Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
20 December 1856, p. 42.
We find upon our table (and shall put into the fire) a thin octavo volume,
handsomely printed and
bound, with the above curious title. We shall not aid in extending
the sale of this intensely vulgar, nay,
absolutely beastly book, by telling our readers where it may be purchased.
The only review we shall
attempt of it, will be to thus publicly call the attention of the grand
jury to a matter that needs
presentment by them, and to mildly suggest that the author should be
sent to a lunatic asylum, and the
mercenary publishers to the penitentiary for pandering to the prurient
tastes of morbid sensualists. Ralph
W. Emerson's name appears as an indorser of these (so-called) poems
(?)--God save the mark! We
can only account for this strange fatuity upon the supposition that
the letter is a forgery, that Mr. E. has
not read some passages in the book, or that he lends his name to this
vile production of a vitiated nature
or diseased imagination, because the author is an imitator of his style,
and apes him occasionally in his
transcendentalisms. Affectation is as pitiful an ambition in literature
as alliteration, and never has it been
more fully exhibited during the present century than in the case of
Thomas Carlyle, a man with an order
of intellect approaching genius, but who for a distinguishing mark
to point like a finger-board to himself,
left a very terse and effective style of writing to adopt a jargon
filled with new-fangled phrases and
ungrammatical super-superlative adjectives--Mr. Carlyle buried himself
for a long time in German
universities and German philosophy, and came forth clothed in a full
"old clothes" suit of
transcendentalism worthy of the Chatham street embodiments of that
pseudo-philosophy, Kant and
Spinosa [sic]--Carlyle by this operation became a full-fledged Psyche
from the chrysalis, and sported in
the sunshine of popularity, whereupon a young gentleman ambitious of
making New England an umbra
of Scottish-Germanic glory, one Ralph Waldo Emerson, suddenly transforms
himself into a
metaphysical transcendentalist and begins talking about "Objective
and Subjective," the "Inner and
Outer," the "Real and Ideal," the "God-heads and God-tails," "Planes,"
"Spheres," "Finite, Infinite,"
"Unities," and "Dualities," "Squills, Ipecac," "Cascading and Cavorting,"
&c., &c. And Io! another
appeared after this Mr. Emerson, one Walt Whitman, who kicked over
the whole bucket of the Milky
Way, and deluged the world with the whey, curds and bonny-clabber of
Brooklyn--which has resulted
from the turning of the milk of human kindness in a "b'hoy's" brains
to the cream of Tartar--and a
delicious dish of the same is now furnished under cover of Leaves of
Grass, and indorsed by the said
Emerson, who swallows down Whitman's vulgarity and beastliness as if
they were curds and whey. No
wonder the Boston female schools are demoralized when Emerson, the
head of the moral and solid
people of Boston, indorses Whitman, and thus drags his slimy work into
the sanctum of New England
firesides.