Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect offered others hardly inferior.  As I was about to make an endeavor to state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had said about Hebel’s ‘Allemannische Gedichte,’ which, making proper deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what I would have said far better than I could hope to do:  ’Allen diesen innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu statten.  Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte ... von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein Vortheil fuer den Dichter ist.  Diese Elemente werden durch glueckliche Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedraengt der zu diesem Zwecke vor unserer Buechersprache grosse Vorzuege hat.’  Of course I do not mean to imply that I have come near achieving any such success as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is there, and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand.

Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I valued.  With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any vanity, I mention as one of these the late A.H.  Clough, who more than any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne, impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we call genius.  He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect.  I have never completed anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at stake, led me to venture some passages nearer to what is called poetical than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former series.  The time seemed calling to me, with the old poet,—­

  ’Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
    The oaten reed forbear;
  For I hear a sound of battle,
    And trumpets rend the air!’

The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident) was in ‘The Courtin’.’  While the introduction to the First Series was going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was a blank page left which must be filled.  I sat down at once and improvised another fictitious ‘notice of the press,’ in which, because verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow.  I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled.  Presently I began to receive letters asking for the rest of it, sometimes for the balance of it.  I had none, but to answer such demands, I patched a conclusion upon it in a later edition.  Those who