Ponkapog Papers | Page 6

hereditary talent!
H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender, graceful, and hollow.
Personally, he is long and narrow, and looks as if he might have been
the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put together, like an
ill-constructed sentence, and affects me like one. His figure is
ungrammatical.
AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in
the spring. Each gen- eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were to break into blossom at
the present moment, would probably be left to fade upon the stem.
Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The
current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as is also
the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed with the
fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into rich earth,

and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan should
involve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installment of a
fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man in
permanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which to
express his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personal
danger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overrate the
importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility.
The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious bar
of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap- pointed judge an exaggerated
sense of superi- ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not his, and
says in effect, if not in so many words: " I am Sir Oracle, and when I
ope my lips let no dog bark." When the critic reaches this exalted frame
of mind his slight usefulness is gone.
AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and
signs it with a rainbow.
I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every
detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which
the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised
knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovely
thought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it.
I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a slight fancy which
Herrick has handled twice in the "Hesperides." The fancy, however, is
not Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the ex- aggeration of lovers, and
I have the same privi- lege as another to try my fortune with it:
UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE CHAUCER

When some hand has partly drawn The cloudy curtains of her bed, And
my lady's golden head Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, Then methinks

is day begun. Later, when her dream has ceased And she softly stirs and
wakes, Then it is as when the East A sudden rosy magic takes From the
cloud-enfolded sun, And full day breaks!
Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour- age literature by
anticipating everybody, puts the whole matter into a nutshell:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and
Juliet is the sun.
THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I have seen quoted
innumerable times, and never once correctly. Hamlet, addressing
Horatio, says:
Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my
heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.
The words italicized are invariably written "heart of hearts"--as if a
person possessed that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, with
the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more familiar with the play of
Hamlet than my good friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart
plural on two occasions in his recent novel, "The Mystery of the Sea."
Mrs. Humphry Ward also twice misquotes the passage in "Lady Rose's
Daughter."
BOOKS that have become classics--books that ave had their day and
now get more praise than perusal--always remind me of venerable
colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit,
find themselves retired upon half pay.
WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself into a ball is a
subject over which my friend John Burroughs and several brother
naturalists have lately become as heated as if the question involved
points of theology. Up among the Adirondacks, and in the very heart of
the re- gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest cottage. This