gard it as a letter of introduction from the Devil. Never give a man your name unless you are willing to trust him with your reputation. There seem nowadays to be two sources of literary inspiration, fulness of mind and emptiness of pocket. I am often struck, especially in reading Montaigne, with the obviousness and familiarity of a great writer's thoughts, and the freshness they gain because said by him. The truth is, we mix their greatness with all they say and give it our best attention. Johannes Faber sic. cogitavit, would be no enticing preface to a book, but an accredited name gives credit like the signature to a note of hand. It is the advantage of fame that it is always privileged to take the world by the button, and a thing is weightier for Shakespeare's uttering it by the whole amount of his personality. It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient with overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin. People are apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention. The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius. Do not look for the Millennium as imminent. One generation is apt to get all the wear it can out of the cast clothes of the last, and is always sure to use up every paling of the old fence that will hold a nail in building the new. You suspect a kind of vanity in my genealogical enthusiasm. Perhaps you are right; but it is a universal foible. Where it does not show itself in a personal and private way, it becomes public and gregarious. We flatter ourselves in the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Virginian offshoot of a transported convict swells with the fancy of a cavalier ancestry. Pride of birth, I have noticed, takes two forms. One complacently traces himself up to a coronet; another, defiantly, to a lapstone. The sentiment is precisely the same in both cases, only that one is the positive and the other the negative pole of it. Seeing a goat the other day kneeling in order to graze with less trouble, it seemed to me a type of the common notion of prayer. Most people are ready enough to go down on their knees for material blessings, but how few for those spiritual gifts which alone answer to our orisons, if we but are an knew it! Some people, nowadays, seem to have hit upon a new moralization of the moth and the candle. They would lock up the light of Truth, lest poor Psyche should put it out in her effort to draw nigh to it. No. X. MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. DEAR SIR, Your letter come to han', Requestin' me to please be funny; But I ain't made upon a plan Thet knows wut 's comin', gall or honey: No preacher 'thout a call 's more solemn. You're 'n want o' sunthin' light an' cute, I'd take an' citify my English. I ken write long-tailed, ef I please,— Then, 'fore I know it, my idees Run helter-skelter into Yankee. Sence I begun to scribble rhyme, I tell ye wut, I hain't ben foolin'; Nor th' airth don't git put out with me, Thet love her 'z though she wuz a woman; An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way Ol' farmers hed when I wuz younger; Their talk wuz meatier, an' 'ould stay, While book-froth seems to whet your hunger; For puttin' in a downright lick 'twixt Humbug's eyes, ther' 's few can metch it, An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick But when I can't, I can't, thet 's all, Like a druv pig ain't wuth a mullein; Feel thet th' old airth's a-wheelin' sunwards. Time wuz, the rhymes come crowdin' thick An' into ary place 'ould stick Without no bother nor objection; But sence the war my thoughts hang back |