think I may call

was too big,

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,

Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, that he's no faith 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 n't keep care

fully mum,

And, to make a clean breast, that 't is perfectly plain

That all kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane;

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

If he

he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm ;

stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,

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 ;

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 traderidden planet?

No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their limestone and granite. If you're 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,

And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,

If you only could palm yourself off for

a mountain.

nights

With a semblance of flame by the chill

Is

worth near as much as your whole

Northern Lights.

He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation

(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),

giant :

If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per

-sons fit for a parallel — Thompson 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 had written.

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 swing

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 't were I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing;

Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction

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;

man rights,

Both singing and striking in front of

the war,

And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor;

Anne haec, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks,

Vestis filii tui, O leather-clad Fox? Can that be thy son, in the battle's mid din,

Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in

To the brain of the tough old Goliah of sin,

With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring

Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?

"All honor and praise to the righthearted bard

Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard,

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 down-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

geiton,

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!

Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable,

In learning to swim on his librarytable.

"There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine

The sinews and chords of his pugilist brain,

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, to show he could leap Art's wide ditch, if he tried,

Jumps clean o'er it, and into the hedge t' other side.

He has strength, but there's nothing about him in keeping;

One gets 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.