Yourn,
BIRDOFREDUM SAWIN.

No. II

MASON AND SLIDELL: A YANKEE IDYLL

TO THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

JAALAM, 6th Jan., 1862.

Gentlemen,--I was highly gratified by the insertion of a portion of my
letter in the last number of your valuable and entertaining Miscellany,
though in a type which rendered its substance inaccessible even to the
beautiful new spectacles presented to me by a Committee of the Parish on
New Year's Day. I trust that I was able to bear your very considerable
abridgment of my lucubrations with a spirit becoming a Christian. My
third granddaughter, Rebekah, aged fourteen years, and whom I have
trained to read slowly and with proper emphasis (a practice too much
neglected in our modern systems of education), read aloud to me the
excellent essay upon 'Old Age,' the author of which I cannot help
suspecting to be a young man who has never yet known what it was to have
snow (_canities morosa_) upon his own roof. _Dissolve frigus, large
super foco ligna reponens_, is a rule for the young, whose woodpile is
yet abundant for such cheerful lenitives. A good life behind him is the
best thing to keep an old man's shoulders from shivering at every
breath of sorrow or ill-fortune. But methinks it were easier for an old
man to feel the disadvantages of youth than the advantages of age. Of
these latter I reckon one of the chiefest to be this: that we attach a
less inordinate value to our own productions, and, distrusting daily
more and more our own wisdom (with the conceit whereof at twenty we wrap
ourselves away from knowledge as with a garment), do reconcile ourselves
with the wisdom of God. I could have wished, indeed, that room might
have been made for the residue of the anecdote relating to Deacon
Tinkham, which would not only have gratified a natural curiosity on the
part of the publick (as I have reason to know from several letters of
inquiry already received), but would also, as I think, have largely
increased the circulation of your Magazine in this town. _Nihil humani
alienum_, there is a curiosity about the affairs of our neighbors which
is not only pardonable, but even commendable. But I shall abide a more
fitting season.

As touching the following literary effort of Esquire Biglow, much might
be profitably said on the topick of Idyllick and Pastoral Poetry, and
concerning the proper distinctions to be made between them, from