Oh a gentle heart
Is the better part
Of a lovely woman’s looks, O!
And I totter on the brink
Of love when I think,
When I think, when I think of Miss B——, O!
For a thousand girls
Have hair that curls,
And a sort of expressive face, O!
But it isn’t the hair
Nor the genteel air—
’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!
Ay, lasses are many
Without e’en a penny,
But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O!
Whom I’d sooner wed—
Yea, and sooner bed
Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!
No bee e’er sucked honey
From gold or silver money,
But he does from the lovely flower, O!
Then give me a spouse
Without fortune, land, or house,
And her charming self for a dower, O!
By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two years! I wrote it con amore and currente calamo. ’Tis yours now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send it down as “a song” for Harvardiana, for which I protested I would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I like it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is not finished yet. I wish it were.
The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to Kant.
“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C,
And I will wring my poem out of thee.
Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given
The thing for which my brains so long have striven.
. . . . . . . .
Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song,
Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”
The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of Woman’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:—
“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march,
Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch,
Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots,
To hobble round and pick up raw recruits,
And, able both to battle and to teach,
Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach.
Great conqueror of the English language, hail!
How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale
To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung
In Revolutions from a Scottish tongue!”
In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.