'Don't suppose I would underrate Cooper's abilities; If I thought you'd do that, I should feel very ill at ease; The men who have given to _one_ character life And objective existence are not very rife; You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers, And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. 1060 'There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis; Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity. Now he may overcharge his American pictures, But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his strictures; And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, 1070 Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower. 'There are truths you Americans need to be told, And it never'll refute them to swagger and scold; John Bull, looking o'er the Atlantic, in choler At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar; But to scorn such eye-dollar-try's what very few do, And John goes to that church as often as you do, No matter what John says, don't try to outcrow him, 'Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; 1080 Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One Displacing himself in the mind of his son, And detests the same faults in himself he'd neglected When he sees them again in his child's glass reflected; To love one another you're too like by half; If he is a bull, you're a pretty stout calf, And tear your own pasture for naught but to show What a nice pair of horns you're beginning to grow. 'There are one or two things I should just like to hint, For you don't often get the truth told you in print; 1090 The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves; Though you brag of your New World, you don't half believe in it; And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it; Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, With eyes bold as Herë's, and hair floating free, And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, 1100 Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing, Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass, Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked glass. Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste; She loses her fresh country charm when she takes Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.