'Nay, 'tis clear That your Damon there's fond of a flea in his ear, And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick He would buy some himself, just to hear the old click;

Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japan
Should turn up his nose at the 'Poems on Man,'
Your friend there by some inward instinct would
know it,

Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it ;
As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit
The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet;
Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after
column,

Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn,
By way of displaying his critical crosses,

And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis, His broadsides resulting (and this there's no doubt

of,)

In successively sinking the craft they're fired out of.

Now nobody knows when an author is hit,

If he don't have a public hysterical fit;

Let him only keep close in his snug garret's dim ether,

And nobody'd think of his critics-or him either; If an author have any least fibre of worth in him, Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him, All the critics on earth cannot crush with their

ban,

One word that's in tune with the nature of man."

Well, perhaps so; meanwhile I have brought you a book,

Into which if you'll just have the goodness to look, You may feel so delighted, (when you have got through it,)

As to think it not unworth your while to review it, And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do,

A place in the next Democratic Review."

"The most thankless of gods you must surely have thought me,

For this is the forty-fourth copy you've brought me, I have given them away, or at least I have tried, But I've forty-two left, standing all side by side, (The man who accepted that one copy, died,)— From one end of a shelf to the other they reach, 'With the author's respects' neatly written in each.

The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum, When he hears of that order the British Museum Has sent for one set of what books were first printed

In America, little or big,-for 'tis hinted

That this is the first truly tangible hope he
Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy.
I've thought very often 'twould be a good thing
In all public collections of books, if a wing
Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry
lands,

Marked Literature suited to desolate islands,

And filled with such books as could never be read Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,

Such books as one's wrecked on in small countrytaverns,

Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns, Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented, As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented,

Such as Crusoe might dip in, although there are few so

Outrageously cornered by fate as poor Crusoe; And since the philanthropists just now are bang ing

And gibbeting all who're in favor of hanging,(Though Cheever has proved that the Bible and Altar

Were let down from Heaven at the end of a halter, And that vital religion would dull and grow

callous,

Unrefreshed, now and then, with a sniff of the

gallows,)

And folks are beginning to think it looks odd,
To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God;
And that He who esteems the Virginia reel
A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal,
And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery
Than crushing His African children with slavery,-
Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillion

Are mounted for hell on the Devil's own pillion,
Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows,
Approaches the heart through the door of the
toes,-

That He, I was saying, whose judgments are stored For such as take steps in despite of his word, Should look with delight on the agonized prancing Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing,

While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter

About offering to God on his favorite halter, And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence,

Sells the clothes to a Jew, and the corpse to the surgeons

Now, instead of all this, I think I can direct you all

To a criminal code both humane and effectual ;-I propose to shut up every doer of wrong

With these desperate books, for such term, short or long,

As by statute in such cases made and provided,
Shall be by your wise legislators decided;

Thus :-Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler,

At hard labor for life on the works of Miss
Petty thieves, kept from flagranter crimes by their

fears,

Shall peruse Yankee Doodle a blank term of

years,

That American Punch, like the English, no doubt— Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.

“But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on

The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,

A loud-cackling swarm, in whose feathers warm

drest,

He goes for as perfect a―swan, as the rest.

"There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,

Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies

on,

Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,

Is some of it pr-No, 'tis not even prose ;

I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled From those rare depths of soul that have neʼer been excelled;

They're not epics, but that doesn't matter a pin,
In creating, the only hard thing's to begin ;
A grass-blade 's no easier to make than an oak,

If you've once found the way, you've achieved the grand stroke;

In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,
But thrown in a heap with a crush and a clatter;
Now it is not one thing nor another alone
Makes a poem, but rather the general tone,
The something pervading, uniting the whole,
The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,
So that just in removing this trifle or that, you
Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue ;
Roots, wood, bark, and leaves, singly perfect may
be,

But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don't make

a tree.

But, to come back to Emerson, (whom by the way,

I believe we left waiting,)—his is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range

Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange;

He seems, to my thinking, (although I'm afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made,)

A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist

And the Gascon's shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl co

exist;

All admire, and yet scarely six converts he's got
To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what;
For though he builds glorious temples, tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.
'Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me,
To meet such a primitive Pagan as he,
In whose mind all creation is duly respected
As parts of himself-just a little projected;