When, more than three years ago, my talented young parishioner, Mr.
Biglow, came to me and submitted to my animadversions the first of his
poems which he intended to commit to the more hazardous trial of a city
newspaper, it never so much as entered my imagination to conceive that
his productions would ever be gathered into a fair volume, and ushered
into the august presence of the reading public by myself. So little are
we short-sighted mortals able to predict the event! I confess that there
is to me a quite new satisfaction in being associated (though only as
sleeping partner) in a book which can stand by itself in an independent
unity on the shelves of libraries. For there is always this drawback
from the pleasure of printing a sermon, that, whereas the queasy stomach
of this generation will not bear a discourse long enough to make a
separate volume, those religious and godly-minded children (those
Samuels, if I may call them so) of the brain must at first lie buried in
an undistinguished heap, and then get such resurrection as is
vouchsafed to them, mummy-wrapt with a score of others in a cheap
binding, with no other mark of distinction than the word
"_Miscellaneous_" printed upon the back. Far be it from me to claim any
credit for the quite unexpected popularity which I am pleased to find
these bucolic strains have attained unto. If I know myself, I am
measurably free from the itch of vanity; yet I may be allowed to say
that I was not backward to recognize in them a certain wild, puckery,
acidulous (sometimes even verging toward that point which, in our rustic
phrase, is termed _shut-eye_) flavour, not wholly unpleasing, nor
unwholesome, to palates cloyed with the sugariness of tamed and
cultivated fruit. It may be, also, that some touches of my own, here and
there, may have led to their wider acceptance, albeit solely from my
larger experience of literature and authorship.[3]
I was, at first, inclined to discourage Mr. Biglow's attempts, as
knowing that the desire to poetize is one of the diseases naturally
incident to adolescence, which, if the fitting remedies be not at once
and with a bold hand applied, may become chronic, and render one, who
might else have become in due time an ornament of the social circle, a
painful object even to nearest friends and relatives. But thinking, on a
further experience, that there was a germ of promise in him which
required only culture and the pulling up of weeds from around it, I
thought it best to set before him the acknowledged examples of English
compositions in verse, and leave the rest to natural emulation. With
this view, I accordingly lent him some volumes of Pope and Goldsmith, to
the assiduous study of which he promised to devote his evenings. Not
long afterwards he brought me some verses written upon that model, a
specimen of which I subjoin, having changed some phrases of less
elegancy, and a few rhymes objectionable to the cultivated ear. The poem
consisted of childish reminiscences, and the sketches which follow will
not seem destitute of truth to those whose fortunate education began in
a country village. And, first, let us hang up his charcoal portrait of
the school-dame.
"Propt on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see
The humble school-house of my A, B, C,
Where well-drilled urchins, each behind his tire,
Waited in ranks the wished command to fire;
Then all together, when the signal came,
Discharged their _a-b abs_ against the dame,
Who, 'mid the volleyed learning, firm and calm,
Patted the furloughed ferule on her palm,
And, to our wonder, could detect at once,
Who flashed the pan, and who was downright dunce.
There young Devotion learned to climb with ease
The gnarly limbs of Scripture family-trees,
And he was most commended and admired
Who soonest to the topmost twig perspired;
Each name was called as many various ways
As pleased the reader's ear on different days,
So that the weather, or the ferule's stings,
Colds in the head, or fifty other things,
Transformed the helpless Hebrew thrice a week
To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek,
The vibrant accent skipping here and there,
Just as it pleased invention or despair;
No controversial Hebraist was the Dame;
With or without the points pleased her the same;
If any tyro found a name too tough,
And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough;
She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing,
And cleared the five-barred syllables at a spring.
Ah, dear old times! there once it was my hap,
Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap;
From books degraded, there I sat at ease,
A drone, the envy of compulsory bees."
I add only one further extract, which will possess a melancholy interest
to all such as have endeavoured to glean the materials of Revolutionary
history from the lips of aged persons, who took a part in the actual
making of it, and, finding the manufacture profitable, continued the
supply in an adequate proportion to the demand.
"Old Joe is gone, who saw hot Percy goad
His slow artillery up the Concord road,
A tale which grew in wonder, year by year,
As, every time he told it, Joe drew near
To the main fight, till, faded and grown gray,
The original scene to bolder tints gave way;
Then Joe had heard the foe's scared double-quick
Beat on stove drum with one uncaptured stick,
And, ere death came the lengthening tale to lop,
Himself had fired, and seen a red-coat drop;
Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight
Had squared more nearly to his sense of right,
And vanquished Percy, to complete the tale,
Had hammered stone for life in Concord jail."
I do not know that the foregoing extracts ought not to be called my own
rather than Mr. Biglow's, as, indeed, he maintained stoutly that my file
had left nothing of his in them. I should not, perhaps, have felt
entitled to take so great liberties with them, had I not more than
suspected an hereditary vein of poetry in myself, a very near ancestor
having written a Latin poem in the Harvard _Gratulatio_ on the accession
of George the Third. Suffice it to say, that, whether not satisfied with
such limited approbation as I could conscientiously bestow, or from a
sense of natural inaptitude, I know not, certain it is that my young
friend could never be induced to any further essays in this kind. He
affirmed that it was to him like writing in a foreign tongue,--that Mr.
Pope's versification was like the regular ticking of one of Willard's
clocks, in which one could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind
of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a poverty-stricken _tick,
tick_ after all,--and that he had never seen a sweet-water on a trellis
growing so fairly, or in forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape
over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I know not what, to the effect
that the sweet-water would only be the more disfigured by having its
leaves starched and ironed out, and that Peg[=a]sus (so he called him)
hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curl-papers. These and
other such opinions I did not long strive to eradicate, attributing them
rather to a defective education and senses untuned by too long
familiarity with purely natural objects, than to a perverted moral
sense. I was the more inclined to this leniency since sufficient
evidence was not to seek, that his verses, as wanting as they certainly
were in classic polish and point, had somehow taken hold of the public
ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting him right as to the
quantity of the proper name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent of
his natural genius.
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 niggard 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 shore, 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 ship, 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 horn-book, 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 shifts, 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 button 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 {pou sto} but his
own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A strange hybrid,
indeed, did circumstance beget, here in the New World, upon the old Puritan
stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such
niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm,
such unwilling humour, such close-fisted-generosity. This new _Graeculus
esuriens_ will make a living out of any thing. 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 afterwards. _In c[oe]lum, jusseris, ibit_,--or the
other way either,--it is all one, so any thing 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 flattened 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 Rev. Mr. Wilbur, having been seized with a dangerous fit
of illness, before this Introduction had passed through the press, and
being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes,
memoranda, &c., and requested me to fashion them into some shape more
fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and
disjointed state of his manuscripts, 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 Massachusetts 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 multitudinous, 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 title to the
ownership 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 far higher
popular average of correctness, than in Britain. The great writers of
it, too, we might claim as ours, were ownership 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 endeavoured to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to
the ordinary mode of pronunciation. Let the reader who deems me
overparticular remember this caution of Martial:--
"_Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus;
Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus._"
A few further explanatory remarks will not be impertinent.