull thay.he men who retailed them out-doors 
 Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,) 
 First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is 
 Would induce a moustache, for you know he s iniberbis ; 
 Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position 
 Was assailed by the age of his son the physician ; 
 At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately, 
 And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly ; 
 "MehercTe! I d make such proceedings felonious, 
 Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius ? 
 Look well to your seat, tis like taking an airing 
 On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing ; 
 It leads one, tis true, through the primitive forest, 
 
10 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Grand natural features but, then, one has no rest ; 
 
 You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance, 
 
 When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence, 
 
 Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any ?" 
 
 Here the laurel-leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne. 
 
 " O, weep with me, Daphne," he sighed, " for you know it s 
 A terrible thing to be pestered with poets ! 
 But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good, 
 She never will cry till she s out of the wood ! 
 What wouldn t I give if I never had known of her ? 
 Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over ; 
 If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over, 
 I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher, 
 And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. 
 One needs something tangible, though to begin on 
 A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on ; 
 What boots all your grist 1 it can never be ground 
 Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round, 
 (Or, if tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor, 
 And say it won t stir, save the wheel be well wet afore, 
 Or lug in some stuff about water " so dreamily," 
 It is not a metaphor, though, tis a simile ;) 
 A lily, perhaps, would set my mill agoing, 
 For just at this season, I think, they are blowing, 
 Here, somebody, fetch one, not very far hence 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 11 
 
 They re in bloom by the score, tis but climbing a fence ; 
 There s a poe*t hard by, who does nothing but fill his 
 Whole garden, from one end to t other, with lilies ; 
 A very good plan, were it not for satiety, 
 One longs for a weed here and there, for variety ; 
 Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise, 
 Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes. 
 
 Now there happened to be among Phcebus s followers, 
 A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers 
 Who bolt every book that comes out of the press, 
 Without the least question of larger or less, 
 Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head, 
 For reading new books is like eating new bread, 
 One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he 
 Is brought to death s door of a mental dyspepsy. 
 On a previous stage of existence, our Hero 
 Had ridden outside, with the glass below zero ; 
 He had been, tis a fact you may safely rely on, 
 Of a very old stock a most eminent scion, 
 A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on, 
 Who stretch the new boots Earth s unwilling to try on, 
 Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on, 
 Whose hair J s in the mortar of every new Zion, 
 Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one, 
 Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on, 
 
JC "FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Who hunt, if they e er hunt at all, with the lion, 
 (Though they hunt lions also, whenevei they spy one,) 
 Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one, 
 And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on, 
 Whose pedigree traced to earth s earliest years, 
 Is longer than any thing else but their ears ; 
 In short, he was sent into life with the wrong key, 
 He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey. 
 Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters, 
 Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters; 
 Far happier than many a literary hack, 
 He bore only paper-mill rags on his back ; 
 (For it makes a vast difference which side the mill 
 One expends on the paper his labor and skill ;) 
 So, when his soul waited a new transmigration, 
 And Destiny balanced twixt this and that station, 
 Not having much time to expend upon bothers, 
 Remembering he d had some connexion with authors, 
 And considering his four legs had grown paralytic, _ 
 She set him on two, and he came forth a critic. 
 
 Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took 
 In any amusement but tearing a book ; 
 For him there was no intermediate stage, 
 From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age ; 
 There were years when he didn t wear coat-tails behind 
 
V 
 
 ,w 
 
 A FABLE FOR THE CRIT 
 
 But a boy he could never be rightly defined ; 
 
 Like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span, 
 
 From the womb he came gravely, a little old man ; 
 
 While other boys trowsers demanded the toil 
 
 Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil, 
 
 Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy, 
 
 He sat in a corner and read Viri Romse. 
 
 He never was known to unbend or to revel once 
 
 In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once ; 
 
 He was just one of those who excite the benevolence 
 
 Of old prigs who sound the soul s depths with a ledger, 
 
 And are on the look out-for some young men to " edger- 
 
 -cate," as they call it, who won t be too costly, 
 
 And who ll afterward take to the.^ ministry mostly ; 
 
 Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious, 
 
 Always keep on good terms with each mater -familias 
 
 Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear 
 
 Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year ; 
 
 Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions, 
 
 Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions. 
 
 In this way our hero got safely to College, 
 Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge ; 
 A reading-machine, always wound up and going, 
 He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing, 
 Appeared in a gown, and a vest of black satin, 
 
14 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin, 
 That Tully could never have made out a word in it, 
 (Though himself was the model the author preferred in it,) 
 And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee, 
 All the mystic and so-forths contained in A. B., 
 He was launched (life is always compared to a sea,) 
 With just enough learning, and skill for the using it, 
 To prove he d a brain, by forever confusing it. 
 So worthy Saint Benedict, piously burning 
 With the holiest zeal against secular learning, 
 Nesciensque scienter, as writers express it, 
 Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit. 
 
 Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew, 
 All separate facts, undeniably true, 
 But with him or each other they d nothing to do; 
 No power of combining, arranging, discerning, 
 Digested the masses he learned into learning ; 
 There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for, 
 (And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for,) 
 Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter, 
 Till he d weighed its relations to plain bread and butter. 
 When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits 
 In compiling the journals historical bits, 
 Of shops broken open, men falling in fits, 
 Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 15 
 
 And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,- 
 
 Then, rising by industry, knack, and address, 
 
 Got notices up for an unbiassed press, 
 
 With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for 
 
 Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for ; 
 
 From this point his progress was rapid and sure, 
 
 To the post of a regular heavy reviewer. 
 
 And here I must say, he wrote excellent articles 
 On the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles, 
 They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for, 
 And nobody read that which nobody cared for ; 
 If any old book reached a fiftieth edition, 
 He could fill forty pages with safe erudition ; 
 .He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules, 
 And his very old nothings pleased very old fools ; 
 But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart, 
 And you put him at sea without compass or chart, 
 His blunders aspired to the rank of an art ; 
 For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, 
 Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him, 
 So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him, 
 Carving new forms of truth out of Nature s old granite, 
 New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier s planet, 
 Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create 
 In the soul of their critic the measure and weight, 
 
16 
 
 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace, 
 To compute their own judge, and assign him his place, 
 Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it, 
 And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it, 
 Without the least malice, his record would be 
 Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea, 
 
 Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes, 
 Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes, 
 Or, borne by an Arab guide, ventured to render a 
 General view of the ruins at Denderah. 
 
 As I said, he was never precisely unkind, 
 The defect in his brain was mere absence of mind ; 
 If he boasted, twas simply that he was self-made, 
 A position which I, for one, never gainsaid, 
 My respect for my Maker supposing a skill 
 In his works which our hero would answer but ill ; 
 And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he, 
 Made bold by success, may make broad his phylactery, 
 And set up a kind of a man-manufactory, 
 An event which I shudder to think about, seeing 
 That Man is a moral, accountable being. 
 
 He meant well enough, but was still in the way, 
 As a dunce always is, let him be where he may ; 
 Indeed, they appear to come into existence 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 17 
 
 To impede other folks with their awkward assistance ; 
 
 If you set up a dunce on the very North pole, 
 
 All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul, 
 
 He d manage to get betwixt somebody s shins, 
 
 And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins, 
 
 To the grave polar bears sitting round^n the ice, 
 
 All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice ; 
 
 Or, if he found nobody else there to pother, 
 
 Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other, 
 
 For there s nothing we read of in torture s inventions, 
 
 Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions. 
 
 A terrible fellow to meet in society, 
 Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea ; 
 There he d sit at the table and stir in his sugar, 
 Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar ; 
 Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights, 
 Of your time he s as fond as an Arab of dates ; 
 You ll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way, 
 Of something you ve seen in the course of the day ; 
 And, just as you re tapering out the conclusion, 
 You venture an ill-fated classic allusion, 
 The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack ! 
 The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back ; 
 You had left out a comma, your Greek s put in joint, 
 
 And pointed at cost of your story s whole point. 
 2 
 
18 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 In the course of the evening, you venture on certain 
 
 Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain ; 
 
 You tell her your heart can be likened to one flower, 
 
 " And that, oh most charming of women, s the sunflower, 
 
 Which turns" here a clear nasal voice, to your terror, 
 
 From outside the curtain, says " that s all an error." 
 
 As for him, he s no matter, he never grew tender, 
 
 Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender, 
 
 Shaping somebody s sweet features out of cigar smoke, 
 
 (Though he d willingly grant you that such doings are smoke 
 
 All women he damns with mutdbile semper, 
 
 And if ever he felt something like love s distemper, 
 
 Twas toward a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican, 
 
 And assisted her father in making a lexicon ; 
 
 Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious 
 
 About one Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius, 
 
 Or something of that sort, but, no more to bore ye 
 
 With character-painting, I ll turn to my story. 
 
 Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes 
 To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes, 
 The genus, I think it is called, irritabile, 
 Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily, 
 And nurses a what is it ? immedicdbile, 
 Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel, 
 As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 19 
 
 If any poor devil but looks at a laurel ; 
 
 Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting, 
 
 (Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting 
 
 Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a 
 
 Retreat to the shrine of a tranquil siesta,) 
 
 Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray, 
 
 Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away ; 
 
 And if that wouldn t do, he was sure to succeed, 
 
 If he took his review out and offered to read ; 
 
 Or, failing in plans of this milder description, 
 
 He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription, 
 
 Considering that authorship wasn t a rich craft, 
 
 To print the " American drama of Witchcraft." 
 
 " Stay, I ll read you a scene," but he hardly began, 
 
 Ere Apollo shrieked " Help !" and the authors all ran : 
 
 And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit, 
 
 And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate, 
 
 He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle, 
 
 As calmly as if twere a nine-barrelled pistol, 
 
 And threatened them all with the judgment to come, 
 
 Of " A wandering Star s first impressions of Rome." 
 
 " Stop ! stop !" with their hands o er their ears screamed the 
 
 Muses, 
 
 " He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses, 
 Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying, 
 Tis mere massacre now that the enemy s flying ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 If he s forced to t again, and we happen to be there, 
 
 Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether." 
 
 I called this a " Fable for Critics ;" you think it s 
 More like a display of my rhythmical trinkets ; 
 My plot, like an icicle, s slender and slippery, 
 Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry, 
 And the reader unwilling in loco desipere, 
 Is free to jump over as much of my frippery 
 As he fancies, and, if he s a provident skipper, he^ 
 May have an Odyssean sway of the gales, 
 And get safe into port, ere his patience all fails ; 
 Moreover, although tis a slender return 
 For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn, 
 And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me, 
 You may e en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me 
 If too angry for that, you can tear me in pieces, 
 And my membra disjecta consign to the breezes, 
 A fate like great Ratzau s, whom one of those bores, 
 Who beflead with bad verses poor Louis Quatorze, 
 Describes, (the first verse somehow ends with victoire,) 
 As dispersant parlout et ses merribres et sa gloire ; 
 Or, if I were over-desirous of earning 
 A repute among noodles for classical learning, 
 I could pick you a score of allusions, I wis, 
 As new as the jests of Didaskalos tis ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Better still, I could make out a good solid list 
 
 From recondite authors who do not exist, 
 
 But that would be naughty : at least, I could- twist 
 
 Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries 
 
 After Milton s prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris ; 
 
 But, as Cicero says he won t say this or that, 
 
 (A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat,) 
 
 After saying whate er he could possibly think of, 
 
 I simply will state that I pause on the brink of 
 
 A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion, 
 
 Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion, 
 
 So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied, 
 
 Just conceive how much harder your teeth you d have gritted, 
 
 An twere not for the dulness I ve kindly omitted. 
 
 Td apologize here for my many digressions, 
 Were it not that I m certain to trip in,to fresh ones, 
 ( Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once ;) 
 Just reflect, if you please, how tis said by Horatius, 
 That MsBonides nods now and then, and, my gracious ! 
 It certainly does look a little bit ominous 
 When he gets under way with ton d apameibomenos. 
 (Here a something occurs which I ll just clap a rhyme to, 
 And say it myself, ere a Zoilus has time to, 
 Any author a nap like Van Winkle s may take, 
 If he only contrive to keep readers awake, 
 
22 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 But he ll very soon find himself laid on the shelf, 
 If they fall a nodding when he nods himself.) 
 
 Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I 
 When Phoebus expressed his desire for a lily. 
 Our hero, whose homoeopathic sagacity 
 With an ocean of zeal mixed his drop of capacity, 
 Set off for the garden as fast as the wind, 
 (Or, to take a comparison more to my mind, 
 As a sound politician leaves conscience behind,) 
 And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps 
 O er his principles, when something else turns up trumps* 
 
 He was gone a long time, and Apollo meanwhile, 
 Went over some sonnets of his with a file, 
 For of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet 
 Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it ; 
 It should reach with one impulse the end of its course, 
 And for one final blow collect all of its force ; 
 Not a verse should be salient, but each one should tend 
 With a wave-like up-gathering to burst at the end ; 
 So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink, 
 
 He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. ; 
 
 At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses, 
 Went dodging about, muttering " murderers ! asses !" 
 From out of his pocket a paper he d take, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 23 
 
 With the proud look of martyrdom tied to its staKe, 
 
 And, reading a squib at himself, he d say, " Here I see 
 
 Gainst American letters a bloody conspiracy, 
 
 They are all by my personal enemies written ; 
 
 I must post an anonymous letter to Britain, 
 
 And show that this gall is the merest suggestion 
 
 Of spite at my zeal on the Copyright question, 
 
 For, on this side the water, tis prudent to pull 
 
 O er the eyes of the public their national wool, 
 
 By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull, 
 
 All American authors who have more or less 
 
 Of that anti- American humbug success, 
 
 While in private we re always embracing the knees 
 
 Of some twopenny editor over the seas, 
 
 And licking his critical shoes, for you know tis 
 
 The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice ; 
 
 My American puffs I would willingly burn all, 
 
 (They re all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal,) 
 
 To get but a kick from a transmarine journal !" 
 
 So, culling the gibes of each critical scorner 
 As if they were plums, and himself were Jack Horner, 
 He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner, 
 And into each hole where a weasel might pass in, 
 Expecting the knife of some critic assassin, 
 Who stabs to the heart with a caricature, 
 
24 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure 
 Yet done with a dagger-6-type, whose vile portraits 
 Disperse all one s good, and condense all one s poor traits. 
 
 Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching, 
 And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching, 
 
 " Good day, Mr. , I m happy to meet 
 
 With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat, 
 Who through Grub-street the soul of a gentleman carries, 
 What news from that suburb of London and Paris 
 Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize 
 The credit of being the New World s metropolis ?" 
 
 "Why, nothing of consequence, save this attack 
 On my friend there, behind, by some pitiful hack, 
 Who thinks every national author a poor one, 
 That isn t a copy of something that s foreign, 
 And assaults the American Dick " 
 
 " Nay, tis clear 
 
 That your Damon there s fond of a flea in his ear, 
 And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick 
 He would buy some himself, just to hear tb^ old click ; 
 Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japa% 
 Should turn up his nose at the Poems on Man, 
 Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it, 
 Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 25 
 
 As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit 
 The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet ; 
 Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column, 
 Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn, 
 By way of displaying his critical crosses, 
 And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis, 
 His broadsides resulting (and this there s no doubt of,) 
 In successively sinking the craft they re fired out of. 
 Now nobody knows when an author is hit, 
 If he don t have a public hysterical fit ; 
 Let him only keep close in his snug garret s dim ether, 
 And nobody d think of his critics or him either ; 
 If an author have any least fibre of worth in him, 
 Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him, 
 All the critics on earth cannot crush with their ban, 
 One word that s in tune with the nature of man." 
 
 " Well, perhaps so ; meanwhile I have brought you a book, 
 Into which if you ll just have the goodness to look, 
 You may feel so delighted, when you have got through it, 
 As to think it not unworth your while to review it, 
 And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do, 
 A place in the nextj Democratic Review." 
 
 " The most thankless of gods you must surely have tho t me, 
 For this is the forty-fourth copy you ve brought me, 
 
26 4 FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 I have given them away, or at least I have tried, 
 
 But I ve forty-two left, standing all side by side, 
 
 (The man who accepted that one copy, died ; ) 
 
 From one end of a shelf to the other they reach, 
 
 With the author s respects neatly written in each. 
 
 The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum, 
 
 When he hears of that order the British Museum 
 
 Has sent for one set of what books were first printed 
 
 In America, little or big, for tis hinted 
 
 That this is the first truly tangible hope he 
 
 Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy. 
 
 I ve thought very often twould be a good thing 
 
 In all public collections of books, if a wing 
 
 Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands, 
 
 Marked Literature suited to desolate islands, 
 
 And filled with such books as could never be read 
 
 Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread, 
 
 Such books as one s wrecked on in small country-taverns, 
 
 Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns, 
 
 Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented, 
 
 As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented, 
 
 Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so 
 
 Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe ; 
 
 And since the philanthropists just now are banging 
 
 And gibbeting all who re in favor of hanging, 
 
 (Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 27 
 
 Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter, 
 
 \nd that vital religion would dull and grow callous, 
 
 Jnre freshed, now and then, with a sniff of the gallows,) 
 
 \nd folks are beginning to think it looks odd, 
 
 To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God ; 
 
 \nd that He who esteems the Virginia reel 
 
 \. bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, 
 
 d regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery 
 Than crushing His African children with slavery, 
 Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillion 
 A.re mounted for hell on the Devil s own pillion, 
 Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, 
 Approaches the heart through the door of the toes, 
 That He, I was saying, whose judgments are stored 
 For such as take steps in despite of his word, 
 Should look with delight on the agonized prancing 
 Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing, 
 While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter 
 About offering to God on his favorite halter, 
 And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence, 
 Sells the clothes to a Jew, ancl the corpse to the surgeons ; 
 
 Now, instead of all this, I think I can direct you all 
 To a criminal code both humane and effectual ; 
 I propose to shut up every doer of wrong 
 With these desperate books, for such term, short or long, 
 
A_BBLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 
 
 28 
 
 As by stakule in such cases made and provided, 
 Shall be by your wise legislators decided 
 Thus : Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler, 
 At hard labor for life on the- works of Miss - ; 
 Petty thieves, kept from flagranter crimes by their fears, 
 Shall peruse Yankee Doodle a blank term of years, 
 That American Punch, like the English, no doubt 
 Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out. 
 
 " But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on 
 The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on, 
 A loud cackling swarm, in whose feathers warm-drest, 
 He goes for as perfect a swan, as the rest. 
 
 " There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, 
 Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, 
 Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, 
 Is some of it pr - No, tis not even prose ; 
 I m speaking of metres ; some poems have welled 
 From those rare depths of soul that have ne er been excelled 
 They re not epics, but that doesn t matter a pin, 
 In creating, the only hard thing s to begin ; 
 A grass-blade s no easier to make than an oak, 
 If you ve once found the way, you ve achieved the grand stroke 
 
 MMM* 
 
 In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, 
 But thrown in a heap with a crush and a clatter ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CK^K^. 
 
 Now it is not one thing nor another alone 
 Makes a poem, but rather the general tone, 
 The something pervading, uniting the whole, 
 The before unconceived, unconceivable soul, 
 So^ that just in removing this trifle or that, you 
 Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue ; 
 Roots, wood, bark, and leaves, singly perfect may be, 
 But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don t make a tree. 
 
 " But, to come back to Emerson, (whom by the way, 
 I believe we left waiting,) his is, we may say, 
 A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range 
 Has Olympus for one pole, for t other the Exchange ; 
 He seems, to my thinking, (although I m afraid 
 The comparison must, long ere this, have been made,) 
 A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian s gold mist 
 And the Gascon s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl co-exist; 
 All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he s got 
 To I don t (nor they either) exactly know what ; 
 For though he builds glorious temples, tis, odd 
 He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. 
 J Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me, 
 To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, 
 In whose mind all creation is duly respected 
 As parts of himself just a little projected ; 
 And who s willing to worship the stars and the sun, 
 
30 A FABLfi FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 A convert to nothing but Emerson, 
 
 So perfect a balance there is in his head, 
 
 That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead ; 
 
 Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort, 
 
 He looks at as merely ideas ; in short, 
 
 As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, 
 
 Of such vast extent that our earth s a mere dab in it ; 
 
 Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her, 
 
 Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer \ 
 
 You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, 
 
 Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion, 
 
 With the quiet precision of science he ll sort em, 
 
 But you can t help suspecting the whole a post mortem. 
 
 w 
 
 " 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 ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 31 
 
 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 the blues, 
 
 And rims common-sense things with mystical hues, 
 
 E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, 
 
 And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense ; 
 
 C. shows you how every-day matters unite 
 
 With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,- 
 
 While E., in a plain, preternatural way, 
 
 Makes mysteries matters of mere every day ; 
 
 C. draws all his characters quite a la Fuseli, 
 
 He don t sketch their bundles of muscles and thews illy r 
 
 But he paints with a brush so untamed and profuse, 
 
 They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews ; 
 
 E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe, 
 
 And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear ; . 
 
 To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords 
 
 The design of a white marble statue in words. 
 
 C. labors to get at the centre, and then 
 
 Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men ; 
 
 E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted, 
 
 And, given himself, has whatever is wanted. 
 
 p 
 
 " He has imitators in scores, who omit 
 No part of the man but his wisdom and wit, 
 Who go carefully o er the sky-blue of his brain, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again ; 
 If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is 
 Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities, 
 As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute, 
 While a cloud that floats o er is reflected within it. 
 
 " There comes , for instance ; to see him s rare,spoi 
 
 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 u$e, 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 dishfull, 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, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 33 
 
 And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, 
 
 With a snug room at Plato s, when night comes, to walk to, 
 
 And people from morning till midnight to talk to, 
 
 And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening ; 
 
 So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, 
 For his highest conceit of a happiest state is 
 Where they d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis ; 
 And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better 
 
 , Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter ; 
 He seems piling words, but there s royal dust hid 
 In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid. 
 While he talks he is grea^ but goes out like a taper, 
 If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper ; 
 Yet his fingers itch for em from morning till night, 
 And he thinks he does wrong if he don t always write ; 
 In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, 
 He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen. 
 
 " Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very full 
 With attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull ; 
 Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goes 
 A stream of transparent and forcible prose ; 
 He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound 
 That tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round, 
 And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind, 
 
 That the weather-cock rules and not follows the wind ; 
 
 3 
 
34 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side, 
 
 With no doctrine pleased that s not somewhere denied, 
 
 He lays the denier away on the shelf, 
 
 And then -down beside him lies gravely himself. 
 
 He s the Salt River boatman, who always stands willing 
 
 To convey friend or foe without charging a shilling, 
 
 And so fond of the trip that, when leisure s to spare. 
 
 He ll row himself up, if he can t get a fare. 
 
 The worst of it is, that his logic s so strong, 
 
 That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong ; 
 
 If there is only one, why, he ll split it in two, 
 
 And first pummel this half, then that, black and blue. 
 
 That white s white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow 
 
 To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow. 
 
 He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve, 
 
 When it reaches your lips there s naught left to believe 
 
 But a few silly- (syllo-, I mean,) -gisms that squat em 
 
 Like tadpoles, o erjoyed with the mud at the bottom. 
 
 " There is Willis, so natty and jaunty and gay, 
 Who says his best things in so foppish a way, 
 With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o erlaying em, 
 That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying err 
 v 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, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 35 
 
 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 he might have admired j 
 
 Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced, 
 
 It runs like a stream with a musical waste, 
 
 And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep ; 
 
 Tis not deep as a river, but who d have it deep ? 
 
 In a country where scarcely a village is found 
 
 That has not its author sublime and profound, 
 
 For some one to be slightly shoal is 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. 
 
 J Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice, 
 
 J Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz ; 
 
 It is Nature herself, and there s something in that, 
 
 Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat. 
 
 No volume I know to read under a tree, 
 
 More truly delicious than his A 1 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. 
 
36 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 " He s so innate a cockney, that had he been born 
 Where plain bare-skin s the only full-dress that is worn, 
 He d have given his own such an air that you d say 
 T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway. 
 His nature s a glass of champagne with the foam on t, 
 As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont ; 
 So his best things are done in the flush of the moment, 
 If he wait, all is spoiled ; he may stir it and shake it, 
 But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it. 
 He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness, 
 If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness ; 
 And he ought to let Scripture alone tis self-slaughter, 
 For nobody likes inspiration-and-water. 
 He d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid, 
 Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid, 
 His wit running up as Canary ran down, 
 The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town. 
 
 " Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man 
 Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban, 
 (The Church of Socinus, I mean) his opinions 
 Being So- (ultra) -cinian, they shocked the Socinians ; 
 They believed faith I m puzzled I think I may call 
 Their belief a believing in nothing at all, 
 Or something of that sort I know they all went 
 For a general union of total dissent : 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 37 
 
 He went a step farther ; without cough or hem, 
 
 He frankly avowed he believed not in them ; 
 
 And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented, 
 
 From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented. 
 
 There was heresy here, you perceive, for the right 
 
 Of privately judging means simply that light 
 
 Has. been, granted to me, for deciding on you, 
 
 And, in happier times, before Atheism grew, 
 
 The deed contained clauses for cooking you, too. 
 
 Now at Xerxes and Knut we all laugh, yet our foot 
 
 With the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut ; 
 
 And we all entertain a sincere private notion, 
 
 That our Thus far ! will have a great weight with the ocean. 
 
 Twas so with our liberal Christians : they bore 
 
 With sincerest conviction their chairs to the shore ; 
 
 They brandished their worn theological birches, 
 
 Bade natural progress keep out of the Churches, 
 
 And expected the lines they had drawn to prevail 
 
 With the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale ; 
 
 They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See, 
 
 And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P. ; 
 
 But he turned up his nose at their murmuring and shamming, 
 
 And cared (shall I say ?) not a d for their damming ; 
 
 So they first read him out of their Church, and next minute 
 
 Turned round and declared he had never been in it. 
 
 But the ban was too small or the man was too big, 
 
33 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig ; 
 
 (He don t look like a man who would stay treated shabbily, 
 
 Sophroniscus son s head o er the features of Rabelais ;) 
 
 He bangs and bethwacks them, their backs he salutes 
 
 With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots ; 
 
 His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced, 
 
 And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht, 
 
 Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan, 
 
 Gush, Pitt (not the bottomless, that he s no faith in,) 
 
 Pan, Pillicock, Shakspeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson, 
 
 Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson, 
 
 Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis, 
 
 Musseus, Muretus, hem, p Scorpionis, 
 
 Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac Mac ah ! Machiavelli, 
 
 Condorcet, Count d Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli, 
 
 Orion, O Connell, the Chevalier D O, 
 
 (Whom the great Sully speaks of,) TO nav, the great toe 
 
 Of the statue of Jupiter, now made to pass 
 
 For that of Jew Peter by good Romish brass, 
 
 (You may add for yourselves, for I find it a bore, 
 
 All the names you have ever, or not, heard before, 
 
 And when you ve done that why, invent a few more.) 
 
 His hearers can t tell you on Sunday beforehand, 
 
 If in that day s discourse they ll be Bibled or Koraned, 
 
 For he s seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired,) 
 
 That all men (not orthodox) may le inspired ; 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 39 
 
 Yet, though wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in, 
 
 He makes it quite clear what he doesn t believe in, 
 
 While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom Come 
 
 Is a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum, 
 
 Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumb 
 
 Would be left, if we did nt keep carefully mum, 
 
 And, to make a clean breast, that tis perfectly plain 
 
 That all kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane ; 
 
 Now P. s creed than this may be lighter or darker, 
 
 But in one thing, tis clear, he has faith, namely Parker ; * 
 
 And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher, 
 
 There s a back-ground of god to each hard-working feature, 
 
 Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced 
 
 In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest : 
 
 There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest, 
 
 If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least, 
 
 His gestures all downright and same, if you will, 
 
 As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill, 
 
 But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke, 
 
 Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak, 
 
 You forget the man wholly, you re thankful to meet 
 
 With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street, 
 
 And to hear, you re not over-particular whence, 
 
 Almost Taylor s profusion, quite Latimer s sense. 
 
 " There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, 
 
40 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified, 
 
 Save when by reflection tis kindled o nights 
 
 With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights. 
 
 He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation, 
 
 (There s no doubt that he stands ?n supreme ice-olation,) 
 
 Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, 
 
 But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on, 
 
 He s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on : 
 
 Unqualified merits, I ll grant, if you choose, he has em, 
 
 But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm ; 
 
 If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul, 
 
 Like being stirred up with the very North Pole. 
 
 " He is very nice reading in summer, but inter 
 Nos, we don t want extra freezing in winter j 
 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, or where er it is, 
 Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities, 
 To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet 1 
 No, to old Berkshire s hills, with their limestone and granite. 
 If you r one who in loco (add foco here) desipis, 
 You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece ; 
 But you d get deeper down if you came as a precipice, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 41 
 
 And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain 
 
 If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain. 
 
 Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning, 
 
 Some scholar who s hourly expecting his learning, 
 
 Calls B. the American Wordsworth ; but Wordsworth 
 
 Is worth near as much as 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 mto a giant : 
 
 If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per- 
 
 -sons fit for a parallel Thomson and Cowper ;* 
 
 I don t mean exactly, there s something of each, 
 
 There s T. s love of nature, C. s penchant to preach ; 
 
 Just mix up their minds so that C. s spice of craziness 
 
 Shall balance and neutralize T. s turn for laziness, 
 
 And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, 
 
 Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot, 
 
 A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on 
 
 The heart which strives vainly to burst off a button, 
 
 A brain which, without being slow or mechanic, 
 
 Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic ; 
 
 He s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten, 
 
 And the advantage that Wordsworth before him has written. 
 
 * To demonstrate quickly and easily how per- 
 -versely absurd tis to sound this name Cowper, 
 As people in general call him named super, 
 
42 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 " But, my dear little bardlings, don t prick up your ears, 
 Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers ; 
 If I call him an iceberg, I don t mean to say 
 There is nothing in that which is grand, in its way ; 
 He is almost the one of your poets that knows 
 How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose ; 
 If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar 
 His thought s modest fulness by going too far ; 
 Twould be well if your authors should all make a trial 
 Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial, 
 And measure their writings by Hesiod s staff, 
 Which teaches that all has less value than half. 
 
 " There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart 
 Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, 
 And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect 
 Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect ; 
 There was ne er a man born who had more of the swino- 
 
 O 
 
 Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing ; 
 
 And his failures arise, (though perhaps he don t know it,) 
 
 From the very same cause that has made him a poet, 
 
 A fervor of mind which knows no separation 
 
 Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration, 
 
 As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing 
 
 If twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing j 
 
 Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 43 
 
 And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, 
 
 While, borne with the rush of the metre along, 
 
 The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, 
 
 Content with the whirl and delirium of song ; 
 
 Then his grammar s not always correct, nor his rhymes, 
 
 And he s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes, 
 
 Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white -heats 
 
 When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats, 
 
 And can ne er be repeated again any more 
 
 Than they could have been carefully plotted before : 
 
 Like old what s-his-name there at the battle of Hastings, 
 
 (Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings,) 
 
 Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights 
 
 For reform and whatever they call human rights, 
 
 Botn singing and striking in front of the war 
 
 And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor ; 
 
 Anne haeci one exclaims, on beholding his knocks, 
 
 Vestis flu tui, O, leather-clad Fox ? 
 
 Can that be thy son, invthe battle s mid din, 
 
 Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in 
 
 To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin, 
 
 With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly s spring 
 
 Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling 1 
 
 " All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard 
 Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard, 
 
44 ;. & & 
 
 ABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave 
 
 When to look but a protest in silence was brave ; 
 
 All honor and praise to the women and men 
 
 Who spoke out for the dumb and the drown-trodden then ! 
 
 I need not to name them, already for each 
 
 I see History preparing the statue and niche ; 
 
 They were harsh, but shall you be so shocked at hard words 
 
 Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords, 
 
 Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gain 
 
 By the reaping of men and of women than grain ? 
 
 Why should you stand aghast at their fierce wordy war, if 
 
 You scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff? 
 
 Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day long 
 
 Don t prove that the use of hard language is wrong ; 
 
 While the World s heart beats quicker to think of such men 
 
 As signed Tyranny s doom with a bloody steel-pen, 
 
 While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright one 
 
 With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton, 
 
 You need not look shy at your sisters and brothers 
 
 Who stab with sharp words for the freedom of others ; 
 
 No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and true 
 
 Who, for sake of the many, dared stand with the few, 
 
 Not of blood-spattered laurel for enemies braved, 
 
 But of broad, peaceful oak-leaves for citizens saved ! 
 
 " Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along. 
 
POK THE 
 
 Involved in a paulo-post- future of song, 
 
 Who ll be going to write what ll never be written 
 
 Till the Muse, ere he thinks 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 judicially 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 any thing more ; 
 
 The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him, 
 
 The depth arid the vastness and longing sweep o er him, 
 
 He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart, 
 
 He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart, 
 
 Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable, 
 
 In learning to swim on his library-table. 
 
 " There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine 
 The sinews and chords of his pugilist brain, 
 
46 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he 
 
 Preferred to believe that he was so already; 
 
 Too hasty to wait till Art s ripe fruit should drop, 
 
 He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop ; 
 
 Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it, 
 
 It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it ; 
 
 A man who s made less than he might have, because 
 
 He always has thought himself more than he was, 
 
 Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard, 
 
 Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard, 
 
 And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice, 
 
 Because song drew less instant attention than noise. 
 
 Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, 
 
 That he goes the farthest who goes far enough, 
 
 And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff. 
 
 No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood ; 
 
 His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good ; 
 
 Tis the modest man ripens, tis he that achieves, 
 
 Just what s needed of sunshine and shade he receives ; 
 
 Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves ; 
 
 Neal wants balance ; he throws his mind always too far, 
 
 And whisks 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. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 47 
 
 He has strength, but there s nothing about him in keeping j 
 
 One ge-ts 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 muddied the stream ere he took his first taste. 
 
 
 
 " There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare 
 That you hardly at first see the strength that is there ; 
 A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, 
 So earnest, so graceful, so solid, 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 Fouque, a Puritan Tieck ; 
 When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted 
 For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, 
 So, to fill out her model, a little she spared 
 From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared, 
 And she could not have hit a more excellent plan 
 
48 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 For making him fully and perfectly man. 
 The success of her scheme gave her so much delight, 
 That she tried it again, shortly after, in D wight ; 
 Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay, 
 She sang to her work in her sweet childish way, 
 \nd found, when she d put the last touch to his soul, 
 That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole, 
 
 " Here s Cooper, who s written six volumes to show 
 He s as good as a lord : well, let s grant that he s so j 
 If a person prefer that description of praise, 
 Why, a coronet s certainly cheaper than bays ; 
 But he need take no pains to convince us he s not 
 (As his enemies say) the American Scott. 
 Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud 
 That one of his novels of which he s most proud, 
 And I d lay any bet that, without ever quitting 
 Their box, they d be all, to a man, for acquitting. 
 He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, 
 One wild flower he s plucked that is wet with the dew 
 Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, 
 He has done naught but copy it ill ever since ; 
 His Indians, with proper respect be it said, 
 Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red, 
 And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat, 
 Rigged up in duck pants and a sou -wester hat, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 (Though, once in a Coffin, a good chance was found 
 
 To have slipt the old fellow away underground.) 
 
 All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, 
 
 The dernier chemise of a man in a fix, 
 
 (As a captain besieged, when his garrison s small, 
 
 Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o er the wall ;) 
 
 And the women he draws from one model don t vary, 
 
 All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. 
 
 When a character s wanted, he goes to the task 
 
 As a cooper would do in composing a cask ; 
 
 He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful, 
 
 Just hoops them together as tight as is needful, 
 
 And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he 
 
 Has made at the most something wooden and empty. 
 
 " Don t suppose I would underrate Cooper s abilities, 
 If I thought you d do that, I should feel very ill at ease ; 
 The men who have given to one character life 
 And objective existence, are not very rife, 
 You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, 
 Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers, 
 And Natty won t go to oblivion quicker 
 Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. 
 
 " There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is 
 That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis ; 
 
50 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, 
 
 He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity. 
 
 Now he may overcharge his American pictures, 
 
 But you ll grant there s a good deal of truth in his strictures 
 
 And I honor the man who is willing to sink 
 
 Half his present repute for the freedom to think, 
 
 And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, 
 
 Will risk t other half for the freedom to speak, 
 
 Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, 
 
 Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower. 
 
 " There are truths you Americans need to be told, 
 And it never ll refute them to swagger and scold ; 
 John Bull, looking o er the Atlantic, in choler 
 At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar ; 
 But to scorn such i-dollar-try s what very few do, 
 And John goes to that church as often as you do. 
 No matter what John says, don t try to outcrow him, 
 Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him ; 
 Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One 
 Displacing himself in the mind of his son, 
 A.nd detests the same faults in himself he d neglected 
 When he sees them again in his child s glass reflected ; 
 To love one another you re too like by half, 
 If he is a bull, you re a pretty stout calf, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 51 
 
 And tear your own pasture for naught but to show 
 What a nice pair of horns you re beginning to grow. 
 
 " There are one or two things I should just like to hint, 
 For you don t often get the truth told you in print ; 
 The most of you (this is what -strikes all beholders) 
 Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders ; 
 Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, 
 You ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves ; 
 Tho you brag of your New World, you don t half believe in it, 
 And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it ; 
 Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, 
 With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, 
 With eyes bold as Here s, and hair floating free, 
 And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, 
 Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, 
 Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing, 
 Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass, 
 Keeps glancing aside into Europe s cracked glass, 
 Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, 
 And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste ; 
 She loses her fresh country charm when she takes 
 Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes. 
 
 "You steal Englishmen s books and think Englishmen s 
 thought, 
 
52 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught ; 
 
 Your literature suits its each whisper and motion 
 
 To what will be thought of it over the ocean ; 
 
 The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries 
 
 And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies ; 
 
 Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood 
 
 To which the dull current in hers is but mud ; 
 
 Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, 
 
 In her voice there s a tremble e en now while she rails, 
 
 And your shore will soon be in the nature of things 
 
 Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings, 
 
 Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow s Waif, 
 
 Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe. 
 
 O, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he 
 
 Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea ; 
 
 Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, 
 
 By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs, 
 
 Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, 
 
 As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page, 
 
 Plough, dig, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all things 
 
 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. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 53 
 
 Hem ! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o t, 
 
 Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot." 
 
 Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic 
 More pepper than brains, shrieked " The man s a fanatic, 
 T am a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, 
 And will make him a suit that 11 serve in all weathers ; 
 But we ll argue the point first, I m willing to reason } t, 
 Palaver before condemnation s but decent, 
 So, through my humble person, Humanity begs 
 Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs." 
 But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth 
 As when %ie VVXTI SOMU^ and so forth, 
 And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, 
 But, as he was going, gained courage to say, 
 " At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, 
 I am as strongly opposed to t as any one else." 
 " Ay, no doubt, but whenever I ve happened to meet 
 With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete," 
 Answered Phoebus severely ; then turning to us, 
 "The mistakes of such fellows as just made the fuss 
 
 Is only in taking a great busy nation 
 
 For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation. 
 
 But there comes Miranda, Zeus ! where shall I fiee to ? 
 
 She has such a penchant for bothering me, too ! 
 
54 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 She always keeps asking if I don t observe a 
 
 Particular likeness twixt her and Minerva ; 
 
 She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever ; 
 
 She s been travelling now, and will be worse than ever; 
 
 One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she d be 
 
 Of all that s worth mentioning over the sea, 
 
 For a woman must surely see well, if she try, 
 
 The whole of whose being s a capital I : 
 
 She will take an old notion, and make it her own, 
 
 By saying it o er in her Sybilline tone, 
 
 Or persuade you tis something tremendously deep, 
 
 By repeating it so as to put you to sleep ; 
 
 And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, 
 
 When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. 
 
 There is one thing she owns in her own single right, 
 
 It is native and genuine namely, her spite : 
 
 Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows 
 
 A censor of vanity neath her own nose." 
 
 Here Miranda came up, and said, " Phoebus ! you know 
 That the infinite Soul has its infinite woe, 
 As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl, 
 Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul ; 
 I myself introduced, I myself, I alone, 
 To my Land s better life authors solely my own, 
 Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 55 
 
 Whose works sound a depth by Life s quiet unshaken, 
 Such as Shakspeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon, 
 Not to mention my own works ; Time s nadir is fleet, 
 And, as for myself, I m quite out of conceit," 
 
 " Quite out of conceit ! I m enchanted to hear it," 
 Cried ,pp(5Jlo aside, " Who d have thought she was near it ? 
 To be sure one is apt to exhaust those commodities 
 He uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is 
 As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings, 
 * I m as much out of salt as Miranda s own writings, 
 (Which, as she in her own happy manner has said, 
 Sound a depth, for tis one of the functions of lead.) 
 She often has asked me if I could not find 
 A place somewhere near me that suited her mind ; 
 I know but a single one vacant, which she, 
 With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T. 
 And it would not imply any pause or cessation 
 In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation, 
 She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses, 
 And remain Tiring- woman for life to the Muses." 
 
 (Miranda meanwhile has succeeded in driving 
 Up into a corner, in spite of their striving, 
 A small flock of terrified victims, and there, 
 With an I-turn-the-crarik-of-the-Universe air 
 
56 A FABLE FOR THE CEITICS. 
 
 And a tone which, at least to my fancy, appears 
 Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears, 
 Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise,) 
 For tis dotted as thick as a peacock s with I s.) 
 Apropos of Miranda, I ll rest on my oars 
 And drift through a trifling digression on bores, 
 For, though not wearing ear-rings in more majorum, 
 Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore em. 
 There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least, 
 Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast, 
 And of all quiet pleasures the very ne plus 
 Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us. 
 Archseologians, I know, who have personal fears 
 Of this wise application of hounds and of spears, 
 Have tried to make out, with a zeal more than wonted, 
 Twas a kind of wild swine that our ancestors hunted ; 
 But I ll never believe that the age which has strewn 
 Europe o er with cathedrals, and otherwise shown 
 That it knew what was what, could by chance not have known, 
 (Spending, too, its chief time with its buff on, no doubt,) 
 Which beast twould improve the world most to thin out. 
 I divide bores myself, in the manner of rifles, 
 Into two great divisions, regardless of trifles ; 
 There s your smooth-bore and screw-bore, who do not much 
 
 vary 
 In the weight of cold lead they respectively carry. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 57 
 
 The smooth-bore is one in whose essence the mind 
 
 Not a corner nor cranny to cling by can find ; 
 
 You feel as in nightmares sometimes, when you slip 
 
 Down a steep slated roof where there s nothing to grip, 
 
 You slide and you slide, the blank horror increases, 
 
 Y"ou had rather by far be at once smashed to pieces, 
 
 You fancy a whirlpool below white and frothing, 
 
 And finally drop off and light upon nothing. 
 
 The screw-bore has twists in him, faint predilections 
 
 For going just wrong in the tritest directions ; 
 
 When he s wrong he is flat, when he s right he can t show it, 
 
 He ll tell you what Snooks said about the new poet,* 
 
 Or how Fogrum was outraged by Tennyson s Princess ; 
 
 He has spent all his spare time and intellect since his 
 
 Birth in perusing, on each art and science, 
 
 Just the books in which no one puts any reliance, 
 
 And though nemo, we re told, horis omnibus sapit, 
 
 The rule will not fit him, however you shape it, 
 
 For he has a perennial foison of sappiness ; 
 
 He has just enough force to spoil half your day s happiness, 
 
 And to make him a sort of mosquito to be with, 
 
 But just not enough to dispute or agree with. 
 
 These sketches I made (not to be too explicit) 
 From two honest fellows who made me a visit, 
 
 * (If you call Snooks an owl, he will show by his looks 
 That he s morally certain you re jealous of Snooks.) 
 
58 . ..#. FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 > X 
 
 And broke, like the tale of the Bear and the Fiddle, 
 
 My reflections on Halleck short off by the middle ; 
 
 I shall not now go into the subject more deeply, 
 
 For I notice that some of my readers look sleep ly, 
 
 I will barely remark that, mongst civilized nations, 
 
 There s none that displays more exemplary patience 
 
 Under all sorts of boring, at all sorts of hours, 
 
 From all sorts of desperate persons, than ours. 
 
 Not to speak of our papers, our State legislatures, 
 
 And other such trials for sensitive natures, 
 
 Just look for a moment at Congress, appalled, 
 
 My fancy shrinks back from the phantom it called ; 
 
 Why, there s scarcely a member unworthy to frown 
 
 Neath what Fourier nicknames the Boreal crown ; 
 
 Only think what that infinite bore-pow r could do 
 
 If applied with a utilitarian view 
 
 Suppose, for example, we shipped it with care 
 
 To Sahara s great desert and let it bore there, 
 
 If they held one short session and did nothing else, 
 
 They d fill the whole waste with Artesian wells. 
 
 But tis time now with pen phonographic to follow 
 
 Through some more of his sketches our laughing A^pollo 
 
 " There comes Harry Franco, and, as he draws near, 
 You find that s a smile which you took for a sneer ; 
 One half of him contradicts t other, his wont 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICft. &A & r r 59 
 
 Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt ; 
 
 His manner s as hard as his feelings are tender, 
 
 And a sortie he ll make when he means to surrender ; 
 
 He s in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest, 
 
 When he seems to be joking, be sure he s in earnest ; 
 
 He has common sense in a way that s uncommon, 
 
 Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman, 
 
 Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak, 
 
 Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke, 
 
 Is half upright Quaker, half downright Gome-outer, 
 
 Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her, 
 
 Quite artless himself is a lover of Art, 
 
 Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart, 
 
 And though not a poet, yet all must admire 
 
 In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar., 
 
 " There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, 
 Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge, 
 Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, 
 In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres, 
 Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, 
 But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind, 
 Who but hey-day ! What s this? Messieurs Mathews and Poe, 
 You mustn t fling mud-balls at Longfellow so, 
 Does it make a man worse that his character s such 
 As to make his friends love him (as you think) too much ? 
 
00 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Why, there is not a bard at this moment alive 
 
 More willing than he that his fellows should thrive ; 
 
 While you are abusing him thus, even now 
 
 He would help either one of you out of a slough ; 
 
 You may say that he s smooth and all that till you re hoarse, 
 
 But remember that elegance also is force ; 
 
 After polishing granite as much as you will, 
 
 The heart keeps its tough old persistency still ; 
 
 Deduct all you can that still keeps you at bay, 
 
 Why, he ll live till men weary of Collins and Gray ; 
 
 I m not over- fond of Greek metres in English, 
 
 To me rhyme s a gain, so it be not too jinglish, 
 
 And your modern hexameter verses are no more 
 
 Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer ; 
 
 As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is, 
 
 So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes ; 
 
 1 may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o t is 
 
 That I ve heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies, 
 
 And my ear with that music impregnate may be, 
 
 Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea, 
 
 Or as one can t bear Strauss when his nature is cloven 
 
 To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven ; 
 
 But, set that aside, and tis truth that I speak, 
 
 Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek, 
 
 I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line 
 
 In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 61 
 
 That s not ancient nor modern, its place is apart 
 Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art, 
 Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth s hubbub and strife 
 As quiet and chaste as the author s own life. 
 
 " There comes Philothea, her face all a-glow, 
 She has just been dividing some poor creature s woe 
 And can t tell which pleases her most, to relieve 
 His want, or his story to hear and believe ; 
 No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails, 
 For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales ; 
 She knows well that silence is sorrow s best food, 
 And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood, 
 So she ll listen with patience and let you unfold 
 Your bundle of rags as twere pure cloth of gold, 
 Which, indeed, it all turns to as soon as she s touched it, 
 And, (to borrow a phrase from the nursery,) mucked it, 
 She has such a musical taste, she will go 
 Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow ; 
 She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main 
 And thinks it geometry s fault if she s fain 
 To consider things flat, inasmuch as they re plain ; 
 Facts with her are accomplished, as Frenchmen would say, 
 They will prove all she wishes them to either way, 
 And, as fact lies on this side or that, we must try, 
 If we re seeking the truth, to find where it don t lie ; 
 
02 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 I was telling her once of a marvellous aloe 
 
 That for thousands of years had looked spindling and sallow, 
 
 And, though nursed by the fruitfullest powers of mud, 
 
 Had never vouchsafed e en so much as a bud, 
 
 Till its owner remarked, as a sailor, you know, 
 
 Often will in a calm, that it never would blow, 
 
 For he wished to exhibit the plant, and designed 
 
 That its blowing should help him in raising the wind ; 
 
 At last it was told him that if he should water 
 
 Its roots with the blood of his unmarried daughter, 
 
 (Who was born, as her mother, a Calvinist said, 
 
 With a Baxter s effectual call on her head,) 
 
 It would blow as the obstinate breeze did when by a 
 
 Like decree of her father died Iphigenia ; 
 
 At first he declared he himself would be blowed 
 
 Ere his conscience with such a foul crime he would load, 
 
 But the thought, coming oft, grew less dark than before, 
 
 And he mused, as each creditor knocked at his door, 
 
 If this were but done they would dun me no more ; 
 
 I told Philothea his struggles and doubts , 
 
 And how he considered the ins and the outs 
 
 Of the visions he had, and the dreadful dyspepsy, 
 
 How he went to the seer that lives at Po keepsie, 
 
 How the seer advised him to sleep on it first 
 
 And to read his big volume in case of the worst, 
 
 And further advised he should pay him five dollars 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 63 
 
 For writing f^ttltt, l^UWl, on his wristbands and collars ; 
 
 Three years and ten days these dark words he had studied 
 
 When the daughter was missed, and the aloe had budded ; 
 
 I told how he watched it grow large and more large, 
 
 And wondered how much for the show he should charge, 
 
 She had listened with utter indifference to this, till 
 
 I told how it bloomed, and discharging its pistil 
 
 With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot 
 
 The botanical filicide dead on the spot ; 
 
 It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains, 
 
 For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains, 
 
 And the crime was blown also, because on the wad, 
 
 Which was paper, was writ Visitation of God, 
 
 As well as a thrilling account of the deed 
 
 Which the coroner kindly allowed me 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 twere her own child most tenderly bred it, 
 Laid the scene (of the legend, I mean,) far away a- 
 mong the green vales underneath Himalaya. 
 And by artist-like touches, laid on here and there, 
 Made the whole thing so touching, I frankly declare 
 I have read it all thrice, and, perhaps I am weak, 
 But I found every time there were tears on my cheek- 
 
 
64 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 " The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls, 
 But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles, 
 And folks with a mission that nobody knows, 
 Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose ; 
 She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope 
 Converge to some focus of rational hope, 
 And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall 
 Can transmute into honey, but this is not all ; 
 Not only for those she has solace, 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 feel 
 Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat 
 The soothed head in silence reposing could hear 
 The chimes of far childhood throb thick on the ear ? 
 Ah, there s many a beam from the fountain of day 
 That to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way, 
 Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope 
 To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope ; 
 Yes, a great soul is hers, one that dares to go in 
 To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin, 
 And to bring into each, or to find there, some line 
 Of the never completely out-trampled divine ; 
 If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 
 Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 65 
 
 As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain 
 Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain ; 
 What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour 
 Could they be as a Child but for one little hour ! 
 
 " What ! Irving? thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain, 
 You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain, 
 And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there 
 Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair ; 
 Nay, don t be embarrassed, nor look so beseeching, 
 I 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, minus the chill, 
 With the whole of that partnership s stock and good will, 
 Mix well, and while stirring, hum o er, as a spell, 
 The fine old English Gentleman, simmer it well, 
 Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain, 
 That only the finest and clearest remain, 
 Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives 
 From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves, 
 And you ll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving 
 A name either English or Yankee, just Irving. 
 
60 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 " There goes, but stet nominis umbra, his name 
 You ll be glad enough, some day or other, to claim, 
 And will all crowd about him and swear that you knew him 
 If some English hack-critic should chance to review him ; 
 The old porcos ante ne projiciatis 
 MARGARITAS, for him you have verified gratis ; 
 What matters- his name ? Why, it may be Sylvester, 
 Judd, Junior, or Junius, Ulysses, or Nestor, 
 For aught I know or care ; tis enough that I look 
 On the author of Margaret, the first Yankee book 
 With the soul of Down East in t, and things farther East, 
 As far as the threshold of morning, at least, 
 Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true, 
 Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new. 
 J T has a smack of pine woods, of bare field and bleak hill 
 Such as only the breed of the Mayflower could till ; 
 The Puritan s shown in it, tough to the core, 
 Such as prayed, smiting Agag on red Marston moor; 
 With an unwilling humor, half-choked by the drouth 
 In brown hollows about the inhospitable mouth ; 
 With a soul full of poetry, though it has qualms 
 About finding a happiness out of the Psalms ; 
 : Full of tenderness, too, though it shrinks in the dark, 
 Hamadryad-like, under the coarse, shaggy bark ; 
 That sees visions, knows wrestlings of God with the Will, 
 And has its own Sinais and thunderings still." 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 67 
 
 Here, " Forgive me, Apollo," I cried, " while I pour 
 My heart out to my birth-place : O, loved more and more 
 Dear Baystate, from whose rocky bosom thy sons 
 Should suck milk, strong-will-giving, brave, such as runs 
 In the veins of old Graylock, who is it that dares 
 Call thee pedler, a soul 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 up to their place, beetles drive home the beams : 
 It is songs such as these that she croons to the din 
 Of her fast-flying shuttles, year out and year in, 
 While from earth s farthest corner there comes not a breeze 
 But wafts her the buzz of her gold-gleaning bees : 
 What though those horn hands have as yet found small time 
 For painting and sculpture and music and rhyme ? 
 These will come in due order, the need that pressed sorest 
 Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest, 
 To bridle and harness the rivers, the steam, 
 Making that whirl her mill-wheels, this tug in her team, 
 To vassalize old tyrant Winter, and make 
 Him delve surlily for her on river and lake ; 
 When this New World was parted, she strove not to shirk 
 Her lot in the heirdom, the tough, silent Work, 
 
68 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 The hero-share ever, from Herakles down 
 
 To Odin, the Earth s iron sceptre and crown ; 
 
 Yes, thou dear, noble Mother ! if ever men s praise 
 
 Couid be claimed for creating heroical lays, 
 
 Thou hast won it ; if ever the laurel divine 
 
 Crowned the Maker and Builder, that glory is thine ! 
 
 Thy songs are right epic, they tell how this rude 
 
 Rock-rib of our earth here was tamed and subdued ; 
 
 Thou hast written them plain on the face of the planet 
 
 In brave, deathless letters of iron and granite ; 
 
 Thou hast printed them deep for all time ; they are set 
 
 From the same runic type-fount and alphabet 
 
 With thy stout Berkshire hills and the arms of thy Bay, 
 
 They are staves from the burly old Mayflower lay. 
 
 If the drones of the Old World, in querulous ease, 
 
 Ask thy Art and thy Letters, point proudly to these, 
 
 Or, if they deny these are Letters and Art, 
 
 Toil on with the same old invincible heart ; 
 
 Thou art rearing the pedestal broad-based and grand 
 
 Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand, 
 
 And creating, through labors undaunted and long, 
 
 The true theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song ! 
 
 " But my good mother Baystate wants no praise of mine. 
 She learned from her mother a precept divine 
 About something that butters no parsnips, her forte 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 69 
 
 In another direction lies, work is her sport, 
 
 (Though she ll curtsey and set her cap straight, that she will, 
 
 If you talk about Plymouth and one Bunker s hill.) 
 
 The 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 11 be so dear, for, as sure as she s living, 
 
 She will use rye-and-injun then, whether the pig 
 
 By this time ain t got pretty tolerable big, 
 
 And whether to sell it outright will be best, 
 
 Or to smoke hams and shoulders and salt down the rest, 
 
 At this minute, she d swop all my verses, ah, cruel ! 
 
 For the last patent stove that is saving of fuel ; 
 
 So I ll just let Apollo go on, for his phiz 
 
 Shows I ve kept him awaiting too long as it is." 
 
 " If our friend, there, who seems a reporter, is through 
 With his burst of emotion, our theme we ll pursue," 
 Said Apollo ; some smiled, and, indeed, I must own 
 There was something sarcastic, perhaps, in his tone ; 
 
 " There s Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit ; 
 A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit 
 The electrical tingles of hit after hit ; 
 
70 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 In long poems tis painful sometimes and invites 
 
 A thought of the way the new Telegraph writes, 
 
 Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully 
 
 As if you got more than you d title to rightfully, 
 
 And if it were hoping its wild father Lightning 
 
 Would flame in for a second and give you a fright ning. 
 
 He has perfect sway of what / call a sham metre, 
 
 But many admire it, the English hexameter, 
 
 And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse, 
 
 With less nerve, swing, and fire in the same kind of verse, 
 
 Nor e er achieved aught in t so worthy of praise 
 
 As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise. 
 
 i r ou went crazy last year over Bulwer s New Timon ; 
 
 Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on, 
 
 Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, 
 
 He could ne er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes. 
 
 His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric 
 
 Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric 
 
 In so kindly a measure, that nobody knows 
 
 What to do but e en join in the laugh, friends and foes. 
 
 " There is Lowell, who s striving Parnassus to climb 
 With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, 
 He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, 
 But he can t with that bundle he has on his shoulders, 
 The top of the hill he will ne er come nigh reaching 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 71 
 
 Till he learns the distinction twixt singing and preaching ; 
 His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, 
 But he d rather by half make a drum of the shell, 
 And rattle away till he s old as Methusalem, 
 At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. 
 
 " There goes Halleck, whose Fanny s a pseudo Don Juan, 
 With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one, 
 He s a wit, though, I hear, of the very first order, 
 And once made a pun on the words soft Recorder ; 
 More than this, he s a very great poet, I m told, 
 And has had his works published in crimson and gold, 
 With something they call Illustrations, to wit, 
 Like those with which Chapman obscured Holy Writ,* 
 Which are said to illustrate, because, as I view it, 
 Like lucus a non, they precisely don t do it ; 
 Let a man who can write what himself understands 
 Keep clear, if he can, of designing men s hands, 
 Who bury the sense, if there s any worth having, 
 And then very honestly call it engraving. 
 But, to quit badinage, which there isn t much wit in, 
 No doubt Halleck s better than all he has written ; 
 In his verse a clear glimpse you will frequently find, 
 If not of a great, of a fortunate mind, 
 Which contrives to be true to its natural loves 
 
 * (Cuts rightly called wooden, as all must admit.) 
 
72 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 In 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 earns 
 
 Our sincerest respect, (read, for instance, his " Burns,") 
 
 And we can t but regret (seek excuse where we may) 
 
 That so much of a man has been peddled away. 
 
 " But what s that ? a mass-meeting ? No, there come in lots 
 The American 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 profusions 
 Of all kinds of gr.eatness bless free institutions, 
 That while the Old World has produced barely eight 
 Of such poets as all men agree to call great, 
 And of other great characters hardly a score, 
 (One might safely say less than that rather than more,) 
 With you every year a whole crop is begotten, 
 They re as much of a staple as corn, or as cotton ; 
 AVhy, there s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties 
 That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes ; 
 I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys, 
 Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles, 
 Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, 
 One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,- 
 
 In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, 
 
 He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
 
 Will be some very great person over again. 
 
 There is one inconvenience in all this which lies 
 
 In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,* 
 
 And, where there are none except Titans, great stature 
 
 Is only a simple proceeding of nature. 
 
 What puff the strained sails of your praise shall you furl at, if 
 
 The calmest degree that you know is superlative ? 
 
 At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must, 
 
 As a matter of course, be well issimused and errimused, 
 
 A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost, 
 
 That his friends would take care he was wroged and wi 
 
 And formerly we, as through grave-yards 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 grave-yard 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 under-ground, 
 
 * That is in most cases we do, but not all, 
 
 Past a doubt, there are men who are innately small, 
 Such as Blank, who, without being minished a tittle, 
 Might stand for a type of the Absolute Little. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 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 you 
 Will find in each yard every cardinal virtue ;* 
 Each has six truest patriots : four discoverers of ether, 
 Who never had thought on t nor mentioned it either : 
 Ten poets, the greatest who ever wrote rhyme : 
 Two hundred and forty first men of their time : 
 One person whose portrait just gave the least hint 
 Its original had a most horrible squint : 
 One critic, most (what do they call it ?) reflective, 
 Who never had used the phrase ob- or subjective : 
 Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred 
 
 (And at this just conclusion will surely arrive, 
 
 That the goodness of earth is more dead than alive.) 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Their sons lor 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 jailor : 
 
 Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor : 
 
 Two dozen of Italy s exiles who shoot us his 
 
 Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses, 
 
 Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,* 
 
 Mount serenely their country s funereal pile : 
 
 Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers 
 
 Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars, 
 
 Who shake their dread fists o er the sea and all that, 
 
 As long as a copper drops into the hat : 
 
 Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark 
 
 From Vaterland s battles just won in the Park, 
 
 Who the happy profession of martyrdom take 
 
 Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak : 
 
 Sixty-two second Washingtons : two or three Jacksons : 
 
 And so many everythings else that it racks one s 
 
 Poor memory too much to continue the list, 
 
 Especially now they no longer exist ; 
 
 I would merely observe that you ve taken to giving 
 
 The puffs that belong to the dead to the living, 
 
 And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom s tones 
 
 Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones." 
 
 * Not forgetting their tea and their toast, though, the while. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Here the critic came in and a thistle presented*^ 
 From a frown to a smile the god s features relented, 
 As he stared at his envoy, who, swelling with pride, 
 To the god s asking look, nothing daunted, replied, 
 " You re surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long, 
 But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong ; 
 I hunted the garden from one end to t other, 
 And got no reward but vexation and bother, 
 Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither, 
 This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither." 
 
 " Did he think I had given him a book to review ? 
 I ought to have known what the fellow would do," 
 Muttered Phcebus aside, " for a thistle will pass 
 Beyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass ; 
 He has chosen in just the same way as he d choose 
 His specimens out of the books he reviews ; 
 And now, as this offers an excellent text, 
 I ll give em some brief hints on criticism next." 
 So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd, 
 And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud, 
 
 " My friends, in the happier days of the muse, 
 We were luckily free from such things as reviews ; 
 
 * Turn back now to page goodness only knows what, 
 And take a fresh hold on the thread of ray plot. 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 77 
 
 Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer 
 
 The heart of the poet to that of his hearer ; 
 
 Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they 
 
 Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay ; 
 
 Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul 
 
 Pre-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 moods 
 
 Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods 
 
 O er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods ; 
 
 He asked not earth s verdict, forgetting the clods, 
 
 His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods ; 
 
 Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line, 
 
 And shaped for their vision the perfect design, 
 
 With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true, 
 
 As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue ; 
 
 Then a glory and greatness invested man s heart, 
 
 The universal, which now stands estranged and apart, 
 
 In the free individual moulded, was Art ; 
 
 Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire 
 
 For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher, 
 
 As once with her lips, lifted.hands, and eyes listening, 
 
 And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening, 
 
 Eurydice stood like a beacon unfired, 
 
 Which, once touchd with flame, will leap heav nward inspired 
 
78 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 And waited with answering kindle to mark 
 
 The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark , 
 
 Then painting, song, sculpture, did more than relieve 
 
 The need that men feel to create and believe, 
 
 And as, in all beauty, who listens with love, 
 
 Hears these words oft repeated beyond and above, 3 
 
 So these seemed to be but the visible sign 
 
 Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine ; 
 
 They were ladders the Artist erected to climb 
 
 O er the narrow horizon of space and of time, 
 
 And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained 
 
 To the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained, 
 
 As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod 
 
 The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving" god. 
 
 " But now, on the poet s dis-privacied moods 
 With do tliis and do that the pert critic intrudes ; 
 While he thinks he s been barely fulfilling his duty 
 To interpret twixt men and their own sense of beauty, 
 And has striven, while others sought honor or pelf, 
 To make his kind happy as he was himself, 
 He finds he s been guilty of horrid offences 
 In all kinds of moods, numbers, genders, and tenses ; 
 He s been ob and subjective, what Kettle calls Pot, 
 Precisely, at all events, what he ought not, 
 
A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 79 
 
 You have done this, says one judge ; done that, says another ; 
 
 You should have done this, grumbles one ; that, says t other ; 
 
 Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out Taboo ! 
 
 And while he is wondering what he shall do ; 
 
 Since each suggests opposite topics for song, 
 
 They all shout together you 7 re right f or you re, wrong ! 
 
 " Nature fits all her children with something to do, 
 He who would write and can t write, can surely review, 
 Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his 
 Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies ; 
 Thus a lawyer s apprentice, just out of his teens, 
 Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines ; 
 Having read Johnson s lives of the poets half through, 
 There s nothing on earth he s not competent to ; 
 He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles, 
 He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles, 
 It matters not whether he blame or commend, 
 If he s bad as a foe, he s far worse as a friend ; 
 Let an author but write what s above his popr 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 along 
 Who has any thing in him peculiar and strong, 
 
80 A FABLE FOR THE CRITICS. 
 
 Every cockboat that swims clear its fierce (pop-) gundeck a 
 
 him 
 And make as he passes its ludicrous Peck at him," 
 
 Here Miranda came up and began, " As to that," 
 Apollo at once seized his gloves, cane, and hat, 
 And, seeing the place getting rapidly cleared, 
 I, too, snatched my notes and forthwith disappeared. 
 
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