Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By James RussellLowell

348 From “A Fable for Critics”

TO HIS COUNTRYMEN

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;

Though 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.

ON HIMSELF

There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,

He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,

But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders,

The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching

Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching;

His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,

But he ’d rather by half make a drum of the shell,

And rattle away till he ’s old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.