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

Does n'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

With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton, 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!

And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.

No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood;

His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good;

'Tis the modest man ripens, 't is he that achieves,

Just what's needed of sunshine and shade he receives;

Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves;

Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far,

Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a

star;

He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it,

That he strips himself naked to prove he's a poet,

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.

Are just Natty Bumppo, 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 slipped the old fellow away underground).

All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks,

The dernière 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 prosewriters 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 pic

tures,

You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;

Though 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 Herë'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

For a woman must surely see well, if she try,

The whole of whose being 's a capital I: She will take an old notion, and make it her own,

By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, Or persuade you 't is something tremendously deep,

By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,

When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.

There is one thing she owns in her own single right,

It is native and genuine — namely, her spite;

Though, when acting as censor, she pri vately blows

A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose."

Here Miranda came up, and said, “Phœ

bus! you know That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe, As I ought to know, having lived check by jowl,

Since the day I was born, with the In

Soul;