No More Learning

Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?

Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to
state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had
said about Hebel's 'Allemannische Gedichte,' which, making proper
deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what
I would have said far better than I could hope to do: 'Allen diesen
innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu
statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte
. . . von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele
kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein
Vortheil fur den Dichter ist. Diese Elemente werden durch gluckliche
Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedrangt der zu
diesem Zwecke vor unserer Buchersprache grosse Vorzuge hat. ' Of course I
do not mean to imply that _I_ have come near achieving any such success
as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is _there_,
and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand.

Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I
valued. With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any
vanity, I mention as one of these the late A. H.
Clough, who more than
any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne,
impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we
call genius. He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee
Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without
foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never completed
anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of
his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at
stake, led me to venture some passages nearer to what is called poetical
than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former
series. The time seemed calling to me, with the old poet,--

'Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
The oaten reed forbear;
For I hear a sound of battle,
And trumpets rend the air! '

The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that
may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident)
was in 'The Courtin'. ' While the introduction to the First Series was
going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was
a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and
improvised another fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because
verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract
from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the
printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Presently I
began to receive letters asking for the rest of it, sometimes for the
_balance_ of it. I had none, but to answer such demands, I patched a
conclusion upon it in a later edition. Those who had only the first
continued to importune me. Afterward, being asked to write it out as an
autograph for the Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other
verses, into some of which I fused a little more sentiment in a homely
way, and after a fashion completed it by sketching in the characters'
and making a connected story. Most likely I have spoiled it, but I shall
put it at the end of this Introduction, to answer once for all those
kindly importunings.

As I have seen extracts from what purported to be writings of Mr.
Biglow, which were not genuine, I may properly take this opportunity to
say, that the two volumes now published contain every line I ever
printed under that pseudonyme, and that I have never, so far as I can
remember, written an anonymous article (elsewhere than in the 'North
American Review' and the 'Atlantic Monthly,' during my editorship of it)
except a review of Mrs.