No More Learning

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 he 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.


Do not look for the Millennium as imminent. One 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 universal 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 ef 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, nowadays, 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:
Ther' 's times the world does look so queer,
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,
Rattlin' an' shrewd an' kin' o' jingleish, 10
An' wish, pervidin' it 'ould suit,
I'd take an' citify my English.
I _ken_ write long-tailed, ef I please,--
But when I'm jokin', no, I thankee;
Then, fore I know it, my idees
Run helter-skelter into Yankee.

Sence I begun to scribble rhyme,
I tell ye wut, I hain't ben foolin';
The parson's books, life, death, an' time
Hev took some trouble with my schoolin'; 20
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
But half forgives my bein' human.


An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way
Ol' farmers hed when I wuz younger;
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, 30
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick
Ez stret-grained hickory does 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 arth's a-wheelin' sunwards. 40

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
Ez though I wanted to enlist 'em,
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, 50
An' yit my brains jes' go buzz, buzz,
Like bumblebees agin a winder;
'fore these times come, in all airth's row,
Ther' wuz one quiet place, my head in,
Where I could hide an' think,--but now
It's all one teeter, hopin', dreadin'.

Where's Peace? I start, some clear-blown night,
When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number,
An' creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white,
Walk the col' starlight into summer; 60
Up grows the moon, an' swell by swell
Thru the pale pasturs silvers dimmer
Than the last smile thet strives to tell
O' love gone heavenward in its shimmer.

I hev been gladder o' sech things
Than cocks o' spring or bees o' clover,
They filled my heart with livin' springs,
But now they seem to freeze 'em over;
Sights innercent ez babes on knee,
Peaceful ez eyes o' pastur'd cattle, 70
Jes' coz they be so, seem to me
To rile me more with thoughts o' battle.

Indoors an' out by spells I try;
Ma'am Natur' keeps her spin-wheel goin',
But leaves my natur' stiff and dry
Ez fiel's o' clover arter mowin';
An' her jes' keepin' on the same,
Calmer 'n a clock, an' never carin'
An' findin' nary thing to blame,
Is wus than ef she took to swearin'.