nd out whether his
baptismal 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