It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient with overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin. People are apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention. The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius. One Do not look for the Millennium as imminent. generation is apt to get all the wear it can out of the cast clothes of the last, and is always sure to use up every paling of the old fence that will hold a nail in building the new. You suspect a kind of vanity in my genealogical enthusiasm. Perhaps you are right; but it is a uni versal foible. Where it does not show itself in a personal and private way, it becomes public and gregarious. We flatter ourselves in the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Virginian offshoot of a transported convict swells with the fancy of a cavalier ancestry. Pride of birth, I have noticed, takes two forms. One complacently traces himself up to a coronet; another, defiantly, to a lapstone. The sentiment is precisely the same in both cases, only that one is the positive and the other the negative pole of it. Seeing a goat the other day kneeling in order to graze with less trouble, it seemed to me a type of the common notion of prayer. Most people are ready enough to go down on their knees for material blessings, but how few for those spiritual gifts which alone are an answer to our orisons, if we but knew it ! Some people, now-a-days, seem to have hit upon a new moralization of the moth and the candle. They would lock up the light of Truth, lest poor Psyche should put it out in her effort to draw nigh to it. No. X. MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. DEAR SIR, Your letter come to han', Requestin' me to please be funny; But I ain't made upon a plan Thet knows wut 's comin', gall or honey: Odd fancies come afore I call 'em ; An' then agin, for half a year, No preacher 'thout a call's more solemn. You're 'n want o' sunthin' light an' cute, An' wish, pervidin' it 'ould suit, I'd take an' citify my English. I ken write long-tailed, ef I please,- Run helter-skelter into Yankee. Sence I begun to scribble rhyme, I tell ye wut, I hain't ben foc. '; The parson's books, life, death, an' time Hev took some trouble with my schoolin'; Nor th' airth don't git put out with me, Thet love her 'z though she wuz a woman; Why, th' ain't a bird upon the tree An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way Their talk wuz meatier, an' 'ould stay, While book-froth seems to whet your hunger; For puttin' in a downright lick 'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther' 's few can metch it, An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet. But when I can't, I can't, thet 's all, For Natur' won't put up with gullin'; Idees you hev to shove an' haul Like a druv pig ain't wuth a mullein; Live thoughts ain't sent for; thru all rifts O' sense they pour an' resh ye onwards, Like rivers when south-lyin' drifts Feel thet th' old airth 's a-wheelin' sunwards. Time wuz, the rhymes come crowdin' thick Ez office-seekers arter 'lection, An' into ary place 'ould stick Without no bother nor objection; But sence the war my thoughts hang back An' subs'tutes, they don't never lack, But then they'll slope afore you've mist 'em. Nothin' don't seem like wut it wuz; I can't see wut there is to hender, An' yit my brains jes' go buzz, buzz, 'Fore these times come, in all airth's row, Where I could hide an' think, - but now It's all one teeter, hopin', dreadin'. |