‘Like aconite, where’er they spread, they kill.’

He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and threatening the very fane itself with fire.  Mere words will never strike him dumb.  He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by the roadside.  Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O’Phace, Esquire, lest some Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.

  ‘Wy, all o’ them grand constitootional pillers,
  Our four fathers fetched with ’em over the billers,
  Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on,
  Wile to slav’ry, invasion an’ debt they were swept on,
  Wile our destiny higher an’ higher kep mountin’
  (Though I guess folks’ll stare wen she hands her account in). 
  Ef members in this way go kickin’ agin ’em,
  They won’t hev so much ez a feather left in em.’

Not less wonderful than his penetration into political affairs is Lowell’s command of the pure Yankee dialect.  His knowledge of it is perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers.  There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience:  a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred.  These are the dapper gentlemen, who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner’s Waltzes, would judge every man’s intellect by the measure of their own.  Know, oh dwarfed descendants of Procustes, that the quality of humor is not strained, but droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven; and if, after patient blending with grains of intolerance and egotism, in the mortar of your minds, it seems to you but that poisonous foam that of old sorcerers drew, by their incantations, from the moon, we can only smile with Voltaire at your ‘foolish ingenuities,’ and recommend to you a new career.  ‘Go pype in an ivy lefe,’ Monsieur Mustard-seed, or ’blow the bukkes’ horne.’