men whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the
opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is
that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian
Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected
to homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and its
utterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions and
yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot be
uttered." If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights and
sounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vague
analogy between them and its internal experiences and longings. It
leaves the warm and comfortable fireside of actual knowledge and human
comprehension, and goes wailing and gibbering like a ghost about the
impassable doors of mystery:--

"It fain would be resolved
How things are done,
And who the tailor is
That works for the man I' the sun."

How shall we account for this marked tendency in the literature of a
shrewd, practical people? Is it that real life in New England lacks
those conditions of poetry and romance which age, reverence, and
superstition have gathered about it in the Old World? Is it that

"Ours are not Tempe's nor Arcadia's vales,"

but are more famous for growing Indian corn and potatoes, and the
manufacture of wooden ware and pedler notions, than for romantic
associations and legendary interest? That our huge, unshapely shingle
structures, blistering in the sun and glaring with windows, were
evidently never reared by the spell of pastoral harmonies, as the walls
of Thebes rose at the sound of the lyre of Amphion? That the habits of
our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp
and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of
speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of
Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very
awkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But the
Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at,
must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether
conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of
Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the
commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and y