“ There goes Halleck, whose Fanny's a pseudo

Don Juan, With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true

one, He's a wit, though, I hear, of the very first order, And once made a pun on the words soft Recorder; More than this, he's a very great poet, I'm told, And has had his works published in crimson and

gold, With something they call . Illustrations,' to wit, Like those with which Chapman obscured Holy

Writ, Which are said to illustrate, because, as I view it, Like lucus a non, they precisely don't do it; Let a man who can write what himself under

stands Keep clear, if he can, of designing men's hands, Who bury the sense, if there's any worth having, And then very honestly call it engraving. But, to quit badinage, which there isn't much wit

in, Halleck's better, I doubt not, than all he has writ

ten; In his verse a clear glimpse you will frequently

find, If not of a great, of a fortunate mind, Which contrives to be true to its natural loves In a world of back-offices, ledgers, and stoves. When his heart breaks away from the brokers and

banks, And kneels in its own private shrine to give

thanks, There's a genial manliness in him that earns Our sincerest respect, (read, for instance, his

“ Burns,”)

* (Cuts rightly called wooden, as all must admit.)

And we can't but regret (seek excuse where we

may) That so much of a man has been peddled away. “But what's that.? a mass-meeting ? No, there

come in lots The American Disraelis, Bulwers, and Scotts, And in short the American everything elses, Each charging the others with envies and jeal

ousies ; By the way, 'tis a fact that displays what profu

sions Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions, That while the Old World has produced barely

eight Of such poets as all men agree to call great, And of other great characters hardly a score, (One might safely say less than that rather than

more,) With you every year a whole crop is begotten, They're as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton ; Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and

shanties That has not brought forth its own Miltons and

Dantes; I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three

Shelleys, Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles, Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, One (but that one is plenty) American. Dickens, A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tenny

sons, In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain Will be some very great person over again. There is one

inconvenience in all this which lies

In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,*
And, where there are none except Titans, great

stature Is only a simple proceeding of nature. What puff the strained sails of your praise shall

you furl at, if The calmest degree that you know is superlative ? At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry

must, As a matter of course, be well issimused and

errimused, A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat

he tost, That his friends would take care he was lotoçed

and wratosed, And formerly we, as through graveyards we past, Thought the world went from bad to worse fear

fully fast; Let us glance for a moment, 'tis well worth the

pains, And note what an average graveyard contains; There lie levellers levelled, duns done up them

selves, 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 whipt 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 wrapt 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,
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 ;* 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 black

eye: Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was

a jailer: Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:

a

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,*
Mount serenely their country's funereal pile:
Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers
'Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars,
Who shake their dread fists o'er the sea and all

that,
As long as a copper drops into the hat :
Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark
From Vaterland's. battles just won—in the Park,
Who the happy profession of martyrdom take
Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak:
Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jack-
And so many everythings else that it racks one's
Poor memory too much to continue the list,
Especially now they no longer exist ;-
I would merely observe that you've taken to giv-

ing The puffs that belong to the dead to the living, And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary

doom's tones Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.”

a

sons:

a

Here the critic came in and a thistle

presented tFrom a frown to a smile the god's features relented, As he stared at his envoy, who; swelling with pride, To the god's asking look, nothing daunted, replied, “ You’re surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long, But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong i I hunted the garden from one end to t’other, And got no reward but vexation and bother,