No. 268.] SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1854. WAR AT HOME, OR WAR ABROAD. "There is a vast deal of contradictory truth in the Fire-head, Bob! Captain Dash has the finest auburn hair-has he not, mamma ? Red, indeed! I like that!" "How dear everything will be, Mr. G., I must go out and buy a good stock of everything-no more tallow, I fear." "If the regiment goes, no more balls." "And no more mess dinners, or matches; that cuts us all though, sisters dear." "And a little message, loves, from the chancellor ; And this is about all we English know of war;-In- At earliest dawn the whole town is alive. Many who [PRICE 1 d. into rooms where mothers or wives hang in mute agony on manly breasts, and tells with cutting sound that the dread hour of separation has come; the mute walls stifle the agony-all without is happiness and gaiety. Wide fly the barrack-doors, and the marshalled mass appear, ranged in military order. Out blow the colours honoured by a thousand fields; loud sounds the band, with soul-inspiring strain-forward! forward! Now they sweep down the street, encumbered by the crowd; mistress at the first-floor, miss in the upper, maid at the door, cheer them on:-" God bless you, men! God bless you!" They turn the corner,-fainter, fainter fall the martial strains; the crowd is passed, and the usual routine of daily life begins-Great England is at war with half the world. The bright spring sun rises from the steppe, which, like an ocean in the roll of its undulations stretches away eastward over half the globe; not a cloud obscures his glory, and though the year is but in his boyhood, ere that sun has reached ten degrees of elevation, his genial rays will pour down with ripening strength on harvestward provinces. The villagers go forth to their work: wild, black-eyed boys lead out the flocks, shaming the lark with the melody of their song. The little girls run off with the younglings, their special care; they escape with a merry push from the youths who would bid them turn to them their healthy faces contradict the repulse, and invite him to disobedience of their commands to begone. The happy matrons, work with new energy at their household toils, as the babe rolls on the soft pasture; the husband jogs along to his day's work, steadily and quietly;-heaven is good, labour is light, nature repays, God is great, the labourer is content. It is noon- -man, beast, and life repose; the sun reigns lord of all. Who would move? Now let us lie and enjoy the consciousness of existence. Who is this what madman that comes riding at that pace, at noonday? "Stop, stranger; stay, friend, rest here till eve, refresh yourself, then take God speed, and go on your way." But the horseman stays not till he reaches the centre of the village, and then throwing himself from his exhausted steed, enters the chief man's house. The village is alive-the news spreads fast; the enemy come -they come the foe pours his legions o'er the land. "Look," cries the stranger to his gathering audience, pointing eastward as he speaks; "look, where but this morn that sun rose in unclouded splendour, see those black clouds ascending from the horizon, those are the mists of smoking home and homestead, fed by the life's blood of those who loved them. Fly, fly while there is yet time; leave field and flock, crop and store; fly, while you can. Bless God, there is yet space for that: see, even now they come, they come." The fields are alive with horsemen; they seem to grow from the corn which they trample down as they approach; their numbers multiply; they converge to the village ; the inhabitants, stupified, cluster together; hark! a wild shout, the assemblage is taken for resistance, the intruders close, and ere the villagers can breathe, the spears are levelled, and the horses on them. The crowd is down or flown; blood trickles from the lance-heads. "It was all a mistake; we thought you were going to resist; come, fcols, don't run away, we will not hurt you; be active; food and forage, quick." Now, old man, your gold; ah! pretty maid, here are lovers; old dame, that necklace will do for my lass at home; off with those ear-rings; if the spring is fast, here is a knife will open it; now then, chief, no nonsense, rations for my men, or I shall have to look out for a tree; plenty of fruit like you we have left hanging on our road. My men lodge here to-night; beds and attendance, food and plenty; hurry, old man; touch him up with your spear to hasten his movements!" 66 They feast, they riot; and as night closes, a wail of pain, or shrill shriek of despair, mingles with the sentries' call of "All's well. Alert." The bugle sounds, the foes of our foes approach: "Quick, men-soldiers to the front; the fight begins-the houses fortified; walls loopholed; furniture-carts, corn-sacks, barricade the streets; the shot plays on the unhappy scene of morning's peace. We must retire," cries the chief; "fire the place, fire it in a hundred points; burn the stores; kill that old fool who bars the door." The flames arise; the thirsty, eager fire presses on the homesteads; the foe retires; the foes' foe advancing, presses on; the night closes in. The morn, it was but yesterday we saw the scene: look now. The plain,-a trampled desert. Where are the flocks, where are the maids who led them ? The one are goaded before the retiring foe, or swell the victor's spoil; the other lifelessly hides her shame behind the ruined walls. The son lies blackened on the hearth he strove to save; the mother sits beside her husband, too hopeless to grieve; her babe strains vainly at her shrivelled breast; the husband looks at the ashes of his home, striving to comprehend the ruin of his life. Such is war, where war is, war brought to our doors. This picture is not overdrawn. A newspaper tells us of such and such a reconnaisance: we read the lines, but forget the moral. That village burnt was the home and the all of hundreds; two words describe the affair to us, the rest is lost, save in the records of Him, the All-seeing. Englishmen, countrymen, let us then indeed thank the Almighty that in the present war our cause is just. We send forth our might to prevent such scenes as these,-to stay, in fact, the destroyer's band. Let us remember the blessings of our insular position. Let us all cheerfully contribute to maintain its inviolability. Let us think, with all our hearts, of our gallant defenders; and, while humbly trusting that general peace will soon be restored, fervently pray the enemy may never bring war to our own homes. AN AMERICAN HUMORIST. THE BIGLOW PAPERS. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, the American, is better known among us as a serious poet than as a humorist; and yet he is decidedly greater in the latter capacity than in the former. We cannot help feeling, while we read his poems, that they are but echoes,-at one time of Spenser, at another of Wordsworth, at another of Keats, and lastly of Tennyson. He is not better than any of these; he is not equal to any of them. More recently he has taken to reform subjects, and worked them up in poems; but politics and poetry cannot always, cannot often, be made to harmonise. Solid prose better suits such severe subjects as democracy, annexation, slave emancipation, temperance, and tariff reform. If a man has got anything to say on these subjects, it is not necessary that he should sing it in rythmic measure. It is better that he should say his say in fitting words, in the form of prose, which is capable of greater force, or at least precision, than can be reached in the hampered form of rhyme. In poems on such subjects, there is too often foaming without fits, show of strength without real force, and much violent wrenching of words without any genuine result. But in his humour Mr. Lowell is altogether successful. There he is at case, homely, and natural. It is never gross, as so much American humour is, but delicate and penetrating, though sometimes broad, almost farcical, yet in either case irresistible. It does not depend for its success upon mere slang and misspelling, which is all that there is to recommend the works of some other adventurers in this department. His humour is subtle, discriminating, shrewed, genial, yet thoroughly Yankee. Mr. Lowell first appeared as a humorist in the Biglow Papers. These purport to be a collection made by the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the first church in Jalaam, of the papers, poetical and otherwise, of his young parishioner, Hosea Biglow. Hosea has great ambition to get into print, and submits his "littery efforts" to his pastor, who was not backward to recognise in them a certain wild, puckery, acidulous (or, as the Yankees say), shut-eye flavour, not wholly unpleasing, nor unwholesome, to palates cloyed with the sugariness of tamed and cultivated fruit. Mr. Wilbur first duly counselled his promising young parishioner to study Pope and Goldsmith, and he accordingly tried one or two picces in their style; but the youth objected 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 rythm 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; adding that the sweetwater would only be disfigured by having its leaves starched and ironed out, and that "Pegasus" hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curl-papers. So the Rev. Mr. Wilbur left young Hosea Biglow to follow the bent of his natural genius; and American writers generally would do well to follow the same, without thinking so much of either Pope, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson. Mr. Wilbur, in his preface to the Biglow Papers, gives a very graphic account of the founding of New England, which we cannot pass over:-" New England," says he, I was not so much a colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness. The little selfexiled band which came 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 on hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea, even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. * * As Want was the prime foe these hardy exodists had to fortress themselves against, so it is little wonder if that traditional feud is long in wearing out of the stock. The wounds of the old warfare were long a-healing, and an east wind of hard times puts a new ache in every one of them. Thrift was the first lesson in their horn-book, pointed out, letter after letter, by the lean finger of the hard schoolmaster, Necessity. Neither were they plump, rosy-gilled Englishmen that came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilarious, earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling with the Lord in prayer, and who had taught Satan to dread the new Puritan hug. Add two hundred years' influence of soil, climate, and exposure, with its necessary result of idiosyncrasies, and we have the present Yankee, full of expedients, halfmaster of all trades, inventive in all but the beautiful, full of shifts, not yet capable of comfort, armed at all points against the old enemy, Hunger; longanimous, good at patching, not so careful for what is best as for what will do, with a clasp to his purse and a button to his pocket; not skilled to build against Time, as in old countries, but against sore-pressing Need, accustomed to move the world with no rov or@, but his own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A strange hybrid indeed did circumstances beget here in the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron enthusiasm, such unwilling humour, such close-fisted generosity." But to the Biglow Papers and their humour. The principal subjects discussed in them are the Mexican war and the slavery question, seen from a popular or rustic point of view. If the reader can master the dialectic peculiarities of the following extracts, he will find some genuine humour in them, and not a little shrewd sense. We believe the Papers are also valuable as furnishing a repository of the current patois of the New England States, as well as the tone of thought and mode of viewing public questions which prevails in most of them. The first letter is from Ezekiel Biglow to the Editor of the Boston Courier, inclosing a poem by "our Hosea " on the recruiting then going on for soldiers to serve in the Mexican War. It begins thus : "MISTER EDDYTER: Our Hosea wuz down to Boston last week, and he see a crnetin sarjunt a struttin round as popler as a hen with 1 chicking, with 2 fellers a drummin and fifin arter him like all natur. the sarjunt he thout Hosea hed'nt gut his i teeth cut cos he looked a kinda's though he'd jest com down, so he cal❜lated to hook him in, but Hosy woodn't take none o' his sarse for all he hed as much as 20 Roosters' tales stuck onto his hat and eenamost enuf brass a bobbin up and down on his shoulders and figureed onto his coat and trousis, let alone wut natur hed sot in his featers, to make a 6 pounder out on. "wal, Hosea he com home considerabal riled, and arter I'd gone to bed I heern Him a thrashin round like a short-tailed Bull in fli-time. The old Woman ses she to me ses she, Zekle ses she, our Hosee's gut the chollery or suthin another ses she; don't you be skeered, ses I, he's oney amakin pottery ses i, he's ollers on hand at that ere busynes like Da & martin, and shure enuf, cum mornin, Hosy he cum down stares full chizzle, hare on eend and cote tales flyin, and sot right of to go reed his varses to Parson Wilbur bein he aint aney grate shows o' book larnin himself, bimeby he cum back and sed the parson wuz dreffle tickled with 'em as i hoop you will Be, and said they wuz True grit." We can only give a few verses of Hosea's "Pottery," composed in answer to the recruiting sergeant's invitation to him to "List, list, O list!" They are genuine Yankee:Thresh away, you'll hev to rattle On them kittle drums o' yourn-- Let folks see how spry you be,- Want to tackle me in, du ye I expect you'll have to wait; Though they be so very bold; 'Fore they think on't they will sprout, Hosea is a thorough Peace-man, and goes the whole hog in that line, calling war murder in plain terms :— 'Taint your epyletts an' feathers Make the thing a grain more right; But although Hosea was able to resist the drum and fife of the recruiting sergeant, it appears that a "yung feller" of the same town, Birdofreedom Scawin by name, "cocktale 32 whose great ambition was to sport a on his hat, had been tempted to volunteer to Texas; and, feeling a good deal of disgust at the military profession, he writes home a letter which falls into Hosea Biglow's hands, and which Parson Wilbur says "oughter at once Bee printed." Mr. Scawin, it appears, finds real sojerin a very different thing from holiday reviewing, much more disagreeable, and he is disgusted accordingly This kind o' sogerin' sint a mite like our October trainin', A chap could clear right out from there ef't only looked like rainin'; An' th' Cannles, tu, could kiver up their shappoes with ban danners, An' send the insines skootin' to the bar-room with their banners, (Fear o' gittin on 'em spotted), an' a feller could cry quarter, Ef he fired away his ramrod arter tu much rum an' water. It is very different, however, in Texas. Hard work, hard fighting, and no time for bandanners. Mr. Scawin also makes a very alarming discovery about the particular shape of the bayonet, which he thus comically alludes to : It's glory,-but, in spite o' all my tryin to git callous, This goin' were glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur, Poor Birdofreedom Scawin, however, now that he was fairly in for it, was obliged to fight with the rest, and next time we hear of him, he has lost a leg and an eye, got numerous ribs broken, and been stripped of several of his fingers. As for the loss of the leg, it was no great matter: There's one good thing, though, to be said about my wooden new one, The liquor can't git into it as't used to in the true one; He finds he can also dispense with his lost eye, for the one that remains he finds quite big enough to see all that he will ever get by losing the other. But the loss of his fingers is more serious, as his powers of arithmetic are thereby taken away from him, and he can no longer cast up his calculations on his finger-ends. As for Texas, now conquered, it entirely disappointed Mr. Scawin. Instead of a country flowing with rum and water, as Canaan flowed with milk and honey; instead of gold being dug up in as great plenty as taters are in America during harvest-time; instead of precious stones and "propaty to be had for the gathering, there were horrid insects, abominable water, scarcity of food, and many very hard knocks. Here is Mr. Scawin's graphic account of the climate, its long droughts and then sudden deluges,—and the reader will observe in the description the extremely clever picture of female perplexity in Prude's management of her teapot: The clymit seems to me jest like a teapot made o' pewter Our Prudence hed, thet wouldn't pour (all she could du) to suit her; Fust place, the leaves 'ould choke the spout, so's not a drop 'ould dreen out, Then Prude 'ould tip an' tip an' tip, till the holl kit bust clean out, The kiver hinge-pin bein' lost, tea-leaves an' tea an' kiver 'Ould all come down kerswosh! ez though the dam broke in a river. Jest so'tis here: holl months there ain't a day o' rainy weather, An' jest ez th'officers 'ould be a layin' heads together Ez t'how they'd mix their drink at sech a milingtary deepot,'T'ould pour ez though the lid wuz off the everlastin' teapot. The consequence is, thet I shall take, wen I'm allowed to leave here, one, One piece o' propaty along,-an' thet's the shakin' fever; Consoling himself with this philosophy, Mr. Scawin looks to the future, but doesn't see his way so clear. He finds he has got some "glory," which may, "arter all," turn out a good investment; but as for solid pudding, it has not yet come to hand. For (speaking of the common soldiers) he says: We get the licks,-we're jest the grist thet's put into War's hoppers; Leftenants is the lowest grade thet helps pick up the coppers. Mr. Scawin forthwith thinks of making use of his wooden leg for the purpose of hopping into Congress. He will set up as a candidate for office, on the strength of his "milingtary" reputation, for There aint no kin' o' quality in candidates, it's said, So useful ez a wooden leg,-except a wooden head. As for principles he has none, but if any cantankerous elector should ask for them, he will answer that he has a wooden leg got in the service of his country; and if harder pressed for something more definite, he will reply that he has had one eye put out. Then for a popular cry of the "Old Hickory" kind, Mr. Scawin thinks he will do: Then you can call me "Timbertoes,"-that's wat the people likes; Sutthin combinin' morril truth with phrazes sich as strikes; "Old Timbertoes" you see's a creed it's safe to be quite bold on, There's nothin in't the other side can any ways git hold on; That valooable class o'men who look thru brandy-toddy; Them's wat takes hold o' folks that think, ez well ez o' the masses, An' makes you sartin o' the aid o' good men of all classes. There is only one little difficulty which Birdofreedom Seawin admits, which is, that in order to be a proper candidate for the presidency, he must own a nigger of some sort, and therefore he requests his friends to raise subscriptions amongst them to enable him to purchase the requisite qualification-that is, "enough for me to buy a low-priced baby." Mr. Scawin writes a third letter, from which it appears that he retires from the contest for president, as sick of political as he had been of "milingtary campaigning." But, from the specimens we have given, it will be observed how rich is the vein of humour which runs through his observations. I'm willin a man should go tollable strong Is ollers unpop'lar an' never gits pitied, But he musn't be hard on partickler sins, Coz then he'll be kickin the people's own shins. The Pious Editor's Creed" is a terrible satire on Yankee politics, more severe than anything that old country writers have yet said of them. Parson Wilbur is disposed to derive the name of Editor not so much from edo to publish, as from edo to eat, that being the peculiar profession to which the American editor esteems himself called. "He blows up the flames of political discord for no other occasion than that he may thereby handily boil his own pot. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of the thousand labour to impress upon the people the great principles of Treeedledum, and nine hundred and ninetynine out of the other thousand preach with equal earnestness the gospel according to Tweedledee." Here are a few extracts from "The Pious Editor's Creed: I du believe in Freedom's cause, Ez far away ez Paris is; I love to see her stick her claws I du believe the people wunt I du believe it's wise an' good I mean nine thousan' dolls. per ann. I du believe in special ways " I mean in preyin 'till one busts I du believe with all my soul ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL. I du believe in prayer an' praise I don't believe in princerple, But, O, I Du in interest. I du believe in bein' this Or that, ez it may happen One way or t'other hendiest is My president course is steadied, I scent which pays the best, an' then I du believe wutever trash 'll keep the people in blindness,Thet we the Mexicans can thrash Right inter brotherly kindness, Thte bombshells, grape, an' powder 'n ball Thet peace, to make it stick at all, MUST BE DRUV IN WITH BAGNETS. In short, I firmly du believe In Humbug generally, Fer it's a thing that I perceive To hev a solid vally; This heth my faithful shepherd ben, In pasturs sweet heth led me, Hosea Biglow puts some questions to a popular candidate, who sends an answer of a very comical description. -one that The candidate is of the class "artful dodger' won't give a pledge. Yet he pretends to be very straightforward, though all the while he is, as the Yankees say, riding on the fence." Here are his views anent the Mexican war, which some of our peace men in the House of Commons may imitate to advantage next time they appear before their British constituents: Ez for the war, I go agin it,- I sign to thet with all my heart,- SOMETIMES UPON A POWDER-CART. We cannot, however, proceed further with quotations from these clever and highly-humorous jeux d'esprit. But we cannot refrain from giving a short piece by Mr. Lowell in an altogether different vein,-one which, perhaps, he thinks the lightest of, having thrown it off in a careless mood; and yet it is the most characteristic little poem which he has yet written. It is so thoroughly Why will not Americans American-so native-so true. write after nature, instead of after Wordsworth and Tennyson? Let Mr. Lowell write more in the following strain, commonplace and vulgar as it may seem, yet thoroughly true to nature-and he will do more to create The a school of popular American poetry than by writing no end of "Rosalines" and "Legends of Brittany." It is entitled piece which we refer to is unfinished. The Courtin." Time-twilight. Ezekiel goes a courting Huldy, who is sitting in the kitchen all alone, peeling The piece has the finish of a apples by the firelight. Dutch picture :~ Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown, Agin' the chimbly crooknecks hung, The ole queen's arm thet gran' ther Young The wannut logs shot sparkles out The very room, coz she wuz in, Ez th' apples she wuz peelin'. She heerd a foot, an' know'd it, tu, He kin' o' l'itered on the mat Here the poem ends. Perhaps to carry it much further would have been to spoil it. But even as it stands, it is a gem. We only wish that Mr. Lowell would write more in this vein. He might even do so in English if he liked, instead of that lingo. MY FIRST ADVENTURE IN PARIS. (Concluded from our last.) But "RANKS at the theatre door, and march!" I repeated Sallying out, I perceived M. Saucissard standing at tinued to keep his hand upon my collar until I gently |