Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

Vast, rarely-trodden forests are wild and lonely: the cit who plunges into one, a stranger to its ways, is awed by its gloom, its silence, its restricted range of vision, its stifled winds, and its generally forbidding aspect. He may talk bravely and even blithely to his companions, but his ease and gayety are unnatural: Leatherstocking is at home in the forest, but Pelham is not, and can not be. On the better portion of the Plains--say in the heart of the Buffalo region--it is otherwise: though you are hundreds of miles from a human habitation other than a rude mail-station tent or ruder Indian lodge, the country wears a subdued, placid aspect; you rise a gentle slope of two or three miles, and look down the opposite incline or 'divide,' and up the counterpart of that you have just traversed, seeing nothing but these gentle, wave-like undulations of the surface to limit your gaze, which contemplates at once some fifty to eighty square miles of unfenced, treeless, but green and close-cropped pasturage; and it is hard to realize that you are out of the pale of civilization, hundreds of miles from a decent dwelling-house, and that the innumerable cattle moving and grazing before you--so countless that they seem thickly to cover half the district swept by your vision--are not domestic and heritable--the collected herds of some great grazing county, impelled from Texas or New Mexico to help subdue some distant Oregon. It seems a sad waste to see so much good live-stock ranging to no purpose and dying to no profit: for the roving, migrating whites who cross the Plains slaughter the buffalo in mere wantonness, leaving scores of carcasses to rot where they fell, perhaps taking the tongue and the hump for food, but oftener content with mere wanton destruction. The Indian, to whom the buffalo is food, clothing, and lodging (for his tent, as well as his few if not scanty habiliments, is formed of buffalo-skins stretched over lodge-poles), justly complains of this shameful improvidence and cruelty. Were _he_ to deal thus with an emigrant's herd, he would be shot without mercy; why, then, should whites decimate his without excuse?

Beyond the Buffalo region the Plains are bleak, monotonous, and solitary. The Antelope, who would be a deer if his legs were shorter and his body not so stout, is the redeeming feature of the well-grassed plains next to Kansas, and which recur under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains; but he is an animal of too much sense to remain in the scantily grassed desert which separates the buffalo range from the latter. There the lean Wolf strolls and hunts and starves; there the petty Prairie-Wolf, a thoroughly contemptible beast, picks up such a dirty living as he may; while the sprightly, amusing little Prairie-Dog, who is a rather short-legged gray squirrel, with a funny little yelp and a troglodyte habitation, lives in villages or cities of from five hundred to five thousand dens, each (or most of them) tenanted in common with him by a harmless little Owl and a Rattlesnake of questionable amiability. The Owl sits by the mouth of the hole till driven away by your approach, when he follows his confrere's example by diving; the Rattlesnake stays usually below, to give any prowling, thieving prairie-wolf, or other carnivorous intruder, the worst of the bargain, should he attempt to dig out the architect of this subterranean abode. But for this nice little family arrangement, the last prairie-dog would long since have been unearthed and eaten. As it is, the rattlesnake gets a den for nothing, while the prairie-dog sleeps securely under the guardianship of his poison-tongued confederate. The owl, I presume, either pays _his_ scot by hunting mice and insects for the general account, or by keeping watch against all felonious approaches. Even man does not care to dig out such a nest, and prefers to drown out the inmates by pouring in pail after pail of water till they have to put in an appearance above ground. The only defense against this is to construct a prairie-dog town as far as possible from water, and this is carefully attended to. I heard on the Plains of one being drowned out by a sudden and overwhelming flood; but of the hundreds I passed, not one was located where this seemed possible.

Absence of rock in place--that is, of ridges or strata of rock rising through the soil above or nearly to the surface--has determined the character not only of the Plains but of much of the roll of the great rivers east and south of them. Even at the very base of the Rocky Mountains, the Chugwater shows a milky though rapid current, while the North Platte brings a considerable amount of earthy sediment from the heart of that Alpine region. After fairly entering upon the Plains, every stream begins to burrow and to wash, growing more and more turbid, until it is lost in 'Big Muddy,' the most opaque and sedimentary of all great rivers. I suspect that all the other rivers of this continent convey in the aggregate less earthy matter to the ocean than the Missouri pours into the previously transparent Mississippi, thenceforth an unfailing testimony that evil company corrupts and defiles. Louisiana is the spoil of the Plains, which have in process of time been denuded to an average depth of not less than fifty and perhaps to that of two or three hundred feet. I passed hills along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains where this process is less complete and more active than is usual,--hills which are the remaining vestiges of a former average level of the plain adjacent, and which have happened to wear away so steeply and sharply that very little vegetation ever finds support on their sides, which every rain is still abrading. At a single point only do I remember a phenomenon presented by some other mountain bases,--that of a water-course (dry perhaps half the year, but evidently a heady torrent at times), which had gradually built up a bed and banks of boulders, pebbles and gravel, washed down from a higher portion of its headlong course, so that its current, when it had a current, was considerably above the general surface on either side of it. Away from the mountains, however, boulders or loose stones of any size are rarely seen in the beds of even the largest and deepest channeled streams, which are usually swift, but never broken by a fall, because never down to the subjacent rock in place, assuming that such rock must be.

In the rare instances of rocky banks skirting the immediate valley of a stream, the seeming rock is evidently a modern concrete of clay and the usual sand or gravel composing the soil,--a concrete slowly formed by the action of sun and rain and wind, on a bank left nearly or quite perpendicular by the wearing action of the stream. In the neighborhood of Cheyenne Pass,--say for a distance of fifty to a hundred miles S.S.W. of Laramie,--this effect is exhibited on the grandest scale in repeated instances, and in two or three cases for an extent of miles. Along either bank of the Chugwater, at distances of twenty to forty miles, above its junction with the Laramie affluent of the North Platte, stretch perpendicular rocky terraces, thirty to forty feet high, looking, from a moderate distance, as regular and as artificial as the façade of any row of city edifices. I did not see 'Chimney Rock,' farther down the Platte; but I presume that this, too, is a relic of what was once the average level of the adjacent country, from which all around has been gradually washed away, while this 'spared monument' has been hardened by exposure and the action of the elements from earth to enduring rock--a gigantic natural _adobe_.

The Plains attest God's wisdom in usually providing surface-rock in generous abundance as the only reliable conservative force against the insidious waste and wear of earth by water. Storms, rills, and rivers are constantly at work to carry off the soil of every island and continent, and lose it in the depths of seas and oceans. Rock in place impedes this tendency, by arresting the headlong course of streams, and depositing in their stiller depths the spoils that the current was hastening away; still more by the formation of swamps and marshes, which arrest the sweep of fires, and so protect the youth and growth of trees and forests. An uninhabited, moderately-rolling or nearly flat country, wherein no ridges of stubborn rock gave protection to fire-repelling marshes, would gradually be swept of trees by fires, and converted into prairie or desert.

Life on the Plains--the life of white men, by courtesy termed civilized--is a rough and rugged matter. I can not concur with J.B. Ficklin, long a mail-agent ranging from St. Joseph to Salt Lake (now, I regret to say, a quarter-master in the rebel army), who holds that a man going on the Plains should never wash his face till he comes off again; but water is used there for purposes of ablution with a frugality not fully justified by its scarcity. A 'biled shirt' lasts a good while. I noted some in use which the dry, fine dust of that region must have been weeks in bringing to the rigidity and clayey yellow or tobacco-stain hue which they unchangeably wore during the days that I enjoyed the society of the wearers. Pilot-bread, a year or so baked, and ever since subjected to the indurating influences of an atmosphere intensely dry, is not particularly succulent or savory food, and I did not find it improved by some minutes' immersion in the frying-pan of hot lard from which our rations of pork had just been turned out; but others of more experience liked it much. The pork of the Plains is generally poor, composed of the lightly-salted and half-smoked sides of shotes who had evidently little personal knowledge of corn. The coffee I did not drink; but, in the absence of milk, and often of sugar also, and in view of its manufacture by the rudest and rawest of masculine cooks, I judge that the temptation to excessive indulgence in this beverage was not irresistible. Most of the water of the Plains, unlike that of the Great Basin, is pretty good; but as you near the Rocky Mountains, 'alkali' becomes a terror to man and beast.

The present Buffalo range will, doubtless, in time, be covered with civilized herdsmen and their stock; but beyond that to the fairly watered and timbered vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, settlers will be few and far between for many generations. What the Plains universally need is a plant that defies intense protracted drouth, and will propagate itself rapidly and widely by the aid of winds and streams alone. I do not know that the Canada thistle could be made to serve a good purpose here, but I suspect it might. Let the plains be well covered by some such deep-rooting, drouth-defying plant, and the most of their soil would be gradually arrested, the quality of that which remains, meliorated, and other plants encouraged and enabled to attain maturity under its protection. Shrubs would follow, then trees; until the region would become once more, as I doubt not it already has been, hospitable and inviting to man. At present, I can only commend it as very healthful, with a cooling, non-putrefying atmosphere; and, while I advise no man to take lodgings under the open sky, still, I say that if one must sleep with the blue arch for his counterpane and the stars for its embellishments, I know no other region where an out-door roll in a Mackinaw blanket for a night's rest is less perilous or more comfortable.

* * * * *

SEVEN DEVILS:

A REMEMBRANCE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

Once upon a time--see the Arabian Nights Entertainments--as the Caliph Haroun Alraschid--blessed be his memory!--walked, disguised, as was his wont, through the streets of Bagdad, he observed a young man lashing furiously a beautiful, snow-white mare to the very verge of cruelty. Coming every day to the same place, and finding the spectacle repeated, the curiosity of the humane Caliph, was excited to learn the cause of such treatment. Mr. Rarey had not yet been born; but the Arab knows, and always has known, how to subdue and to control his steed with equal skill, without resort to severity. The explanation of this afterwards appears in that wonderful book.

One Sidi Norman having married, as the custom was, without ever having seen his bride, was agreeably surprised, when the veil was removed, at finding her dazzlingly beautiful. He enfolded her in his arms with joy unspeakable, and so the honeymoon began. Short dream of bliss; she became capricious at once, and seven devils at least seemed to have nestled in her lovely bosom. Sid was touchy himself, and not the man to bear with such humors. Every day she sat at his bountiful board, and, instead of partaking the food which he set before her, she would daintily and mincingly pick out a few grains of rice with the point of a bodkin. Sid asked her what she meant by such conduct, and whether his table was not well supplied. To this she deigned no reply. When she ate no rice, she would choke down a few crumbs of bread, not enough for a sparrow. His indignation was aroused, but his curiosity also. He looked daggers; but he was a still man, kept his counsel to himself, and set himself to study out the solution of this problem.

One night, when his wife stole away from his side,--she thought he was asleep, did she?--he followed her with the stealthiness of a cat; and, oh horrible! tracked her steps to a graveyard, where she began to cut and carve; and he then discovered, to his great loathing, that he had been married to a ghoul!

Amina came home after a good feast. Sid was snoring away, apparently in the profound depths of sleep, hiding away from any Caudle lectures. He was about as sound asleep as a weasel. Breakfast passed off most charmingly without a word said by any one; and he walked round to the khan to scrutinize some figs.

'How does the lady?' said Ben Hadad, sarcastically.

'Very well indeed, I thank you,' replied Sid.

The dinner-bell rang, down they sat, and out came the bodkin. It did not, however, 'his quietus make.'

'My dear,' he said, smothering up his Arabian fury, 'do you not like this bill of fare, or does the sight of me take away your taste for food? Could you obtain a better meal even at the Bagdad St. Nicholas?'

No answer.

'All well,' said he; 'I suppose that this food is not so toothsome to you as dead men's flesh!'

Thunder and furies! A more dreadful domestic scene was never beheld. The lovely Amina turned black in the face, her eyes bulged out of her head, she foamed at the mouth, and, seizing a goblet of water, dashed it into the face of the unfortunate man.

'Take that,' said she, 'and learn to mind your own business.' Whereupon he became a dog, and a miserable dog at that.

Many adventures he then had. For full particulars, see the Arabian Nights. He used to fight for a bone, or lick up a mouthful from a gutter. He had not the spirit to prick up his ears, or to wag or curl up his tail, if he had one--for, shortly after his transformation, the end of it was wedged into a door by his wife, and he was cur-tailed.

Happy is he who gets into trouble by necromancy, who can get out of it by the same. The devil rarely bolts and unbolts his door for his own guests. He is not wont to say, 'Walk in, my friend,' and afterward, 'Good-by.' But it so turned out in the case of Sid Norman, because he had not been knowingly bewitched; and Mrs. Amina Ghoul Sid Norman learned to respect the motto, _Cave canem!_

While his canine sufferings lasted, he fell in with various masters, and nosed about to see if he could substitute reason for instinct, and get established on two legs again. He looked up wistfully into the faces of passers-by, as if to say, 'I am not a dog, but the man for whom a large reward has been offered.' On one occasion, seeing Amina come from a shop where she had just purchased a Cashmere shawl of great size and value, he set his teeth like a steel trap, and made a grab at her ankles. But she recognized him on all fours, with a diabolical grin, and fetching him a kick with her little foot, caused him to yelp most pitifully. Running under a little cart which stood in the way, he skinned his teeth, and growled to himself, 'By the prophet, but I can almost love her again; she distinguished herself by that kick, which was aimed with infinite tact; it went right to the spot, and struck me like a discharge from a catapult, drove all the wind out of me, and left an absolute vacuum, as if a stomach-pump had sucked me out. Yap--yow--eaow--yeaow--yap--snif--xquiz;' and, after a good deal of panting and distress, he at last yawned so wide as nearly to dislocate his jaws, sneezed once or twice, and then trotted off on three legs, with his half a tail tucked up underneath, and lay down disconsolate in an ash-hole.

'Oh, how distressing it is,' said he, 'to be bewitched by a bad woman! It metamorphoses one entirely. He loses all semblance to his former self, parts with all his reason, no more walks upright, and bids philosophy adieu. One drop from the cup of her incantations, and the gossamer net-work which she threw about him is changed into prisonbars, her silken chain into links of forged iron; strong will is dwindled, and he who on some 'heaven-kissing hill' stood up to gaze upon the stars, is fit to grovel in a sty.--Miserable dog! Bow-wow, bow-wow!'

One day, as the story proceeds, Sid's master was offered a base coin in his shop, when this 'learned dog' at once put his foot upon it, and in fact put his foot in the bargain.

'Ah, indeed!' said a Bagdad lady, who stood by; 'that's no dog, or, if he is, the Caliph ought to have him.' So, snapping her fingers slyly as she went out, he followed her.

'Daughter,' said she to the fair Xarifa, who was working embroidery, 'I have brought the baker's famous dog that can distinguish money. There is some sorcery about it.--You have once walked on two legs,' said she, looking down upon the fawning animal, 'have you not? If so, wag your tail.'

Sid thumped the floor most furiously with the stump of it, whereupon she poured liquid into a phial, threw it into his face, and he stood up once more a man,--Sid Norman, lost and saved by a woman, his eyes beaming one moment with the tenderest gratitude, but on the next flashing with the most deadly revenge. Heaven and hell, the one with its joyous sunshine, the other with its lurid lights, appeared to struggle and mix up their flashes on Sid Norman's countenance, till gratitude, that rarest grace, was quenched, and hell triumphed.

'Than all the nectar ever served in golden cups and brewed by houries in Mahomet's paradise, revenge is sweeter,' he murmured to himself.

'Stay,' said Xarifa, who divined his thoughts; 'you will transform yourself back again. There will be no transmigration of soul for you, if you are lost by your own sorcery. Let dogs delight to bark and bite.'

'Hold your tongue, Xarifa,' said the mother, who was not so amiable. 'The man shall have revenge. Since he has trotted about so long on all fours, he must be paid for it. It is not revenge, it is sheer justice.'

'True as the Koran,' exclaimed Sid Norman, who was becoming infatuate again, and would have fallen down at the knees of this new charmer and worshiped her. The fact is, that he was too easily transformed, and submitted too quickly to the latest magic; otherwise he would have always walked erect, instead of wearing fur on his back, and a tail at the end of it. A coat of tar and feathers would have been a mere circumstance compared with such an indignity. Well, it was the fault, perhaps it should rather be called the misfortune, of character.

'Sidi Norman,' said the lady, fixing upon him an amorous glance, 'you shall not only have revenge, but the richest kind of it. You have a bone to pick with your wife. She was brought up in the same school of magic that I was, hence I hate her. She has the secret of the same rouge, and concocts the same potions and love-filters; but she shall smart for it. Excellent man! injured husband! Monopolize to yourself all the whip-cords of Bagdad.'

Sid Norman kneeled and kissed her hand. Xarifa looked up from her embroidery and frowned.

The benefactress withdrew to consult her books, but returned presently.

'Your wife,' she said, 'has gone out shopping, also to leave some cards, to fulfil an engagement with the French minister, and to engage a band of music for an entertainment at which Prince Schearazade is expected to be present. Wait patiently for her return, then confront her boldly, upbraid her, toss this liquor in her eyes, and then you shall see what you shall see.'

Sid Norman went to his late home, which was in the West End, the Fifth Avenue of Bagdad. He opened the door, but silence prevailed. Costly silks, and many extravagant and superfluous things, lay strewn about. He sat down in a rocking-chair and gazed at a full-length portrait of the Haroun Alraschid.

About noon the lady came in, with six shop clerks after her, bearing packages, tossed off her head-dress, and flung herself inanimately on the sofa.

'Ahem,' grunted Sid Norman, who was concealed in the shadow of an alcove.

Amina looked up. Furies! what an appalling rencontre! She looked as pale as the corpses which she adored; she would have shrieked, but had no more voice than a ghost; she would have fled, but was riveted as with the gaze of a basilisk.

'Dear,' said Sid Norman, with an uxorious smile, 'what ails you? Has the fast of Kamazan begun? Hardly yet, for this looks more like the carnival. How much gave you for this Cashmere, my love?'

A great sculptor was Sid Norman, for, without lifting a hand, or using any other tool than a keen eye and a sharp tongue, he had wrought out before him, carved as in cold marble, the statue of a beautiful, bad woman. Such is genius. Such is conscience!

'Mrs. Amina Sidi Ghoul Norman,' proceeded the husband, giving his wife time to relax a little from her rigor, 'is dinner ready? We want nothing but a little rice. Set on only two plates, a knife and fork for me, and a _bodkin_ for you, if you please, madam.'

(_A symptom of hysterics, checked by a nightmare inability of action_.)

'Have you nothing to say? Is thy servant a dog? Why have you wrought this deviltry? Take that.'

Therewith he flung some liquid in her face, and the late fashionable lady of Bagdad became a mare. Sid seized a cow-skin, and laid on with a will.

'You may now cut up as many capers as you please,' said he, reining her in with a bit and bridle, and cutting her with the whip until the blood rolled. 'To-morrow you may go to grass in the graveyard.'

Every day he made a practice of lashing her around the square, if possible, to get the devil out of her. When the Caliph Haroun Alraschid learned the true cause of such conduct, he remarked that it was punishment enough to be transformed into a beast; and, while the stripes should be remitted, still he would not have the woman to assume her own shape again, as she would be a dangerous person in his good city of Bagdad.

* * * * *

The moral of this tale of sorcery, which is equal to any in Æsop's Fables, may be drawn from a posthumous letter which was found among the papers of Sidi Norman, and is as follows:--

'TO BEN HADAD, SON OF BEN HADAD.

'You, who stand upon the verge of youth,--for that is the age, and there is the realm, of genii, fairies, and wild 'enchantments,--learn wisdom from the said story of Sidi Norman.

'I was brought up to respect the laws of God and the prophet. When I came to marriageable age, and, "unsight, unseen," was induced to espouse the veiled Amina, it was, as we say in Bagdad, like "buying a pig in a poke," although rumor greatly magnified her charms, and a secret inclination prompted me. I longed eagerly for the wedding-day; and when her face was revealed to conjugal eyes, methought that Mahomet had sent down a houri from his paradise. Yet I found out, to my cost, that a little knowledge of a woman is worse than ignorance, and that the blinding light of beauty hides the truth more than the thick veil of darkness. Oh, her bosom was white as the snows of Lebanon, and her eyes were like those of the dear gazelle. Cheeks had she as red as the Damascus rose, and a halo encircled her like that of the moon. Her smiles were sunshine, her lips dropped honey. I thought I saw upon her shoulders the cropping out of angelic wings. I sought out the carpets of Persia for the soft touch of her tiny feet, and hired all the lutes of Bagdad to be strung in praise of my beloved. I sent plum-cake to the newspapers, and placed a costly fee in the hand of the priest. Oh, blissful moments! But I purchased hell with them, for she began to lead me a dog's life. She had no taste for home, no appetite for healthful food; she ran me into debt, hated my friends, loved my enemies, and changed her soft looks into daggers to stab me with. Her bloom became blight; her lips oozed out poison, and she dabbled in corrupt things. I tracked her footsteps from my sacred couch as they led to the very brink of the grave.

'O, my son, beware of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet used to say, in his jocular moods, 'those who will dance must pay the fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a ---- as Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment to the dog-kennel of humility. Go thou, and don't do likewise.

'Woe is me! Who takes one wrong step, gets out of it by another; and so I went on from enchantment to enchantment, and fell out of the frying-pan into the fire. If I stood erect, and no longer groveled, if I was not any more a beast, I became like the devils which possessed them. So did I scourge and lash the object of my hatred with feelings of the deadliest revenge.

'Oh, my Ben Hadad, presume not from my ultimate escape. If I have ceased to snap and snarl and growl,--if I now, in the decline of life, pursue the even tenor of my way,--if I have been redeemed from snares, and learned even to forgive my enemies, it is because the fair Xarifa represented my better nature, and that has triumphed because I took counsel of her. Farewell, my son, and, in the pilgrimage of life, reflect upon the dear-bought experience of SIDI NORMAN.'

* * * * *

'WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH US?'

What will we do with you, if God
Should give you over to our hands,
To pass in turn beneath the rod,
And wear at last the captive's bands?'
'What will we do?' Our very best
To make of each a glorious State,
Worthy to match with North and West,--
Free, vigorous, beautiful and great!
As God doth live, as Truth is true,
We swear we'll do all this to you.

* * * * *

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

A late _National Review_ asserts with true English shrewdness that American literature is yet to be born,--that it has scarcely a substantive existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally still only a province of this country.' With a gallantry too characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual _quid pro quo_, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its co-nationality with Irving.

What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict. We venture, however, to predict that the _National Review_ will not be called upon to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces, and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a _credo_ as absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature, whose principal defect--a defect to which the one infallible remedy is daily applied by the winged mower--is youth, inquire into its leading characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden maturity.

It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise, present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down the rugged steeps of the past. We have begun to believe that our writers are afflicted with a sort of myopy that shuts out effectually sky and star and sea, and sees only the pebbles and thistles by the dusty roadside. Truly, the prospect is at first disheartening. The great Byron, who wept in faultless metre, and whose aristocratic maledictions flow in graceful waves that caress where they mean to stifle, has so poisoned our 'well of English undefiled,' that wise men now drink from it warily, and only after repeated filterings and skillful analyses by the Boerhaaves of the press. And Poe, who, with all the great poet's faults, possessed none of his few genial features, has painted the fatal skull and cross-bones upon our banners, that should own only the oriflamme. Yet it is Poe whom the English critic honors as exceeding all our authors in intensity, and approaching more nearly to genius than they all.

Now may St. Loy defend us! At the proposition of Poe's intensity we do not demur. All of us who have shrieked in infancy at the charnel-house novelettes of imprudent nurses, shivered in childhood at the mysterious abbeys and concealed tombs of Anne Radcliffe, or rushed in horror from the apparition of the dead father of the Archivarius of Hoffman, tumbling his wicked son down stairs in the midst of the onyx quarrel, will willingly and with trembling fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe. He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason. In his sad world eternal night reigns and the sun is never seen.

'Tristis Erinnys,
Prætulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces,'

by whose red light awed audiences see the fruit of his labors.

But what right has he to a place in our van, who never asked our sympathy, whose every effort was but to widen the gulf between him and his fellow-man, whose sword was never drawn in defence of the right? Genius! The very word is instinct with nobility and heartiness. Genius clasps hands with true souls everywhere: it wakes the chord of brotherhood in rude hearts in hovels, and quickens the pulses under the purple and ermine of palaces. It has a smile for childhood and a reverent tone for white-haired age. Its clasp takes in the frail flower bending from slender stems and the stars in their courses. There is laughter in its soul, and a huge banquet-table there to which all are welcome. And to us, on its borders, come the summer-breath of Pæstum roses and the aroma of the rich red wine of Valdepeñas; and there toasts are given to the past and to the future, for genius knows no nation nor any age. It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm smile deserts blossom like the rose.

And Poe? With a mind neither well balanced nor unprejudiced, and an imagination that mistook the distorted fantasies of a fevered brain for the pure impulses of some mysterious muse, and gave the reins to coursers that even Phaeton would have feared to trust, he can only excite our pity where he desires our admiration. _Qui non dat quod amat, non accipit ille quod optat_, was an inscription on an old chequer-board of the times of Henry II. And what did Poe love? Truth shrugs her shoulders, but forbears to answer,--Himself. His were the vagaries of genius without its large-hearted charities; its nice discrimination without its honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering energies. He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim; he even busied himself--as so many of the unfortunate great have done--with no chimera. From a mind so highly cultured, an organization so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest melodies. The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate around us, matchless in mechanism, wondrous in miraculous accord, but as destitute of the _soul_ of harmony as the score of Beethoven's sonata in A flat to unlearned eyes. If his analyses and criticisms are keen and graceful, they are unreliable and contradictory, for he was often influenced by private piques, and unpardonable egotism, and the opinions of those whose favor he courted. He was Byron without Byron's wonderful perceptions of nature, Byron's consciousness of the good.

And is it from a genius like this that our literature has taken its tone? Heaven forbid! Wee Apollos there may be, 'the little Crichtons of the hour,' who twist about their brows the cypress sprays that have fallen from this perverted poet's wreath, and fancy themselves crowned with the laurel of a nation's applause. But these men are not types of our literature. The truly great mind is never molded by the idol of a day, a clique, a sect. Pure-hearted and strong the man must be whose hands take hold of the palaces of the world's heart, who grasps the spirit of the coming time. Errors may be forgiven, vices may be forgotten, where only a noble aim has influenced, as a true creative genius gleamed.

But larger constellations have appeared in our literary sky, that burn with undimmed lustre even beside that great morning star that rose above the horizon of the Middle Ages. Historians we have, with all of Chaucer's truthfulness and luxuriance of expression, and poets with his fresh tendernesses, his flashing thoughts, and exquisite simplicity of heart. And perhaps, if we inquire for the distinguishing features of our literature, we shall discover them to be the strength and cheerfulness so pre-eminently the characteristics of Chaucer, which we have so long been accustomed to deny to ourselves. Observe the stately but flowing periods of Motley; his polished courtliness of style, the warm but not exaggerated coloring of his descriptions, the firm but never ungraceful outlines of his sketches of character that mark him the Michael Angelo among historians. In his brilliant imagery, his splendid scholarship, his fine analytical power, he is not surpassed by Macaulay, while he far exceeds him in impartiality,--that diamond of the historian,--and in his keen comprehension of the great motive-principles of the age which he describes. Neither are Prescott, Bancroft, or Irving inferior to Gibbon, Hume, or Robertson.

And over and through our poetry blow fresh and inspiring the winds from our own vast prairies. Those names, few, but honorable, that have become as household words among us, are gilded, not with the doubtful lustre of a moonlit sentimentality, but with the real gold of day-dawn. If they are few, let it be remembered that we are now but first feeling our manhood, trying our thews and sinews, and must needs stop to wonder a little at the gradual development of our unsuspected powers. The most of our great men have been but stalwart mechanics, busied with the machinery of government, using intellect as a lever to raise ponderous wheels, whereon our chariot may run to Eldorado. We have a right to be proud of our poets; their verses are the throbs of our American heart. And if we do but peer into their labyrinth of graceful windings and reach their Chrimhilde Rose-garden, we shall find it begirt with the strong, fighting men of humor. This element lurks under many a musical strophe and crowns many a regal verse. And yet in real humorous poetry we have been sadly deficient. Only of late years have the constant lions by the gate begun to rouse from their strong slumber, to shake their tawny manes, and rumble out a warning of their future prowess.

Nor is it strange that we, who were scarcely an organized people, should have lacked this great witness to the vitality and stability of a race. The features of a national character must be marked and prominent, and a strong sense of a national individuality be developed, before that last, best faculty of man is aroused, and leaps forth to maturity in verse. The one magnificent trait of true humorous poetry is, that in its very nature it is incapable of trivialities. It must grasp as its key-note some vast truth, must grapple with some great injustice, must hurl its lances at some wide-spread prejudice, or toy with the tangles of some mighty Nærea's hair. Undines and satyrs, cupids and merry fauns, may spring laughing from under the artist's hand, but it is from the unyielding marble that these slender children of his mirthful hours are carved. It was not in her infancy that Rome produced her Juvenal. Martial and Plautus caricatured the passions of humanity after Carthage had been destroyed and Julius Cæsar had made of his tomb a city of palaces. Aristophanes wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had boasted her Pericles. France had given birth to Richelieu when Molière assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking church and state, appeared before her king. So with America. It was not until wrongs were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked, that the voice of LOWELL'S scornful laughter was heard in the land, piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith and ism.

True, we had the famous 'Hasty Pudding' of Joel Barlow, the 'Terrible Tractoration' of Fessenden, and Halleck's 'Fanny,' but these were mere _jeux_, gallant little histories, over which we laughed and _voila le tout!_ And our Astolfo, Holmes, flying by on his winged horse, sends down now and then

'His arrowes an elle long
With pecocke well ydight,'

which we gather, and our fair dames weave into brilliant fans that flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue and purple smile with irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile countenances. Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained freedom of prose. His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart,--pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the _Rime équivoquée_. From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, and down its stream

'Went sailing with vast celerity,'

with the 'Biglow Papers' for his sail. This work electrified the public. It pierced the crust of refinement and intelligence, and roused the latent laughter of its heart. Even newsboys chuckled with delight over its caustic hits at the powers that were, against which, with the characteristic precocity of Young America, each had his private individual spite; while they found in its peculiar phraseology a mine of fun. Patriots rejoiced that one vigilant thinker dared stand guard over our national honor, with the two-edged sword of satire in his hand. Men in authority, at whom the shafts of its scathing rebukes were leveled, writhed on their cushions of state, while, in sheer deference to his originality and humor, they laughed with the crowd at--themselves. And in sooth it was a goodly sight, the young scholar, who had hitherto only dabbled delicately with the treasures of poetry, whose name was a very synonym for elegance and the repose of a genial dignity, whom we suspected of no keen outlooks into the practical world of to-day,--to see this man suddenly flashing into the dusty arena, with indignation rustling through his veins and breathing more flame

'Than ten fire-kings could swallow,'

scorching with his burning words, which an inimitable carelessness made doubly effective, the willful absurdities of government and the palpable wrongs of society, to question which had seemed before almost a heresy. But Lowell's humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing. He never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet him uninvited. And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,

'That bowed our hearts like barley bending.'

Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor. Off with the hauberk and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediæval crusade, and, lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own New England, our country boy sings his _Ave Aquila!_ while other men are rubbing the sunbeams of of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.

And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase of our poet's genius was acknowledged and applauded. Says a British Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,--Mr. Bailey at their head,--in England, and one really powerful satirist in America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical genius which has reached us from the United States. We have been under the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American literature from time to time, and it is with hearty pleasure that we are now able to own that the Britishers have been for the present utterly and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department of poetry. In the United States, social and political evils have a breadth and tangibility which are not at present to be found in the condition of any other civilized country. The "peculiar domestic institution," the fillibustering tendencies of the nation, the charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the shafts of the satirist, which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell. We do not pretend to affirm that the evils of European society may not be as great in their own way as those which affect the credit of the United States, with the exception, of course, of slavery, which makes American freedom deservedly the laughing-stock of the world; but what we do say is, that the evils in point have a boldness and simplicity which our more sophisticated follies have not, and that a hundred years hence Mr. Lowell's Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every one.'

The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires' are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny in his prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in this present year of grace,--passions that,

'Like aconite, where'er they spread, they kill.'

He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and threatening the very fane itself with fire. Mere words will never strike him dumb. He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by the roadside. Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O'Phace, Esquire, lest some Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.

'Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers,
Our four fathers fetched with 'em over the billers,
Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on,
Wile to slav'ry, invasion an' debt they were swept on,
Wile our destiny higher an' higher kep mountin'
(Though I guess folks'll stare wen she hands her account in).
Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em,
They won't hev so much ez a feather left in em.'

Not less wonderful than his penetration into political affairs is Lowell's command of the pure Yankee dialect. His knowledge of it is perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred. These are the dapper gentlemen, who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner's Waltzes, would judge every man's intellect by the measure of their own. Know, oh dwarfed descendants of Procustes, that the quality of humor is not strained, but droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven; and if, after patient blending with grains of intolerance and egotism, in the mortar of your minds, it seems to you but that poisonous foam that of old sorcerers drew, by their incantations, from the moon, we can only smile with Voltaire at your 'foolish ingenuities,' and recommend to you a new career. 'Go pype in an ivy lefe,' Monsieur Mustard-seed, or 'blow the bukkes' horne.'

It is no trifling merit in a work of so extraordinary a character that the original programme should have been so perfectly carried out. The poet never relaxes, even into a Corinthian elegance of allusion; his metaphors are always fresh and ungarnished; they no more shine with the polish of the court than do those of Panurge. In fact, there is a flavor of the camp about them, a pleasant suspicion, and more than a suspicion, of life in the open air, the fresh smell of the up-turned earth, the odor of clover blossoms. The poet is walking in the _fresco_, and the sharp winds cut a pathway across every page. Equally remarkable and pervaded by a most delightful personality are the editorial lucubrations of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. The very lustre of the midnight oil shines upon their glittering fragments of philosophy, admirably twisted to suit the requirements of an eminently unphilosophical age; moral axioms from heathen writers applied judiciously to the immoral actions of Christian doers; distorted shadows of a monstrous political economy, and dispassionate and highly commendable views '_de propagandâ fide_.' Like Johnson,

'He forced Latinisms into his line,
Like raw undrilled recruits,'

that have yet done immense service in his conflicts with the enemy. This pedantry, so inimitable, is unequaled even by the most weighty pages of the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' of Sir Thomas Browne. That it should prove obnoxious to some critics only testifies to its perfection and their own incapacity for enjoyment. If a man does not relish the caviare and truffles at a dinner, he does not question the wisdom of his Lucullus in providing them; the fault is in his own palate, not in the judgment of his host. The aggrieved individuals, who are either too weak or too indolent to scale the numberless peaks of Lowell's genius, may comfort themselves with the reflection that the treasures of their minds will never be tesselated into the mosaic of any satirist's fancy, for in them can abound only emptiness and cobwebs--as saith the Staphyla of Plautus:--

'Nam hic apud nos nihil est aliud qua sti furibus,
Ita inaniis sunt oppletæ atque araneis.'

Caricatures have never been disdained by the greatest minds. They were rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours. Even the stern and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful exercises. We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and Æneas are represented with the heads of apes and pigs. Lessing even tells us in his Laocoon that in Thebes the rage for these _caricatura_ was so great that a law was passed forbidding the production of any work conflicting with the severe and absolute laws of beauty.

In quite another vein, yet transfused with the same irrepressible mirth, we have Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' which, with its 'preliminary notes and few candid remarks to the reader,' is a literary curiosity whose parallel we have not in any work by an American author. It is all one merry outburst of youth and health, and music and poetry, with the spice of a criticism so rare and genial, that one could almost court dissection at his hands, for the mere exquisitely epicurean bliss of an artistic euthanasia. It is genius on a frolic, coquetting with all the Graces, and unearthing men long since become gnomes,

'In that country
Where are neither stars nor meadows,'

to join in his merry carousing. They float on floods of Chian and moor their barks under 'hills of spice.' What golden wine of inspiration has our poet drunk, whose flush is on his brow and its fire in his veins? For every sentence of this poem is aglow with vigor and life and power;

'Its feeldes have een and its woodes have eeres.'