With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,

He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,

But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders,

The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching

Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;

His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,

But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,

And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem, At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.

tains;

There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,

There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,

Horizontally there lie upright politicians, Dose-a-dose with their patients sleep faultless physicians,

There are slave - drivers quietly whipped under ground,

There bookbinders, done up in boards, are fast bound,

There card-players wait till the last trump be played,

There all the choice spirits get finally laid, There the babe that's unborn is supplied with a berth,

There men without legs get their six feet of earth,

There lawyers repose, each wrapped up in

his case,

There seekers of office are sure of a place, There defendant and plaintiff get equally cast,

There shoemakers quietly stick to the last,

1 That is in most cases we do, but not all,

Past a doubt, there are men who are innately small, Such as Blank, who, without being 'minished a tittle, Might stand for a type of the Absolute Little.

There brokers at length become silent as stocks,

There stage-drivers sleep without quitting their box,

And so forth and so forth and so forth and so on,

With this kind of stuff one might endlessly go on;

To come to the point, I may safely assert

you

Will find in each yard every cardinal virtue; 1

Each has six truest patriots: four discoverers of ether,

Who never had thought on 't nor mentioned it either;

Ten poets, the greatest who ever wrote rhyme:

Two hundred and forty first men of their time:

One person whose portrait just gave the least hint

Its original had a most horrible squint: One critic, most (what do they call it?) reflective,

Who never had used the phrase ob- or subjective:

Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred

Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,

And their daughters for-faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi: Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual blackeye:

Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:

Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:

Two dozen of Italy's exiles who shoot us his Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses,

Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,2

Mount serenely their country's funereal pile:

Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebel

lers

Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out Taboo!

And while he is wondering what he shall do, Since each suggests opposite topics for

song,

They all shout together you're right! and you're wrong!

"Nature fits all her children with something to do,

He who would write and can't write can surely review,

Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his

Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies; Thus a lawyer's apprentice, just out of his teens,

Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines; Having read Johnson's lives of the poets half through,

There's nothing on earth he's not competent to;

He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,

He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles;

It matters not whether he blame or commend,

If he's bad as a foe, he's far worse as a friend:

Let an author but write what's above his

PART I

SHOWING HOW HE BUILT HIS HOUSE AND HIS WIFE MOVED INTO IT

My worthy friend, A. Gordon Knott,

From business snug withdrawn, Was much contented with a lot That would contain a Tudor cot

"Twixt twelve feet square of garden-plot, And twelve feet more of lawn.

If painted a judicious blue?)

The woodland I've attended to;"

[He meant three pines stuck up askew, Two dead ones and a live one.]

"A pocket-full of rocks 't would take To build a house of freestone,

But then it is not hard to make What nowadays is the stone;

The cunning painter in a trice Your house's outside petrifies, And people think it very gneiss Without inquiring deeper;

My money never shall be thrown Away on such a deal of stone, When stone of deal is cheaper."

square

Stuck on at random everywhere, -
It was a house to make one stare,
All corners and all gables;
Like dogs let loose upon a bear,
Ten emulous styles staboyed with care,
The whole among them seemed to tear,
And all the oddities to spare

Were set upon the stables.

Knott was delighted with a pile
Approved by fashion's leaders:
(Only he made the builder smile,
By asking every little while,

Why that was called the Twodoor style,
Which certainly had three doors?)
Yet better for this luckless man
If he had put a downright ban

Upon the thing in limine;
For, though to quit affairs his plan,
Ere many days, poor Knott began
Perforce accepting draughts, that ran
except up chimney;

All ways

The house, though painted stone to mock,
With nice white lines round every block,
Some trepidation stood in,
When tempests (with petrific shock,
So to speak,) made it really rock,

Though not a whit less wooden;
And painted stone, howe'er well done,
Will not take in the prodigal sun
Whose beams are never quite at one
With our terrestrial lumber;

So the wood shrank around the knots,