Poems of James Russell Lowell Part 55

BY HOMER WILBUR, A.M.

Two brothers once, an ill-matched pair, Together dwelt (no matter where), To whom an Uncle Sam, or some one, Had left a house and farm in common.

The two in principles and habits Were different as rats from rabbits; Stout farmer North, with frugal care, Laid up provision for his heir, Not scorning with hard sun-browned hands To sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with his lands; Whatever thing he had to do He did, and made it pay him, too; He sold his waste stone by the pound, His drains made water-wheels spin round, His ice in summer-time he sold, His wood brought profit when 'twas cold, He dug and delved from morn till night, Strove to make profit square with right, Lived on his means, cut no great dash, And paid his debts in honest cash.

On tother hand, his brother South Lived very much from hand to mouth, Played gentleman, nursed dainty hands, Borrowed North's money on his lands, And culled his morals and his graces From c.o.c.k-pits, bar-rooms, fights, and races; His sole work in the farming line Was keeping droves of long-legged swine, Which brought great bothers and expenses To North in looking after fences, And, when they happened to break through, Cost him both time and temper too, For South insisted it was plain He ought to drive them home again, And North consented to the work Because he loved to buy cheap pork.

Meanwhile, South's swine increasing fast, His farm became too small at last, So, having thought the matter over, And feeling bound to live in clover And never pay the clover's worth, He said one day to brother North:--

"Our families are both increasing, And, though we labor without ceasing, Our produce soon will be too scant To keep our children out of want; They who wish fortune to be lasting Must be both prudent and forecasting; We soon shall need more land; a lot I know, that cheaply can be bo't; You lend the cash, I'll buy the acres, And we'll be equally partakers."

Poor North, whose Anglo-Saxon blood Gave him a hankering after mud, Wavered a moment, then consented, And, when the cash was paid, repented; To make the new land worth a pin, Thought he, it must be all fenced in, For, if South's swine once get the run on't No kind of farming can be done on't; If that don't suit the other side, 'Tis best we instantly divide.

But somehow South could ne'er incline This way or that to run the line, And always found some new pretence 'Gainst setting the division fence; At last he said:--

"For peace's sake, Liberal concessions I will make; Though I believe, upon my soul, I've a just t.i.tle to the whole, I'll make an offer which I call Gen'rous,--we'll have no fence at all; Then both of us, whene'er we choose, Can take what part we want to use; If you should chance to need it first, Pick you the best, I'll take the worst."

"Agreed!" cried North; thought he, this fall With wheat and rye I'll sow it all, In that way I shall get the start, And South may whistle for his part; So thought, so done, the field was sown, And, winter having come and gone, Sly North walked blithely forth to spy, The progress of his wheat and rye; Heavens, what a sight! his brother's swine Had asked themselves all out to dine, Such grunting, munching, rooting, shoving, The soil seemed all alive and moving, As for his grain, such work they'd made on't, He couldn't spy a single blade on't.

Off in a rage he rushed to South, "My wheat and rye"--grief choked his mouth; "Pray don't mind me," said South, "but plant All of the new land that you want;"

"Yes, but your hogs," cried North;

"The grain Won't hurt them," answered South again; "But they destroy my grain;"

"No doubt; 'Tis fortunate you've found it out; Misfortunes teach, and only they, You must not sow it in their way;"

"Nay, you," says North, "must keep them out;"

"Did I create them with a snout?"

Asked South demurely; "as agreed, The land is open to your seed, And would you fain prevent my pigs From running there their harmless rigs?

G.o.d knows I view this compromise With not the most approving eyes; I gave up my unquestioned rights For sake of quiet days and nights, I offered then, you know 'tis true, To cut the piece of land in two."

"Then cut it now," growls North;

"Abate Your heat," says South, "'tis now too late; I offered you the rocky corner, But you, of your own good the scorner, Refused to take it; I am sorry; No doubt you might have found a quarry, Perhaps a gold-mine, for aught I know, Containing heaps of native rhino; You can't expect me to resign My right"--

"But where," quoth North, "are mine?"

"_Your_ rights," says tother, "well, that's funny, _I_ bought the land"--

"_I_ paid the money;"

"That," answered South, "is from the point, The owners.h.i.+p, you'll grant, is joint; I'm sure my only hope and trust is Not law so much as abstract justice, Though, you remember, 'twas agreed That so and so--consult the deed; Objections now are out of date, They might have answered once, but Fate Quashes them at the point we've got to; _Obsta principiis_, that's my motto."

So saying, South began to whistle And looked as obstinate as gristle, While North went homeward, each brown paw Clenched like a knot of natural law, And all the while, in either ear, Heard something clicking wondrous clear.

To turn now to other matters, there are two things upon which it would seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely in this place,--the Yankee character and the Yankee dialect. And, first, of the Yankee character, which has wanted neither open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies in the persons of those unskilful painters who have given to it that hardness, angularity, and want of proper perspective, which, in truth, belonged, not to their subject, but to their own n.i.g.g.ard and unskilful pencil.

New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which came hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. They came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea, even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And surely, if the Greek might boast his Thermopylae, where three hundred men fell in resisting the Persian, we may well be proud of our Plymouth Rock, where a handful of men, women, and children not merely faced, but vanquished, winter, famine, the wilderness, and the yet more invincible _storge_ that drew them back to the green island far away. These found no lotus growing upon the surly sh.o.r.e, the taste of which could make them forget their little native Ithaca; nor were they so wanting to themselves in faith as to burn their s.h.i.+p, but could see the fair west wind belly the homeward sail, and then turn unrepining to grapple with the terrible Unknown.

As Want was the prime foe these hardy exodists had to fortress themselves against, so it is little wonder if that traditional feud is long in wearing out of the stock. The wounds of the old warfare were long ahealing, and an east wind of hard times puts a new ache in every one of them. Thrift was the first lesson in their hornbook, pointed out, letter after letter, by the lean finger of the hard schoolmaster, Necessity. Neither were those plump, rosy-gilled Englishmen that came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilious, earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling with the Lord in prayer, and who had taught Satan to dread the new Puritan hug. Add two hundred years' influence of soil, climate, and exposure, with its necessary result of idiosyncrasies, and we have the present Yankee, full of expedients, half-master of all trades, inventive in all but the beautiful, full of s.h.i.+fts, not yet capable of comfort, armed at all points against the old enemy Hunger, longanimous, good at patching, not so careful for what is best as for what will _do_, with a clasp to his purse and a b.u.t.ton to his pocket, not skilled to build against Time, as in old countries, but against sore-pressing Need, accustomed to move the world with no p?? st? but his own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A strange hybrid, indeed, did circ.u.mstance beget, here in the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such n.i.g.g.ard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm, such sourfaced-humor, such close-fisted-generosity. This new _Graeculus esuriens_ will make a living out of anything. He will invent new trades as well as tools. His brain is his capital, and he will get education at all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, and he would make a spelling-book first, and a salt-pan afterward. _In clum, jusseris, ibit_,--or the other way either,--it is all one, so anything is to be got by it. Yet, after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains. He feels more at home with Fulke Greville, Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George Herbert, and Browne, than with his modern English cousins. He is nearer than John, by at least a hundred years, to Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, and the time when, if ever, there were true Englishmen. John Bull has suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much fattened out of him. Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the world of the Unseen as well as of the Seen. To move John, you must make your fulcrum of solid beef and pudding; an abstract idea will do for Jonathan.

*.* TO THE INDULGENT READER.

My friend, the Reverend Mr. Wilbur, having been seized with a dangerous fit of illness, before this Introduction had pa.s.sed through the press, and being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes, memoranda, &c., and requested me to fas.h.i.+on them into some shape more fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and disjointed state of his ma.n.u.scripts, I have felt wholly unable to do; yet, being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to segregate these from the rest, I have concluded to send them all to the press precisely as they are.

Columbus Nye , _Pastor of a church in Bungtown Corner._

It remains to speak of the Yankee dialect. And, first, it may be premised, in a general way, that any one much read in the writings of the early colonists need not be told that the far greater share of the words and phrases now esteemed peculiar to New England, and local there, were brought from the mother country. A person familiar with the dialect of certain portions of Ma.s.sachusetts will not fail to recognize, in ordinary discourse, many words now noted in English vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of which were in common use about the time of the King James translation of the Bible. Shakspeare stands less in need of a glossary to most New Englanders than to many a native of the Old Country. The peculiarities of our speech, however, are rapidly wearing out. As there is no country where reading is so universal and newspapers are so mult.i.tudinous, so no phrase remains long local, but is transplanted in the mail-bags to every remotest corner of the land.

Consequently our dialect approaches nearer to uniformity than that of any other nation.

The English have complained of us for coining new words. Many of those so stigmatized were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now an unquestioned part of the currency, wherever English is spoken.

Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words, as they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. It might be questioned whether we could not establish a stronger t.i.tle to the owners.h.i.+p of the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves.

Here, past all question, is to be its great home and centre. And not only is it already spoken here by greater numbers, but with a higher popular average of correctness, than in Britain. The great writers of it, too, we might claim as ours, were owners.h.i.+p to be settled by the number of readers and lovers.

As regards the provincialisms to be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavored to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of p.r.o.nunciation. Let the reader who deems me over-particular remember this caution of Martial:--

"_Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus; Sed male c.u.m recitas, incipit esse tuus._"

A few further explanatory remarks will not be impertinent.

I shall barely lay down a few general rules for the reader's guidance.

1. The genuine Yankee never gives the rough sound to the r when he can help it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it even before a vowel.

2. He seldom sounds the final _g_, a piece of self-denial, if we consider his partiality for nasals. The same of the final _d_, as _han'_ and _stan'_ for _hand_ and _stand_.

3. The _h_ in such words as _while_, _when_, _where_, he omits altogether.

4. In regard to _a_, he shows some inconsistency, sometimes giving a close and obscure sound, as _hev_ for _have_, _hendy_ for _handy_, _ez_ for _as_, _thet_ for _that_, and again giving it the broad sound it has in _father_, as _hansome_ for _handsome_.

5. To the sound _ou_ he prefixes an _e_ (hard to exemplify otherwise than orally).

The following pa.s.sage in Shakspeare he would recite thus:--

"Neow is the winta uv eour discontent Med glorious summa by this sun o' Yock, An' all the cleouds thet leowered upun eour heouse In the deep buzzum o' the os.h.i.+n buried; Neow air eour breows beound 'ith victorious wreaths; Eour breused arms hung up fer monimunce; Eour starn alarums changed to merry meetins, Eour dreffle marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war heth smeuthed his wrinkled front, An' neow, instid o' mountin' barehid steeds To fright the souls o' ferfle edverseries, He capers nimly in a lady's chmber, To the lascivious pleasin' uv a loot."

6. _Au_, in such words as _daughter_ and _slaughter_, he p.r.o.nounces _ah_.

7. To the dish thus seasoned add a drawl _ad libitum_.

[Mr. Wilbur's notes here become entirely fragmentary.--C. N.]

a. Unable to procure a likeness of Mr. Biglow, I thought the curious reader might be gratified with a sight of the editorial effigies. And here a choice between two was offered,--the one a profile (entirely black) cut by Doyle, the other a portrait painted by a native artist of much promise. The first of these seemed wanting in expression, and in the second a slight obliquity of the visual organs has been heightened (perhaps from an over-desire of force on the part of the artist) into too close an approach to actual _strabismus_. This slight divergence in my optical apparatus from the ordinary model--however I may have been taught to regard it in the light of a mercy rather than a cross, since it enabled me to give as much of directness and personal application to my discourses as met the wants of my congregation, without risk of offending any by being supposed to have him or her in my eye (as the saying is)--seemed yet to Mrs. Wilbur a sufficient objection to the engraving of the aforesaid painting. We read of many who either absolutely refused to allow the copying of their features, as especially did Plotinus and Agesilaus among the ancients, not to mention the more modern instances of Scioppius, Palaeottus, Pinellus, Velserus, Gataker, and others, or were indifferent thereto, as Cromwell.

. Yet was Caesar desirous of concealing his baldness. _Per contra_, my Lord Protector's carefulness in the matter of his wart might be cited. Men generally more desirous of being _improved_ in their portraits than characters. Shall probably find very unflattered likenesses of ourselves in Recording Angel's gallery.

?. Whether any of our national peculiarities may be traced to our use of stoves, as a certain closeness of the lips in p.r.o.nunciation, and a smothered smoulderingness of disposition, seldom roused to open flame?