Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/28

18 And he half felt that what in them was grace

Made the unlucky weakness of his race.

What powers he had he hardly cared to know,

But sauntered through the world as through a show,

A critic fine in his haphazard way,

A sort of mild La Bruyère on half-pay.

For comic weaknesses he had an eye

Keen as an acid for an alkali,

Yet you could feel, through his sardonic tone,

He loved them all, unless they were his own.

You might have called him, with his humorous twist,

A kind of human entomologist:

As these bring home, from every walk they take,

Their hat-crowns stuck with bugs of curious make,

So he filled all the lining of his head

With characters impaled and ticketed,

And had a cabinet behind his eyes

For all they caught of mortal oddities.

He might have been a poet,—many worse,—

But that he had, or feigned, contempt of verse,

Called it tattooing language, and held rhymes

The young world's lullaby of ruder times.

Bitter in words, too indolent for gall,

He satirized himself the first of all,

In men and their affairs could find no law,

And was the ill logic that he thought he saw.

Scratching a match to light his pipe anew,

With eyes half shut some musing whiffs he drew,

And thus began:—"I give you all my word,

I think this mock-Decameron absurd;

Boccaccio's garden! how bring that to pass

In our bleak clime save under double glass?

The moral east-wind of New-England life

Would snip its gay luxuriance like a knife;

These foreign plants are but half-hardy still,

Die on a south, and on a north wall chill;

Had we stayed Puritans! They had some heat,

(Though whence derived, I have my own conceit,)

But you have long ago raked up their fires;

Where they had faith, you 've ten sham-Gothic spires.

Why more exotics? Try your native vines,

And in some thousand years you may have wines;

Your present grapes are harsh, all pulps and skins.

And want traditions of ancestral bins

That saved for evenings round the polished board

Old lava-fires, the sun-steeped hillside's hoard;

Without a Past, you lack that southern wall

O'er which the vines of Poesy should crawl;

Still they 're your only hope; no midnight oil

Makes up for virtue wanting in the soil;

Manure them well and prune them; 't won't be France,

Nor Spain, nor Italy, but there 's your chance.