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 Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts,

And in short the American everything elses, Each charging the others with envies and jealousies;

By the way, 't is a fact that displays what profusions

Of all kinds of greatness 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 is, or cotton;

Why, 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 whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,

In short, if a man has the luck to have any

There is one inconvenience in all this, which lies

In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,1

And, where there are none except Titans,

great stature

Is only the normal proceeding of nature. What puff the strained sails of your praise will 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 issimust and errimust,

A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost,

That his friends would take care he was ιστοst and ωτατος,

And formerly we, as through graveyards we past,

Thought the world went from bad to worst fearfully fast;

Let us glance for a moment, 't is well worth the pains,

And note what an average graveyard 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 whipped under ground,

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 wrapped 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,

1 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.

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; 1

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

Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,

And their daughters for faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi: Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual blackeye:

Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:

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,2

Mount serenely their country's funereal pile:

Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebel

lers

We were luckily free from such things as reviews;

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

Precreated 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

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 touched with flame, will leap❘ heav'nward inspired —

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,'

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're right! and you're wrong!

"Nature fits all her children with some thing 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 compe tent 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 com

PART I

SHOWING HOW HE BUILT HIS HOUSE AND HIS WIFE MOVED INTO IT

My worthy friend, A. Gordon Knott,

From business snug withdrawn, Was much contented with a lot That would contain a Tudor cot

'Twixt twelve feet square of garden-plot, And twelve feet more of lawn.

He had laid business on the shelf
To give his taste expansion,
And, since no man, retired with pelf,
The building mania can shun,
Knott, being middle-aged himself,
Resolved to build (unhappy elf!)
A medieval mansion.

He called an architect in counsel;

"I want," said he, "a you know what,

(You are a builder, I am Knott,) A thing complete from chimney-pot Down to the very grounsel;

Here's a half-acre of good land;

Just have it nicely mapped and planned And make your workmen drive on; Meadow there is, and upland too, And I should like a water-view, D' you think you could contrive one? (Perhaps the pump and trough would do,

If painted a judicious blue ?)

The woodland I've attended to;" [He meant three pines stuck up askew, Two dead ones and a live one.]

"A pocket-full of rocks 't would take To build a house of freestone,

But then it is not hard to make
What nowadays is the stone;
The cunning painter in a trice
Your house's outside petrifies,
And people think it very gneiss
Without inquiring deeper;

My money never shall be thrown
Away on such a deal of stone,
When stone of deal is cheaper."

And so the greenest of antiques

Was reared for Knott to dwell in:
The architect worked hard for weeks
In venting all his private peaks
Upon the roof, whose crop of leaks
Had satisfied Fluellen;
Whatever anybody had

Out of the common, good or bad,

Knott had it all worked well in;

A donjon-keep, where clothes might dry,
A porter's lodge that was a sty,
A campanile slim and high,

Too small to hang a bell in;

All up and down and here and there,
With Lord-knows-whats of round and

square

Stuck on at random everywhere,

It was a house to make one stare,
All corners and all gables;
Like dogs let loose upon a bear,
Ten emulous styles staboyed with care,
The whole among them seemed to tear,
And all the oddities to spare

Were set upon the stables.

Knott was delighted with a pile
Approved by fashion's leaders:
(Only he made the builder smile,
By asking every little while,
Why that was called the Twodoor style,
Which certainly had three doors?)
Yet better for this luckless man
If he had put a downright ban

Upon the thing in limine;
For, though to quit affairs his plan,
Ere many days, poor Knott began
Perforce accepting draughts, that ran
All ways except up chimney;

The house, though painted stone to mock,
With nice white lines round every block,
Some trepidation stood in,
When tempests (with petrific shock,
So to speak,) made it really rock,

Though not a whit less wooden;
And painted stone, howe'er well done,
Will not take in the prodigal sun
Whose beams are never quite at one
With our terrestrial lumber;

So the wood shrank around the knots,