tion are decidedly the best, or rather we should say those in which a quiet humor is blended with the pathetic so as to heighten the effect of the grotesque without destroying the plaintive character of the whole. . . . . At the same time we must allow that his more comic pieces are exceedingly entertaining, particularly the lines upon the Comet, which is irresistible for its humor and at the same time contains one or two passages of great power."-The North American Review, January, 1837. "We have hardly left ourselves room to say a word about our old favorite, Holmes; but as he is also everybody's favorite, there is no occasion for critics to meddle with him, either to censure or to praise. He can afford to laugh at the whole reviewing fraternity. His wit is all his own, so sly and tingling, but without a drop of ill-nature in it, and never leaving a sting behind. His humor is so grotesque and queer that it reminds one of the frolics of Puck; and deep pathos mingles with it so naturally that when the reader's eyes are brimming with tears he knows not whether they have their source in sorrow or in laughter. The great merits of his English style we noticed on a former occasion; for point, idiomatic propriety, and terseness it is absolutely without a rival."-The North American Review, January, 1849.

....

"The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were noteworthy. . . . . Such lyrics as . . . . that unique compound of humor and pathos, 'The Last Leaf,' show that he possesses the power of touching the deeper chords of the heart and of calling forth tears as well as smiles. . . . . Holmes writes simply for the amusement of himself and his readers; he deals only with the vanity, the foibles, and the minor faults of mankind, good-naturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting excuses for the folly which he tosses about on the horns of his ridicule."-John G. Whittier, in The National Era (as reprinted in Littell's Living Age, March 17, 1849).

"In all humbleness-for we should be sorry to say aught that might be construed into a detraction or derogation of the merits of this highly cultured and pleasant writer-we shall, nevertheless, endeavor to prove and we hope satisfactorily that his so-called poems are only verses-certainly verses of fine quality, musical in rhythm, chaste in tone, delicate in sentiment, and unexceptionable in point of finish and expression; but still, with all these qualities to recommend them, in our meek opinion only verses, lacking the very elements and essentials that would constitute them poems. . . . Now there is no doubt that this set of verses, like others in the volume, has been wrought with studious care and perhaps with painful study; and yet the result is only a jingle of vacuous commonplaces, tinged with poor sentiment, bearing the same relation to poetry as a page of Martin Tupper's 'Proverbial Philosophy' does to a page of 'Paradise Lost.'. . . . And yet we must do justice to the dormant powers of Doctor Holmes, for occasionally he gives us a sample of what he might do when the higher mood is on him. . . . . Among the few really lofty ebullitions of his fancy 'The Chambered Nautilus' is a fair example. This piece wafts rich odors from the fairyland of poesy. Its undulating rhythm of melody, its wide-reaching pathos, and its solemn appeal to the soul cannot be resisted."-The Knickerbocker Monthly, March, 1863.

"We have reserved Holmes to the last, not that he is least among American humourists, but because he brings American humour to its finest point, and is, in fact, the first of American Wits. Perhaps the following verses ["Contentment"] will best illustrate a specialty of Holmes's wit, the kind of badinage with which he quizzes common sense so successfully by his happy paradox of serious straightforward statement and quiet qualifying afterwards by which he tapers his point.”— The Quarterly Review, January, 1867.

"The melody of Holmes's verse is characteristic and supreme. Of all the meters he has chosen he is easily master. . . . . In the choice of subjects Holmes is seen to be a poet of high rank. He is not restricted, like many, to a monotonous kind of song. . . . . His ideas, his manner, his wit and pathos, his fire, his melody are entirely his own. Not one of his characteristic poems can be referred to any outward source, nor mistaken for the production of any other poet. He is a new essence, a new color or flavor."-F. H. Underwood, in Scribner's Monthly, May, 1879.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The text, with the exceptions noted, is from the 1863 edition.

(387) OUR LOVE IS NOT A FADING, EARTHLY FLOWER. Cf. Shakspere, Sonnets Nos. 73 and 116, for similarities in style and thought.

(388) WENDELL PHILLIPS. Wendell Phillips (1811-84), a descendant of one of the oldest and best New England families, graduated from Harvard College at twenty years of age, and was admitted to the bar three years later; at the age of twenty-six he gave up the brilliant career which was opening before him and threw in his lot with the unpopular Abolitionist movement.

(388) RHŒCUS. Cf. Landor's "Hamadryad" (1846). The legend has been traced back to Greek sources in the fifth century B.C. 1-35. Cf. Emerson's "Problem" (p. 315) and Carlyle's "The Hero as Divinity" in Heroes and HeroWorship (1841).

(389) 18. like the hazel twig: an allusion to the belief that a fork-shaped branch of hazel, carried in the hands, will indicate the presence of water underground by a downward twitch. 20-24. Cf. Emerson's Nature (1836), chap. iv, "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact," and the doctrine of the whole work; cf. also "The Poet" in Essays, Second Series (1844), "There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water."

(392) TO THE DANDELION. First published in Graham's Magazine, January, 1845.1-9. Cf. Bryant's "Yellow Violet" (p. 181) and Wordsworth's "To the Small Celandine" and "To the Daisy" (first poem). ¶ 2. harmless gold: cf. ll. 1013. 11. Indian: i.e., West Indian; the allusion is to the Spaniards' exploitation of Mexico and Peru.

(393) 19-36. Cf. Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and Tennyson's "LotusEaters" for similarities in style and description of nature. 26. Sybaris: Sybaris, a city in southern Italy, founded by Greek colonists, was famous for its wealth and luxury.

(394) THE BIGLOW PAPERS. "When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote the first of the series, I had no definite plan and no intention of ever writing another.

....

Thinking the Mexican war, as I think it still, a national crime committed in behoof of Slavery, our common sin, and wishing to put the feeling of those who thought as I did in a way that would tell, I imagined to myself such an up-country man as I had often seen at anti-slavery gatherings, capable of district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of self-forgetfulness. . . . . I needed on occasion to rise above the level of mere patois, and for this purpose conceived the Reverend Mr. Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New England character and its pedantry, as Mr. Biglow should serve for its homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience. . . . . Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouthpiece of the mere drollery (for I conceive that true humor is never divorced from moral conviction), I invented Mr. Sawin for the clown of my little puppetshow. . . . . For the names of two of my characters, since I have received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happened to bear them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere unconscious memories of signboards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle; and I purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny'-in other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness. . . . . In choosing the Yankee dialect I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scotrowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate.' . . . . In the literary world things seemed to me very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope, skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of life's daily bread; and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or, worse, of Heine's pachouli ? And might it not be possible to escape them by turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack? . . . . I do not think that Mr. Biglow can be fairly charged with vulgarity, and I should have entirely failed in my design if I have not made it appear that high and even refined sentiment may coexist with the shrewder and more comic elements of the Yankee character. I believe that what is essentially vulgar and mean-spirited in politics seldom has its source in the body of the people, but much rather among those who are made timid by their wealth or selfish by their love of power. ... To me the dialect was native, was spoken all about me when a boy, at a time when an Irish day-laborer was as rare as an American one now. Since then I have made a study of it so far as opportunity allowed. But when I

....

write in it, it is as in a mother-tongue; and I am carried back far beyond any studies of it to long-ago noonings in my father's hay-fields, and to the talk of Sam and Job over their jug of blackstrap under the shadow of the ash-tree which still dapples the grass whence they have been gone so long."-Introduction to The Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1866 edition.

(394) No. I. First published in The Boston Courier, June 17, 1846. When the poem was published in book form it was preceded and followed by a letter and a note, as follows:

"A Letter from Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jaalam to the Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of The Boston Courier, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow: JAYLEM, june 1846.

Mister Eddyter:-Our hosea wuz down to Boston last week, and he see a cruetin Sarjunt a struttin round as popler as a hen with 1 chicking, with 2 fellers a drummin and fifin arter him like all nater. the sarjunt he thout Hosea hedn't gut his i teeth cut cos he looked a kindo's though he'd jest com down, so he cal'lated to hook him in, but Hosy woodn't take non o' his sarse for all he hed much as 20 Rooster's tales stuck onto his hat and eenamost enuf brass a bobbin up and down on his shoulders and figureed onto his coat and trousis, let alone wut nater hed sot in his featers, to make a 6 pounder out on. wal, Hosea he com home considerabal riled, and arter I'd gone to bed I heern Him a thrashin round like a short-tailed Bull in fli-time. The old Woman ses she to me ses she, Zekle, ses she, our Hosee's gut the chollery or suthin anuther ses she, don't you Bee skeered, ses I, he's oney amakin pottery' ses I, he's ollers on hand at that ere busynes like Da & martia, and shure enuf, cum mornin, Hosy he cum down stares full chizzle, hare on eend and cote tales flyin, and sot rite of to go reed his varses to Parson Wilbur bein he haint aney grate shows o' book larnin himself, bimeby he cum back and sed the parson wuz dreffle tickled with 'em as i hoop you will Be, and said they wuz True grit. Hosea ses taint hardly fair to call 'em hisn now, cos the parson kind o' slicked off sum o' the last varses, but he told Hosee he didnt want to put his ore in to tetch to the Rest on 'em, bein they wuz werry well As thay wuz, and then Hosy ses he sed suthin a nuther about Simplex Mundishes or sum sech feller, but I guess Hosea kind o' didn't hear him, for I never hearn o' nobody o' that name in this villadge, and I've lived here man and boy 76 year cum next tater diggin, and thair aint no wheres a kitting spryer 'n I be. If you print 'em I wish you'd jest let folks know who hosy's father is, cos my ant Keziah used to say it's nater to be curus ses she, she aint livin though and he's a likely kind o' lad.

EZEKIEL BIGLOW."

"The first recruiting sergeant on record I conceive to have been that individual who is mentioned in the Book of Job as going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it. Bishop Latimer will have him to have been a bishop, but to me that other calling would appear more congenial. The sect of Cainites is not yet extinct, who esteemed the first-born of Adam to be the most worthy, not only because of that privilege of primogeniture, but inasmuch as he was able to overcome and slay his younger brother. That was a wise saying of the famous Marquis

'Aut insanet, aut versos facit.-H. W.

Pescara to the Papal Legate, that it was impossible for men to serve Mars and Christ at the same time. Yet in time past the profession of arms was judged to be xar' ¿oxýv that of a gentleman, nor does this opinion want for strenuous upholders even in our day. Must we suppose, then, that the profession of Christianity was only intended for losels, or, at best, to afford an opening for plebeian ambition? Or shall we hold with that nicely metaphysical Pomeranian, Captain Vratz, who was Count Königsmark's chief instrument in the murder of Mr. Thynne, that the Scheme of Salvation has been arranged with an especial eye to the necessities of the upper classes, and that 'God would consider a gentleman and deal with him suitably to the condition and profession he had placed him in'? It may be said of us all, Exemplo plus quam ratione vivimus.-H. W."

(394) 9. air there. ¶ 19. ollers = always.

(395) 57. airy area. 61. Californy: California, then belonging to Mexico, was invaded by United States troops in 1846; in 1848, as a result of the war, it was ceded to the United States.

(396) 72. wite = white. ¶ 76. gump a dullard. ¶81. turnin' out to hack folks: giving grand people (riding in hacks) more than their share of the road; "hack folks," in this sense, is still occasionally used in parts of New England. ¶ 84. put upon deceived, tricked.

(397) 121, 122. The governor of Massachusetts had just called for the enlistment of troops to fight Mexico; and two Massachusetts Congressmen had recently voted for a bill appropriating $10,000,000 to carry on the war. ¶ 126. wracks = flying storm-clouds. ¶ 129. sold your colored seamen: several of the Southern states had laws forbidding free Negroes to enter their borders, and under this law Negro sailors had been punished by imprisonment and whipping and even sold into slavery. 130. env'ys envoys. In 1844 two envoys had been sent by the governor of Massachusetts to South Carolina and Louisiana to protest against the ill treatment of Massachusetts freedmen in those states; they were compelled to leave, one by a legislative order, the other by threats. wiz=whizz, hurry away.

(398) 153-60. Many Abolitionists at this time believed in the right of a state peaceably to withdraw from the Union, and preferred that the slave states should secede rather than that the whole nation should continue to be responsible for slavery. Cf. Whittier's "Texas "(1846), stanzas 17, 18:

Take your land of sun and bloom;

Only leave to Freedom room

For her plough and forge and loom.

Take your slavery-blackened vales;
Leave us but our own free gales,
Blowing on our thousand sails.

(398) No. II. First published in The Boston Courier, August 18, 1847. When reprinted in book form the poem was preceded by the following letter, with a prefatory note by the Reverend Mr. Wilbur (the reverend gentleman's dissertation at the end of the poem is here omitted):

"A letter from Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Hon. J. T. Buckingham, editor of The Boston Courier, covering a letter from Mr. B. Sawin, private in the Massachusetts regiment.