A substratum of truth underlies these fantastic lines—indeed we have seen (and possibly written) whole pages of critical prose, investigatory of Mr. Hawthorne's genius, which have said much less amid all their censorial perambulations and circumlocutions than these few fanciful verses.
Alcott and Brownson enjoy a reputation in their own land quite disproportionate to the meagre recognition accorded them in the Old World. With the notice they obtain in the "Fable for Critics," we must conclude our own notice of the vivacious fabulist. Alcott—of whom some interesting things are said by Miss Bremer in her book on America—is here set down as a great talker and no writer at all, in spite of his cacistoëthes scribendi: it seems
his highest conceit of a happiest state is
Where they'd live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis;
And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better—
Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter;
… While he talks, he is great, but goes out like a taper,
If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper.
He must be a veritable study, this dreamy neotero-platonist, his face glistening with the joy of transcendental musings, who, as he stalks along, "calm as a cloud," fancies himself in the groves of the Academy,
With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o'er him,
And never a fact to perplex or to bore him,
With a scrag room at Plato's, when night comes, to walk to,
And people from morning till midnight to talk to.
But we can scarcely say, happy the people that are in such a case—judging by the specimens we have met with of Mr. Alcott's matter and manner, spoilt it may be in translation to paper and print. Brownson has attracted some attention among those of us who indulge in transcendentalism or Romanism, or both—semper in extremis, and loving to have it so, and what will he do (one marvels) in the end thereof? He is here commended for his transparent and forcible prose, but flouted for his infatuated attachment to paradox, and for the topsy-turvy, wrong-side-out character of his dialectics:
The worst of it is, that his logic's so strong,
That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong;
If there is only one, why, hell split it in two,
And first pummel this half, and then that, black and blue.
That white's white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow
To prove it jet black, and that jet black is yellow.
He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,—
When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe
But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean)-gisms that squat 'em
Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.
The most important, we believe, of Mr. Lowell's performances in prose, is the "Biglow Papers"—a work not quite appreciable on this side the ocean, the humour being so closely interwoven with the oddities of dialect and patois, which require a glossary for those not to the manner born or bred.
