, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires'
are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he
created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny in his
prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in
this present year of grace,--passions that,

'Like aconite, where'er they spread, they kill.'

He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the
altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their
in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been
distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and
threatening the very fane itself with fire. Mere words will never strike
him dumb. He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the
ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by
the roadside. Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and
earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must
now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O'Phace, Esquire, lest some
Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.

'Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers,
Our four fathers fetched with 'em over the billers,
Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on,
Wile to slav'ry, invasion an' debt they were swept on,
Wile our destiny higher an' higher kep mountin'
(Though I guess folks'll stare wen she hands her account in).
Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em,
They won't hev so much ez a feather left in em.'

Not less wonderful than his penetration into political affairs is
Lowell's command of the pure Yankee dialect. His knowledge of it is
perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its
own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody
in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is,
however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who
venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have
descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads
below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and
lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very
Devil of Delphos might have demurred. These are the dapper gentlemen,
who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner's
Waltzes, would judge every man's intellect by the measure of their own.
Know, oh dwarfed desc