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Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,

Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

"There are truths you Americans need to be told,

And it never'll refute them to swagger and scold;
John Bull, looking o'er the Atlantic, in choler
At your aptness for trade, says you worship the
dollar;

But to scorn such i-dollar-try's what very few do,
And John goes to that church as often as you do.
No matter what John says, don't try to outcrow
him,

'Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One Displacing himself in the mind of his son,

And detests the same faults in himself he'd neglected

When he sees them again in his child's glass reflected;

To love one another you're too like by half,

If he is a bull, you're a pretty stout calf,

And tear your own pasture for naught but to show What a nice pair of horns you're beginning to

grow.

"There are one or two things I should just like to hint,

For you don't often get the truth told you in print; The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; Though you ought to be free as the winds and the

waves,

You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;

Tho' you brag of your. New World, you don't half believe in it,

And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;
Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,
With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,
With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free,
And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,

Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,

Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass,

Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked glass, Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe

waist,

And makes herself wretched with transmarine

taste;

She loses her fresh country charm when she takes Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

"You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean;
The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship

tries

And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-
Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,
To which the dull current in hers is but mud;
Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,
In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she

rails,

And your shore will soon be in the nature of things Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings, Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif,

Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe. O, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he

"Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea; Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,

By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs, Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page, Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things make new,

To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,

Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks,

And become my new race of more practical Greeks.

Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't,

Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot."

Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic More pepper than brains, shrieked-" The man's a fanatic,

I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers;

But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason 't,

Palaver before condemnation's but decent,

So, through my humble person, Humanity begs
Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs."
But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth
As when ἤϊε νύκτι ἐοικώς, and so forth,

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And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,-.

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At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to't as any one else." "Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to

meet

With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete," Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, "The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss

Is only in taking a great busy nation

For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.-
But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I
flee to ?

She has such a penchant for bothering me too!
She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva ;
She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-
She's been travelling now, and will be worse than

ever;

One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be

Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea,

For a woman must surely see well, if she try,
The whole of whose being's a capital I:

She will take an old notion, and make it her own,
By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone,

Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;

And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.

There is one thing she owns in her own single right,

It is native and genuine-namely, her spite: Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose."

Here Miranda came up, and said,

you know

"Phœbus!

That the infinite Soul has its infinite woe,

As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul; I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,

To my Land's better life authors solely my own, Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,

Whose works sound a depth by Life's quiet unshaken,

Such as Shakspeare, for instance, the Bible, and

Bacon,

Not to mention my own works; Time's nadir is

fleet,

And, as for myself, I'm quite out of conceit,”—

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Quite out of conceit! I'm enchanted to hear it,"

Cried Apollo aside, "Who'd have thought she was near it?

To be sure one is apt to exhaust those commodities He uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is

As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings,

'I'm as much out of salt as Miranda's own writings,' (Which, as she in her own happy manner has said, Sound a depth, for 'tis one of the functions of

lead.)

She often has asked me if I could not find

A place somewhere near me that suited her mind;
I know but a single one vacant, which she,
With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T.
And it would not imply any pause or cessation
In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,—
She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses,
And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses.”

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