"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 understands

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 toroyed and wraτored,

And formerly we, as through graveyards we past, Thought the world went from bad to worse fearfully 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 underground,

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

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

* 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 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:

* (And at this just conclusion will surely arrive,
That the goodness of earth is more dead than alive.)

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-

sons:

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 giving

The puffs that belong to the dead to the living, And that somehow your trump-of-contemporarydoom's tones

Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.".

Here the critic came in and a thistle pre

sented †

From 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 hunted the garden from one end to t'other,
And got no reward but vexation and bother,

*Not forgetting their tea and their toast, though, the while.
† Turn back now to page-goodness only knows what,
And take a fresh hold on the thread of my plot.