But, Jeremy, we live in a funny world, and even with our criminal code, and prison discipline, I fear me, the moral reformer has a vast work to do. The shades of right and wrong, as worked up in the woof of practical life, are not of colors which contrast very strongly. They form rather the figures of a kaleidoscope. Is there not a little gambling done, in the way of “specimens” in literature, as well as in “specimens” in copper? Do the samples shown as “inducements” always honestly represent the real article afterward put upon the purchaser? Oh! very nice, rigid and self-complacent moralist, “with good fat capon lined,” why are thy hands held up in such affected holy horror at thy brother, who has stumbled and fallen, “because he has done this thing;” when printed records of thy falsified pledges and assertions, fill the post-towns of the country, the Union over! The lie in type and upon record, is it less venal, because multiplied by thousands, than that by word, which palms upon the unsuspecting a sinking fancy stock! Let the canting, praying hypocrite, of all trades, go down into his own heart, and clear it of its “dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness,” before, with bastard honesty, he casts a stone at his most desperate brother.
Ah, Jeremy, is there not a thriving business done, by men professing to be respectable, by “The Suction and Pumping Process,” in most of the trades of life—even in the very honorable business of manufacturing and selling goods? Ay! in the thousand well dressed, painted living lies, that stare at you in the streets, and from behind counters, and impose upon the ignorant—is there no rascality? When goods are put upon the poor and ignorant hired girls at high prices—the remnants of shabby gentility—are the shopkeepers honest do you suppose? In the poisoned rum, that is sold for good (God defend us!) and which sends destitution, misery, and crime into the hovels of the poor—is there no weight of damnation, past finding out? Is every marble palace, with steeds prancing at the door, the monument of a good man’s well spent life; has every stone and carved niche been paid for by money honestly earned? Are the laces, and feathers, and gold and jewels, that flash upon us and glitter in the sun, all, always the well-earned rewards of honest and praiseworthy toil? Much of the money thus lavishly displayed, and on which an insolent pride fattens and corrupts, may it not be the legitimate reward of a sin that would taint the fingers of a thief? Hold up thy head, young brother, and keep thy heart pure; all is not lost! the courage to dare, the power and will to do are thine! Up! and against wrong and oppression of every shade, set thy face as a flint, and with conscious might and truth, press on! The world is before thee where to choose—it is thy battle-ground! Do nobly, and thou art man—meanly, a more creeping thing than a worm a upon whom every coward braggart will set his heel. Aye on! there is yet to come—thank God—a reckoning-day, of motives and of actions, when assumption shall be stript—deceit exposed—the hollow heart laid bare, and when the secret sin of pride and self-complacency, dragged from its hiding-place, shall be thrust, blazing into its face.
My dear Jeremy, there is a consolation in this—we shall see one of these times, every man’s motive for the acts he has committed revealed—whether it is only the poor devils cast down, forsaken, down-trodden and despised, that die in the ditch, who are damned; or whether he only is on his way to heaven—the sleek and lucky moralist who dozes over his wine—who thinks he can pave his way to heaven with ingots, however got, that shall be saved. That will be a sight worth seeing, Jeremy, for it will open the eyes of the Universe, and make all things even. We can afford to wait for even this, can we not? It will not be long.
G. R. G.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Poems. By Robert Browning, Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 2 vols. 12mo.
This edition of Browning is almost a facsimile of the beautiful London edition, published by Chapman & Hall, the only real difference between the two being that the American reprint costs less than half as much as the London original.
Browning, for the last four or five years, has been steadily advancing to fame; and having overcome by the pure strength of his genius all outward and some inward obstacles, is now widely recognized as a new force in English letters. Next to Tennyson, we know of hardly another English poet of the day who can be compared with him. He possesses striking excellences both of thought and diction, but he is so indisputably an originality, that he is compelled to create the taste which appreciates him. Like almost all the poets of the new school, he is “high contemplative,” scorns rather than courts the means of popularity, and is more pleased by conquering one reader than by enticing many. In his distaste for the stereotyped diction and ideas of English poetry, he is apt to go to the opposite extreme of obscurity. There is a beautiful willfulness, a delicious bit of the devil, in him; accordingly many of his verses seem thrown off in an imaginary boxing match with professors of square-toed rhetoric and critics of the old school. This independence and pugnacity are sometimes carried to that extreme of recklessness, which indicates self-conceit and supercilious arrogance, rather than a wrestling with the difficulties of expression. “Sordello,” a poem which the author has now suppressed, was a tangled mass of half-formed thoughts and half-clutched sentiments, tottering dizzily on the vanishing points of meaning; and the publication of such a piece of elaborate worthlessness was an insult to public intelligence which would have consigned to deserved damnation, any poet who did not possess sufficient genius to retrieve his reputation.