Tho'

you brag of your New World, you don't half
believe in it,

And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;
Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,
With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,
With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free,
And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,

Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,

Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass,

Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked glass, Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe

waist,

And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;

She loses her fresh country charm when she takes Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

"You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean;
The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship

tries

And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-
Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,
To which the dull current in hers is but mud;
Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,
In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she

rails,

And your shore will soon be in the nature of things Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings, Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif,

Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe. O, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he

"Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea; Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,

age,

By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,
Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth
As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page,
Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things
make new,

To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,

Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks,

And become my new race of more practical Greeks.

Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't,

Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot."

Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic More pepper than brains, shrieked-" The man's a fanatic,

I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers;

But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason 't,

Palaver before condemnation's but decent,

So, through my humble person, Humanity begs
Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs."
But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth
As when ἦτε νύκτι ἐοικώς, and so forth,

And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,"At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to't as any one else." "Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to

meet

With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,” Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, "The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss

Is only in taking a great busy nation

For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.—
But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I
flee to ?

She has such a penchant for bothering me too!
She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva ;

She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-
She's been travelling now, and will be worse than

ever;

One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be

Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea,

For a woman must surely see well, if she try,
The whole of whose being's a capital I:

She will take an old notion, and make it her own,
By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone,

Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;

And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.

There is one thing she owns in her own single right,

It is native and genuine-namely, her spite:

Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose.'

Here Miranda came up, and said, "Phœbus! you know

That the infinite Soul has its infinite woe,

As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul; I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,

To my Land's better life authors solely my own, Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,

Whose works sound a depth by Life's quiet unshaken,

Such as Shakspeare, for instance, the Bible, and

Bacon,

Not to mention my own works; Time's nadir is fleet,

And, as for myself, I'm quite out of conceit,"

"Quite out of conceit! I'm enchanted to hear

it,"

Cried Apollo aside, near it ?

"Who'd have thought she was

To be sure one is apt to exhaust those commodities He uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is

As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings,

'I'm as much out of salt as Miranda's own writings,' (Which, as she in her own happy manner has said, Sound a depth, for 'tis one of the functions of lead.)

She often has asked me if I could not find

A place somewhere near me that suited her mind;
I know but a single one vacant, which she,
With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T.
And it would not imply any pause or cessation
In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,—
She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses,
And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses."

(Miranda meanwhile has succeeded in driving Up into a corner, in spite of their striving, A small flock of terrified victims, and there, With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air And a tone which, at least to my fancy, appears Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears, Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise,) For 'tis dotted as thick as a peacock's with I's.) Apropos of Miranda, I'll rest on my oars

And drift through a trifling digression on bores, For, though not wearing ear-rings in more majorum, Our ears are kept bored just as if we still wore 'em. There was one feudal custom worth keeping, at least,

Roasted bores made a part of each well-ordered feast,

And of all quiet pleasures the very ne plus

Was in hunting wild bores as the tame ones hunt us. Archæologians, I know, who have personal fears Of this wise application of hounds and of spears, Have tried to make out, with a zeal more than wonted,

'Twas a kind of wild swine that our ancestors hunted;

But I'll never believe that the age which has strewn Europe o'er with cathedrals, and otherwise shown That it knew what was what, could by chance not have known,

(Spending, too, its chief time with its buff on, no doubt,)

Which beast 'twould improve the world most to

thin out.

I divide bores myself, in the manner of rifles,
Into two great divisions, regardless of trifles;—
There's your smooth-bore and screw-bore, who do
not much vary

In the weight of cold lead they respectively carry.