So little are we short-sighted mor- 1 The reader curious in such matters may refer (if he can find them) to A sermon preached on the Anniversary of the Dark Day, An Artillery Election Sermon, A Discourse on the Late | But I was at first inclined to discourage Mr. Biglow's attempts, as knowing that the desire to poetize is one of the diseases naturally incident to adolescence, which, if the fitting remedies be not at once and with a bold hand applied, may become chronic, and render one, who might else have become in due time an ornament of the social circle, a painful object even to nearest friends and relatives. thinking, on a further experience, that there was a germ of promise in him which required only culture and the pulling up of weeds from about it, I thought it best to set before him the acknowledged examples of English composition in verse, and leave the rest to natural emulation. With this view, I accordingly lent him some volumes of Pope and Goldsmith, to the assiduous study of which he promised to devote his evenings. Not long afterward, he brought me some verses written upon that model, a specimen of which I subjoin, having changed some phrases of less elegancy, and a few rhymes objectionable to the cultivated ear. The poem consisted of childish reminiscences, and the sketches which follow will not seem destitute of truth to those whose fortu. nate education began in a country | village. And, first, let us hang up his charcoal portrait of the schooldame. Propped on the marsh, a dwelling The humble school-house of my Where well-drilled urchins, each Eclipse, Dorcas, A Funeral Sermon on the Death of Madam Submit Tidd, Relict of the late Experience Tidd, Esq., &c., &c. Waited in ranks the wished com mand to fire, She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing, Then all together, when the signal And cleared the five-barred sylla bles at a spring. ‘Ah, dear old times! there once it was my hap, Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap; From books degraded, there I sat at ease, A drone, the envy of compulsory bees; Rewards of merit, too, full many a time, Each with its woodcut and its moral rhyme, And pierced half-dollars hung on ribbons gay About my neck (to be restored next day) I carried home, rewards as shining then As those that deck the lifelong More solid than the redemanded pains of men, praise With which the world beribbons later days. ye return! So that the weather, or the ferule's 'Ah, dear old times! how brightly stings, Colds in the head, or fifty other How, rubbed afresh, your phosthings, phor traces burn! Transformed the helpless Hebrew The ramble schoolward through thrice a week dewsparkling meads, To guttural Pequot or resounding The willow-wands turned Cinder Greek, ella steeds, The vibrant accent skipping here The impromptu pin-bent hook, the With or without the points pleased That still a space for ball and peg her the same; If any tyro found a name too tough, top found, Nor satiate yet, could manage to confine And looked at her, pride furnished Horse chestnuts, flagroot, and the skill enough; kite's wound twine, Nay, like the prophet's carpet Whistling I wade the knee-deep could take in, leaves again, Enlarging still, the popgun's mag- While eager Argus, who has missed azine; all day The dinner carried in the small The sharer of his condescending tin pail, Shared with some dog, whose most beseeching tail And dripping tongue and eager ears belied The assumed indifference of canine pride; play, Comes leaping onward with a bark elate And boisterous tail to greet me at the gate; That I was true in absence to our love The caper homeward, shortened if Let the thick dog's - ears in my the cart Of Neighbor Pomeroy, trundling from the mart, O'ertook me, the seat primer prove.' I add only one further extract, then, translated to which will possess a melancholy interest to all such as have en I praised the steed, how stanch he deavored to glean the materials of was and fleet, While the bluff farmer, with superior grin, Explained where horses should be thick, where thin, And warned me (joke he always had in store) revolutionary history from the lips of aged persons, who took a part in the actual making of it, and, finding the manufacture profitable, continued the supply in an adequate proportion to the demand. To shun a beast that four white 'Old Joe is gone, who saw hot A tale which grew in wonder, year by year, How did his well-thumbed hat, As, every time he told it, Joe drew Its curve decorous to each rank To the main fight, till, faded and adapt! grown gray, How did it graduate with a courtly The original scene to bolder tints ease gave way; The whole long scale of social dif- Then Joe had heard the foe's ferences, Yet so gave each his measure run ning o'er, scared double-quick Beat on stove drum with one uncaptured stick, None thought his own was less, And, ere death came the lengthen his neighbor's more; ing tale to lop, The squire was flattered, and the Himself had fired, and seen a redpauper knew Old times acknowledged 'neath the threadbare blue! Dropped at the corner of the embowered lane, coat drop; Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight Had squared more nearly with his sense of right, And vanquished Percy, to com- with purely natural objects, than plete the tale, to a perverted moral sense. I was Had hammered stone for life in the more inclined to this leniency Concord jail.' I do not know that the foregoing extracts ought not to be called my own rather than Mr. Biglow's, as, indeed, he maintained stoutly that my file had left nothing of his in them. I should not, perhaps, have felt entitled to take so great lib-| erties with them, had I not more than suspected an hereditary vein of poetry in myself, a very near ancestor having written a Latin poem in the Harvard Gratulatio on the accession of George the Third. Suffice it to say, that, whether not satisfied with such limited approbation as I could conscientiously bestow, or from a sense of natural inaptitude, certain it is that my young friend could never be induced to any further essays in this kind. He affirmed that it was to him like writing in a foreign tongue, that Mr. Pope's versification was like the regular ticking of one of Willard's clocks, in which one could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a poverty-stricken tick, tick, after all, and that he had never seen a sweet-water on a trellis growing so fairly, or in forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I know not what, to the effect that the sweet-water would only be the more disfigured by having its leaves starched and ironed out, and that Pegasus (so he called him) hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curlpapers. These and other such opinions I did not long strive to eradicate, attributing them rather to a defective education and senses untuned by too long familiarity since sufficient evidence was not to seek, that his verses, wanting as they certainly were in classic polish and point, had somehow taken hold of the public ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting him right as to the quantity of the proper name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent of his natural genius. Yet could I not surrender him wholly to the tutelage of the pagan (which, literally interpreted, signifies village) muse without yet a further effort for his conversion, and to this end I resolved that whatever of poetic fire yet burned in myself, aided by the assiduous bellows of correct models, should be put in requisition. Accordingly, when my ingenious young parishioner brought to my study a copy of verses which he had written touching the acquisition of territory resulting from the Mexican war, and the folly of leaving the question of slavery or freedom to the adjudication of chance, I did myself indite a short fable or apologue after the manner of Gay and Prior, to the end that he might see how easily even such subjects as he treated of were capable of a more refined style and more elegant expression. Mr. Biglow's production was as follows: THE TWO GUNNERS A FABLE Two fellers, Isrel named and Joe, One Sundy mornin' 'greed to go Agunnin' soon 'z the bells wuz done And meetin' finally begun, So'st no one would n't be about Ther Sabbath-breakin' to spy out. Joe did n't want to go a mite; He felt ez though 't warn't skeercely right, But, when his doubts he went to speak on, Isrel he up and called him Deacon, An' kep' apokin' fun like sin Till Joe, less skeered o' doin' wrong 'I won't agree to no such bender,' Sez Isrel; 'keep it tell it 's tender; 'T ain't wuth a snap afore it's ripe.' Sez Joe, 'I'd jest ez lives eat tripe; You air a buster ter suppose I'd eat what makes me hol' my nose!' So they disputed to an' fro Than bein' laughed at, went along. Till cunnin' Isrel sez to Joe, 'Don't fire,' sez Joe, 'it ain't no But Isrel kind o' liked the smell Thet's Deacon Peleg's tame wil'- An' made his dinner very well on 't. |