vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and entertainment pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him. 5 His 10 How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As 15 if one were to begin the day with longsuffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider 20 the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and 25 Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great 30 Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die,'- that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies 35 and great men of Assyria,- where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the 40 spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. 45 Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of appletree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts,from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened we esteem ourselves wise, and have an 50 by hearing of this? Who knows what established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,— may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the char acter of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are 5 awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. From Walden, 1854. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891) Though by far the youngest of the mid-century American writers, Lowell may be called the Dr. Johnson of the period. From 1857, when he assumed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he was our literary dictator. He revised the manuscript of Thoreau until that individual genius refused longer to contribute to the magazine, he reproved Holmes who was ten years his senior, he wrote Whittier, I shall not let you rest until I have got a New England pastoral out of you,' he labeled and dismissed many of his contemporaries with almost brutal harshness, and he trained with dogmatic authority the new group of poets and novelists that was beginning to appear. Lowell's ancestors, like those of Emerson and Holmes, were New England Brahmins'. he was of a long line of Puritan,ministers. His father was stationed at Cambridge when Lowell was born and this house of his birth was the home of the poet rare circumstance in America during his whole life. Naturally he entered Harvard, and quite as naturally, since his temperament was not at all ministerial, he entered the legal course, actually finishing it and entering upon the practice of law, at least to the extent of producing a volume of poems - A Year's Life, 1841. But law had no charms for the wayward young genius: like the youthful Longfellow, he dreamed of a literary career, and America as yet had not made literature a profession by which one might win a respectable livelihood. He tried editorial work, edited in New York a literary magazine, The Pioneer, which died after its third issue. In 1844 he launched another volume of poems which sold eleven hundred copies in three months. Emboldened by this unexpected income, he immediately was married to a poetess of real inspiration, Miss Maria White, a marriage as perfect as that of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Both had become ardent abolitionists, and at once they started for Philadelphia where Lowell had secured a position as editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, which earlier had been edited by Whittier. The salary of ten dollars a month proved inadequate, and after four months they were again back in Cambridge. With the inspiration of his new home life upon him, there began now the creative period of his literary career. He wrote eagerly, copiously. In 1847 he began The Biglow Papers, his protest against the Mexican war. The next year, 1848, was the wonder year of his life. He issued a new edition of his poems, A Fable for Critics, The Biglow Papers. The Vision of Sir Launfal, and some twenty other articles and poems for the magazines. In 1851 with his family he went for a year to Europe. In 1853 Mrs. Lowell died, and his poetic period abruptly ended: 'My moon is set; my vision set with her.' Save for the fashing up of his poetic soul at the time of the Civil War which produced his inspired improvisation, The Commemoration Ode, the rest of his life produced only prose. He became professor of French and Spanish at Harvard in 1855, entering upon his duties after a year in Europe and holding his chair until 1877. In 1857 he added the editorship of the Atlantic to his professional duties, and, resigning in 1861, became joint editor with Charles Eliot Norton of The North American Review, a position which he held until 1872. From 1877 to 1885 he was abroad, first as Minister to Spain, then as Minister to the Court of St. James, England. His writings during the whole period are significant. They touch a broad variety of subjects: literary criticism, statesmanship, international politics, mere literature. social problems. His pregnant studies of our American democracy were especially noteworthy. As a critic he has been in many respects overrated. His greatest work for American letters, undoubtedly, was his influence and guidance during a critical era. He stood ever for originality and native wood notes wild.' More than any one else, perhaps, he was instrumental in freeing American literature from the slavery of English and continental influences. And with a child's undoubting wisdom look On all these living pages of God's book. Graham's Magazine, Jan., 1845. THE BIGLOW PAPERS, FIRST SERIES No. III WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS [A few remarks on the following verses will not be out of place. The satire in them was not meant to have any personal, but only a general, application. Of the gentleman upon whose letter they were intended as a commentary Mr. Biglow had never heard, till he saw the letter itself. The position of the satirist is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated tenues in auras. For what says Seneca? Longum iter per proecepta, breve et efficace per exempla. A bad principle is comparatively harmless while it continues to be an abstraction, nor can the general mind comprehend it fully till it is printed in that large type which all men can read at sight, namely, the life and character, the sayings and doings, of particular persons. It is one of the cunningest fetches of Satan, that he never exposes himself directly to our arrows, but, still dodging behind this neighbor or that acquaintance, compels us to wound him through them, if at all. He holds our affections as hostages, the while he patches up a truce with our conscience. Meanwhile, let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood, and, as Truth and Falsehood start from the same point, and sometimes even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at the end of it. Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine. The danger of the satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of lan guage. He becomes more and more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends. He may be careful to put on his boxing-gloves, and yet forget that, the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through that dust of the ring which obscures Truth's wreath of simple leaves. I have sometimes thought that my young friend, Mr. Biglow, needed a monitory hand laid on his arm, -aliquid sufflaminandus erat. I have never thought it good husbandry to water the tender plants of reform with aqua fortis, yet, where so much is to do in the beds, he were a sorry gardener who should wage a whole day's war with an iron scuffle on those ill weeds that make the garden-walks of life unsightly, when a sprinkle of Attic salt will wither them up. Est ars etiam maledicendi, says Scaliger, and truly it is a hard thing to say where the graceful gentleness of the lamb merges in downright sheepishness. We may conclude with worthy and wise Dr. Fuller, that one may be a lamb in private wrongs, but in hearing general affronts to goodness they are asses which are not lions.' -H. W.] Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T. Parson Wilbur he calls all these argimunts lies; Sez they're nothin' on airth but jest fee, faw, fum; An' thet all this big talk of our destinies Is half on it ign'ance, an' t' other half |