In the Arabian Nights; until the stranger Began to think his ear-drums in some danger. In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it; They turn and vary it in every way, Hashing it, stewing it, mincing it, ragouting it; Sometimes they keep it purposely at bay, Then let it slip to be again pursuing it; They drone it, groan it, whisper it and shout it, Refute it, flout it, swear to 't, prove it, doubt it. 'T is fortunate, my friends, that you have lost your United parts of speech, or it had been "Produce! says Nature, what have you produced? A new strait-waistcoat for the human mind; Are you not limbed, nerved, jointed, arteried, juiced, As other men? yet, faithless to your kind, Rather like noxious insects you are used To puncture life's fair fruit, beneath the rind Laying your creed-eggs, whence in time there spring Consumers new to eat and buzz and sting. In a letter, June 16, 1846, to Mr. Sydney Howard Gay, then editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, Lowell wrote: "I mean to send all the poems I write (on whatever subject) first to the Standard, except such arrows as I may deem it better to shoot from the ambushment of the Courier, because the old enemy offers me a fairer mark from that quarter. . . . You will find a squib of mine in this week's Courier. I wish it to continue anonymous, for I wish slavery to think it has as many enemies as possible. If I may judge from the number of persons who have asked me if I wrote it, I have struck the old hulk of the Public between wind and water." This was the first of the Biglow Papers. The scheme of anonymity was preserved through the first series, and as Lowell wrote forty years later to Thomas Hughes (Letters, II. 334): “I had great fun out of it. I have often wished that I could have had a literary nom de guerre, and kept my own to myself. I should n't have cared a doit what 66 happened to him." But as appears from the letter given above, the satire was readily fathered on Lowell, and many of the subsequent papers were published in the Standard. As for Hosea," he wrote to his friend Mr. Charles F. Briggs, November 13, 1847, "I am sorry that I began by making him such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself, but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll per se. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting him for college, and has already commenced his education. Perhaps you like the last best, because it is more personal and has therefore more directness of purpose. But I confess I think that Birdofredom's attempt to explain the AngloSaxon theory is the best thing yet, except Parson Wilbur's letter in the Courier of last Saturday." The series ran at intervals for about eighteen months, when the papers were collected into a volume. Lowell's letters, written when he was busy over the equipment of the book, show him in high spirits over his jeu d'esprit. "I am going," he writes to Mr. Briggs," to indulge all my fun in a volume of H. Biglow's verses which I am preparing, and which I shall edit under the character of the Rev. Mr. Wilbur. I hope you saw Mr. B.'s last production, which I consider his best hitherto. I am going to include in the volume an essay of the reverend gentleman on the Yankee dialect, and on dialects in general, and on everything else, and also an attempt at a complete natural history of the Humbug which I think I shall write in Latin. book will purport to be published at Jaalam (Mr. B.'s native place), and will be printed on brownish paper, with those little head and tailpieces which used to adorn our earlier publications such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like." -- The This was written on the last day of the year 1847, but it was not until September of the next year that the actual volume got under way; for meanwhile Lowell's original design had been modified, and he turned the fun he had been devising for the volume of mock poetry into the collection of his Biglow Papers. The essay on the Yankee dialect by Mr. Wilbur was included, but it was not till the second series was published, nearly twenty years later, that there appeared the scholarly introduction, not now as a piece of affected pedantry, but as the serious and delightful study of the author delivered in his own voice. At the beginning of September, 1848, Lowell wrote to Mr. Gay: "I am as busy as I can be with Mr. Biglow's poems, of which I have got between twenty and thirty pages already printed. It is the hardest book to print that ever I had anything to do with, and what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur's annotations, keeps me more employed than I care to be." Later in the same month he wrote to the same correspondent that he was "wearied out with Mr. Biglow and his tiresome (though wholly respectable) friend Mr. Wilbur." His notes continue to show the pressure under which he worked until the book was published, the middle of November. The first edition (1500) was gone in a week, and the book and its author became famous. A little more than ten years afterward an English edition was to appear, and Thomas Hughes, who had it in charge, wrote to Lowell asking for a new preface. The answer, a portion of which is here given, is interesting as showing how the book appeared as a whole to its author when he was in the midst of his University service and had made a name for himself as scholar and critic as well as poet. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Sept. 13, 1859. MY DEAR SIR: :I have put off from time to time writing to you, because I hardly knew what to write. To say simply that I liked your writings would have been pleasant enough (though that would have given me no claim upon you that was not shared by all the world), but I find it particularly hard to write anything about a book of my own. It has been a particular satisfaction to me to hear, now and then, some friendly voice from the old motherisland say "Well done" of the Biglow Papers; for, to say the truth, I like them myself, and when I was reading them over for a new edition, a year or two ago, could not help laughing. But then as I laughed I found myself asking, "Are these yours? How did you make them?" Friendly people say to me sometimes, “Write us more Biglow Papers," and I have even been simple enough to try, only to find that I could not. This has helped to persuade me that the book was a genuine growth, and not a manufacture, and that, therefore, I had an honest right to be pleased without blushing if people liked it. But then, this very fact makes it rather hard to write an introduction to it. All I can say is that the book was thar; how it came is more than I can tell. I cannot, like the great Goethe, deliberately imagine what would have been a proper Entstehungsweise for my book, and then assume it as a fact. And as for an historical preface, I find that quite as hard after now twelve years of more cloistered interests and studies that have alienated me very much from contemporary politics. I only know that I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, 1 believed, and still believe, that slavery is the Achilles-heel of our polity; that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect |