ith no thought of publication. Daily instalments of
the poem were sent off, as soon as written, to a friend of the poet,
Mr. Charles F. Briggs, of New York, who found the lines so
irresistibly good, that he begged permission to hand them over to
Putnam's for publication. This, however, Mr. Lowell declined to do,
until he found that the repeated urging of his friend would not be
stayed. Then he consented to anonymous publication. The secret was
kept, until, as the author himself tells us, "several persons laid
claim to its authorship." No poem has been oftener quoted than the
fable. It is full of audacious things. The authors of the day, and
their peculiar characteristics (Lowell himself not being spared in the
least), are held up to admiring audiences with all their sins and
foibles exposed to the public gaze. It was intended to have "a sting
in his tale," this "frail, slender thing, rhymey-winged," and it had
it decidedly. Some of the authors lampooned took the matter up, in
downright sober earnest, and objected to the seat in the pillory which
they were forced to occupy unwillingly. But they forgave the satirist,
as the days went by, and they realized that, after all, the fun was
harmless, nobody was hurt actually, and all were treated alike by the
ready knife of the fabler. But what could they say to a man who thus
wrote of 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."

Apart from the humorous aspect of the fable, there is, certainly, a
good deal of sound criticism in the piece. It may be brief, it may be
inadequate, it may be blunt, but for all that it is truthful, and
decidedly just, as far as it goes. Bryant, who was called cold, took
umbrage at the portrait drawn of him. But his verse has all the cold
glitter of the Greek bards, despite the fact that he is America's
greatest poet of nature, and some of his songs are both sympathetic
and sweet, such as the "Lines to a Water-fowl," "The