Hand-EooK Dr. Edward Everett Hale Mr. Julian Hawthorne rs. James T* Fields Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson And Others mm /. ■ 16 7 >7 SEYMOUR EATON Librarian FREDERIC W. SPEIRS, Ph.D. Educational Director (7) THE LIBRARY OF 0ONG3ESS, Two Copies Received 1 1901 JiJOpt ■ Copyright entry CLASS Ct'XXo. Nc COF B. Copyright, 1901. The Booklovers Library / SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS Course V: Booklovers Reading Club g BOOKS SELECTED FOR THIS READING COURSE by D* EDWARD EVERETT HALE (9) ^ The CLASSICS HE following six classics were selected by D? Hale. 'The first four books are supplied by The Booklovers Library to Club Members who have enrolled for Course V. /. REPRESENTATIVE MEN By Ralph Waldo Emerson //. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES By Nathaniel Hawthorne III. MONTCALM AND WOLFE By Francis Parkman IV. SELECT ORATIONS By Daniel Webster V.' THE BIGLOW PAPERS By James Russell Lowell VI. EVANGELINE By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (") SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS TALKS and LECTURES • by JULIAN HAWTHORNE and M KS JAMES T. FIELDS and EDWARD WALDO EMERSON These papers by M* Hawthorne, M r ?- Fields and D R Emerson have been prepared specially for readers of this course. EDITORIAL NOTES by FRED LEWIS PATTEE (i?) A WORD from THE DIRECTOR \E are sure that our readers feel that for their excursion in the field of New England classics, they can have no safer guide than Dr. Edward Everett Hale. We assigned a delicate task to Dr. Hale when we asked him to choose for us six classics from a literature produced almost entirely within his own lifeti?ne. It is easy to name the classics of Eliza- bethan literature, for time has done its sure selec- tive work. It is difficult to select classics from the writings of men with whom you have played (15) A Word from the Director chess and talked politics. In his letter naming the books, Dr. Male remarks : " Lord Mansfield is reported to have said to a merchant whom they sent out as judge to the East Indies, who was rather modest about his ability ', that everything would go well if he confined himself to giving decisions. 'If however, you try to give reasons you will very probably be wrong,' he said. I am im- pressed with the value of Lord Mansfield 's advice in sending you my list." Nevertheless, Dr. Hale has favored us with a very clear, concise and convincing statement of the reasons for his choice which we have printed for the benefit of our readers. The invitations to "Julian Hawthorne and Mrs. Fields to contribute papers to our course did not specify the particular classics which Dr. Hale had selected. 'Thus it happens that they have each na??ied a list of classics. Both have e??iinent qualifications for this choice and a cot?i- parison of their selections with that of Dr. Hale is a most interesting study. Mrs. Fields, as the wife of the great publisher, was in close touch with the personality of all the writers under con- sideration, and she knows their works most inti- ?nately. Julian Hawthorne' 's judgment on all literary subjects has much weight, but in this case it ?nanifestly has unique value. 06) A Word from the Director Dr. Emerson chose to contribute critical esti- mates of the great writers and he made his own selection of the masters. In viewing these great New Eng/anders he stands on high vantage- ground. He knew them all personally ', with the exception of Longfellow. Our handbook treats the complete list of classics chosen by Dr. Hale, but we decided that it was not necessary to supply Evangeline and The Biglow Papers. Copies of the poems of Long- fellow and Lowell are in almost every home li- brary ana the two classics chosen from these authors are therefore already accessible to every- body. With the four books which we supply a) id the pamphlet covering the entire list of classics, the reader is equipped most satisfactorily for a profitable pursuit of this course. 07) The Idea of the Course HERE are two kinds of general read- ing : first, that which is desultory, where one picks up at odd moments a book chosen almost at random and skims over it simply for entertainment, or where one is content to follow the caprices and impulses of the crowd and orders his reading solely in refer- ence to the best selling books of the month ; and, second, that which is careful and systematic, for intellectual improvement and general culture. It is needless to compare and contrast these two methods. The first places reading in the same category with solitaire, the vaudeville, or any other absorbing pastime. The second makes it one of the most important aids to general culture and a well-rounded education. Reading, to be really valuable, must be sys- tematic. Hasty and desultory reading is like hasty and desultory eating ; it results at length in dyspepsia — an intellectual dyspepsia that is fatal to clear and consecutive thinking and to the enjoyment of what is best in literature. System- atic reading must begin always with the best — with the classics. There is in every literature a number of books which to admit ignorance of is to confess 09) The Booklovers Reading Club oneself unread and to a large degree uncultured. One must know something of Shakespeare, Mil- ton, Addison, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Browning and others, or else be classed in a cate- gory which, to say the least, is not conducive to self-congratulation. There is a disciplinary value, too, from the study of such classics that one can get from no other course. They lead us con- stantly to the higher levels of human thinking and imagining and bring us into an atmosphere which is pure, serene and holy. Our own country, young as she is, has pro- duced several acknowledged classics which every educated American, at least, must know. They are redolent of the new western world. They voice America — its problems, its ideals, its hope, its past. They are teeming with the life and vi- tality of a virile and intensely spirited people. The education of no American youth is complete without them. American culture and American art first began in New England. Here the wrestle with a raw and savage continent, with its attendant toil and priva- tion and isolation, first began and was first ended. The pioneer period for New England was over nearly two centuries ago. Then came a century and a half of orientation, of evolution into national self-consciousness and self dependence, of the de- velopment of an atmosphere of stability, of con- fidence, of refinement, art and elegant leisure. (20) Six New England Classics Finally, beginning in the early thirties of the last century, there came the first creative outburst and it gave to America all at once a group of literary masterpieces now everywhere acknowl- edged as classics. Just which of these works are to go down through the centuries as world-clas- sics, time, the only infallible literary critic, alone can determine. It is the object of this reading course to outline a systematic course of reading in these New England classics beginning with those concerning whose preeminence there can be no question and suggesting lines of work from these as a starting point which shall cover the entire field of classic New England literature. Since we are not yet far enough removed in time from these master- pieces to determine with accuracy which are supreme classics and which are not, we have been compelled to base our selection upon the judg- ment of the best contemporary authority obtain- able. It should be constantly in the mind of the reader that these six classics, with the suggestions and helps for studying them, form only the starting point for a course of reading in the American masterpieces. He who has completed only the six has but entered the portal of the subject. It is an inspiring and helpful thought that with every true classic completed with diligence and thought- fulness one has added to his love of the beautiful, (21) The Booklovers Reading Club to his fund of knowledge of human life and art, and to his taste for what is best in the literature of the world. (22) A Letter from D* HALE Matunuck, R. I . , July 23, 1901. Dear Mr . Eaton : Lord Mansfield is reported to have said to a merchant whom they sent out as judge to the East Indies, who was rather modest about his ability, that everything would go well if he confined himself to giv- ing decisions. "If, however, you try to give reasons for your decis- ions you will very probably be wrong, " he said. I am impressed with the value of Lord Mansfield's advice in send- ing you my list . 1. Nothing that you or I can do will extend much further the enormous circulation which Emer- son's philosophical essays now have. Then there is the uncon- scious circulation which central truths gain, though very likely they do not add to the present reputation of him who announced them. Nineteen out of twenty of the sermons which were preached (23) The Booklovers Reading Club in America last Sunday were inspired more or less directly by Emerson. Yet nineteen out- of twenty of the preachers would be surprised at the first moment at being told so. I have chosen, on the whole, the volume called REPRESENTATIVE MEN, not because it illustrates his philosophical teachings most directly, but because it is sure to interest young readers and to lead them to study all his other works . Z. Hawthorne's imagination served him whether the scenery which he chose was that of Rome and its neighborhood or whether the time was that of Major Molineux. But his heart, untraveled, still returned to home. In Salem he was born; in Salem he loved to live. In the description of the SEVEN GABLES, and in the story which he created of that home, he had only to call on the associations of his whole life for material. Hawthorne never forgot that he had the blood of Sheriff Hathorn in his veins. 3. As you know, I have hesi- (24) Six New England Classics tated a good deal whether to include the name of the poet Whittier or that of the historian Parkman. I choose Parkman, on the whole, because the literature of New England has given itself to history with an emphasis quite as distinct as any which has been given to poetry or to philosophy or to political science. It seems, then, as if history ought to be represented. The classical volume in his own series is the volume called MONTCALM AND WOLFE which describes the wars which gave Canada to England . 4. For the classical illustra- tion of Webster we would take his oration at Plymouth in 1820 and his oration at Bunker Hill in 1825 and his speeches in Congress on nullification. These speeches are known as the REPLIES TO HAYNE . We select the first two because they illustrate what has been a very important line of education in America, the teaching by his- tory of the great lessons of the Commonwealth. We select the last two because they rank among the (25) The Booklovers Reading Club best statements of the essential principles on which the nation as a nation is founded. The foun- dation thus laid is the basis of all the success and prosperity of the nation to-day. 5. I name with some hesitation, as the classic which will present Lowell to a new generation, THE BIGLOW PAPERS. This because they undoubtedly made Lowell known to a very large circle of people who would not have known him had he not addressed them in this humor- ous way. Second , because to young readers they will show the questions round which the Civil War gathered, the questions the solu- tion of which was important in working out the America of to-day. 6. Longfellow is preeminently the poet of the common people. Men would say that they do not need a dictionary to read his poems. They would even say that they could have written them themselves some- times. He is a classic because he has made his way into so many homes and has given so much delight to so many readers. EVANGELINE (26) Six New England Classics illustrates the charm by which he secures such entrance into homes and affections; and I therefore suggest that as, on the whole, the most convenient book for our purpose . Always yours, (27) HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS TO THE READER \ Jothing is more destructive to all that is most ■*■ * valuable in reading than the habit of skim- ming rapidly over a book and considering it fin- ished when the last leaf has been turned. A clas- sic should be read carefully and thoughtfully, pencil in hand, and it should be read more than once. The real heart of a great book is not to be had by the careless and headlong reader. The greater the book the more it should be re-read and studied. A single ordinary life is too short to get all there is in some great classics — Homer, Horace, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the like. One may live with them year by year, re-reading with loving care, annotating, dreaming over them, and find them expand and gather new meanings and new beauties with every perusal. It is this living, growing quality of a book that makes it a classic. Not all masterpieces are worthy of exhaustive study, but all are worthy of careful and studious and thoughtful perusal. The first general suggestion, then, is, read slowly, digest and think, make notes and write, and (29) The Booklovers Reading Club get without fail the heart of the book. Attention to details of style, to beauties, to all that may be grouped tinder the general head of cause and effect, should come second. The first duty of the 7'eader is to determine the object of the book, its central thought, its standpoint and definitions, and the degree in which the author has succeeded in his plan. To aid the readers of the classics under' con- sideration and to suggest methods for the study of any literary masterpiece we have prepared the fol- lowing random hints. They are not in any sense systematic or exhaustive ; they are simply sugges- tive thoughts and directions as to the beginning of a course of analysis and original thinking which a careful reader may carry to almost any length. I. Emerson's Representative Men — A Series of Essays. Emerson, it must be admitted, is not always easy reading, though the difficulty of following him has doubtless been much exaggerated. Much of Representative Men is sun-clear ; he who runs may read. Such essays as those on Shakespeare and Napoleon will trouble no one. The Uses of Great Men and parts of certain of the others will require thoughtful reading. The main difficulty lies in the condensation of the thought and the seeming lack of connection between sentences and between paragraphs. All at once an inspira- (30) Six New England Classics tion comes to the writer and he goes striding over the mountain tops in seeming forgetfulness that others have not the seven-league boots that he owns. One must often tarry and bridge pain- fully the chasm which he passed over at a stride. There is this consolation, however — Emerson is not an obscure writer. He has no hopeless readers. One may follow him if he will be patient and thoughtful. The first suggestion, then, for readers of Emer- son, is to read slowly and carefully. One must hold himself steadily to the work and take broad views and frequent reviews. Make a note of the passages that seem obscure to you and go back to them frequently. Suddenly a burst of sunshine will illuminate them. Don't hasten ; don't smatter. There is no hurry ; there is no plot to rush you headlong into the middle of the book. Often the author invites you to sit and ponder with him over problems and tendencies. Think, think, think ! — this is the cry of Emerson. Try to think to the end of these marvelously condensed and sugges- tive sentences ; try to think out the connections between them ; let the mind wander in paths of thought indicated here and there. It is good dis- cipline ; it will keep you ever on high levels ; it will lead to original thought. More young minds, in America at least, during the past half century, have learned to think over the pages of Emerson than over any other single author. (30 The Booklovers Reading Club The reader of Representative Men must deter- mine at the outset Emerson's object in writing the book. What is the central thought ? What is his definition of a great man ? Go through the book carefully and note down all requirements which he has given for true greatness. Make a list of quotations defining a great man. A profitable excursion would be to do the same thing with Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, and then compare the two men with this unit of measure. Why did Emerson group together men as widely different as Napoleon and Swedenborg? Why did he choose the particular six that he treats ? Did he have certain abstract ideas, universal ten- dencies, molding influences in mind and then seek for the best representative of that particular thing? For instance, before treating Montaigne, he offers "an apology for selecting him as the representa- tive of skepticism." Why did he select the six particular phases of human life that he did ? Note that the first, philosophy, deals with the in- tellect alone ; the second, mysticism, deals with the soul, with the supernatural that sees visions. Both are extremes. The third, skepticism, is a mean between these. It goes to neither extreme ; it says, " What do I know ?" The fourth, poesy, deals with the imagination and the combining and creative power of man. The last two are cer- tain tendencies of the nineteenth century. The reader should seek for Emerson's definitions of (32) Six New England Classics philosophy, mysticism, skepticism, etc.; jot them down and study them carefully. It is this course of thinking that lays bare the heart ot the book and incidentally the heart of Emerson also. Get an epitome of the essays by trying to sum up in a single sentence each paragraph. Note as many uses as you can for great men. What is Emerson's real opinion of skepticism, of mysti- cism, of Shakespeare, of Napoleon ? Note how each essay ends by showing the subject "to share the halfness and imperfections of humanity." What does this suggest to you ? Shut the book and try to give the substance of what has espe- cially impressed you. Note the style of the essays. First, their per- fect sentences. Select several that seem, as Em- erson once declared them, " sentences incompres- sible." Note their epigrammatic character. Make a collection of brilliant mots like "The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy," "Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors," "Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man be- hind the book." Note how, at times, there is lit- tle connection between sentences. One critic has declared that some of the essays read as if the sentences had been drawn at random from a hat. Determine yourself whether or not this is a just criticism. Note that Emerson uses figurative language freely but never for mere ornament. His figures are always original, effective, illumi- 3B (33) The Booklovers Reading Club nating. Make a list of a few effective ones like, " Life is girt around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky," "Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth." Note finally the precision with which he chooses his words. " They hit the mark every time," declares Lowell, "like a backwoodsman's rifle." Note also his avoidance of the adjective and the decorative epithet. Write a paragraph on the leading characteristics of Emerson's style. II. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables — A Romance. From no one of Hawthorne's creations can one get a more complete, many-sided view of the romancer than from the House of the Seven Gables. All the elements of his strength and weakness are in it. Before studying it one should go over carefully his introduction, for it contains his defi- nition and discussion of the romance as distin- guished from the novel. The romance, he con- tends, is compelled to be true to nothing but " the truth of the human heart." Bearing this in mind the reader will pass over many things which in the more realistic novel would be positive blemishes. After reading the romance through for the story the reader should turn back and make a (34) Six New England Classics leisurely study of it. First, its central theme : "the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and un- controllable mischief." Study the problem as Hawthorne worked it out. Note his attitude to- ward aristocracy and inherited things generally. How long does such a curse endure? Second, the atmosphere of the book. A romance, as Hawthorne has elsewhere observed, needs long vistas into the past ; ivy-covered ruins, legends, old wrong-doings, handed down through centuries, — in general, the atmosphere of hoary antiquity. Note how, out of the comparatively short history of New England, he has in the first chapter created this atmosphere. Note the art with which he has made the old mansion the very embodiment of age and faded tradition. His imagery is taken largely from weird and creepy things, — vaults, haunted houses, graves, coffins. Note the grim touches — figures, allusions, comparisons — every- where in the book. The tale is redolent of New England and especially Salem with its gloomy traditions. The Pyncheons are typical of the old aristocracy. There was, too, something morbid in the Puritan character and there was a certain morbid strain in Hawthorne that enabled him, of all men, to catch it. No one but he could have created this atmosphere. The Hawthornes them- selves had lived for a century or more under the (35) The Booklovers Reading Club tradition of an inherited curse. The thought crops out more than once in the romancer's work. Then as to the characters ; they lack flesh and blood. Note how often they seem like mere wax figures. They have the pale cast of plants that have sprung up in a cellar. Note also that the dialogue is wooden and unreal. No old laborer ever talked like Uncle Venner. The romance is more like an allegory than anything else. Every- thing is symbolic. The house and its surround- ings are but the background for the human tragedy. It invariably reflects the passions and emotions of the beings that are before it. Even the garden and the hens share the curse. Note many other examples. The movement is leisurely. There is nothing too trivial for the romancer to tarry for. Every word and look and voice is minutely analyzed, sometimes with fantastic and far-fetched compari- sons. The author does not hesitate at the very climax of the plot to introduce a whole chapter of elaborate irony, every bit of which delays the action. The plot is developed by analysis. The romancer describes and comments upon and dis- sects his characters with minute and elaborate care rather than allow them to disclose them- selves to the reader. There is little dramatic effect and most of what there is centres about Holgrave. The characters are few — five or six (36) Six New England Classics in all. Contrast with Dickens, who sometimes has as many as two hundred in a single novel. The chief strength of the work lies in its subtle study of the workings of the human heart. How would one feel and act under certain abnormal and startling conditions ? Hawthorne is never at a loss for an answer. His characters may seem too cold and unreal to seem like living people. They are humanity as known by one who had made the greater part of his studies from a secluded standpoint, but at heart they are true to the great fundamentals of human life. Clifford is drawn with a master hand; the character ofHep- zibah is full of the truest pathos, and Phoebe is always most delightful. The romance abounds in contrasts : Hepzibah, devoted to the past, Holgrave, despising it ; Clifford, soft and weak-willed, the Judge, unscrup- ulous and inflexible ; Phoebe, full of young life, the old house, full of death. The constructive art of the work is marvelous. It has almost the three unities of the Greek drama. Its time, ex- cluding the introductory chapter, is only a few weeks ; with one exception the tale never leaves the gloom of the old mansion, and its action throughout is a unity. The reader should note the style of the romance ; its limpid flow, its ease and finish, its precise diction, its abundance of epigram and its perfect naturalness. (37) The Booklovers Reading Club III. Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe — An Historical Narrative. In Parkman the narrative element is pre- dominant. He has himself designated his great work on France and England in North America as "a series of historical narratives." The dis- tinction should be kept in mind. His object is much like that of the novelist. He would simply tell the story, reproduce the time, the men, the scene. He seldom philosophizes ; he seldom, save in summary chapters, indulges in generaliza- tions. He tells the bare story in its details and he tells it so interestingly that the reader often forgets that he is dealing with what has been called " the dry bones of history." It is like reading an historical novel. He excels in de- scribing battles, Indian pageants, marches — move- ment generally. The reader is hurried along with the narrative. Compare, for instance, his account of the siege and the massacre at Fort William Henry with Cooper's narrative in The Last of the Mohicans. Parkman had to deal with a mass of material that might appal any historian. The French and Indian war was a series of movements and battles and skirmishes scattered over almost an entire continent and lasting seven years. Hardly a mile of the English frontier but witnessed some part of the struggle. Furthermore, the war in (38) Six New England Classics America was but the echo of an almost universal European war, whose leaders and problems and diplomacy must not once be lost sight of. The reader should note the skill with which Parkman has threaded his way through this vast swamp of facts, neglecting not a single important move, and losing not once the reader's interest. Note the careful proportions and the skilful groupings. Each chapter is a unity, treating only a single campaign or battle or phase of the war. There is never danger of confusion, the reader never loses the thread. One is impressed with the author's authority. He inspires confidence. One is willing after a time to surrender himself implicitly to his guid- ance. We feel that Parkman has visited the spot, has weighed every existing scrap of evi- dence, and can back up every statement. There is an evident attempt at every point to be impar- tial. No Englishman during the generation after the war could have been fair had he tried. The awful barbarities of the Indians had enraged all who knew of them to such an extent that a cool, impartial view was impossible. Parkman wrote in cold blood. He knew the Indian and could sympathize with the difficulties with which the French struggled. If the narrative favors the English, it is because the evidence at his command made any other view impossible. He knew the Indian thoroughly. He had lived with him for (39) The Booklovers Reading Club weeks at a time when white civilization had hardly touched him. One should study with care the Indian of Parkman ; he is, to say the least, not the Indian of Cooper's novels. Note the graphic way in which the historian brings up the picture of a man. Braddock, Montcalm, Bigot, Pitt, Wolfe seem to breathe before us, and the picture was done with a few strokes. The first chapter is an epitome of Euro- pean history in the eighteenth century that cannot be studied too carefully, and the last chapter, summing up the results of the war, is certainly suggestive. The reader should make notes of the most graphic passages ; as, for instance, the defeat of Braddock. Study the choice of words, the rapid movement, the perfect clearness of the narrative. Not often does history ascend to the plane of pure literary art. One will do well to fix the book in his memory by jotting down the leading events ot each year of the war, studying the plans of the different campaigns and their results, and making careful reviews of the most important facts. IV. Webster's Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill Orations and the Replies to Hayne. It was a saying of Charles Fox that "a good speech never reads well." An oration is so vitally (40) Six New England Classics connected with the physical presence of the orator and of his hearers and with an occasion which all understand and which makes the air electric, that only seldom can it exist apart from these accom- paniments. Its essence is usually too volatile for storage and transportation. Thus among the great classics of the world there are very few orations. Of that fervid and teeming oratorical half century that preceded the civil war only one orator has come down to us as a classic, and much of his work must be classed with ephemeral stuff. There are unquestionably, however, in his works, frequent passages that rise into the pure ether of classic literature. Oratory is best read aloud. The one object for which it was created is vocalization. Before reading try to picture as vividly as possible in your mind the occasion, the audience, the orator. Try to read the lines as you imagine Webster gave them. It will help you greatly in your con- ception of the work. The first two orations are more easily studied than the last. They lead the reader over more or less familiar ground. To get the most from the replies to Hayne one must do a large amount of collateral reading. Webster took it for granted that his hearers knew intimately all the complex- ities of the politics of that day. They understood all of his allusions. But with the reader of the present day it is different. The first two orations (41) The Booklovers Reading Club are more finished and oratorical than the second two, which were running debates almost wholly extemporaneous. Note first of all the object of the orations, especially of the first two, and how the orator accomplishes it. What was his purpose, his stand- point, his audience? Note the plan of his work — the elaborate exordium and perorations. Note the artificiality everywhere manifest — the round, sonorous sentences, the inflated diction, the stately adjectives and epithets, the apostrophes to the dead, the absent, the future generations, the elaborate antitheses and balances, and all the other devices that mark artificial prose. The style is that of Dr. Johnson's day; it hovers ever on the ed^e of bombast. Note such sentences as these : "Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of po- sition appropriately lying at the foot of this mount and seeming fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you but your coun- try's own means of distinction and defense." Note the constant inflation of language. Instead of enduring the storm the pilgrims "struggle with the elements;" instead of looking out to sea the orator " casts his eyes abroad over the ocean " and he sees not a ship, but "a little bark." To appreciate fully this artificial and inflated style take some passage, as for instance that in the Plymouth Rock oration beginning, "Different, indeed, most widely different from all these in- (42) Six New England Classics stances of emigration," and re-write it in plain prose as it would probably appear, for instance, in one of John Fiske's studies of American his- tory. But despite this artificiality there are ever and anon passages that thrill and burn. The fervid passion that swayed their first hearers is still in them. There is a Miltonic grandeur often about this prose, organ-toned and almost sublime. Go through the orations and mark the bursts of true oratory. Note the vigor and vitality of it, the sonorous and rolling sentences, the marvelous choice of words, the figures of speech — all poetic and elevated. It is the prose of a man who knew by heart Shakespeare, Milton and the English Bible. Note that it reads aloud easily. It was created first of all with vocal intent and the breathing places and pauses take care of them- selves. The replies to Hayne should be studied with the thought in mind that so far as diction and final dress is concerned they were purely extempora- neous efforts. One cannot appreciate Webster in his fulness without doing this. Make apian of the argument and follow step by step the course of his logic. Then, last of all, sum up the main arguments of the whole oration and determine what part it was that, in the opinion of the majority who heard the effort, won the debate. (43) The Booklovers Reading Club V. Lowell's Biglow Papers— a Satire. The best place to begin the Biglow Papers is with the introduction to the second series. Here we find a careful discussion of the work by the poet himself. Note that the object of the first series was to satirize the Mexican War and that each of the characters is a type. Parson Wilbur represents the pedantic New England university man of the Cotton Mather type ; Mr. Biglow, the uncouth Yankee, full of honesty, conviction and homely common sense ; and Sawin, the impulsive clown, put in as a contrast. His letters serve to bring the news from the front. The elaborate intro- ductory matter, the learned footnotes and com- ments fill much space ; one can scarcely see the structure for the scaffolding. The nine principal poems are satires on the war, but the rest of the book is a satire on many other things. The principal object of the Bigloiv Papers was undoubtedly to express the author's burning in- dignation, in the first series against the Mexican War ; in the second series against slavery. Beneath all the dialect and buffoonery there is a ring of true steel, of a large-hearted, honest soul that has been outraged in its sense of justice and right. Select passages where the author seems at first merely funny, but where on examination they may be said fairly to throb with indignation and passion. (44) Six New England Classics The comic element was a secondary considera- tion. It was a kind of bait for readers. Note the abundance of humorous devices. First, there is wit, which is merely intellectual — puns, comic twists, sly hits. It crackles and sparkles every- where, but wit alone cannot keep alive a poem. There is diffused everywhere the subtle, indefinable element of humor which, wherever it may be found, is immortal. Humor is of the heart as wit is of the head. It laughs with you, wit at you. It is always blended with a touch of pathos — it laughs when it had rather cry. Seek out the various elements of wit and humor in the poem. Note the comic devices — phonetic spelling, dialect twists, homely comparisons, far-fetched rhymes, cute Yankee wisdom. Note how at first one thinks of Parson Wilbur as merely a comic figure. His pedantry is so ridiculously overdone that we smile over his Latin and his leaden style, yet after a time a human element creeps in and we find the old man really alive and lovable. Nothing so quickly loses its original freshness as satire. Only its first readers can appreciate the full force of it. It deals with the life of the present moment. Its allusions, its subject matter, its personalities are a mere riddle to later genera- tions. Thus much of the original thrill and fire have departed from the Biglow Papers. One no longer cries out delightedly, "A hit, a hit ! " One rather turns to the encyclopedia to find out what (45) The Booklovers Reading Club occasioned the allusion. What keeps the Bigloiu Papers alive is that universal quality that is " not for an age but for all time." Hosea Biglow is a creature of flesh and blood. He embodies a type ; he is alive and will continue to live. So, too, will Parson Wilbur, ridiculous as he is. But more than all, the book contains the record of a burn- ing, honest heart, not afraid to voice its sentiments, not ashamed to lay itself bare for the interest of humanity. Not all of Parson Wilbur's elaborate introduc- tions and notes need be read, but the central poems should be studied for their wit and humor, their Yankee wisdom, their earnestness and con- viction, their message to their times and their final influence. VI. Longfellow's Evangeline — An Epic Poem. In an epic poem the poet tells a story. We see nothing of the narrator ; everything is objective. Lyric poetry, on the other hand, is subjective. The poet tells his own joys and sorrows, impres- sions and imaginings. A very brief epic poem is a ballad — The Wreck of the Hesperus, for instance. A longer one dealing with quiet life is a pastoral or idyl, like Goldsmith's Deserted Village. A very long one, treating of heroic themes, of gods and war, is an epic proper of the classic type, like (46) Six New England Classics the Iliad. Evangeline is best classed, perhaps, as an idyl. Anyone who has followed thus far this course of reading will be unusually well prepared to appreciate its historical background. Parkman's Montcalnt and Wolfe contains by far the best account of the removal of the Acadians. Note any points of disagreement between the poem and the history. The object of Evangeline, however, was not to give a mere chapter of history — its historical framework is very slight. It was written as the poet himself has expressed it, to show " the beauty and strength of woman's devotion." Note the contrast between Evangeline and Gabriel. Instead of searching restlessly and end- lessly, he settles down in solitude, to " seek oblivion of self and of sorrow." The poem is in reality two poems. The charm of the first part lies in the idyllic pictures of still life in the little Acadian village. Note the poetic coloring, the soft backgrounds, the peace and rustic simplicity. Everything is idealized and seen through a romantic mist. It is not the work of an eye witness — Longfellow did not even visit the scene of the poem — it is the work of a dreamer and a poet. It is a characteristic of Longfellow to soften and ornament his pictures, using gen- eral words rather than specific, defining nothing sharply, until they are smooth and graceful and (47) The Booklovers Reading Club pretty rather than rugged and strong and real- istic. Note, for instance, how vague are his por- traits. Evangeline is young, beautiful and black- eyed, but that is all the poet vouchsafes as to her appearance. Gabriel is a mere phantom, even as the Shawnee woman suspected. Only one of the characters is really alive — the full-blooded, irasci- ble blacksmith, who is admirably drawn. Go through the book and make a study of each char- acter. The weakness of the poem is its element of mere prettiness. Such lines as these are sources of weakness rather than strength : " Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels." It is this element of prettiness, of graceful smoothness, and almost sentimentality, that more than any other ranks Longfellow as a minor poet. The second part is largely descriptive. It is a panorama of the Mississippi and of the wild west. Note that the poet's methods of description are of the catalogue order. The details of the land- scape are given with an added embroidery of pretty imagery. The grapevines stretch over the river " like the ladder of Jacob" and the humming- birds are the angels ascending and descending. Amid all this description and imagery runs the thread of the story. Evangeline, do what she may, is ever one day behind her lover. The (48) Six New England Classics unreasonableness of the story is likely to spoil for the reader the pathos of it. Does it not seem unbelievable that where all the Acadians, save only Gabriel, are in the secret the two should live until old age, seeking each other in vain ? One feels that come what will they must be kept apart or the story be spoiled. There are in the poem many touches of genuine pathos — the children trudging to the ships with rescued toys in their little hands, the cry that goes up from the shore when the village is burning, and Evangeline's prayer in the garden. The episode of the Shawnee woman is a strong imagi- native touch. Note other points of real strength in the poem. A study should be made of Longfellow's imagery. His similes, often merely pretty touches, his Biblical allusions, his adjectives and epithets, can all be studied to advantage. The reader, too, should make a careful investigation of the metre, its strength and weakness. The best discussions of the English hexameter are in Matthew Arnold's essay On Translating Homer and Stedman's Poets and Poetry of America under his treatment of Longfellow. The matter is too complicated to discuss here. In such lines as "Bent like a laboring oar that toils in the surf of the ocean " the metre is well-nigh perfect. In many other lines, like 4B (49) The Booklovers Reading Club "Be transported to other lands. God grant you may dwell there" one has to strain to get the metrical effect. In few other poems has Longfellow so fully displayed himself, both his strength and his weak- ness. It is well worth careful and even minute investigation, first as a charming idyl — one of the few unquestioned American classics ; and, second, as an admirable ground from which to study the poet himself. (5°) The Great Classics of New England: A Ten- Minute Talk by Julian Hawthorne (50 The Great Classics of New England : A Ten-Minute Ta Ik by Julian Hawthorne The only son of the New England novelist, born in the recognized centre of American culture and learning, Julian Hawthorne saw the light of day in the same year in which was published Mosses from an Old Manse. His youth was spent in Concord and in Cambridge with the exception of a residence abroad during the consulate of his father and a study period at Dresden where he took courses in civil engineering. For two years immediately after his marriage, Mr. Haw- thorne was a hydrographic engineer for the city of New York. Since then he has devoted himself entirely to authorship. His first successful novel, Bressant, appeared when he was twenty-six years old. The list of his literary works is long and imposing. The best known are : Garth, Dust, Archibald Malmaison and Sinfire. Much of the author's time of late years has been spent abroad though he resides in New York. Recently he has been a voluminous con- tributor of critical and descriptive matter to the great American newspapers. More than six classics of literature have been produced in New England, and between some of them the choice must be determined by individual taste rather than absolute merit. But in review- ing the best books of this country merely, not to say of the world, it at once becomes plain that few can hope for leisure to study them all. Though the entire body of literature of the first class now extant is but a minute fraction of the (53) The Booklovers Reading Club total of published works represented in the great libraries, the number of desirable volumes still remains so large that he who would master them all must make up his mind to give his life to the enterprise. From this point of view, it cannot be said that six books is less than a fair appor- tionment for New England. The authors from whose works I would make my choice are Webster, Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Motley and Dana. I include Web- ster partly for his representative character ; he was the greatest of American statesmen, and one of the greatest orators of the world ; and, though he was not specifically a literary man, several of his speeches are literature of the highest class. I would place in one volume his address at Salem, Mass., in the trial for the murder of Mr. White, his reply to Henry Clay, and his reply to Hayne in 1830. Each of these is a masterpiece, and they contain many passages which have entered into the language. Webster had an imagination of Miltonian grandeur, his mind dwelt habitually in the loftier regions of human thought, and his elo- quence was unmatchable. Emerson is the New England philosopher. He Avas a loving student of Plato ; but he was able to criticize the Platonian system, and his personal genius is so essentially modern that he wins the right to be regarded as a great original force. But he was not so much a reasoner as a (54) Six New England Classics seer, for he was a poet even before he was a phi- losopher ; and this gives a unique quality to his writings. He constantly asserts what he sees as truth ; and if it be objected against him that all his assertions do not always appear compatible one with the other, he replies that he is concerned to state the truth, not to reconcile its seeming in- consistencies. Certain it is that the best things in his writings are those in which he has sur- rendered himself frankly to the intuitive inspira- tion of the seer ; what he then says the mind spontaneously assents to ; whereas in the occa- sional passages where he follows the ordinary custom of supporting his position by argument, he is apt to be less convincing. His gift was that of universal spiritual apprehension ; he did not possess, save in a moderate degree, the faculty in which Hawthorne was supreme in his day — that of insight into the depths of human nature. He expounded the laws of the universe, and the right relations of man to his environment ; but he had little to say to individual seekers for spiritual peace. His cordiality towards the strong man was more marked than was his sympathy with the sinner. Therefore there is always something intangible and impersonal in Emerson, and we grow to think of him more as an idea or principle than as a man. But his works have been con- stantly growing in popularity since his death, and his conceptions are being fitted into numerous (55) The Booklovers Reading Club modern systems of thought, with which, were he alive, he would perhaps acknowledge little fellow- ship. It is suggestive that from first to last he applied himself to interpreting various phases of life according to doctrine, or premise, which he stated at the outset of his career ; so that it might almost be said that you may find the whole of Emerson in any one of his volumes, or almost of his essays. His poetry harmonizes with his prose — it is the soul of it, and, in the opinion of many, the finest poetry written by an American. But since a choice from his works must be made, I would select the first volume of Essays, includ- ing the treatise on Nature. Longfellow is far from being our highest poet ; but he is more widely known than any other, and I choose him rather than the profounder Bryant, or the more lightsome Holmes, because he has produced sustained efforts which will fill a volume each, and can be estimated by themselves. Whit- tier is more spiritual than Longfellow, and more passionate ; but he is also more narrow and less catholic. Longfellow has comforted the hearts, purified the thoughts, and strengthened the faith of millions of his fellow creatures ; and there is a simple grace and felicity about most of his verse that make it poetry in spite of what may often be commonplaceness of subject. Longfellow was not a great poet ; but he was a poet to his very marrow, and all that came from him (56) Six New England Classics echoed the harmony and grace of his mind. No one but he could have written Excelsior and The Psalm of Life, and not made them baldly trivial and pathetic ; but Longfellow's art, or his faith, or his grace, has rendered them enormously popular, and their sentiments are part of the structure of our minds. Of his longer pieces the most important are Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish and Hiawatha; he also pro- duced an admirable translation of Dante's great poem, but that can hardly be included among his original works. The Miles Standish does not rise to the excellence of the two other narrative poems ; of the latter, I myself in some respects would be disposed to select Evangeline ; but, owing to the originality of Hiawatha, which also contains many beautiful and powerful passages, I have decided to give it the palm. It is the only great poem in our language based upon Indian traditions ; the characters are well portrayed and sustained, and the relations be- tween Hiawatha and Minnehaha are exquisitely described. It is a poem which stays in the me- mory; the ridicule with which it was greeted in some quarters on its first appearance has long since died out ; and we may safely regard it as one of the masterpieces of our poetic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne stands apart from other writers, not only of his own, but of other times. He had no predecessors, and has had no success- es?) The Booklovers Reading Club ful imitators. There is in him, for groundwork, the old New England Puritan spirit, inherited from his ancestry, coming in contact with and modified by the new and more tolerant spirit of the future. In this respect he represents the evolution from the past of the present and future ; there is in his writings a profound but very undemonstrative re- volt from the old orthodox towards a radicalism, which has even yet become only partly realized in our lives. At the same time Hawthorne, living alone during the formative period of his career, dwells in a world of causes rather than of effects ; he searches out the spirit of things, and is com- paratively indifferent to the temporary physical embodiment. Thus what would otherwise have been novels, become with him a form he calls ro- mance, though widely divergent in many ways from the literary structure which ordinarily goes under that title. Hawthorne's way was to take an actual human incident and spiritualize it — lay bare its spiritual meaning and consequences. In this way he relates the particulars of life to the universal, and, working beneath the surface that the eye sees, develops the permanent significance of his theme. His imagination is of the finest order ; but it is singularly and fortunately blended with a masculine strength and common sense, which prevent him from lapsing into mere senti- ment or fancifulness. Truth was his avowed ob- ject in all his work ; and he preferred the truth (58) Six New England Classics which lies at the centre to that which dwells at the circumference. He had the humor — the vision beyond the immediate and particular — which is nearly always present in great literature ; and to his other gifts he added a literary style which is as limpid as water, and as true to form as a crys- tal. It is flexible, musical, eloquent, and yet so simple and unassuming that it seems like the familiar converse of a friend. In addition to sev- eral volumes of short tales and pieces, some of which are masterpieces, he wrote, before his so- journ in England, three romances — The Scarlet Letter, which made his reputation ; The House of the Seven Gables, which confirmed it ; and The Blithedale Romance, which enlarged it. The story which he wrote while abroad, The Marble Faun, while beautiful in itself, suffers in technical respects from the fact that description enters so largely into it. Of the three first-named, I select The House of the Seven Gables, as being less gloomy than The Scarlet Letter, and more char- acteristic than The Blithedale Romance. John Lothrop Motley was a product of our best New England culture, and by birth and fortune he was qualified to move in the foremost society of his time. But his tendencies were literary from the first ; and after a novel or two, and some coquetting with the law, he found his proper sphere in history. He conceived the idea of writing the story of the struggle against Spain of (59) The Booklovers Reading Club the Dutch Republic ; and this became, in itself and in its sequels, the labor of his life. In order to avail himself of every source of original infor- mation, he took up his residence in Holland, where he was put in contact with documents and other valuable material ; and, working strenuously for many years, he at length brought forth in three volumes his Rise of the Dutch Republic. This was followed in after years by The History of the United Netherlands, and, shortly before his death, by The Life and Death of John of Barne- veld. At the time he began to write, history had passed from the style of Hume and Gibbon into that of Macaulay, and had not as yet entered upon the later phase exemplified in Green and his followers. But Motley struck out a style of his own, the strength and richness of which im- mediately attracted attention ; while the abound- ing evidences of research and judgment which his volumes contained gave him a place among historians second to none of the moderns. The theme was also noble and stimulating ; the strug- gle portrayed was both heroic and successful, and it sounded the keynote of human liberties which was to be prolonged and accentuated in our own Revolution. After more than half a century, Motley's book still remains the best treatment of its subject ; and though Prescott and Bancroft both chose the scenes of their narratives on the western continent, yet the superiority of Motley's (60) Six New England Classics work as a literary composition and an accurate historical document decides me to select it for our list. R. H. Dana's narrative of a voyage round Cape Horn to California and back, which he en- titled Two Years Before the Mast, possesses every merit which can belong to a writing of its class ; and it has been recognized as a classic ever since its first appearance. As literature it is as unimpeachable as it is when regarded as a statement of facts ; and the picture it painted of life on a merchant vessel in the early years of the last century led to reforms which vastly improved the condition of our sailors. No story of real life more fascinating than this has been published ; and it is a favorite among Eng- lish readers almost as much as here. Yet nothing could be less pretentious than this book ; and the last thing the author expected, or that he aimed at, was a literary triumph. His style is dignified but plain ; and his theme nothing more consider- able than the day-to-day adventures of routine life before the mast on a long voyage. But the clearness and vividness with which the events are described, the masterly yet effortless character drawing, the intellectual command of the situa- tion which is evinced and the impregnable justice and staunchness throughout of the author's atti- tude, combine to render his book irresistible and unforgetable. I would willingly have included (61) The Booklovers Reading Club in this list one or other of the admirable books of Herman Melville, some of which are even more charming and genial than Dana's ; but in power and permanent value they cannot be held equal to Two Years Before the Mast, which likewise occupies in our literature a place by itself. Jl^/L^sUfa*^ "**++%, (62) which are the New England Classics? A Ten -Minute Talk by Mrs. James T. Fields <«3) Which are the New England Classics ? A Ten-Minute Talk by Mrs. James T. Fields A native of Boston; a descendant of Ebenezer, brother of John Adams of Quincy ; the friend of Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell and Agassiz, Mrs. Fields breathed the most stimulating atmosphere of American in- tellectual life. Her home in Boston was the most brilliant and perhaps the first American salon to which resorted artists and authors, American and European. She did not publish any of her work until the year of her widowhood, twenty- seven years after her marriage to James T. Fields, the great publisher and editor of The At- lantic Mo?ithly. Under the Olive appeared in 1881, succeeded by a memoir of her husband. She has also published Notes on the Life of Whittier ; A Shelf of Old Books ; Authors and Friends ; The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe and several other works. A rather startling question has lately been asked respecting the literature of New England. It is this : Who are the six New England classic writers ? Ten or twelve names have already been suggested in reply to this question. It is easily seen that in spite of the wonder which greeted the idea in the first place, we are pretty sure to find ourselves full in the faith that there are at least six classic New Englanders. There can hardly be a wide divergence of opinion as to the classics : Emerson's Essays, Haw- SB (65) The Booklovers Reading Club thorne's The Scarlet Letter ; Longfellow's, Hia- watha and Evangeline, Lowell's Biglow Papers and Commemoration Ode, Dana's Two Years Be- fore the Mast, Dr. Holmes' Autocrat of the Break- fast Table, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom s Cabin and Whittier's Snow- Bound. Of course the first point to be settled is, why these modern writers should be called " classic " at all. The doubting Thomas will refer to his English dictionary of a generation ago which will uphold him in his faith that a classic is an ancient book written in either Greek or Latin, which every true scholar is supposed to have read. Why, then, are Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow and the rest to be named in this way ? Lately in a group of talkers upon this subject, one person spoke of a visit his uncle once made to Mr. Lowell when he was ambassador to England. He remembered quite well that his uncle withdrew from the interview in a most happy frame of mind, declaring that Mr. Lowell was one of the kindest as well as the wittiest of men. Another could recall an invitation his mother re- ceived while a school-girl in Cambridge, to go with all her class and have tea in the garden of Craigie House. She never forgot that Longfel- low himself cut a flower for each and presented it as they came away, nor how he filled their hearts with delight by his kindness and the charm of his manner. A third could remember that his (66) Six New England Classics eldest sister told him, when Emerson went west- ward to lecture, he was a guest at their mother's home in Iowa. "He was a tall, thin man," she said, "with a beautiful smile, who seemed to like to hear what they had to say but did not talk much himself. He was a very comfortable guest to have in the house for he did not mind a cold sleeping-room and it was not necessary to modify the family breakfast for him. But he looked over their books and asked about the school and then he told one sister who especially loved country life that he would send her a book of Thoreau's." So it was with nearly the whole list, and how could these men be classical? Could we be quite sure there was no mistake about the matter? The subject was very seriously discussed in this way by various groups of men and women young and old. "I think," said one thoughtful person, " that Lowell should be called ' classic,' because he has written an ode in memory of the young men who died for the Union and the abolition of slavery, which takes its place by the side of all classic poetry; also because in the Biglow Papers, he was the first to do with dignity what others have done as caricature." "I think," said another of the company, " that a classic must be any book which is as good, years and years after, as it was the day it was written ;" and still another declared that he could not remember the exact (67) The Booklovers Reading Club words, but Matthew Arnold had somewhere said once for all what a true classic is. Tried by these standards Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is surely a classic. It appears to grow better as the years pass and like old wine is per- fected and ripened as time goes on. The pas- sionate depth of feeling in Hester is as young as yesterday and as old as ^schylus. The historic background upon which the figures rest becomes more pure and brilliant in color as the dross of contemporary reminiscence is eliminated from it. There seems to be no doubt about Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter holding topmost rank in the present literature of America. Lowell had determined in his heart to leave some study, if not a life, of Haw- thorne upon record. It was one of his aspirations, but it was never done. Perhaps he had never been able to satisfy himself as to a proper per- spective ; perhaps it was only the inadequacy of human life to the suggestions of the imagination. Certainly Lowell's Life of Haivthorne seems never to have left a trace upon paper anywhere. But we are straying a little from the question which has been raised. Why are all these writers who are so near to us, upon whose works we have been nourished since childhood, why are they called classic? Is it because, as Matthew Arnold has said very simply, so simply that it was hard for our friend to recall it in the discussion : " If a writer is a real classic, his (68) Six New England Classics work belongs to the very best, for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical." It is a great thing to remember that the " very best" may be done or said or written as well to- day as in the immortal days of Greece. Nothing can be so good, so stimulating for the human soul as to know and to remember that oppor- tunity is born again with every new birth. Hence we have our New England classics. Every one who hears of The Booklovers Library should read The Scarlet Letter before the season ends, if he has not done so; also the Commemoration Ode, which stands among the great poems of the world; and Longfellow, whose poems endear him to his time and speak to every human heart with persuasive voices. Emerson, too, should be re-read— the Master, the Teacher, who was the strongest personal influence of his period ; and Dana who has left a work of adven- ture in his Two Years Before the Mast of the " very best "—the first class, a classic ; Mrs. Stowe wringing tears from the heart of the whole world for an oppressed race in Uncle Toms Cabin; Holmes with his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a small book of essays to be placed on the shelf with Charles Lamb, Addison, Hazlitt; Whittier with his Snow-Bound and School Days, his fiery soul pouring itself out in numberless other poems ; and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, the great (69) The Booklovers Reading Club orators who have left imperishable records of their vast intellects. These men, these writers, have taken place among the "very best," and the people of our country should read them or re-read them now in the first year of this new century in order that they may be filled with fresh dignity and recover their native standards of simplicity and true greatness. It is worse than useless, it is dishonest, in speaking of the classics of New England or of Greece or of any land in any age to pretend that masterpieces can as perfectly and as surely with- stand "the blows of Time" when written in prose as when cast in the poetic mold. However won- derful the style, however instinct with vigor and passion a work of prose may be, it stands a smaller chance of survival than a poem which possesses not only the transcendent thoughts and feeling of the highest prose but has passed through the alembic of a brain heated beyond the power of fire to transfuse; being molded thus into "one entire and perfect chrysolite." Nevertheless we see above the waves of time many a work of prose upon which the minds of centuries have fed ; works that still endure for the generations which are to come. We do not say these are not classic for indeed they are, but finer still and surer in their immortality are the songs, the idyls, the tragedies and the epics of the nations of the past. (70) Six New England Classics In recording our standards, therefore, we find that the committing of great poetry to memory has been through all time one of the first aids to education, one of the consolations of humanity. Poetry is often called hard reading, but classic poetry, however deep and "hard," will root itself in the memory and return in moments of de- spondency to feed the soul with fresh courage. Classic prose is always discovered to be prose instinct with poetry, lacking only the concentrated form — the quality of the jewel. Much responsibility rests upon the head of this little New England — the home of the classic writers of America ! To influence behavior and elevate the spirit were the aspirations of these men. Now a vast country is their domain ; a horizon of which they never dreamed ; but east and west, north and south may share freely the beneficence of their inspiration. 5?*^ (70 rke Classical Writers of New England: A Lecture By EDWARD WALDO EMERSON (73) The CLASSICAL WRITERS tf/New England: A LECTURE By EDWARD WALDO EMERSON In the year that Ralph Waldo Emerson pub- lished his second volume of philosophic Essays, his second son, Edward Waldo Emerso^ was born. The Threnody, a dirge for his first-born son Waldo, is one of Emerson's poems most widely read. Edward W. Emerson went from the Concord schools to Harvard University from which he received the baccalaureate degree, and later that of doctor of medicine. For a decade he followed his profession of medicine, but during the last fifteen years he has become known as a lecturer and writer. In the latter role he is repre- sented by his Emerson in Concord, an account of the domestic and civic aspects of his father's life, by magazine articles, by his Phi Beta Kappa poem The Winning Game (Harvard, 1897), and A Cor- respondence between John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he edited. For some years Dr. Emerson has been the lecturer in art anatomy at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. To fully enjoy and understand Hawthorne, one should begin with the Wonder Book and Tangle- wood Tales. These are far and away the most charming presentations of the myths of Old Greece, and parents are happy who have in their children the excuse of reading them anew. Note the Child in the interludes of these books, (75) The Booklovers Reading Club and in The Chimcera, the best of the stories. In hoc signo vinces may have been an early oracle to this artist. The childlike in him, the recurrence in his romances of childhood's faith and its power to scatter darkness is one of the prime secrets of their charm. Hawthorne's mind was like Corne- lius Agrippa's magic mirror, and in it he made men see pictured a shadowy life of the Puritans in the old New England towns which "The sea moans round with many voices." Persons who are repelled by anything short of fresh air and light find in Hawthorne only the student of the unwholesome and uncanny. But he was not, like some modern psychologists dis- guised as story-tellers, through over-subtlety en- meshed in his own web. He was an artist ; more so than any of his predecessors and contempora- ries here — some will say anywhere. Wonderful tapestries came from his loom. He speaks of "the stern old stuff of Puritanism with a gold thread in the web." His background of gloom and fate is like that of an old Flemish picture from which some perfect piece of nature may stand out focussed in the light, whether of candle or of sun. Yes, he is sometimes unwholesome ; but let us judge an artist by his best, for all must often fail of that. The House of the Seven Gables shows Haw- thorne's characteristic charm. Here the ancient (76) Six New England Classics house, curse-haunted, shadowing itself with its projecting stories, is echoed by the withered and unconsciously frowning gentlewoman who lives in its chambers, "overgrown with the deso- lation which watches to obliterate every trace of man's happier hours." But the house is as in- teresting as one of Prout's old drawings, and the natural refinement of Hawthorne will not allow old Miss Hepzibah to be a farce character. We are not permitted to laugh, only to smile at the touching old, near-sighted, stiff-kneed, incapable creature. The prematurely aged cousin, demented by his wrongs, deepens the sombre picture. But in this gloom shines out first devotion and then love ; and then wholesome youth, in the shape of Phoebe Pyncheon, enters and makes Indian sum- mer there. She and the flowers she loves make the centre of the picture whose color the gloom around only heightens, and Fate is not dominant at last, and the Miracle is new. When Hawthorne has peered into the dark witch-wood, the haunted house, the cursed spring, the hereditary doom, he brings in the chubby child, the damask rose, the faint fragrance of some old-fashioned garden flower, the fearless inno- cence of youth, and makes from simplest materials bright and wholesome pictures with almost the freshness of morning upon them ; yet there is an atmosphere, a slight subduing of light in all we see in his mamc mirror. (77) The Booklovers Reading Club Lowell in his Fable for Critics thus explains the flower-like delicacy of Hawthorne's apparently robust personality : " When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted ; So to fill out her model a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared ; And she couldn't have hit a more excellent plan For making him fully and perfectly man." II. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Born in Maine and educated at a " fresh- water" college with other American youths des- tined to fame, Longfellow, in face and figure, speech and thought, suggested old-world cul- ture, yet invigorated by the virgin soil and fine air of the new. Poeta nascitur, non Jit. It was in vain that, to please his father, though with sure mental reserve, the boy began to study law. Within a year kind fortune took her favorite by the hand and set him in the path. Good old Madam Bowdoin had provided that there should be in the raw land a professorship of Belles Let- tres when the right man could be found, and this youth of nineteen showed that he was the fated man. He went abroad to study the modern languages before beginning his work at Bowdoin College, and again when, after a few years, Har- (78) Six New England Classics vard called him to the professorship of the French and Spanish languages and Belles Lettres. Longfellow wrote verses, original or transla- tions, from the first. Though he held these chairs at the university for a number of years, he magnified his office. First America and soon the rest of the civilized world became his students during and after his life. The only real sorrows that came to him were those of bereavement, and these came early and also late, but to strengthen as well as soften. " Henceforth let me bear upon my shield the Holy Cross," he said. And note here that as early as 1842 he appeared in the lists — without a second thought, of course — a champion of the cause of human liberty, but with a poet's wea- pons. He did not rail, but he pictured the slave's cruel lot in seven poems in a way that went straight to the human heart, though a professor of the English language at the University sneers at them to-day. Longfellow's mission was to bring into the sternness of our older and the crudeness of our newer American life a sight of the purple bloom that wraps things of the elder world, a whiff of its enchanted airs : this first, and then to show that the material which lay close at hand and around us in America was as good as that out of which Homer or Chaucer or the Minnesingers wrought their lays. He brought into humble (79) The Booklovers Reading Club work-a-day homes from the Penobscot to the Mis- souri, to enrich the lives of the dwellers, gifts from Germany, Spain, Old France, Italy and Denmark, even Persia and Tartary. He created a market for poetry in places where it was un- known. Then he took the sad story of Acadie, and following Evangeline, led Americans through their great unknown land. Soon after he dealt charmingly with the myths of the aboriginal tribes. Neither theme was dealt with realistic- ally. Then came the charming idyl of the Ply- mouth colony. At last Longfellow put forth the best work of his ripened manhood, the tales of a Wayside Inn, drawn from eight lands and more centuries, fol- lowing the old plan of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, but likely to reach more ears than they, and beautiful, and clean. The Northern Lights stream and the waves swing in his rendering of the Saga of King Olaf the Killingworth birds sing in the apple trees, Robert of Sicily is nobly told, and Paul Revere s Ride alone would make a poet's name. The Prelude, telling of the old Red Horse Tavern at Sudbury and the company, is charming. A day would hardly serve to tell of Longfel- low's hospitalities and his charities to men's souls and bodies. His poems reached the hearts of men and women and children, not only here, but over the civilized world. They are translated into (80) , Six New England Classics all the tongues of Europe, are loved in palaces, cottages and city tenements. He was not one of " the howling dervishes of song." The tone was always pure and high as the verses were simple and sweet. If Longfellow was not a star of the first magnitude, neither is the North Star, yet it is more seen and loved of more people than any other. III. RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Of Emerson's youth it may be said that he had little in boyhood, but that it increased with his years. The elders liked him best when a boy, and the young people in his manhood and age. It is certain that his following among the young, whether in years or in spirit, grew with each year. Yet he wished no disciples, only to teach young people to trust implicitly the word of the Spirit in its special revelation to them when they had learned to rightly listen. The lessons of poverty, self-denial, self-help, mutual help, carefulness and hardiness which he and his brothers learned after their father's early death, he counted as invaluable. The brothers helped each other through Harvard where his education but partly coincided with the narrow curriculum of the day, for, in his own words, he Slighted Minerva's learned tongue, But leaped with joy when on the wind The shell of Clio rung. 6b (8i) The Booklovers Reading Club Then followed school teaching and study of divin- ity, both interrupted by ill health ; the beginning and the brave ending by himself of a happy min- istry, where he had won love and gratitude, be- cause he could no longer with clear conscience perform certain rites which the custom of his church had hallowed. His young wife and bril- liant brother died in these years. Emerson went abroad to recover as he might from these blows, heeding little that he saw ex- cept a few men, notably Carlyle, and returned speedily to send forth from " The close low pine-woods of a river town " his thoughts on nature and her help for man. The Lyceum, spreading through the towns and villages, gave him a pulpit everywhere. He found with pleasure that people welcomed on weekdays the thoughts they shrank from in Sun- day garb. Lowell called Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa ora- tion in 1837 {The American Scholar) "our intel- lectual Declaration of Independence," and tells what a remarkable event it was in the annals of the university. But when, the following year, he spoke to the divinity students at Cambridge in a like strain, the heresy seemed so great to the professors and even to the Unitarian clergy that his name became anathema there, and thirty years passed before Harvard again recognized (82) Six New England Classics him and invited him to begin lectures on phil- osophy. Of these many misfortunes, as they appeared to many eyes, Mr. Emerson said that every one had been a help to him, quoting Mrs. Barbauld's poem The Brook, "And, the more falls I get, move faster on." The essays were all delivered first as lectures all over the country and were later severely pruned and refined. He lived in Concord, going almost daily to Walden woods to receive the thoughts which he found came to the mind attuned by nature and by solitude. He taught self-reliance, but on the purified self, and stood for the Indivi- dual in a generation in which the claims of organization were increasingly pressed. Reformers of all sorts came to Concord, at- tracted by his hospitality to thought. He fed and protected and heard them, but resolutely held to his belief in his special work and that one must not mistake others' chivalries for one's own. But the chivalry of freedom was universal and commanding, and in the long struggle against slavery Emerson early showed his colors and came, as a free-lance, to fight beside Garrison and Phillips when it was dangerous to do so. Emerson read widely, was less of a student than many believed, but had a sure instinct for what was for him in a book— the rest he let go. (83) The Booklovers Reading Club But he studied men with delight, the "men who can do things " in fields where the scholar is often helpless. Especially he honored the farmer : " And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides." But he was not false to his class. He said that "the scholar has drawn the white lot in life." But everywhere he taught that the scholar must be ready to stand for the truth which he on his lonely watch-tower has seen, against the mob, well dressed or in rags ; also, that the scholar must toil unweariedly in his own fields of thought. " To live without, duties is obscene." He eagerly listened to the talk of the tavern, the bank, the club, the laboratory. "These men don't know what to do with their facts," he said, "but I know," recog- nizing that truth is one, and natural facts but the embodiment of spiritual laws. Hence he was in- creasingly attracted to verse as the proper vehicle for his delighted perceptions of beauty, of har- mony, of unity : " And through man and woman and sea and star Saw the dance of Nature forward and far ; Through worlds and races and terms and times Saw musical order and pairing rhymes." He early celebrated the beautiful laws of Com- pensation, and welcomed the doctrine of Evolu- (84) Six New England Classics tion in which he saw, not blind destiny, but the triumph of effort and hope, a confirmation of "good out of evil," his sure belief. Emerson's prose and poetry annotate and ex- plain each other and should be read together. It was as a poet that he would have wished to be remembered. " The sun set, but set not his hope. Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up." IV. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. For poems descriptive of the landscape, the life, the legends of New England, Whittier might well have claimed the laurel, could such an act be even imagined of this gentle and heroic man. Lowell's Hosea Biglow, had that patriot- rustic oftener essayed descriptions of Nature, might perhaps have divided the wreath. What Whit- tier might have done in dialect we do not know, but his native refinement shrank from it, though it was the daily speech which he heard, and he loved Burns, who was not more surely the poet of the Scottish Lowlands than he of the hills, the valleys and sea-sands of rugged New England. The fire and zeal of one of Cromwell's colonels was in his frail frame, yet happily tempered by the religion of the Friends and beautified by a poet's thought. Military terms cannot be avoided (85) The Booklovers Reading Club in speaking of this gentle poet. Though a non- resistant and a man of the gown and pen, he was a born member of the church militant. Courage shone out from his strangely dark eyes. It was of the two-o'clock-in-the-morning type and it was sustained through life, though, like General Gor- don, whom he admired, he went absolutely un- armed (except for the sword of the spirit) into the thickest of the fight for Freedom in its dark- est days, and on the unpopular side. For as early as 1836, when George Thompson came from England to begin his agitation against slavery here, Whittier had him for a guest and escorted him to a meeting where the mob rose and stoned them, and yet, undaunted, went with him to a second where they met with a like reception. It seems strange that this shy, devout Quaker poet should have been in early life a newspaper man, editor and a keen politician. But duty was clear in his eyes. If he saw the public enemy he must warn others, stand guard, and strike when the right was assailed. Were Whittier's standard of a citizen's duty general, our country would be a model republic. Slowly he came to see that the gift which he had thrust aside as a temptation was really his best weapon for the battle. When he was thirty- six years old, he says, he saw that he had sent out newspaper articles which would have amounted to ten closely printed octavo volumes with no appar- (86) Six New England Classics ent response. He then began to be the poet of Freedom, to send his ringing appeals, like The Pine Tree, To Faneuil Hall and To Massachusetts, to rouse the North from lethargy and selfishness to the sense of honor and humanity. His trumpet calls were borne far and wide over the land. But that befel him which must come to all writers who war against a transient evil, that, with its pass- ing, much of the interest which their work should have for later generations is gone. Yet his great poem entitled Ichabod (the glory is departed) on Webster's desertion of the cause of Freedom will, like Browning's Lost Leader, stand as long as weak humanity can betray great trusts. " Scorn ? Would the angels laugh to mark A bright soul driven, Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark From hope and Heaven? Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, Dishonored brow." When the curse of slavery was lifted from the land his name had become widely known, and he passed with joy to pleasanter themes. Having in youth been a shoemaker's apprentice, had early celebrated the nobility of toil in his Songs of Labor ; and now in Home Ballads, with touches of nature everywhere and occasional quiet humor, he preserved in graceful verse traditions of older (87) The Booklovers Reading Club New England. Indeed, he knew her forests, fields and farms and the homely life of his people by heart. As a reformer, he was saved from narrowness by his Quaker faith, by his humor and sense of beauty. Whittier "stayed put," as he phrased it, in the loved region of his birth, always a country man and close to the people, yet widely read and in correspondence with people of culture. Though affectionate and domestic, he remained a bachelor all his days ; yet one cannot help feeling, even wishing, that it was true that there had been a romance in his youth, and that it gave him, per- haps, his most perfect work, My Playmate, Tell- ing the Bees, and In School Time. His poems are little known abroad. He speaks to our people, especially to New Englanders, in a way that no other of their poets has of " The unsung beauty hid Life's common things below." V. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. From fifty to thirty years ago both staircases leading to the anatomical lecture room of the Harvard Medical School were daily packed with struggling youths, and when the bolts were drawn it was as if a dam had burst and a torrent (88) Six New England Classics poured down and flooded the seats of the steep amphitheatre. Such a sight was seen at no other lecture. It was not only due to Dr. Holmes' exact technical knowledge and thorough demon- stration of the dissection of the day, for the idlest and rudest students eagerly attended. To his title "Professor of Anatomy and Physiology" might well have been added "and the Humani- ties." He divested the cast-off human chrysalis of all gruesome associations, treated it reverently, summoned the old masters of anatomy, and its martyrs too — Vesalius and the rest — to counsel, yet never forgot to praise the good work of his assistant and the young prosectors. His illustra- tions were poetic and his similes most fortunate, and the lecture, though conversational, was a rhetorical masterpiece. And the word passed among the young barba- rians that this man had written a book, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which they pre- sently got and read and lent — very likely their first improving book, a liberal education in itself, be- traying them by its sparkling shallows into deeper basins wherein perchance they learned to swim, or could flounder through till they felt firm bot- tom again. Dr. Holmes was Professor of Physiology too, the last to teach in the old didactic way — he welcomed the laboratory method when it came in younger hands, always provided that experi- (89) The Booklovers Reading Club merits were done under anaesthetics — but none the less the instruction was valuable and always civilizing. Ancient and modern literature, me- chanics, optics (he revelled in the microscope and its contributions to knowledge), psychology, behavior, humanity, religion found place in his in- struction ; yet he had a sense of proportion and subordinated them. He knew, too, when to resign his professorship in the Medical School, though he really gave up this because he had created a wider chair with thousands in America and Europe on the benches. It was Holmes who, only half in fun, had given Boston the name of the Hub of the Universe. Harvard College was its training school. Seated on the Hub, then, this charming and frankly avowed egotist — the reproach of the name being neutralized by the size of his heart and the breadth and culture of his mind — proceeded on a university-extension and home-culture plan as Autocrat, Professor and Poet to ameliorate the world. He surely must have accomplished much. The grafting of medicine on to a Puritan cleri- cal stock, the repotting into the conservatory of Paris, the transplantation after several years of vigorous culture back to the native soil, gave a wonderfully successful hybrid, a small, hardy per- ennial, not notably medicinal, yet a good test of medicine, blossoming singularly and sometimes (90) Six New England Classics beautifully, and bearing delicious, wholesome and spicy fruit. Dr. Holmes had prepared himself faithfully and thoroughly to practice medicine, but he was des- tined for other things. All through life he was an admirable adviser of other physicians, but through addresses and books, not as a consultant. His keen tests by scientific method of medical usage and his ridicule of medical fashion with his hatred of all quackery, whether in "regular" or "irregular," has done much good. He was the most honest of men, and ingenuous as a child, soft-hearted and of delicate perceptions. Chival- rous and sympathetic with regard to women, he always recognizes the delicacy of their organiza- tion and cautions the coarser sex in the words of the French toymakers, Ilfaut ne pas brutalizer la machine. Mercury, a patron of physicians, bore a magic caduceus, ^Esculapius a spear with a healing butt. Dr. Holmes carried both weapons — tested with the one, and, as stoutly as St. George himself, thrust his spear — a ray of science and humanity — into cruelty and hypocrisy wherever it appeared, though clothed with the priest's or the doctor's robe. Mock miracles, inhuman doctrines, he loathed as the philosopher and poet should, and he was both. The Doctor's wit was admirable and he seldom let it run away with him. His singular skill in (90 The Booklovers Reading Club running over the thin ice of subjects not usually allowed in general conversation was a temptation to him, but he usually accomplished it brilliantly. His literary armory was full of shining weapons beautifully wrought by him from physiological and even pathological material. His poems often show what he would have delighted to dem- onstrate, how the muscles with which we laugh and cry lie side by side. His almost school-boy poem, Old Ironsides, roused the people to protest, and saved the glorious old frigate " Constitution." What he was capable of as a poet his Chambered Nautilus shows. VI. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Lowell, like Holmes, was the son of a preacher and born in a university town — rural enough for that matter — yet Boston lay at the end of the long bridge which spanned the tidal river that flowed by Elmwood. The boy in his walks towards the sunset found the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, three miles away, which he cele- brated in his verse, and as far to the eastward was the ocean, from time immemorial the quickener of man's imagination and his desire for older lands. His environment may be traced in his life. Devoted to letters from the first, he had the recoil from the shackles of Puritanism (9*) Six New England Classics proverbial in ministers' sons, but all the faith and fire of it remained. Believing only in natural aristocracy, he was an ideal citizen of the Repub- lic from the day he first voted to the time when, equally honored at home and abroad, he cared for the interests of his country at the courts of Europe. He knew the New England country and its life and speech and spirit by heart, but he was also better versed than almost any of her scholars in the literature of the old world. Lowell had the fortune to come to manhood at the time called the Transcendental Epoch, when the spirit, the intellect and the conscience of the country were awakening, and in his essays he tells of those days and their effect on him and the gen- erous youth of the country. As poetry was Lowell's forte, so criticism was his foible ; his wit often carried him too far ; es- pecially is his criticism of Thoreau inadequate and unworthy of him. There is some reason to think that he felt this, too late. The influence of woman was a force in Lowell's life, and his marriage had a softening and an inspiring effect on him. Like a young knight he threw himself into the front rank of the forces that fought for the right in his day, and remained there for life. The shrewd sense and virtue of best New England spoke out in the vernacular, though his Hosea Biglow, and his amusing exposure of the politicians in the days of the Mexican War (93) The Booklovers Reading Club- were better than many sermons. Again in the dark days of the Civil War, to which the Lowell kindred gave the lives of three noble youths, he wrote a second series of Biglow Papers in more heroic strain, yet scintillating with wit, through which were scattered beautiful descriptions of Nature in New England. These dialect poems went everywhere and strengthened flagging patriotism. Lowell's friend and admirer, Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown), in a speech in the House of Commons against some injustice planned by the Ministry, actually quoted from Jonathan to John. Who made the law thet hurts, John, Heads I win — ditto tails ? "J. B." was on his shirts, John, Onless my memory fails. Ole Uncle S. sez he, " I guess, John preaches wal," sez he ; " But, sarmon thru, an' come to du, Why there's the old J. B. A crowdin' you an' me ! " But when the war was over and Harvard gathered her gallant soldiers about her to receive their Mother's praise and mourn with her her fallen sons, Lowell reached his highest level of song in the Commemoration Ode. At Harvard the chair of Belles Lettres which Longfellow and Lowell successively held still awaits their successor. Like that in Arthur's hall it is a Siege Perillous. (94) Six New England Classics In closing these notes on the lives of six of New England's classic writers, let me for the honor of poetry recall that the four who are chiefly known as poets chose unhesitatingly and early the unpopular side, in the struggle in this country for human freedom, and all lived to see the triumph of their cause. (95) Stimulative Questions hese questions are not merely a kind of exami- nation paper after the completion of the classic; their objeEl is rather to open up fields of thought and to stimu- late the reader to think for himself Ji single question may sometimes suggest lines of thinking that may make clear large areas of a classic which might otherwise have remained vague and un- satisfactory. If possible the reader should write out his answers to the ques- tions, since this is the most certain means of avoiding hasty and superficial thinking. 7B (97) STIMULATIVE QUESTIONS REPRESENTATIVE MEN. i . What is an essay ? 2. For what purpose did Emerson write this series of essays ? 3. Do you detect in the essays anything that sug- gests this early use of them ? 4. Who is a great man according to Emerson's definition ? 5. Why did he choose the six men that he did ? 6. Does the selection of these particular six throw any light upon Emerson himself ? 7. Does Emerson's statement of the all embracing influence of Plato seem to you overdrawn ? 8. Comment on Emerson's characterization of Soc- rates. 9. What is there suggestive about his selection of Swedenborg and his elaborate treatment of him ? 10. What is mysticism ? Do you find any traces of it in Emerson ? 11. Is Emerson philosopher, mystic, skeptic, or writer, using the word in each case as he himself has defined it ? 12. How do you account for the fact that five out of the six treated were in a sense literary men ? 13. How is Napoleon the typical figure of the nine- teenth century ? 14. How is Goethe a type of the century ? 15. What is Emerson's attitude toward originality? 16. What impression is made upon you by the fact that Emerson ends each of his studies with a sigh ? (98) Six New England Classics HAWTHORNE'S HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 1. What elements of such Twice Told Tales as Dr. Heidigers Experiment and Sights from a Steeple may be found in the romance ? 2. Does the characterization of Hepzibah seem to you to come near to caricature ? 3. Is there any element of exaggeration in the char- acters of Phoebe and the Judge ? 4. Does the Judge's smile and manner strike you as melodramatic ? 5. What in reality terminated the curse? 6. Is chapter XVIII an artistic defect ? 7. Is it ever safe in your opinion to substitute minute analysis and characterization for movement and dramatic effect ? 8. What do you consider the strongest portions of the book ? 9. In what way does Hawthorne create the atmos- phere of his book ? 10. Do you consider that the author tried to depict in Holgrave one of the New England reformers of his day ? n. How was mesmerism regarded in 1851 ? 12. In depicting Clifford was Hawthorne uncon- sciously bringing out any traits of his own ? MONTCALM AND WOLFE. 1. What according to Parkman was the importance of the French and Indian War ? 2. What gave the French the advantage at first ? L.ofC. (99) The Booklovers Reading Club 3. What really won the war ? 4. To what extent are the French open to criticism in their use of the Indians ? 5. What was Parkman's object in writing the history? 6. Does the popularity of his histories depend upon their subject, their style, or their thoroughness ? 7. Do you detect any leaning on the historian's part toward an undue sympathy for the English ? 8. Were the Indians an advantage or a hindrance to the French ? 9. What is Parkman's method of characterizing a man ? 10. What does he find to be the chief weakness of the French during the war ? WEBSTER'S ORATIONS. 1. What was the occasion of each of these orations ? 2. What seems to you the most truly eloquent pas- sage in them ? 3. Has Webster over-estimated New England's part in the " molding of the American republic ?" 4. What echoes in the orations of the Era of Good Feeling and the period of turgid Fourth of July oratory? 5. Find traces of Webster's knowledge of the Eng- lish Bible. 6. What traces do you find of what may be called the Era of Sentiment in America ? 7. To what elements does Webster attribute New England's greatness ? (100) Six New England Classics 8. What was Webster's position on the slavery ques- tion ? On the question of internal improvements ? On the tariff ? 9. Where was the most vital difference of opinion between Webster and Hayne ? 10. What, in your mind, is the most cogent and con- vincing piece of reasoning in the Reply to Hayne ? 11. What was the object of the opening sentence of the second Reply to Hayne ? 12. What similarity between the endings of the Bunker Hill oration and the Second Reply to Hayne ? THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 1. Is the pedantry of Parson Wilbur carried too far by Lowell ? 2. Which predominates in the work, wit or humor ? 3. Which is the most spontaneous, the first series or the second ? 4. What difference is there between Mr. Biglow and Mr. Sawin ? 5. Which of the lyrics seems to you the most impas- sioned and genuine ? Which the most labored ? 6. Does the fun in any of the poems predominate over the feeling ? 7. How does the work display Lowell's versatility ? 8. What Yankee expressions and idioms impress you as particularly ludicrous ? 9. What glimpses are there of Lowell's love for external nature ? (101) The Booklovers Reading Club io. Do the wit and humor seem to you to be sponta- neous, or is there at times a straining to be funny ? ii. Does the envelop of fun and buffoonery seem to you out of all proportion to the central kernel of open attack upon slavery ? 12. Why did Lowell go to such elaborate lengths with his introductory matter, his notes and indexes ? EVANGELINE. 1. How much real history is there in the poem ? Are there any false touches ? 2. Do the simplicity and the communal life of the peasantry seem to you overdone ? 3. What is the chief charm of part one? 4. What contrasts in the poem ? 5. Which is the better, part one or part two ? 6. Does the background dominate the picture too much? 7. Does part two seem reasonable to you ? 8. Why was the episode of the Shawnee woman in- troduced ? 9. Show how the poet makes constant use of alliter- ation. What is its effect ? 10. Does the hexameter add or to detract from the effectiveness of the story ? 11. What are the main defects of the poem ? 12. What elements detract from the effectiveness of the pathos in part two ? 13. What is the central truth of the poem ? (102) Topics for Special Papers AND FOR OPEN DISCUSSION i. The Websterian school of oratory. 2. Is oratory on the decline ? 3. The great oratorical period in America. 4. New England and its influence on American his- tory. 5. Which has supplied more to the republic, New England or Virginia ? 6. The essay as treated by Montaigne, Bacon, Ma- caulay and Emerson. 7. A comparison of Carlyle and Emerson on the basis of Representative Men and Heroes and Hero Wor- ship. 8. Emerson's debt to Plato and to Montaigne. 9. Was Emerson a mystic ? 10. Hawthorne, a type of Puritanism. 11. The romance and the novel. 12. Hawthorne's tendency to allegory. 13. Do the defects in The House of the Seven Gables outweigh the merits ? 14. The Indian of Parkman and of Cooper. 15. Who is the greatest American historian ? 16. Will Parkman's work ever be done over again ? 17. The differences between wit and humor. 18. The Lowell of the Biglow Papers and the Lowell of the Commemoration Ode. 19. Is the Biglow Papers a classic ? 20. A comparison between Evangeline and Whittier's Snow Bound. 21. Is Longfellow a minor poet ? 22. Longfellow's Evangeline in the light of Park- man's historical study of the Acadians. (103) Illustrative Extracts The following extracts from the two classics selected by Dr. Hale not furnished to our readers are given for their convenience in applying the foregoing criticisms and helps if they do not care to get the books and make a careful study of them. An extract should never take the place of an entire classic. One should read whole books. However, if one finds it impossible to read the entire classic he can often find much profit from a judiciously made quotation from it. THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— No. i. A LETTER From Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jaalam to the Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. Jaylem, June, 1846. Mister Eddyter : — Our Hosea wuz down to Boston last week, and he see a cruetin Sarjunt a struttin round as popler as a hen with 1 chicking, with 2 fellers a drum- min and fifin arter him like all nater. the sarjunt he thout Hosea hed n't gut his i teeth cut cos he looked a kindo's though he'd jest com down, so he cal'lated to hook him in, but Hosy wood n't take none 0' his sarse for all he hed much as 20 Rooster's tales stuck onto his hat and eenamost enuf brass a bobbin up and down on his shoulders and figureed onto his coat and trousis, let (i°5) J The Booklovers Reading Club alone wut nater hed sot in his featers, to make a 6 pounder out on. wal, Hosea he com home considerabal riled, and arter I'd gone to bed I heern Him a thrashin round like a short-tailed Bull in fli-time. The old Woman ses she to me ses she, Zekle, ses she, our Hosee's gut the chollery or suthin anuther ses she, don't you Bee skeered, ses I, he's oney amakin pottery * ses i, he's oilers on hand at that ere busynes like Da & martin, and shure enuf, cum mornin, Hosy he com down stares full chizzle, hare on eend and cote tales flyin, and sot rite of to go reed his varses to Parson Wilbur bein he haint aney grate shows o'book larnin himself, bimeby he cum back and sed the parson wuz dreffle tickled with 'em as i hoop you will Be, and said they wuz True grit. Hosea ses taint hardly fair to call 'em hisn now, cos the parson kind o' slicked off sum o' the last varses, but he told Hosee he didn't want to put his ore in to tetch to the Rest on 'em, bein they wuz verry well As thay wuz, and then Hosy ses he sed suthin a nuther about Simplex Mundishes or sum sech feller, but I guess Hosea kind o' did'nt hear him, for I never hearn o' nobody o' that name in this villadge, and I've lived here man and boy 76 year cum next tater diggin, and thair aint no wheres a kitting spryer 'n I be. If you print 'em I wish you'd jest let folks know who hosy's father is, cos my ant Keziah used to say it's nater to be curus ses she, she aint livin though and he's a likely kind o' lad. EZEKIEL BIGLOW. * Aut insanity aut versos facit. — H. W. (106) Six New England Classics Thrash away, you '11 hev to rattle On them kittle-drums o' yourn, — 'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle Thet is ketched with mouldy corn ; Put in stiff, you fifer feller, Let folks see how spry you be, — Guess you'll toot till you are yeller 'Fore you git ahold o' me ! Thet air flag's a leetle rotten, Hope it aint your Sunday's best ; — Fact ! it takes a sight o' cotton To stuff out a soger's chest : Sence we farmers hev to pay fer 't, Ef you must wear humps like these, Sposin' you should try salt hay fer 't, It would du ez slick ez grease. 'T would n't suit them Southun fellers, They 're a dreffle graspin' set, We must oilers blow the bellers Wen they want their irons het ; May be it's all right ez preachin', But my narves it kind o' grates, Wen I see the overreachin' O' them nigger-drivin' States. Them thet rule us, them slave-traders, Haint they cut a thunderin' swarth (Helped by Yankee renegaders), Thru the vartu o' the North ! We begin to think it's nater To take sarse an' not be riled ; — Who'd expect to see a tater All on eend at bein' biled ? Ez fer war, I call it murder, — There you hev it plain an' flat ; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that ; (107) The Booklovers Reading Club God hez sed so plump an' fairly, It's ez long ez it is broad, An' you've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God. 'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers Make the thing a grain more right ; 'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers Will excuse ye in His sight ; Ef you take a sword an' dror it, An' go stick a feller thru, Guv'ment aint to answer for it, God '11 send the bill to you. Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin' Every Sabbath, wet or dry, Ef it's right to go amowin' Feller-men like oats an' rye? I dunno but wut it's pooty Trainin' round in bobtail coats, — But it's curus Christian dooty This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats. They may talk o' Freedom's airy Tell they're pupple in the face, — It's a grand gret cemetary Fer the barthrights of our race ; They jest want this Calif orny So 's to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye, An' to plunder ye like sin. Aint it cute to see a Yankee Take sech everlastin' pains, All to git the devil's thankee Helpin' on 'em weld their chains? Wy, it's jest ez clear ez riggers, Clear ez one an' one make two, Chaps thet make black slaves o' niggers Want to make wite slaves o' you. (108) Six New England Classics Tell ye jest the eend I've come to Arter cipherin' plaguy smart, An' it makes a handy sum, tu, Any gump could larn by heart ; Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame. Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same. 'Taint by turnin' out to hack folks You're agoin' to git your right, Nor by lookin' down on black folks Coz you're put upon by wite ; Slavery aint o' nary color, 'Taint the hide thet makes it wus, All it keers fer in a feller 'S jest to make him fill its pus. Want to tackle me in, du ye ? I expect you'll hev to wait ; Wen cold lead puts daylight thru ye You'll begin to kal'late ; S'pose the crows wun't fall to pickin' All the carkiss from your bones, Coz you helped to give a lickin' To them poor half-Spanish drones? Jest go home an' ask our Nancy Wether I'd be sech a goose Ez tojine ye, — guess you'd fancy The etarnal bung wuz loose ! She wants me fer home consumption, Let alone the hay 's to mow, — Ef you're arter folks o' gumption, You've a darned long row to hoe. Take them editors thet's crowin' Like a cockerel three months old, — Don't ketch any on 'em goin', Though they be so blasted bold ; (109) The Booklovers Reading Club Aint they a prime lot o' fellers ? 'Fore they think on't they will sprout (Like a peach thet's got the yellers), With the meanness bustin' out. Wal, go 'long to help 'em stealin' Bigger pens to cram with slaves, Help the men thet's oilers dealin' Insults on your fathers' graves ; Help the strong to grind the feeble, Help the many agin the few, Help the men thet call your people Witewashed slaves an' peddlin crew ! Massachusetts, God forgive her, She's akneelin' with the rest, She, thet ough' to ha' clung ferever In her grand old eagle-nest ; She thet ough' to stand so fearless Wile the wracks are round her hurled, Holdin' up a beacon peerless To the oppressed of all the world ! Haint they sold your colored seamen ? Haint they made your env'ys wiz? Wut '11 make ye act like freemen ? Wut '11 git your dander riz? Come, I'll tell ye wut I 'm thinkin' Is our dooty in this fix, They'd ha' done 't ez quick ez winkin* In the days o' seventy-six. Clang the bells in every steeple, Call all true men to disown The tradoocers of our people, The enslavers o' their own ; Let our dear old Bay State proudly Put the trumpet to her mouth, Let her ring this messidge loudly In the ears of all the South : — (no) Six New England Classics "I'll return ye good fer evil Much ez we frail mortils can, But I wun't go help the Devil Makin' man the cus o' man ; Call me coward, call me traiter, Jest ez suits your mean idees, — Here I stand a tyrant-hater, An' the friend o' God an' Peace !" Ef I'd my way I hed ruther We should go to work an' part, — They take one way, we take t' other, - Guess it wouldn't break my heart ; Man hed ough' to put asunder Them thet God has noways jined ; An' I shouldn't gretly wonder Ef there's thousands o' my mind. (in) The Booklovers Reading Club EVANGELINE. THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY AFTER THE GEN- ERAL INTRODUCTION. Now recommenced the reign of rest and affection and stillness. Day with its burden and heat had departed, and twilight descending Brought back the evening star to the sky, and the herds to the homestead. Pawing the ground they came, and resting their necks on each other, And with their nostrils distended inhaling the freshness of evening. Foremost, bearing the bell, Evangeline's beautiful heifer, Proud of her snow-white hide, and the ribbon that waved from her collar, Quietly paced and slow, as if conscious of human affection. Then came the shepherd back with his bleating flocks from the seaside, Where was their favorite pasture. Behind them followed the watch-dog, Patient, full of importance, and grand in the pride of his instinct, Walking from side to side with a lordly air, and superbly Waving his bushy tail, and urging forward the stragglers ; Regent of flocks was he when the shepherd slept ; their protector, When from the forest at night, through the starry silence, the wolves howled. Late, with the rising moon, returned the wains from the marshes, Laden with briny hay, that filled the air with its odor. Cheerily neighed the steeds, with dew on their manes and their fetlocks, While aloft on their shoulders the wooden and ponderous saddles, Painted with brilliant dyes, and adorned with tassels of crimson, Nodded in bright array, like hollyhocks heavy with blossoms. Patiently stood the cows meanwhile, and yielded their udders Unto the milkmaid's hand ; whilst loud and in regular cadence Into the sounding pails the foaming streamlets descended. Lowing of cattle and peals of laughter were heard in the farm-yard, Echoed back by the barns. Anon they sank into stillness ; Heavily closed, with ajarring sound, the valves of the barn-doors, Rattled the wooden bars, and all for a season was silent. (112) Six New England Classics Indoors, warm by the wide-mouthed fireplace, idly the farmer Sat in his elbow-chair, and watched how the flames and the smoke- wreaths Struggled together like foes in a burning city. Behind him, Nodding and mocking along the wall, with gestures fantastic, Darted his own huge shadow, and vanished away into darkness. Faces, clumsily carved in oak, on the back of his arm-chair Laughed in the flickering light, and the pewter plates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame, as shields of armies the sunshine. Fragments of song the old man sang, and carols of Ch istmas, Such as at home, in the olden time, his fathers before him Sang in their Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom, that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bag- pipe, Followed the old man's song, and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause of the song, with measured motion the clock clicked. THE ENDING OF EVANGELINE'S FIRST JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF HER LOVER. Over the joyous feast the sudden darkness descended. All was silent without, and, illuming the landscape with silver, Fair rose the dewy moon and the myriad stars ; but within doors, Brighter than these, shone the faces of friends in the glimmering lamplight. Then from his station aloft, at the head of the table, the herdsman Poured forth his heart and his wine together in endless profusion. Lighting his pipe, that was filled with sweet Natchitoches tobacco, Thus he spake to his guests, who listened, and smiled as they listened ; — "Welcome once more, my friends, who long have been friendless and homeless, 8b (113) The Booklovers Reading Club Welcome once more to a home, that is better perchance than the old one ! Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers ; Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer. Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, as a keel through the water, All the year round the orange-groves are in blossom ; and grass grows More in a single night than a whole Canadian summer. Here, too, numberless herds run wild and unclaimed in the prairies ; Here, too, lands may be had for the asking, and forests of timber With a few blows of the axe are hewn and framed into houses. After your houses are built, and your fields are yellow with harvests, No King George of England shall drive you away from your homesteads, Burning your dwellings and barns, and stealing your farms and your cattle." Speaking these words, he blew a wrathful cloud from his nostrils, While his huge, brown hand came thundering down on the table, So that the guests all started ; and Father Felician, astounded, Suddenly paused, with a pinch of snuff half-way to his nostrils. But the brave Basil resumed, and his words were milder and gayer :— "Only beware of the fever, my friends, beware of the fever ! For it is not like that of our cold Acadian climate, Cured by wearing a spider hung round one's neck in a nutshell !" Then there were voices heard at the door, and footsteps approaching Sounded upon the stairs and the floor of the breezy veranda. It was the neighboring Creoles and small Acadian planters, Who had been summoned all to the house of Basil the Herdsman. Merry the meeting was of ancient comrades and neighbors : Friend clasped friend in his arms ; and they who before were as strangers, Meeting in exile, became straightway as friends to each other, Drawn by the gentle bond of a common country together. But in the neighboring hall a strain of music, proceeding From the accordant strings of Michael's melodious fiddle, Broke up all further speech. Away, like children delighted, All things forgotten beside, they gave themselves to the maddening Whirl of the dizzy dance, as it swept and swayed to the music, Dreamlike, with beaming eyes and the rush of fluttering garments. (i>4) Six New England Classics Meanwhile, apart, at the head of the hall, the priest and the herdsman Sat, conversing together of past and present and future ; While Evangeline stood like one entranced, for within her Olden memories rose, and loud in the midst of the music Heard she the sound of the sea, and an irrepressible sadness Came o'er her heart, and unseen she stole forth into the garden. Beautiful was the night. Behind the black wall of the forest, Tipping its summit with silver, arose the moon. On the river Fell here and there through the branches a tremulous gleam of the moonlight, Like the sweet thoughts of love on a darkened and devious spirit. Nearer and round about her, the manifold flowers of the garden Poured out their souls in odors, that were their prayers and confes- sions Unto the night, as it went its way, like a silent Carthusian. Fuller of fragrance than they, and as heavy with shadows and night-dews, Hung the heart of the maiden. The calm and the magical moon- light Seemed to inundate her soul with indefinable longings, As, through the garden gate, and beneath the shade of the oak- trees, Passed she along the path to the edge of the measureless prairie. Silent it lay, with a silvery haze upon it, and fire-flies Gleaming and floating away in mingled and infinite numbers. Over her head the stars, the thoughts of God in the heavens, Shone on the eyes of man, who had ceased to marvel and worship, Save when a blazing comet was seen on the walls of that temple, As if a hand had appeared and written upon them, " Upharsin." And the soul of the maiden, between the stars and the fire-flies, Wandered alone, and she cried, " O Gabriel ! O my beloved ! Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee ? Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me ? Ah ! how often thy feet have trod this path to the prairie ! Ah ! how often thine eyes have looked on the woodlands around me ! Ah ! how often beneath this oak, returning from labor, Thou hast lain down to rest, and to dream of me in thy slumbers ! When shall these eyes behold, these arms be folded about thee? " Loud and sudden and near the note of a whippoorwill sounded ("5) The Booklovers Reading Club Like a flute in the woods ; and anon, through the neighboring thickets, Farther and farther away it floated and dropped into silence. "Patience!" whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of dark- ness: And, from the moonlit meadow, a sigh responded, "To-morrow!" (116) Selected Criticism REPRESENTATIVE MEN JUL Richard Garnett. " Emerson's discourses on Representative Men, first delivered in 1845, though not pub- lished until 1850, exhibit a greater tendency to the oracular than anything written before or afterwards. The first lecture, ' The Uses of Great Men,' is obscure in the only sense in which obscurity is justly imputable to Emerson. It is a succession of sayings for the most part individu- ally comprehensible and sometimes of stimulating freshness, but so abrupt and discontinuous that we find ourselves landed at last in Emerson's favorite conclusion, with but slight idea how we have arrived at it. Genius ' appears as an ex- ponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of a First Cause.' It is the purpose of the remaining lec- tures to resolve this pure ray of primal intellect into the sixfold spectrum of philosopher, mystic, skeptic, poet, man of the world, and writer, re- spectively personified by Plato, Swedenborg Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. Here we find Emerson's success to be propor- tioned to his hold on concrete fact. The figure of Plato, of whose personality so little is known, (117) The Booklovers Reading Club is, as Carlyle complains, vague and indefinite. ' Can you tell me,' asked an auditor of his neigh- bor, ' what connection all this has with Plato ?' ' None, my friend, save in God.' But the other figures are visible, if not palpable. Nothing can be more generous than his trampling down of prejudice in recognizing the true inspiration of Swedenborg, or more crushing than his criticism of the merely mechanical element in that seer. The lecture on Montaigne teaches that a wise skepticism leads to the same result as a large faith. The discussion on Napoleon shows Emer- son at his best as a connoisseur of men and would alone prove that he did not addict himself to speculation out of incapacity or contempt for the affairs of the world. The ideologist judges the man of action more shrewdly and justly than the man of action would have judged the ideolo- gist; and after having painted most brilliantly Napoleon's perfect sufficiency in all things for which virtue is not needful, puts him on his right footing with ' Bonaparte is the idol of common men, because he has in transcendent degree the qualities and the powers of common men.' On Goethe and Shakespeare, Emerson says many excellent things, but the former's activity is too multifarious to be condensed into a lecture, though the man himself he got into a sentence, 1 the old eternal genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any (118) Six New England Classics other ' and Emerson is incapable of contemplating Shakespeare with the eye of the dramatic artist. His unsatisfied demands ignore the fact that Shakespeare's plays were designed for the stage and must not be burdened with incongruous wisdom." Oliver Wendell Holmes. " It would teach us a good deal merely to con- sider the names he has selected as typical and the ground of their selection. We get his classifica- tion of men considered as leaders in thought and action. He shows his own affinities and repul- sions and, as everywhere, writes his own biog- raphy no matter about whom or what he is talk- ing. There is hardly any book of his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not Petrarch, not Napoleon, but Emer- son himself. All his great men interest us for their own sake ; but we know a good deal about most of them and Emerson holds the mirror up to them at such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero ; unintentionally, un- consciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize. Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation. Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of all great men : ' The power they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do (i '9) The Booklovers Reading Club not owe this to Plato but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.' " Thomas Wentworth Higginson. " Within the limits of a single sentence no man who ever wrote the English tongue has put more meaning into words than Emerson. In his hands, to adopt Ben Jonson's vigorous phrase, words ' are rammed with thought.' No one has reverenced the divine art of speech more than Emerson, or practiced it more nobly. Look through all Emer- son's writings and then consider whether in all literature you can find a man who has better fulfilled that aspiration stated in such condensed words by Joubert, ' to put a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word.' After all, it is phrases and words won like this that give immortality." THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES JUL Lowell to Hawthorne . " It seems to me that The House of the Seven Gables is the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made. It is with the highest art that you have typified (in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor, the Colonel) that intimate relationship between the Present and the Past in the way of ancestry (120) Six New England Classics and descent which historians so carefully overlook. Yesterday is commonly looked upon and written about as of no kin to to-day though the one is the legitimate child of the other and has its veins filled with the same blood." Henry James. " If it be true of the others that the pure, natural quality of the imaginative strain is their great merit, this is at least as true of The House of the Seven Gables the charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds, like that of the sweetness of a piece of music or the softness of fine September weather. It is vague, indefinable, ineffable ; but it is the sort of thing which we must always point to in justification of the high claim that we make for Hawthorne. In this case, of course, its vague- ness is a drawback, for it is difficult to point to ethereal beauties , and if the reader whom we have wished to inoculate with our admiration in- form us, after looking awhile, that he perceives nothing in particular, we can only reply that, in effect, the object is a delicate one." «JUL Moncure D. Conway. " The Judge appears to me an unrealistic stage- villain, acting ' as it is written ' in the legend. Nor does heroine Phoebe, charming and satisfac- (121) The Booklovers Reading Club tory as she is, seem a particularly unique crea- tion. The miracles of the book are the gradual effort of the prisoner, so long buried alive, to re- cover his lost youth and happiness, and the loyal devotion of gaunt Hepzibah to this brother, even to the withdrawal of her marred visage which he dislikes to look upon. In all the detail work of this romance the reader feels that he is receiving actual impressions and experiences." JUL Henry W. Longfellow. " Another characteristic of this writer is the exceeding beauty of his style. It is clear as Tun- ing waters are. Indeed he uses words merely as stepping-stones upon which, with a free and youth- ful bound, his spirit crosses and recrosses the bright and rushing stream of thought." JJL Hawthorne in a Letter to Bridge. " The House of the Seven Gables, in my opinion, is better than The Scarlet Letter ; but I should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character a little too much for popular appre- ciation, nor if the romance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that por- tions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write, and the publisher speaks encouragingly of it by its success." (122) Six New England Classics MONTCALM AND WOLFE E. L. Godkin. " Parkman often reminded me of Walter Scott. His mental make-up was very much the same ; he had the same deep and abiding love for his native land, of 'the brown heath and shaggy woods ' in which his boyhood had been passed, and the same reverence for the America of his ancestors that Scott felt for the Borderland." George Stewart. "To the preparation of his histories, which are marked by an eloquent and graceful style and strict faithfulness to facts, Parkman devoted an industry, care, and thoroughness which leave un- questioned the statements put forward. We know of the vastness of his task and the difficulties under which he worked for many years. He neglected nothing. He visited all the scenes which his luminous pen so admirably describes, not once or twice, but many times. The archives of France, England, Russia and Canada yielded their treasures to him. Every known letter, journal, report, and despatch which bore even in the remotest way upon his subject were copied and sent to him." Charles Francis Richardson. " His most conspicuous quality, and that by which, I suppose, he will longest be kept in re- (123) The Booklovers Reading Club membrance, is his picturesqueness. His points of view are well chosen, and from the selected stand- points he makes us see with the eyes of a by- stander at the time of action the larger and the smaller deeds that are done. Word-painting for a purpose is not often better offered ; hence, of course, it follows that Parkman is the most inter- esting of American historians, with the possible exception of Prescott, who is suffering at the pres- ent time from a comparative neglect that is not easily accounted for. This sort of graphic writing is found in the pages of Motley plus an analytical power which neither Prescott nor Parkman pos- sesses." WEBSTER'S ORATIONS. Henry Cabot Lodge. " Many persons consider the Plymouth oration to be the finest of all Mr. Webster's efforts in this field. It is certainly one of the very best of his productions, but he showed en the next great occasion a distinct improvement which he long- maintained. Five years after the oration at Ply- mouth he delivered the address on the laying of the cornerstone of Bunker Hill monument. The superiority to the first oration was not in essen- tials but in details, the fruit of a ripening and ex- panding mind. At Bunker Hill, as at Plymouth, he displayed the massiveness of thought, the dig- (124) Six New England Classics nity and grandeur of expression, and the range of vision which are all so characteristic of his in- tellect and which are so much enhanced by his wonderful physical attributes. But in the latter oration there is a greater finish and smoothness. We appreciate the fact that the Plymouth oration is a succession of eloquent fragments. The same is true of the Bunker Hill address but we no longer realize it. The continuity is, in appear- ance, unbroken, and the whole work is rounded and polished. The style, too, is now perfected. It is at once plain, direct, massive, and vivid. The sentences are generally short and always clear but never monotonous. The preference for Anglo-Saxon words and the exclusion of Latin derivatives are extremely marked and we find here in rare perfection that highest attribute of style, the union of simplicity, picturesqueness and force. In the first Bunker Hill oration Mr. Webster touched his highest point in the difficult task of commemorative oratory. In that field he not only stands unrivaled but no one has approached him. "As every one knows, this speech [the reply to Hayne] contains much more than the argu- ment against nullification which has just been dis- cussed and exhibits all its author's intellectual gifts in the highest perfection. Mr. Hayne had touched on every conceivable subject of political impor- tance, including slavery, which, however covered (125) The Booklovers Reading Club up, was really at the bottom of every Southern movement, and was certain sooner or later to come to the surface. All these various topics Mr. Webster took up, one after another, displaying a most remarkable strength of grasp and ease of treatment. He dealt with them all effectively and yet in just proportion. Throughout there are bursts of eloquence skilfully mingled with state- ment and argument, so that the listeners were never wearied. Yet, while the attention was closely held by the even flow of lucid reasoning, the emotions and passions were from time to time deeply aroused and strongly excited. In many passages of direct retort Mr. Webster used an irony which he employed always in a perfectly characteristic way. He had a strong natural sense of humor, but he never made fun or de- scended to trivial efforts to excite laughter against an opponent. He was not a witty man or a maker of epigrams. But he was a master in the use of a cold, dignified sarcasm which at times, and in this instance particularly, he used freely and mer- cilessly. . . . More than all this, however, in the immediate effect of Mr. Webster's speeches was the physical influence of the man himself. We can but half understand his eloquence and its influence if we do not carefully study his physical attributes, his temper and disposition. In face, form, and voice nature did her utmost for Daniel Webster. . . . There is no man in all history (126) Six New England Classics who came into the world so equipped physically for speech. In this direction nature could do no more. The mere look of the man and the sound of his voice made all who saw and heard him feel that he must be the embodiment of wisdom, dio-- nity, and strength, divinely eloquent, even if he sat in dreamy silence or uttered nothing but heavy commonplaces." THE BIGLOW PAPERS Jul Edmund Clarence Stedman. "They \T he Biglow Paper s\ are a master work in which Lowell's ripe genius fastened the spirit of its region and period. Their strength lies in qualities which, as here combined, were no man's save his own. They declare the path of a sincere and intelligent party with respect to war — a senti- ment called out by the invasion of Mexico, unjust in itself, but now seen to be a historical factor in the world's progress. This was a minority faith, held in vulgar contempt, and there was boldness in declaring it. Again The Biglow Papers were the first and are the best metrical presentation of Yankee character in its thought, dialect, manners and singular mixture of coarseness and shrewd- ness with the fundamental sense of beauty and right. Never sprang the flower of art from a more unpromising soil, yet these are eclogues as (127) The Booklovers Reading Club true as those of Theocritus or Burns. Finally, they are not merely objective studies, but charged with the poet's own passion and bearing the marks of a scholar's hand. ... In the second series of The Biglow Papers the humor is more grim, the general feeling more intense. Still they are not Tyrtaean strains, but chiefly called out by political episodes — like the Mason and Slidell affair — and constantly the poet seeks a relief from the tension of the hour. One feels this in read- ing the dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument at Concord, suggested by Burns' Tzva Briggs, the return to Sunthin in the Pastoral Line, or, most of all, The Courtin . This bucolic idyl is without a counterpart ; no richer juice can be pressed from the wild grape of the Yankee soil." JJL Francis H. Underzvood. " The wit of Hosea Biglow is the native wit of Lowell, instantaneous as lightning ; and Kosea's commonsense is Lowell's birthright too. . . . The poems were finally gathered into a volume which in comic completeness is without a parallel. The work begins with notices of the press, which are delightful travesties of the perfunctory style both of ' soft soaping ' and of ' cutting up.' There happening to be a vacant page, the space was filled off-hand by the first sketch of Zekle's Court- ship. This is the most genuine of our native (128) Six New England Classics idyls. There is a burlesque advertisement in Latin of one of Mr. Wilbur's projected works preceding the title page. In the course of the volume the parson delineates himself until he be- comes a character as real and as charming as the most enduring creations of English fiction. . . . The Biglow Papers end appropriately with a comic glossary and index. It must be repeated by way of emphasis that from the first fly-leaf to the colophon this is the only complete and perfect piece of grotesque comedy in existence." EVANGELINE Charles Francis Richardson. " ' Tell me a story ' has been the request made of singers and makers of prose fiction for many a century. Evangeline told a story with simple grace and quiet art and with that human sympathy which pulses through nearly all that Longfellow ever wrote. A new-world theme, taken from an unfamiliar coast or from the wild interior, gave the poem an originality of plot which fitly accom- panied its unfamiliar metre. There was in it enough of freshness to separate it from the well- known productions of its author whose qualities of mind and soul it, however, reflected sufficiently clearly. He had been deeply and constantly indebted to Europe for poetic theme and color, 9 b (129) The Booklovers Reading Club but here he essayed a long poem of strictly American tone. The experiment, discreetly made, was a wise one. The story was one suited to his mind, and his previous metrical experiments and obvious artistic powers enabled him to give it a proper setting. Bold and high imagination, a soaring genius, were not his ; but the imagination which is tender, sweet and human was never far away from his hand. Therefore in Evangeline are shown at large the patient endurance and gentle love of which he had so often sung in lyrics. Here, too, Longfellow's habitual diffuseness almost ceased to be a blemish, for diffuseness is too essential a part of the English hexameter — alas, how different from the Greek — that in Longfellow and Clough we scarcely stop to note it. The body and soul of the poem Evangeline offer no dis- cordant impression to the reader's mind. «JUL Edmund Clarence Stedman. " With the measure that came to him, the poet had chanced upon an idyllic story seemingly made for its use and wholly after his liking. A beautiful, pathetic tradition of American history, remote enough to gather a poetic halo, and yet fresh with sweet humanities ; tinged with provin- cial color which he knew and loved, and in its course taking on the changing atmospheres of his own land ; pastoral at first, then broken into (130) Six New England Classics action, and afterward the record of shifting- scenes that made life a pilgrimage and dream. There are few dramatic episodes ; there is but one figure whom we follow — that one the most touching of all, the betrothed Evangeline searching for her lover through weary years and over half an un- known world. There are chance pictures of Acadian fields, new-world rivers, prairies, bayous, forests, by moonlight and starlight and midday ; glimpses, too, of picturesque figures, artisans and farmers, soldiery, trappers, boatmen, emigrants and priests. But the poem already is a little classic and will remain one just as surely as The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, or any other sweet and pious idyl of our English tongue." (131) Supplementary Course of Reading From the suggestions of the four contributors to the course a supplementary list of New England Classics may be arranged as follows : 7. Franklin's Autobiography. " It is undoubtedly the best of all autobiographies in the English language. It has had an extraordi- nary circulation. Probably no American book is now so widely known in countries where English is not spoken. As it happens, it also describes what is one of the most remarkable features of the American system. For the prosperity of our country depends on our keeping the lines of pro- motion open. It was because the lines of promo- tion were open that a runaway printer's apprentice became one of the leaders of his country in the establishing of her independence, and that he was known through the world as 'He who snatched the sceptre from kings and the lightnings from Jupiter. '"—Dr. Hale. 8. Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. "A small book of essays to be placed on the shelf with Charles Lamb, Addison, Hazlitt." — Mrs. Fields. 9. Whittier's Snow Bound and Home Ballads. "Burns was not more surely the poet of the Scottish Lowlands than he of the hills, the val- leys and sea-sands of rugged New England." — Dr. Emerson. (i33) The Booklovers Reading Club io. Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. "The superiority of Motley's work as a literary composition and an accurate historical document decides me to select it for our list."— -Julian Haw- thorne. ii. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. " There seems to be no doubt about Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter holding topmost rank in the present literature of America." — Mrs. Fields. 12. Longfellow's Hiawatha. " Owing to the originality of Hiawatha, which also contains many beautiful and powerful passages, I have decided to give it the palm."— -Julian Haw- thorne. 13. Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. " The best work of his ripened manhood . . . drawn from eight lands and more centuries, fol- lowing the old plan of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, but likely to reach more ears than they, and beautiful and clean." — Dr. Emerson. 14. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. "Two Years Before the Mast possesses every merit which can belong to a writing of its class and it has been recognized as a classic ever since its first appearance."— -Julian Hawthorne. 15. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. " Mrs. Stowe, wringing tears from the heart of the whole world for an oppressed race in Uncle Toms Cabin!' — Mrs. Fields. (134) Six New England Classics i 6. Emerson's Essays. " Since a choice from his works must be made I would select the first volume of Essays, including the treatise on Nature T —Julian Hazvthorne. 17. Lowell's Commemoration Ode. "When the war was over and Harvard gathered her gallant soldiers about her to receive her moth- er's praise and mourn with her her fallen sons, Lowell reached his highest level of song in the Commemoration Ode!' — Dr. Emerson. ('35) Books for Reference AND GENERAL READING To understand thoroughly any classic one should know something of the life of its creator — the more the better. A careful reading of the life and letters of the author will very often let in a flood of light upon a classic. It is well, also, to consult often standard works of criti- cism to supplement one's own judgment, never, however, to save oneself the trouble of thinking independently and honestly. The following list is meant to be brief but representative : I. GENERAL WORKS A History of American Literature. By Charles F. Richardson. Two vols. The standard history of American literature. A Literary History of America. By Barrett Wendell. A book to be used cautiously, yet in many of its judgments helpful. The Poets and Poetry of America. By Ed- mund C. Stedman. A standard book of very great value. II. SPECIAL WORKS Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot. Two vols. The authorized life. It is narrative rather than critical ; made up largely of letters. O36) Six New England Classics Ralph Waldo Emerson. American Men of Let- ters Series. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. By all means the best short life. Emerson and other Essays. By John jay Chap- man. A stimulating and helpful study. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. By Julian Hawthorne. Two vols. The best extended life of the novelist. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Great Writers Series. By Henry James. A brilliant piece of criticism. Life of Parkman. By C. H. Farnham. The only complete life of the historian. A Century of Science. By John Fiske. Containing an appreciative and discriminating essay on Parkman. Daniel Webster. American Men of Letters Series. By Henry Cabot Lodge. The most usable life of the orator. Brief but suf- ficient. Lowell's Letters. By George William Curtis. Two vols. The nearest approach to a complete life of Lowell. James Russell Lowell and His Friends. By Edward Everett Hale. Fresh and delightful. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Samuel Longfellow. Three vols. One of the most charming biographies ever issued in America. (i37) Twenty-Five Reading Courses No. i— PROBLEMS IN MODERN DEMOCRACY Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are ex- President Cleveland; Woodrow Wilson, Professor of Politics, Princeton University ; Henry J. Ford, author of Rise and Growth of American Politics; and Henry D. Lloyd, author of Newest England. The books for the course are selected by Mr. Cleveland. No. 2— MODERN MASTERS OF MUSIC Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are Reginald de Koven, Dr. W. S. B. Mathews, editor of Music ; James G. Huneker, editor of Musical Courier ; Henry E. Krehbiel, musical critic New York Tribune; and Gustave Kobbe", author of Wagner" s Life and Works. The most attrac- tive reading course ever offered to lovers of music. No. 3— RAMBLINGS AMONG ART CENTRES Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are F. Hopkinson Smith, Dr. John C. Van Dyke, Dr. John La Farge, President of the Society of American Artists ; Kenyon Cox and Dr. Russell Sturgis. The handbook is attractively illustrated. Mr. Smith and Dr. Van Dyke are responsible for selecting the books to be read. No. 4— AMERICAN VACATIONS IN EUROPE This course is the next best thing to going abroad oneself. Among the contributors to the handbook are Frank R. Stockton, Jeannette L. Gilder, editor of The Critic; Mrs. Schuyler Crown- inshield and George Ade. The handbook has a fine portrait frontispiece. No. 5— A STUDY OF SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS The books for this course are selected by Dr. Edward Everett Hale. Among the contributors to the handbook are Dr. Hale, Julian Hawthorne, Mrs. James T. Fields and Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson is a son of Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is one of the most attractive courses in the entire series. No. 6- SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS The plays are selected for this course by H. Beerbohm Tree, the well-known English actor, and the books to be read in connection with the plays are selected by Sir Henry (139) The Booklovers Reading Club Irving. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Prof. Edward Dowden, acknowledged the greatest Shakespearean scholar of Great Britain, Dr. Hiram Corson, of Cornell Univer- sity; Dr. William J. Rolfe and Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie. The handbook is very attractively illustrated. No. 7— CHARLES DICKENS : HIS LIFE AND WORK Among the contributors to the delightful handbook accompany- ing this course are George W. Cable, the well-known novelist; Irving Bacheller, author of Eben Holden; Andrew Lang, the distinguished English writer ; Amelia E. Barr, the novelist ; and James L. Hughes, author of Dickens as an Educator. The books to be read are selected by Mr. Cable and Mr. Bacheller. The handbook is beautifully illustrated. No. 8— CHILD STUDY FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are Margaret E. Sangster, Nora Archibald Smith, Anne Emilie Poulson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Wheelock and Kate Gannett Wells. Mrs. Sangster selects the books to be read. No. 9— INDUSTRIAL QUESTIONS OF THE DAY The following distinguished writers on economic problems contribute to the handbook accompanying this course : Presi- dent Jacob Gould Schurman, of Cornell University ; Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, Professor of Political Science, Cornell University ; Richard Theodore Ely, Director of the School of Economics, Political Science and History, University of Wisconsin ; Sidney Webb, Lecturer London. School of Economics and Political Science, Member London County Council ; and Carroll Davidson Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor. No. io— FLORENCE IN ART AND LITERATURE Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are William Dean Howells, Dr. Russell Stnrgis, Frank Preston Stearns, author of Midsummer of Italian Art, Life of Tintoretto, etc.; Dr. William Henry Goodyear, Curator Fine Arts Museum of Brooklyn Institute; and Lewis Frederick Pilcher, Professor of Art, Vassar College. The handbook has some attractive illustrations. No. ii— STUDIES OF EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS The books have been selected specially for this course by the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, of the English House of Commons, and the Hon. Andrew D. White, United States Ambassador to Ger- (140) The Booklovers Reading Club many. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Jesse Macy, Professor of Constitutional History and Political Science, Iowa College; and John William Burgess, Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law, and Dean of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University. No. 12— FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Deland and Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The handbook has several very interesting illustrations. No. 13— THE MODERN CITY AND ITS PROBLEMS Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are Dr. Frederic W. Speirs ; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of The Review of Reviews ; Bird S. Coler, Comptroller of the City of New York, author of Municipal Government ; and Charles }. Bonaparte, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the "National Municipal League. The books are selected by Dr. Speirs. No. 14— STUDIES IN APPLIED ELECTRICITY This is without exception the most attractive and the most helpful reading course ever offered to students of electricity. Thomas A. Edison selects the books specially for these studies. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Dr. Edwin J. Houston, Dr. Elihu Thomson, Carl Hering, Ex-President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ; and Arthur V. Abbott, Chief Engineer of the Chicago Telephone Company. No. 15— FIVE WEEKS' STUDY OF ASTRONOMY Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are Charles A. Young, Professor of Astronomy, Prince- ton University ; Sir Robert S. Ball, Professor of Astronomy, Cambridge University, and Director of Cambridge Observa- tory, England ; Camille Flammarion, founder of the As- tronomical Society of France, and author of Marvels of the Heavens, Astronomy, etc.; George C. Comstock, Director of Washburn Observatory, University of Wisconsin ; and Harold lacoby, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University. The "study programme includes contributions from the most famous astronomers of England and France. No. 16— RECENT ENGLISH DRAMATISTS Lovers of the best modern dramas will find much pleasure in these studies. Among the contributors to the handbook are Brander Matthews, Professor of Literature, Columbia University; (HO The Booklovers Reading Club Dr. William Winter, Dramatic Critic for the New York Tribune ; Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, Editor of The Bookman; Louise Chandler Moulton ; and Norman Hapgood, the well-known writer of dramatic criticism. The handbook has some interest- ing illustrations. No. 17— STUDIES IN CURRENT RELIGIOUS THOUGHT The books are chosen for the course by Dr. Lyman Abbott and Dr. Washington Gladden. Among the contributors to the handbook are Dr. Samuel D. McConnell, Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn ; President William DeWitt Hyde, of Bowdoin College ; Dr. Amory H. Bradford, Editor of The Outlook ; Dr. Henry Collin Minton, of San Francisco Theological Seminary, late Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly ; Dr. H. W. Thomas, Pastor of the People's Church, Chicago; and Dr. Theodore T. Munger, Pastor of the United Congrega- tional Church, New Haven. For clergymen and laymen who wish to stimulate the growth of a theology which is in harmony with the best thought of the time we recommend this handbook and this reading course. No. 18— THE GREATER VICTORIAN POETS The books are selected for this course by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English, Yale University; Dr. T. M. Parrott, of Princeton University ; and Marie Ada MoH- neux, author of The Phrase Book of Browning. No. 19— OUT-OF-DOOR AMERICANS Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this course are John Burroughs, Ernest Seton-Thompson, President David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University; Ernest Ingersoll and Hamlin Garland. Lovers of nature will find delight in the outlines and recommendations of this course. No. 20— THE WORLD'S GREAT WOMAN NOVELISTS Mrs. Humphry Ward, the well-known English novelist, is the first contributor to the handbook accompanying this course. The other contributors are Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mary E. Wilkins, Agnes Repplier, Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of English, Wellesley College; and Oscar Fay Adams. The hand- book contains some interesting illustrations. No. 21— AMERICAN FOUNDATION HISTORY Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge selects the books for this course. Among the other contributors are Albert Bushnell Hart, Pro- fessor of American History, Harvard University ; John Bach (142) The Booklovers Reading Club McMaster, Professor of American History, University of Penn- sylvania ; Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Histori- cal Society of Wisconsin, author of The Colonies ; Paul Leicester Ford, author of Janice Meredith; and Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, Professor of American History, University of Michigan. No. 22— STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY LIFE Professor Barrett Wendell and Professor Lewis E. Gates, of Harvard, and Dr. Horace E. Scudder, late editor of The Atlantic Monthly, contribute to the handbook accompanying this course. For a brief stimulative and instructive course in American litera- ture nothing better could possibly be offered. No. 23— STUDIES IN RECENT FRENCH FICTION Alc£e Fortier, Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane University of Louisiana, has chosen the books for this reading course. Among the contributors to the handbook are the three distinguished French writers, Edouard Rod, Ferdinand Bru- netiere and Paul Bourget, and the notable American critic, Dr. Benjamin W. Wells, author of Modern French Literature and A Century of French Literature. No. 24— THE ENGLISH BIBLE : HOW WE GOT IT The contributors to this course include President William R. Harper, of the University of Chicago ; John Franklin Genung, Professor of Rhetoric, Amherst College ; William Newton Clarke, Professor of Christian Theology, Colgate University ; and Richard G. Moulton, Professor of English Literature, University of Chicago. The handbook is a very interesting and instructive volume in itself. No. 25— THE MECHANISM OF PRESENT DAY COMMERCE In Preparation. The books are selected by the Hon. Lyman J. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury. 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