University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

BY REV. C. CHAUNCEY BURR.

Old Play.

A pretty story enough is related of the wild boy of Newstead Abbey, who, by
the death of the grandson of an old man at Corsica, was left with the title of lord.
On hearing of this, George ran up to his mother and asked if she perceived any
difference in him since he was made lord, as he could perceive none in himself.
The next morning, when his name was called out in school, it came with the title
of Dominus prefixed to it. Unable to give the usual answer, “adsum,” he stood
abashed before the comic gaze of his schoolfellows, and at last burst into tears.
But what could the title of Dominus do for that talismanic genius, slumbering
there in the soul of young Byron? It is like planting May-weeds round Trajan's
column. I take the title of Genius to be altogether higher than this “Dominus.”
That title came down fresh out of Heaven. In that high heraldry, it means somewhat
greater than these poor things we call lords, cabinets, kings, or what else
belongs to that accident of birth or fortune.

The very name Genius signifieth original, unacquired gifts, born gifts: from
the Latin of “gignor” to be born; or older still, from the Greek of “gennuo,”
to generate, to produce. Hence there is a pleonasm in the fashionable editorial
phrase “original genius.” Genius is originality. Talent is the fruit of industry:
Genius of birth. The one judges, combines, arranges, compares; the other produces,
invents. A man of talents may be a good historian, a commentator, a grammarian;
only a man of genius can be a poet, a painter, or statuary.

Genius is greater than talent. Which do we count most worthy of admiration,
the Jenisca which receives seventy tributary rivers to make up its own current,
or the mightier Nile, flowing from an unknown source receiving to its waters but
eleven nameless streams, and at length pouring itself out through seven awful
mouths into the astonished ocean? Not unlike this is Genius; a strange wild
current, bursting up from invisible fountains in the man; rushing on swift, unresting,

copious, a broad right royal river, into the `sea of life and love unknown,
without a bottom and without a shore.' All other men's hopes and fears, tears
and smiles float away like bubbles on that tide. After all, the history of the
world is but a record of the few great men that have been here. In one view at
least I see it thus. In history the mass are nothing, whatever great sacred thing
they may be in the ever toiling fact of existence. They have no name on earth
beyond their breathing hour. The poetry, chivalry, science of the world, what
have we had to do with these, except to sing the songs, fight the battles, and read
the discoveries of the great masters?

And then, in this our time, we hear enough of pity, sighs, and very pious condolence
for the fate of genius. We are told there is so much of it which could
never make itself known, pent up in some cobbler's brain, or cordwainer's shop,
held down by poverty, circumstances; and its great speech hushed in the coarse
din of toil. Poor Genius to wear itself out hewing wood, drawing water, it may
be in measuring tape and bobbin; and then to sink down so ingloriously into the
cold grave at last, and be covered up very much like a dog! Ah, it is very melancholy
to see this glorious God-gift of genius creeping through life, and creeping
out of it again, at such a poor funeral tune. All this will do very well to tickle
the ears of bobbin measurers and counter jumpers: but it is false, nevertheless.
No genius ever went through life thus.

Look at that boy at Stratford-on-Avon! what of him? A very dirty, obscure,
uninteresting looking lad; the rascally little deer-stealer of his native village—
who cares for him? He will teach you to care for him. He will teach this
whole world to be still, that he may speak to it.

Shakspeare is in him! The immortal fires of Genius are there, deep down in
the soul of that despised and ragged deer-stealer, and his name shall be Shakspeare
ringing in all the earth.

Poverty has no power upon a soul like that. What can circumstances do for
it? It is greater than circumstances.

Look at Mohammed; born in the desert, coming up to manhood without a
book, and without a teacher. But will he submit to circumstances, to die and be
forgotten in that sandy solitude? Never; there is genius in him; and that can as
well be heard from the rocks of Mount Hara as from the vales of Piedmont.

They tell me this man is an impostor. It may be so: but then his imposture
(if you will commit so great a wrong upon an honest fanatic) has done more for
a greater number of the human race than the truth of any other man born within
these twelve centuries. His awful “No by alla” has shook a thousand idols into
dust. His holy “ALLA ACBAR! ALLA ACBAR!” has built, in the wild waste of Arab
hearts, a shrine where God is worshipped.

This world has not yet forgotten Robert Burns; nor will it while the stars shine—
that noble peasant, who came out from behind his plough, on the mountain's

side, and stood with brow unabashed in the presence of royal splendor, for he felt
that

And defying the circumstances of writing in the provincial dialect of a rude
northern land, still made himself the immortal representative of a nation's intellect.
It will be a long time before circumstances will make a Robert Burns. Circumstances
have made small men enough: but great men make circumstances.

What circumstances called out “Rare old Ben Jonson”—rough, hardy, terrible
old Ben Jonson, from whose wild elegant muse even Milton caught inspiration?
Why the circumstances that were polite enough to call this man out were those
of a regularly bred brick-layer, with poverty enough to make life a desperate tug
withal for him. Make what you will of the circumstances: enough for me that
he came out, and wrote “Alchemist,” “Volpone,” and others by which the world
will never forget the rugged old bard and wit of Shakspeare's time.

Who called out Franklin, that son of the soap-boiler? Doubtless those envious
friends who ridiculed the first efforts of his genius. Peradventure those three
rolls of baker's bread he eat in the streets of Philadelphia to save himself from
starvation. No, there is genius in that homeless, straggling boy; and when that
is spoken we have said that he will go out himself: when that is told it is revealed
that philosophy is to appear in the sky of Columbia. Soap-boiling, starvation,
or what you please, that boy will some day come out and snatch the lightnings
from the heaven, to weave himself a fame less perishable than the ancient
thunderer of Olympus.

How came John Keats out, that melancholy youth of whom Shelly was proud
to sing

Whose name is embalmed by his own “Endymion,” where he sings in tones of
deathless rapture
The circumstance attending him was a birth at a livery-stable in Moorfields. No
matter: there was genius in this poor child of the livery-stable too, and he has
written “Hyperion,” and the “Eve of St. Agnes.” The soul that has Hyperion
and the Eve of St. Agnes in its core is as well born in a stable as a palace. That
soul, once born, defies all circumstances; will work its way through all poverty
and all scorn, into immortality.

There is a kind of men in this world that occasions make: these are plenty
enough too, such as they are. We call them talented—men of capacity; because

they can judge accurately, combine and compare with facility, write good
histories, good dictionaries— be learned compilers of other men's thoughts. Altogether
unlike this is genius. That will seldom stop to write histories. Its task,
rather, is to create the events out of which all histories are written. Its thoughts
spring out of itself, as Minerva from the head of Jupiter: thoughts still, and vast,
and solemn, like the midnight of the stars—thoughts that rise and set like suns—
that blaze, and burn, and avalanche along the world until their mighty roar blends
with the music of eternity.

Go back, if you will, after those men, Tasso, Alfieri, Dante, Petrarch, Raphael,
Camoens, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Marlowe, Congreve, Klopstock,
Correggio, and find also the circumstance that made them. As well may you attempt
to dig the soul out of a poem with spades and pickaxes, or measure the heavens
with yard-sticks, as to seek after these souls among the things called circumstances.

Somehow those men continually remind us of the author of these Legends. He
seems to have been born with that same restless, heaving, fiery heart; the wild,
earnest, truthful sincerity withal, that has marked Genius in all ages. In the earliest
boyhood, thrown upon his own resources—cheated by pious villains—buffetted
by poverty—his soul at length kindles up under the cold winds that blow upon it,
into flames that flash evermore in the face of the world. He was a sickly intense
kind of a boy, like poor Dante, perpetually haunted by an idea of his own mortality.
No one could see in him the Author of the most entertaining and truthful
book, on the most interesting portion of American History. No one could discover
how he, with his slender girlish frame, should one day stand so upright and
sullen before heaven and earth, flinging such charges and wrongs in the face of
this lying social state of the world—this vast machine, called civilization, out of
which Mammon grinds blood, and coins it drop by drop into gold. It is plain
enough that his eye caught first on this black side of the picture. The thought
poured gall into him; it whipt his soul up into a premature manhood. The
dwarfed, shrivelled, wretched masses every where lay stretched out before his imagination
as so many millions of hunger-throats, gurgling in death-agonies
shrieking upwards through the crannies of their lazar-house of woe, for
pity, for knowledge, for guidance, until despair quivers in his face, and burns
every fibre of his soul into action. All these millions of wrongs, seen in corporations,
in vast idle wealth, in bankrupt speculation, in genteel prostitution,
in barbarous theologies and divinity shambles, mount his heart, and shriek
through his brain, in many a headlong torrent of scorn, and bitterness, and woe.
The editors (I may not say critics) called it writing immoral books. He thought
it was tearing off the mantle from this most seeming arch-angel, to lay bare the
cloven foot that sneaked beneath it. He thought it was laying the axe at the root

of the tree. He thought with Alexander Pope, that vice to be hated need but to
be seen. There was truth in this too; though it was not all truth.

There are such writers as deify lust, exalt harlotry into queenly poesy, and, as
we may say, sing the devil's tunes with such bursts of God's music between whiles,
that our nicest ears shall hardly tell which is from above, or which from beneath.

But I think no good fair critic will place Mr. Lippard in the list of these writers.
He never speaks praisingly of any lust; but far otherwise. There is indeed an unrelenting
bitterness, nay, an almost savage ferociousness in his manner of stripping
vice to its bare bones. Of all his writings, however, I believe the “Quaker
City is the only book of his that has fallen under this ban of being immoral. For
one I could never see into the strict justice of the charge. Undoubtedly it is a
book to be censured by men of cold and chastised fancy, who dwell only in the
little harmless abstractions of artificial life. They will blame the character of
“Devil Bug;” and so do we: but the real question with the just and wise critic
is, whether society has Devil Bugs in it; and has our author drawn such a
character truly to the life? I must hold him a sad kind of a critic who expects a
devil bug, in a place like Monk Hall, to talk like the amiable St. John in his Isle
of Patmos. Was it not Lord Byron who said he could not, for the life of him,
make the devil talk like a clergyman? I think, perhaps, the noble lord may have
paid the profession an undeserved compliment; but the critic, notwithstanding,
may get a morsel from his civility. The novelist's task, with this Quaker City,
was not to show what it ought to be, but rather what it is. He came not to lie
—to praise a skulking servility, an insane worship of wealth, to christianize our
wine-buts, and call universal libertinism by the genteeler name of gallantry; but
rather with a thunderous no against all quackeries, pretensions, and sins in high
places. Why should the novelist be held down with an obligation to truckle to
tithe mongers? What is all pious mummery to him, who sees that the white-washed
worshippers are sordid and selfish, and mean—hard and strong upon the
weak, exacting the uttermest farthing of hopeless penury—clutching with avaricious
insanity at the little metal dollar while the immortal man is left, with bloody
muscles, and a broken heart, to die like a dog upon his straw! What is all the
tragi-comic face acting to him, upon whose soul already flash the hot fever-flames,
from the depraved and groaning heart of humanity? What has he to do
with all these conventional lies, but to hurry them off to death and doom, under
the tread and crash of his most truthful exposure? It were as just to hold the
health officer, who advertises a neighborhood as infected with contagion, responsible
for the ravages of death there, as to blame the novelist for his faithful exposure
of the secret heart of society. Nor has society or true religion any thing to fear
from the truthful portraiture of a bad character in a romance. No preacher, in
this Philadelphia, can by any anathemas from his pulpit, make Devil Bugs appear
half so odious, as they already appear in the pages of the “Quaker City.” Let

the miser, the libertine, the knave read that dream of Devil Bug, and listen to the
mad horrid music of that “Orchestra of hell,” and then say what part of it does
not cut through his soul like a knife? On which page of the “Quaker City” is
lust and falsehood eulogized? No, the fault of this book is not laxity of morals.
It rather visits the seducer and all transgression with too severe and merciless a
punishment. Every page shrieks with unrelenting vengeance against the doer
of wrong, whether he be merchant, banker, good pious parson, or clerk, who debanches
on his master's money.

It is not a thing strange to me that the Rev. Dr. Pynes, and Fitz-Cowles should
cry out against such a book. It is very much such a thing to them as the rope to
the felon's neck. Ever since I have seen how this book has agitated the tender
conscience of society—ever since I have heard the groans of the press about it, I
have felt convinced that its sin is its truth. Had it been false it would have died
from the press. Without great truth, and great literary merit, it could not have
lived to go through these twenty editions in the little space of three years.

The author, who succeeds like that, can well enough afford to forgive the critics.
He must content himself to be sufficiently abused to give a generous variety to
what of life there is for him. Ignorance will grin, and bigotry make faces, as
puppy dogs in the streets bark at the man who walks faster than the rest. But
never mind, if so that he keep faithfully on, he shall make the ears of bigotry, and
what else opposes him, tingle again. Not any genius will ever be silenced by the
clamor of the fool, who would put it in strait-jackets, make it say mass, subscribe
to thirty-nine articles, read diciplines and confessions of faith, and work all day
long in the dull tread-mill of the schools: never. It will leave all creed mongers
and lilliputs, like so many chattering skeletons, to dig away in the scum and
spawn of a thousand years, that lie rotting upon the dead bosom of the past: a
mystic hand writing gleams there upon the solid dome of heaven; genius will go
on to translate the fire-ciphers; dig who will after the grave clothes of the dead
yesterdays. His task is not to write immoral books neither: but to hold up in the
face of the world, a picture of what life is. If gross and sensual men can see in
this picture only the gross characters there, whose fault is that? Would you have
a painter who is sent to sketch pandemonium, steal a picture of paradise, and call
that the metropolis of hell? The devils might enjoy the compliment of seeing
their faces in paradise; but what would the angels say! Nay what would the critics
say of the skill and truth of such a painter. Why then by a vanity and falsehood
not less ridiculous do you wish the novelist, who paints a great, proud, corrupt,
mammon-worshipping city to give you a picture only of saints and apostles? His
own soul would smite him in the face evermore when he had prostituted his pen
to such lying. Such writers are plenty enough who truckle to the vanity of fops
and wealth-mongers. Their books are plenty enough too, on their publishers
shelves, where they lie in mould and cob-webs, looked into only by the moths that

eat them. “No false man ever got a deliverance eloquent enough to captivate a
single heart. His thoughts are muffled like a dead bell, and instead of the clear
distinct vibrations which make the heavens ring, there is but the dumb underbreath
which every body knows to be artificial and unnatural.”

Words with souls in them is what we want: words that go out like cannon
balls against all falsity in church or state. Rigid, unsparing, outspeaking truthfulness—rough
and rugged as a northern land-scape—that is what we want. Your
novelists who would feed us on sugar-plums; or amuse us by a harmless cock-robin
and puss-in-boots literature, may for aught we know have a mission to the
nurseries, with the cats and cradles; but not any mission to manhood. Neither in
literature, nor in politics, nor in morals, nor in philosophy, nor in religion did such
writers ever effect a revolution for good or evil. For revolutions we want Luthers,
who will throw their ink-stands at the devil's head, and go to Leipzig though it
rain Duke Georges for nine days continually. And these true earnest kind of
men are the only records that Time leaves behind him. But your great mass, of
what are called “moral writers,” your pious pretenders, and fashion-worshippers,
your effeminate eulogizers of genteel fools, and scheming bigots—these will
perish and rot away, like the flies of the summer shambles. Not thus will it be
with the men, who, with words of fire, have depicted your sins: cry out as you
will against them, brand them with whatever anathema—their writings are the
coin and currency of truth, stamped with its image and superscription, so that they
will last forever. What has the sneer of the critics done against the “Quaker
City!” twenty editions answer. It is better to ask what has the “Quaker City”
done to the critics? Let a paragraph or two from the book itself answer.

“Devil Bug was silent. The shouts of the revelers in the adjoining cellar grew
more loud and uproarious, yet he heeded them not. Deep in the heart of this
monster, like a flower blooming from the very corruption of the grave, the memory
of that fair young girl, who eighteen years ago, had sought the shelter of Monk-Hall,
lay hidden, fast entwined around the life-cords of his deformed soul.

“Oh, tell us, ye who in the hours of infancy have laid upon a mother's bosom,
who have basked in a father's smile, who have had wealth to bring you comfort,
luxury, and a home—who have sunned in the light of religion, as you grew towards
manhood, and been warmed into intellectual life by the blessing of education;
Oh, tell us, ye who with all these gifts and mercies flung around you by the hand
of God, have after all refused his laws, and rotted in your very lives, with the foul
pollution of libertinism and lust; tell us, who shall find most mercy at the bar of
avenging justice—you, with your prostituted talents, gathering round your guilty
souls, so many witnesses of your utter degradation—or Devil-Bug, door-keeper of
Monk-Hall, in all his monstrous deformity of body and intellect, yet with one redeeming
memory, gleaming like a star from the chaos of his mind!” * * *

“And this is the great Quaker City, which every Sunday lifts its demure face to

Heaven, and, with church-burning, Girard-College, and Bank-robbery, hanging
around its skirts, tells Almighty God, that it has sent missionaries to the isles of
the sea, to the Hindoo, the Turk, and the Hottentot; that it feels for the spiritual
wants of the far-off nations to an extent that cannot be measured by words, while
it has not one single throb of pity for the poor, who starve, rot, and die, within its
very eye-sight!”

That is plain talk enough. There is a kind of heroism, we may say soldierly
bravery in such writing, that makes cowards tremble again. Hypocrites will not
like it, neither. What should cowards, hypocrites and bigots do but hate a book
that continually thunders in their ears such words as these—“Bribery sits on the
judicial bench, and a licentious mob administers justice with the knife and the
torch. In the pulpit crouches grim Superstition, preaching a God, whose mercy is
one incarnate threat, whose beneficence is written on the grave-stone of a wrecked
world!”

Or, if you will, let us hear Luke Harvey rail a little—“Justice in the Quaker
City! Suppose the Almighty God should hold a court one day, and try the justice
of the Quaker City, by his impartial law! What a band of witnesses would come
thronging to that solemn bar; come into court, old Stephen Girard, come into court
with your will in hand—that will which bequeathed your enormous wealth to the
white male orphans of the past, the present of generations yet unborn; come into
court and testify! What say you of Quaker City justice? Is your College built?
Has a single orphan been clothed, or educated at your expense, or with your money?
Come into court, widows and orphans, beggared by the hands of bank directors—come
into court in your rags and misery; come and testify: What think
you of justice, as she holds the scales in Philadelphia! Come into court Religion,
and point to your churches in ruins! Come into court, Humanity, and point to the
blackened ashes of the Asylum, the School-house and the Hall!”

There are some crumbs that will be found hard eating enough for the seducer
also.

“In some old book of mysticism and superstition, I have read this wild legend,
which mingling as it does the terrible with the grotesque, has still its meaning and
its moral.

“In the sky, far, far above the earth—so the legend runs—there hangs an Awful
Bell, invisible to mortal eye, which angel hands alone may toll, which is never
tolled save when the Unpardonable sin is committed on earth, and then its judgment
peal rings out like the blast of the archangel's trumpet, breaking on the ear
of the Criminal, and on his ear alone, with a sound that freezes his blood with
horror. The peal of the bell, hung in the azure depths of space, announces to the
Guilty one, that he is an outcast from God's mercy forever that his Crime can
never be pardoned; while the throne of the Eternal endures; that in the hour of
Death, his soul will be darkened by the hopeless prospect of an eternity of wo;

wo without limit, despair without hope; the torture of the never-dying worm, and
the unquenchable flame, forever, and forever.

“Reader! Did the sound of the judgment bell, pealing with one awful toll, from
the invisible air, break over the soul of the Libertine, as in darkness and in silence,
he stood shuddering over the victim of his Crime?

“If in the books of the Last Day there should be found written down but One
unpardonable crime, that crime will be known as the foul wrong, accomplished in
the gaudy Rose Chamber of Monk-hall, by the wretch who now stood trembling
in the darkness of the place, while his victim lay senseless at his feet.”

No doubt a large book, crowded full of this kind of sentiment, will be found very
immoral to the moral feelings of the common knaves, and libertines of a great
city. No doubt that the more refined sensualists, the Dr. Pynes and patent gospelers,
in their libidinous taste, will pass by all these scorching rebukes, and fasten
on the voluptuous picture of Dora Livingston's bosom.

No doubt the hypocrite, the swindler, the monied knave, the Catholic-hater, the
heathen-saver, and the despiser of the poor at home, will find enough to condemn
in these pages. No doubt that fat and festered profligacy in the senate, the bench,
the pulpit and the bar will cry out under the terrible lash of indignant and insulted
genius pleading with the injured masses to arise and resent their wrongs. The
work of genius would indeed go for naught if profligacy did not cry out. But why
need good honest men take up the bigot's watch-word of alarm! Mr. Lippard has
never once aimed his envenomed shaft at any good brave man, in any profession or
post of life. There is indeed somewhat of idolatry in the extravagant worship
which he pays, both in his writings and private life, to all true great men. His
scorn has been directed at none but the cunning knaves, who have smuggled themselves
into professions and posts of honor, very much as lizards may crawl into the
lion's den, and set up to be lions too.

These have found poor mercy at his hands. Let us make room in this place for
one more extract.

“The State House clock had just struck eight, when amid the gay crowds that
thronged Chesnut Street, might be discerned one poor wan-faced man, who strode
sadly up and down the pavement in front of a jeweller's window. The night was
bitter cold, but a tattered round-about and patched trowsers, constituted his scanty
apparel. He had not been shaven for several days, and a thick beard gave a wild
appearance to his lank jaws and compressed lips. His face was pale as a mortcloth,
but his eye shone with that clear wild light that once seen can never be
forgotten. There was Famine in the unnatural gleam of that eye. His much-worn
hat was thrown back from his pale forehead, and there, in the lines of that
frowning brow you might read the full volume of wrong and want, which the oppressors
of this world write on the faces of the poor.

“Up and down the cold pavement he strode. He looked from side to side for a

glance of pity. There was no humanity in the eyes that met his gaze. Fashionable
Dames going to the Opera, Merchants in broad-cloth returning from the
counting-house, Bank Directors hurrying to their homes, godly preachers wending
to their Churches, their faces full of sobriety and their hearts burning with enmity
to the Pope of Rome: These all were there, on that crowded pavement. But
pity for the Poor man, who with Famine written on his forehead and blazing from
his eyes, strode up and down, in front of the Jeweller's gaudy window? Not one
solitary throb!

“No bread, no fire,” muttered the Mechanic as he looked to the sky with a
dark scowl on his brow. “No bread, no fire for two whole days. I can bear it,
but—God! My child, my child!”

With the tattered cuff of his coat sleeve, he wiped away a salt tear from his
cheek.

“God!” he fiercely muttered between his set teeth. “Is there a God? Is he
just? Then why have these people fine clothes and warm homes, when I, I, with
honest hands, have no bread to eat, no fire to warm me?”

Your pardon, pious people, your pardon for the blasphemy of this starving
wretch! Starvation you know is a grim sceptic, a very Infidel, a doubter and a
scoffer!

“Two days without bread or fire!” he muttered and strode wearily along the
street. Suddenly a half-muttered cry of delight escaped from his lips. A splendid
carriage, drawn by two blood horses, with a coat of arms gleaming on its panels,
met his gaze. It was the work of an instant for the Mechanic to spring up behind
this carriage, while a smiling-faced elderly gentleman sat alone by himself within.
And away the horses dashed, until they reached a large mansion in one of
the most aristocratic squares of the city. The smiling-faced elderly gentleman
came out of the carriage, and after telling James, the coachman, to be very careful
of the horses, he took his night-key from his pocket, and entered the mansion.

“He failed three days ago,” said the Mechanic, glancing at the mansion with a
grim smile, as he leapt down from the coach. “The Bank of which he is President
broke a fortnight since! Ha, ha!”

And with a hollow laugh he pointed to the retreating coach and then to the
mansion, from whose curtained windows the blaze of lights flashed out upon the
street.

“He is the President of the Bank that broke, and yet has his coach and horses,
his house, his servants and his wines. I had six hundred dollars in that Bank,
and yet have not a crust of bread to eat. I 'spose this must be what they call
justice!”

And with that same mocking laugh he strode up the marble steps of the Bank
President's Palace.

“I will make another effort,” he whispered. “And if that fails—Ha! God

will take care of my child. As for myself—ha! ha! I'spose the over-seers of the
Poor will bury me!”

The door of the Bank President's Palace was ajar. The Mechanic pushed it
open and entered. A ruddy glow of light streamed through the parlor door-way
into the hall. Walking boldly forward, the Mechanic paused at the door and
looked in. Oh, such fine furniture, a splendid glass above the mantel, ottomans,
a sofa, a gorgeous carpet, and silk curtains drooping along from the windows—
magnificent furniture!

“And he is the President of the Broken Bank.”

Mr. Job Joneson, the President of the Bank which had just failed for only one
million dollars, sate writing at a table in the centre of that gorgeous parlor. He
was a pleasant man, with a round face and small eyes, a short neck and a white
cravat, corpulent paunch and a showy broad-cloth coat. Altogether Job Joneson,
Esq. was one of your good citizens, who subscribe large sums to tract societies,
and sport velvet-cushioned pews in church. He did not perceive the entrance of
the Mechanic, but having taken his seat in a hurry, was making some memorands
in his note book by the light of the astral lamp.

“Twenty dollars to the Society for promoting Bible Christianity at Rome,”
thus he soliloquized. “Good idea, that. Be in all the Patent-Gospel papers.
Two hundred dollars for jewelry; Mrs. Joneson is very extravagant. Fifty
dollars for furniture broken by my son Robert who is now at College. Bad boy
that! One thousand dollars for a piano, grand piano for my daughter Corinne

—Ha! Hum! Who's there? What do you want?”

The Mechanic advanced, and taking off his hat, approached the table. It was
a fine contrast; the unshaven Mechanic, and the Bank President; on this side of
the table rags and want, on that side, broadcloth and plenty; here a face with
Famine written on its every line; there a visage redolent of venison steaks and
turtle soup.

“Your business, Sir?”

“Do you not know me, Mr. Joneson? I am John Davis.”

“Indeed! You shingled a house for me last summer. Why you are sadly
changed!”

The lip of the Mechanic trembled.

“I was a little better-looking last summer, I believe,” he said, “But Mr. Joneson,
I have called upon you in order to ascertain, whether there is any hope of
my ever getting any portion of my money from the * * * * * Bank?”

“Not one cent!” said the Bank President, taking out his watch and playing
with the seals.

“I worked very hard for that money, Mr. Joneson. I've frozen in the winter's
chill, and broiled in the summer's heat for that money, Mr. Joneson.”

“My dear fellow, you talk to me as if I could help it,” said Mr. Joneson,
gazing intently upon the motto engraven on his seal, `Up with the Bible.'

“And now Mr. Joneson, I am without work; my money is gone,” continued
John Davis, speaking in a low tone that God's angels could not listen to without
tears, “My child lays at the point of death,—”

“How can I help that, my good fellow? I am sorry that your child is sick
—but can I help it?” said the Bank President in the tone of withering politeness.

“I have neither bread nor medicine to give her,” said Davis as his grey eye
blazed with a strange light. “There has been no fire in her room for two
days—”

“Get work,” said the Bank President, in a short decided tone.

“Where?” And Davis extended his lean hands, while a quiet look of despair
stamped every line of his countenance.

“Anywhere! Everywhere! You don't mean to say that an able-bodied man
like you can't get work in this enlightened city of Philadelphia? Pshaw!”

“I have tried to get work for two long weeks, and am now without a crust of
bread!” And John gazed steadily in Joneson's face.

“Well then, where's your credit? You don't mean to say that an industrious
mechanic like you are, or ought to be, can't obtain credit in this enterprizing city
of Philadelphia?”

“There is no imprisonment for debt,” said John with a sickly smile. “No
poor man gets `trust' now-a-days.”

“Well, my poor fellow, I am sorry for you, sorry that our Bank failed to meet
its liabilities, sorry that you invested your little money in it, very sorry! But
d'ye see? I have an engagement, and must go.”

The corpulent Bank President rose from his seat, inserted his watch in its fob,
put on his great coat, and moved toward the door.

Davis stood as if rooted to that gorgeous carpet. He made an effort to speak
but his tongue produced but a hollow sound. Then his lip trembled, and his
quivering fingers were pressed nervously against his breast.

“Come,my fellow, I pity your case, but I can't help it. There is a meeting of
the Patent-Gospel Association to-night, and I must go. You see my fellow, the
Pope of Rome must be put down, and I must go an' help do it.”

Davis advanced toward the corpulent Bank President.

“Look here, Mr. Joneson,” he said in that husky whisper, which speaks from
the thin lips of want. “My hands are hardened to bone by work. Look at these
fingers. D'ye see how cramped and crooked they are? Well, Mr. Joneson, for
six long years have I slaved for that six hundred dollars. And why? Because I
wanted to give my wife a home in our old age, because I wished to give some
schoolin' to my child. This money, Mr. Joneson, I placed in your hands last
summer. You said you'd invest it in stock, and now, now, Sir, my wife has been

dead a month, my child lies on her dyin' bed without bread to eat, or a drop of
medicine to still a single death-pain. An' I come to you, and ask you for my
money, an' you tell me that the Bank is broke! Now, Mr. Joneson, what I want
to ask you is this—”

His voice trembled, and he raised his hands to his eyes for a single instant.

“Will you lend me some money to buy some wood and some bread?”

“Why Davis, really you are too hard for me,” said the round-faced Joneson,
moving a step nearer to the threshhold. There was a supercilious curl about his
fat lip, and a sleepy contempt about his leaden eyes.

“Will you,” cried Davis, his voice rising into a whispered shriek, “Will you
lend me one dollar?”

“Davis, Davis, you're too hard for me,” said the Bank President, jingling the
silver in his pocket with his gouty hands. “The fact is, were I to listen to all
such appeals to my feelings, I would be a beggar to-morrow—”

He strode quickly over the threshhold as he spoke.

“John,” he cried to the servant who was passing through the hall, “If anybody
calls for me, you can say that I have gone to the special meeting of
the American Patent-Gospel Association. And look ye,John, tell James to have
the coach ready by twelve to-night: one of the Directors gives a party, and I
must be there; and when this person goes out, you can put down the dead-latch.”

Having thus spoken, the Bank President walked quietly to the front door of the
mansion, and in a moment was passing along the crowded street. John Davis
stood in the centre of that gorgeous parlor, silent and motionless as a figure carved
out of solid rock.

“Come, Mister, as the gentleman's gone, I'spose you may as well tortle!” said
a harsh voice. John Davis looked up, and beheld a fat-faced servant in livery,
motioning him toward the front door.

Without picking his hat from the carpet, John walked slowly from the house.

Meanwhile Job Joneson, Esq. passing with a dignified waddle through the
crowded street, reached the corner of Sixth and Chesnut streets, where the outline
of the State House arose into the clear, cold, star-lit sky.

A hand was laid gently on his shoulder. Joneson turning quickly round, beheld
a man of some thirty years, whose slovenly dress and red nose betrayed his
profession. He was a tip-staff of one of the Courts of Justice.

“Beg pardon, Sir, your name Joneson, Sir? There is a case to be tried in
Court to-morrow, and you are summoned to appear as a witness. Here's the
Subpœna—”

Joneson reached forth his hand to grasp the paper, when the figure of John
Davis strode quietly between him and the tip-staff.

“And I,” shrieked a voice, wild and broken, yet horrible in its slightest tones,

“And I have a summons for you, also!” The Bank President made an involuntary
start as the glare of those maniac eyes flashed upon him. “I subpœna you,
you Job Joneson, to appear at the Bar of Almighty God before day-break to-morrow!”

And he raised one thin hand to Heaven while the other rested upon the Bank
President's shoulder. Joneson shrunk from that touch—it was like hot lead on
the bare skin!

“I will be there!” whispered Davis. “There!” And he waved his thin
hands towards the stars. “At the Bar of God Almighty before day-break to
morrow!”

The Bank President raised his hands to his eyes with an involuntary gesture.
When he again looked around, the maniac was gone.”

At his leisure, the reader must finish this terrible lesson. He will see how the
awful summons of the mad mechanic was re-echoed also by the voice of God—
“before day break to-morrow!” He will see how every oppressor is surrounded,
evermore by ministers of vengeance, who grip him by the throat, and with terrible
voices demand the forfeiture of the broken bond: a pound of flesh cut out nearest
the heart! There is no escape from the penalty. No possible jugglery, no theological
bankruptcy, no patent-gospel repentance even, can cheat Heaven of its
dread demand. “He that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath
done,” is a thunder-word, that shrieks, not alone from the Bible of Prophets and
Apostles, but from the Bible of Nature and of Providence also. Bury his evil
deeds under mountains of catechisms and prayers if he will, they roll out of their
graves, and like hot invisible devils shall lash him naked through the world.

That is the moral of the Quaker City also, if the critics had but the insight to
see it. We can well enough afford to forgive the faults of this wild head-long
kind of book, since it preaches this great truth so well. We may overlook its
zigzag, fragmentary, quasi—chaotic manner of saying some things, since it utters
so many other things with such surpassing strength and beauty. The reviewer
who condemns indiscriminately so great a book as the Quaker City, will find it
a special favor to be forgotten by the more truthful critics that will be sure to come
after him. They will rank him evermore with the poor dwarfs who can look
upon some statue of Olympic Jove, majestic and awful in its beauty, yet turn
away in disgust from the splendid image, because of some speck which their pigmy
eyes have detected on the finger nail. Let us not forget this, that great
books are not written for any dwarfs. Little souls, in strait-jackets, are welcome
enough to their primers, and to their romance even, about the house that Jack
built; but who ever asked them to turn critics on the works of genius? I confess
that my heart finds a welcome for this head-long honest Quaker City. Notwithstanding
its hot fiery temper, it will do good. We must look at it, not as a
work of genius only, but also as a work of reform. It comes not alone to amuse

but dreadful, like the song of Agamemnon, to purify. Its wild mad voice has gone
out every where, over this speculating, mammon-worshipping country. From
the rock heights of the Aroostook, to the camp-fires of Monterey, its vengeanceshrieks
are heard, echoing, through the thousand hollow hearts, where idleness
eats the bread that starving industry earns, and pensioned profligacy preaches submission
to sweet virtue in the name of God.

You tell me that this book, true enough in the main, is extravagant. Very
well, thank the extremes into which society everywhere runs for the extravagance
of this book also. It is you who have driven genius out, and compelled it
to pitch its extravagances against your own; for thus only can it weigh you upwards,
to give a lesson from the skies. How shall genius be otherwise than extravagant,
while gazing into a wild firmament of gloom—rushing with its mighty
fire-wings through this broken fragment of eternity; where the insane ravings of
despair lift a horrid din above the music-breath of angels, and the voice of God!
Extravagant indeed: Was not Martin, the brave old monk of Isleben in Saxony,
who threw his ink-stand at the sooty devil's head, extravagant also? So the devil
thought. This extravagance is the bug-bear of little minds: heed it not. But
out with thy thought, loud and seething, like a hot bolt shot from the thunderous
heavens.

So through all the writings of this man—every page impresses you with the
feeling that a mind of dark terrible strength has just gone that way before you: a
man in whose deep soul is a power and a spell—an imagination, fancy, and a wild
utterance, full of awful beauty, fire and love. His “Ladye Annabel” is a splendid
prose-poem, where horrors congregate with strangest phantoms of truth, madly
rushing together in a great carnival of love.

But, Lippard's genius is not all dark and horrible. There is in him too the
sweetest beauty, flashing out betimes like the dancing aurora up the winter sky.
Even amid all the war-horrors of “Blanche of Brandywine” we shall see how the
author's soul delights in the images of beauty and purity that seem to flit ever
before him, in the midst of darkest delineations. Our whole literature does not
contain more beautiful sketches of female character than Lippard has given us in
Rose, Blanche, and the Lady Isidore. All that a pure man could desire in wife,
mother or sister, he will find in this book, made living and beautiful in the lives
of these characters. Isidore we shall love forever. Love, not alone for her
“faultless limbs,” and beautiful bosom, shaded by a veil of dark waving hair: but
we shall love her also that she was “magnificently beautiful, brave, and loving.”
With her, we shall all feel that “Beauty and tenderness and truth have gone
home.” There is religion and poetry in our author's farewell to Isidore.

“Come, let us bid her farewell. Come let us kneel in the softened light and
twine our hands in the glossy waves of her dark hair, and close her eyes and lips,
with kisses, let us gently dispose those faultless limbs in the quiet attitude of death

—for to-morrow, ah, the coffin, the grave, the falling clod! Let us smooth the
black hair in lengthened waves, but do not close that bosom from the light. Let
it gleam in the sun, until the very last moment; for it is pure, for thoughts born
of God and eternal as heaven, once found a home within those globes of snow.
Farewell, Isidore, we leave you now forever. Farewell, Isidore, we leave your
face to the grave-worm, your bosom to the clod, your soul to its home. Farewell,
brave and beautiful, on your cold brow we drop no tear, for since the world began,
it has been the fate of hearts like yours, to love and break and die. And when
the flowers bloom over your grave, the angels of God will kiss them, and fling
their fragrance like blessings upon the summer air.”

But we have even now too little space left for a just notice of these legends of
the Revolution.

Altogether we take this to be the best book that has been written on this portion
of our history. In the dull popular idea of history, this book is not merely a
history. It is something more. It is a series of battle pictures; with all the truth
of history in them, where the heroes are made living, present and visible to our
senses. Here we do not merely turn over the dead dry facts of General Washington's
battles, as if coldly digging them out of their tomb—but we see the
living general as he moves round over the field of glory. We almost hear the
word of his command. We are quite sure that we see the smoke rolling up from
the field of battle, and hear the dreadful roar of the cannon, as it spouts its deathflame
in the face of the living and the dead. Through all we see dashing on the
wild figure of mad Anthony Wayne, followed with the broken battle-cry of Pulaski;
until along the line, and over the field, the images of death and terror are
only hidden from our view by the shroud of smoke and flame.

There is not a relic of the Revolution, in the shape of an old man or woman,
within a good hundred miles of the scene, which has not been visited by Mr.
Lippard, and their old memories sounded to the bottom, until the last and smallest
fact should be brought up. Not an inch of ground, on the old battle-fields, that
he has not explored. Hardly an old revolutionary newspaper has been allowed to
rest in peace; that too must be dug from its garret-grave, and stript of its cob-web
shroud, to satisfy this insatiate hunger for revolutionary crumbs.

At last all that survives, either of fact or legend, of those battles and battle
men, is brought to light: painted before us, so that we can look upon every feature
of the perilous times. Painted indeed. Of all the American authors, poets or
novelists—Lippard comes nearest to the painter. So perfect and powerful are his
descriptions. What a magnificent picture might be made of his “Sunset upon the
Battlefield.”

“It was sunset upon the field of battle—solemn and quiet sunset. The rich,
golden light fell over the grassy lawn, over the venerable fabric of Chew's house,

and over the trees scattered along the field, turning their autumnal foliage to
quivering gold.

“The scene was full of the spirit of desolation, steeped in death, and crimsoned
in blood. The green lawn—with the soil turned up by the cannon wheels, by the
tramp of war steeds, by the rush of the foemen—was all heaped with ghastly piles
of dead, whose cold upturned faces shone with a terrible lustre in the last beams
of the declining sun.

“There were senseless carcasses, with the arms rent from the shattered body,
with the eyes scooped from the hollow sockets, with foreheads severed by the
sword thrust, with hair dabbled in blood, with sunken jaws fallen on the gory
chest; there was all the horror, all the bloodshed, all the butchery of war, without
a single gleam of its romance or chivalry.

“Here a plaid-kilted Highlander, a dark-coated Hanoverian, were huddled
together in the ghastliness of sudden death; each with that fearful red wound
denting the forehead, each with that same repulsive expression of convulsive pain,
while their unclosed eyes, cold, dead, and lustreless, glared on the blue heavens
with the glassy look of death.

“Yonder, at the foot of a giant elm, an old Continental, sunk down in the grasp
of death. His head is sunken on his breast, his white hair all blood-bedabbled, his
blue hunting shirt spotted with clotted drops of purple. The sunburnt hand extended,
grasps the unfailing rifle—the old warrior is merry even in death, for his
lip wears a cold and unmoving smile.

“A little farther on a peasant boy bites the sod, with his sunburnt face half
buried in the blood-soddened earth, his rustic attire of linsey tinted by the last
beams of the declining sun; one arm convulsively gathered under his head, the
long brown hair all stiffened with blood, while the other grasps the well-used fowling
piece, with which he rushed to the field, fought bravely, and died like a hero.
The fowling piece is with him in death; the fowling piece—companion of many
a boyish ramble beside the Wissahikon, many a hunting excursion on the wild
and dreamy hills that frown around that rivulet—is now beside him, but the hand
that encloses its stock is colder than the iron of its rusted tube.”

In this there is no work left for the imagination of the finest artist. Let him
use his mechanical skill in light and shadow; the picture is made for him.

So also in the legend of General Agnew.

“The last beams of the sun trembled over the high forehead of General Agnew,
as, with his back turned to the grave-yard wall, he gazed upon the prospect, and
his eye lit up with a sudden brilliancy, when the quick and piercing report of a
rifle broke on the air, and echoed around the scene.

“A small cloud of light blue smoke wound upward from the grave-yard wall, a
ghastly smile overspread the face of Agnew, he looked wildly round for a single
instant, and then fell heavily to the dust of the road-side, a—lifeless corse.

“His gallant steed of ebon darkness of skin, lowered his proud crest, and thrust
his nostrils in his master's face, his large eyes dilating, as he snuffed the scent of
blood upon the air; and at the very moment that same wild and ghastly face appeared
once more above the stones of the grave-yard wall, and a shriek of triumph,
wilder and ghastlier than the face, arose shrieking above the graves.

“That rifle shot, pealing from the grave-yard wall, was the LAST SHOT of the
battle-day of Germantown; and that corse flung along the roadside, with those
cold eyes glaring on the blue sunset sky, with the death-wound near the heart,
was the LAST DEAD MAN of that day of horror.

“As the sun went down, the dark horse lowered his head, and with quivering
nostrils, inhaled the last breath of his dying master.”

The grave-yard—the cloud of light blue smoke winding up over the grave-yard
—the muscular form of General Agnew stretched in the dust by the road-side—
the gallant war-horse, with his dilating eyes and swollen nostrils snuffing in the
face of his fallen rider—the ghastly murderer's face looking over the old grave-yard
wall—and away off in the west the soft sun set: would not this make a
magnificent picture, to be called “THE LAST SHOT OF THE BATTLE-DAY OF
Germantown?”—There is hardly a page in this whole book from which some
such picture might not be made.

But the poetry of these Legends perhaps is the first thing that will arrest the
attention of the competent reviewer. This indeed is the first thing in all
Lippard's works. Whatever we may say of his ability for the most accomplished
of historians, of his genius as a novelist, I take him to be as much poet as any
thing else after all. Though we may find him utterly without capacity in
rhythm or rhyme; still he is a poet. Whoever that old man Ossian was, he was
such another rhymeless rhythmless poet, for all that I can see.

Mr. Lippard's genius beholds the Hudson River as “a mirror in its mountain
frame.” Or a “Queen who reposes in a strange majesty, a crown of snow upon
her forehead of granite, the leaf of Indian corn, the spear of wheat, mingled in the
girdle which binds her waist, the murmur of rippling water ascending from the
valley beneath her feet.”

The Susquehanna is “a warrior, who rushes from his home in the forest, hews
his way through primeval mountains, and howls in his wrath as he hurries to the
ocean. Ever and anon, like a conqueror overladened with the spoils of battle,
he scatters a green island in his path.”

The Wissahikon is “a Prophetess, who with her cheek embrowned by the sun,
and her dark hair—not gathered in clusters or curling in ringlets—falling
straightly to her white shoulders, comes forth from her cavern in the woods,
and speaks to us in a low soft tone, that awes and wins our hearts, and looks
at us with eyes whose steady light and supernatural brightness bewilder our
soul.”

To our author's fancy also “The night comes slowly down.” And he could
see the strong man bearing off “the little girl, whose golden hair floated over
his dark dress like sunshine over a pall.” To his ears the “wind sweeps
through the woods, not with a boisterous roar, but with the strange sad cadence
of an organ, whose notes swell away through the arches of a dim cathedral
aisle.”

To his vision also there are sunny days in winter when “the glad maiden,
May, seems to blow her warm breath in the grim face of February, until the
rough old warrior laughs again.”

He sees the smoke of the battle-field as “The shroud of death for millions.”

To him the Wissahikon is a thing of beauty forever—“It is a poem of beauty,
where the breeze mourns its anthem through the tall pines; where the silver
waters send up their voices of joy; where calmness, and quiet, and intense solitude
awe the soul, and fill the heart with bright thoughts and golden dreams, woven in
the luxury of the summer hour.”

I take these to be good specimens enough of poetry. Nearly every page in the
whole book is alive with this quaint or beautiful imagery. Such a book has never
appeared in this country before—to give us so poetical and striking a view of the
age of the Revolution.

Somehow I think history ought to be written with somewhat of the poet's inspiration.
It is only the poet who can call back to us the remote and dead, and
invest them with a visible and life-like form. He alone can

The effigies of Lippard's heroes have almost as much life as the scene of their
utmost actions. Nothing is dead any more that his imagination once grasps. He
continually reminds us of that French poet historian, Michelet, who, take him all
in all, is perhaps the sweetest and best historian the world allows us just now.

Our author may, if he will, make himself the Michelet of America—the poet-historian
of his country.

In this volume he has given us an earnest of his sincerity, independence. The
light which he has shed on the subject of Arnold's treason shows patience enough
in the performance of the most difficult task. His defence of the political fame of
unhappy Thomas Paine evinces courage enough too. For this he has been called
an infidel; but only by fire-skull's who, justly enough, hate Paine's scepticism,
but most unjustly traduce his well earned political fame. Lippard's appreciation
of the political writings of Paine is precisely that entertained by Washington,
Adams, and all our great countryman of the past. The indispensible service
which this man performed for America, in the time of its trial, has never been disputed
by any man capable of forming an intelligent opinion on so great a subject.

Mr. Lippard is not an infidel: unless infidel be a man who will not profanely worship
his Creator, as tailors cut jackets, by the square rule. He is not an infidel;
unless it mean a man who will not follow the smokey flickering torch lights, in
the hands of groping creed-mongers, nor bow down his soul to the graven images
of soulless sectarianism, which clings only to the dead body of the Saviour, having
dismissed his spirit from the temple. If a profound belief in Theism, in prophets
and apostles—a warm and sincere reverence for that most beautiful and loving
spirit that ever sanctified the form of humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, make a
christian, Mr. Lippard is far enough from infidelity. Read the book, in his
work called Fourth of July 1776, and then say whether this man is infidel to
Jesus. There is a better, a juster appreciation of the spirit and purity of Nazareth,
in this brief chapter, than in half a ton of sermons ground out of the cast-iron
brains of intolerant sectaries.

Mr. Lippard's religious views are precisely those of nearly every man of genius
in this country; and we may say every other country. This world over, and the
ages over, genius has had its own religion. It was never infidel either. In the
highest order of genius at least we shall never find raw and scoffing infidelity.
To every soul capable of catching so vast a sight, the life of Jesus is a poem of
beauty; a brother-voice, whispering there, when man's heart is weakest. Jesus:
name divine! the soul's amulet of love—“prest evermore to the lips of ages.” If
men of genius have ever been heedless of that word, it could have been only in
some mad moment when revenging themselves upon the vulgarity and materialism
of its professed followers. They may not be able to behold the spirit of Jesus
floating in the rivers of blood which have flowed in his name: they may not be
able to hear his voice in the murder-shrieks and blasphemies that swell upward
from the wild war of sects. But in those tones of peace, once heard in Judeath,
“Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest,”
they will recognise evermore the music-breath of God. They may not take to
their bosoms the pedant Christ of artificial theology—Christ in effigy alas! but
Jesus of Nazareth they will press to their heart of hearts as the divinest friend of
man, and the truest son of God. To them religion, as made easy by catechism
and rule, and bound in calf, may seem of little value to the soul; but that religion
which streams in glory from the stars—reflected upward again in the smile of
each flower, and hiding itself at last in the still heart of man—made living and
eternal there by the voice of revelation—that religion is always with them. The
Prophets and the Apostles are their companions too.

Genius by intuition falls into truth, sooner than the greatest elaboration
of mere talent can reason its way into it. It catches truth by inspiration:
the one great fact of nature and providence flashes in on it perpetually, like a
sunrise of the soul.

Every thing great and true is a revelation of Deity. The songs of Isaiah the
sermons of Jesus, the oaks, the lillies, the seasons—does not the God speak in
them all? In them all, if we have but the purity and spirituality to hear it. To
the mind of Jesus there was a witness of the Father in the “lillies of the field,”
the “birds of the air,” the “rain,” the “sun-beams;” but not any witness to the
coarse mind of the Jewish doctor of divinity. He could find deity only in parchments,
creeds, tradition, ritualism. The fact of creation, providence, and revelation,
is plain enough to all men; but the character in which we behold that fact
depends entirely on the light or darkness within us. A coarse rude man must
have coarse rude conceptions of his Deity, and of all works of Deity. The gods
of Creetons and Hottontots are fashioned out of the loathsome indolence of their
own souls. If we will look into it, we shall find that the difference between the
God and Father of Jesus, and the gods of the Philistines, was precisely the difference
between the moral and intellectual character of Jesus and the Philistine.

The coarse mass of mankind, at this day, can see in the ocean only a foul mass
of brackish water, full of codlings and devil-fish: but to the poet, whom the world
has foolishly enough agreed to call infidel, it was

Thus much have we said in the way of rebuke to the religious vulgarity, that
babbles evermore about the infidelity of Genius. Genius is deeply and beautifully
religious. But its religion is alone there, with Jesus and all Prophets, in the
highest regions of the soul, in the great watch-tower of the Eternal—alone, where
the floods of God's eternity flow round and encompass it forever.

How poor and mean a thing a fighting human creed must look to the God-gifted
soul! Is this our christian justice, to brand all genius as infidel, because it
will not stoop to the region of quarrelsome sects? Is there no better defence of
religion, nay, is there no better recognition of religion than this sect-madness—
this insane idolatrous worship of consecrated ink and paper? I hope there is. I
should indeed be poor in faith if there were not.

Through all of Lippard's writings there is a vein of deep religiousness—a constant
recognition of God and justice—the devotion of a heart belonging to no
creed; but of a heart devoted to whatsoever things are pure in all men.

Read his “Grave-yard of Germantown,” in this book, and say of it, is not so. If
we will, we may take it as a specimen of style also—of good old fashioned honest
Saxon-English; free enough from the decrepitude of the mongrel English-Latin,
we have so miserably imitated from the school of Jonson, Dryden, Addison, and a
long list of Latin-English writers.

“In Germantown there is an old-time graveyard. No gravelled walks, no delicate
sculpturings of marble, no hot-beds planted over corruption are there. It is
an old-time graveyard, defended from the highway and encirclings fields by a
thick stone wall. On the north and west it is shadowed by a range of trees, the
sombre verdure of the pine, the leafy magnificence of the maple and horse-chesnut,
mingling in one rich mass of foliage. Wild flowers are in that graveyard, and
tangled vines. It is white with tomb-stones. They spring up, like a host of
spirits from the green graves; they seem to struggle with each other for space,
for room. The lettering on these tombstones, is in itself, a rude history. Some
are marked with rude words in Dutch, some in German, one or more in Latin, one
in Indian; others in English. Some bend down, as if hiding their rugged faces
from the light, some start to one side; here and there, rank grass chokes them
from the light and air.

“You may talk to me of your fashionable graveyards, where Death is made to
look pretty and silly and fanciful, but for me, this one old graveyard, with its rank
grass and crowded tombstones, has more of God and Immortality in it, than all
your elegant cemetries together. I love its soil: its stray wild flowers are omens
to me, of a pleasant sleep, taken by weary ones, who were faint with living too
long.

“It is to me, a holy thought, that here my bones will one day repose. For here,
in a lengthening line, extend the tombstones, sacred to the memory of my fathers,
far back in to time. They sleep here. The summer day may dawn, the winter
storm may howl, and still they sleep on. No careless eye looks over these walls.
There is no gaudiness of sculpture to invite the lounger. As for a pic nic party,
in an old graveyard like this, it would be blasphemy. None come save those who
have friends here. Sisters come to talk quietly with the ghost of sisters; children
to invoke the spirit of that Mother gone home! I, too sometimes, panting to get
free from the city, come here to talk with my sisters—for two of mine are here—
with my father—for that clover blooms above his grave.

“It seems to me, too, when bending over that grave, that the Mother's form,
awakened from her distant grave, beneath the sod of Delaware, is also here!—
Here, to commune with the dead, whom she loved while living; here, with the
spirits of my fathers!

“I cannot get rid of the thought that good spirits love that graveyard. For all
at once, when you enter its walls, you feel sadder, better; more satisfied with
life, yet less reluctant to die. It is such a pleasant spot, to take a long repose. I
have seen it in winter, when there was snow upon the graves, and the sleigh-bells
tinkled in the street. Then calmly and tenderly upon the white tombstones,
played and lingered the cold moon.

“In summer, too, when the leaves were on the trees, and the grass upon the sod,
when the chirp of the cricket and katy-did broke shrilly over the graves through
the silence of night. In early spring, when there was scarce a blade of grass to
struggle against the north wind, the late in fall when November baptizes you
with her cloud of gloom, I have been there.

“And in winter and summer, in fall and spring, in calm or storm, in sickness or
health, in every change of this great play, called life, does my heart go out to
that graveyard, as though part of it was already there.

“Nor do I love it the less, because on every blade of grass, in every flower, that
wildly blooms there, you find written:—“This soil is sacred from creeds. Here
rests the Indian and the white man; here sleep in one sod, the Catholic, Presbyterian,
Quaker, Methodist, Lutheran, Mennonist, Deist, Infidel. Here, creeds
forgotten, all are men and woman again, and not one but is a simple child of
God.

“This graveyard was established by men of all creeds, more than a century ago.
May that day be darkness, when creeds shall enter this rude gate. Better had
that man never been born, who shall dare pollute this soil with the earthly clamor
of sect. But on the man, who shall repair this wall, or keep this graveyard
sacred from the hoofs of improvement, who shall do his best to keep our old graveyard
what it is, on that man, be the blessings of God; may his daughters be virtuous
and beautiful, his sons gifted and brave. In his last hour, may the voices of
angels sing hymns to his passing soul. If there was but one flower in the world,
I would plant it on that man's grave.”

I know not how we shall keep back our hearts from the utmost love of the man
who could write this “Old-time Graveyard.” It is what we all feel; but cannot
utter it thus. It breathes such a loving, longing spirit—it seems as though some
holy tear had found an utterance, and spoken to our hearts, as they speak to themselves
in moments of purest sadness.

It is a great fort of Lippard's, this speaking to our hearts. With the deepest
insight into the inmost workings of the human soul, he has also a passionate sense
of the beautiful; joined with the loftiest enthusiasm, the strongest imagination,
and the keenest relish for whatsoever things are true. A necessity is upon him,
to be a writer of the finest house-hold sentiments.

Another necessity is upon him too. His thoughts again take fire-wings, and
rush off into gloom and space—now dipping their pinions in the blood of battles,

now wheeling through chaos and black night, now shouting a cry of horror to the
skies—now melting into tears again on some high rock that overlooks the mighty
field of the world.

In all this there is no affectation. He is still true to his nature, which is capable
of entering into all these extremes of sentiment and passion. he does not force
his thoughts: his thoughts force him.—So there is little fillagree work in his
writings—small use enough of ginger-bread and sugar-candy words.

His severity is dreadful: it would split “the gnarled oak.” If he thunders it
is no blast of a tin trumpet; but Jove's most dreadful anger. He does not make
earth-quakes and tempests by “breaking flower-pots,” and fireing torpedoes: it is
not his way. His sneer is a terrible caustic—frightful as the wrinkling of Jupiter's
brow: and, again, it flows off in a vein of extravagant heedless levity, after
the fashion, the Frenchman Rabelais.

Take it all in all, this book is, perhaps, the best work Lippard has written.
Though I doubt if we may say as much when his “Nazarene” is finished. From
what has already appeared of the “Nazarene,” and from what I know of the author's
plan in the completion of it, I shall look to that as his greatest work.
Already it is freer of the faults of careless impetuous Genius than his previous
books. I said faults: it were as well said merits. That wild, heedless, reckless
dashing on, seen so often in the works of the freshest highest order of genius,
would indeed be a merit to the tame dull perfection of less gifted minds. These
faults, as we call them, to their “smooth round periods,” would be like souls to
a pile of dead bodies. It is not worth our while, though, to spend much time in
talking of faults in the style of a man of Lippard's genius. What has he to do
with style, whose great heart is already a furnace of fire-thoughts, seething and
simmering with emotions for which he can find no utterance. Style indeed: that
is a thing for pedants, word-mongers, sentence-makers to talk about. In this respect
however our author is fast getting above all honest criticism. Five years
hence, life and health prospering him, it will not be a very safe thing for any
scribbler to meddle with his faults of style.

We are glad enough to say that his health seems firm at present: though he is
by no means a stout-man. In height, he is about the medium size, of a slight
swarth complexion, with a frame as symmetrically delicate as a woman's; a large
flashing dark grey eye, a massive beautifully formed forehead, slightly enlarging
from the base upwards, a personal appearance somewhat independent of the prejudicies
of mankind, denoting in every step and look the utmost energy and
power. In a crowd of a thousand men you would be likely to pick him out as a
man you would be glad to know something about. His conversation is brilliant,
and merry, even to playfulness. You would hardly take his soul to be the terrible
whip it is, when he scents a foe. He is an enthusiastic friend: and an enthusiastic
enemy, alas! Though we are glad to say he is getting the better of this last

enthusiasm. He is a man of warm generous heart, incapable of any envy, and
will be sure never to open an attack until he has good reason, real or imagined.
But, the attack once opened upon him, and we can no longer vouch for his moderation.
He is a terrible Titan then; who from his mount Othyrs would make
war upon the gods, if they were his enemies too: war! until the earth groans,
the heavens sigh, the woods blaze with the lightnings, as we have read before in
classic story. Such is his courage. In a moral way, he has never yet stopt to
commit to memory the meaning of fear. Nor will he stop for it, now that his
fame, as a Novelist, is already secure. His works of romance bring a higher
price in the market of this day, than the works of any other American novelist.
They have met with a rapider and larger sale, than was even known in his history
of novel-publishing, in this country, before his day. He has already a hundred
imitators, among the aspiring geniuses of the land—very “clever,” commendable,
ambitious graspers after fame or money, who vainly strive after his wild,
headlong idiomatic style. Some of them seem to think, if they but break the back
of an old fashioned, long Jonsonian sentence, into a dozen pieces, they have it.
Others run away with his titles. I cannot tell how many writers of “legends”
have sprung up like mushrooms, the growth of a single night, since Lippard began
his “Legends of the Revolution.” Indeed it is difficult to say when our literature
will recover from this attack of legends.

We live in jeopardy every hour, expecting “legends of Noah's Ark,” “legends
of the golden fringed baby-jumper,” “legends of Dame Walder's tea-pot,”
“legends of John Rogers' nine children;” with critical notes on the small “one at
the breast.”

Did we not hold our Author to be the innocent cause of this terrible affliction,
we would vote to have him cribbed in iron bars, or hanged, as a rebellious Cyclops
against the peace of our literature.

Why need men prostitute their gifts to mere imitation and theft! Out with
your own thoughts, in your own words: to that must you come at last, if you
would make either fame or bread by thoughts and words. Be a native voice in
your own mountains; and not some faint echo from afar. Get your own titles
too. But, have not you as good a right as any body, to that title of “Legends?”
Then so had Mark, Suple or Jack Sprat a good right to the title of “Paradise
Lost.” As well may you steal a man's ideas, as his title. When an author has
found out a good title, and identified his name with it, what right have a hundred
scribblers to seize upon it, and make it the common property of every adventurer
after fame? Not possibly can there be a meaner piece of plagiarism. Pilfer
whole pages from an author's book, and you will not be doing him the injury you
would to steal his successful title. Give the title stealer then, the same doom we
do the word-stealer, the idea-stealer. Let the whole band of literary thiefs receive
the one brand of shame. Man was not sent into this world to steal, but to work.

The highest price of work is not gold, or bread either; but knowledge. If it
were gold or bread, then might you steal it; for that way the world wags at present;
but not any stealing can bring knowledge. Think out a few thoughts for
yourselves—that will be knowledge. And do you find it so difficult to think?
Look upward to that jeweled curtain of the heavens—to those stars, the eyes of
eternity, that look at you with such a strange loving light—the moon that swims
away in the blue infinite, that smiles evermore in the dark face of night—the
clouds, the dim moon-light drapery of the sky—the thousands of years that have
hastened away into the dark, like tempests—the nations which have gone whirling
down into night, like bubbles—the great flood of Eternity, that hastens you,
and all flesh into the same unfathomable sea—is there nothing to think about in
all this? Think then! and leave off thy following in the wake of other men's
thinking.

Lippard's perfect rest in himself, his determinate, immovable self-reliance, has
been a great cause of his success. It was nothing what the critics, and all men
said of him. What could he, and what ought he to say for himself? seemed a
question of infinitely more importance. This man is not a pipe for Fortune's finger
(or any body else's finger) to play what stop she pleases on. If it come to
that matter of playing, he will be likely to play his own tunes, and to his own
time; beat all the drums and blow all the fifes against him nevertheless. There
is something so great in self-reliance.

For all that I can find out, no other kind of reliance ever availed a man much
in this world. This suffering ourselves to be led about in swaths and strings, to
be divided into schools, and parties—cut up into companies, to shoulder arms and
march at the command of some noisy Captain, whose superiority we should
never guess, but by his cocked-hat and feather—this may do well enough for fighting
men in Mexico; but it is not the way any intellectual greatness was ever
achieved. From a “ragged Manchester boy “George Thompson becomes the
mouth-piece of West India freedom; and then twenty millions of hungry white-livered
Saxons “shriek and groan through his brain,” until the demon of English
corn-laws trembles at the thunder of his truth. This is the history of no imitator;
but of a self-relying dauntless hero, who abides evermore by his own thoughts,
and by his own utterance.

From a cheated, sickly, unhappy boy, whose Father and mother were dead—
who wandered weeping, with a single crust of bread in his pocket, up and down
the glen of the Wissahikon, and day after day wondered when he should die,
George Lippard becomes the author of Books that go off to the tune of twelve
editions a year. That is something.

Another cause of our Author's speedy triumph over nearly every obstacle that
lay in his way, is his sincerity—his great passionate truth to himself. His rebukes
of the wrong are all honest—felt in his heart: his praise of good men and

brave men is honest too. If he lays bare the black heart of the coward, or any
traitor, it is because his whole natural soul is in arms against these things. If he
writes books, it is not for the sake of writing—not altogether for bread—not
wholly for fame even—but because he must write. His nature forces him. Wild
and chaotic as the Quaker City may appear to the shallow mind, still the deeper,
purer judgment, sees in it all, the earnest skilful work of the dissecting knife—
the faithful laying bare of black hearts, and oppressive institutions. This was his
aim. His whole heart was honest and most true in the work. That is why he
succeeded. He thought of these wrongs, his wrongs, until they goaded him into
madness; until whithersoever he went, in the blaze of noon, in the silence of
dusk, night, bitter mockery and chattering fiends laughed at him through every
chink and crevice in the wall. With scorn, and wrath, and execrations, he flung
defiance in their face, and shouted a battle-cry over the dumb anguish of the
millions, perishing in conventional lies; until it rolls away, like thunder through
a hundred presses, and dies at last into whispers on a thousand tongues. None
but the sincere man can do that. Insincerity crucifies the heart: then every
thing born of it, is a forced birth. Its only sign of life, is the gasp of death. That
is the reason why so many books (well-written enough) fall dead from the press.
They were written without any high aim, without any great sincerity; and they
must die. Sincerity is such a great thing—such an inspirer of genius—such a
sanctifier of its actions—beckons it so serenely on the path of fame, I wish all men
had it. It enables one to look out so calmly upon the storm: as if eyes of love
looked at us through the black cloud—as if some lips of heaven kissed off the
tears from our cheeks—and the hand of God lay quiet on our breast, to soothe the
chafed and injured heart: there is something so sweet in sincerity! I wish all
men had it. I wish all men to succeed; and there can be no success without
sincerity. Take that thought home with thee, reader. And when next we meet
again, may it be to speak well of thee and thy works: to give thee a good hand of
welcome, and sit down and talk about thee, as about a brother. I shall be
glad to do it.