Should look with delight on the agonised prancing
Of a wretch who has not the least ground for his dancing,
While the State, standing by, sings a verse from the Psalter
About offering to God on his favourite halter,
And, when the legs droop from their twitching divergence,
Sells the clothes to a Jew, and the corpse to the surgeons."
Will this kind of reckless hash of punning and profanity extort a smile from any whose smile is worth having? Or would any of us like to see wife or sister smiling over the poet's choice bits of witty helter-skelter irreverence, such as abound in the "Fable for Critics," and of which the foregoing piece of gallows-work (though ill-suited to our Tyburnia) is but a mild type?
In those serious verses which Mr. Lowell devotes to the enforcement of his faith in the onward and upward advance of humanity, there is little to suggest his identity with the rollicking satirist of conservative tendencies. He can be as elevated and impressive as the severest apostle of "Progress," when it is his cue to "look good," as the children say. Not to the most enthusiastic does he yield in enthusiasm, in the hopes he cherishes of man's destiny, and the faith he holds in man's capabilities. If not a believer in human perfectibility, he is little less than kin and more than kind thereto; if not a pure optimist, he is not far from that amiable standard. His Prometheus says,
And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,
Leaving it richer for the growth of truth;
But Good, once put in action or in thought,
Like a strong oak, doth from its boughs shed down
The ripe germs of a forest.
And again (idem loquitur):
Having two faces, as some images
Are carved, of foolish gods; one face is ill;
But one heart lies beneath, and that is good,
As are all hearts, when we explore their depths.
Similarly it is maintained that among the qualifications of the true poet—not the mere silken bard environed by proprieties, but the poet who speaks home to the national heart—this is one, and a foremost one; that he is a man
Control a lovely prospect every way;
Who doth not sound God's sea with earthly plummet,
And find a bottom still of worthless clay;
Who heeds not how the lower gusts are working,
Knowing that one sure wind blows on above,
And sees, beneath the foulest faces lurking,
One God-built shrine of reverence and love.[1]
- ↑ "Ode" (1841).
