Till the Muse, ere he thinks of it, gives him the mitten, Who is so well aware of how things should be done," That his own works displease him before they're begun, Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows, In a very grave question his soul was immersed,— on, He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton, Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there, You'll allow only genius could hit upon either. He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart, Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable, In learning to swim on his library-table. "There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine The sinews and chords of his pugilist brain, Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he Preferred to believe that he was so already; He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop ; Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it, It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it; A man who's made less than he might have, be cause He always has thought himself more than he was,- And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice, noise. Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough, His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good; ceives; Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves; Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far, Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star ; He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it, That he strips himself naked to prove he's a poet, And, to show he could leap Art's wide ditch, if he tried, Jumps clean o'er it, and into the hedge t'other side. He has strength, but there's nothing about him in keeping; One gets surelier onward by walking than leap ing; He has used his own sinews himself to distress, And had done vastly more had he done vastly less; In letters, too soon is as bad as too late, Could he only have waited he might have been great, But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist, And muddied the stream ere he took his first taste. "There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck; When nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, And she could not have hit a more excellent plan The success of her scheme gave her so much de light, That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight; Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay, She sang to her work in her sweet childish way, And found, when she'd put the last touch to his soul, That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole. "Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so; If a person prefer that description of praise, new, One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, He has done naught but copy it ill ever since; His Indians, with proper respect be it said, Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red, And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat, Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'-wester hat, (Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found To have slipt the old fellow away underground.) All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, The derniere chemise of a man in a fix, (As a captain besieged, when his garrison's small, Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall ;) And the women he draws from one model don't vary, All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. When a character's wanted, he goes to the task he Has made at the most something wooden anl empty. "Don't suppose I would underrate Cooper's abilities, If I thought you'd do that, I should feel very ill at ease; The men who have given to one character life You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers, And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. "There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis And I honor the man who is willing to sink |