'You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought, With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught; 1110 Your literature suits its each whisper and motion To what will be thought of it over the ocean; The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-- Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood, To which the dull current in hers is but mud: Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she rails, And your shore will soon be in the nature of things Covered thick with gilt drift-wood of castaway kings, 1120 Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif, Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe. O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he 'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea; Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs, Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page, Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all over new, To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true, 1130 Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks, And become my new race of more practical Greeks.-- Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't, Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot.' Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic More pepper than brains, shrieked, 'The man's a fanatic, I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers; 1140 But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason 't, Palaver before condemnation's but decent: So, through my humble person, Humanity begs Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.' But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth As when [Greek: aeie nukti eoikios], and so forth, And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,-- 'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' 1150 'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,' Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, 'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.-- But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to? She has such a penchant for bothering me too! She always keeps asking if I don't observe a Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva; 1160 She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-- She's been travelling now, and will be worse than ever; One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea, For a woman must surely see well, if she try, The whole of whose being's a capital I: