One gets surelier onward by walking than leap ing;

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 Fouqué, 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 pre-
pared,

And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.

The success of her scheme gave her so much de

light,

That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight;

Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay,

She sang to her work in her sweet childish way, And found, when she'd put the last touch 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;

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 wildflower 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, (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 derniere 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
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,

And 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,

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;

64

A FABLE FOR CRITICS.

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,

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,