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TO THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

James Russell Lowell

JAALAM, 6th Jan., 1862.

 

Gentlemen,--I was highly gratified by the insertion of a portion of my

letter in the last number of your valuable and entertaining Miscellany,

though in a type which rendered its substance inaccessible even to the

beautiful new spectacles presented to me by a Committee of the Parish on

New Year's Day. I trust that I was able to bear your very considerable

abridgment of my lucubrations with a spirit becoming a Christian. My

third granddaughter, Rebekah, aged fourteen years, and whom I have

trained to read slowly and with proper emphasis (a practice too much

neglected in our modern systems of education), read aloud to me the

excellent essay upon 'Old Age,' the author of which I cannot help

suspecting to be a young man who has never yet known what it was to have

snow (_canities morosa_) upon his own roof. _Dissolve frigus, large

super foco ligna reponens_, is a rule for the young, whose woodpile is

yet abundant for such cheerful lenitives. A good life behind him is the

best thing to keep an old man's shoulders from shivering at every

breath of sorrow or ill-fortune. But methinks it were easier for an old

man to feel the disadvantages of youth than the advantages of age. Of

these latter I reckon one of the chiefest to be this: that we attach a

less inordinate value to our own productions, and, distrusting daily

more and more our own wisdom (with the conceit whereof at twenty we wrap

ourselves away from knowledge as with a garment), do reconcile ourselves

with the wisdom of God. I could have wished, indeed, that room might

have been made for the residue of the anecdote relating to Deacon

Tinkham, which would not only have gratified a natural curiosity on the

part of the publick (as I have reason to know from several letters of

inquiry already received), but would also, as I think, have largely

increased the circulation of your Magazine in this town. _Nihil humani

alienum_, there is a curiosity about the affairs of our neighbors which

is not only pardonable, but even commendable. But I shall abide a more

fitting season.

 

As touching the following literary effort of Esquire Biglow, much might

be profitably said on the topick of Idyllick and Pastoral Poetry, and

concerning the proper distinctions to be made between them, from

Theocritus, the inventor of the former, to Collins, the latest authour I

know of who has emulated the classicks in the latter style. But in the

time of a Civil War worthy a Milton to defend and a Lucan to sing, it

may be reasonably doubted whether the publick, never too studious of

serious instruction, might not consider other objects more deserving of

present attention. Concerning the title of Idyll, which Mr. Biglow has

adopted at my suggestion, it may not be improper to animadvert, that the

name properly signifies a poem somewhat rustick in phrase (for, though

the learned are not agreed as to the particular dialect employed by

Theocritus, they are universanimous both as to its rusticity and its

capacity of rising now and then to the level of more elevated sentiments

and expressions), while it is also descriptive of real scenery and

manners. Yet it must be admitted that the production now in question

(which here and there bears perhaps too plainly the marks of my

correcting hand) does partake of the nature of a Pastoral, inasmuch as

the interlocutors therein are purely imaginary beings, and the whole is

little better than [Greek: kapnou skias onar]. The plot was, as I

believe, suggested by the 'Twa Brigs' of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet

of the last century, as that found its prototype in the 'Mutual

Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey' by Fergusson, though, the metre of

this latter be different by a foot in each verse. Perhaps the Two Dogs

of Cervantes gave the first hint. I reminded my talented young

parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the

edacious tooth of Time. But he answered me to this effect: that there

was no greater mistake of an authour than to suppose the reader had no

fancy of his own; that, if once that faculty was to be called into

activity, it were _better_ to be in for the whole sheep than the

shoulder; and that he knew Concord like a book,--an expression

questionable in propriety, since there are few things with which he is

not more familiar than with the printed page. In proof of what he

affirmed, he showed me some verses which with others he had stricken

out as too much delaying the action, but which I communicate in this

place because they rightly define 'punkin-seed' (which Mr. Bartlett

would have a kind of perch,--a creature to which I have found a rod or

pole not to be so easily equivalent in our inland waters as in the books

of arithmetic) and because it conveys an eulogium on the worthy son of

an excellent father, with whose acquaintance (_eheu, fugaces anni!_) I

was formerly honoured.

 

'But nowadays the Bridge ain't wut they show,

So much ez Em'son, Hawthorne, an' Thoreau.

I know the village, though; was sent there once

A-schoolin', 'cause to home I played the dunce;

An' I 've ben sence a visitin' the Jedge,

Whose garding whispers with the river's edge,

Where I 've sot mornin's lazy as the bream,

Whose on'y business is to head upstream,

(We call 'em punkin-seed,) or else in chat

Along 'th the Jedge, who covers with his hat

More wit an' gumption an' shrewd Yankee sense

Than there is mosses on an ole stone fence.'

 

Concerning the subject-matter of the verses. I have not the leisure at

present to write so fully as I could wish, my time being occupied with

the preparation of a discourse for the forthcoming bicentenary

celebration of the first settlement of Jaalam East Parish. It may

gratify the publick interest to mention the circumstance, that my

investigations to this end have enabled me to verify the fact (of much

historick importance, and hitherto hotly debated) that Shearjashub

Tarbox was the first child of white parentage born in this town, being

named in his father's will under date August 7th, or 9th, 1662. It is

well known that those who advocate the claims of Mehetable Goings are

unable to find any trace of her existence prior to October of that year.

As respects the settlement of the Mason and Slidell question, Mr. Biglow

has not incorrectly stated the popular sentiment, so far as I can judge

by its expression in this locality. For myself, I feel more sorrow than

resentment: for I am old enough to have heard those talk of England who

still, even after the unhappy estrangement, could not unschool their

lips from calling her the Mother-Country. But England has insisted on

ripping up old wounds, and has undone the healing work of fifty years;

for nations do not reason, they only feel, and the _spretæ injuria

formæ_ rankles in their minds as bitterly as in that of a woman. And

because this is so, I feel the more satisfaction that our Government has

acted (as all Governments should, standing as they do between the people

and their passions) as if it had arrived at years of discretion. There

are three short and simple words, the hardest of all to pronounce in any

language (and I suspect they were no easier before the confusion of

tongues), but which no man or nation that cannot utter can claim to have

arrived at manhood. Those words are, _I was wrong;_ and I am proud that,

while England played the boy, our rulers had strength enough from the

People below and wisdom enough from God above to quit themselves like

men.

 

The sore points on both sides have been skilfully exasperated by

interested and unscrupulous persons, who saw in a war between the two

countries the only hope of profitable return for their investment in

Confederate stock, whether political or financial. The always

supercilious, often insulting, and sometimes even brutal tone of British

journals and publick men has certainly not tended to soothe whatever

resentment might exist in America.

 

'Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,

But why did you kick me down stairs?'

 

We have no reason to complain that England, as a necessary consequence

of her clubs, has become a great society for the minding of other

people's business, and we can smile good-naturedly when she lectures

other nations on the sins of arrogance and conceit: but we may justly

consider it a breach of the political _convenances_ which are expected

to regulate the intercourse of one well-bred government with another,

when men holding places in the ministry allow themselves to dictate our

domestic policy, to instruct us in our duty, and to stigmatize as unholy

a war for the rescue of whatever a high-minded people should hold most

vital and most sacred. Was it in good taste, that I may use the mildest

term, for Earl Russell to expound our own Constitution to President

Lincoln, or to make a new and fallacious application of an old phrase

for our benefit, and tell us that the Rebels were fighting for

independence and we for empire? As if all wars for independence were by

nature just and deserving of sympathy, and all wars for empire ignoble

and worthy only of reprobation, or as if these easy phrases in any way

characterized this terrible struggle,--terrible not so truly in any

superficial sense, as from the essential and deadly enmity of the

principles that underlie it. His Lordship's bit of borrowed rhetoric

would justify Smith O'Brien, Nana Sahib, and the Maori chieftains, while

it would condemn nearly every war in which England has ever been

engaged. Was it so very presumptuous in us to think that it would be

decorous in English statesmen if they spared time enough to acquire some

kind of knowledge, though of the most elementary kind, in regard to this

country and the questions at issue here, before they pronounced so

off-hand a judgment? Or is political information expected to come

Dogberry-fashion in England, like reading and writing, by nature?

 

And now all respectable England is wondering at our irritability, and

sees a quite satisfactory explanation of it in our national vanity.

_Suave mari magno_, it is pleasant, sitting in the easy-chairs of

Downing Street, to sprinkle pepper on the raw wounds of a kindred people

struggling for life, and philosophical to find in self-conceit the cause

of our instinctive resentment. Surely we were of all nations the least

liable to any temptation of vanity at a time when the gravest anxiety

and the keenest sorrow were never absent from our hearts. Nor is conceit

the exclusive attribute of any one nation. The earliest of English

travellers, Sir John Mandeville, took a less provincial view of the

matter when he said, 'For fro what partie of the erthe that men duellen,

other aboven or beneathen, it semethe alweys to hem that duellen that

thei gon more righte than any other folke.' The English have always had

their fair share of this amiable quality. We may say of them still, as

the authour of the 'Lettres Cabalistiques' said of them more than a

century ago, _'Ces derniers disent naturellement qu'il n'y a qu'eux qui

soient estimables_'. And, as he also says,_'J'aimerois presque autant

tomber entre les mains d'un Inquisiteur que d'un Anglois qui me fait

sentir sans cesse combien il s'estime plus que moi, et qui ne daigne me

parler que pour injurier ma Nation et pour m'ennuyer du récit des

grandes qualités de la sienne_.' Of _this_ Bull we may safely say with

Horace, _habet fænum in cornu._ What we felt to be especially insulting

was the quiet assumption that the descendants of men who left the Old

World for the sake of principle, and who had made the wilderness into a

New World patterned after an Idea, could not possibly be susceptible of

a generous or lofty sentiment, could have no feeling of nationality

deeper than that of a tradesman for his shop. One would have thought, in

listening to England, that we were presumptuous in fancying that we were

a nation at all, or had any other principle of union than that of booths

at a fair, where there is no higher notion of government than the

constable, or better image of God than that stamped upon the current

coin.

 

It is time for Englishmen to consider whether there was nothing in the

spirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to

rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the

part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as

ours then was, of foreign interference. Was there nothing in the

indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the

Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in

the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the blood of

a people already overcharged with doubt, suspicion, and terrible

responsibility? The laity in any country do not stop to consider points

of law, but they have an instinctive perception of the _animus_ that

actuates the policy of a foreign nation; and in our own case they

remembered that the British authorities in Canada did not wait till

diplomacy could send home to England for her slow official tinder-box to

fire the 'Caroline.' Add to this, what every sensible American knew,

that the moral support of England was equal to an army of two hundred

thousand men to the Rebels, while it insured us another year or two of

exhausting war. It was not so much the spite of her words (though the

time might have been more tastefully chosen) as the actual power for

evil in them that we felt as a deadly wrong. Perhaps the most immediate

and efficient cause of mere irritation was, the sudden and unaccountable

change of manner on the other side of the water. Only six months before,

the Prince of Wales had come over to call us cousins; and everywhere it

was nothing but 'our American brethren,' that great offshoot of British

institutions in the New World, so almost identical with them in laws,

language, and literature,--this last of the alliterative compliments

being so bitterly true, that perhaps it will not be retracted even now.

To this outburst of long-repressed affection we responded with genuine

warmth, if with something of the awkwardness of a poor relation

bewildered with the sudden tightening of the ties of consanguinity when

it is rumored that he has come into a large estate. Then came the

Rebellion, and, _presto!_ a flaw in our titles was discovered, the plate

we were promised at the family table is flung at our head, and we were

again the scum of creation, intolerably vulgar, at once cowardly and

overbearing,--no relations of theirs, after all, but a dreggy hybrid of

the basest bloods of Europe. Panurge was not quicker to call Friar John

his _former_ friend. I cannot help thinking of Walter Mapes's jingling

paraphrase of Petronius,--

 

'Dummodo sim splendidis vestibus ornatus,

Et multa familia sim circumvallatus,

Prudens sum et sapiens et morigeratus,

Et tuus nepos sum et tu meus cognatus,'--

 

which I may freely render thus:--

 

So long as I was prosperous, I'd dinners by the dozen,

Was well-bred, witty, virtuous, and everybody's cousin;

If luck should turn, as well she may, her fancy is so flexile,

Will virtue, cousinship, and all return with her from exile?

 

There was nothing in all this to exasperate a philosopher, much to make

him smile rather; but the earth's surface is not chiefly inhabited by

philosophers, and I revive the recollection of it now in perfect

good-humour, merely by way of suggesting to our _ci-devant_ British

cousins, that it would have been easier for them to hold their tongues

than for us to keep our tempers under the circumstances.

 

The English Cabinet made a blunder, unquestionably, in taking it so

hastily for granted that the United States had fallen forever from their

position as a first-rate power, and it was natural that they should vent

a little of their vexation on the people whose inexplicable obstinacy in

maintaining freedom and order, and in resisting degradation, was likely

to convict them of their mistake. But if bearing a grudge be the sure

mark of a small mind in the individual, can it be a proof of high spirit

in a nation? If the result of the present estrangement between the two

countries shall be to make us more independent of British twaddle

(_Indomito nec dira ferens stipendia Tauro_), so much the better; but if

it is to make us insensible to the value of British opinion in matters

where it gives us the judgment of an impartial and cultivated outsider,

if we are to shut ourselves out from the advantages of English culture,

the loss will be ours, and not theirs. Because the door of the old

homestead has been once slammed in our faces, shall we in a huff reject

all future advances of conciliation, and cut ourselves foolishly off

from any share in the humanizing influences of the place, with its

ineffable riches of association, its heirlooms of immemorial culture,

its historic monuments, ours no less than theirs, its noble gallery of

ancestral portraits? We have only to succeed, and England will not only

respect, but, for the first time, begin to understand us. And let us

not, in our justifiable indignation at wanton insult, forget that

England is not the England only of snobs who dread the democracy they do

not comprehend, but the England of history, of heroes, statesmen, and

poets, whose names are dear, and their influence as salutary to us as to

her.

 

Let us strengthen the hands of those in authority over us, and curb our

own tongues, remembering that General Wait commonly proves in the end

more than a match for General Headlong, and that the Good Book ascribes

safety to a multitude, indeed, but not to a mob, of counsellours. Let us

remember and perpend the words of Paulus Emilius to the people of Rome;

that, 'if they judged they could manage the war to more advantage by any

other, he would willingly yield up his charge; but if they confided in

him, _they were not to make themselves his colleagues in his office, or

raise reports, or criticise his actions, but, without talking, supply

him with means and assistance necessary to the carrying on of the war;

for, if they proposed to command their own commander, they would render

this expedition more ridiculous than the former.' (Vide Plutarchum in

Vitâ P.E._) Let us also not forget what the same excellent authour says

concerning Perseus's fear of spending money, and not permit the

covetousness of Brother Jonathan to be the good fortune of Jefferson

Davis. For my own part, till I am ready to admit the Commander-in-Chief

to my pulpit, I shall abstain from planning his battles. If courage be

the sword, yet is patience the armour of a nation; and in our desire for

peace, let us never be willing to surrender the Constitution bequeathed

us by fathers at least as wise as ourselves (even with Jefferson Davis

to help us), and, with those degenerate Romans, _tuta et præsentia quam

vetera et periculosa malle_.

 

And not only should we bridle our own tongues, but the pens of others,

which are swift to convey useful intelligence to the enemy. This is no

new inconvenience; for, under date, 3d June, 1745, General Pepperell

wrote thus to Governor Shirley from Louisbourg: 'What your Excellency

observes of the _army's being made acquainted with any plans proposed,

until ready to be put in execution_, has always been disagreeable to me,

and I have given many cautions relating to it. But when your Excellency

considers that _our Council of War consists of more than twenty

members_, I am persuaded you will think it _impossible for me to hinder

it_, if any of them will persist in communicating to inferior officers

and soldiers what ought to be kept secret. I am informed that the Boston

newspapers are filled with paragraphs from private letters relating to

the expedition. Will your Excellency permit me to say I think it may be

of ill consequence? Would it not be convenient, if your Excellency

should forbid the Printers' inserting such news?' Verily, if _tempora

mutantur_, we may question the _et nos mutamur in illis;_ and if tongues

be leaky, it will need all hands at the pumps to save the Ship of State.

Our history dotes and repeats itself. If Sassycus (rather than

Alcibiades) find a parallel in Beauregard, so Weakwash, as he is called

by the brave Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, need not seek far among our own

Sachems for his anti-type.

 

With respect,

Your ob't humble serv't

Homer Wilbur, A.M.

 

 

I love to start out arter night's begun,

An' all the chores about the farm are done,

The critters milked an' foddered, gates shet fast,

Tools cleaned aginst to-morrer, supper past.

An' Nancy darnin' by her ker'sene lamp,--

I love, I say, to start upon a tramp,

To shake the kinkles out o' back an' legs,

An' kind o' rack my life off from the dregs

Thet's apt to settle in the buttery-hutch

Of folks thet foller in one rut too much: 10

Hard work is good an' wholesome, past all doubt;

But 't ain't so, ef the mind gits tuckered out.

Now, bein' born in Middlesex, you know,

There's certin spots where I like best to go:

The Concord road, for instance (I, for one,

Most gin'lly ollers call it _John Bull's Run_).

The field o' Lexin'ton where England tried

The fastest colours thet she ever dyed,

An' Concord Bridge, thet Davis, when he came,

Found was the bee-line track to heaven an' fame, 20

Ez all roads be by natur', ef your soul

Don't sneak thru shun-pikes so's to save the toll.

 

They're 'most too fur away, take too much time

To visit of'en, ef it ain't in rhyme;

But the' 's a walk thet's hendier, a sight,

An' suits me fust-rate of a winter's night,--

I mean the round whale's-back o' Prospect Hill.

I love to l'iter there while night grows still,

An' in the twinklin' villages about,

Fust here, then there, the well-saved lights goes out, 30

An' nary sound but watch-dogs' false alarms,

Or muffled cock-crows from the drowsy farms,

Where some wise rooster (men act jest thet way)

Stands to 't thet moon-rise is the break o' day;

(So Mister Seward sticks a three-months' pin

Where the war'd oughto eend, then tries agin:

My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:

_Don't never prophesy--onless ye know_.)

I love to muse there till it kind o' seems

Ez ef the world went eddyin' off in dreams; 40

The northwest wind thet twitches at my baird

Blows out o' sturdier days not easy scared,

An' the same moon thet this December shines

Starts out the tents an' booths o' Putnam's lines;

The rail-fence posts, acrost the hill thet runs,

Turn ghosts o' sogers should'rin' ghosts o' guns;

Ez wheels the sentry, glints a flash o' light,

Along the firelock won at Concord Fight,

An', 'twixt the silences, now fur, now nigh,

Rings the sharp chellenge, hums the low reply. 50

 

Ez I was settin' so, it warn't long sence,

Mixin' the puffict with the present tense,

I heerd two voices som'ers in the air,

Though, ef I was to die, I can't tell where:

Voices I call 'em: 'twas a kind o' sough

Like pine-trees thet the wind's ageth'rin' through;

An', fact, I thought it _was_ the wind a spell,

Then some misdoubted, couldn't fairly tell,

Fust sure, then not, jest as you hold an eel,

I knowed, an' didn't,--fin'lly seemed to feel 60

'Twas Concord Bridge a talkin' off to kill

With the Stone Spike thet's druv thru Bunker's Hill;

Whether 'twas so, or ef I on'y dreamed,

I couldn't say; I tell it ez it seemed.