mal name was Franklin, or Francis, or
simply Frank, for I think children are sometimes christened with this
abbreviated name. But it is too much in the style of Cowper's unpleasant
acquaintance:

"The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumping on your back
How he esteems your merit."

I should not like to hear our past chief magistrates spoken of as
Jack Adams or Jim Madison, and it would have been only as a political
partisan that I should have reconciled myself to "Tom" Jefferson. So,
in spite of "Ben" Jonson, "Tom" Moore, and "Jack" Sheppard, I prefer to
speak of a fellow-citizen already venerable by his years, entitled to
respect by useful services to his country, and recognized by many as
the prophet of a new poetical dispensation, with the customary title
of adults rather than by the free and easy school-boy abbreviation with
which he introduced himself many years ago to the public. As for his
rhapsodies, Number Seven, our "cracked Teacup," says they sound to him
like "fugues played on a big organ which has been struck by lightning."
So far as concerns literary independence, if we understand by that term
the getting rid of our subjection to British criticism, such as it was
in the days when the question was asked, "Who reads an American book?"
we may consider it pretty well established. If it means dispensing with
punctuation, coining words at will, self-revelation unrestrained by a
sense of what is decorous, declamations in which everything is glorified
without being idealized, "poetry" in which the reader must make the
rhythms which the poet has not made for him, then I think we had better
continue literary colonists. I shrink from a lawless independence to
which all the virile energy and trampling audacity of Mr. Whitman fail
to reconcile me. But there is room for everybody and everything in our
huge hemisphere. Young America is like a three-year-old colt with his
saddle and bridle just taken off. The first thing he wants to do is to
roll. He is a droll object, sprawling in the grass with his four hoofs
in the air; but he likes it, and it won't harm us. So let him roll,--let
him roll.

Of all The Teacups around our table, Number Five is the one who is the
object of the greatest interest. Everybody wants to be her friend, and
she has room enough in her hospitable nature to find a place for every
one who is worthy of the privilege. The difficulty is that it is so hard
to be her frien