INTRODUCTION. WHEN, more than three years ago, my talented young parishioner, Mr. Biglow, came to me and submitted to my animadversions the first of his poems which he intended to commit to the more hazardous trial of a city newspaper, it never so much as entered my imagination to conceive that his productions would ever be gathered into a fair volume, and ushered into the august presence of the reading public by myself. So little are we short-sighted mortals able to predict the event! I confess that there is to me a quite new satisfaction in being associated (though only as sleeping partner) in a book which can stand by itself in an independent unity on the shelves of libraries. For there is always this drawback from the pleasure of printing a sermon, that, whereas the queasy stomach of this generation will not bear a discourse long enough to make a separate volume, those religious and godly-minded children (those Samuels, if I may call them so) of the brain must at first lie buried in an undistinguished heap, and then get such resurrection as is vouchsafed to them, mummy-wrapped with a score of others in a cheap binding, with no other mark of distinction than the word "Miscellaneous" printed upon the back. Far be it from me to claim any credit for the quite unexpected popularity which I am pleased to find these bucolic strains have attained unto. If I know myself, I am measurably free from the itch of vanity; yet I may be allowed to say that I was not backward to recognize in them a certain wild, puckery, acidulous (sometimes even verging toward that point which, in our rustic phrase, is termed shut-eye) flavor, not wholly unpleasing, nor unwhole some, to palates cloyed with the sugariness of tamed and cultivated fruit. It may be, also, that some touches of my own, here and there, may have led to their wider acceptance, albeit solely from my larger experience of literature and authorship.* I was, at first, inclined to discourage Mr. Biglow's attempts, as knowing that the desire to poetize is one of the diseases naturally incident to adolescence, which, if the fitting remedies be not at once and with a bold hand applied, may become chronic, and render one, who might else have become in due time an ornament of the social circle, a painful object even to nearest friends and relatives. But thinking, on a further experience, that there was a germ of promise in him which required only culture and the pulling up of weeds from around it, I thought it best to set before him the acknowledged examples of English composition in verse, and leave the rest to natural emulation. With this view, I accordingly lent him some volumes of Pope and Goldsmith, to the assiduous study of which he promised to devote his evenings. Not long afterward, he brought me some verses written upon that model, a specimen of which I subjoin, having changed some phrases of less elegancy, and a few rhymes objectionable to the cultivated ear. The poem consisted of childish reminis cences, and the sketches which follow The reader curious in such matters may refer (if he can find them) to "A Sermon preached on the Anniversary of the Dark Day," "An Artillery Election Sermon," "A Discourse on the Late Eclipse," "Dorcas, a Funeral Sermon on the Death of Madam Submit Tidd, Relict of the late Experience Tidd, Esq.," &c., &c. will not seem destitute of truth to those whose fortunate education began in a country village. And, first, let us hang up his charcoal portrait of the schooldame. "Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see The humble school-house of my A, B, C, Where well-drilled urchins, each behind his tire, Waited in ranks the wished command to fire, "There young Devotion learned to climb with ease The gnarly limbs of Scripture family-trees, To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek, same; If any tyro found a name too tough, And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough; She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing, And cleared the five-barred syllables at a spring. "Ah, dear old times! there once it was my hap, Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap; From books degraded, there I sat at ease, More solid than the redemanded praise "Ah, dear old times! how brightly ye return! How, rubbed afresh, your phosphor traces burn! The ramble schoolward through dewsparkling meads more; The squire was flattered, and the pauper knew Old times acknowledged 'neath the threadbare blue! Dropped at the corner of the embowered lane, Whistling I wade the knee-deep leaves again, I add only one further extract, which will possess a melancholy interest to all such as have endeavored to glean the materials of revolutionary history from the lips of aged persons, who took a part in the actual making of it, and, finding the manufacture profitable, continued the supply in an adequate proportion to the demand. "Old Joe is gone, who saw hot Percy goad His slow artillery up the Concord road, A tale which grew in wonder, year by year, Beat on stove drum with one uncaptured stick, And, ere death came the lengthening tale to lop, Himself had fired, and seen a red-coat drop; Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight Had squared more nearly with his sense of right, And vanquished Percy, to complete the tale, Had haminered stone for life in Concord jail.' I do not know that the foregoing extracts ought not to be called my own rather than Mr. Biglow's, as, indeed, he maintained stoutly that my file had left nothing of his in them. I should not, perhaps, have felt entitled to take so great liberties with them, had I not more than suspected an hereditary vein of poetry in myself, a very near ancestor having written a Latin poem in the Harvard Gratulatio on the accession of George the Third. Suffice it to say, that, whether not satisfied with such limited approbation as I could conscientiously bestow, or from a sense of natural inaptitude, certain it is that my young friend could never be induced to any further essays in this kind. He affirmed that it was to him like writing in a foreign tongue, that Mr. Pope's versification was like the regular ticking of one of Willard's clocks, in which one could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a poverty-stricken tick, tick, after all, and that he had never seen a sweet-water on a trellis growing so fairly, or in forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I know not what, to the effect that the sweet-water would only be the more disfigured by having its leaves starched and ironed out, and that Pegasus (so he called him) hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curl-papers. These and other such opinions I did not ong strive to eradicate, attributing them rather to a defective education and senses untuned by too long familiar ity with purely natural objects, than to a perverted moral sense. I was the more inclined to this leniency since sufficient evidence was not to seek, that his verses, as wanting as they certainly were in classic polish and point, had somehow taken hold of the public ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting him right as to the quantity of the proper name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent of his natural genius. Yet could I not surrender him wholly to the tutelage of the pagan (which, literally interpreted, signifies village) muse without yet a further effort for his conversion, and to this end I resolved that whatever of poetic fire yet burned in myself, aided by the assiduous bellows of correct models, should be put in requisition. Accordingly, when my ingenious young parishioner brought to my study a copy of verses which he had written touching the acquisition of territory resulting from the Mexican war, and the folly of leaving the question of slavery or freedom to the adjudication of chance, I did myself indite a short fable or apologue after the manner of Gay and Prior, to the end that he might see how easily even such subjects as he treated of were capable of a more refined style and more elegant expression. Mr. Biglow's production was as follows: THE TWO GUNNERS, A FABLE. Two fellers, Isrel named and Joe, Joe did n't want to go a mite; He felt ez though 't warnt skeercely right, Past noontime they went trampin' round An jest ez they wuz settin' down To take their noonin', Joe looked roun' Isrel he ups and grabs his gun; Sez he, "By ginger, here's some fun!" Sez Joe, "I would n't ha' been hired "I won't agree to no such bender," So they disputed to an' fro Now 't wuz the hottest kind o' weather, My own humble attempt was in manner and form following, and I print it here, I sincerely trust, out of no vainglory, but solely with the hope of doing good. LEAVING THE MATTER OPEN. A TALE. BY HOMER WILBUR, A. M. Two brothers once, an ill-matched pair、 Together dwelt (no matter where), To whom an Uncle Sam, or some one, Had le t a house and farm in cominon⚫ The two in principles and habits Were different as rats from rabbits; Stout Farmer North, with frugal care, Laid up provision for his heir, Not scorning with hard sun-browned hands He did, and made it pay him, too; His wood brought profit when 't was cold, On tother hand, his brother South He ought to drive them home again, Meanwhile, South's swine increasing fast, "Our families are both increasing, Poor North, whose Anglo-Saxon Llood But somehow South could ne'er incline "For peace's sake, Liberal concessions I will make; Though I believe, upon my soul, I've a just title to the whole, I'll make an offer which I call Gen'rous, we 'll have no fence at all; Then both of us, whene'er we choose, Can take what part we want to use; If you should chance to need it first, Pick you the best, I'll take the worst.' "Agreed!" cried North; thought he, This fall With wheat and rye I'll sow it all; He could n't spy a single blade on't. "I paid the money"; Clenched like a knot of natural law, To turn now to other matters, there are two things upon which it would seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely in this place, -the Yankee character and the Yankee dialect. And, first, of the Yankee character, which has wanted neither open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies in the persons of those unskilful painters who have given to it that hardness, angularity, and want of proper perspective, which, in truth, belonged, not to their subject, but to their own niggard and unskilful pencil. came New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. They came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea, even unto thirtyseventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And surely, if the Greek might boast his Thermopyla, where three hundred men fell in resisting the Persian, we may well be proud of our Plymouth Rock, where a handful of men, women, and children not merely faced, but you |