The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862

'I was brought up to respect the laws of God and the prophet. When I came to marriageable age, and, "unsight, unseen," was induced to espouse the veiled Amina, it was, as we say in Bagdad, like "buying a pig in a poke," although rumor greatly magnified her charms, and a secret inclination prompted me. I longed eagerly for the wedding-day; and when her face was revealed to conjugal eyes, methought that Mahomet had sent down a houri from his paradise. Yet I found out, to my cost, that a little knowledge of a woman is worse than ignorance, and that the blinding light of beauty hides the truth more than the thick veil of darkness. Oh, her bosom was white as the snows of Lebanon, and her eyes were like those of the dear gazelle. Cheeks had she as red as the Damascus rose, and a halo encircled her like that of the moon. Her smiles were sunshine, her lips dropped honey. I thought I saw upon her shoulders the cropping out of angelic wings. I sought out the carpets of Persia for the soft touch of her tiny feet, and hired all the lutes of Bagdad to be strung in praise of my beloved. I sent plum-cake to the newspapers, and placed a costly fee in the hand of the priest. Oh, blissful moments! But I purchased hell with them, for she began to lead me a dog's life. She had no taste for home, no appetite for healthful food; she ran me into debt, hated my friends, loved my enemies, and changed her soft looks into daggers to stab me with. Her bloom became blight; her lips oozed out poison, and she dabbled in corrupt things. I tracked her footsteps from my sacred couch as they led to the very brink of the grave.

'O, my son, beware of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet used to say, in his jocular moods, 'those who will dance must pay the fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a – as Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment to the dog-kennel of humility. Go thou, and don't do likewise.

'Woe is me! Who takes one wrong step, gets out of it by another; and so I went on from enchantment to enchantment, and fell out of the frying-pan into the fire. If I stood erect, and no longer groveled, if I was not any more a beast, I became like the devils which possessed them. So did I scourge and lash the object of my hatred with feelings of the deadliest revenge.

'Oh, my Ben Hadad, presume not from my ultimate escape. If I have ceased to snap and snarl and growl,—if I now, in the decline of life, pursue the even tenor of my way,—if I have been redeemed from snares, and learned even to forgive my enemies, it is because the fair Xarifa represented my better nature, and that has triumphed because I took counsel of her. Farewell, my son, and, in the pilgrimage of life, reflect upon the dear-bought experience of SIDI NORMAN.'

'WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH US?'

What will we do with you, if God  Should give you over to our hands,To pass in turn beneath the rod,  And wear at last the captive's bands?''What will we do?' Our very best  To make of each a glorious State,Worthy to match with North and West,—  Free, vigorous, beautiful and great!As God doth live, as Truth is true,  We swear we'll do all this to you.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A late National Review asserts with true English shrewdness that American literature is yet to be born,—that it has scarcely a substantive existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally still only a province of this country.' With a gallantry too characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual quid pro quo, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its co-nationality with Irving.

What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict. We venture, however, to predict that the National Review will not be called upon to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces, and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a credo as absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature, whose principal defect—a defect to which the one infallible remedy is daily applied by the winged mower—is youth, inquire into its leading characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden maturity.

It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise, present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down the rugged steeps of the past. We have begun to believe that our writers are afflicted with a sort of myopy that shuts out effectually sky and star and sea, and sees only the pebbles and thistles by the dusty roadside. Truly, the prospect is at first disheartening. The great Byron, who wept in faultless metre, and whose aristocratic maledictions flow in graceful waves that caress where they mean to stifle, has so poisoned our 'well of English undefiled,' that wise men now drink from it warily, and only after repeated filterings and skillful analyses by the Boerhaaves of the press. And Poe, who, with all the great poet's faults, possessed none of his few genial features, has painted the fatal skull and cross-bones upon our banners, that should own only the oriflamme. Yet it is Poe whom the English critic honors as exceeding all our authors in intensity, and approaching more nearly to genius than they all.

Now may St. Loy defend us! At the proposition of Poe's intensity we do not demur. All of us who have shrieked in infancy at the charnel-house novelettes of imprudent nurses, shivered in childhood at the mysterious abbeys and concealed tombs of Anne Radcliffe, or rushed in horror from the apparition of the dead father of the Archivarius of Hoffman, tumbling his wicked son down stairs in the midst of the onyx quarrel, will willingly and with trembling fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe. He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason. In his sad world eternal night reigns and the sun is never seen.

'Tristis Erinnys,Prætulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces,'

by whose red light awed audiences see the fruit of his labors.

But what right has he to a place in our van, who never asked our sympathy, whose every effort was but to widen the gulf between him and his fellow-man, whose sword was never drawn in defence of the right? Genius! The very word is instinct with nobility and heartiness. Genius clasps hands with true souls everywhere: it wakes the chord of brotherhood in rude hearts in hovels, and quickens the pulses under the purple and ermine of palaces. It has a smile for childhood and a reverent tone for white-haired age. Its clasp takes in the frail flower bending from slender stems and the stars in their courses. There is laughter in its soul, and a huge banquet-table there to which all are welcome. And to us, on its borders, come the summer-breath of Pæstum roses and the aroma of the rich red wine of Valdepeñas; and there toasts are given to the past and to the future, for genius knows no nation nor any age. It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm smile deserts blossom like the rose.

And Poe? With a mind neither well balanced nor unprejudiced, and an imagination that mistook the distorted fantasies of a fevered brain for the pure impulses of some mysterious muse, and gave the reins to coursers that even Phaeton would have feared to trust, he can only excite our pity where he desires our admiration. Qui non dat quod amat, non accipit ille quod optat, was an inscription on an old chequer-board of the times of Henry II. And what did Poe love? Truth shrugs her shoulders, but forbears to answer,—Himself. His were the vagaries of genius without its large-hearted charities; its nice discrimination without its honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering energies. He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim; he even busied himself—as so many of the unfortunate great have done—with no chimera. From a mind so highly cultured, an organization so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest melodies. The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate around us, matchless in mechanism, wondrous in miraculous accord, but as destitute of the soul of harmony as the score of Beethoven's sonata in A flat to unlearned eyes. If his analyses and criticisms are keen and graceful, they are unreliable and contradictory, for he was often influenced by private piques, and unpardonable egotism, and the opinions of those whose favor he courted. He was Byron without Byron's wonderful perceptions of nature, Byron's consciousness of the good.

And is it from a genius like this that our literature has taken its tone? Heaven forbid! Wee Apollos there may be, 'the little Crichtons of the hour,' who twist about their brows the cypress sprays that have fallen from this perverted poet's wreath, and fancy themselves crowned with the laurel of a nation's applause. But these men are not types of our literature. The truly great mind is never molded by the idol of a day, a clique, a sect. Pure-hearted and strong the man must be whose hands take hold of the palaces of the world's heart, who grasps the spirit of the coming time. Errors may be forgiven, vices may be forgotten, where only a noble aim has influenced, as a true creative genius gleamed.

But larger constellations have appeared in our literary sky, that burn with undimmed lustre even beside that great morning star that rose above the horizon of the Middle Ages. Historians we have, with all of Chaucer's truthfulness and luxuriance of expression, and poets with his fresh tendernesses, his flashing thoughts, and exquisite simplicity of heart. And perhaps, if we inquire for the distinguishing features of our literature, we shall discover them to be the strength and cheerfulness so pre-eminently the characteristics of Chaucer, which we have so long been accustomed to deny to ourselves. Observe the stately but flowing periods of Motley; his polished courtliness of style, the warm but not exaggerated coloring of his descriptions, the firm but never ungraceful outlines of his sketches of character that mark him the Michael Angelo among historians. In his brilliant imagery, his splendid scholarship, his fine analytical power, he is not surpassed by Macaulay, while he far exceeds him in impartiality,—that diamond of the historian,—and in his keen comprehension of the great motive-principles of the age which he describes. Neither are Prescott, Bancroft, or Irving inferior to Gibbon, Hume, or Robertson.

And over and through our poetry blow fresh and inspiring the winds from our own vast prairies. Those names, few, but honorable, that have become as household words among us, are gilded, not with the doubtful lustre of a moonlit sentimentality, but with the real gold of day-dawn. If they are few, let it be remembered that we are now but first feeling our manhood, trying our thews and sinews, and must needs stop to wonder a little at the gradual development of our unsuspected powers. The most of our great men have been but stalwart mechanics, busied with the machinery of government, using intellect as a lever to raise ponderous wheels, whereon our chariot may run to Eldorado. We have a right to be proud of our poets; their verses are the throbs of our American heart. And if we do but peer into their labyrinth of graceful windings and reach their Chrimhilde Rose-garden, we shall find it begirt with the strong, fighting men of humor. This element lurks under many a musical strophe and crowns many a regal verse. And yet in real humorous poetry we have been sadly deficient. Only of late years have the constant lions by the gate begun to rouse from their strong slumber, to shake their tawny manes, and rumble out a warning of their future prowess.

Nor is it strange that we, who were scarcely an organized people, should have lacked this great witness to the vitality and stability of a race. The features of a national character must be marked and prominent, and a strong sense of a national individuality be developed, before that last, best faculty of man is aroused, and leaps forth to maturity in verse. The one magnificent trait of true humorous poetry is, that in its very nature it is incapable of trivialities. It must grasp as its key-note some vast truth, must grapple with some great injustice, must hurl its lances at some wide-spread prejudice, or toy with the tangles of some mighty Nærea's hair. Undines and satyrs, cupids and merry fauns, may spring laughing from under the artist's hand, but it is from the unyielding marble that these slender children of his mirthful hours are carved. It was not in her infancy that Rome produced her Juvenal. Martial and Plautus caricatured the passions of humanity after Carthage had been destroyed and Julius Cæsar had made of his tomb a city of palaces. Aristophanes wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had boasted her Pericles. France had given birth to Richelieu when Molière assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking church and state, appeared before her king. So with America. It was not until wrongs were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked, that the voice of LOWELL'S scornful laughter was heard in the land, piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith and ism.

True, we had the famous 'Hasty Pudding' of Joel Barlow, the 'Terrible Tractoration' of Fessenden, and Halleck's 'Fanny,' but these were mere jeux, gallant little histories, over which we laughed and voila le tout! And our Astolfo, Holmes, flying by on his winged horse, sends down now and then

'His arrowes an elle longWith pecocke well ydight,'

which we gather, and our fair dames weave into brilliant fans that flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue and purple smile with irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile countenances. Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained freedom of prose. His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart,—pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the Rime équivoquée. From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, and down its stream

'Went sailing with vast celerity,'

with the 'Biglow Papers' for his sail. This work electrified the public. It pierced the crust of refinement and intelligence, and roused the latent laughter of its heart. Even newsboys chuckled with delight over its caustic hits at the powers that were, against which, with the characteristic precocity of Young America, each had his private individual spite; while they found in its peculiar phraseology a mine of fun. Patriots rejoiced that one vigilant thinker dared stand guard over our national honor, with the two-edged sword of satire in his hand. Men in authority, at whom the shafts of its scathing rebukes were leveled, writhed on their cushions of state, while, in sheer deference to his originality and humor, they laughed with the crowd at—themselves. And in sooth it was a goodly sight, the young scholar, who had hitherto only dabbled delicately with the treasures of poetry, whose name was a very synonym for elegance and the repose of a genial dignity, whom we suspected of no keen outlooks into the practical world of to-day,—to see this man suddenly flashing into the dusty arena, with indignation rustling through his veins and breathing more flame

'Than ten fire-kings could swallow,'

scorching with his burning words, which an inimitable carelessness made doubly effective, the willful absurdities of government and the palpable wrongs of society, to question which had seemed before almost a heresy. But Lowell's humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing. He never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet him uninvited. And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,

'That bowed our hearts like barley bending.'

Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor. Off with the hauberk and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediæval crusade, and, lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own New England, our country boy sings his Ave Aquila! while other men are rubbing the sunbeams of of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.

And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase of our poet's genius was acknowledged and applauded. Says a British Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,—Mr. Bailey at their head,—in England, and one really powerful satirist in America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical genius which has reached us from the United States. We have been under the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American literature from time to time, and it is with hearty pleasure that we are now able to own that the Britishers have been for the present utterly and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department of poetry. In the United States, social and political evils have a breadth and tangibility which are not at present to be found in the condition of any other civilized country. The "peculiar domestic institution," the fillibustering tendencies of the nation, the charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the shafts of the satirist, which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell. We do not pretend to affirm that the evils of European society may not be as great in their own way as those which affect the credit of the United States, with the exception, of course, of slavery, which makes American freedom deservedly the laughing-stock of the world; but what we do say is, that the evils in point have a boldness and simplicity which our more sophisticated follies have not, and that a hundred years hence Mr. Lowell's Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every one.'

The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires' are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny in his prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in this present year of grace,—passions that,

'Like aconite, where'er they spread, they kill.'

He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and threatening the very fane itself with fire. Mere words will never strike him dumb. He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by the roadside. Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O'Phace, Esquire, lest some Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.

'Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers,Our four fathers fetched with 'em over the billers,Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on,Wile to slav'ry, invasion an' debt they were swept on,Wile our destiny higher an' higher kep mountin'(Though I guess folks'll stare wen she hands her account in).Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em,They won't hev so much ez a feather left in em.'

Not less wonderful than his penetration into political affairs is Lowell's command of the pure Yankee dialect. His knowledge of it is perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred. These are the dapper gentlemen, who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner's Waltzes, would judge every man's intellect by the measure of their own. Know, oh dwarfed descendants of Procustes, that the quality of humor is not strained, but droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven; and if, after patient blending with grains of intolerance and egotism, in the mortar of your minds, it seems to you but that poisonous foam that of old sorcerers drew, by their incantations, from the moon, we can only smile with Voltaire at your 'foolish ingenuities,' and recommend to you a new career. 'Go pype in an ivy lefe,' Monsieur Mustard-seed, or 'blow the bukkes' horne.'

It is no trifling merit in a work of so extraordinary a character that the original programme should have been so perfectly carried out. The poet never relaxes, even into a Corinthian elegance of allusion; his metaphors are always fresh and ungarnished; they no more shine with the polish of the court than do those of Panurge. In fact, there is a flavor of the camp about them, a pleasant suspicion, and more than a suspicion, of life in the open air, the fresh smell of the up-turned earth, the odor of clover blossoms. The poet is walking in the fresco, and the sharp winds cut a pathway across every page. Equally remarkable and pervaded by a most delightful personality are the editorial lucubrations of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. The very lustre of the midnight oil shines upon their glittering fragments of philosophy, admirably twisted to suit the requirements of an eminently unphilosophical age; moral axioms from heathen writers applied judiciously to the immoral actions of Christian doers; distorted shadows of a monstrous political economy, and dispassionate and highly commendable views 'de propagandâ fide.' Like Johnson,