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STELLIGEEI 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS CONCERNING 
 
 AMERICA 
 
IN UNIFORM BINDING. 
 
 ANDREW LANG. 
 
 Letters to Dead Authors, - - - $1 00 
 
 AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 
 
 Obiter Dicta — First Series, - - 1 00 
 Obiter Dicta — Second Series, - - 1 00 
 
 W. E. HENLEY. 
 
 Views and Reviews — Literature, - 1 00 
 
 BARRETT WENDELL. 
 
 Stelligeri and other Essays, - - 1 25 
 
STELLIGERI 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 CONCERNING 
 
 AMERICA 
 
 BARRETT WENDELL 
 
 [**0CT 19 1893.) 
 
 NEW YORK Lj £ y? U y 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1893 
 
Copyright, 1893, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 /- j^«..v4 5 6 5 &j 
 
 7* 
 
 TROW DIRECTORY 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
IN 
 STELLIGERORUM 
 
 /Ifcemorfam 
 
 They came in youthful ardour here, where we 
 Follow their footsteps. Here like us they played 
 And worked ; like us had follies, that dismayed 
 
 Their shaven elders. Hence exultantly 
 
 Like us they encountered life, eager to see 
 Its prizes theirs. Unperfect, "brave, they made 
 Our poor world better. Like them, unafraid, 
 
 May we at last merge in eternity. 
 
 From out their old New England, still pure 
 Of foreign taint, where in their dreamy past 
 They stand heroic, comes the courage now 
 That nerves us for the conflict we must know. 
 What nobler prize for who the trial endure 
 Than place in their companionship at last ? 
 
 Harvard College, 1893 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Stelligeri 1 
 
 II. The Four American Centuries . . 21 
 
 III. Some Neglected Characteristics of 
 
 the New England Puritans . . 45 
 
 IV. Were the Salem Witches Guiltless ? 63 
 V. American Literature . . . .91 
 
 VI. John Greenleaf Whittier . . . 147 
 VII. Mr. Lowell as a Teacher . . . 203 
 
I 
 
 STELLIGEEI 
 
STELLIGEEI 
 
 A few years ago the authorities of Harvard 
 University made in their quinquennial catalogue 
 a change which has generally commended itself 
 to modern good sense. For the first time they 
 wrote it in English. Changes in this catalogue 
 have quite as much precedent as uniformity. 
 Only ten years before, the quinquennial catalogue 
 had been a triennial. And they say that no two 
 numbers had ever possessed quite the same 
 characteristics of form and arrangement. But un- 
 til 1890, all these official lists of those whom Har- 
 vard College — or Harvard University, as nowadays 
 they prefer to call it — had educated or honoured, 
 had in common one trait that is now definitely a 
 thing of the past. They w T ere written, from be- 
 ginning to end, in something that passed for 
 Latin. 
 
 No doubt there was obvious absurdity in offi- 
 cially naming an every-day Yankee Johannes or 
 Jacobus ; or in translating such abnormal Chris- 
 tian names as that of Increase Mather into bar- 
 barous terms like Crescentius. The absurdity of 
 
4 STELLIGEEI 
 
 similarly Latinizing surnames — an absurdity dis- 
 carded ever so many years ago — was no greater. 
 No doubt, equally, the long strings of incompre- 
 hensible Latin abbreviations which used to follow 
 the names of distinguished alumni were very 
 ridiculous. But to many of us the absurdity 
 seemed lovably harmless ; and with it went one 
 or two phrases that some of us are sorry to lose. 
 
 Chief among these, perhaps, was the sonorous 
 little sentence that used to close the numerical 
 summary of Harvard men. The total number was 
 given first ; then, formally subtracted from it, 
 came the number of the dead. In the class lists 
 " the names of the dead were prefixed by asterisks. 
 In the final summary, the number of the dead 
 was defined thus : E vivis cesserunt stelligeri. — 
 They that bear the stars have passed from among the 
 living. One did not read the sentence often. Some 
 of us looked at it so seldom that I have heard it 
 honestly misquoted in a far more dogmatic form : 
 Ex his stelligeri in cwlum processerunt. — Of these 
 they that tear the stars have passed forth into the 
 heavens. Stelligeri was the fatal word. To all of 
 us who cared for the old catalogues, the dead men 
 of Harvard were always stelligeri — they that hear the 
 stars. And some of us had a sentimental way of 
 looking at the skies of a clear night, with a half- 
 phrased feeling that their faint, twinkling, lasting 
 glory had something to do with our college mates 
 who were gone before us. For did not the cata- 
 
STELLIGEEI 5 
 
 logue say so ? It was a pleasantly childish fancy 
 which made those who yielded to it sometimes 
 feel more akin than usual to the old worlds of 
 youthful humanity which the colleges and univer- 
 sities once kept so much in mind. I have not 
 had the heart to look for what our dead men 
 are called now — "deceased," perhaps, or "no 
 longer living." * At all events, they are no longer 
 stelligeHj — which I am informed, by the way, was 
 never classical Latin. 
 
 The change came none too soon. Harvard 
 College, to be sure, has always been true to what 
 remains its oldest and strongest tradition — that 
 every man and every generation has an inalien- 
 able right to think. Thereby the men and the 
 generations make their conclusions — no matter 
 how orthodox — impregnably their own . The deep 
 conservatism which has preserved this heretical 
 tradition for above two centuries has resulted in 
 a good many superficial changes meanwhile. The 
 first conclusion arrived at by people who do their 
 own thinking is generally that their immediate 
 predecessors have been seriously mistaken. And 
 the Harvard of one generation has almost always 
 been a perceptibly different place from the Har- 
 vard of the next. The unparalleled growth of 
 the college during the past twenty years, however, 
 has made the most marked change in its history. 
 
 * Since writing this I have looked, and find them " Re- 
 ported as deceased." 
 
6 STELLIGEKI 
 
 The old graduates — stelligeri — belonged to classes 
 small enough and submitted to systems of instruc- 
 tion similar enough to make them in a sense all 
 friends, with a hundred traditions and memories in 
 common. Nowadays, when every Freshman class 
 is bigger than the whole college was fifty years ago, 
 and when every man meets the elective system at 
 the college threshold, everything is altered. One 
 cannot say for the worse : most of us who know 
 modern Harvard well think it a far better place 
 than the old. But it is not the same. We have 
 discarded no end of useless things and phrases ; 
 we have introduced no end of useful ones ; we are 
 striving to know and to preserve the truth with 
 as much eagerness as any who have gone before. 
 In every superficial way, though, our experience 
 is utterly different from that of our elders. The 
 authorities might have kept the old forms. They 
 might have called us, in our time, stelligeri too. 
 But we could never have been the real thing. 
 
 II 
 
 A typical evidence of what the real thing was 
 lately came to me. A kinswoman on her death- 
 bed sent me as a farewell greeting the record of 
 his class which her father, dead these thirty years, 
 had kept from admission to college until the end of 
 his life. It is in a small, leather-bound note-book, 
 with thick, old-fashioned leaves. It begins with 
 
STELLIGERI 7 
 
 an alphabetic list of the class as they entered 
 college. A series of simple hieroglyphics in- 
 dicates 1 who attained the supreme glory of the 
 Porcellian Club, who belonged to the Hasty 
 Pudding, who to the Phi Beta Kappa, who 
 dropped out of college, and so on. Then come 
 pages of notes as to the professions the men 
 took up, whom they married, how many children 
 they had, and in general what became of them ; 
 then pages into which are pasted clippings from 
 the newspapers, generally eulogistic and frequent- 
 ly obituary. The last bears a date forty-eight 
 years after graduation, and only a few weeks before 
 the faithful recorder died. He did not live to see 
 his college jubilee. 
 
 Provincial, even trivial, these records may seem. 
 If I remember rightly, the most eminent of all the 
 fifty or sixty men they concern was one who for a 
 few years became a sober local dignitary. They 
 tell little of character, anyway, beyond the fact 
 that a rather surprising number of the class 
 seem to have been afflicted with insanity or in- 
 sane wives. In cold blood, one cannot call the 
 little volume much more than a record of names 
 and dates. And yet I have seen few books which 
 affect me as less prosaic. These dry records were 
 kept unremittingly for above half a century by a 
 loyal Harvard man who longed to have always be- 
 fore him every little fact that transpired about 
 the college and the college men of his time. In 
 
8 STELLIGEEI 
 
 substance, they were almost as formal as the firm, 
 slow handwriting in which they were traced. In 
 essence, one felt, every stroke of the fine pen was 
 loving. 
 
 The men these records concerned were almost 
 all native Yankees of the old stock. In later life 
 by far the greater part of them were honourable 
 and useful citizens — divines, lawyers, physicians, 
 merchants, teachers. It is some years now since 
 the last survivor died. Every one, I think, was 
 written down stelliger. 
 
 There was little time to send an answer for this 
 gift. Yet I tried more than once to phrase an 
 answer that should tell all it meant. Finally, in 
 despair of expressing the thing literally, I tried to 
 make some verses ; that effort, it seemed, might 
 tell more than any formal phrases of the emotion 
 I had to convey. The verses, though rather lame 
 and halting, served their purpose. My kins- 
 woman sent back word that they were welcome. 
 She had loved the old Harvard traditions, too. 
 At her death, a few weeks later, it was reported 
 that she had bequeathed to the college, in memory 
 of her father, a small foundation for an annual 
 lecture on the immortality of the soul. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The verses thus written I have used for the dedi- 
 cation of this little book. That they were made 
 
STELLIGERI 9 
 
 for so widely different a purpose is one reason 
 why I have liked to use them here. The essays 
 of which 1 the book is made were written indepen- 
 dently, with no thought of collection, and little 
 that they had anything in common. It was only 
 when they were all done that I began to see how 
 they belong together. 
 
 The reminiscences of Mr. Lowell were written 
 first. When he died, people did not half appre- 
 ciate what his professional work as a teacher had 
 been. So I wrote down what I remembered of it, 
 as the best tribute I could pay his memory. At the 
 time I did not sign it, because at such a moment 
 the obtrusion of an unknown name seems to me 
 impertinent. What any reader cared for was not 
 who might have written this tribute, but what the 
 tribute might add to those already paid the mem- 
 ory of a man who had lived to be the unques- 
 tioned head of American letters. That objection, 
 I think, need not stand in my way now. In sub- 
 stance, the paper belongs with the others ; and in 
 a collection of one's own work, it would be silly to 
 assume one's self unknown in such sense as must 
 be the case when one's occasional writing chances 
 to be accepted by an established magazine. 
 
 The other papers in this book are all occasional, 
 in the conventional sense of the word. They 
 were written to be read or presented at formal 
 meetings. In 1891 I was asked to tell the Ameri- 
 can Historical Association as much as I could 
 
10 STELLIGERI 
 
 read in twenty minutes of what I thought about 
 the New England Puritans. A little later I was 
 asked to address the meeting held by the Essex 
 Institute, at Salem, in commemoration of the 
 two hundredth anniversary of the issuing of war- 
 rants against the witches. In the autumn of 
 1892 I was asked to address the Public Schools 
 of Worcester, on the four hundredth anniversary 
 of the Discovery of America. A little later I was 
 invited to give a formal lecture on American 
 Literature at Vassar College. And when Mr. 
 Whittier died, the American Academy of Arts and 
 Sciences invited me to write the memoir of him 
 for their Proceedings. 
 
 Some such statement as this was almost neces- 
 sary, to explain the differences of form and man- 
 ner among these papers. One does not write for 
 school children in quite the way that one falls 
 into when addressing a learned society ; and one's 
 personal reminiscences can hardly be phrased in 
 such style as one unconsciously assumes when 
 making a university lecture. These natural di- 
 vergences of style and temper, then, made me at 
 first think of these papers as separate things. 
 Then, as I turned them over, I began to see that 
 among them they had gone far to express, from 
 different points of view, certain opinions about 
 American life, past and present, that I was glad 
 to have formulated. In collecting the papers, 
 however, I was not sorry that their style is not 
 
STELLIGEEI 11 
 
 uniform. Its very irregularity will go as far as 
 anything can to disclaim the assumption, which 
 always seems inherent in print, that one's views 
 are final. What I have written here is only what 
 I have grown to think during thirteen years of 
 academic teaching — a mode of life dangerously 
 remote from practical experience, but perhaps 
 more favorable than that to observation. What I 
 have said is shown, by its very diversity of form, 
 to be only an expression of what an individual 
 who has little to do with active life has come to 
 think. 
 
 IV 
 
 In brief, it seems to me that the America of 
 the past resembles, in more ways than one, the 
 stelligeri of Harvard. It is a thing we shall not 
 see again ; we love to think about it and to cherish 
 its traditions ; and if we drop love — using our heads 
 and not our hearts — we find it on scrutiny not 
 altogether so imposing as we like to imagine it. 
 For it was not divine but human; and the only 
 thing that can make humanity godlike is unvio- 
 lated tradition. 
 
 In a certain sense, we may say that hitherto the 
 history of America has been that of a great na- 
 tional inexperience. This does not mean, of 
 course, that human life has not existed here in 
 all its real complexity. It means that hitherto 
 
12 STELLIGERI 
 
 our communities have generally been so far from 
 overcrowded, and our people so free to make their 
 way whither they would and could, that in 
 America the material problems of life have pre- 
 sented themselves less regularly than in Europe. 
 So hitherto we have been naturally disposed on 
 the one hand to over-estimate small merit and 
 petty success, and on the other to display our 
 vices in forms which, however deplorable on a 
 moral scale, still have in them something of 
 youthful naughtiness as distinguished from ma- 
 ture rascality. 
 
 The race to which these generations of inex- 
 perience were coming met them with a dogmatic 
 creed actually based on such experience of human 
 frailty and wickedness as must always be the lot 
 of any dense society. Creeds long survive expe- 
 rience. The dogmas of Calvinism were uttered 
 for generations in communities where, in normal 
 moods, they could not seem exhaustively true. 
 A certain unconscious divergence between state- 
 ments and facts followed, as a national character- 
 istic. It grew until our freer minds flung the 
 old dogmas away, trying to make new and better 
 ones of their own. 
 
 The new dogmas, which in brief rest on the as- 
 sumption that human nature is perfectible, are a 
 great deal more inspiring than the old that harp 
 so on depravity. What is more, they are a good 
 deal more true to the national inexperience of 
 
STELLIGERI 13 
 
 America than were the old ones. But they have 
 been utflered, and are uttered still, by the de- 
 scendants and the heirs of a race that for genera- 
 tions has been habituated to the most serious kind 
 of assertion unchecked by reference to actual fact. 
 
 On the optimism that underlies these new dog- 
 mas is really based our tremendous national 
 faith in democracy. If human nature is really 
 perfectible, even though it never get to perfection, 
 democracy can really solve the problems of life, 
 when they come upon us in all their force, as 
 they have never been solved before. But if 
 human nature should after all prove damnable, 
 democracy may turn out a less certain panacea 
 than we have been accustomed to believe. 
 
 Experience nowadays seems bound rapidly to 
 supplant the national inexperience that has hith- 
 erto been our most characteristic heritage. As ex- 
 perience grows about us, there is reason to doubt 
 whether the serenely optimistic dogmas of the last 
 century or more are essentially so true as we have 
 been taught at school. There are moments, in 
 fact, when the gloomier dogmas that the Calvinist 
 fathers brought from wicked, overcrowded Eng- 
 land seem after all nearer the truth visible to our 
 own eyes. And in that case democracy cannot 
 seem as ultimate a solution of life as it used to. 
 There are obvious aspects in which it is begin- 
 ning to look terribly like the substitution of a 
 myriad damnable tyrants for a few. 
 
14 STELLIGEKI 
 
 So much, in one way or another, the papers in 
 this little book will show. Coldly written down 
 here, it looks disheartening, if not disloyal. Yet 
 I do not think that it is really either. It is dis- 
 heartening only if we are afraid to face a future 
 of manly struggle instead of Utopian dreams. It 
 is disloyal only in the sense in which a subject is 
 disloyal who feels bound not to deny the sins and 
 the vices of a sovereign he willingly serves. 
 
 To any thoughtful man, I suppose, the evils 
 and the dangers of his own time are often more 
 apparent than its nobler traits. And, very surely, 
 this is no depressing symptom. So long as evils 
 and dangers are recognized, they will be met, at 
 least, with effort. It is the hidden disease that 
 works the worst havoc. And even when these evils 
 and dangers seem to permeate a whole national 
 system, there is no need to lose courage. Human 
 institutions, like human beings, must have their 
 faults and their weaknesses. They must be trans- 
 itory. Even the great religions of the world are 
 bound to change and to pass; much more, the 
 political systems by which from time to time men 
 submit to be governed. But through every change 
 runs what after all is a steady purpose. Eeally, 
 in its deepest heart, the human race is constantly 
 struggling onward in a blind effort to be happier, 
 wiser, better. 
 
STELLIGERI 15 
 
 Any man or any generation can see only a mo- 
 mentary fragment of this struggle. In that mo- 
 ment, however, men can perceive the forces that 
 they must meet and conquer if they are to leave 
 their children a richer, wider heritage than they 
 themselves received. To meet and to conquer 
 these hostile forces they must yield themselves 
 up to human leaders ; and these human leaders, 
 being human, must be frail. Now it is a sovereign 
 man whom the loyal are bound to follow, again a 
 sovereign class, with us a sovereign people. And 
 how hearty, for all our misgivings, is our real 
 loyalty to our sovereign, we can all feel for our- 
 selves when our blood tingles at the thought of 
 submission to domination. We may lament as we 
 please the follies and the errors of the thousand- 
 headed populace who stand for us in the place 
 traditionally held in history by consecrated sov- 
 ereigns. But each of us would still rather live 
 and die a citizen than even the proudest subject. 
 Whoever does not feel this spirit in himself can- 
 not know, in his inner heart, what the name 
 American means. 
 
 VI 
 
 Theke are moments, however, when the sight 
 of the great changes that are now coming upon 
 us makes our hearts sink. If America in the fut- 
 ure, we tell ourselves, were to be like America 
 
16 STELLIGEKI 
 
 in the past, all would surely go well, as far as 
 human foresight can reach. There is none of us, 
 I believe, who would not willingly trust our fut- 
 ure to such native guidance as has governed our 
 past. But the floodgates are opened. Europe is 
 emptying itself into our Eastern seaports ; Asia 
 overflowing the barriers we have tried to erect on 
 our Western coast ; Africa sapping our life to the 
 southward. And meantime the New England 
 country is depopulated, and the lowlands drained 
 by the Mississippi are breeding swarms of dema- 
 gogues. And so on, and so on, and so on. If 
 the future were to be as the past, we say ! 
 
 Well, how if it were ? Better still, how, after 
 all, if perhaps it be ? In many ways it will inevi- 
 tably differ. Its experience must be far sterner, 
 far fiercer — in every way on a grander scale. 
 But if the evils to meet be greater, may not 
 greater virtues rise to meet them? For, after 
 all, as we scrutinize this past, we cannot find 
 the facts quite so splendid as the traditions. A 
 little while ago we tried to sum up our impres- 
 sions of what this real past was ; and we called it 
 no better than two centuries or so of national in- 
 experience, youthfully asserting human nature 
 to be essentially better than scrutiny shows it to 
 have been even on the spot where these cheerful 
 generalizations were made. That the past was j 
 not really all that we like to boast, is a fact that 
 should give us courage. By the same token, it 
 
STELLIGERI 17 
 
 may well be that the future shall not bring all 
 that we dr\sad to fear. 
 
 YII 
 
 It is posterity, of course, that makes traditions. 
 But it can make them only of the stuff it finds 
 ready. The children in their youth know the 
 fathers, in their age tell their own children what 
 manner of men the fathers were. Untrue in a 
 thousand details, then, traditions — like other 
 ideals — are bound to rest on a basis of truth per- 
 haps deeper than appears to one who coolly 
 scrutinizes in all their living confusion the facts 
 from which they rise. 
 
 Petty we may find the realities of our actual past 
 — sordid, inexperienced. But whatever these re- 
 alities, we all know, and instinctively we all thrill 
 with the knowledge, that from that past have 
 come the traditions that have guided and that 
 still guide our native national life. "What the 
 reality was, after all, is not the chief question. 
 More notable for us, a thousand times, is the 
 ideal which that reality, with all its errors, has 
 transmitted to posterity. For that ideal, that 
 tradition — smile at its details as we may — is really 
 noble. It is pure, simple, aspiring. In us all it 
 has bred the deepest feeling that marks us as fel- 
 low-countrymen. Let us be pure in heart, simple 
 in life, aspiring in effort. Then so far as in us 
 2 
 
18 STELLIGERI 
 
 lies we may transmit to our children an enriched 
 heritage of such tradition as the fathers have left 
 us. Our faults, like theirs, shall fade and pass ; 
 our memories shall merge with theirs in the 
 dreamy past from whence shall come the inspira- 
 tion that shall make greater than our own America 
 the unseen America of the future. 
 
 VIII 
 
 It is easier to realize such sentiments as this in 
 small instances than in large. We are right, then, 
 in cherishing so dear]y our local traditions, our 
 family pride. We are better men, I believe, and 
 better citizens, for loving not only our country 
 but our States, not only our States but our towns, 
 not only our families but our colleges. And very 
 surely there is for some of us no firmer warrant 
 that the traditions we love shall live as long as 
 our memory shall last than the warrant we find in 
 remembering the stelligeri of Harvard. 
 
 Their lives and their notions were often petty 
 enough, limited, absurd to their children as the 
 barbarous old Latin catalogues will probably 
 seem to ours. There were plenty of weaklings 
 among them, too, no doubt. Almost every class 
 had its Tom who drank himself to death, or its 
 Dick who was justly jailed, or its Harry who 
 proved the most deplorable of husbands. Nor 
 were these stelligeri, as a body men, of great dis- 
 
STELLIGEEI 19 
 
 tinction. They number several thousands, and 
 among them are not many dozens who, as the 
 years begin to pass, can survive in human memory. 
 Names and dates most of them must ultimately 
 be. The rest oblivion. 
 
 Yet whatever their personal traits, there has 
 come from them to us who follow them a tradition 
 of our own without which we, and our country, 
 were poorer. Like the great traditions of Amer- 
 ica, this little tradition of Harvard is pure, simple, 
 aspiring, and lasting. And in it finally merge all 
 the folly, the error, the weakness, the nonsense 
 of the swiftly passing college generations that for 
 two centuries and more have received and pre- 
 served it. On the open books of the college 
 shield is the single word, " Veritas" — " Truth" 
 Keep truth in view, say the silent voices of them 
 that bear the stars, and trust, like us, that all 
 shall be well. 
 
 In aspect, in thought, in phrase, in purpose, 
 we of the present and the future differ more and 
 rAore from them of .the past. That their names 
 were preserved in pompous, barbarous Latin, and 
 that ours shall be recorded in plain, every- day 
 English, typifies the difference with a truth that 
 makes the very change a preservation of the 
 deepest tradition of Harvard. But in spirit, if we 
 be loyal, we may be at one with them. And so 
 far as our parts may go to preserve for America 
 what is best, to discard what is evil, to fight our 
 
20 STELLIGEKI 
 
 fight bravely, and at last to go without misgiving 
 to our rest, our way is plain before us. For we 
 have only to follow the footsteps of them that 
 bear the stars. 
 
II 
 
 THE FOUB AMEEICAN 
 CENTIIEIES 
 
 (An Address before the Public Schools of Worcester, 
 Massachusetts, on Columbus Day, October 21, 1892.) 
 
THE FOUE AMEEICAN 
 CENTUKIES 
 
 Among the most interesting books of the past 
 year is Mr. John Fiske's " Discovery of America." 
 It is a history of that fascinating kind which tells 
 us, to be sure, little that was not known before- 
 hand ; but that shows us, so simply that we 
 hardly realize we are being taught, where each 
 scattered bit of knowledge belongs. Careful 
 students of one period or another may find in 
 Mr. Fiske's work errors of detail : to write so com- 
 prehensive a book without minor errors were al- 
 most to transcend human frailty. But no one, I 
 think, can read the book without a fresh and a 
 lasting appreciation of that great process of 
 human development whose most significant mo- 
 ment we celebrate to-day. 
 
 For, after all, the moment when Columbus set 
 foot on the unknown land which marked the limit 
 of the western seas is a moment worth all the honour 
 we pay it, not for its own sake, but because it was 
 no accident — no isolated thing ; it was one step 
 in a great process, started in the most remote past 
 
24 FOUE AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 and even as yet unfinished. In itself it might 
 have meant as little as the landfall of those half- 
 legendary Norsemen who have left behind them 
 no more trace than the winter tales of their sagas. 
 But the landing of Columbus means more : it is 
 significant to all men, as a part of the direct proc- 
 ess by which human beings finally came to know 
 the inevitable limit of material things. 
 
 II 
 
 As I write that phrase it sounds mysterious. 
 Yet what it means, any child, who will stop to 
 think, can understand. Wherever we read of 
 human beings in history, up to the time when 
 this Western continent was discovered, we find 
 that they were living in a world surrounded by 
 oceans or countries they knew nothing about. 
 The Romans, for instance, knew most of Europe 
 pretty well, and they knew something of Asia 
 and of northern Africa. But all about them, 
 north, south, east, and west, the earth stretched 
 on, they knew not whither. Somewhere in the 
 Western Ocean there was an ultima Thule — an isl- 
 and beyond which no man had gone. And there 
 were faint legends of other great islands to the 
 west of Gibraltar, and of a fabled Atlantis, no 
 more tangible than the rivers and canals of the 
 planet Mars. And just as those imperial Romans 
 — in so many ways people quite as civilized as the 
 
FOUK AMEKICAN CENTUEIES 25 
 
 i 
 
 earth has ever known — lived in a world where be- 
 yond known lands and seas there stretched on an 
 endless region of lands and seas that were un- 
 known ; so, in just such a world of endless pos- 
 sibilities beyond its known limits, lived every 
 human being, recorded or unrecorded, until the 
 process of discovery was finished which the voy- 
 age of Columbus began. 
 
 It is worth our while, then, to consider for a 
 moment just what this change in our knowledge 
 of the shape and limits of the earth means. In 
 order to live, human beings must be fed ; in order 
 to be fed, they must cultivate and consume the 
 fruits of the earth. And as population anywhere 
 increases, more and more of the earth has to be 
 cultivated to feed it. In this very city of Worces- 
 ter, for example, there was probably a time, not 
 quarter so long ago as the time of Columbus, when 
 everybody who lived here could raise on his own 
 land enough food to supply himself and his fam- 
 ily. At this moment, though Worcester is not a 
 great city like New York or London, it is a good 
 deal too large to be supported by food grown on 
 Worcester soil ; it has to send West for its beef 
 and its flour, and so on. What is more, I should 
 be surprised if there were among you many who 
 do not number among your friends somebody 
 who, instead of settling down at home, has gone 
 West ; in other words, somebody who could not 
 find at home work that would provide him with 
 
26 FOUK AMEEICAN CENTUKIES 
 
 such food and clothing and comfort as he had 
 made up his mind to have, and who has gone to 
 a newer country in search of a quicker fortune. 
 Now just such a process as each of you can under- 
 stand here on a small scale, is always going on 
 all over the world. The places where people 
 live grow too crowded to support them ; so peo- 
 ple move somewhere else where there is more 
 room. 
 
 I do not mean that people in general sit down 
 and quietly think this out. In the time of Co- 
 lumbus, for example, I do not suppose that many 
 people in Europe actually realized that the time 
 was not far off when Europe would be over- 
 crowded. But, all the same, the fact was there ; 
 and with it the fact that no human being, until 
 long after Columbus was dead and buried, knew 
 whether there might not be, beyond the known 
 world, endless lands where the human beings 
 who should by and by be crowded out of Europe 
 might go. 
 
 Now think of what every one of you knows to- 
 day. On this globe of ours, which any of us 
 might easily travel around in three months, there 
 are two great continents — one in each hemi- 
 sphere ; and there are some islands in the South- 
 ern seas, Australia and New Zealand, and a great 
 archipelago of smaller ones; and that is all. 
 There is nowhere else where human beings can 
 ever go. When the population of the world, as 
 
FOUE AMEKICAN CENTUKIES 27 
 
 we see it mapped in any school geography, has 
 increased in anything like the proportion in 
 which, within less than a hundred years, the 
 population of the city of Worcester has in- 
 creased, the human race will have such a prob- 
 lem to solve as in all its history it has never had 
 before. It will be face to face with what it can 
 already foresee — with the limited power of this 
 earth to support life, or, to use the more mysteri- 
 ous phrase with which I began, with the in- 
 evitable limit of material things. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the time of Columbus, four hundred years 
 ago, the Old World of Europe was getting far 
 nearer its own limits than anybody realized. I do 
 not mean, of course, that it was within a few 
 years of starvation ; such processes as I am now 
 talking of move on, not by months or years, but 
 by centuries. This four-hundredth birthday of 
 the New World might better be called the fourth 
 birthday of the whole world. But even before 
 the time of Columbus, the more active men in 
 Europe were getting restless; the spirit of ex- 
 ploration was in the air. Travellers had forced 
 their way eastward across the whole width of the 
 continent of Asia. Sailors had begun to round 
 the southern limits of Africa. And all this meant 
 that, hardly knowing what it did, growing Eu- 
 
28 FOUE AMEBICAN CENTUKIES 
 
 rope was calling to its aid the resources of the 
 Indies. Had there been no Indies, or had the 
 lands which Columbus always believed to be 
 Asiatic proved to be anything other than the 
 coasts of a new hemisphere, almost untenanted 
 by man, then — even by this time — the final strug- 
 gle of European humanity with the inevitable 
 limit of material things might have begun. 
 
 For, after all, looked at in a larger way, we of 
 America are Europeans as truly as our language 
 is English. There are differences, to be sure, be- 
 tween us who have crossed the western seas and 
 our kinsfolk whom our crossing has permitted to 
 remain safely at home. Such differences, with 
 that fine instinct of self-respect which is, perhaps, 
 our finest national trait, we love to cherish, much 
 as we love to cherish family pride. But just as 
 our past history is as truly European as is the 
 past history of Spain or of England, so is the fut- 
 ure history of Europe bound to include our future 
 history too. For this world we live in we know 
 now to be a whole world, united in itself as 
 surely as it is eternally separate from other 
 planets and other systems. Its history is bound 
 to be the history of the domination of that race 
 which in the struggles of the ages proves most 
 w T orthy to survive. And that race, I hope and 
 believe, is the race of which we form a part and 
 in a certain sense the advance guard — the race 
 whose great records were first written, now by 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 29 
 i 
 
 this nation, now by that, in the history and the 
 
 literature of Europe. 
 
 IV 
 
 To this history and this literature our New 
 World has added its own pages. To-day we turn 
 the fourth ; what shall be written on the fifth and 
 those which shall come beyond, none of us may 
 ever live to know. And to prophesy were idle. 
 But it seems to me that we may well consider for a 
 few moments the record that our New World has 
 already made ; and perhaps pause for a little while 
 to consider also its meaning. The limits of the 
 centuries of world history are as accidental as the 
 limits of the years in a man's life. Our birthdays 
 are matters of chance. But just as each of the 
 years which are carrying us on from cradle to 
 grave has for each of us who looks back on it a 
 character of its own, so when we look back on 
 the four centuries that separate us from the time 
 when to our forefathers all beyond the western 
 sea was fathomless mystery, it seems to me that 
 each of the centuries begins to grow distinct. 
 
 The first — the Sixteenth Century of the Christian 
 era — sums itself up in our American history as the 
 century of exploration and of Spanish conquest. 
 In the records of that time there is nothing, I be- 
 
30 FOUK AMEBICAN CENTUEIES 
 
 lieve, more fascinating than the maps. Almost 
 year by year, as fresh navigators brought back 
 fresh reports, we can watch the islands and the 
 continents emerging from the fantastic mystery 
 of legendary seas. Perhaps no one feature of this 
 growth is more notable than that of the region to 
 which German geographers first gave the name 
 of the maligned Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci — 
 a name, as at last we know, that in every sense 
 we may be proud to bear. Sailing to the south- 
 ward of the lands where Columbus had preceded 
 him, he came upon another land, seemingly inde- 
 pendent of those, hitherto unknown. In the older 
 maps it appears as an island, of which the exact 
 limits are still to be fixed, much as Greenland used 
 to appear in the school geographies of my child- 
 hood. Map by map these limits grow distinct, 
 until by and by we see that the first America of 
 Vespucci was no island at all ; it was that eastern- 
 most part of our own great continent to which 
 later geographers finally gave what had once been 
 the legendary name of Brazil. And as map by 
 map the continent grows, we can watch the emer- 
 gence into human history of these northern re- 
 gions, which were destined to be the homes of 
 our fathers and our children. 
 
 During the first century of our Western history, 
 however, these northern regions were little vexed 
 by other than exploring Europeans. It was to 
 the southward that Europeans were making their 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 31 
 
 permanent mark, in the regions that still bear 
 the name of the Indies, and those yet wider regions 
 which to this day retain an impress that could 
 have been made only by the imperial Spain of 
 Charles V. and Philip II. Within our own coun- 
 try, one may almost say, the only lasting mark 
 of that century is the name Virginia, preserving 
 for us the memory of her who, until our own 
 time, might stand unchallenged as the noblest of 
 English queens. Beyond our limits, in Mexico, 
 in Peru, in the Indies, Spain wrote upon the face 
 of the New World the ineffaceable records of a 
 system in devotion to which untold millions of 
 earnest lives have been and shall be spent ; a sys- 
 tem which assumes that all earthly authority must 
 come straight from God in Heaven, through his 
 temporal and his spiritual anointed. 
 
 VI 
 
 The second century of American history — the 
 Seventeenth Century of the Christian era — is one 
 whose records mean far more to us. In the course 
 of it, I believe, all but one of the colonies were 
 finally settled which were destined to be the germ 
 of the United States ; and those which for a little 
 while owned the sovereignty of Sweden and of 
 Holland yielded themselves to the authority of 
 the English crown. For all that to the north of 
 us the subjects of Louis XIV. were striving to 
 
32 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 gain for France such a foothold as to the south- 
 ward the subjects of Charles and of Philip had 
 gained for Spain, it is with no lack of confidence, 
 I believe, that we may name the second century 
 of American history the century of English con- 
 quest. 
 
 It was the century in which the English planters 
 were finally settled on the James ; the century 
 in which the Pilgrim fathers came to Plymouth 
 and the Puritan colonists to Boston Bay. Our 
 national records are full of traditions which be- 
 long to this epoch. It was the century of Captain 
 John Smith and Pocahontas, of Peter Stuyvesant 
 and the old Dutch worthies of the Hudson, of 
 Miles Standish and Governor Winthrop, of Roger 
 Williams, of King Philip's War, of Sir Edmund 
 Andros, of the Salem witches. In the country 
 towns of New England there is hardly a burying - 
 place whose gray stones do not bear the names of 
 men and women who have been resting beneath 
 the pines and the elms since the days were still 
 fresh in memory when our own forefathers broke 
 the soil that is still ours. But it seems to me 
 that too few of us are disposed to remember 
 what, as the centuries begin to pass, stands out 
 as the chief record of that olden time. It was 
 in the Seventeenth Century that first were planted 
 in American soil the seeds of the system which, 
 whether we know it or not, is the system by 
 which our national life must stand or fall. In 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 33 
 
 that century our continent first gave asylum to 
 the race which, in its heart of hearts, acknowl- 
 edged and still acknowledges no earthly author- 
 ity above the common law. For, looked at in the 
 light of the centuries, our own constitution and 
 all that has grown up beneath it are but out- 
 growths, strong with the strength that comes 
 from natural, undistorted growth, of that firmest 
 known system of human rights — the common law 
 of England. 
 
 VII 
 
 The third century of American history — the 
 Eighteenth of the Christian era — is a century of 
 which the memory is still more our own. From 
 whatever point of view one looks at it, no fact in 
 its course is much more salient than the American 
 Revolution. To foreigners and to superficial ob- 
 servers, the chief trait of this great event seems 
 perhaps to be that for the first time in modern 
 history it demonstrated the power of colonies to 
 break free from the control of a mother country. 
 To us, I think, it has a trait more notable than 
 that : it marks the beginning of our conscious na- 
 tional life ; it gives us a right to name this third 
 century of American history the century of native 
 conquest. 
 
 Between this century of native conquest, how- 
 ever, and the two centuries of foreign conquest 
 3 
 
34 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 which preceded it, there is a distinction, I think, 
 which, unlike in themselves as were the con- 
 quests of England and of Spain, groups them to- 
 gether ; and which marks our native conquest as 
 a thing apart. The purpose of the conquests both 
 of England and of Spain was to impose upon a 
 new world, hitherto untrodden by civilized men, 
 the systems of government which had prevailed 
 in old Europe. It was the purpose of our native 
 conquest to impose no system on anybody or on 
 any territory ; but only to maintain, in the face 
 of all the military force of England, those rights 
 which by the common law of England not even 
 the English crown had a right to touch. This is 
 the trait that distinguishes our revolution from 
 all the others that have since troubled the Old 
 "World and the New. One and all, these have 
 striven to substitute for some old, established 
 authority, some brand-new system, devised by 
 enthusiasts and untried by mankind. Ours, and 
 ours only, strove not to innovate, but to preserve ; 
 not to manufacture a ready-made system of law 
 and government, but to guard and protect in its 
 normal growth a system of government which had 
 been proved sound and wholesome by centuries 
 of ancestral experience. 
 
 As our glances at American history come nearer 
 to our own time, their field perforce grows nar- 
 rower. As I think of this third century of our his- 
 tory, I find myself recalling to memory two struct- 
 
FOUK AMERICAN CENTURIES 35 
 
 ures on the Atlantic sea-board which together 
 symbolize much of the history we have considered. 
 
 The first is on the Island of Cape Breton. On a 
 little peninsula there, rocky, grass-grown, dotted 
 with grazing sheep — a little peninsula which 
 stands between the everlasting surges of the foggy 
 ocean and a quiet harbor still capable of floating 
 a navy — is a great line of ruined fortifications. 
 About the middle of the last century, a whole 
 regiment of British sappers and miners worked for 
 half a year in the endeavor to blow them up and 
 obliterate them. Yet all this work has only made 
 huge breaches in the walls, and half -filled the 
 ditches at their foot. Grass-grown, deserted but 
 for the sheep and a few poor fishermen and smug- 
 glers, the walls of Louisbourg still remain inde- 
 structible in their outline. You or I can still 
 trace there every bastion and every port. And 
 this useless, deserted ruin, permanent in its de- 
 fenceless strength, is almost all that remains on 
 the eastern coast of North America to symbolize 
 the power and the fall of that system of authority 
 which France, with the example of Spain before 
 her eyes, once hoped to impose upon our whole 
 continent. 
 
 The second structure is nearer home. In the 
 straggling village that has grown at the mouth of 
 the Piscataqua, is a fragment of an old, unpainted 
 wooden house. Newer houses and village shops 
 crowd close upon it now. But even in its shabby 
 
36 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 decay its great gambrel roof and its two square 
 chimneys preserve a dignity of their own. It is a 
 dignity less austere, less stern, less lordly than 
 that of the lasting masonry of Louisbourg; but 
 a dignity still far above that of the cottages and 
 the shops of later times. Here in his day lived 
 "William Pepperell, the Yankee merchant who, in 
 the name of King George II. , took command of 
 the Yankee volunteers. From this house he set 
 forth, leading them against that fortress of Louis- 
 bourg, where, behind the strongest military archi- 
 tecture of France, the system of authority had 
 intrenched itself to withstand and to oppose the 
 growth of that other system whose strength lay 
 in the English common law. And hither he re- 
 turned, victorious with his undisciplined Yankees 
 over the trained mercenaries of Louis XV. — to 
 be made, in honor of his good fortune, the one 
 native baronet of New England. 
 
 In honor of his good fortune, I say, because 
 whoever reads the story of that first Yankee con- 
 quest must admit that our victory came half from 
 the blunders of the French and half from pure 
 chance, hardly at all from any skill or notable prow- 
 ess of our own. In a way, I think, that very ele- 
 ment of chance, of good fortune, makes the con- 
 quest of Louisbourg all the more typical of the 
 growth in America of that system whose strength 
 lies not in force but in law. 
 
 But Sir William Pepperell's house is to-day as 
 
FOUE AMERICAN CENTURIES 37 
 
 far sunk from its high estate as is the fortress of 
 Louisbourg itself. Here the American Revolu- 
 tion has done its work. When he set out against 
 Louisbourg, Pepperell stood for that force which 
 characterized the second century of American his- 
 tory as opposed to the force which characterized 
 the first. Thirty years later, his descendants, un- 
 changed in principle, found themselves opposed, 
 not to the past but to the future. The victorious 
 people of America had scant mercy for whoever 
 opposed them. The Pepperells, like hundreds of 
 other loyal gentlemen, saw their lands confiscated 
 and themselves driven into lasting exile. And 
 to-day strange villagers swarm over what were 
 once their gardens and in the dismantled cham- 
 bers of their dismembered house. 
 
 In this aspect, it seems to me, the ruinous man- 
 sion symbolizes, more clearly than we like to ad- 
 mit, the state in which the American Revolution 
 left us. In that great struggle, I believe, the Amer- 
 icans were in the right, and in the right because 
 what they fought for was no abstract principle, 
 but rather the maintenance of their vested rights. 
 In so doing, however, they were forced to be for 
 the moment rebels. As rebels, it was their inevi- 
 table misfortune to find opposed to them that great 
 part of the best and worthiest people in the land 
 who in any crisis feel bound to throw themselves 
 on the side of established authority. And this 
 old gray house of the Pepperells, deserted for a 
 
38 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 century and more of all who have had a birth- 
 right to be there, typifies what few of us allow 
 ourselves to remember — the tremendous sacrifice 
 of good men and true that was the inevitable 
 price of our national independence. 
 
 VIII 
 
 National independence — that is the substance 
 of the fourth and last page of our American his- 
 tory, the page we are closing now, with the Nine- 
 teenth Century of the Christian era. The days of 
 the Spanish conquests are past ; of English con- 
 quests, too, and of native. For a hundred years 
 we have held in our grasp the prize that the Old 
 World proved all too weak to retain. What ac- 
 count shall we give of it ? 
 
 Our greatest national characteristic, it seems to 
 me, is a superb self-confidence, born at once of 
 temporary freedom from limits and of necessary 
 ignorance of standards. We have had the terri- 
 tory of a whole continent wherein to make our 
 experiments and to correct our blunders. And 
 we have never had close at hand any older and 
 wiser nations than ourselves by which as a people 
 we might measure our own shortcomings. It has 
 been the fashion, then, very honestly to assert 
 that God opened for us of America a clean page 
 of history, and that the record which our free- 
 born citizens are writing there is a new one in the 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 39 
 
 history of mankind. At times it has seemed so 
 to all of us. There is a great charm in those 
 high-sounding commonplaces of triumphant de- 
 mocracy that we have borrowed rather from the 
 impracticable philosophy of Eighteenth -Century 
 France than from the sane experience of Eng- 
 land, Old and New. There is a certain sethereal 
 purity in the philosophical utterances of our own 
 New England which sometimes seems very mar- 
 vellous to those of us who would be helped to 
 live in the spirit. And we are far enough to-day 
 from that terrible conflict which has knit together 
 this Union with bonds closer than before it men 
 dreamed of, to see that North and South alike had 
 ready, when the moment came, endless armies of 
 men who would lay down their lives for what 
 they deemed the truth. 
 
 But this is not all the story. We must admit, 
 too, I fear, that we have in our history records 
 as sordid, as corrupt, as debased as any that the 
 Old World can show. We must admit that as 
 this continent, which a century ago was a hardly 
 explored wilderness, grows densely populous, the 
 human nature that is bred here is the same old 
 human nature of the ages. We have added incal- 
 culably to the material wealth of mankind; we 
 have added perhaps a few exquisitely pure notes 
 — none the less pure for their faintness — to that 
 literature which our mother tongue has for a 
 thousand years been adding to the literature of 
 
40 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 
 
 the world; we have tried on a scale never at- 
 tempted before the great experiment of demo- 
 cratic self-government. And, when we honestly 
 begin to give an account of this new page of hu- 
 man history we have tried to write alone, we are 
 forced, I think, to say that there is in it no new 
 lesson. The law of life decrees that life shall be 
 an unending struggle. Relax the limits of ma- 
 terial things, as for us they have been awhile re- 
 laxed, and the struggle grows less intense. But 
 faster and faster, as the human race fills the earth 
 whose limits we know at last, the inevitable old 
 struggle for existence is upon us, with all its old 
 possibilities of heroism and of baseness. 
 
 Whether we will or no, then, the future offers 
 to us of America little else than it offers all man- 
 kind. As our past history is European, so our 
 future history must be shared with all the world. 
 And we may feel sure that whatever form it take, 
 the grand outline of that future history must be 
 the same as the grand outline of human history 
 through all time. The life of man is an unend- 
 ing struggle for existence, now with the material 
 things about him, now with his own kind. Our 
 fathers were fighters ; we must fight ourselves ; 
 and the battle must be passed on and on to our 
 children till latest time. 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 41 
 
 IX 
 
 The final question, then, for us of America to 
 ask ourselves, is whether in our own history we 
 can find ideals and figures that shall serve us and 
 our children for watchwords in the struggle. 
 There are moments when the materialism, the 
 baseness, the corruption that at any moment 
 mark human existence anywhere, make one sick 
 at heart. The dominant fact of our national 
 history, too, the fact of democracy, is sometimes 
 terribly disheartening. For, with all its splendid 
 generosity to the people at large, democracy at 
 heart must always be the sworn foe of excellence. 
 No man can excel without making other men 
 seem less in comparison. And whatever tends 
 to inequality, without which no excellence can 
 be, arouses the spirit of democracy to fierce 
 rebellion. By the side of the great histories of 
 the world, then, this page of ours, despite its 
 material records, seems none too rich or noble in 
 those traits which make mankind better. 
 
 But, for all this, and for all the blatant 
 patriotic untruth that sometimes makes one feel 
 as if all patriotism were a lie, we may find in our 
 records traits and figures that, if we prize them 
 well, may guide us in the struggle to come as 
 surely if not so brilliantly as any in the records of 
 peoples who more wdllingly recognize and respect 
 superiority. 
 
42 FOUE AMEKICAN CENTUKIES 
 
 The trait that above all others, I believe, we of 
 the United States should reverence and cherish 
 and preserve is the trait that phrases itself in the 
 angry phrase of any country Yankee — " I'll have 
 the law on him." Other people would fight foul ; 
 we fight fair, or strive to. In our deepest polit- 
 ical nature there still lurks the spirit that our 
 forefathers brought from England two centuries 
 ago ; the spirit —so much misrepresented since — 
 that fought and won the American Revolution ; the 
 spirit that, discarding all cloud-spun theories, 
 declares and with self-restraint maintains the 
 final authority of that common law which, dis- 
 daining empty philosophies, has maintained and 
 extended through the centuries those privileges 
 and rights which the sure teaching of human ex- 
 perience has shown us may safely be permitted 
 to men. 
 
 And if we ask what figures we may place before 
 ourselves, as incarnations of what is best in our 
 national history, I find myself more and more apt 
 to answer that there is in our history a roll open 
 to all eyes, in which those who ponder upon it 
 may well feel more and more pride. It is not a 
 roll of great men — rather, perhaps, of petty poli- 
 ticians, some of them a bit contemptible to those 
 who knew them best. Better still, it is a roll of 
 native citizens called by a process that almost 
 fatally excludes the higher excellences of char- 
 acter, to stand for a little while before the eyes of 
 
FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 43 
 
 the world. I mean the roll of the dead Pres- 
 idents of the United States. At a moment like this 
 it is not fitting to speak of the three* who still 
 survive. But when their time shall come, these 
 men, I believe, could ask in human history for no 
 worthier place than that which shall be theirs. 
 For their stations await them in the lengthening 
 line of those sovereign representatives of a sover- 
 eign people, for no one of whom that people has 
 as yet the right to feel a blush of shame. 
 
 * Written before the death of Mr. Hayes. 
 
Ill 
 
 SOME NEGLECTED CHAKACTEEISTICS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 
 
 [A paper read before the American Historical Associa- 
 tion at Washington, December 30, 1891 ; and published in 
 the Harvard Monthly, April, 1892.] 
 
SOME NEGLECTED CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 
 
 On February 15, 1728, the Reverend Benja- 
 min Colman, first minister of the Brattle Street 
 church, preached the Boston lecture in memory 
 of Cotton Mather, who had died two days before. 
 Cotton Mather had lived all his life in Boston ; 
 there is no record, they say, of his ever having 
 travelled farther from home than Ipswich or 
 Andover or Plymouth. Of sensitive tempera- 
 ment, and both by constitution and by conviction 
 devoted to the traditions in which he was trained, 
 he certainly presented, to a degree nowhere com- 
 mon, a conveniently exaggerated type of the 
 characteristics that marked the society of which 
 he formed a part. But Benjamin Colman, at least 
 in earlier life, was of different mettle. After 
 graduation at Harvard College he had passed 
 some years in England, at a time when clever Dis- 
 senters could see good company. In Boston, 
 whither he had returned late in 1699 to take 
 
48 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 
 
 charge of the new church subsequently known as 
 the Brattle Street, he had been so liberal — at 
 least in matters of discipline — as to impress the 
 Mathers, who were the leaders of the strictly 
 orthodox party, as a dangerous Eadical. It is not 
 too much, perhaps, to say that his ministerial ca- 
 reer marks the beginning of that movement in 
 the Boston churches which, a century later, be- 
 came Unitarianism and put Calvinism, at best, 
 hopelessly out of fashion. In view of this, his 
 lecture on Cotton Mather becomes curious. 
 
 His text is the translation of Enoch: "And 
 Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God 
 took him." From these words he draws infer- 
 ences that enable him to expound the career and 
 character of the patriarch, with edifying pre- 
 cision, to the length of four closely printed pages. 
 But what he chiefly insists on is that Enoch's 
 blessed fate 
 
 " must be resolved into the good pleasure of God, His wise 
 and sovereign will ; and to be sure it was not for any 
 merit or desert in Enoch's holy walking with God. Enoch 
 deserved to have died for his sins as well as any before or 
 after him. . . . Elias was a man of like passions 
 with others. ... It was not due to the righteous- 
 ness of either that they were taken without seeing death. 
 Before that God formed them in the belly he designed 
 them their translation." 
 
 In other words, the Boston divine, who at 
 times seems the most Badical of his generation, 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 49 
 
 feels bound, as a matter of course, to begin his 
 eulogy on the most distinguished of his fellow- 
 ministers by an assertion in the most concrete 
 terms of the doctrine of election. 
 
 II 
 
 Beyond question this doctrine was never, for 
 many hours, absent from the mind of Cotton 
 Mather, nor often from that of Samuel Sewall, 
 the two worthies of the period then drawing to 
 a close whose diaries are best preserved. Beyond 
 question, too, these men were, in this respect, 
 not peculiar, but typical of their time. There is 
 hardly a figure in the first century of Boston his- 
 tory whose conduct and opinions can present 
 themselves, to modern temperaments, as compre- 
 hensibly human, unless we keep this doctrine con- 
 stantly in mind ; and keep it in mind, too, not as 
 a verbal dogma, but as a living reality. It is worth 
 our while, then, to recall exactly what it was. 
 
 In the beginning, the Puritans believed, God 
 created man, responsible to Him, with perfect 
 freedom of will. Adam, in the fall, exerted his 
 will in opposition to the will of God. Thereby 
 Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punish- 
 ment. As a mark of that punishment they lost 
 the power of exerting the will in harmony with 
 the will of God, without losing their hereditary 
 responsibility to Him. But God, in His infi- 
 
50 THE NEW ENGLAND PUBITANS 
 
 nite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His justice. 
 Through the mediation of Christ certain human 
 beings, chosen at God's pleasure, might be re- 
 lieved of the just penalty of sin, ancestral and 
 personal, and received into everlasting salvation. 
 These were the elect ; none others could be saved, 
 nor could any acts of the elect impair their sal- 
 vation. 
 
 All this is familiar enough. What puzzles pos- 
 terity about it is how so profoundly fatalistic a 
 creed could possibly prove a motive power strong 
 enough to result not only in individual lives but 
 in a corporate life, that was destined to grow 
 into a national life, of passionate enthusiasm, 
 and of abnormal moral as well as material ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 To understand this nowadays we must em- 
 phasize a fact generally neglected by the writers 
 of New England history : namely, the test by 
 which the elect could be recognized. The test of 
 election, the Puritans believed, was ability to 
 exert the will in true harmony with the will of 
 God — a proof of emancipation from the hereditary 
 curse of the children of Adam ; whoever could 
 at any time do right, and want to, had ground for 
 hope that he might be saved. But even the elect 
 were infected with the hereditary sin of humanity ; 
 and besides, no wile of the Devil was more con- 
 stant than that which deceived men into believing 
 themselves regenerate when in truth they were 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 51 
 
 not. The task of assuring one's self of election, 
 then, could end only with life. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Oolman, in his funeral lecture, states this doc- 
 trine very specifically : 
 
 " To walk with God means, in all the parts and instances 
 of a sober, righteous, and godly life, and constancy therein 
 all our days. We walk with God in a sincere, universal, 
 and persevering obedience to the written Word and re- 
 vealed law of God ; and blessed are the undefiled in the 
 way that walk in the law of the Lord. To walk is not to 
 take a step or two, nor is it for a day or a year, but for 
 the whole life, all our days. We must walk and work 
 while the day lasts ; the light is given for this. How much 
 .does it concern us, then, to ask ourselves whether we have 
 indeed begun this walk with God and to Him ? Whither 
 are we going ? What are we doing ? How do we live and 
 act ; and what will become of us a few days hence ? Will 
 God take us ; take us on the wings of angels and in their 
 arms to His own presence and glory ; or will death drag us 
 out of the body and devils take us away to their abodes 
 of darkness and of fire unquenchable ? " 
 
 The Puritans themselves would probably have 
 told us, as their lineal religious followers some- 
 times tell us to-day, in both cases with perfect 
 honesty of intention, that this specifically as- 
 serts the duty of man to give himself up to 
 God, with no other purpose than to advance 
 God's glory. Such a statement does not explain 
 in modern terms why any living man ever really 
 did so. Few facts, indeed, seem much truer to 
 
52 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 
 
 modern minds than that human beings do what 
 they do not want to do only when some humanly 
 overpowering motive makes self-denial, in the 
 end, the line of least resistance. And looking 
 at Colman's teaching in a modern spirit we may 
 see in it, without much trouble, an appeal to 
 an everyday human motive which goes farther 
 than most things else to explain the apparent 
 inconsistency of Puritan doctrine and Puritan 
 character. In short, what ho does, and what all 
 the Puritan preachers do, is to assume the doc- 
 trine of election ; to declare the test of election 
 to be ability to w T alk with God, to exert the will in 
 true harmony with His ; and then, by every means 
 known to their rhetoric, to stimulate in every 
 one of their hearers the elementary and absorbing 
 passion of curiosity, concerning self-preservation. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the diary of Cotton Mather, a most charac- 
 teristic Puritan document, this trait appears in 
 a form almost incredibly exaggerated. We have 
 in these manuscripts a pretty full account of him 
 from eighteen to sixty-one. The number of 
 private fasts he kept was enormous. It is not too 
 much to say that they were at least weekly through- 
 out those forty-three years. For twenty-two of 
 those years he habitually held vigils, too, — all- 
 night watches in his library of ecstatic prayer and 
 effort to penetrate the veil that is between God 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 53 
 
 and man. And this was but a little part of his 
 passionate effort to walk with God. And the 
 only modernly comprehensible motive to account 
 for all this passion is the one he records in a self- 
 examination at the age of forty-two : 
 
 U I am afraid," he writes, u of allowing my soul a wish 
 of evil to the worst of all [my enemies]. . Q. 
 
 Whether the man that can find these marks upon himself 
 may not conclude himself marked out for the city of 
 
 God?" 
 
 The same trait appears in Increase Mather ; 
 the same in that vastly less emotional personage, 
 Samuel Sewail ; the same reveals itself distinctly 
 in almost every godly portrait in that quaint 
 gallery of worthies that fills so much of Cotton 
 Mather's " Magnalia." 
 
 This book, with all its obvious faults and 
 errors, remains, on the whole, the chief literary 
 monument of New England Puritanism. It has 
 been rather the fashion, of late years, to criticise 
 it as a modern historical document ; as a record of 
 actual fact. As such it is certainly untrustworthy 
 from beginning to end. So modern critics are 
 generally disposed to put it aside as worthless, 
 and incidentally, to apply the same adjective to 
 its author. Psychologically, however, the " Mag- 
 nalia " is a document of such historic value that 
 an earnest student of Puritan New England can- 
 
54 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 
 
 not safely neglect it. Any work of serious lit- 
 erature, we are beginning to see, must inevitably 
 express, at least in its implications, the conditions 
 of the society wherein it was produced. And these 
 it often expresses in a conveniently generalized 
 form where they may be better studied than in 
 individual imases from which posterity, as best it 
 may, would draw what it is apt to think more 
 accurate, because more conscious, inductions. 
 This is the aspect in which the " Magnalia'' is 
 most significant. As a piece of literature it pos- 
 sesses two traits which should follow directly 
 from the fundamental self-curiosity of the Puri- 
 tan character. Within arbitrary and rigidly de- 
 fined limits it is intensely imaginative ; and it 
 displays throughout a serene disregard for that 
 fine adjustment of phrase to fact which our 
 modern scientific spirit of veracity assume sfor 
 the moment to be eternally the chief of the 
 cardinal virtues. 
 
 VI 
 
 To understand the peculiar nature of its in- 
 tensely imaginative quality we may best, perhaps, 
 refer not to itself but to the passage from Col- 
 man's funeral discourse to which we last directed 
 our attention. The quality is so constant among 
 the Puritans that you may find it almost anywhere. 
 
 u Will God," he writes, " take us ... on the 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 55 
 
 wings of angels and in their arms to His own presence 
 and glory ? or will death drag us out of the body, and 
 devils take us away to their abodes of darkness and of fire 
 unquenchable ? " 
 
 This sounds commonplace enough, nowadays. 
 But a gentleman who once visited Goethe at 
 Weimar, has told me that Goethe's first ques- 
 tion was whether it w 7 ere a fact that in America 
 there were still people who believed in actual 
 winged and crowned angels ; and that when 
 he answered, as was then true, that he believed 
 in them himself, Goethe looked at him with an 
 expression he can never forget and exclaimed, 
 "Das ist wunderbar /" Which exclamation, my 
 friend says, began his emancipation from Puritan 
 anthropomorphism. To come nearer our own 
 time, it is not a dozen years since in a Boston 
 newspaper somebody wrote in a very serious obitu- 
 ary notice concerning a secretary of the American 
 Board of Foreign Missions, that "few men on 
 entering heaven will find a wider circle of per- 
 sonal acquaintance or a larger number of those 
 under indirect obligations." 
 
 These things all go together : Colman's angels 
 and devils, the material angels of the Amer- 
 ican boy of 1830, the white chokered old mis- 
 sionary receiving in staid social formality the 
 emancipated spirits of the Polynesian elect, and 
 the godly ministers and magistrates of our Puritan 
 Plutarch. In earlier and later forms they are 
 
56 THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 
 
 concrete examples of the way in which the faculty 
 we call imagination, exerting itself for genera- 
 tions within the limits of what after all was an in- 
 tensely anthropomorphic creed, will first create 
 for itself concrete images, only less material than 
 the bronze and marble ones iconoclasm casts 
 down ; and then, while denying that bronze or 
 marble can be symbolic, will passionately and 
 honestly assert its own images to be real. Nowa- 
 days we are apt to look on all these images — 
 material and immaterial alike — as only symbols. 
 But Cotton Mather at least once was rewarded, in 
 ecstasy, by an actual vision of an angel — wings, 
 robes, crown, and all ; and there is no reason to 
 question that Oolman, who was well on with his 
 preparation for college at this moment of Cotton 
 Mather's highest ecstasy, actually believed his 
 devils to be waiting, with hoofs and horns and 
 tridents, for such of humanity as the unspeakable 
 free grace of his just God had not undeservedly 
 released, with Enoch, from the ancestral penalty 
 of human sin. 
 
 "When Cotton Mather drew his godly portraits, 
 they stood for figures so vivid in his imagina- 
 tion that he had no more suspicion of their 
 actual truth than of the elements of fiction 
 and invention which a modern eye detects in his 
 God, his angels, his devils. When Colman spoke 
 of "abodes of darkness and of fire unquench- 
 able," he spoke of something that to the Puritans 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 57 
 
 represented a fact as concrete as the Tower of 
 London, or as the George II of whom in the same 
 lecture he writes thus : 
 
 u What an honor should we account it if our earthly 
 prince would allow us to walk after him in his garden ? 
 Only a few select and favorite nobles have the honor 
 done them." 
 
 And it is not a little significant of the exhaustion 
 of human power that must follow constant, over- 
 wrought intensity of exercise that Colman failed 
 to remark the strict incompatibility of darkness 
 and unquenchable flames. 
 
 To consider this exercise of imagination in an- 
 other and more modern spirit, what it amounted 
 to was this : Only by incessant assurance and re- 
 assurance that the will was exerting itself in 
 harmony with the will of God could the insatiable 
 curiosity to know whether God's free grace were 
 ours be for a moment stayed. God's way of con- 
 templating things heavenly, earthly, infernal, 
 belongs to that class of perceptions to which so 
 many modern thinkers give the convenient name 
 unknowable; it is a thing which, true or false, 
 can never be verified by either observation or ex- 
 periment. But the God of the Puritans, for all 
 he was a spirit, was a white-bearded spirit, with 
 limbs and passions, — still " le pere eternel de Vecole 
 italienne" who had made man in His visible im- 
 age. To them His will in regard to all things, 
 great and small, was a thing not only that might 
 
58 THE NEW ENGLAND PUBITANS 
 
 be known, but— if life were to possess any mean- 
 ing — that must be known ; and that being known 
 must be proclaimed. In the intense, incessant 
 effort that followed to formulate the unknowable 
 in concrete, anthropomorphic terms, imagination 
 exhausted itself. "What we call the prosaic color- 
 lessness of Puritan life is merely external. The 
 subjective life of the Puritans was intensely, 
 passionately ideal ; blazing with an emotional 
 enthusiasm constantly stimulated by the unrec- 
 ognized impulse of selfish human curiosity. If 
 you want proof of it, ask yourselves how otherwise 
 people who after all are not far from us in years 
 and in blood could have survived the discipline 
 and the public devotions which were to them 
 what meat and drink are to the starving. 
 
 VII 
 
 The difficulty that followed these godly emoi 
 tional debauches is obvious. To the Puritans the 
 concrete images thus created in moments of 
 abnormal ecstasy were more real and unspeakably 
 more important than any facts of actual life. Yet 
 these images, in each case inevitably the creation 
 of a single brain, could neither be confirmed by 
 any general process of human observation, nor 
 tested by any general process of experiment. 
 Each seer could tell what he himself saw; that 
 was all. For the rest, these visions were such 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 59 
 
 as human language has only metaphoric terms to 
 describe. The consent that governs the meaning 
 of words demands, for precision, wide identity of 
 experience. We all know the insidious tempta- 
 tion to impressive inaccuracy of statement which 
 besets whoever has had a solitary adventure with 
 a fish or a snake. Spiritual experiences are in- 
 evitably solitary. Inevitably, too, they cannot be 
 precisely described. Given these truths, given 
 the fundamental errors of human nature, given too 
 the passionate Puritan conviction that an exact 
 account of spiritual experience is the only valid 
 evidence you can give of your eternal salvation, 
 and you get two pretty obvious results. 
 
 The first was never better phrased than by In- 
 crease Mather, perhaps the most canny of the 
 Puritan divines whose career is recorded. In early 
 life he habitually recorded the heavenly affiations 
 that rewarded his ecstatic prayers. 
 
 "As I was praying," he wrote once, " my heart was ex- 
 ceedingly melted, and methoughts saw God before my eyes 
 in an inexpressible manner, so that I was afraid I should 
 have fallen into a trance in my study." — "In his latter 
 years," adds Cotton Mather, writing of him, u he did not 
 record so many of these heavenly affiations, because they 
 grew so frequent with him. And he also found . 
 that the nights of a soul rapt up into a more intimate con- 
 versation with heaven are such as cannot be exactly re- 
 membered with the happy partakers of them." 
 
 The second appears very clearly in what Col- 
 
60 THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 
 
 man wrote of Cotton Mather, with whom in his 
 day he had waged fierce fights : 
 
 " But here love to Christ and His servant commands me 
 to draw a veil over every failing ; for who is without them ? 
 Not ascending Elijah himself, who was a man of like 
 passions with his brethren, the prophets ; and we have his 
 mantle left us wherewith to cover the defects and infirm- 
 ities of others after their translation in spirit. These 
 God remembers no more, and why should we ? and he 
 blots out none of their good deeds, and no more should 
 we." 
 
 Nil de mortuis nisi bonum, in other words, is 
 God's will — and not merely a Latin apothegm. In 
 other words still, it is God's will that the whole 
 truth should never be spoken. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The traits thus hastily specified are incessant 
 activity, within rigid limits, of anthropomorphic 
 imagination, strained to the utmost by life-long 
 efforts concretely to formulate the unknowable ; 
 and a sense of veracity weakened at once by inces- 
 sant dogmatic assertion of unprovable fact and by 
 constant conviction that only such truth should be 
 spoken as was agreeable to the disposition of God. 
 These traits appear throughout the "Magnalia." 
 And whoever does not recognize in the " Mag- 
 nalia " an image not to be neglected of the Puri- 
 tan character can never seriously understand the 
 Puritans. These traits, as we have seen, both 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 61 
 
 follow directly from unquestioning acceptance, in 
 its most concrete form, of the doctrine of election 
 at a time when its freshness had not faded into 
 theological tradition. Doubts assailed the Puri- 
 tans often enough, but, like Increase Mather, the 
 Puritans met doubts not by reasoning — " it puts 
 too much respect upon a devil, to argue and par- 
 ley with him, on a point which the devil himself 
 believes and trembles at " — but by "flat contra- 
 diction." And the energy that, during the first 
 century of Boston history, fortified them to con- 
 tradictions as incessant as temptations, sprang, 
 we may believe, from no mystic cause, but from 
 nothing more marvellous at bottom than the al- 
 most incredible stimulus which acceptance of this 
 fundamental doctrine gave to self-searching, self- 
 seeking curiosity. 
 
 IX 
 
 In discussing these old New Engianders one is 
 apt to speak as if, historically, they were a unique 
 class. It is perhaps worth while, then, for one 
 who cannot profess to be a trained student of his- 
 tory, distinctly to disclaim any such elementary 
 error. Human affairs, people think nowadays, 
 are as much questions of cause and effect as any 
 other phenomena observable by science. Simi- 
 lar conditions will produce similar characters any- 
 where. And this old hierarchy of ours will very 
 
62 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 
 
 probably prove more like than unlike the other 
 hierarchies that by and by serious students will 
 have studied comparatively. In none of them, 
 any more than in this, will such fundamental 
 traits as we have tried to detect prove to be the 
 sole ones. In no serious study of corporate char- 
 acter can the serious student for a moment forget, 
 for one thing, the crushing, distorting influence of 
 those petty material facts to which we give the 
 convenient name of e very-day life. And certainly 
 these concrete facts are generally more profitable 
 subjects of study than such subjective matters as 
 we have dealt with here. What is more, of course, 
 such extreme traits as we have touched on char- 
 acterized chiefly the leaders — the clergy, the 
 priestly class. During the first century of New 
 England history, however, the influence of this 
 class can hardly be overstated. And just because 
 the concrete facts commonly engross professional 
 students and makers of history, it sometimes 
 seems that such aspects of history as we have 
 glanced at — aspects that in this case reveal them- 
 selves with startling distinctness to an unprofes- 
 sional explorer of Puritan records — have been 
 perhaps unduly neglected. 
 
 Note. — The passages from Colman are cited from " The 
 Holy Walk and Glorious Translation of Blessed Enoch." 
 (Boston : J. Phillips & T. Hancock, 1728. ) The other cita- 
 tions are referred to authorities in my "Life of Cotton 
 Mather." (New York : Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891.) From 
 this is taken directly the account of the Puritan creed. 
 
IV 
 
 WEEE THE SALEM WITCHES 
 GUILTLESS? 
 
 [A paper read before the Essex Institute, Salem, Massa- 
 chusetts, on February 29, 1892.] 
 
WEEE THE SALEM WITCHES 
 GUILTLESS? 
 
 Within the past few years, I have happened, 
 at the suggestion of friends interested in Psychic 
 Besearch, to observe three different phases of 
 occult phenomena. The first is materialization, 
 a process by which professional mediums pretend 
 to call up the visible and tangible bodies of the 
 dead. The second is trance-mediumship ; the 
 medium, in this case also professional, pretends 
 to be controlled by some departed spirit who uses 
 the tongue of the medium, rather unskilfully, as a 
 means of communication with living beings. The 
 third is automatic writing ; in this, acting as a 
 medium myself, I have held a pencil and allowed 
 my hand to run unwatched and uncontrolled by 
 any conscious act of will. I have thus written a 
 great many distinct words, and a few articulate 
 sentences. 
 
 Remote as this statement may appear from a 
 confession of capital crime, and far from con- 
 clusive as my limited observation and experiment 
 must be, I found that when, in studying the life 
 5 
 
66 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 of Cotton Mather, I was compelled to examine 
 the history of Salem witchcraft, my own occult 
 experiences had induced in me a state of mind 
 that led to some speculative conclusions widely 
 different from those commonly accepted. These 
 I shall venture to state, wholly aware that I- have 
 neither the scientific nor the historical learning 
 necessary to give them even a semblance of au- 
 thority, but hoping that they may, perhaps, prove 
 suggestive of a line of study which, in more com- 
 petent hands than mine, might lead to interest- 
 ing results; for I am disposed to believe not 
 only that in 1692 there was existent in New Eng- 
 land, under the name of witchcraft, a state of 
 things quite as dangerous as any epidemic of 
 crime, but also that there is, perhaps, reason to 
 doubt whether all the victims of the witch trials 
 were innocent. 
 
 To explain this statement, I may best, perhaps, 
 begin by briefly recounting my own observations 
 and experiments, and then turn to some of the 
 evidence in the witch trials. By comparing this 
 with my experience and with a few facts admitted 
 nowadays — such as the phenomena of hypnotism 
 — I may indicate why I am disposed so heartily 
 to dissent from the rationalistic view of the 
 tragedy of two centuries ago, which has been so 
 admirably and honestly set forth by standard 
 historians. 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 67 
 
 II 
 
 My own observations of modern occultism were 
 made in the order in which I have named them. 
 I saw the materialized spirits first ; later I visited 
 a trance-medium ; and not till some time later 
 did I try my hand at automatic writing. 
 
 Materialization impressed me as indubitable 
 fraud from beginning to end. You went into a 
 room which was subsequently so darkened that 
 you could not discern the hands of your watch. 
 In this dim light, a small company, mostly ardent 
 believers, were wrought up into such emotional 
 excitement as could be awakened by hymn tunes 
 played on a common parlor organ ; and presently 
 uncanny shapes began to flit about. Sometimes 
 these emerged from a cabinet in which the me- 
 dium had professed to go into the trance-state ; 
 sometimes they apparently rose through the floor ; 
 at least once — to all appearances — they took shape 
 on top of an ordinary three-legged table. These 
 figures would talk with yon, would shake hands 
 with you, would sometimes be unpleasantly affec- 
 tionate in demeanor, and would often end by 
 '^materializing"— that is, by suddenly flopping 
 down into nothing, much as figures in the panto- 
 mime disappear through trap-doors. You could 
 not see how the trick was done, but the trick was 
 essentially like what any number of travelling 
 magicians perform. 
 
68 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 Before long, however, you remarked that the 
 habitual frequenters of these unedifying exercises 
 seemed fervently to believe in them. I remem- 
 ber once finding at my side an elderly man who 
 passionately embraced a male spirit that appeared, 
 and returning to his seat whispered to me in agi- 
 tated tones that it was his son, who had lately 
 killed himself. The son had been a friend of 
 mine ; and when I told the father so, he begged 
 the medium to recall him, that I might speak to 
 him myself and be convinced. But the medium 
 professed inability to recall that particular spirit 
 at the moment, so I was forced to remain scepti- 
 cal of everything but the fervent belief of the 
 heart-broken father. Next you remarked that, 
 knaves and charlatans as the mediums seemed, 
 they seemed knaves and charlatans of a specific 
 kind. There was no doubt in your mind that 
 they lied to you and tricked you, but I for one 
 could never feel satisfied as to how thoroughly 
 they were aware of the exact extent of their false- 
 hood — as to whether beneath all this nonsense 
 and rascality there were not lurking some mys- 
 terious subjective experience that had to them a 
 semblance of fact. Finally, you felt a growing 
 sense of debasement in such surroundings. The 
 uncanny insincerity of the mediums, the crass 
 superstition of the believers who formed the 
 circle, the meaningless words and conduct of the 
 materialized spirits — never indecent, but always 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 69 
 
 petty, trivial, low — led me by and by heartily to 
 agree with a friend who declared that while he 
 did not for a moment believe these were spirits at 
 all, he had no shadow of doubt that if they were 
 spirits they were devils. 
 
 The chief trance-medium I visited was a woman 
 of high respectability, and of great apparent sin- 
 cerity of character. In her normal condition she 
 professed complete ignorance of what occurred 
 when she was in the trance-state. Into this state 
 she could throw herself at will. Once in this 
 state she assumed a voice and manner totally un- 
 like her own, and professing to be controlled by 
 a spirit, she gave you any number of messages 
 from departed friends, whom she sometimes de- 
 scribed and sometimes named. In a sitting with 
 her of some two hours I remarked that, in a vague 
 kind of way, she seemed to follow my line of 
 thought. For example, she made a queer noise 
 that reminded me of the death agony of a friend 
 some time before. This recalled him to my mind, 
 and the circumstances of his death. By and 
 by, she named him, and described him with some 
 approach to verisimilitude. The correspondence 
 between what I knew and what she told me was 
 never exact enough to convince me of any thing- 
 extraordinary ; but it seemed close enough to 
 warrant me, if I had believed in mind-reading, in 
 classing her performance as mind-reading, once 
 for all. At the expiration of some two hours, I 
 
70 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 found myself obliged to request her, while still in 
 the trance state, to bring the sitting to a close. 
 At my suggestion, then, and not of her own ac- 
 cord, she endeavored to resume her natural con- 
 dition. The result was unexpected : she had a 
 startling fit. Amid the contortions which accom- 
 panied what she asserted to be the departure of 
 the spirit which had controlled her, she fell on 
 her knees with a cry of terror, and clutching me 
 begged me not to let it take her away ; and she 
 looked with every appearance of agonized alarm, 
 at an empty corner of the room from which she 
 shrank away ; you would have said she saw the 
 Devil himself waiting for her. In a very short 
 time she resumed her natural condition, at first 
 rather dazed, and declared that she had no idea 
 whatever of anything that had happened since 
 she first went into the trance-state two hours be- 
 fore.* 
 
 The most remarkable thing to me about her 
 was that in her normal condition she was the sort 
 of person whom you instinctively believe to speak 
 the truth. It was perfectly easy to assert that 
 she was a common trickster ; but to my mind, at 
 all events, the assertion was by no means convinc- 
 
 * It is fair to remark here, that a friend deeply inter- 
 ested in Psychic Research questions the accuracy of my 
 memory in this case. I can reply only that the incident 
 was unique in my experience, and so horrible as to produce 
 a very lasting impression. 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 71 
 
 ing. My own impression was strongly that she 
 was an honest person, in a very abnormal state, 
 honestly self-deceived ; and in this abnormal dis- 
 play and in this self-deception was a quality of 
 debasement, more subtle, less tangible, than I 
 had found in materialization, but, if you granted 
 the supernatural hypothesis at all, equally dia- 
 bolical. 
 
 A year or two after this I found that if, pencil 
 in hand, I left my hand free to run as it would, 
 and occupied my eyes and thoughts with other 
 matters, my hand would clumsily scrawl first 
 queer tremulous lines, then letters, then words. 
 This experience was in no wise peculiar. The 
 friend who first directed my attention to these 
 experiments had made a considerable collection 
 of automatic writings from various people ; and 
 these had in common a trait that mine shared with 
 them. The avowedly un guided hand would make 
 for a while — sometimes day after day — apparently 
 meaningless lines that constantly repeated them- 
 selves. In time, these lines would grow more 
 definite. Finally a word would be written ; and 
 by comparing a number of the writings you could 
 trace what looked like a long series of almost im- 
 potent experiments, finally resulting in this dis- 
 tinct achievement. The first word my hand thus 
 wrote was " sherry." 
 
 That it was going to write " sherry " I had no 
 idea. To this point I had been incredulous that it 
 
72 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 would actually write anything at all. ' ' Sherry " 
 once written, I began to feel more interest in 
 what it might write next. And then soon fol- 
 lowed an experience that determined me to give 
 the matter up. In the first place, I found that 
 experiments in automatic writing left me in an 
 irritable nervous condition for which I can find 
 no better name than demoralized. The whole 
 fibre of character seemed for the moment weak- 
 ened ; will, intelligence, self-control, temper, 
 were alike inferior things after the experiments 
 to what they had been before. In the second 
 place, I found that very soon I could not be quite 
 sure whether I actually let my hand run un- 
 guided, or whether I slyly helped it write. And 
 whenever that doubt arose in my mind, there al- 
 ways came with it so strong an impulse to deny 
 its existence, to assert that I had no idea what I 
 was about, that I found myself for the moment 
 a completely untrustworthy witness. In other 
 words, the further I got in my very slight excur- 
 sion into occult experiment, the further I was 
 from intelligence, veracity, and honesty. The 
 definite result of these experiments for me was a 
 conviction that, at any rate, no man's word about 
 automatic writing is worth the breath that ut- 
 ters it. The thing is not all fraud — there is 
 something very queer about it ; but not the least 
 phase of the queerness is that it is constantly, in- 
 creasingly credulous, tricky, and mendacious. 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 73 
 
 In reflecting on these three experiences, I 
 found them by and by grouping themselves as 
 three stages of what I may call a specific mental 
 or moral disorder. The first and simplest was the 
 automatic writing whose ill effects induced me to 
 abandon the whole thing. The second w T as the 
 mediumistic trance, in which a woman whom I 
 believe honest in her natural character hypno- 
 tized herself, and in the hypnotic state became 
 perhaps abnormally perspicacious, and almost 
 certainly a dangerous charlatan. The third was 
 the elaborately dishonest mummery of material- 
 ization, where the fraud was so palpable that it 
 seemed almost indubitably deliberate from begin- 
 ning to end. But comparing this deliberate fraud 
 with the simpler phases of occultism that I had 
 observed, I found myself more and more disposed 
 to believe it a kind of deliberate fraud, in all re- 
 spects debasing, into which I could easily con- 
 ceive an originally honest person to be unwitting- 
 ly led. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All this time my impressions of Salem witch- 
 craft had been derived from two absorbing days 
 that I had passed with Mr. Upham's book some 
 years ago. It had never occurred to me to ques- 
 tion his conclusions ; nor would it have occurred 
 to me had I not been called on to make a careful 
 study of the life and character of Cotton Mather, 
 
74 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 whom I found on intimate acquaintance by no 
 means the deliberate villain I had been led to be- 
 lieve him. In making that study, I had occasion 
 to read the original evidence in the witch-trials.* 
 And what most impressed me in that evidence 
 was its startling familiarity. The surroundings 
 were in all respects different from anything I 
 had known. In a century and a society far more 
 remote from us in condition than they are in 
 time, certain unhappy people were bringing 
 against others more unhappy still charges that 
 involved their lives. But the controlling spirit, 
 the atmosphere of this grotesque tragedy was 
 something I had known in the flesh. Whoever 
 has frequented materialization seances, and who 
 then reads with sympathetic imagination the 
 broken records of the witch-trials, can hardly 
 help admitting, I think, that these things are of 
 the same kind. There is fraud in both — terribly 
 tragic fraud then, grotesquely comic fraud now — 
 but in both the fraud is of the same horrible 
 vapourous kind ; and in both there is room for 
 a growing doubt whether there be not in all this 
 more than fraud and worse. If there be, that 
 mysterious thing is subtly evil beyond words ; if 
 there be an incarnate spirit of evil, then that mys- 
 terious thing is the direct work of that spirit. 
 
 * Woodward, W. E. Records of Salem Witchcraft, 
 1691-92, copied from the original documents. Roxbury, 
 1864-65, 2 vols , 4to. (Woodward's Hist. Ser., vols. 1, 2. ) 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 75 
 
 The Nineteenth Century has discarded the Devil ; 
 to the Seventeenth Century, at least in New Eng- 
 land, he was just as real as God. And the sin 
 that transcended all other sin that could be done 
 by the fallen children of Adam was the sin of 
 those who, despairing of Heaven, leagued them- 
 selves before their time with Hell. 
 
 This is not the moment to analyze in detail the 
 tremendous force of that doctrine of election 
 which underlies Calvinism — the creed that for 
 seventy years dominated New England. But 
 whoever would understand the society from 
 whose midst sprang the witches and the witch- 
 judges of 1692 must never forget the grim creed 
 which, declaring that no man could be saved but 
 by the special grace of God, and that the only 
 test of salvation was ability to exert the will in 
 accordance with His, bred in the devout, and in 
 whoever was affected by their counsels, an habit- 
 ual introspection, and an habitual straining for 
 mystical intercourse with the spiritual world, to- 
 day almost inconceivable. In a world dominated 
 by a creed at once so despairing and so mystic, it 
 would not have been strange if now and then 
 wretched men, finding in their endless introspec- 
 tion no sign of the divine marks of grace, and 
 stimulated in their mysticism beyond modern 
 conception by the churches that claimed and 
 imposed an authority almost unsurpassed in his- 
 tory, had been tempted to seek, in premature 
 
76 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 alliance with the powers of evil, at least some 
 semblance of the freedom that their inexorable 
 God had denied them. It was such an alliance 
 with which the Salem witches were charged. It 
 is just such miserable debasement of humanity as 
 should follow such an alliance that pervades the 
 evidence of the witch-trials, just as to-day it 
 pervades the purlieus of those who give them- 
 selves up to occultism in its lower forms. 
 
 IV 
 
 The question I asked myself, when this view 
 of the matter became clear to me, was whether in 
 this evidence I could find traces of the other 
 stages of occultism to which I have already called 
 your attention. To answer this question to any- 
 body's satisfaction would need longer and more 
 careful study than I have been able to give the 
 documents ; but what little study I have had 
 time for has suggested to me, more and more 
 strongly, that prolonged study might yield sur- 
 prising results. I will try very briefly to analyze 
 the evidence, to show w r hat I mean. 
 
 It is not generally remembered, in spite of 
 Mr. Upham's admirable work, that the great bulk 
 of this evidence is what was called spectral. A 
 girl, for example, was bewitched, and testified 
 that the physical torture she was apparently 
 undergoing w T as caused by the conduct of the 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 77 
 
 apparition of one of the accused — an apparition 
 providentially invisible to whoever was not be- 
 witched. It was the acceptance by the court of 
 this obviously worthless evidence that hanged 
 the witches; it was the throwing out of such 
 evidence that brought the witch-trials to a close. 
 It was his momentary faith in such evidence — 
 not in the horrible reality of witchcraft itself — 
 that Samuel Sewall publicly repented in the Old 
 South Church. And in analyzing the records of 
 these old trials, we must put aside, once for all, 
 every particle of spectral evidence, except as it 
 tells against the witnesses themselves. 
 
 In a way, however, spectral evidence tells against 
 the witnesses themselves rather startlingly. It 
 was often accompanied in full court, by conduct 
 that went far to make judges and attendants 
 believe it. I cite almost at random, a single 
 example of what I mean. In the examination of 
 Kebecca Nurse is this passage : * 
 
 " Why should not you also be guilty for your apparition 
 doth hurt also, 
 
 u Would you have me bely myself. 
 
 u She held her neck on one side, and accordingly so were 
 the afflicted taken." 
 
 A moment later — " Nurse held her neck on one side and 
 Eliz. Hubbard (one of the sufferers) had her neck set in 
 that posture whereupon another patient Abigail Williams, 
 cryed out, set up Goody Nurse's head, the maid's neck 
 will be broke, and when some set up Nurse's head Aa- 
 
 *1: 86,87. 
 
78 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 ron Wey, observed y* Betty Hubbards was immediately 
 righted." 
 
 This tells nothing whatever against Kebecca 
 Nurse. What it tells against Betty Hubbard 
 would have seemed a few years ago merely that 
 she was a deliberate and unprincipled trickster. 
 To-day, I think, it goes far to suggest a much 
 less simple state of things ; namely, that Betty 
 Hubbard was a hypnotic subject, so far gone as 
 to be instantly affected by the slightest suggestion 
 from a person on whom her diseased attention 
 was concentrated. And it is typical of things that 
 occurred throughout the sessions of the witch- 
 courts. I am no expert in hypnotism, but what 
 little I have read and seen of it so exactly corre- 
 sponds with so much that is in this witch-evidence 
 that I should be gravely surprised if experts 
 who examined the evidence did not find the evi- 
 dence going far to suggest that almost all the 
 bewitched were probably victims of hypnotic ex- 
 cesses. 
 
 It is only in recent times, I believe, that care- 
 ful study of the still mysterious and dangerous 
 phenomena of hypnotism has tended to show that 
 it depends far more on the subject than on the 
 operator, and that a good subject, by careful con- 
 centration of attention, can hypnotize himself. 
 That the bewitched sufferers at Salem often 
 hypnotized themselves is highly probable. Here 
 is another extract from the evidence — this time 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 79 
 
 from one of those unaccountable confessions which 
 have so baffled cool critics.* 
 
 v 'Now Mary Warren fell into a fit, and some of the 
 afflicted cryed out that she was going to confess, but Goody 
 Korey and Procter and his wife came in their apparition 
 and struck her down and said she should tell nothing. 
 
 " Mary Warren continued a good space in a fit, that she 
 did neither see, nor hear, nor speak. 
 
 u Afterward she started up, and said I will speak and 
 cryed out, Oh ! I am sorry for it, I am sorry for it, and 
 wringed her hands and fell a little while into a fit again 
 and then came to speak, but immediately her teeth were 
 set, and then she fell into a violent fit and cryed out, Oh 
 Lord help me ! Oh Good Lord save me ! 
 
 K ' And then afterward cryed again, I will tell, I will tell 
 and then fell into a dead fit again " — which continued 
 until " she was ordered to be had out." 
 
 A little later she was i c called in afterward in private 
 before magistrates and ministers. 
 
 " She said I shall not speak a word ; but I will I will 
 speak Satan. — She saith she will kill me. Oh ! she says 
 she owes me a spite and will claw me off. 
 
 u Avoid Satan, for the name of God Avoid and then fell 
 into fits again ; and cryed will ye, I will prevent ye in the 
 name of God." — 
 
 But in spite of her will, her fits persisted and " her lips 
 were bit so that she could not speak so she was sent away." 
 
 "Within two days she made an elaborate, and 
 apparently mendacious confession of all sorts of 
 occult absurdity, beginning with the assertion 
 that her master and mistress had forced her into 
 
 * 1 : 120. 
 
80 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 witchcraft, making her sign a book, and that they 
 had made her stick a pin into a puppet, and so on. 
 
 Though not disposed to put much credence in 
 this testimony against her employers, I am never- 
 theless very much struck by the likeness between 
 this poor creature's conduct before the Salem 
 magistrates and ministers, and the conduct of the 
 trance-medium in Boston, who, as she was emerg- 
 ing at my request from her trance, begged me to 
 save her from the horrible spectre she thought she 
 saw in the corner. This medium was undoubt- 
 edly given to hypnotizing herself. How she had 
 learned to do so I do not know. Is there not 
 reason to guess that Mary Warren may have been 
 given to hypnotizing herself, too ; and that very 
 possibly she may have been taught to do so ? 
 
 In the midst of all this horrible confusion, then, 
 there are glimpses of two of the stages of occult- 
 ism to which I bore personal testimony. Is there 
 any of the third, such as I dabbled in myself? 
 Of automatic writing, I have found no trace ; that 
 experiment I conceive to be a very modern one. 
 But here is what poor Giles Corey testified against 
 his wife : * 
 
 " Last Satturday in the Evening Sitting by the fire my 
 wife asked me to go to bed. I told her I would go to 
 prayer and when I went to prayer I could not utter my 
 desires w h any sense, not open my mouth to speake^ my 
 wife did perceive itt and came toward me and said she 
 
 * 1 : 55-56. t These italics are mine. 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 81 
 
 was coming to me. After this in a little space I did ac- 
 cording to my measure attend the duty . . . My 
 wife hath ben wont to sett up after I went to bed and I 
 have perceived her to kneel doun on the harth as if she 
 were at prayer but heard nothing." 
 
 A mere question of temper, if you please ; but 
 if he had set about to describe an elementary hyp- 
 notic experiment, could he have said much other- 
 wise ? And is that kneeling figure at the hearth, 
 in the flickering firelight of two centuries ago, 
 quite godly in aspect ? 
 
 Again : * 
 
 "John Blye Senior agett about 57 yeers and William 
 Blye aged about 15 years both of Salem Testifieth and 
 sayth yt being Imployed by Bridgitt Boshop Alies Oliuer 
 of Salem to helpe take doune ye Cellar wall of The Owld 
 house she formerly Lived in wee ye sd Deponents in holes 
 in ye sd owld wall belonging to ye sd Cellar found seuerall 
 popitts made up of Raggs And hoggs Brussells wth head- 
 les pins in Them, wth ye points outward and this was 
 about Seaven years Last past." 
 
 Children's toys, to a nineteenth-century mind. 
 But all through the records of mediaeval witch- 
 craft and magic lie just such children's toys which 
 the world believed very fatal engines of death. I 
 spoke of that testimony the other day to a friend 
 who happens to be — what I am far from being — 
 an ardent believer in that prevalent mysticism 
 called Christian Science. To me, I said, the evi- 
 
 *1:163. 
 6 
 
82 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 dence went a good way to show that somebody 
 had actually been trying in Salem to see whether 
 by sticking pins into a doll you could not torture 
 the enemy that the doll represented ; the practice 
 certainly had existed in Europe, absurd as it must 
 seem to us. To my surprise, my friend replied 
 that to her it did not seem absurd at all ; any be- 
 liever in Christian Science, she went on, knew 
 that by concentrating your mind on an absent 
 person you could affect that person for good or 
 for ill ; and that while the actual sticking of pins 
 into dolls could never directly hurt anything but 
 the dolls, it could help a malevolent mind so to 
 concentrate itself on the person a doll represented 
 as to injure him with far less effort than when 
 there was no doll to aid it ; which view, she 
 added, was the view of Paracelsus. 
 
 I mention that case just to remind you how 
 curiously some of the educated minds of our 
 own time are recurring to kinds of mysticism 
 that have so long seemed purely superstitious ; 
 how much more credible witchcraft is than it 
 used to be, now that we see these honest, intelli- 
 gent mystics all about us. 
 
 For only change the impulse of these very 
 people from the pure one it generally is, to the 
 base one that was held to actuate the witches, 
 and you have at your very firesides not a few ex- 
 amples of what witches were. And do not the 
 silenced husband of Martha Corey, and the pin- 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 83 
 
 riddled dolls hidden in Bridget Bishop's cellar 
 wall go at least a little way to suggest that per- 
 haps they had made unholy experiments? 
 
 Only a little way, I hasten to add. No one can 
 be better aware than I that such evidence as I have 
 offered here is very slight — at best not more than 
 suggestive. Nor can anyone know better than I 
 what I cannot too earnestly repeat, that I have 
 neither the scientific nor the historical learn- 
 ing necessary to make anything I should say 
 more than suggestive to better and wiser stu- 
 dents. But this evidence, typical of much more 
 that can be dug out of those bewildering old 
 documents, will show you the sort of thing 
 that has led me both to believe that there was 
 abroad in 1692 an evil quite as dangerous as any 
 still recognized crime, and to wonder whether 
 some of the witches, in spite of the weakness and 
 falsity of the evidence that hanged them, may not 
 after all have deserved their hanging. 
 
 It remains for me to show why I believe this 
 evil so serious and the crime of whoever com- 
 mitted it in the seventeenth century so gross. I 
 cannot do so better than by repeating some words 
 I published a few months ago : * 
 
 If, as modern science tends to show, human 
 
 *In my Life of Cotton Mather, pp. 95-96. 
 
84 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 beings are the result of a process of evolution 
 from lower forms of life, there must have been 
 in our ancestral history a period when the in- 
 telligence of our progenitors was as different 
 from the modern human mind as were their re- 
 mote aquatic bodies from the human form we 
 know to-day. It seems wholly conceivable, then, 
 that in the remote psychologic past of our race 
 there may have been in our ancestors certain 
 powers of perception which countless centuries 
 of disuse have made so rudimentary that in our 
 normal condition we are not conscious of them. 
 But if such there were, it would not be strange 
 that, in abnormal states, the rudimentary ves- 
 tiges of these disused powers of perception should 
 sometimes be revived. If this were the case, we 
 might naturally expect two phenomena to accom- 
 pany such a revival : in the first place, as such 
 powers of perception belong normally to a period 
 in the development of our race when human so- 
 ciety and moral law have not yet appeared, we 
 should expect them to be intimately connected 
 with a state of emotion that ignores the moral 
 sense, and so to be accompanied by various forms 
 of misconduct ; in the second place, as our chief 
 modern means of communication— articulate lan- 
 guage — belongs to a period when human intelli- 
 gence has assumed its present form, we should 
 expect to find it inadequate for the expression of 
 facts which it never professed to cover, and so 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 85 
 
 we should expect such phenomena as we are con- 
 sidering to be accompanied by an erratic, impo- 
 tent inaccuracy of statement, which would soon 
 shade into something indistinguishable from de- 
 liberate falsehood. In other words, such phenom- 
 ena would naturally involve, in whoever abandons 
 himself to them, a mental and moral degeneracy 
 which anyone who believes in a personal devil 
 would not hesitate to ascribe to the direct inter- 
 vention of Satan. 
 
 Now what disposes me, scientifically a layman 
 I cannot too earnestly repeat, to put faith in this 
 speculation concerning occultism is that mental 
 and moral degeneracy — credulity and fraud — seem 
 almost invariably so to entangle themselves with 
 occult phenomena that many cool-headed persons 
 are disposed to assert the whole thing a lie. To 
 me it does not seem so simple. I incline more 
 and more to think that necromancers, w 7 itches, 
 mediums — call them what you will — actually do 
 perceive in the infinite realities about us things 
 imperceptible to normal human beings ; but that 
 they perceive them only at a sacrifice of their 
 higher faculties— mental and moral — not inaptly 
 symbolized in the old tales of those who sell 
 their souls. 
 
 If this be true, such an epidemic of witchcraft 
 as came to New England in 1692 is as diabolical 
 a fact as human beings can know ; unchecked, it 
 can really work mischief unspeakable. For un- 
 
86 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 cheeked it would mean that more and more hu- 
 man beings would give themselves up to delib- 
 erate, or perhaps instinctive, effort to retrace the 
 steps by which human intelligence, in countless 
 centuries, has slowly risen from the primitive 
 consciousness of the brute creation. 
 
 VI 
 
 To my mind, then, the fatally tragic phase of 
 the witch trials is not that there was no evil to 
 condemn, but that the unhappy victims of the 
 trials were condemned literally on clairvoyant evi- 
 dence. And what I have already said shows that 
 in all probability those really guilty of the name- 
 less crime I have tried to indicate were, in my 
 opinion, not so often the witches as the bewitched. 
 
 But let us look at the matter a little more 
 closely again. These wretched bewitched girls 
 were in all probability victims of hypnotic ex- 
 cess. In all probability they had learned, will- 
 ingly or unwillingly, to hypnotize themselves. 
 Is there not a likelihood, then, that first of all they 
 may have been hypnotized by others ? And is 
 there not, in the records of those terrible days, 
 some faint suggestion that among those who first 
 dragged the wretched girls down may have been 
 some of the accused ? The actual charges are 
 sometimes manifestly false, almost always utterly 
 incredible —lying, contradictory, vapourous — but 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 87 
 
 beneath them all there remains a something 
 which would make me guess that not all of the 
 accused believed themselves innocent. 
 
 Put yourself for a moment in the place of those 
 petty New England Calvinists, born and bred un- 
 der an iron creed that forbade all hope of salva- 
 tion to any but the elect of a capricious God. 
 Fancy yourself toiling for years in vain to make 
 your human will agree with His, to find in your- 
 self the divine marks of grace. Then fancy your- 
 self, in a moment of despair, toying with occult 
 experiment — not as a scientific observer of the 
 Nineteenth Century, but as a creed-ridden zealot 
 of the Seventeenth, bound to believe that mysteri- 
 ous phenomena are the direct handiwork of either 
 God or Satan. Fancy yourself finding that you 
 could exercise over other and weaker wills than 
 yours, that power which, under the name of 
 hypnotism, scientific folks are studying to-day, 
 and not a few of them denouncing as terribly 
 dangerous. Fancy yourself finding that the more 
 you exercised this power the more your victims 
 yielded to it. Remember the debasement and 
 the fraud that come as hardly resistible tempta- 
 tions to dabblers in occultism to-day. And then 
 ask yourselves if anyone who yielded himself up 
 in old Salem to such temptations as these, could 
 have doubted that, in the Devil's mysterious way, 
 he was doing the Devil's chosen work. 
 
 I cannot assert a single one of the dead witches 
 
88 THE SALEM WITCHES 
 
 to have been such a figure as I have asked you to 
 fancy. But I can assert that if any of them were 
 by chance such a figure — and it seems to me 
 that careful study might go far to show that more 
 than one of them may have been — then the 
 dreadful fate that came to him, though it came 
 through evidence hopelessly weak and false, was 
 his moral due. 
 
 VII 
 
 I have said enough to suggest to you the view 
 of Salem witchcraft that has forced itself on me. 
 From personal observation I have seen enough of 
 modern occultism, of the lower kind, to believe 
 it unholy. From the evidence of the witch-trials 
 I have gathered hints enough to make me believe 
 that beneath its horrible vapourous confusion lurks 
 just such unholiness as I have seen in the flesh. 
 And no one who knows a bit of the inner history 
 of New England Puritanism can doubt that if this 
 be true, then there were in old Salem men and 
 women who had deliberately sinned against God. 
 I have told all this in a manner that may well 
 have seemed too personal, too assertive of myself. 
 I have chosen to tell it thus deliberately. No 
 one can be better aware than I that, to be proved, 
 such views as I have suggested need the full 
 authority that should come from years of scientific 
 and of historical research. No one can know 
 better than I how far I am from such learning as 
 
THE SALEM WITCHES 89 
 
 should give my words authority. But sometimes, 
 I think, a frank statement of how an old matter 
 looks to a fresh eye that glances at it never so 
 superficially, may suggest to eyes familiar with 
 it, views that their very familiarity would have 
 prevented them from seeing for themselves. Such 
 a service as this is among the best that men of 
 letters can do for men of learning. And it is only 
 as one who has tried to make himself a man of let- 
 ters that I have earned the privilege of telling 
 here not what is known of old Salem, but what 
 seems to me perhaps knowable. 
 
 One reflection I shall venture to add. It is 
 customary to regard the witch-trials as histori- 
 cally unimportant, except as a dreadful example 
 of human delusion. If the views presented in 
 this paper are valid, however, the witch - trials, 
 far from being fruitless, may have accomplished 
 a result of lasting importance in the history of 
 New England. There was little more playing 
 with occultism here, I think, until modern spirit- 
 ualism arose, to be followed by the excessive in- 
 terest in occult matters so notable within the last 
 ten years. It seems more than possible, then, that 
 the witch-trials, surrounding the whole subject 
 with horror, may actually have checked for more 
 than a century the growth of a tendency which 
 unchecked, in the formative period of our na- 
 tional life, might gravely have demoralized our 
 national character. 
 
V 
 
 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 [An Address made at Vassar College, on January 27, 1893.] 
 
AMEEICAN LITEKATUKE 
 
 Among the Christmas-cards that lately rilled the 
 windows of Cambridge shops was one that clearly 
 distinguished itself from the rest. Quite large 
 enough to frame, it included six oval passe-par- 
 touts ; and from these, executed with conven- 
 tional flattery, gazed six heroic faces : the faces 
 of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Haw- 
 thorne, and Dr. Holmes. In the midst of chromo- 
 lithographed angels, stars of Bethlehem, belfries, 
 snow-storms, grotesques, these six worthies of 
 New England were pleasant things to look at. In 
 the midst of mere conventions any fact not yet 
 lifelessly conventional is a pleasant thing, and 
 surely an American can hardly look at those six 
 faces without a feeling of pride. Here are men 
 of our own blood and almost of our own time, 
 men whom any of us that has reached the thresh- 
 old of middle age might have known well. 
 Only one of them is with us still, but the others 
 are gone only a little before. We shall all pass 
 together into that shadowy future where the 
 generations shall merge. In a sense, then, these 
 
94 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 men are our leaders ; and they are noble leaders 
 to follow. Whatever their shortcomings, what- 
 ever their errors, the world rarely affords the 
 spectacle of such a group : silently chosen from 
 among their fellows for honest work honestly 
 done, honest words honestly spoken, these men, 
 as we study their lives, triumphantly prove how 
 nearly stainless human manhood may be. 
 
 In certain moods, one goes on to say, this is 
 answer enough for whoever still questions the 
 claim of American literature to a place among 
 the literatures of the ages. In such moods one 
 has only to look at these faces, to utter these 
 names. The questioner whom these will not 
 silence, one feels, is a questioner who will never 
 accept an answer. We know the lives of these 
 men ; and no lives were ever better. We know 
 their work, which any man may look at. That 
 is enough. Let us trust posterity. 
 
 Posterity will judge ; that is certain. It will 
 judge, too, with unthinking impartiality — with- 
 out acrimony, without tenderness. What man- 
 kind wants or needs it will preserve and remem- 
 ber ; what mankind finds useless it will cast aside 
 and forget. That is what makes the past seem 
 heroic to all eyes not unduly sharpened by the 
 engines of science. " It is the sin and the tumult 
 and the passion of human life that die. En- 
 shrined in art the beauty of the old days lives, 
 and it will live forever." And even though 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 95 
 
 science nowadays teach us the suggestive truth 
 that the old days which we have reverenced were 
 after all, when the sun still shone on them, days 
 of turbulence and wickedness disheartening as 
 any that surges about us now, that same science, 
 one often thinks, is prone to forget the deep law 
 of human nature which makes each generation, in 
 the end, remember instinctively of those that are 
 gone before only or chiefly those traits and deeds 
 which shall add to the wisdom and the power of 
 humanity. 
 
 So from among the written records of past time 
 the posterity of which you and I are part has un- 
 wittingly selected some which are of lasting value. 
 These we call literature. What literature con- 
 tains for us already, nobody quite knows as yet. 
 Modern learning, they say, at last exploring the 
 mysteries of the East, discerns and reveals to us 
 more and more records, unknown to us for cen- 
 turies amid what used to seem the outer darkness 
 of India or China, from which perhaps we of the 
 Western world may by and by glean things worth 
 having. But our own possessions are already 
 rich. We have the great literature of the He- 
 brews ; we have the literatures of Greece and 
 Eome, the literatures of Italy and Spain, and 
 France, and Germany, and England. It is to 
 this list that we so confidently try to add our own 
 literature of America. 
 
 Already, our confidence seems less certain than 
 
96 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 when we were considering by themselves the six 
 worthies of New England. Already we begin to 
 see that, discarding all literatures but those of 
 Europe, there is a group of great figures among 
 whom Homer and Dante and Shakespeare are 
 perhaps supreme, but only in a great company of 
 notable personages pressing closely about them. 
 It is in such company as this that we claim place 
 for Emerson, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and 
 Whittier, and Hawthorne, and Holmes. Very 
 clearly, we cannot claim it as confidently as when 
 at first we only looked at their faces and remem- 
 bered their lives. To be confident at all, in fact, 
 one way or the other, we must hesitate. We 
 must ask ourselves first what literature is; then 
 by what right any men or any people may claim 
 a place in its history or its hierarchy ; and final- 
 ly, what these heroes of ours and our other fel- 
 low-countrymen have done to make good the 
 claim that we rather urge for them than they for 
 themselves. 
 
 II 
 
 Literature, then, we may perhaps define as 
 the lasting expression in words of the meaning of 
 life. 
 
 Whatever our philosophy, we must admit that 
 to every conscious being life presents itself as 
 an endlessly interwoven web of impressions to 
 which we give the names thought and emotion. 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 97 
 
 What things are in themselves no philosophy has 
 finally settled; but how things present them- 
 selves to human intelligence even the vulgar in- 
 stinctively know, each for himself. This instinc- 
 tive knowledge, this fundamental sense of the 
 reality of thought and emotion which each of us 
 possesses, which all of us share in common, grows, 
 as we contemplate it, more and more wonderful. 
 Our senses bring to our intelligence images of 
 material things, — commonplace, beautiful, repel- 
 lent. Some faculty within us brings to our in- 
 telligence conceptions of pleasure and of pain-, of 
 utility and of danger, of good and of evil. To 
 each of us, even before he is grown old enough 
 to talk, this great panorama of human experience 
 is a thing that has already begun to impress him 
 somehow. In what seems inextricable confusion, 
 he is aware of something not himself that defines 
 itself in a thousand phantasmagoric forms, end- 
 lessly awakening in him those myriad reactions 
 that together make the individuality by which he 
 is known to others. These impressions and these 
 reactions slowly group themselves. By and by 
 one comes to know some of them as hateful, some 
 as noble, some as alluring. By and by one grows 
 to feel that some of these should be sought, some 
 repelled. High or low, good or evil, spiritual 
 or material, ideals declare themselves. At most 
 times we are merely aware of this vast web of ex- 
 perience weaving itself inexorably about our in- 
 7 
 
98 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 telligence from without and from within. When, 
 at rare moments, we pause to contemplate it, 
 we generally contemplate it only in fragments. 
 There are other moments, far more rare, when 
 for awhile we try to contemplate it as a whole. 
 When thus, deliberately or instinctively, we pause 
 to contemplate life, in whole or in its smallest part, 
 we are sure to discover that what we contemplate 
 impresses us in a way peculiar to itself and to us. 
 In other words, it has a meaning, be that meaning 
 only a transient sense of vulgar pleasure or pain, 
 or be it what we deem the nobler conceptions of 
 philosophy or religion. And this meaning, which 
 we have power to express, is the substance of 
 which all art, and so all literature, is made. 
 
 We have power to express it, to share it with 
 others. This power we are always exerting — in 
 every word we utter, in every quiver of muscle 
 that tells the unending story of human pleasure 
 and pain, grief and joy. Most of our expressions, 
 incalculably most, are trivial things and pass- 
 ing, little more significant than the purrs or the 
 whines of animals that we are fond of calling 
 lower than ourselves. Sometimes, however, in- 
 stinctively or deliberately, men express the mean- 
 ing of life in a way that is not quite trivial or 
 passing. In plastic form, from the scratched 
 bones of prehistoric caverns to the splendour of 
 Periclean Athens or the Italy of the Medici, there 
 have been records of what human eyes have seen 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUKE 99 
 
 that make humanity permanently richer. In 
 mnsic, from the twanging bowstring of savages to 
 the ^ethereal orchestra of Beethoven or of Wag- 
 ner, there have been such records of what human 
 ears have heard. This protean meaning of life 
 has phases that are lasting, the record of which, 
 by whoever is fortunate enough or great enough to 
 perceive them, is permanently significant. Such 
 records, such expressions as these are what make 
 each generation richer in the possession of more 
 and more experiences which the inexorable con- 
 ditions of space and of time have forbidden them 
 in the flesh. Sometimes these records have a sig- 
 nificance chiefly sympathetic, declaring through 
 the centuries how men have been men from old- 
 est time. Sometimes they actually reveal to us 
 aspects of life which otherwise we might never 
 have known. Sympathetic or enriching, these 
 records which are permanently significant, these 
 expressions of the meaning of life which are 
 lasting, are the body of all art, and so of all liter- 
 ature. 
 
 Of these lasting expressions of the meaning of 
 life, some, as we have seen, are in plastic form, 
 bearing their message, in architecture, in sculpt- 
 ure, in painting, to whoever having eyes will see ; 
 some, in the form of music, bear their message to 
 whoever having ears will hear. Some, however, 
 and these perhaps the most definitely significant, 
 phrase themselves not in these forms, which the 
 
100 AMEEICAN LITEKATUKE 
 
 laws of human nature render in each generation 
 practicable only by the few who are born with 
 the power of mastering them ; but in that other 
 form, not more easy of mastery though so incal- 
 culably more familiar in practice, by which hu- 
 man beings are agreed to conduct the affairs of 
 daily life. It is such lasting expressions of the 
 meaning of life as these — such lasting expressions 
 as are phrased in words — to which we give the 
 name literature. 
 
 Ill 
 
 By what right, was our second question, may 
 ' any man or any people claim a serious place in 
 the history of literature or in its hierarchy ? Be- 
 fore we try to answer this with certainty, I think, 
 we shall do well to consider perhaps the most 
 notable feature of the vehicle which literature 
 employs — the chief characteristic of words. 
 
 Lines and colours, the vehicles of the plastic 
 arts, are essentially imitative ; whoever has looked 
 at nature can recognize in the work of architect, 
 sculptor, or painter the effort to make its literal 
 . or conventional image. The very vagueness, the 
 intangible ^ethereality of the emotions most fitly 
 phrased by the melodies and the harmonies of 
 music make these melodies and harmonies elu- 
 sively, mysteriously intelligible to whoever has 
 felt the experience that gave them birth. Words, 
 however, though we use them so constantly that 
 
AMEKICAN LITERATURE 101 
 
 we hardly know ourselves in other than verbal 
 terms, are neither imitative, like lines and colours, 
 nor inevitable as the strains of music. Essential- 
 ly their meaning is as arbitrary as that of the let- 
 ters by which we have agreed to symbolize them. 
 Instinctively fit as the words seem by which you 
 and I exchange our thoughts, we all know that 
 they are meaningless, except after months or 
 years of study, to anyone whose native tongue is 
 not English ; and we have only to glance at any 
 obvious monument of Roman antiquity — at the 
 Arch of Constantine, for example — to feel the 
 difference between the lastingly intelligible plas- 
 tic form in which imperial power was expressed, 
 and the puzzling obscurity of even the simplest 
 inscription phrased in terms no longer used by 
 human beings. Intelligible to those who are 
 agreed to use them, these arbitrary symbols that 
 we call words have no meaning to those who have 
 not learned, by environment or by study, what 
 meaning has been attached to them by the tacit 
 consent of those by whom they are used. Arbi- 
 trary, intelligible only to those whom chance or 
 effort has made masters of them, these words 
 which literature employs to express the lasting 
 meaning of life vary with every language that 
 human beings have grown to use. According as 
 we know language or not, then, literature is either 
 the most familiar of arts or the most unmeaning. 
 This very diversity of languages, however, se- 
 
102 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 riously as it must limit the range and the pow- 
 er of any single literature, greatly extends the 
 range and the power of literature in its broader 
 sense. No commonplace, when one considers, 
 is much more pregnant than that which asserts 
 the inevitable discrepancy between the number 
 of ideas that form part of every man's experience 
 and the number of words at his disposal to name 
 them. It is a large dictionary that contains a 
 hundred thousand words ; and a copious author 
 who uses of these above ten or twelve thou- 
 sand. Yet the varying experiences even of a sin- 
 gle conscious day might almost be numbered 
 by millions. At best, the vocabulary of any lan- 
 guage names only in a tentative, approximate way 
 the thoughts and emotions it recognizes. At 
 best, any grammar expresses the relations of these 
 ideas within very narrow limits. In the hurried 
 intercourse of every day we are too busy, our per- 
 ceptions too much blunted by habit, to be aware 
 of how little beyond the experiences common to 
 every day the language at our disposal will ex- 
 press. But try for a moment to phrase any idea 
 not quite familiar, try to impress even your most 
 familiar idea on some one to whom it is strange, 
 and you are face to face with the inevitable in- 
 adequacy of language to do more than faintly 
 symbolize the immaterial reality of thought and 
 emotion that you know within yourself. What is 
 thus true of us as individuals is true of those 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 103 
 
 races, as races, that have agreed to use a com- 
 mon tongue. Try to translate the simplest words 
 from the languages most intimately connected 
 with ours — ennui, for example, or blase — and you 
 will often find that though we know just what 
 they mean we have no name of our own by which 
 English-speaking folks have agreed to express it. 
 Try to translate the title of Dante's " Convito" : 
 you will say feast, but feast combines for us no 
 two words that mean by themselves a living to- 
 g ether. These trite illustrations are enough. 
 Each language names ideas in a way peculiarly 
 its own. The common agreement on arbitrary 
 symbols that at length results in the vocabulary 
 of any language is sure to produce symbols that 
 stand for peculiar aspects of the real thought and 
 emotion which language tries to define — for as- 
 pects, in other words, which differ from those 
 named by any other tongue. And what is thus 
 plainly true of words by themselves is just as true 
 of words in combination. The difficulty we find 
 in mastering a foreign grammar is more than for- 
 mal ; each foreign grammar defines in ways of its 
 own relations of thought which our grammar 
 neglects, and neglects meanwhile relations that 
 our grammar defines. What can express in Eng- 
 lish, for example, the relations so definitely ex- 
 pressed by the inflections of Latin or of Greek ? 
 What in Latin or Greek the almost sexual gender 
 of English? In its vocabulary, in its grammar, 
 
104 AMEKICAN LITEEATURE 
 
 in its entirety, each language must express the 
 lasting meaning of life in aspects different from 
 those expressed by any other. Limited as the 
 range of any one language must be, then, or of 
 any one literature, the range of language and 
 literature, in their broadest sense, may be called 
 almost limitless. 
 
 A growing sense of this perhaps underlies the 
 impatience of some modern scholars with the old 
 classification of literature. The notion of na- 
 tional literatures, they feel, is artificial, archaic. 
 It were better to gather all literature together, to 
 study it comparatively, neglecting the accident of 
 phrase, looking rather at the growing, developing 
 range of thought and emotion that the combined 
 literatures of the ages express. In this feeling 
 there is much that commands one's sympathy. 
 Words as words are dead things — arbitrary sym- 
 bols incredibly less meaning in themselves than 
 the lines of plastic art or the strains of music. 
 The pedantry that so enshrouds linguistic learn- 
 ing, too, even in its innermost strongholds, makes 
 these dead words often seem farther from vitality 
 than in fact they are. Yet no impatience with 
 artificiality, with archaism, with pedantry, can 
 conceal in the end the actual fact that underlies 
 the old classification of national literatures. Each 
 national literature expresses the lasting meaning 
 of life in its own peculiar language; and each 
 language, we have seen, names the innumerable 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 105 
 
 phenomena of life in aspects and in combinations 
 that to a greater degree or a less, every other 
 language neglects. In the nature of language it 
 seems inherently necessary that as each new 
 tongue develops to a point where it can lastingly 
 express the meaning of life it must express that- 
 meaning in a manner of its own. 
 
 We can answer our question better now. By 
 what right, we asked, may any man or any people 
 claim a serious place in the history of literature or 
 in its hierarchy? In its history, we may say, by 
 one of two rights : either by expressing in words 
 some phase of the lasting meaning of life which 
 words have not hitherto expressed ; or by ex- '■ 
 pressing some known phase of that meaning in 
 words more lasting than those which have hitherto 
 expressed it. In the hierarchy of literature, we 
 may go on to say, a serious place can be claimed 
 only when both rights are combined — when a man 
 or a people has given to the world an expression 
 of the meaning of life at once new and final. 
 
 It is for expressing a strange, dreamy, fleeting 
 poetry of feeling that people are tardily accord- 
 ing a place in the history of literature to the 
 vanished poetry of the British Celts. It is for a 
 vague, half-slumbrous sense of Titanic awakening 
 — God knows to what end — that many are to-day 
 disposed to accord such a place to the new litera- 
 ture of Russia. It is for startling flashes of in- 
 sight through the murky shams of modern con- 
 
106 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 vention that of late it has been the fashion to 
 claim such a place for Henrik Ibsen, and chiefly 
 by right of his genius for the literature of Nor- 
 way. To pass to greater things, it is not for fresh- 
 ness of thought but for unsurpassed power of 
 condensation and epigram that we may most cer- 
 tainly claim such a place for the ultimately com- 
 pact literature of the Latin tongue. It is for a 
 sense of order, of lucidity, of amenity unequalled 
 in any other modern language that so many ac- 
 cord the first place in contemporary literature to 
 the literature of France. 
 
 To pass to greater things still, the literature of 
 the Hebrews most of us know only in the modern 
 versions by which, since the time of Luther, it 
 has become the great motive force of the Protes- 
 tant world ; but as version after version adds each 
 something to our composite notion of what the 
 fact that all stand for must be, not a few of us are 
 willing to believe that in its native form that 
 literature, expressing spiritual truths as none has 
 expressed them since, may well be such as to give 
 colour to the old dreams of verbal inspiration. 
 The literature of Greece is half closed to men of 
 our time by the transitional pedantry that in our 
 school-days has passed for education ; yet even 
 we can appreciate it enough to know that in its 
 native form it expresses its meaning with an ex- 
 quisitely modulated precision not to be dreamed 
 of by those who know it only in the guise of 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 107 
 
 translation ; and those who know it only thus 
 seem more and more aware that even to them it 
 phrases, in a way that nothing can supplant, the 
 view of life which has made so many thoughtful 
 generations deem the word classic only less sacred 
 than the word holy. So far, perhaps, I have 
 spoken hearsay. There are two supreme writers 
 — Dante and Shakespeare — whom it has been 
 my own fortune to know from the very words 
 they wrote. And as the years pass I realize 
 for myself more and more — as all who know su- 
 preme things must realize — why such work as 
 theirs were alone enough to give a lasting place 
 in the hierarchy of literature to the languages in 
 which each has finally expressed a meaning of life 
 which before him none had quite perceived and 
 after him none need phrase. 
 
 We have doubtless seemed to stray from our 
 subject, from America. Yet with less general 
 consideration we should hardly have been able to 
 discuss American literature fairly. For in all 
 fairness we are bound to admit that only by such 
 rights as we have tried to define may any man or 
 any people claim a serious place in the history of 
 literature or in its hierarchy. 
 
 IV 
 
 The question that is left us is becoming more 
 definite. Have we Americans as a people, or 
 
108 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 have men among us as individuals made good 
 any claim to a serious position in literature ? To 
 put the question bluntly, What does American 
 literature amount to ? 
 
 We should be able to see that the question is 
 not easy to answer off-hand ; that the fine, if 
 over-sensitive patriotism which so often impels us 
 to assert that our literature amounts to pretty 
 much all creation, is little more reasonable than 
 the still more sensitive reaction from such patriot- 
 ism, which makes some of us occasionally feel 
 like saying that it does not amount to anything. 
 The question is really one of simple fact ; but of 
 simple fact that is rather hard to get hold of. In 
 all the other literatures we have touched on there 
 is one important trait which ours obviously lacks. 
 Celtic Britain, Bussia, Norway, Rome, France, 
 have had each a language of its own ; so have the 
 Hebrews, and Greece, and Italy, and England. 
 The one fact which we must definitely admit about 
 ourselves is that for better or worse we think 
 and speak in English. There are things called 
 " Americanisms," of course, frequently discover- 
 able only in dictionaries compiled elsewhere than 
 in America. There is hardly one of the United 
 States, however, whose current speech is so far 
 removed from the normal standard of literary 
 English as is the dialect of Devonshire or of 
 Yorkshire. Whatever we have of our own, we 
 have as yet no distinct language. When we ask 
 
AMEEICAN LITEKATUBE 109 
 
 if we have an American literature, then, we really 
 mean to inquire whether as a people or as indi- 
 viduals we have added anything distinctively our 
 own, in thought or in phrase, to that lasting ex- 
 pression in words of the meaning of life which is 
 the common property of the English-speaking 
 world. 
 
 In considering this question we may conven- 
 iently remind ourselves of the broad facts of our 
 national history. The facts of national history 
 are the memoranda of national experience. If in 
 these we find experiences peculiarly ours, we 
 shall have found at least the material for a na- 
 tional literature, whether we have used it or not. 
 
 Briefly, then, we may say that our national his- 
 tory covers about two hundred and fifty years ; 
 that, broadly speaking, it is the history of a 
 series of emigrations from a highly civilized, 
 overcrowded world, — in the beginning, to a wil- 
 derness where there was plenty of room, and un- 
 til very lately to a continent, still unsettled in 
 every sense of the word, where the material prob- 
 lems of life have presented themselves much less 
 definitely than in Europe. Broadly speaking, the 
 earlier of these emigrations were remarkable for 
 excellence of personal quality ; among the settlers 
 of New England, for example, the proportion of 
 people who amounted to something, cannot fail 
 
110 AMEBICAN LITEKATUEE 
 
 to impress whoever studies the documents they 
 have left us. For nearly two centuries these emi- 
 grations were not remarkable either for excellence 
 of personal quality or for badness; they com- 
 prised good, every-day people whom any decent 
 community could absorb without danger. Dur- 
 ing the greater part of our own lifetimes the 
 quality of these emigrations has again become re- 
 markable, until one may guess that not a few 
 native American hearts were tempted to greet 
 with un-Ohristian enthusiasm even the epidemic 
 cholera which lately checked, though only for a 
 little while, the influx of degradation that had 
 been swirling upon us from every moral and 
 political pest-hole in Europe and Asia. Broadly 
 speaking, the motive of the first emigration to 
 New England — the emigration whose traditions 
 have most profoundly affected our national 
 thought — was, in the words of Eichard Mather, a 
 desire to remove 
 
 " from a place where all the ordinances of God cannot be 
 enjoyed unto a place where they may ; " 
 
 in other words, the Puritan fathers were prepared 
 to make any sacrifice for the purpose — profoundly 
 human in spite of all their godliness — of manag- 
 ing their affairs, temporal and spiritual, in their 
 own way. Broadly speaking, the successive emi- 
 grants not personally noteworthy, who for two cen- 
 turies or so added their energies to those of the 
 fathers and their direct descendants, came hither 
 
AMEKIOAN LITEKATUEE 111 
 
 for the purpose of making their fortunes. The 
 unhappily remarkable emigration of the last gen- 
 eration seems to have been impelled by a purpose 
 less definite than these ; but it is not easy to dis- 
 cover for such unfortunate people as now swarm 
 about us any much more useful function in 
 human society than the making of mischief. 
 Broadly speaking, then, the social aspect of our 
 national history shows us first a people remark- 
 able for self-assertion and singularly free from 
 the problems which the struggle for life presents 
 in any densely populous community ; secondly, 
 a people whom this very freedom permits to 
 attain, with less concentrated effort than others, 
 a remarkable degree of rather irresponsible ma- 
 terial prosperity ; and, finally, a people whose very 
 prosperity has brought upon them, in their New 
 World, almost precisely the problems which un- 
 til lately they have prided themselves upon hav- 
 ing escaped or solved. 
 
 Politically, our national history is even a more 
 familiar commonplace. It begins with the devel- 
 opment of communities geographically remote 
 from the centre of power to a degree now incon- 
 ceivable, and by this very fact both permitted 
 and compelled to develop real centres of power 
 within themselves. It proceeds through that 
 great struggle for national independence and 
 unity in which all the mists of philanthropic and 
 rhetorical bombast that now obscure it cannot 
 
112 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 conceal the victory of reality over sham, of facts 
 over words and theories. It comprises that terri- 
 ble experience of national distemper when with- 
 in ourselves two systems that could not coexist 
 fought, each nobly, to the death. It finds us 
 now face to face with the world-old problem, new 
 only to us among the nations, of how when the 
 struggle for life grows fierce, human power can 
 preserve those things which are good and repress 
 those which are evil. 
 
 In our discussion of American literature, we 
 may best put the present aside. And this for 
 more reasons than one. Our present and our 
 future, for one thing, differ little from the pres- 
 ent and the future of all European humanity. 
 If we face our problems differently, it is not 
 because the problems themselves are different, 
 but because our two or three centuries of Ameri- 
 can experience have made us other than we 
 should have been had we remained with our 
 kindred across the Atlantic. Again, no man can 
 fitly estimate himself, nor can any period ; it is as 
 if a soldier or a captain, ignorant of his general's 
 knowledge and plans, tried to tell in the midst 
 of a campaign its whole history and significance. 
 And less certainly, but more powerfully, a feeling 
 perhaps sentimental but not fleeting, makes some 
 of us dread to seek or to recognize in the actual 
 world of which you and I are part actual signs of 
 a great, lasting record of its meaning. For one 
 
AMEKICAN LITERATURE 113 
 
 sometimes thinks that the history of fine art, in 
 all its phases, teaches a lesson that the lovers of 
 fine art dread to learn. Such expressions of the 
 meaning of life as prove lasting, one feels in such 
 moods, are the final expressions of states of things 
 almost past. In such moods, the stories of the 
 Athens of Pericles, of the Eome of Augustus 
 Csesar, of the Italy of Raphael and of Michael 
 Angelo, of the England of Shakespeare, seem the 
 same; and these names seem to name only in- 
 stances of an inexorable law. The end of man, 
 one feels like saying, is expression ; but expres- 
 sion is just as truly the end of man. The songs 
 that live are the swan-songs. 
 
 Aspiration to make all our art fine — all our 
 records, of every kind, lasting and beautiful — is 
 surely a noble thing. Not to foster, not to en- 
 courage such aspiration is just as surely igno- 
 ble. But there are moods in which such aspira- 
 tion seems something like earthly preparation for 
 heaven. The best of us are really best because 
 they are constantly preparing themselves for 
 what inevitably must come. When the time for 
 heavenly glory comes, of course, or for great artis- 
 tic expression, it is only those who are best by the 
 noblest standards of human experience that are 
 anything like ready. If on earth or in heaven, 
 then, we of America are ever to be lastingly noble, 
 we must never relax our effort always to be as 
 noble as we can ; but the very end we hope for 
 8 
 
114: AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 is an end that at the same time we dread. As 
 lovers of art we may well regret that among our- 
 selves we find at this moment no expression of 
 what this actual life of ours means which forces 
 itself upon us as undoubtedly lasting. As patri- 
 ots, though, and as human beings who love with- 
 out knowing why this actual state of life that 
 for a little while is ours, we may take comfort in 
 the thought that our vital energies as a people 
 are still thoughtlessly engaged in action, not yet 
 thoughtfully or recklessly in contemplation or in 
 expression. There are few surer warrants of the 
 soundness of our national youth. 
 
 Our real meaning, then, when we ask what 
 American literature amounts to, is this : Have we 
 lasting expressions of the meaning of the past 
 periods of American life, in words which have 
 added either thought or phrase to the literature 
 of the English language ? 
 
 VI 
 
 The fathers of New England were almost as 
 prolific in mind as in body. The fate of their in- 
 tellectual offspring, too, resembled that of their 
 physical — generally it did not survive. And 
 tradition, remembering chiefly the titles of their 
 sermons and their pamphlets and their treatises, 
 much as it remembers the extremely Christian 
 names of their children, reports their work as 
 
AMEKIOAN LITEEATUEE 115 
 
 godly, narrow, dull, dreary, fruitless — anything, 
 in short, that should repel a reader. 
 
 In a way, they have been unduly abused. 
 People nowadays know so little of what Seven- 
 teenth-Century Yankees actually wrote, that it is 
 perhaps worth our while to consider a bit of Sev- 
 enteenth-Century Yankee narrative. It is from 
 Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," where it closes his 
 account of Theophilus Eaton, the first Governor 
 of New Haven : 
 
 u His eldest son he maintained at the Colledge until he 
 proceeded master of arts ; and he was indeed the son of his 
 vows and hopes. But a severe catarrh diverted this young 
 gentleman from the work of the ministry whereto his 
 father had once devoted him ; and a malignant fever then 
 raging in those parts of the country, carried him off with 
 his wife within two or three days of one another. This 
 was counted the sorest of all the trials that ever befel his 
 father in the ' days of the years of his pilgrimage ; ' but he 
 bore it with a patience and composure of spirit which was 
 truly admirable. His dying son looked earnestly on him, 
 and said, ' Sir, what shall we do V ' Whereto, with a well- 
 ordered countenance, he replied, ' Look up to God ! ' And 
 when he passed by his daughter, drowned in tears on this 
 occasion, to her he said, ' Remember the sixth command- 
 ment : hurt not yourself with immoderate grief : remember 
 Job, who said, " The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath 
 taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord ! " You 
 may mark what a note the Spirit of God put upon it ; u in 
 all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly : " God 
 accounts it a charging of Him foolishly, when we don't 
 submit unto His will patiently.' Accordingly, he >*fow 
 
116 AMEKICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 governed himself as one that had attained unto the rule of 
 * weeping as if we wept not ; ' for it being the Lord's day, 
 he repaired unto the church in the afternoon, as he had 
 been there in the forenoon, though he was never like to see 
 his dearest son alive any more in this world. And though 
 before the first prayer began, a messenger came to prevent 
 Mr. Davenport's praying for the sick person, who was now 
 dead, yet his affectionate father altered not his course, but 
 wrote after the preacher as formerly ; and when he came 
 home he held on his former methods of divine worship in 
 his family, not for the excuse of Aaron, omitting anything 
 in the service of God. In like sort, when the people had 
 been at the solemn interment of this his worthy son, he 
 did with a very unpassionate aspect and carriage then say, 
 1 Friends, I thank you all for your love and help, and for 
 this testimony of respect unto me and mine : the Lord hath 
 given, and the Lord hath taken : blessed be the name of the 
 Lord ! ' Nevertheless, retiring hereupon into the chamber 
 where his daughter then lay sick, some tears were observed 
 falling from him while he uttered these words, ' There is 
 a difference between a sullen silence or a stupid senseless- 
 ness under the hand of God, and a child-like submission 
 thereunto. ' 
 
 "Thus continually he, for about a score of years, was 
 the glory and p Mar of New Haven colony. He would often 
 say, ' Some count it a great matter to die well, but I am 
 sure 'tis a great matter to live well. All our care should 
 be while we have life to use it well, and so when death 
 puts an end unto that, it will put an end unto all our cares.' 
 But having excellently managed his care to live well, God 
 would have him to die well, without any room or time then 
 given him to take any care at all ; for he enjoyed a death 
 sudden to every one but himself ! Having worshipped God 
 with his family after his usual manner, and upon some 
 occasion charged all the family to carry it well unto their 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 117 
 
 mistress who was now confined by sickness, he sapped, and 
 then took a turn or two abroad for his meditations. After 
 that he came in to bid his wife good-night, before he left 
 her with her watchers ; which when he did, she said, 
 1 Methinks you look sad ! ' Whereto he replied, ' The 
 differences risen in the church of Hartford make me so ; ' 
 she then added, 4 Let us even go back to our native 
 country again ; ' to which he answered, l You may (and so 
 she did), but I shall die here. 7 This was the last word 
 that ever she heard him speak ; for now retiring unto his 
 lodging in another chamber, he was overheard about mid- 
 night fetching a groan ; and unto one sent in presently to 
 enquire how he did, he answered the enquiry with only 
 saying, 4 Very ill ! ' and without saying any more, he fell 
 1 asleep in Jesus, 7 in the year 1657, loosing anchor from 
 New Haven for the better." 
 
 A shorter extract could hardly give the full 
 effect of this typical Puritan story. It is very 
 foreign to our present ways of thought and 
 speech. Perhaps it deserves all the epithets 
 posterity unthinkingly gives it — godly, narrow, 
 dull, dreary, what-not. Yet as one grows familiar 
 with the literature for which it may fairly stand 
 representative, one finds in it more and more not 
 only a certain half-scriptural charm of style, but a 
 genuinely interesting record of human experience. 
 A strangely tense life it shows us, dull and trivial 
 externally, commonplace in phrase, but in its es- 
 sence intensely idealistic. This Theophilus Eaton 
 is a man to whom the real things are the things 
 unseen, to whom things seen are only passing 
 
118 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 shows. These passing shows, moreover, are of a 
 very simple kind, because they were passing not 
 in Crom well's populous England but in a colony 
 where, after all, nothing was yet actually more im- 
 portant than what went on of a Sunday at church. 
 Cotton Mather, the writer of this story, lived two 
 generations later ; his life, in fact, was spent in 
 fruitless efforts to maintain the principles that his 
 "Magnaria" records — chief among which was the 
 political supremacy of the clergy, which in Eaton's 
 time had seemed assured. Cotton Mather lived so 
 late that in his prime he sent a letter to the Spec- 
 tator, or at least planned to send one, for there is 
 no record of its reception. When he wrote this 
 life of Eaton, Dry den's work was almost finished. 
 This contrast is what most impresses one, in 
 the literary aspect of his narrative. The style has 
 dignity, character, a fine rhythm of its own ; no 
 other could tell quite so well the story of what 
 emigrant Puritanism meant. But in England 
 | such a style was obsolete. The u Magnalia " was 
 published in the Eighteenth Century ; body and 
 soul it is a book of the Seventeenth. That sen- 
 tence tells the whole story. Remote from the 
 great world, the American colonies preserved, in 
 somewhat fading colours, traditions that England 
 had outgrown. We cannot assert that either in 
 thought or in phrase they actually added to the 
 literature of our language anything which that 
 literature did not already possess. 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 119 
 
 VII 
 
 For Puritanism, which is all that the earlier 
 literature of America voices, had exponents 
 enough and to spare in England itself. The 
 course of Puritanism in America, however, dif- 
 fered from its course in the mother country. 
 There, its dominant power was short. The system 
 of Calvin, to be sure, states the problems of life 
 with a fidelity that to-day surprises any stranger 
 who has known the system only by distorted 
 tradition, or by verbal dogmas which time has 
 stripped of their vital meaning even for those who 
 utter them. Beneath it lies a profound, lasting 
 sense of the actual evils which life, by inexorable 
 law, is bound to develop in any dense population. 
 What Calvinism regarded as evidence of the to- 
 tal depravity of man, indeed, is very like what 
 modern science calls the struggle for existence. 
 "What it regarded as evidence for the doctrine of 
 election is very like what people have in mind 
 nowadays when they talk about the survival of 
 the fittest. Such a struggle for such survival 
 involves a good many problems, material and 
 spiritual. These Calvinism states admirably ; 
 but it is one thing to state problems and an- 
 other to solve them. The solution which Calvin- 
 ism offers is not one, apparently, which — true or 
 false — any dense, active population can be in- 
 duced, for any length of time, to accept. In 
 
120 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 England the facts on which the dogmas of Pu- 
 ritanism were based remained ; and the solution 
 which Puritanism offered broke down. In Amer- 
 ica, almost to our own time, the facts have been 
 greatly relaxed ; and the Oalvinistic solution re- 
 mained for generations as a dogmatic system, 
 nominally dominant, but really losing itself more 
 and more in such intricacies of logical abstrac- 
 tion as men will generally weave for themselves 
 when stern fact does not check them. 
 
 While the forgotten theologians of our first 
 century were thus making the logic whose ulti- 
 mate monument is the " One-Hoss Shay," the 
 social and political facts of American history, as 
 we have seen, were pretty steadily developing 
 themselves in the direction of an ideal whose 
 name still remains, perhaps, the most instinctive- 
 ly inspiring to American ears — the ideal of inde- 
 pendence. Socially, men were discovering that, 
 if they neglected the theoretical principles of the 
 fathers, and adhered only to the practical principle 
 of insisting upon managing their affairs in their 
 own way, they could so manage their affairs as to 
 make themselves in the end a good deal better 
 off than they were in the beginning. They were 
 really started on that road to fortune-making 
 which in our own time they have travelled so far 
 as gravely to disturb some of our contemporaries 
 who lag behind in the race. Politically, at the 
 same time, they were discovering that small, 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 121 
 
 homogeneous communities can really manage 
 their public business much better than anybody 
 else can manage it for them ; and what is more, 
 that whether they can or not, there was at that 
 period no choice. Whence, by and by, common 
 sense began apparently to confirm sundry vague 
 notions of the divine rights of liberty and equality 
 which the experience of our heterogeneous and 
 overgrown communities makes some people at 
 present think less axiomatic than of old. Mean- 
 while, it was evident to whoever calmly observed 
 American human nature under these conditions, 
 that while by no means celestial in perfection, it 
 very generally developed traits which did not 
 seem necessarily damnable. Theology, in fact, 
 originally based on actual experience, was insen- 
 sibly separating itself from experience ; and ex- 
 perience was reaching fresh, unformulated con- 
 clusions of its own. 
 
 Hastily as we have considered these lines of 
 thought, we have perhaps seen enough to account 
 for the two Americans of the Eighteenth Century 
 whose names most certainly survive in the history 
 of American literature, — the two whose thought 
 was most surely earnest enough, and whose phrase 
 apt enough, to be read still. These are Jona- 
 than Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. In the 
 passionate effort of Edwards to revive the pristine 
 force of orthodox Calvinism, the theology of the 
 fathers reached the highest point. It was sincere, 
 
122 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 it was terribly earnest, it was almost impregnably 
 logical ; but it was so highly developed that even 
 though we knew nothing of its circumstances we 
 might shrewdly guess it to be, like so many great 
 works of art, essentially a thing of the past. In 
 point of fact, we know its circumstances. What it 
 thought the innate depravity of human nature had 
 so flourished along with it that Edwards preached 
 and wrote to a world where year by year there 
 were more and more men who felt in their bones 
 that after all this was not so. In that very world, 
 too, the cool common-sense that has made on the 
 whole inefficient the later efforts of Calvinistic 
 logic was voiced by " Poor Richard," and by that 
 sturdy practical life of Franklin's whose self- 
 written record remains among the best narratives 
 of personal experience in the English language. 
 
 In the English language, we must remember, — 
 the English language that is ours. Edwards and 
 Franklin are surely figures that we may call our 
 own. Almost as surely, though, they are figures 
 that English literature may equally claim. In 
 both thought and phrase they may have added 
 a little to what English literature already pos- 
 sessed. It would be overbold, however, confi- 
 dently to assert that either added anything more 
 significant than an indication of how English 
 human nature develops itself in a world where 
 there is still room enough for every man to move 
 freely. 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 123 
 
 VIII 
 
 Fkanklin, however, is far more than a merely- 
 literary figure. It is the tradition of his life that 
 has survived rather than any wide knowledge of 
 what he wrote. No figure in our history is more 
 generally remembered, nor any more deservedly ; 
 for whatever his merits on a moral scale, the man 
 was in his life first, last, and always an American. 
 Shrewd common-sense never had a more palpable 
 incarnation ; nor that peculiar, ever-present, not 
 needlessly obtrusive personal independence which 
 so generally makes a native Yankee, wherever he 
 goes, a troublesome match for people who assume 
 to be his betters. Himself, then, we remember 
 first ; and if we are suddenly asked what he was 
 besides being himself, our impulse would be in 
 conveniently general terms to answer that he was 
 a statesman and a philosopher. 
 
 In this double character, more than in any- 
 thing lie actually said or wrote, Franklin typi- 
 fies something beyond the rational spirit of his 
 own time, which put an end in America to the 
 dominance of theological logic. From that time 
 to ours the most serious expressions of Ameri- 
 can thought have been either political or philo- 
 sophic. Before we consider, then, those later 
 phases of American literature whose purpose is 
 more purely artistic, we may conveniently re- 
 mind ourselves first of the political literature, 
 
124 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 then of the philosophic, and finally of the pecul- 
 iar fusion of the two that precede and surround 
 them. 
 
 IX 
 
 From the middle of the Eighteenth Century to 
 a time that we ourselves can remember, American 
 public men produced a pretty steady flow of ora- 
 tory. The standard speakers that, very possibly, 
 are still among the most thumbed text-books of 
 secondary schools, have made a good deal of this 
 eloquence household words. From Patrick Henry 
 and Otis to Daniel Webster and the dozens of 
 lesser men who surrounded him, we are familiar 
 with endless declamations which voice with vary- 
 ing merit the patriotic enthusiasm and vagaries 
 of American independence. Much of this, at 
 least to us of America, seems really fine and stir- 
 ring ; much of it, at least to some of us, is begin- 
 ning to seem rather sonorous than significant. Ul- 
 timately true, though, or ultimately empty, it cer- 
 tainly phrases, with spontaneous enthusiasm, the 
 thoughts and emotions which at critical moments 
 have been the vital forces of our national history ; 
 and these thoughts and emotions, when we con- 
 sider them coolly, appear to be just such as we 
 should expect to arise among the conditions of life 
 that we have considered. The dominant ideals 
 that run through all this eloquence are the ideals 
 of law and of right. These are not very clearly 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 125 
 
 distinguished. In general, there seems to be an 
 underlying feeling that if by any chance they are 
 not identical they ought to be, and therefore will 
 be. Anyhow, we ought all to be law-abiding, and 
 all to be moral, and all to be at liberty to think 
 and to behave as we choose within the obvious 
 limits of law and morals. And what we ought to 
 be we mean to be ; and that is American. So, be- 
 ing Americans, we are, generally speaking, pretty 
 much what we ought to be. Incidentally, then, 
 we are always in the right ; and whoever disagrees 
 with us is consequently and obviously wrong, and 
 ought to be made to understand it. 
 
 In this summary of the ultimate impression pro- 
 duced by the patriotic eloquence of our country 
 there is perhaps a suggestion of caricature ; for 
 the summary certainly neglects the most admira- 
 ble emotional trait of the eloquence in question, 
 — the sincerity, the enthusiasm, the tremendous 
 motive power of such convictions as it phrases. 
 In less critical moods one finds this enthusi- 
 asm heroically contagious ; this eloquence really 
 seems to voice the meaning of life. If we ask 
 ourselves, however, what phase of the meaning 
 of life it lastingly voices our answer seems in- 
 evitable : very clearly it is a phase of human ex- 
 perience where for a while the troublesome press- 
 ure of external fact is blessedly relaxed. 
 
 In a society so simple as ours used to be, one 
 man is really about as good as another. The ex- 
 
126 AMEKIOAN LITEKATUEE 
 
 perience of the generations that preceded the 
 American Kevolution, one may almost say of the 
 generations that preceded the American Civil War, 
 had confirmed those inspiring doctrines of human 
 equality and fraternity which in reality we learned 
 rather from the philosophical vagaries of Eigh- 
 teenth-Century France than from the practical ex- 
 perience we inherit from law-abiding England. 
 Our actual conduct was generally based on the 
 sound old English traditions ; our words and our 
 thoughts "were, more than we have generally real- 
 ized, borrowed from the cloud-spun theories of 
 clever Frenchmen. We have never yet dreamed 
 that our conduct and our speech do not agree ; 
 and at the period we are now considering — the 
 period that gave rise to the great century of 
 American oratory — the theories that our oratory 
 uttered actually came far nearer to correspond- 
 ence with fact than is commonly the case in hu- 
 man history. Society was not yet complex enough 
 to group itself in distinct, hostile classes. The 
 only men who were really dangerous were the 
 men who were not law-abiding or not good. 
 
 Here, then, one feels like saying, is at least one 
 body of literature, whatever its final value, that is 
 historically American. In a way it is. But turn to 
 those very standard speakers in which we are most 
 familiar with it. You will find there a great many 
 examples of English oratory, too. Compare the 
 speeches made in Parliament with the speeches 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 127 
 
 made in Congress. You will find a difference, of 
 course ; but as you read on, you can hardly escape 
 a growing doubt as to whether this difference is 
 essential, a difference of kind. If you were late- 
 ly vexed by a perhaps unsympathetic summary 
 of American eloquence, you may be consoled by 
 observing how much of it might be applied to 
 British eloquence, too. Less hampered by the 
 pressure of material facts, less restrained by the 
 presence of keen critics, our orators perhaps 
 soar higher and certainly circle more widely 
 than the orators of England. At heart, though, 
 one must feel, they are as closely akin as they 
 are in language. If our political literature has 
 added anything to the political literature of 
 England, we can hardly assert that it has added 
 more than a demonstration of w T hat that literature 
 might have been in England itself, if in England 
 the constant pressure of external fact had been 
 awhile relaxed. 
 
 Such relaxation of the pressure of external fact 
 as has seemed to underlie our political thought 
 seems more clearly still to underlie the religious 
 and the philosophical thought of the period we 
 are now considering. The profound truth most 
 emphasized by the Calvinistic creed of the emi- 
 grant fathers was the inherent vileness of human 
 nature. Men were born bad, it held, so bad that 
 
128 AMEEICAN LITERATUEE 
 
 nothing they themselves could do might ever be 
 enough to save them from deserved damnation. 
 A few generations of native American experience 
 led Americans seriously to question this view of 
 human nature, and in the end to substitute for 
 it one diametrically opposite. In the pure rec- 
 ords of New England Unitarianism, in the unfet- 
 tered philosophy of Emerson, in the half-inspired 
 preaching of the late Bishop of Massachusetts, 
 one cannot help feeling a sublime confidence in 
 the divine possibilities that lie hidden in even the 
 vilest human being. 
 
 If we could only induce ourselves honestly to 
 share this confidence, we might be swept with 
 these enthusiasts to ecstatic heights. These men 
 themselves were good men — wonderfully good. 
 They were sympathetic men, permeated with an 
 honest sense of human fraternity. Let us be our 
 best, they seem to say, and all shall be well ; and 
 by and by there shall be an end of evil. What 
 is more, — what strengthened their faith and still 
 strengthens their authority, — this noble optimism 
 of theirs was nearer to the truth of human nature 
 about them, for all its growing vileness, than was 
 the grim pessimism of the Calvinist fathers to the 
 human facts of the New World where a whole 
 continent lay open to whoever had courage to 
 penetrate its wilderness. It is only where life 
 is dense that the struggle for existence grows 
 fierce. It is only in a crowded world that we 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUKE 129 
 
 have forced upon us, in all their horror, the last- 
 ing realities of sin and evil. In a world where 
 there is still room, whoever will may stand aside, 
 dreaming himself like to a god ; and whoever can 
 put faith in such dreams grows godlike dream- 
 ing, and is a very beautiful fact to contemplate. 
 Without the dreamers the world would be poor- 
 er : we may all grant that. There are moods — 
 and not our least precious ones — in which, for all 
 our knowledge, the dreamers seem the prophets, 
 revealing the things which are to be. 
 
 In the social history of New England there is a 
 petty fact which in moods like this confronts us. 
 It is not unique ; none is more commonplace, 
 none could have been more confidently pre- 
 dicted. Like its innumerable fellows in human 
 experience, though, it has a significance which at 
 moments when we feel like yielding to the ec- 
 stasies of optimistic enthusiasm is almost tragic. 
 You must already recognize that generally comic 
 experiment at Brook Farm, where a company of 
 enthusiasts tried to combine plain living, high 
 thinking, and the earning of a decent livelihood. 
 We all know the result. They did not earn a 
 decent livelihood ; they squabbled, in spite of 
 the highest intellectual and moral intentions ; and 
 what few were not dispersed by this state of affairs 
 found plain living by itself not so intrinsically 
 attractive as to prevent them from reverting each 
 to the most comfortable circumstances he could 
 
130 AMERICAN LITERATUBE 
 
 command. Calvinistic depravity in this little cir- 
 cle took no very acute form ; it was enough, how- 
 ever, to prevent successful co-operative aspira- 
 tion to higher things than every- day life affords. 
 Brook Farm, in short, typifies what in all likeli- 
 hood must always happen to American optimists 
 who try to test their optimism experimentally. 
 Dreams are very noble things ; but to dream we 
 must sleep ; and to get along in this actual world 
 of ours we must be wide awake. 
 
 Our business with these dreams, however, is 
 not to share them for the moment, nor yet to sigh 
 over their evanescence. It is to ask ourselves 
 whether they have added to the dreams of Eng- 
 land anything which makes richer the lasting ex- 
 pression in English words of the meaning of life. 
 They have doubtless added something. What this 
 something is one finds it hard to say ; yet at heart 
 one can hardly help feeling sure that the records 
 of human purity would be poorer without the rec- 
 ords which the New England dreamers have left 
 us. Perhaps, as we scrutinize these dreams, their 
 chief trait seems to be that they are always unfet- 
 tered yet never base. Left to itself, the devout 
 free thought of New England has such freedom 
 from vileness as we love to call childlike. The 
 dreamers of Old England have been perhaps 
 more sophisticated, at all events more conscious 
 of how their dreams must diverge from reality. 
 In England, we remember, real fact has hardly 
 
AMERICAN LITEEATUEE 131 
 
 relaxed its pressure since English literature be- 
 gan. In America, as we have seen, the case has 
 hitherto been different. So we find ourselves 
 where we found ourselves a little while ago, when 
 we were thumbing anew the leaves of our old 
 standard speakers. The philosophic dreamers 
 of America, we must admit, have added to Eng- 
 lish literature little that might not have been 
 added in England itself, if in England the press- 
 ure of external fact had been awhile relaxed. 
 
 XI 
 
 So far we have considered these political and 
 philosophic moods only as they revealed them- 
 selves in mere words. We have neglected per- 
 haps their chief manifestation, when for once 
 they revealed themselves in triumphant action. 
 In this case they not only expressed themselves ; 
 they actually altered the course of human history. 
 A fiery fusion of these moods, which we have 
 considered apart, was what produced that great 
 outburst of human sympathy which resulted in the 
 abolition of African slavery. The forces which 
 brought about this great result gathered them- 
 selves, to no small degree, in literary form. We 
 all know " Uncle Tom's Cabin ; " we all know the 
 work of Whittier and of Lowell ; we all know the 
 passionate intensity of Garrison, the magnificent, 
 scurrilous eloquence of Phillips. Here, we may 
 
132 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 think, is surely something peculiarly our own 
 — native American enthusiasm dealing with stern 
 reality, and practically asserting the eternal truth 
 of humane American optimism. There is no re- 
 laxed sense of fact here. 
 
 To question this conclusion seems nowadays 
 almost disloyal. Whatever our personal sympa- 
 thies, no one can deny the nobly humane impulse 
 which underlay even the vagaries of Abolition. 
 Nor can any one deny that what only sixty years 
 ago was ridiculed as humanitarian fanaticism has 
 taken its place to-day among the most honoured 
 traditions of the American people. Abolition 
 ended what every one now admits to have been 
 the monstrous evil of negro slavery. For that it 
 deserves all honour. 
 
 Were this the whole story, many of us would 
 to-day feel more happily secure than we honest- 
 ly can. To many who pause to think, tradition 
 seems in this case, as in innumerable others, to 
 be blinding the eyes of the people to stern, un- 
 welcome fact. It is hiding the truth that, in the 
 great days of Abolition as well as now and for- 
 ever, enthusiasm lacks foresight. It is hiding 
 the truth that for all their noble enthusiasm, the 
 Abolitionists, after the good old British fashion, 
 directed their reforming energies not against the 
 evils prevalent in the actual society of which they 
 formed a part ; but against those that prevailed 
 in a rival society which they knew chiefly by 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 133 
 
 hearsay. They found this society — and with it 
 our whole country — cursed with the evil of slav- 
 ery. They left us all burdened with another evil, 
 which at times seems almost as monstrous, al- 
 most as untrue to the real facts of human experi- 
 ence. What has supplanted negro slavery is not 
 mere freedom; it is that appalling degradation 
 of American citizenship which the Abolitionists 
 hailed so eagerly under the name of negro suf- 
 frage. 
 
 In this aspect we cannot so confidently assert 
 that the great movement of Abolition was actu- 
 ated by a very stern sense of fact. A moment 
 ago, too, we had a glimpse of another aspect in 
 which we may question whether, after all, Aboli- 
 tion was so distinctively American as we like to 
 think. In this aspect, by no means its least ob- 
 vious, it becomes only one among the many symp- 
 toms that prove us still of English race. At least 
 in their modern history, we must remember, the 
 English have displayed inexhaustible power, 
 when impelled by moral motives, of meddling 
 with the business of other people whose affairs 
 they imperfectly understand. We find ourselves, 
 in short, where we found ourselves before. Like 
 the purely political and the purely philosophical 
 literature that surrounds it, the literature of Abo- 
 lition can hardly be asserted to add much to the 
 lasting expression of the meaning of life other- 
 wise embodied in English words. 
 
134 AMEBICAN LITEEATUEE 
 
 XII 
 
 We have dealt now with those kinds of liter- 
 ature whose office is chiefly to affect human 
 conduct. We must turn to those kinds whose 
 office is chiefly to instruct or to delight — to the 
 literature, in short, that we had in mind when at 
 the beginning of this discussion we first thought 
 of the six worthies of New England. With this 
 we shall have to deal even more summarily than 
 with what we have considered before. We may 
 justify ourselves by the thought that while the 
 literature we have touched on is perhaps known 
 chiefly to students, the literature now before us 
 is the literature still most familiar to the Amer- 
 ican people — the literature, in short, that is sure to 
 be found in any native library, public or private. 
 
 A few words, then, of our historians ; after 
 that, of our purely literary figures ; and we shall 
 have done. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Boston has been the home of historians who 
 may fairly be treated with high respect. One 
 need not name them all, nor need one specifi- 
 cally say that the school for which they stand is 
 not confined to Boston. Once for all, one may 
 affirm that Prescott, and Motley, and the rest, are 
 writers of real industry and real power. Accord- 
 ing to the methods of their time — a time that 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 135 
 
 preceded the microscopic accuracy of the schol- 
 arship now most in vogue — they collected their 
 material with diligence and care ; and according 
 to the pleasantly polite fashion then still prevalent 
 they expressed the results of this labour in a style 
 that, despite occasional formality, is permanently 
 pleasant to read. What they did, they did well. 
 They have given us books that should lastingly 
 hold places in the long list of historical literature 
 that dignifies English prose. So much every 
 one must admit ; and it would be a pleasure to 
 dwell long on this honourable achievement. 
 
 Our business with these men, however, is 
 only to inquire whether they have added to Eng- 
 lish literature anything essentially different, in 
 thought or in phrase, from what that literature 
 would otherwise comprise; in other words, 
 whether they have done work that permanently 
 enhances our conception of what historical lit- 
 erature may be. By itself their work is surely 
 admirable ; but we cannot consider it only by 
 itself. It must take its place in a literature 
 which, to go no further, comprises without it the 
 work of Gibbon, of Hume, of Macaulay, of Carlyle. 
 These names are enough. Admire our own his- 
 torians as we may, we can claim for them no 
 higher merit than that of having added their 
 romantic tales to the already rich store of ro- 
 mantic narrative which without them our lan- 
 guage possesses. 
 
136 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 XIV 
 
 The word romantic is not very precise. Among 
 a dozen meanings, however, it suggests chiefly, 
 perhaps, a fondness for contemplating things not 
 as they are in our actual life, but rather as they 
 might have been in a dreamy past, or as they 
 might be in some far-off present or fantastic 
 future. No phase of romantic feeling is more 
 constant than that which delights in traditions of 
 things remote in time or in space — if so may be 
 in both. These we may dream of as better, more 
 beautiful, more stirring than the trivialities we 
 know about us. We all know this spirit in the 
 curious petty form which makes native Yankees 
 such minute genealogists ; in that more serious 
 form, too, which makes foreign missions so much 
 more popular than domestic. It was a phase of 
 this spirit, delighting to revive the grandeurs of a 
 vanished time, that impelled Irving, and Ticknor, 
 and Prescott, and Motley to live so much of their 
 inner lives rather among the splendours of Renas- 
 cent Spain than among the respectable democ- 
 racy of the United States. 
 
 In this aspect the American historians resem- 
 ble the other American writers whose literary 
 purpose has been more purely artistic. The 
 dominant note in the work of almost all of these 
 may be called romantic. It was a phase of the 
 romantic spirit that impelled Irving again, and 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 137 
 
 Longfellow, and Lowell, and at times even Whit- 
 tier, to saturate themselves in the delights of, 
 great European literature ; and to phrase this ex- 
 perience in terms that, however modern fashion 
 may sometimes slight them, have made romantic 
 dreams the lasting possession of American youth. 
 To no European, indeed, can Europe, with its 
 limitless past, be quite so stirring as to a native 
 of this New World, in whom a starved romantic 
 spirit is lurking ; and nothing has more helped 
 us to this keenest, purest kind of pleasure than 
 our romantic historians, and poets, and novelists. 
 Whoever does not love and enjoy them must be 
 inappreciative or ungrateful. 
 
 They have done us, then, a great service — a 
 service on which it would be pleasant to dwell 
 long. Here, however, we have no time for eulogy. 
 The question before us is simply whether they 
 have made English literature more widely, last- 
 ingly expressive than it would have been with- 
 out them. In all frankness we can hardly as- 
 sert that on the whole they have. Without them 
 English literature possesses records enough and 
 to spare that show what the romantic spirit is. 
 These records, as well as our own, must be in 
 mind whenever we attempt, as we attempted a 
 moment ago, to define this spirit. The defini- 
 tion was unhappily crude and vague. It was 
 enough, though, to fix one fact : in essence the 
 romantic spirit is dreamy, and like a true dream 
 
138 AMEKICAN LITEBATUKE 
 
 flourishes best when the pressure of external fact 
 is deliberately or accidentally relaxed. The dif- 
 ference between our romantic literature and the 
 romantic literature of Europe is not great ; it lies 
 chiefly, perhaps, in the fact that, with perceptibly 
 less intensity and power, ours is less conscious, 
 more spontaneous. As we consider our romantic 
 writers coolly, in short, they generally reveal 
 themselves just as English-speaking men, hap- 
 pily resident in a world where troublesome fact 
 presses more lightly than in England. 
 
 XV 
 
 Among them, however, there are two, very un- 
 like each other, who are similar in being dis- 
 tinctly different from any writers whom we can 
 feel to be characteristically English. These are 
 Poe and Hawthorne. 
 
 Poe, to be sure, is fantastic and meretricious 
 throughout. In his work as in his life he was 
 haunted by the vices and the falsity of the stage 
 that bred him ; but he was really haunted. As 
 one knows him better, one does not love him 
 more. In another way, though, one grows to 
 care for him, or at least to pity him. For with all 
 his falsity, with all his impudence and sham, the 
 man is a man by himself. There is something 
 freakish, not quite earthly, wholly his own in the 
 fancies and the cadences that grow wild amid his 
 
AMEEICAN LITERATURE 139 
 
 work. If it be something to have added a new 
 note to literature, then we Americans must re- 
 spect the memory of Poe. 
 
 With Hawthorne, the case is very different. 
 To men of our time, beyond doubt, his work 
 seems generally not fantastic but imaginative, 
 and surely not meretricious but in its own way 
 beautiful. Nor is this the whole story : almost 
 alone among our writers, we may say, Hawthorne 
 has a lasting native significance. For this there 
 are surely two good reasons. In the first place, 
 he is almost the solitary American artist who has 
 phrased his meaning in words of which the beauty 
 seems sure to grow with the years. In the sec- 
 ond place, what marks him as most impregnably 
 American is this : when we look close to see 
 what his meaning really was, we find it a thing 
 that in the old days, at last finally dead and gone, 
 had been the great motive power of his race. 
 What Hawthorne really voices is that strange, 
 morbid, haunting sense of other things that we 
 see or hear, which underlay the intense idealism 
 of the emigrant Puritans, and which remains per- 
 haps the most inalienable emotional heritage of 
 their children. It is Hawthorne, in brief, who 
 finally phrases the meaning of such a life as The- 
 ophilus Eaton lived and Cotton Mather recorded. 
 
 Hawthorne and Poe, then, have added some- 
 thing, in both thought and phrase, to the litera- 
 ture of England. Yet when we ask ourselves 
 
140 AMEEIOAN LITERATURE 
 
 coolly just what this something is, we need not 
 be surprised to find no very new answer. In the 
 half-mad vagaries of the one, and in the melan- 
 choly musings of the other, we can feel, to be 
 sure, at least emotions that we should have far 
 to seek elsewhere. In the very extravagance of 
 their freedom, however, these emotions bring us 
 back to where we have so often found ourselves 
 before. They are surely such as we should ex- 
 pect dreamy, imaginative, English-speaking folks 
 to know, when their lot is cast in a still un- 
 crowded world. For all this, though, Poe and 
 Hawthorne are in no wise Englishmen. What- 
 ever they express, it is surely something of their 
 own, and so of ours. 
 
 XVI 
 
 Something of our own, too, is expressed by the 
 kind of literature that foreigners are apt to think 
 most characteristically American. This is the 
 sort of thing that is called American humour. In 
 trivial forms it pervades the newspapers. Its 
 vulgar heroes are Artemas Ward and Josh Bill- 
 ings. Its masterpieces are probably to be found 
 in Irving's " Knickerbocker," and in the works 
 of Lowell, and of the last survivor of the best 
 days of New England letters — Dr. Holmes. 
 
 One can hardly define American humour, but 
 we all know what it is. It is based on shrewd, 
 cool, good-tempered common-sense ; it has serene 
 
AMEEICAN LITEEATUBE 141 
 
 assurance, it has great freshness of feeling. One 
 likes it, one laughs at it, and above all one feels 
 it generally spontaneous and wholesome. It 
 leaves no bitterness behind. Somehow, though, 
 it is not profound humour, not great ; it is apt to 
 have less serious relation to life than at first 
 glance seems the case. With all its fresh charm, 
 all its wholesome humanity, its final trait seems, 
 broadly speaking, to be good-natured, reckless 
 extravagance of both thought and phrase. This 
 extravagance, if it be really the chief trait of our 
 humour, marks even this most characteristic 
 phase of our national literature as expressing 
 only another aspect of the same experience that 
 we have found so generally to underlie what we, 
 as a people, have thought, and felt, and said. 
 At bottom, after all, extravagance is only another 
 name for cheerful neglect of stern reality. It is 
 another and a brighter expression of what men 
 know and feel when external fact does not press 
 them too hard. 
 
 XYII 
 
 So much for the American literature of the 
 past. This is not the place to deal with the 
 present or the future. In the period we have con- 
 sidered, almost every writer has been concerned 
 either with what had gone before him or with 
 what was passing about him. Almost all, in 
 short, have expressed what we have seen to be 
 
142 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 the historical experience of American life— the 
 manner of the free growth of an English people 
 in a world where there was still plenty of room. 
 
 In this same period, however, there is a single 
 figure who seems steadily and constantly to face 
 not what is now past, but what is now present or 
 to come. Though his right fco respect is ques- 
 tioned oftenest of all, we cannot fairly pass Walt 
 Whitman without mention. He lacks, of course, 
 to a grotesque degree, artistic form ; but that 
 very lack is characteristic. Artistic form, as we 
 have seen, is often the final stamp that marks 
 human expression as a thing of the past. Whit- 
 man remarkably illustrates this principle : he 
 lacks form chiefly because he is stammeringly 
 overpowered by his bewildering vision of what he 
 believes to be the future. He is uncouth, inar- 
 ticulate, whatever you please that is least ortho- 
 dox ; yet, after all, he can make you feel for the 
 moment how even the ferry-boats plying from 
 New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's 
 eternities. Those of us who love the past are 
 far from sharing his confidence in the future. 
 Surely, however, that is no reason for denying 
 the miracle that he has wrought by idealizing the 
 East River. The man who has done this is the 
 only one who points out the stuff of which per- 
 haps the new American literature of the future 
 may in time be made, who foreruns perhaps a 
 spirit that may inspire that literature, if it grow 
 
AMEKIOAN LITEKATUKE US 
 
 at last into an organic form of its own, with a 
 meaning not to be sought in other worlds than 
 this western world of ours. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Brief and hasty as this sketch has had to be, 
 few as are the aspects of our life and our letters 
 on which we have had time to touch, it has per- 
 haps been enough to indicate what some of us 
 have meant when in careless phrase we have some- 
 times said that America has no literature at all. 
 What we really mean is only that while Ameri- 
 cans have added something to the lasting expres- 
 sions of the meaning of life that are phrased in 
 English words, they are still far from having 
 added enough to justify a valid claim to an inde- 
 pendent place among those peoples whose na- 
 tional literatures are inevitably lasting posses- 
 sions of humanity. New England, in its own 
 little way, has voiced the experience of English 
 humanity free for awhile from the stern pressure 
 of external fact. That is almost all. 
 
 Nor can I feel that we have erred, while con-, 
 sidering American literature, in attending chiefly 
 to that New England which to me is the spot on 
 earth where life means most. In America, I 
 believe, only New England has expressed itself 
 in a literary form which inevitably commands 
 attention from whoever pursues such inquiries 
 
144 AMEKICAN LITEKATUKE 
 
 as ours. What else has been written in the pe- 
 riods of American life that we have consid- 
 ered may almost certainly be brought within 
 generalizations based on the literature of New 
 England. In this fact a New Englander feels 
 a pride deeper than I realized when I began to 
 write these lines ; yet he feels, too, a sadness. 
 By the inexorable law on which we have touched 
 more than once, the very fact that New England 
 has actually expressed its unfettered experience 
 seems to mean that the unfettered experience of 
 New England, and all the New England that we 
 have known and cared for, is past or passing. 
 
 Yet after all, much as we may love it, even that 
 unfettered New England is not the ultimate fact 
 of human history. It is hard to avoid the con- 
 viction that this very New England we love so 
 well has youthfully overestimated herself and her 
 work. In endeavouring not unduly to praise this 
 work, then, many of us perhaps err the other 
 way. So far as it goes, this work is sound and 
 wholesome. What the six worthies with whose 
 names we began this discussion have contributed 
 to lasting literature is no great thing, to be sure ; 
 but it is something. Something better still is 
 the great purity of their lives. Emasculate we 
 may call them in certain moods. In other moods, 
 and better, their lives tell us that if restraint be 
 relaxed what will flourish most in English human 
 nature is not the evil ; and whatever else, great 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 145 
 
 or little, their works tell us, they tell us nothing 
 sordid, base, impure. As the struggling years 
 of the future come upon us, we shall value this 
 purity more and more. In the past many of us 
 have looked at these men with irreverent impa- 
 tience. What have they done, after all, we have 
 asked, that we should so trouble ourselves about 
 them. But now, as the years are passing, we ask 
 ourselves such questions less and less. Rather 
 we look at these men with growing love and 
 veneration. For the little group is a group that 
 we should have far to seek elsewhere. Of each 
 one may be said the truest and the loveliest thing 
 that has been said of Longfellow— and no man 
 could wish a worthier epitaph : 
 
 " He left his native air the sweeter for his song." 
 10 
 
VI 
 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 (A Memoir presented to the American Academy of Arts 
 and Sciences, on June 14, 1893.) 
 
JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haver- 
 hill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807.* His 
 ancestors, in every line of the soundest Yankee 
 stock, had resided from the earliest times in Es- 
 sex County, or in the older regions of New Hamp- 
 shire. The house in which he was born had been 
 built by his emigrant ancestor, Thomas Whittier, 
 who died at the age of seventy-six, in 1696, after 
 above fifty years' residence in New England. In 
 1694, Joseph Whittier, son of the emigrant, and 
 great-grandfather of the poet, had married the 
 daughter of a well-known Quaker. Probably 
 from this time the immediate family of the poet 
 had belonged to the Eeligious Society of Friends. 
 In all other respects their condition had been 
 that of substantial New England farmers. 
 
 Amid the extreme diversity of religious views 
 that marks our own time, and the efforts now so 
 general among the New England clergy to em- 
 phasize the few things that religious people be- 
 
 * For the facts of Whittier 1 s life I rely chiefly on the 
 biography by Mr. F. H. Underwood. 
 
150 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 lieve in common, and to neglect the many con- 
 cerning which they radically differ, we are apt to 
 think of religious divergences as verbal or for- 
 mal. In general we are probably right. Modern 
 Yankees, at all events, are not profound theolo- 
 gians. They are disposed either to take religion 
 as they find it, or else without much ado to se- 
 lect in place of their ancestral faith some creed 
 or form of worship which they find socially or 
 aesthetically more congenial. Sectarian differ- 
 ences nowadays certainly do not display them- 
 selves in obvious differences of character. With 
 people of ordinary parts, of course, this has gen- 
 erally been the case at all times ; with really 
 serious natures the case is different. The few 
 people in any generation who seem instinctively 
 aware of the tremendous seriousness of religion — 
 the people whose presence in this world was per- 
 haps the chief basis of the Calvinistic doctrine 
 of election — are inevitably affected, often perma- 
 mently, by the religious doctrine that surrounds 
 their early years. Whatever else Whittier was, 
 he was a profoundly religious man, who could not 
 help taking life in earnest. To understand him 
 at all, then, we must know something of the 
 peculiar religious views which he never relin- 
 quished. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 151 
 
 II 
 
 The Friends in New England, writes a gentle- 
 man who is now an earnest member of the Relig- 
 ious Society in question, 
 
 u were Orthodox in that they believed in God as Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit, in Christ as truly one with the 
 Father, yet also very man, and in the efficacy of His 
 atonement for the forgiveness of sins. But the term k Or- 
 thodox' in New England is usually taken to mean the 
 tenets of the Westminster Confession. Whittier was 
 trained to regard the extreme views of this Confession 
 with aversion. He drank in the truth of the universal 
 love of God to all men in Christian, Jewish, or Pagan 
 lands, that God so loved the world that He sent His Son, 
 that Christ died for all men, and His atonement availed 
 for all who in every land accepted the light with which He 
 enlightened their minds and consciences, and who listen- 
 ing to His still small voice in the soul turned in any true 
 sense toward God, away from evil and to the right and 
 loving. Whittier thus drank in a spirit of universal love, 
 a sense of oneness with all men, that fitted him to espouse 
 and advocate the cause of the ignorant, the weak, the out- 
 cast — the slave, the Indian, the heathen. It gave him sym- 
 pathy with all loving, saintly souls like Fenelon, Guion, 
 and other Roman Catholics of like spirit, and nerved 
 his manly, indignant scorn of hard and cruel men that 
 professed the name of 4 Christian.' Whittier was trained 
 to have a great reverence for the Bible. . . . He had 
 read much in the Journals of Friends. He had steeped 
 his mind with their thoughts and loved them because they 
 were so saintly and yet so humbly unconscious of it. 
 
 " The title l Quaker Poet ' is a true one, not simply be- 
 
152 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 cause he was a Friend by membership, but because he 
 was permeated by the spirit of Quaker Christianity. It 
 is true that Whittier was much broadened by association 
 with men like Emerson, Longfellow, and others, Garrison 
 especially ; but he was to the end a Friend in his religion." 
 
 The letter from which these passages are quoted 
 was addressed to a kinswoman of Whit tier's, 
 who has kindly sent me some notes of her own 
 recollections of Friends. Though some years 
 younger than he, she was trained under similar 
 influences. Her recollections, then, we may guess 
 in some degree to have blended with his. 
 
 u During the early part of this century," she writes, 
 " I think the Society of Friends throughout the rural dis- 
 tricts of New England retained in a great measure the 
 stern, rigid simplicity and exclusiveness which character- 
 ized the religious people of the old Puritan days. They were 
 thoroughly Orthodox,* and gave little heed to the Unita- 
 rian controversy among others. . . , Friends then had 
 not, I think, all the aggressive fervor of the earlier days ; 
 there was a degree of lukewarmness ; but they had among 
 them many ministers,t untrained in the learning of the 
 world, but full of spiritual life, who laboured not only 
 among Friends, but wherever they felt themselves called. 
 
 lt The Discipline of the Society was rigidly observed by 
 most. Queries were answered Quarterly, and looked after 
 by appointed Committee. I will give some of the Queries, 
 
 * i.e., Trinitarian Christians, but not Calvinists. 
 t Among the Friends in general, men and women may 
 alike be ministers ; but a minister may receive no salary. 
 
JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 153 
 
 as they undoubtedly exerted some influence over the 
 children, who often listened to them : 
 
 M Are meetings for worship duly attended ? hour* ob- 
 served ? Are they preserved from sleeping or other un- 
 becoming behavior ? 
 
 " Are the Holy Scriptures frequently read ? 
 
 "Do [Friends] avoid spirituous liquors except for Medi- 
 cine ? 
 
 "Do they avoid unnecessary frequenting of taverns or 
 other places of public resort ? 
 
 " Are the poor looked after, and assisted in such business 
 as they are capable of ? 
 
 "Are [Friends] careful to inspect their affairs, punctual 
 in promises ? 
 
 "Do they live within the bounds of their income ? 
 
 "Do they deal with offenders in the Spirit of Meekness ? 
 etc., etc. 
 
 " The children of Friends were early taught that there 
 was a still small voice given them by their Heavenly 
 Father which could tell them when they were doing 
 wrong, f 
 
 "In most cases they were taken regularly to meetings 
 for Worship — often to those for Discipline — where they had 
 to sit still on hard benches. They had no Sabbath-schools, 
 but in almost all families on First Day afternoon the chil- 
 dren were required to listen to readings in the Holy Script- 
 ures and they were generally well informed in all Bible 
 History. When Whittier was a little boy he once re- 
 marked he thought David could not have been a Friend, as 
 he was a man of war. 
 
 * i. e. If no one feels called to speak, do they regularly 
 wait for at least one hour in silence V 
 
 t This doctrine of universal conscience seems the funda- 
 mental one of the Society of Friends. 
 
154 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 "Music and dancing were not indulged in. Novels 
 were forbidden. But they all the more enjoyed Milton, 
 Young, Cowper, and histories when obtainable. It seems 
 Whittier had none of these, at which I marvel, as his 
 grandmother, who lived with them, was a Greenleaf , and 
 they were literary people." 
 
 Without actually quoting these notes, so kind- 
 ly sent me, I could hardly have reproduced the 
 effect they make on one who carefully reads them. 
 To restate in one's own words the earnest faith 
 they so tenderly express seems unsympathetic. 
 In more worldly phrase than theirs, however, what 
 Whittier was taught and believed seems to have 
 been this : To all human beings God has given 
 an inner light, to all He speaks with a still small 
 voice. Follow the light, obey the voice, and all 
 will be well. Evil-doers are they who neglect 
 the light and the voice. Now the light and the 
 voice are God's, so to all who will attend they 
 must ultimately show the same truth. If the 
 voice call us to correct others, then, or the light 
 shine upon manifest evil, it is God's will that we 
 smite error, if so may be by revealing truth. If 
 those who err be Friends, our duty bids us ex- 
 postulate with them ; and if they be obdurate, to 
 present them for discipline, which may result in 
 their exclusion from our Eeligious Society. The 
 still small voice, it seems, really warns everybody 
 that certain lines of conduct are essentially wrong 
 — among which are the drinking of spirits, the 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 155 
 
 frequenting of taverns, indulgence in gaming, the 
 use of oaths, and the enslavement of any human 
 being. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In this firm faith, fortified from Scripture, that 
 everybody really knows right from wrong, that 
 many common lines of conduct are indubitably 
 wrong, and that whoever follow such lines of 
 conduct do so from wilful neglect of the inner 
 light and the still small voice divinely vouchsafed 
 them, Whittier was trained and lived. To this 
 faith, involving the essential equality of all 
 mankind, and the deliberate ungodliness of who- 
 ever by word or deed fails to recognize this 
 equality, may be traced many of the peculiar 
 characteristics which make him, even to those who 
 mistrust the reforms in which he so passionately 
 engaged himself, perhaps the least irritating of 
 reformers. Not only was he trained from in- 
 fancy in this faith, of which reform is the only 
 logical expression in action ; but his life from 
 beginning to end was singularly remote from that 
 heart-breaking experience of actual fact, in crowd- 
 ed and growing communities, which goes so far 
 nowadays to disprove, for whoever will frankly 
 recognize what is before him, the essential vital- 
 ity of those parts of human nature which are best. 
 
 A barefoot boy to look at, an unswerving be- 
 liever at heart in the inner light of the Friends, 
 
156 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 and by nature one of those calmly passionate 
 Yankees who cannot help taking life in earnest, 
 he grew up in days when the New England 
 country was still pure in the possession of an un- 
 mixed race whose power of self-government has 
 never been surpassed. His " Snow-Bound " re- 
 lates his own memories of childhood ; some of the 
 sketches preserved in his prose works * add pleas- 
 ant touches to the better-known pictures in his 
 verse. He always had a hankering for literature. 
 A strolling Scotch vagrant, hospitably treated to 
 cheese and cider, sang him in payment some 
 songs of Burns. At fourteen he laid hands on a 
 copy of Burns's poems. These seem to have start- 
 ed him at writing. At seventeen he had written 
 a poem on the " Exile's Departure" from the 
 " shores of Hibernia,"f which in 1826 found its 
 way into print in the Newburyport Free Press, 
 then edited by William Lloyd Garrison. From 
 1827 to 1892 he passed no year without writing 
 verses which sooner or later came to publication. 
 In 1826, before he was nineteen years old, he 
 was visited while at work in the corn-field by Gar- 
 rison, the young editor, who had been struck by 
 the merit of his verses. The friendship thus be- 
 
 * Notably "Yankee Gypsies," and " Magicians and 
 Witch Folk, " Prose Works, i., 326, 399. 
 
 t Poetical Works, iv. , 333. This poem, like that on the 
 ' ' Vale of the Merrimac " cited below, which belongs to the 
 same year, suggests the influence of Moore. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 157 
 
 gun proved life -long. Had anything been needed 
 to enhance the reformatory instincts of a Yankee 
 Quaker, the chance that this first literary recog- 
 nition came from the man destined to be the most 
 strenuous reformer of his time would have been 
 enough. 
 
 In his twentieth year Whittier went to the 
 Academy in Haverhill, where he spent two terms, 
 and particularly distinguished himself in English 
 composition. During a winter vacation he taught 
 a country school. At twenty-one he was already 
 a professional writer for some of the smaller 
 newspapers. At twenty-three he was editor of 
 the Haverhill Gazette ; and before he was twenty- 
 four he was made editor of the New England 
 Weekly Review, a paper published at Hartford, 
 Connecticut. At the end of a year and a half he 
 resigned this office, on the ground of ill-health, 
 and returned to Massachusetts. Meanwhile he 
 had published a small volume of " New England 
 Legends." 
 
 At this time Garrison had just established the 
 Liberator in Boston. The movement for the abo- 
 lition of slavery was fairly begun. Into this 
 movement Whittier threw himself with all his 
 might. For thirty years he constantly advocated 
 it in both prose and verse. He was a member of 
 the Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, in 
 1833. * He was attacked by a mob at Haverhill in 
 
 * See his vivid reminiscences of it ; Prose Works, iii. , 171 . 
 
158 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 1834 ; and by a worse one at Concord, New Hamp- 
 shire, in 1835. In this year he was for one term 
 a member of the General Court of Massachusetts. 
 In 1837 he went to New York, as a secretary of 
 the National Anti-Slavery Society. Early in 1838 
 he was made editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, 
 a journal devoted to the cause of abolition, pub- 
 lished at Philadelphia. In May, 1838, the office 
 of this paper, together with Pennsylvania Hall, 
 just erected for the purpose of providing the 
 Abolitionists with a regular place of meeting, 
 was burned by a mob. In 1840 he resigned his 
 charge of the Freeman, and rejoined his mother 
 and sister, who had moved to Amesbury, Massa- 
 chusetts. Here henceforth was his legal resi- 
 dence. 
 
 From this time on, his life was remarkably un- 
 eventful. Shy in temperament, and generally 
 troubled by that sort of robust poor health which 
 frequently accompanies total abstinence, he lived 
 secluded in the Yankee country for the better 
 part of fifty-two years. He wrote a great deal ; 
 but rarely, it is said, above half an hour at a 
 time.* In 1849 a collection of his poems was 
 published ; in 1857 came another, this time from 
 his final publishers, Ticknor & Fields.f He had 
 
 * My authority for this is a little monograph by Mrs. J. 
 T. Fields. 
 
 t The firm's name has changed several times. It is now 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 159 
 
 now become a recognized literary figure. He 
 was concerned in the starting of the Atlantic 
 Monthly. The temper of the North was begin- 
 ning at last to favour Abolition. In the civil 
 war, dreadful as such an event was to his re- 
 ligious convictions, he saw the hand of God de- 
 stroying the great evil of slavery. He had always 
 adhered to that branch of the Anti-slavery party 
 which believed in opposing the national evil by 
 regular political means. He was an ardent mem- 
 ber of the Republican party. The close of the 
 war, which found his principles victorious, found 
 him in popular estimation a great man. 
 
 In 1871 he was made a Fellow of the American 
 Academy of Arts and Sciences.* It is not remem- 
 bered that he ever attended a meeting. General 
 society, even in its severer forms, he never found 
 congenial. An occasional visit to intimate friends 
 in Boston, and of a summer to the Isles of Shoals, 
 or later to the hill country about Chocorua, were 
 the chief incidents in his life. For all this super- 
 ficial repose, however, he never stopped writing. 
 His " Birthday Greeting," sent to Dr. Holmes on 
 August 29, 1892, was written only a few weeks 
 before his death. He died, in his eighty-fifth 
 year, at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on Sep- 
 tember 7, 1892. 
 
 * By whose kindness I am permitted to reprint this me- 
 moir from their Proceedings. 
 
160 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 IV 
 
 During his last years he made a final collection 
 of his writings, with a few brief notes.* It is in 
 seven volumes, four of verse and three of prose. 
 The arrangement is a little confusing. He classi- 
 fied his works under a number of not very definite 
 heads ; and under each head printed his mate- 
 rial chronologically. The first volume contains 
 " Narrative and Legendary Poems," from 1830 to 
 1888 ; the second contains " Poems of Nature/' 
 from 1830 to 1886, " Poems Subjective and Rem- 
 iniscent," from 1841 to 1887, and "Religious 
 Poems," from 1830 to 1886 ; the third contains 
 "Anti-slavery Poems," beginning with one to 
 William Lloyd Garrison, in 1832, and ending with 
 one to his memory, in 1879, and " Songs of Labor 
 and Reform," from 1838 to 1887 ; the fourth con- 
 tains " Personal Poems," from 1834 to 1886, " Oc- 
 casional Poems," from 1852 to 1888, and reprints 
 of the " Tent on the Beach," originally published 
 in 1867, and of his last volume, "At Sundown," 
 which originally appeared shortly after his death. 
 In an Appendix are some youthful poems, written 
 as early as 1825. The prose works are classified in 
 a similarly confusing way. There is a volume of 
 " Tales and Sketches," including his essay in his- 
 
 * "The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier." River- 
 side Press : 1893. 
 
JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 161 
 
 torical fiction, " Margaret Smith's Journal in the 
 Province of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-9 ; " a vol- 
 ume of "Old Portraits and Modern Sketches," 
 " Personal Sketches and Tributes," and "His- 
 torical Papers ; " and a volume concerning the 
 " Conflict with Slavery," "Reform and Politics," 
 " The Inner Life," and " Criticism." 
 
 This bewildering arrangement of the work of 
 sixty-seven years is characteristic. By far the 
 longest article in any of the seven volumes is 
 "Margaret Smith's Journal," which covers one 
 hundred and eighty-six pages. By far the greater 
 part of all the work consists of verses or papers 
 which could easily have been written at a short 
 sitting. Uncertain health, the early practice of 
 journalism, and the lack of that higher education 
 which demands prolonged intellectual effort in 
 a single direction seem to have combined in pre- 
 venting the power of sustained literary labor, 
 As he writes of himself : * 
 
 " His good was mainly an intent, 
 His evil not of forethought done ; 
 The work he wrought was rarely meant 
 Or finished as begun. 
 
 w 
 
 " The words he spake, the thoughts he penned, 
 Are mortal as his hand and brain, 
 But if they serve the Master's end, 
 He has not lived in vain. " 
 
 * " My Namesake," Poetical Works, ii., 118, 121. 
 11 
 
162 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 That last stanza is unduly modest. There are 
 passages in Whitter's works which have strength 
 and merit of a kind that ought to survive. Of 
 his works as wholes, however, his criticism is 
 true. There is hardly one in which the vital pas- 
 sages are not half-buried in irrelevance, redund- 
 ance, or common -place. The very confusion in 
 which he finally presented his writings to pos- 
 terity is typical of his inability to handle any- 
 thing on a large scale. 
 
 To one who, amid this confusion, sets himself 
 to discover the characteristic traits of the work, 
 the first salient features are not its merits. "Whit- 
 tier was certainly precocious. Certainly, too, the 
 power he displayed in youth did not meet the 
 common fate of precocity. But the change from 
 his earliest work to his latest is surprisingly 
 slight. At seventeen he wrote, of the Merri- 
 mac : * 
 
 u Oh, lovely the scene, when the gray misty vapour 
 Of morning is lifted from Merrimac's shore ; 
 When the firefly, lighting his wild gleaming taper, 
 The dimly seen lowlands comes glimmering o'er ; 
 
 * Poetical Works, iv,, 336. In the rhythm the influence 
 of Moore seems marked. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEU 163 
 
 When on thy calm surface the moonbeam falls brightly, 
 
 And the dull bird of night is his covert forsaking, 
 When the whippoorwill's notes from thy margin sound 
 lightly, 
 And break on the sound which thy small waves are 
 making." 
 
 At thirty-three he wrote of it again : * 
 
 u But look ! the yellow light no more 
 Streams down on wave and verdant shore ; 
 And clearly on the calm air swells 
 The twilight voice of distant bells. 
 From Ocean's bosom, white and thin, 
 The mists come slowly rolling in ; 
 Hills, woods, the river's rocky rim 
 Amidst the sea-like vapour swim, 
 While yonder lonely coast-light, set 
 Within its wave-washed minaret, 
 Half -quenched, a beamless star and pale, 
 Shines dimly through its cloudy veil ! " 
 
 At fifty-nine he wrote of the light-house vis- 
 ible from Hampton Beach : f 
 
 4 ' Just then the ocean seemed 
 To lift a half-faced moon in sight ; 
 And shoreward o'er the waters gleamed, 
 From crest to crest, a line of light. 
 
 " Silently for a space each eye 
 Upon that sudden glory turned : 
 Cool from the land the breeze blew by, 
 The tent-ropes flapped, the long beach churned 
 
 * Poetical Works, ii., 12. 
 t Ibid., iv., 281. 
 
164 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 Its waves to foam ; on either hand 
 Stretched, far as sight, the hills of sand ; 
 
 With bays of marsh, and capes of bush and tree, 
 The woods black shore-line loomed beyond the 
 meadowy sea." 
 
 And as he dealt with Nature here, for above 
 forty years simply looking and telling just what 
 he saw, so he dealt with everything from be- 
 ginning to end. For sixty-seven years his work 
 retains its chief characteristics with remarkably 
 slight alteration. 
 
 The most salient of these characteristics, as I 
 have said, are not the merits. The lines just 
 cited have an obvious air of commonplace. It 
 is deceptive. As one grows to know them, and 
 the hundreds of others for which we must let them 
 stand, one begins insensibly to realize that the 
 power of selective observation which underlies 
 them is of no common order. Commonplace, 
 however, they surely look ; and commonplace be- 
 yond all doubt are endless passages throughout 
 Whittier's verse. The man lacked the saving grace 
 of humour. In all the seven volumes I have found 
 but one passage that really amused me : this is 
 an account in ' ' Yankee Gypsies " * of how a 
 drunken vagabond broke into the Whittier home- 
 stead when the men were away, and made formal 
 love to the dismayed grandmother, who was born 
 
 * Prose Works, i., 339. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 1G5 
 
 Greenleaf. In Whittier's verse his lack of hu- 
 mour is sometimes startling. In a poem * where 
 a Yankee stage-driver describes the profoundly 
 gracious merits of a passenger who once made 
 him stop while she sketched a panoramic view, 
 occurs this stanza : 
 
 i4 4 As good as fair ; it seemed her joy 
 
 To comfort and to give ; 
 My poor, sick wife, and cripple boy, 
 
 Will bless her while they live ! ' 
 The tremor in the driver's tone 
 
 His manhood did not shame : 
 ' I dare say, sir, you may have known ' 
 
 He named a well-known name." 
 
 And in a poem f commemorating a railway con- 
 ductor who lost his life in an accident, come 
 these passages : 
 
 " Lo ! the ghastly lips of pain, 
 Dead to all thought save duty's, moved again : 
 4 Put out the signals for the other train ! ' 
 
 " No nobler utterance since the world began 
 From lips of saint or martyr ever ran, 
 Electric, through the sympathies of man. 
 
 44 Others he saved, himself he could not save. 
 
 44 Nay, the lost life was saved. He is not dead 
 Who in his record still the earth shall tread 
 With God's clear aureole shining round his head." 
 
 * 44 The Hill-Top ; " Poetical Works, iv., 58. 
 
 t 44 Conductor Bradley ; " Poetical Works, i., 359. 
 
166 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 The noble simplicity of this second passage 
 does something to atone for the appalling literal- 
 ness and the monstrous hyperbole of the first. 
 One cannot help wondering, though, whether any 
 other writer of real merit than Whittier would 
 ever have deliberately reprinted such passages 
 side by side. 
 
 His lack of humour, then, was serious. So, to 
 a less degree, was his lack of artistic feeling. 
 The remarkably narrow range of his metrical 
 forms, the astonishing errors of his rhymes are 
 familiar features of his verse. Another defect, 
 too, must have been apparent to whoever has 
 read even the passages already quoted. He had 
 little strength of creative imagination. His 
 poetical figures are almost always both obvious 
 and trite. A light-house resembles a minaret ; 
 the woods bordering a salt meadow are like the 
 shore bordering the actual sea ; a good man, when 
 dead, is provided with an aureole ; and so on. 
 The moralizing passages frequent throughout his 
 work display the same weakness. If in his lack 
 of humour he sinks below the commonplace, there 
 is nothing in the technical form of his work, or 
 in the creative power of his imagination, which 
 often rises above it. 
 
 VI 
 
 Yet as one grows to know the work of Whittier, 
 one grows insensibly to feel that essentially it is 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 167 
 
 far from commonplace, that it really deserves the 
 importance accorded it in contemporary litera- 
 ture, that no small part of it will probably out- 
 live the age to which it was addressed, and per- 
 haps even the work of any other contemporary 
 American. I have purposely touched on his 
 faults, and put them all together. Not to have 
 recognized them would have been deliberately 
 not to see him as he was. In growing to know 
 his work, these are what one first remarks. By 
 and by one finds them forgotten in a sense that 
 this poet, whom one has grown to know, has 
 in him lasting elements for which greatness 
 is perhaps no undue name. Throughout the 
 work of his sixty -seven years one feels with 
 growing admiration a constant simplicity of feel- 
 ing and of phrase, as pure as the country air he 
 loved to breathe. One feels, too, constant, un- 
 swerving purity of nature, of motive, of life. 
 And if one feel, too, the limits of thought and 
 of experience that made such purity and sim- 
 plicity possible throughout eighty-five years of 
 human existence, one is none the sadder for that. 
 What Whittier voiced was a life that could be 
 lived in our own New England through the 
 stormiest years of the Nineteenth Century. Lim- 
 ited though it were, that life throughout, in 
 thought, in feeling, in word, in act, was simple 
 and pure — commonplace, if you will, in more 
 aspects than one, but in one never commonplace : 
 
168 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 never for a moment was it ignoble. It has been 
 the fortune of New England, above other parts of 
 our country, to fix the standards and the ideals 
 that have hitherto prevailed throughout the con- 
 tinent of North America. There is courage in 
 the thought that even in our own time New 
 England could bring forth and sustain such noble 
 purity as his. 
 
 To feel how genuine, how pure, how noble the 
 man was, with all his limits, we must consider his 
 work in some detail. His own classification of 
 it, as we have seen, is confusing. His prose work, 
 once for all, is of little importance. It shows 
 him possessed of a quietly pleasant narrative style, 
 and of a controversial style which has considera- 
 ble force. It phrases little or nothing, however, 
 that is not equally phrased in his more favourite 
 vehicle of verse. We may best consider, then, 
 chiefly his verse : first, that part of it which most 
 reveals himself ; then, that which deals with his 
 own experience of Nature ; then, his romantic nar- 
 ratives ; and finally, the work which he himself 
 deemed most important — his life-long advocacy 
 of human freedom. 
 
 VII 
 
 If masterpiece be not an extravagant term for 
 any work of Whittiers, we may perhaps call 
 " Snow-Bound " * his masterpiece. At fifty-seven, 
 * Poetical Works, ii., 134-159. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEE 169 
 
 when almost all of his immediate family were 
 dead, he wrote in tenderly simple verse this rec- 
 ord of his earliest memories. " Flemish pictures 
 of old days," he calls it toward the end. The 
 phrase would be apt, but that it ignores what 
 seems to me the most notable trait of all. Flem- 
 ish pictures one thinks of as pictures of a peas- 
 antry. In " Snow-Bound " we have a country- 
 folk very rare in human history. No life could 
 be much simpler, much more remote from lux- 
 urious comfort or lazy ease than the life that is 
 pictured here; but for all their brave rusticity 
 these sturdy Yankees, toiling in summer on their 
 rocky farms, resting perforce in such winter 
 moments as buried them in almost Arctic snow- 
 drifts, are no peasants. What makes them what 
 they are is that they are still lords of themselves 
 and of the soil they till. Simple with all the 
 simplicity of hereditary farming folk, they are at 
 the same time gentle with the unconscious grace 
 of people who are aware of no earthly superiors. 
 This is the phase of human nature that Whittier 
 knew first and best. This is what he assumed 
 and believed that all mankind might be. "Very 
 surely, too, this is the stuff of which any sound 
 democracy must be made. So, of this stormy 
 evening, he writes : 
 
 " Shut in from all the world without, 
 We sat the clean- winged hearth about, 
 
170 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 Content to let the north-wind roar 
 In baffled rage at pane and door, 
 While the red logs before us beat 
 The frost-line back with tropic heat ; 
 And ever, when a louder blast 
 Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
 The merrier up its roaring draught 
 The great throat of the chimney laughed ; 
 The house-dog on his paws outspread 
 Laid to the lire his drowsy head, 
 The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
 A couch ant tiger's seemed to fall ; 
 And, for the winter fireside meet, 
 Between the andirons' straggling feet, 
 + The mug of cider * simmered slow, 
 The apples sputtered in a row, 
 And, close at hand, the basket stood 
 With nuts from brown October's wood." 
 
 This vivid simplicity of description is generally 
 recognized. Less obvious and less certainly 
 known is the occasional ultimate simplicity of 
 phrase which makes certain lines f in " Snow- 
 Bound" notable. Take this reference to those 
 that are no more : 
 
 " We turn the pages that they read, 
 Their written words we linger o'er, 
 But in the sun they cast no shade, 
 No voice is heard, no sign is made, 
 No step is on the conscious floor ! " 
 
 *It has generally been customary in New England, I 
 am told, not to deem cider spirituous, 
 t In the following passages the italics are mine. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 171 
 
 Again, take this couplet about the maiden aunt, 
 so familiar a figure in New England households : 
 
 " All unprofaned she held apart 
 The virgin fancies of the heart." 
 
 Again, these lines, for once imaginative : 
 
 14 How many a poor one's blessing went 
 With thee beneath the loiv green tent 
 Whose curtain never outward swings." 
 
 Again : 
 
 " But still I wait with ear and eye 
 For something gone that should be nigh, 
 A loss in all familiar tilings, 
 In flower that blooms, and bird that sings." 
 
 Again still : 
 
 " And while in life's late afternoon, 
 
 Where cool and long the shadows grow, 
 
 I walk to meet the night that soon 
 Shall shape and shadow overflow, 
 
 I cannot feel that thou art far." 
 
 It was from such memories as these, thus re- 
 membered, that he went to his work in this world. 
 The very first poem in his class of " Subjective 
 and Reminiscent " suggests, too, what rarely ap- 
 pears in his writing, that he had tender memories, 
 of a less domestic nature. For these verses, ad- 
 dressed at the age of twenty-three to a lady of 
 
172 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTLES 
 
 Calvinistic tendencies, from whom he seems to 
 have been long parted, contain this passage : * 
 
 " Ere this, thy quiet eye hath smiled 
 My picture of thy youth to see, 
 
 When, half a woman, half a child, 
 
 Thy very artlessness beguiled, 
 And folly'' s self seemed wise in thee." 
 
 His chief work, as we have seen, he believed to 
 be the work of reform. The personal effects of 
 such work he felt sensibly. At thirty-five he 
 wrote of himself for a lady's album : f 
 
 " A banished name from Fashion's sphere, 
 A lay unheard of Beauty's ear, 
 Forbid, disowned, — what do they here? " 
 
 At forty-five, in lines to his Namesake, J he draws 
 his own portrait : 
 
 " Some blamed him, some believed him good; 
 The truth lay doubtless 'twixt the two ; 
 He reconciled as best he could 
 Old faith and fancies new. 
 
 44 He loved his friends, forgave his foes ; 
 And, if his words were harsh at times, 
 He spared his fellow-men, — his blows 
 Fell only on their crimes. 
 
 * 4t Memories"; Poetical Works, ii., 96. 
 + 44 Ego" ; Poetical Works, ii., 102. 
 J Poetical Works, ii., 116. 
 
JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 173 
 
 "He loved the great and wise, but found 
 His human heart to all akin 
 Who met him on the common ground 
 Of suffering and sin. 
 
 " 111 served his tides of feeling strong 
 To turn the common mills of use ; 
 And, over restless wings of song, 
 His birthright garb hung loose ! 
 
 11 His eye was beauty's powerless slave, 
 And his the ear which discord pains ; 
 Few guessed beneath his aspect grave 
 What passions strove in chains. 
 
 11 He worshipped as his fathers did, 
 
 And kept the faith of childish days, 
 And, howsoever he strayed or slid, 
 He loved the good old ways — 
 
 "The simple tastes, the kindly traits, 
 The tranquil air, and gentle speech, 
 The silence of the soul that waits 
 For more than man to teach. 
 
 " And listening with his forehead bowed, 
 Heard the Divine compassion fill 
 The pauses of the trump and cloud 
 With whispers small and still." 
 
 However his actual belief may have been affected 
 by the immense growth of devout free thought 
 
174 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 about him, he never for a moment faltered in 
 faith that the inner light of the Friends is real. 
 On his sixty-fourth birthday, he wrote : * 
 
 " God is, and all is well ! 
 
 " His light shines on me from above, 
 His low voice speaks within, — 
 The patience of immortal love 
 Outwearying mortal sin." 
 
 And again, at seventy-eight : f 
 
 " By all that He requires of me, 
 I know what God himself must be. 
 
 " No picture to my aid I call, 
 
 I shape no image in my prayer ; 
 I only know in Him is all 
 
 Of life, light, beauty, everywhere." 
 
 In his last volume are some lines J which must 
 have been written about this time, concerning an 
 outdoor reception, where some young girls had 
 pleased him : 
 
 " But though I feel, with Solomon, 
 'Tis pleasant to behold the sun, 
 I would not if I could repeat 
 A life which still is good and sweet ; 
 
 * u My Birthday " ; Poetical Works, ii., 164. 
 
 t "Revelation " ; Poetical Works, ii., 343. 
 
 % u An Outdoor Reception " ; Poetical Works, iv., 297. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 175 
 
 I keep in age, as in my prime, 
 A not uncheerf ul step with time. 
 
 11 On easy terms with law and fate, 
 For what must be I calmly wait, 
 And trust the path I cannot see,- 
 That God is good sufficeth me." 
 
 VIII 
 
 With less quotation we could hardly have ap- 
 preciated the effect of Whit tier's personality that 
 emerges from these self- expressive poems. Super- 
 ficially commonplace in their simplicity, they 
 really express a character in which the simple vir- 
 tues of New England are so firmly rooted that by 
 very force of its unassuming strength it becomes 
 strongly individual. It is pervaded, however, 
 with true Yankee melancholy, for which, so far 
 as we have yet seen, there was no help but what 
 might be found in fervent religion and its accom- 
 panying duties. Throughout life, however, Whit- 
 tier had another resource. To quote once more 
 from the poem to his namesake, from which I 
 have already quoted much : 
 
 " Yet Heaven was kind, and here a bird 
 And there a flower beguiled his way ; 
 And, cool, in summer noons, he heard 
 The fountains plash and play. 
 
176 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 "On all his sad or restless moods 
 
 The patient peace of Nature stole ; 
 The quiet of the fields and woods 
 Sank deep into his soul." 
 
 In other words, Whittier found in the contem- 
 plation of New England landscape the most con- 
 stant, lasting pleasure of his life. 
 
 In his collected works, the poems he classifies 
 as u of Nature " fill only eighty-six pages. In re- 
 ality, poetry of Nature pervades his whole work. 
 Under this head, for example, may clearly fall 
 the first lines to the Merrimac which I quoted, * 
 and the passage concerning night-fall on Hamp- 
 ton Beach,f as well as a great part of "Snow- 
 Bound." Yet all these are classified elsewhere. 
 So are numberless passages like the following, 
 which to his mind is apparently either narrative 
 or legendary : $ 
 
 41 Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold 
 The tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, 
 Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, 
 And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers 
 Hang motionless upon their upright staves. 
 The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind, 
 Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, 
 Unfelt ; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf 
 With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams, 
 
 * Page 162. t Page 163. 
 
 % " Among the Hills ; " Poetical Works, i., 260. It is 
 fair to add that this extract is from the Prelude. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAE WHITTIEE 177 
 
 Confesses it. The locust by the wall 
 Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm. 
 A single hay -cart down the dusty road 
 Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep 
 On the load's top. Against the -neighboring hill, 
 Huddled along the stone-wall 1 s shady side, 
 The sheep show white, as if a snow-drift still 
 Defied the dog-star. Through the open door 
 A drowsy smell of flowers — gray heliotrope, 
 And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette — 
 Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends 
 To the prevailing symphony of peace." 
 
 Everywhere in Whittier's work one may find 
 such pictures. Quite to appreciate them, per- 
 haps, one must know the country they deal with. 
 The regions of New England that Whittier knew 
 have a character peculiarly their own. The rocky 
 coast between Cape Ann and the Piscataqua, 
 broken by long stretches of beach ; the marshes, 
 dotted with great stacks of salt hay, stretching 
 back to the woods or the farms of the solid land ; 
 the rolling country, with its elms and pines, its 
 gnarled apple-orchards, its gray wooden farm- 
 houses ; and almost within sight the lower spurs 
 of the New Hampshire hills, bristling with a 
 stubble of young woods, are unlike any other 
 country I know. Such subtile impressions as 
 mark the individuality of a region are unmis- 
 takable, but almost beyond the power of words to 
 phrase. Perhaps the trait which most distin- 
 guishes this country that Whittier so knew and 
 12 
 
178 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 loved, is a nearer approach to the suggestion of a 
 romantic past than is common in North America. 
 Far as the eye can reach or the foot travel, this 
 region has been the home of our own race for 
 above two centuries. It has its own traditions, 
 its own legends. It is humanized in a way al- 
 most European. Yet its legends and its tra- 
 ditions belong to a past not of civilized or me- 
 diaeval grandeur, but of savage wildness. And 
 its actual prosperity is past or passing — but for 
 great factories, swarming with foreign operatives, 
 or for summer visitors who come to idle in the 
 regions where the toil of the past generations 
 bred the race that has tamed a savage continent. 
 
 In these regions it was Whittier's lot to know 
 the last days of the olden time and the first of 
 the new. He loved the old days for their hardy 
 virtues ; his faith in human nature, always guided 
 by the inner light, allowed him no misgivings for 
 the future. In " Cobbler Keezar's Vision," * the 
 German wizard finds the Merrimac of the future, 
 with its scores of mill-wheels, and its white-walled 
 farm-houses, and its floating flags of freedom, 
 a lovelier sight than his memories of the vine- 
 clad Rhine, with its clowns and puppets, its flag- 
 ons and its despotism. Whittier found the Mer- 
 rimac lovelier himself — a task in which he was 
 probably helped by the narrow limits of his 
 
 * Poetical Works, i M 241. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 179 
 
 travels. He loved the Nature about him. He 
 found in it something which constantly reward- 
 ed and strengthened his life-long love. 
 
 Expressing this constant delight in the country 
 that his verses have made peculiarly his own, he 
 accomplished, half unwittingly, the work which in 
 all likelihood will ultimately be thought his best. 
 One may question, if one choose, the merit of his 
 personal and religious poems ; one may find his 
 romantic narratives trivial, and his passionate 
 advocacy of reform blind, dangerous, truculent ; 
 but one cannot deny that he has seen the land- 
 scapes of his own New England with an eye as 
 searching as it was loving, or that he has told 
 us what he saw so simply, so truly, so constantly 
 that, however time or chance may change in 
 years to come the face of the regions he knew so 
 well, the things he saw and loved may be seen 
 and loved throughout time by all who will but 
 read. The peculiar character of his poetry of 
 Nature is that it is not interpretative but faith- 
 fully representative. The examples of it already 
 quoted are enough to show this trait. There are 
 critics, then, and real lovers of poetry, who find 
 his work harshly literal, unimaginative, prosaic. 
 Such critics, I think, will not let themselves sym- 
 pathize with the exquisitely sympathetic sense of 
 fact which underlies his utter simplicity. When 
 he tried to interpret, he added nothing to his 
 work. When he was content to tell us what he 
 
180 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 saw, lie showed us constantly what many of lis 
 should never have seen for ourselves ; and this he 
 showed so truly that, as in the course of centuries 
 proves true of the art which the centuries pro- 
 nounce great, each one of us may in turn inter- 
 pret it anew for himself, just as each may in- 
 terpret for himself the life that passes before his 
 living eyes. 
 
 IX 
 
 In this constant strength of his instinctive 
 fidelity to Nature, Whittier distinguishes him- 
 self from almost all other American men of let- 
 ters. In most of our literature there is a quality 
 of consciousness. Sometimes this takes the form 
 of aggressive cleverness ; sometimes it deliber- 
 ately assumes the traditional dignity of culture ; 
 often — and perhaps most characteristically — it 
 half-consciously, half-unwittingly follows or re- 
 vives tradition. As somebody has extravagantly 
 said, American verse swarms with nightingales — 
 a bird unknown on this continent. For this state 
 of things there is a reason which these perhaps 
 imaginary nightingales typify. An American 
 would not be a true son of the fathers if he did 
 not instinctively love tradition. The emigrants 
 brought from the Old World fireside tales of 
 things and folks, of pomps and grandeurs, of 
 comedies and tragedies which their children could 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 181 
 
 never know in the flesh. And history has moved 
 fast with us, and society has been overturned 
 more than once. And Western children to-day 
 are listening to such stories of New England as 
 Yankee children of the early days heard about 
 Old England itself. This love of tradition, which 
 shows itself perhaps most markedly in the pas- 
 sion for genealogy which permeates New Eng- 
 land, is a prime trait of the true Yankee. Whit- 
 tier was as true a Yankee as ever lived. His first 
 published volume, we remember, was a volume 
 of " New England Legends." New England le- 
 gends he continued to write almost all his life ; 
 and, as his reading extended, he wrote many 
 other legends, too, of regions and races that he 
 had never known in the flesh. 
 
 Of the latter little need be said. They are 
 not profoundly characteristic. He got them 
 from books, and he put them into other books, 
 where their simple ballad-form makes them pleas- 
 antly readable. He generally managed to infuse 
 into them a certain amount of blameless moraliz- 
 ing which does not enhance their stimulating 
 quality. On the whole, we may class them with 
 that great body of innocuous American verse 
 which is permeated with the innocent unreality 
 of conscious culture. 
 
 The New England legends are of firmer stuff. 
 In his prose works one finds some of the material 
 that goes to make them. "Charms and Fairy 
 
182 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 Faith," and "Magicians and Witch Folk "* tell 
 of such actual traditions as were kept alive at the 
 snow-bound fireside. "Margaret Smith's Jour- 
 nal,"! while no permanent contribution to his- 
 torical fiction, is so true a picture of the Seven- 
 teenth Century in New England as to prove 
 beyond perad venture the solidity of Whittier's 
 study in local history. And verses like these J 
 show how well he knew the ancestral Puritans : 
 
 " With the memory of that morning by the summer sea I 
 
 blend 
 A wild and wondrous story, by the younger Mather 
 
 penned, 
 In that quaint Magnolia Christi, with all strange and 
 
 marvellous things, 
 Heaped up huge and undigested, like the chaos Ovid 
 
 sings. 
 
 " Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of 
 
 old, 
 Inward, grand with awe and reverence ; outward, mean 
 
 and coarse and cold ; 
 Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar 
 
 clay, 
 Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden 
 
 gray. " 
 
 His romantic and legendary narratives of New 
 England, then, have much of the true flavour of 
 
 * Prose Works, i., 385, 399. t Ibid., 9. 
 
 X " The Garrison of Cape Ann ; " Poetical Works, i., 166. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 183 
 
 the soil. He seems to have been haunted, how- 
 ever, by a lurking Yankee conscience which con- 
 stantly suggested doubts as to whether it is quite 
 right to tell a good story just for its own sake. 
 His introduction to the "Tent on the Beach,"* 
 the volume which contained, on the whole, his 
 most effective narrative poems, is distinctly apol- 
 ogetic. Here, at fifty-nine, he writes : 
 
 14 I would not sin in this half -playful strain, — 
 
 Too light perhaps for serious years, though born 
 
 Of the enforced leisure of slow pain, — 
 Against the pure ideal which has drawn 
 
 My feet to follow its far-shining gleam. " 
 
 As a result of this state of things, his narratives 
 of New England tradition generally deal with 
 such phases of it as have perceptible didactic sig- 
 nificance. Naturally, he represents the Quakers 
 heroically. A typical stanza is this, from the 
 4 ' King's Missive," written at seventy-two : f 
 
 4 4 ' Off with the knave's hat ! ' An angry hand 
 Smote down the offence ; but the wearer said, 
 With a quiet smile, ' By the king's command 
 I bear his message and stand in his stead. ' 
 In the Governor's hand a missive he laid 
 With the royal arms on its seal displayed, 
 
 * Poetical Works, iv., 227. 
 
 t Ibid., i., 383. We must remember that Quaker prin- 
 ciples forbade salutation by uncovering the head. 
 
184 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 And the proud man spake as he glanced thereat, 
 Uncovering, l Give Mr. Shattuck his hat.' " 
 
 Indubitably didactic in motive, too, are those 
 two narrative poems of his which are apparently 
 most familiar : " Maud Muller," * written at forty- 
 six ; and ' ' Skipper Ireson's Ride," f written at 
 forty-nine. The merits and the limits of his 
 work in this kind are patent in " Maud Muller." 
 The little poem is very simple, and in its conven- 
 tional sentimentality is very acceptable to the 
 great American public. In its presentation of a 
 Yankee judge in the character of a knightly hero 
 of romance, it is artlessly consonant with the so- 
 cial ideals of the Yankee country ; so, too, in its 
 tacit assumption that the good looks of a bare- 
 foot country beauty would really have been more 
 congenial life-companions in an eminent legal 
 career than the rich dower and the fashionable 
 tendencies of the lady whom the Judge ultimately 
 married in deference to 
 
 u his sisters proud and cold, 
 And his mother, vain of her rank and gold. " 
 
 If this sort of thing were canting, it would be 
 abominable. What saves it is that it rings true. 
 The man meant it seriously. We may smile at 
 his simplicity, if we like; but we can hardly 
 help loving him for it. Indeed, it is almost 
 
 * Poetical Works, i. , 148. t Ibid. , 1 74. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 185 
 
 enough to make us forgive that insidiously dread- 
 ful rhyme — 
 
 " For of all sad words of tongue or pen, 
 The saddest are these : 4 It might have been ! ' " 
 
 11 Skipper Ireson's Ride," on the other hand, 
 has much of the true ballad quality : 
 
 " Body of turkey, head of owl, 
 Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, 
 Feathered and ruffled in every part, 
 Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. 
 Scores of women, old and young, 
 Strong of muscle and glib of tongue, 
 Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, 
 Shouting and singing the shrill refrain : 
 4 Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 
 Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 
 By the women o' Morble'ead ! ' " 
 
 Such a subject as this stirred the Yankee 
 Quaker to the depths. A human being, deaf to 
 the still small voice, had acted devilishly. The 
 weakest creatures of his seaside home had ris- 
 en up against him ; and, not overstepping the 
 bounds of due punishment, had held him up last- 
 ingly to public scorn and detestation. It is per- 
 haps instructive, in connection with such reform- 
 ing enthusiasm as pervades this spirited ballad, 
 to learn from a note in the final edition * that, 
 twenty-two years after the original publication, 
 
 * Poetical Works, i., 174. 
 
186 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 Whittier was credibly informed that Ireson had 
 really been innocent. Against the skipper's will, 
 it appeared, his refractory crew had compelled 
 him to desert his sinking townsfolk ; and then, to 
 screen themselves, they had falsely accused him, 
 with the direful result commemorated by the poet. 
 His answer to his informant is characteristic : 
 
 " I have now no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ire- 
 son's ride is the correct one. My verse was founded solely 
 on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of my 
 early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead. 
 
 "I supposed the story to which it referred dated back at 
 least a century. I knew nothing of the participators, and 
 the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy, I am glad 
 for the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are 
 given in thy book. I certainly would not knowingly do 
 injustice to any one, dead or living." 
 
 And having thus, introductorily, done full justice 
 to the memory of poor Floyd Ireson, he proceeds 
 to reprint his ballad. 
 
 In touching these narrative and legendary poems 
 of Whittier, I have perhaps allowed myself to lay 
 undue emphasis on phases of them that are not 
 their best. One and all of them we may cer- 
 tainly call simple, earnest, artless, and beautifully 
 true to the native traditions and temper of New 
 England. In that last fact, however, which I have 
 tried to emphasize, lies their weakness as litera- 
 ture. The temper of New England is essentially 
 serious, always uncomfortable if it cannot defend 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 187 
 
 itself on firm ethical grounds. Thoroughly good 
 narrative, on the other hand, ought to be as free 
 from obvious ethical admixture as are the ex- 
 quisitely pure descriptions of New England land- 
 scape, which seem to me Whittier's most lasting 
 work. At times these narratives of his blend 
 almost inextricably with his poems of Nature ; 
 from the narratives may be selected extracts 
 which, in simple descriptive power, are as beau- 
 tiful as anything Whittier ever did. In general, 
 however, the impression that these narratives 
 make is one of saturation with the traditional eth- 
 ical ideals of New England, curiously combined 
 with that constant reliance on inner inspiration 
 toward the Right which is the fundamental tenet 
 of the Quaker faith. All men are really equal, he 
 assumes throughout, all ought to be really free ; 
 let them be free, and all they have to do is to fol- 
 low the inner light. And here these narrative 
 poems touch close, on the other hand, the works 
 which Whittier deemed his best — his works for 
 reform. A passage like this, which closes the 
 <c King's Missive,"* might have belonged to 
 either class : 
 
 u The Puritan spirit perishing not, 
 
 To Concord's yeomen the signal sent, 
 And spake in the voice of the cannon-shot 
 That severed the chains of a continent. 
 
 * Poetical Works, i., 386. 
 
188 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 With its gentler message of peace and good-will 
 The thought of the Quaker is living still, 
 And the freedom of soul he prophesied 
 Is gospel and law where the martyrs died." 
 
 From beginning to end, Whittier was an hon- 
 est champion of human freedom. We have seen 
 enough of the peculiar religious faith from which 
 he never swerved, to understand how inevitable 
 such a position must have seemed to him. We 
 have seen enough of his own almost childlike 
 simplicity and honesty of temperament to under- 
 stand the whole-souled, unhesitating vigour with 
 which he threw himself into the task to which he 
 felt himself called. To every human being, he be- 
 lieved, God has given the inner light. Leave hu- 
 man beings free to act, then, as God meant them 
 to act, and God's will shall be done. The voice of 
 the people is literally the voice of God ; it is the 
 concrete, numerical expression of the whisperings 
 of the still small voice. Whether the human form 
 to which the voice whispers be European, Asiatic, 
 African, or American, makes no manner of differ- 
 ence. Difference of race is merely a variety of 
 complexion ; a majority of negroes is as divinely 
 true a force as a majority of Puritan farmers. 
 Are not all alike made in God's image, all alike 
 human, all alike accessible to the inner light and 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 189 
 
 the still small voice which can lead only toward 
 the Truth ? Admit such premises — and Whit tier 
 never for a moment doubted them — and there is 
 room for only one conclusion : Whatever opposes 
 any form of human freedom is against God's will. 
 Not to proclaim this truth — not to assert it in 
 every word and deed — is to be what Whittier 
 could never have been, a deliberate coward. 
 
 In the course of his life he advocated more re- 
 forms than one. His conduct in regard to the 
 abolition of slavery, however, is typical of his 
 conduct throughout. It will serve our purpose to 
 consider that alone. 
 
 Quite to appreciate the courage implied in the 
 public assertion of anti- slavery opinions sixty 
 years ago demands to-day no small effort of im- 
 agination. It was far greater than that which 
 would be shown to-day by an ambitious aspirant 
 for public honours who should honestly and openly 
 question the wisdom of the ultimate abolition of 
 slavery. To-day such an opinion, which was the 
 dominant opinion in 1830, could result in no 
 worse harm than political ridicule or neglect. 
 It would hardly diminish the number or the cor- 
 diality of one's social invitations. In 1830 an 
 Abolitionist was held little less than treasonable. 
 Social ostracism was almost certainly his due. 
 His very person was not safe from public attack ; 
 and the blind hostility of the mob — which for 
 some years to come was far too noisy to detect the 
 
190 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 whisperings of any still small voice — was con- 
 firmed by that profoundly honest belief in the 
 public duty of maintaining existing institutions 
 which has always characterized the better classes 
 in any community of British origin. Perhaps the 
 closest analogy which we can imagine to-day to 
 the Abolitionists of 1833 would be a body of 
 earnest, God-fearing men who should be con- 
 vinced that God bade them cry out against the 
 institution of marriage. 
 
 In the face of such a state of public opinion as 
 this, Whittier never for a moment faltered. He 
 knew he was right. The one curse spared him 
 was the curse of even momentary doubt. Shy in 
 temperament, loving most of all the simple seclu- 
 sion of his native country, he never hesitated to 
 speak and to act with all his power for the cause 
 of human freedom. That enfranchisement, in the 
 broadest sense, could possibly result only in a 
 new phase of evil, he never dreamt to the end. 
 He was a man. Negroes, Indians, Chinamen, 
 Polish Jews, are men, too. Let all have equal 
 rights, all an equal voice, all be equal in the sight 
 of man as they are eternally equal in the sight of 
 God. 
 
 What he actually did we have seen in our 
 brief record of his life. That brief record has been 
 enough to show that the dreadful fact of slavery 
 was a fact of which he had little direct knowl- 
 edge. He was at Washington in 1845. Apart 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 191 
 
 from that his knowledge of actual slaves must 
 have been derived chiefly from fugitives, whose 
 versions of their experience must wholly have 
 confirmed his most extreme views. But what 
 mattered that? When one knows a thing evil, 
 one need not study it in detail to know that right 
 and justice demand its extinction. From such 
 fanatical, heroic logic there is no escape. We 
 have seen, I said, what his actual conduct was. 
 For thirty years and more his words supported, 
 defended, urged on such lines of conduct. Oc- 
 casionally, in his own phrase,* 
 
 "The cant of party, school, and sect, 
 Provoked at times his honest scorn, 
 And Folly, in its gray respect, 
 He tossed on satire's horn." 
 
 As we have seen, though, he lacked humour or 
 wit to make his satire really powerful or tren- 
 chant. His words that really did their work, the 
 words that still tell the story of the great public 
 movement in which he was a foremost figure, 
 were those simple, passionate utterances that came 
 straight from his heart. 
 
 There is room here to quote only a few. But 
 a very few should suffice to give some taste of the 
 quality of all. 
 
 At twenty-six he wrote, for the meeting of 
 
 * Poetical Works, ii., 120. 
 
192 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 the Anti-Slavery Society in New York, a hymn.* 
 Here are a few stanzas : 
 
 14 When from each temple of the free, 
 A nation's voice ascends to Heaven, 
 Most Holy Father ! unto Thee 
 
 May not our humble prayer be given ? 
 
 44 Thy children all, though hue and form 
 Are varied in Thine own good will, 
 With Thy own holy breathings warm, 
 And fashioned in Thine image still. 
 
 44 For broken heart, and clouded mind, 
 Whereon no human mercies fall ; 
 Oh, be Thy gracious love inclined, 
 Who, as a Father, pitiest all ! 
 
 41 And grant, O Father ! that the time 
 Of Earth's deliverance may be near, 
 When every land and tongue and clime 
 The message of Thy love shall hear." 
 
 At twenty-eight, when resolutions had been 
 adopted in Congress forbidding the postal cir- 
 culation of anti-slavery literature, he wrote a 
 44 Summons "f to the North. Here is a touch of 
 its quality : 
 
 44 Methinks from all her wild, green mountains ; 
 From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie ; 
 From her blue rivers and her welling fountains, 
 And clear, cold sky ; 
 
 * Poetical Works, iii., 29. t Ibid., 40. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 193 
 
 " From her rough coast and isles, which hungry Ocean 
 Gnaws with his surges ; from the fisher's skiff, 
 With white sail swaying to the billows' motion 
 Round rock and cliff ; 
 
 u From the free fireside of her unbought farmer ; 
 From her free laborer at his loom and wheel ; 
 From the brown smith- shop, where, beneath the hammer, 
 Rings the red steel ; 
 
 u From each and all, if God hath not forsaken 
 Our land, and left us to an evil choice, 
 Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken 
 A People's voice. 
 
 " Startling and stern ! the Northern winds shall bear it 
 Over Potomac's to St. Mary's wave ; 
 And buried Freedom shall awake to hear it 
 Within her grave." 
 
 At thirty-five he wrote the passionate address, 
 " Massachusetts to Virginia,"* concerning the 
 seizure in Boston of one Latimer, a fugitive 
 slave. To appreciate its stirring vigour one 
 should read it all. But here is a bit of it : 
 
 " From Norfolk's ancient villages, from Plymouth's rocky 
 bound 
 To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her 
 round ; 
 
 " From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm 
 repose 
 Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua 
 flows, 
 
 * Poetical Works, iii., 80. 
 13 
 
194 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
 
 To where Wachuset's wintry blasts the mountain larches 
 
 stir, 
 Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of ' God save 
 
 Latimer ! ' 
 
 "And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea 
 
 spray ; 
 And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett 
 
 Bay! 
 Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill, 
 And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from 
 
 Holyoke Hill. 
 
 u The voice of Massachusetts ! Of her free sons and daugh- 
 ters, 
 
 Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters ! 
 
 Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall 
 stand ? 
 
 No fetters in the Bay State ! No slave upon her land ! " 
 
 At forty-nine, when the elections of 1856 had 
 shown the gains of the Free -Soil party, he wrote 
 this : * 
 
 " For God be praised ! New England 
 
 Takes once more her ancient place ; 
 Again the Pilgrim's banner 
 Leads the vanguard of the race. 
 
 " The Northern hills are blazing, 
 The Northern skies are bright ; 
 The fair young West is turning 
 Her forehead to the light ! 
 
 * " A Song; " Poetical Works, iii., 192. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEK 195 
 
 1 ' Push every outpost nearer, 
 
 Press hard the hostile towers ! 
 Another Balaklava, 
 And the Malakoff is ours ! " 
 
 The tide was turning. Four years later came 
 the war. Here is a bit of his first war poem : * 
 
 " We see not, know not ; all our way- 
 Is night — with Thee alone is day : 
 From out the torrent's troubled drift, 
 Above the storm our prayers we lift, 
 Thy will be done ! 
 
 " Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, 
 The anthem of the destinies ! 
 The minor of Thy loftier strain, 
 Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, 
 Thy will be done ! " 
 
 "Barbara Frietchie"f every one knows— per- 
 haps the most instantly popular ballad of the 
 war. " Laus Deo ! " J in celebration of the con- 
 stitutional abolition of slavery, is not so familiar. 
 Every word of that should be read, too. Here 
 
 are a few : 
 
 "It is done ! 
 Clang of bell and roar of gun 
 Send the tidings up and down. 
 How the belfries rock and reel ! 
 How the great guns, peal on peal, 
 Fling the joy from town to town ! 
 
 * "Thy Will be Done ; " Poetical Works, hi., 217. 
 t Poetical Works, iii., 245. % Ibid., 254. 
 
196 JOHN GBEENLEAE WHITTIER 
 
 "Did we dare, 
 
 In our agony of prayer, 
 Ask for more than He has done ? 
 
 When was ever His right hand 
 
 Over any time or land 
 Strefcched as now beneath the sun ? 
 
 " Ring and swing, 
 Bells of joy ! On morning's wing 
 
 Send the song of praise abroad ! 
 With a sound of broken chains 
 Tell the nations that He reigns, 
 
 Who alone is Lord and God ! " 
 
 These few extracts must suffice to represent 
 the most earnest work he did for above thirty 
 years. With more intensity, with genuine pas- 
 sion, they show the same sincerity, the same sim- 
 plicity that we have felt in him throughout. 
 And he knew the rare happiness of complete con- 
 quest. Beginning with all the world against him, 
 he found himself for the last twenty years of his 
 life in a world where all were against his foes. 
 
 XI 
 
 In view of this, we may well pause to consider 
 two extracts from his writings — one in prose and 
 one in verse — without which our impression of 
 him would be seriously incomplete. They show 
 that he possessed the power which is perhaps the 
 test of manly greatness — the power of serenely 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 197 
 
 recognizing the worth of men from whom for 
 years he honestly and passionately differed. 
 
 The first is from a letter of regret that he could 
 not attend a meeting in memory of Edward Ev- 
 erett : * 
 
 " When the grave closed over him who added new lustre 
 to the old and honoured name of Quincy, all eyes instinc- 
 tively turned to Edward Everett as the last of that vener- 
 ated class of patriotic civilians who, outliving all dissent 
 and jealousy and party prejudice, held their reputation by 
 the secure tenure of the universal appreciation of its 
 worth as a common treasure of the republic. It is not for 
 me to pronounce his eulogy. . . . My secluded country 
 life has afforded me few opportunities of personal inter- 
 course with him, while my pronounced radicalism on the 
 great question which has divided popular feeling rendered 
 our political paths widely divergent. Both of us early 
 saw the danger which threatened the country. . . . 
 But while he believed in the possibility of averting it 
 by concession and compromise, I, on the contrary, as 
 firmly believed that such a course could only strengthen 
 and confirm what I regarded as a gigantic conspiracy 
 against the rights and liberties, the union and the life, 
 of the nation. . . . 
 
 *' Recent events have certainly not tended to change 
 this belief on my part; but in looking over the past, 
 while I see little or nothing to retract in the matter of 
 opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that through the 
 very intensity of my convictions I may have done injus- 
 tice to the motives of those with whom I differed. As 
 respects Edward Everett, it seems to me that only within 
 the last four years 1 1 have truly known him." 
 
 * Prose Works, ii. , 274. Written in 1865. 
 
 t These, we must remember, were the years of the war. 
 
198 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 Fifteen years before lie wrote this letter, be 
 had written concerning "Webster's Seventh-of- 
 March Speech the scathing invective which he 
 named " Ichabod : " * 
 
 ' ' So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn 
 Which once he wore ! 
 The glory from his grey hairs gone 
 For evermore ! 
 
 k ' Let not the land once proud of him 
 Insult him now, 
 Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, 
 Dishonoured brow. 
 
 u But let its humbled sons, instead, 
 From sea to lake, 
 A long lament, as for the dead, 
 In sadness make. 
 
 Cl Then pay the reverence of old days 
 To his dead fame ; 
 Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
 And hide the shame ! " 
 
 Fifteen years after Edward Everett's death, and 
 thirty years after this "Ichabod" had seen the 
 light, Whittier wrote of Webster once more. In 
 his collected works he departs for once from 
 chronology, and puts beside " Ichabod " his final 
 poem on Webster — the " Lost Occasion : " f 
 
 * Poetical Works, iv., 62. t Ibid., 63. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 199 
 
 " Thou shouldst have lived to feel below 
 Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow ; 
 The late- sprung mine that underlaid 
 Thy sad concessions vainly made. 
 Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter's wall 
 The star-flag of the Union fall, 
 And armed rebellion pressing on 
 The broken lines of Washington ! 
 No stronger voice than thine had then 
 Called out the utmost might of men, 
 To make the Union's charter free 
 And strengthen law by liberty. 
 
 Wise men and strong we did not lack ; 
 But still, with memory turning back, 
 In the dark hours we thought of thee, 
 And thy lone grave beside the sea. 
 
 But, where thy native mountains bare 
 
 Their foreheads to diviner air, 
 
 Fit emblem of enduring fame, 
 
 One lofty summit keeps thy name. 
 
 For thee the cosmic forces did 
 
 The rearing of that pyramid, 
 
 The prescient ages shaping with 
 
 Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith, 
 
 Sunrise and sunset lay thereon 
 
 With hands of light their benison, 
 
 The stars of midnight pause to set 
 
 Their jewels in its coronet. 
 
 And evermore that mountain mass 
 
 Seems climbing from the shadowy pass 
 
 To light, as if to manifest 
 
 Thy nobler self, thy life at best ! " 
 
200 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 Is it too much to see in these lines not an as- 
 sent but an approach to that view of the Seven th- 
 of -March Speech which some, of the younger 
 generation, are beginning to take? that it may 
 have been not what men thought it at the time — 
 a blind sacrifice of principle to self ; but rather 
 the most nobly patriotic act of a nobly patriotic 
 career — a deliberate sacrifice of self to the Union 
 which without such sacrifice was not yet strong 
 enough to survive ? 
 
 XII 
 
 But this is not the place for political specula- 
 tion. I have tried to show Whitfcier as he was, 
 extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in 
 malice. Above most men, he was one who can 
 stand the test. His faults are patent. One can- 
 not read him long without forgetting them in 
 admiration of his nobly simple merits. Before 
 considering his work in detail, I suggested that 
 his chance of survival is better than that of any 
 other contemporary American man of letters. 
 Our consideration of his work has perhaps shown 
 why. In the first place, he has recorded in a way 
 as yet unapproached the homely beauties of New 
 England Nature. In the second, he accepted with 
 all his heart the traditional democratic principles 
 of equality and freedom which have always ani- 
 mated the people of New England. These prin- 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTLES 201 
 
 ciples he uttered in words whose simplicity goes 
 straight to the hearts of the whole American peo- 
 ple. Whether these principles be true or false is 
 no concern of ours here. If our republic is to live, 
 they are the principles which must prevail. And 
 in the verses of Whittier they are preserved to 
 guide posterity, in the words of one who was in- 
 capable of falsehood. 
 
VII 
 MR. LOWELL AS A TEACHER 
 
 [Published in Scribfier's Magazine, November, 1891.] 
 
ME. LOWELL AS A TEACHER 
 
 As a student in Harvard College during the 
 years 1876 and 1877— the last two years of Mr. 
 Lowell's regular teaching there — I had the fort- 
 une to be his pupil. My memories of him, in a 
 character not generally known, are perhaps worth 
 recording. 
 
 II 
 
 In my Junior year, a lecture of Professor Nor- 
 ton's excited in me a wish to read Dante under 
 Mr. Lowell. I did not know a word of Italian, 
 though; and I was firmly resolved to waste no 
 more time on elementary grammar. Without 
 much hope of a favourable reception, then, I ap- 
 plied for admission to the course. Mr. Lowell re- 
 ceived me in one of the small recitation -rooms in 
 the upper story of University Hall. My first im- 
 pression was that he was surprisingly hirsute, and 
 a little eccentric in aspect. He wore a double- 
 breasted sack-coat, by no means new. In his neck- 
 tie, which was tied in a sailor-knot, was a pin— an 
 article of adornment at that time recently con- 
 
206 LOWELL 
 
 denmed by an authority which some of us were 
 then disposed to accept as gospel. On his desk 
 lay a silk hat not lately brushed ; and nobody, I 
 then held, had any business to wear a silk hat un- 
 less he wore coat-tails, too. 
 
 My second impression, which was fixed the 
 moment he looked at me, and which has never 
 altered, was that I had never met anybody quite 
 so quizzical. Naturally I was not exactly at ease ; 
 and Mr. Lowell appeared to take a repressed but 
 boyish delight in keeping me a bit uneasy. He 
 listened to my application kindly, though ; and 
 finally, with a gesture that I remember as very 
 like a stretch, told me to come in to the course 
 and see what I could do with Dante. 
 
 To that time my experience of academic teach- 
 ing had led me to the belief that the only way to 
 study a classic text in any language was to scru- 
 tinize every syllable with a care undisturbed by 
 consideration of any more of the context than was 
 grammatically related to it. Any real reading I 
 had done, I had had to do without a teacher. Mr. 
 Lowell never gave us less than a canto to read ; 
 and often gave us two or three. He never, from 
 the beginning, bothered us with a particle of lin- 
 guistic irrelevance. Here before us was a great 
 poem — a lasting expression of what human life 
 had meant to a human being, dead and gone 
 these five centuries. Let us try, as best we 
 might, to see what life had meant to this man ; 
 
LOWELL 207 
 
 let us see what relation his experience, great and 
 small, bore to ours ; and, now and then, let us 
 pause for a moment to notice how wonderfully 
 beautiful his expression of this experience was. 
 Let us read, as sympathetically as we could make 
 ourselves read, the words of one who was as much 
 a man as we ; only vastly greater in his knowledge 
 of wisdom and of beauty. That was the spirit of 
 Ml*. Lowell's teaching. It opened to some of us 
 a new world. In a month, I could read Dante 
 better than I ever learned to read Greek, or Latin, 
 or German. 
 
 His method of teaching was all his own. The 
 class was small— not above ten or a dozen; and 
 he generally began by making each student trans- 
 late a few lines, interrupting now and then with 
 suggestions of the poetic value of passages which 
 were being rendered in a style too exasperatingly 
 prosaic. Now and again, some word or some pas- 
 sage would suggest to him a line of thought — 
 sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically 
 comical — that it would never have suggested to 
 anyone else. And he would lean back in his 
 chair, and talk away across country till he felt 
 like stopping ; or he would thrust his hands into 
 the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and 
 pace the end of the room with his heavy laced 
 boots, and look at nothing in particular, and dis- 
 course of things in general. We gave up note- 
 books in a week. Our business was not to cram 
 
208 LOWELL 
 
 lifeless detail, but to absorb as much as we might 
 of the spirit of his exuberant literary vitality. 
 And through it all he was always a quiz ; you 
 never knew what he was going to do or to say 
 next. One whimsical digression I have always 
 remembered, chiefly for the amiable atrocity of 
 the pun. Some mention of wings had been made 
 in the text, whereupon Mr. Lowell observed that 
 he had always had a liking for wings : he had 
 lately observed that some were being added to the 
 ugliest house in Cambridge, and he cherished 
 hopes that they might fly away with it. I remem- 
 ber, too, how one tremendous passage in the 
 ' ' Inferno " started him off in a disquisition con- 
 cerning canker-worms, and other less mentionable 
 — if more diverting — vermin. And then, all of a 
 sudden, he soared up into the clouds, and pounced 
 down on the text again, and asked the next man 
 to translate. You could not always be sure when 
 he was in earnest ; but there was never a moment 
 when he let you forget that you were a human be- 
 ing in a human world, and that Dante had been 
 one, too. One or two of us, among ourselves, 
 nicknamed him "sweet wag;" I like the name 
 still. 
 
 After a month or two, he found that we were 
 not advancing fast enough. So he fell into a way 
 of making us read one canto to him, and then 
 reading the next to us. If we wished to interrupt 
 him, we were as free to do so as he was to inter- 
 
LOWELL 209 
 
 rupt us. There was one man in the class, I re- 
 member, who liked to read out-of-the-way books, 
 and who used to break in on Mr. Lowell's trans- 
 lation with questions about Gabriel Harvey and 
 other such worthies, rather humorously copying 
 Mr. Lowell's own irrelevancies ; but he could 
 never get hold of anything so out of the way that 
 Mr. Lowell had not read it, or at least could not 
 talk about it as easily as if he had read it often. 
 So, in a single college year, we read through the 
 Divine Comedy, and the Vita Nuova ; and dipped 
 into the Convito and the lesser writings of Dante. 
 And more than one of us learned to love them al- 
 ways. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This class-room work, however, was to some of 
 us the least important part of Mr. Lowell's teach- 
 ing. Almost as soon as the year began, he an- 
 nounced that he should always be at home one 
 evening in the week, and glad to see us. Several 
 of us took him at his word, and even took his 
 word to signify more than the good man ever 
 meant it to. For if the evening he set aside for 
 us proved inconvenient, we made no scruple of 
 going to Elmwood at other times; and if Mr. 
 Lowell was at home — as he generally was in those 
 years— we were always admitted. 
 
 It is those evenings with him in his library that 
 one remembers best. There was always a wood- 
 14 
 
210 LOWELL 
 
 fire burning above a bed of ashes which had been 
 accumulating for years. He would generally sit at 
 one side of the fire, within easy reach of the tongs, 
 which he often plied as he talked. What is more, 
 when some of us grew more familiar and ventured 
 to ply the tongs ourselves, he would not interfere. 
 He would always be rather carelessly dressed : a 
 loose smoking-jacket, I think, and often slippers. 
 And he would smoke a pipe. He would generally 
 begin the evening by offering one a cigar. My 
 impression, I remember, was that the cigar was 
 always the same, and for some months I did not 
 dare accept it. Finally, I summoned courage to 
 smoke it, and found it very dry and the wrapper 
 cracked; which went far to confirm my impres- 
 sion. But one did not care about that sort of 
 thing. His pipe fairly started, Mr. Lowell would 
 begin to talk, in his own quizzical way — at one 
 moment beautifully in earnest, at the next so 
 whimsical that you could not quite make out what 
 he meant — about whatever came into his head. 
 It might be what he had just been reading ; he 
 had generally just been reading some bit of old 
 literature — once I remember finding him deep in 
 a narrative in the Apocrypha, which he went on 
 reading aloud. It might be the news of the day, 
 it might be reminiscence of any kind. All we 
 had to do was to sit and listen, which was far bet- 
 ter than any other way of spending an evening 
 known to me in those davs. To talk to him was 
 
LOWELL 211 
 
 hard. A man to whom people have liked to lis- 
 ten these thirty years rarely remains a good list- 
 ener to things like undergraduate chatter, which 
 are not worth serious attention. But when he did 
 listen, and when he talked, too, he did so — no 
 matter how quizzically — with a certain politeness 
 that at the time seemed to me, and in memory re- 
 mains, a typical example of the signification of 
 the word urbane,' and all this in smoking- jacket 
 and slippers, by lamp-light, before a flickering 
 wood-fire whose ashes were crumbling down into a 
 great bed which had grown from hundreds of such 
 fires before. 
 
 The human friendliness of those evenings, who- 
 ever knew them cannot forget. To some of us it 
 gave a new meaning to everything he touched, in 
 teaching or in talk. Here was a man who faced 
 great things and little undismayed; who found 
 in literature not something gravely mysterious, 
 but only the best record that human beings have 
 made of human life ; who found, too, in human 
 life — old and new T — not something to be disdained 
 w 7 ith the serene contempt of smug scholarship, 
 but the everlasting material from which literature 
 and art are made. Here was a man, you grew to 
 feel, who knew literature, and knew the world, 
 and knew you, too ; ready and willing, in a 
 friendly way, to speak the word of cordial intro- 
 duction. There came from those evenings a cer- 
 tain feeling of personal affection for him, very 
 
212 LOWELL 
 
 rare in any student's experience of even the most 
 faithful teacher. 
 
 Yet, faithful as his work was in spirit, he hated 
 the details of it, and sometimes treated them with 
 a whimsical disregard that whoever did not ap- 
 preciate how thoroughly it put them where they 
 belonged might have deemed cynically indiffer- 
 ent. I remember an example of this in connec- 
 tion with an examination — I believe the first he 
 gave us. There are few things less favourable to 
 literary culture than written examinations ; they 
 are almost unmitigated, if quite necessary, evils. 
 Perhaps from unwillingness to degrade the text 
 of Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we 
 had read the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, 
 a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage 
 from Massimo d* Azeglio, which we had three 
 hours to translate. This task we performed as 
 best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came 
 of our marks. At last one of the class, who was 
 not quite at ease concerning his academic stand- 
 ing, ventured, at the close of a recitation, to ask 
 if Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. 
 Lowell looked at the youth very gravely, and in- 
 quired what he really thought his work deserved. 
 The student rather diffidently said that he hoped 
 it was worth sixty per cent. " You may take it," 
 said Mr. Lowell ; " and I shan't have the bother 
 of reading your book." 
 
 I remember two or three instances of the curi- 
 
LOWELL 213 
 
 ous friendliness which by and by sprang up be- 
 tween him and his pupils. At that time the stu- 
 dents were publishing a paper which contained 
 likenesses of the faculty, imitated — at the longest 
 of intervals — from Vanity Fair. When a por- 
 trait of Mr. Lowell appeared, with his sack-coat, 
 and his silk hat, and his heavy boots all duly em- 
 phasised, somebody ventured to ask him how he 
 liked it. To which he replied that he had been 
 grieved to observe that the artist had allowed a 
 handkerchief to protrude from his breast-pocket ; 
 but had been consoled by the fact that the artist 
 had kindly permitted him to wear plaid trousers 
 —an innocent fancy of his to which Mrs. Lowell 
 strongly objected. 
 
 Another, very different, example of his way of 
 treating us appeared one evening, when I went 
 alone to call at Elmwood, and found him alone in 
 his library. I had never seen him so stern in as- 
 pect, so absent in manner. In a moment he told 
 me why. He had just heard of the death of a 
 dear friend. Of course I rose to go, but he de- 
 tained me; it would do him good, he said, to 
 talk. I have always wished that I had written 
 down what I remembered of the talk that fol- 
 lowed, for it still seems to me that I have never 
 heard another so memorable ; but all that re- 
 mains with me now is the very beginning. 
 There is one blessed comfort, he said, that comes 
 with death ; then, at lastj we c&n begin 5 with cer- 
 
214: LOWELL 
 
 tainty of no awaking disenchantment, to idealise 
 those we love. It is the dead, unbodied Beatrice 
 who lives for ever in the lines of Dante. We can 
 watch among our friends the growth of their own 
 Beatrices that such as have had the happiness to 
 know them make amid the agonies of bereave- 
 ment, each for himself -. This friend of his own, 
 just dead, was already gathering to herself the un- 
 mixed glories of the ideality which would gather 
 about her as long as those who loved her should 
 live to know it. — And so he talked on, rambling 
 far and wide, not forgetting now and then the 
 whimsicality without which his talk would not 
 have been hiSj nor ever forgetting either the deep 
 gravity of the mood in which I had found him. 
 That talk was such a poem as I have never read. 
 When at last I left him, he took my hand more 
 warmly than ever before. It had done him good, 
 that silent greeting said, to talk, to have any 
 listener. 
 
 The feeling of personal regard which came from 
 such intercourse as this was different from any- 
 thing else I knew as a student. You felt, at last, 
 in spite of all his quizzical whimsicality, a sen- 
 timent of intimacy, of confidence, of familiarity 
 which no one else excited. You felt instinctively 
 that such a feeling must be mutual. Mr. Lowell 
 was a celebrated man, of course ; a serious figure 
 in American literature. But at that moment, 
 though he was still in the full vigour of life, his 
 
LOWELL 215 
 
 work seemed pretty well over* You thought of 
 him as a kind old friend, resting contemplatively 
 before his wood-fire, thinking and talking of all 
 manner of human things ; and waiting, very 
 serenely, in sack-coat and slippers, for the far-off 
 end of an ideal life of letters. It was just at the 
 end of my second year of study with him — a year 
 in which he had taught me almost as much over 
 the text of Eoland and other dreary old French 
 poems as he had taught over Dante himself — 
 that the news came that he was going to Spain. 
 
 IV 
 
 I heard it, I think, on our Class-Day. The 
 class had distinguished itself by an internal 
 squabble which had prevented the election of 
 Class-Day officers, and consequently the usual 
 oration and poem, and so on. By way of peace- 
 making, perhaps, Mr. Lowell had invited us all 
 to an open-air breakfast at Elmwood, at the hour 
 when formal ceremonies usually make the begin- 
 ning of Class-Day at Harvard so remote fr^m 
 amusing. Pew of the men knew him, even by 
 sight; but all found him so cordial a host that 
 for the moment our animosities were half for- 
 gotten. I asked him if the report of his mission 
 were true ; and he said it was. I remember won- 
 dering how this friendly, careless, whimsical, hu- 
 man man of letters, who had seemed so perma- 
 
216 LOWELL 
 
 nently settled in his arm-chair, would manage the 
 rather serious business of diplomatic life ; won- 
 dering, with true boyish impudence, whether he 
 would be up to it. After that day I did not see 
 him until his final return from the mission to 
 England. 
 
 All the time I had felt as if such intimate per- 
 sonal feeling as he had aroused and permitted 
 must have been mutual. When at last I met him 
 again, it was a slight shock to find that he had 
 quite forgotten my face, and almost forgotten 
 my name. The truth was, I began at last to see, 
 that throughout those old days he had known 
 better than any of us what dull, fruitless beings 
 we college boys were ; but that his business 
 had been to teach us all he could, and he had 
 known that he, at least, could teach best by show- 
 ing himself to us as he was. All this kindness, 
 all this friendliness, all this humanity was real ; 
 all the culture he had striven to impart to us was 
 as precious as we had ever thought it. We our- 
 selves, though, were mere passing figures, not 
 worth very serious personal memory; and Mr. 
 Lowell valued people at their true worth, and was 
 beautifully free from that clerical kind of humbug 
 which presses your hand after an interval of years, 
 and asks feelingly for the dear children it has 
 never bothered its wits about. And the fact that 
 all he had been to us and all he had done for us 
 had been his honest, earnest work as a teacher, 
 
LOWELL 217 
 
 and not his spontaneous conduct as a human be- 
 ing, makes it seem now all the more admirable. 
 I have often shuddered to think how we must 
 have bored him ; I have never ceased more and 
 more to admire the faithful persistency with 
 which he inspired us. 
 
 The last time I spoke to him was on his seven- 
 tieth birthday. A public dinner had been given 
 him, and in the speeches his public life and 
 works had been rehearsed from beginning to end ; 
 but not a word had been said of his teaching. 
 After dinner I told him that this omission had 
 meant much to me, that to me he would always 
 be chiefly the most inspiring teacher I had ever 
 had. His face lighted with the old quizzical 
 smile, and I could not tell quite how much he 
 was in earnest when, with all the old urbanity, he 
 answered : " I'm glad you said that. I've been 
 wondering if I hadn't wasted half my life." 
 
' »»»»»»>? LIST OF VOLUMES OF 
 ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, ART, 
 MUSIC, ETC., PUBLISHED BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743-745 
 BROAD WA Y, NE W YORK.f $tf&<<&<$<<% 
 
 HENRY ADAMS. 
 
 Historical Essays. (i2mo, $2.00.) 
 
 Contents : Primitive Rights of Women — Captaine John 
 Smith — Harvard College, 1 786-1 787 — Napoleon I. at 
 St. Domingo — The Bank of England Restriction — The 
 Declaration of Paris, 1861 — The Legal Tender Act — The 
 New York Gold Conspiracy — The Session, 1869- 1870. 
 
 " Mr. Adams is thorough in research, exact in statement, 
 judicial in tone, broad of view, picturesque and impressive in 
 description, nervous and expressive in style. His character- 
 izations are terse, pointed, clear." — New York Tribune. 
 
 SIR EDWIN ARNOLD. 
 
 Japonica. Illustrated by Robert Blum. (Large 
 8vo ; $3.00.) 
 
 "Artistic and handsome. In theme, style, illustrations and 
 manufacture, it will appeal to every refined taste, presenting a 
 most thoughtful and graceful study of the fascinating people among 
 whom the author spent a year." — Cincinnati Enquirer. 
 
 AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 
 
 Obiter Dicta, First Series. (i6mo, $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Carlyle — On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr, 
 Browning's Poetry — Truth Hunting — Actors — A Rogue^ 
 Memoirs — The Via Media — Falstaff. 
 
 " Some admirably written essays, amusing and brilliant. The 
 book is the book of a highly cultivated man, with a real gift of 
 expression, a good deal of humor, a happy fancy." — Spectator. 
 
 Obiter Dicta, Second Series. (i6mo, $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Milton — Pope — Johnson — Burke — The Muse 
 of History — Lamb — Emerson — The Office of Literature — 
 Worn Out Types — Cambridge and the Poets — Book-buying. 
 
 "Neat, apposite, clever, full of quaint allusions, happy 
 thoughts, and apt, unfamiliar quotations." — Boston Advertiser. 
 
2 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 
 
 Res Judicata: Papers and Essays. (i6mo, 
 $1.00.) 
 
 " Whether Mr. Birrell writes of Richardson or Barrow, Gibbon 
 or Newman, he shows himself equally intelligent and appreciative. 
 His wit and audacity are backed by sterling sense and fine taste." 
 
 — Chicago Tribune. 
 
 Prof. H. H. BOYESEN. 
 
 Essays on German Literature. (i2mo, 
 $1.50.) 
 
 "Prof. Boyesen is cultivated without being pedantic, and 
 serious without being dull. The literature he analyzes and ex- 
 pounds is the literature that has international value." 
 
 — Boston Beacon, 
 
 W. C. BROWNELL. 
 
 French Traits. (i2mo, $1.50.) 
 
 Contents : The Social Instinct — Morality — Intelligence 
 — Sense and Sentiment — Manners— Women — The Art In- 
 stinct — The Provincial Spirit — Democracy — New York after 
 Paris. 
 
 " These chapters form a volume of criticism which is sympa- 
 thetic, intelligent, acute, and contains a great amount of whole- 
 some suggestion." — Boston Advertiser. 
 
 French Art. (121110, $1.25.) 
 
 " Brought to the judgment in this cool and scientific spirit, the 
 whole course of French painting and sculpture, as shown by the 
 masters pre-eminent in each era, is reviewed by a critic as certain 
 of his criticisms as he is capable in forming them." 
 
 -—Springfield Republican. 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
 Lectures on the History of Literature. 
 (Now printed for the first time. 12010, $1.00.) 
 
 Summary of Contents: Literature in General — Language, 
 Tradition — The Greeks — The Heroic Ages — Horner — /Es- 
 chylusto Socrates — The Romans — Middle Ages — Christianity 
 — The Crusades — Dante — The Spaniards — Chivalry — Cer- 
 vantes — The Germans — Luther — The Origin, Work and 
 Destiny of the English — Shakespeare — Milton — Swift — Hume 
 — Wertherism — The French Revolution — Gcethe and his 
 Works. 
 
 " Every intelligent American reader will instantly wish to read 
 this book through, and many will say that it is the clearest and 
 wisest and most genuine book that Carlyle ever produced. We 
 could have no work from his hand which embodies more clearly 
 and emphatically his literary opinions than his rapid and graphic 
 survey of the great writers and great literary epochs of the world/' 
 
 —Boston Herald. 
 
SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESS A YS % 3 
 
 ALICE MORSE EARLE. 
 
 The Sabbath in Puritan New England. 
 (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 "She writes with a keen sense of humor, and out of the full 
 stores of adequate knowledge and plentiful explorations among old 
 pamphlets, letters, sermons, and that treasury, not yet run dry in 
 New England, family traditions. The book is as sympathetic as 
 it is bright and humorous." — The Independent. 
 
 China Collecting in America. (With 75 
 illustrations. Sq. 8vo, $3.00.) 
 
 11 Her book is full of entertainment, not only for the china 
 hunter and collector, but for all who are interested in early times 
 and manufactures, in the old houses and country people, in the 
 history of America, and the habits and customs of the past." 
 
 — New York Observer. 
 
 Customs and Fashions in Old New England. 
 (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 Mrs. Earle describes the daily life and habits, the festivals, 
 larder, taverns, modes of travel, peculiarities of courtship, 
 marriages, funerals, the utensils and furniture of the Puritan 
 farm and home, with the same wit, sympathetic feeling, and 
 copious information so marked in her former works. 
 
 HENRY T. FINCK. 
 
 Chopin, and Other Musical Essays. (i2mo, 
 $1.50.) 
 
 44 Written from abundant knowledge ; enlivened by anecdote 
 and touches of enthusiasm, suggestive, stimulating." 
 
 — Boston Post. 
 
 JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 
 
 The Spanish Story of the Armada, and 
 Other Essays. (i2mo, $1.50.) 
 
 Contents: The Spanish Story of the Armada — Antonio 
 Perez: An Unsolved Historical Riddle — Saint Teresa — The 
 Templars — The Norway Fjords — Norway Once More. 
 
 Short Studies on Great Subjects. (Half 
 leather, i2mo, 4 vols., each $1.50.) 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 Vol. 1. The Science of History — Times of Erasmus and 
 Luther — The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish 
 Character — The Philosophy of Catholicism — A Plea for the 
 Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties — Criticism and the 
 
4 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 
 
 Gospel History — The Book of job — Spinoza — The Dissolu- 
 tion of Monasteries — England's Forgotten Worthies — Homer 
 — The Lives of the Saints — Representative Man — Reynard 
 the Fox — The Cat's Pilgrimage — Fables — Parable of the 
 Bread-fruit Tree — Compensation. 
 
 Vol. II. Calvinism — A Bishop of the Twelfth Century 
 — Father Newman on "The Grammar of Assent" — Con- 
 ditions and Prospects of Protestantism — England and Her 
 Colonies — A Fortnight in Kerry— Reciprocal Duties in State 
 and Subject — The Merchant and His Wife — On Progress — 
 The Colonies Once More — Education — England's War — 
 The Eastern Question — Scientific Method Applied to History. 
 
 Vol. III. Annals of an English Abbey — Revival of 
 Romanism — Sea Studies — Society in Italy in the Last Days 
 of the Roman Republic — Lucian — Divus Caesar — On the 
 Uses of a Landed Gentry — Party Politics — Leaves from a 
 South African Journal. 
 
 Vol. IV. The Oxford Counter — Reformation — Life and 
 Times of Thomas Becket — Origen and Celsus— A Cagliostro 
 of the Second Century — Cheneys and the House of Russell 
 — A Siding at a Railway Station. 
 
 "All the papers here collected are marked by the qualities 
 which have made Mr. Froude the most popular of living 
 English historians — by skill in argumentative and rhetorical ex- 
 position, by felicities of diction, by contagious earnestness, and by 
 the rare power of fusing the results of research in the imagination 
 so as to produce a picture of the past at once exact and vivid. ** 
 
 — N. Y. Sun. 
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. 
 
 Gleanings of Past Years, 1843- 1879. (7 
 vols., i6mo, each $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Vol. I., The Throne and the Prince Consort. 
 The Cabinet and Constitution — Vol. II., Personal and 
 Literary — Vol. III., Historical and Speculative — Vol. IV., 
 Foreign — Vol. V. and VI., Ecclesiastical — Vol. VII., Miscel- 
 laneous. 
 
 "Not only do these essays cover a long period of time, they 
 also exhibit a very wide range of intellectual effort. Perhaps their 
 most striking feature is the breadth of genuine intellectual sym- 
 pathy, of which they afford such abundant evidence." — Nation. 
 
SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 5 
 
 ROBERT GRANT. 
 
 The Reflections of a Married Man. (i2mo, 
 cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.) 
 
 "Nothing is more entertaining than to have one's familiar ex- 
 periences take objective form; and few experiences are more fami- 
 liar than those which Mr. Grant here chronicles for us. Altogether 
 Mr. Grant has given us a capital little book, which should easily 
 strike up literary comradeship with 'The Reveries of a Bache- 
 lor.' " — Boston Transcript. 
 
 Opinions of a Philosopher. (Illustrated by 
 Reinhart and Smedley. i2mo, cloth, $1.00.) 
 
 A sequel to the author's " Reflections," relating the ex- 
 periences through middle life of Fred and Josephine, with 
 equal charm and humor. 
 
 E. J. HARDY. 
 
 The Business of Life: A Book for Everyone. 
 — How To Be Happy Though Married: Being 
 a Handbook to Marriage — The Five Talents 
 of Woman : A Book for Girls and Women — 
 Manners Makyth Man — The Sunny Days of 
 Youth: A Book for Boys and Young Men. 
 (i2mo, each $1.25.) 
 
 " The author has a large store of apposite quotations and anec- 
 dotes from which he draws with a lavish hand, and he has the art 
 of brightening his pages with a constant play of humor that makes 
 what he says uniformly entertaining.'* — Boston Advertiser. 
 
 W. E. HENLEY. 
 
 Views and Reviews. Essays in Appreciation : 
 Literature. (i2mo, $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Dickens — Thackeray — Disraeli — Dumas — 
 Meredith — Byron — Hugo — Heine — Arnold — Rabelais — 
 Shakespeare — Sidney — Walton — Banville — Berlioz — Long- 
 fellow — Balzac — Hood — Lever — Congreve — TolstoT — Field- 
 ing, etc., etc. 
 
 "Interesting, original, keen and felicitous. His criticism will be 
 found suggestive, cultivated, independent.'* — N. Y. Tribune. 
 
6 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 
 
 J. G. HOLLAND. 
 
 Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single 
 and Married — Gold-Foil, Hammered from 
 Popular Proverbs — Lessons in Life: A Series 
 of - Familiar Essays — Concerning the Jones 
 Family — Plain Talks on Familiar Subiects — 
 Every-Day Topics, First Series, Second Series. 
 (Small i2mo, each, $1.25.) 
 
 "Dr. Holland will always find a congenial audience in the 
 homes of culture and refinement. He does not affect the play of 
 the darker and fiercer passions, but delights in the sweet images 
 that cluster around the domestic hearth. He cherishes a strong 
 fellow-feeling with the pure and tranquil life in the modest social 
 circles of the American people, and has thus won his way to the 
 companionship of many friendly hearts." — N, V, Tribune, 
 
 WILLIAM RALPH INGE. 
 
 Society in Rome under the C/esars. (i2mo, 
 $1.25.) 
 
 " Every page is brimful of interest. The picture of life in Rome 
 under the Csesars are graphic and thoroughly intelligible/' 
 
 — Chicago Herald. 
 
 ANDREW LANG. 
 
 Essays in Little. (Portrait, ismo, $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Alexandre Dumas — Mr. Stevenson's Works 
 — Thomas Haynes Bayly — Theodore de Banville — Homer 
 and the Study of Greek — The Last Fashionable Novel — 
 Thackeray — Dickens — Adventures of Buccaneers — The Sagas 
 — Kingsley — Lever — Poems of Sir Walter Scott — Bunyan — 
 Letter to a Young Journalist — Kipling's Stories. 
 
 "One of the most entertaining and bracing of books. It ought 
 to win every vote and please every class of readers." 
 
 — Spectator (London). 
 
 Letters to Dead Authors. (i6mo, $1.00. 
 Cameo Edition, with etched portrait and four 
 new letters, $1.25.) 
 
 Letters to Thackeray — Dickens — Herodotus — Pope — 
 Rabelais — Jane Austen — Isaak Walton — Dumas — Theocritus 
 — Pope — Scott — Shelley — Moliere — Burns, etc., etc. 
 
 "The book is one of the luxuries of the literary taste. It is 
 meant for the exquisite palate, and is prepared by one of the 
 ' knowing ' kind. It is an astonishing little volume." 
 
 — N. Y. Evening Post. 
 
SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSA VS. 7 
 
 SIDNEY LANIER. 
 
 The English Novel and the Principle of 
 its Development. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 
 
 " The critical and analytical portions of his work are always in 
 high key, suggestive, brilliant, rather dogmatic and not free from 
 caprice. . . But when all these abatements are made, the 
 lectures remain lofty in tone and full of original inspiration." 
 
 — Independent. 
 
 The Science of English Verse. (Crown 8vo, 
 $2.00.) 
 
 "It contains much sound practical advice to the makers of 
 verse. The work shows extensive reading and a refined taste 
 both in poetry and in music." — Nation. 
 
 EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN. 
 
 Windfalls of Observation. Gathered for 
 the Edification of the Young and the Solace of 
 Others. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 A collection of brief essays on topics of perennial interest, 
 personal in quality, literary in treatment, shrewd, and dryly 
 humorous, having a decided " Roundabout," though 
 thoroughly American, flavor. 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
 
 French Dramatists of the 19TH Century. 
 (New Edition, 8vo, $1.50.) 
 
 Contents : Chronology — The Romantic Movement — 
 Hugo — Dumas — Scribe — Augier — Dumas fits — Sardou — 
 Feuillet — Labiche — Meilhac and Halevy — Zola and the 
 Tendencies of French Drama — A Ten Years' Retrospect : 
 1881-1891. 
 
 " Mr. Matthews writes with authority of the French Stage. 
 Probably no other writer of English has a larger acquaintance 
 with the subject than he. His style is easy and graceful, and the 
 book is delightful reading." — N. Y, Times. 
 
 The Theatres of Paris. (Illustrated. i6mo, 
 $1.25.) 
 
 " An interesting, gossipy, yet instructive little book." 
 
 —Academy (London). 
 
8 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS, 
 
 DONALD G. MITCHELL. 
 
 English Lands, Letters and Kings. Vol. I., 
 From Celt to Tudor. Vol. II., From Elizabeth 
 to Anne. (i2mo, each $1.50.) 
 
 '* Crisp, sparkling, delicate, these brief talks about authors, 
 great and small, about kings and queens, schoolmasters and 
 people, whet the taste for more. In ' Ik Marvel's ' racy, sweet, 
 delightful prose, we seethe benefits of English literature assimi- 
 lated. " — Literary World. 
 
 Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the 
 Heart — Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons. 
 (Cameo Edition, with etching, i6mo, each 
 $1.25.) 
 
 " Beautiful examples of the art (of book making). The vein of 
 sentiment in the text is one of which youth never tires." 
 
 — The Nation. 
 
 Seven Stories with Basement and Attic — 
 Wet Days at Edgewood, with Old Farmers, 
 Old Gardeners and Old Pastorals — Bound 
 Together, A Sheaf of Papers— Out-of-Town 
 Palaces, with Hints for their Improvement — 
 My Farm of Edgewood, A Country Book. 
 (i2mo, each $1.25.) 
 
 " No American writer since the days of Washington Irving uses 
 the English language as does ' Ik Marvel.' His books are as 
 natural as spring flowers, and as refreshing as summer rains." 
 
 — Boston Transcript. 
 
 GEORGE MOORE. 
 
 Impressions and Opinions. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 " Both instructive and entertaining . . . still more interest- 
 ing is the problem of an English Theatre Libre, of which Mr. 
 Moore is an ingenious advocate. The four concluding essays, 
 which treat of art and artists, are all excellent.'" 
 
 — Saturday Review (London.) 
 
 Modern Painting. (i2mo, $2.00.) 
 
 The courage, independence, originality, and raciness with 
 which Mr. Moore expressed his opinions on matters relating 
 to the stage and to literature in his " Impressions and 
 Opinions " are equally characteristic of these essays on art 
 topics. 
 
SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 9 
 
 E. MAX MULLER. 
 
 Chips from a German Workshop. Vol. I., 
 Essays on the Science of Religion — Vol. II., 
 Essays on Mythology, Tradition and Customs 
 — Vol. III., Essays on Literature, Biographies 
 and Antiquities — Vol. IV., Comparative Phi- 
 lology, Mythology, etc. — Vol. V., On Free- 
 dom, etc. (5 vols., Crown 8vo, each $2.00.) 
 
 " These books afford no end of interesting extracts ; ' chips ' by 
 the cord, that are full both to the intellect and the imagination ; 
 but we may refer the curious reader to the volumes themselves. 
 He will find in them a body of combined entertainment and in- 
 struction such as has hardly ever been brought together in so 
 compact a form." — N. Y, Evening Post, 
 
 Biographical Essays. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 
 
 " Max Miiller is the leading authority of the world in Hindoo 
 literature, and his volume on Oriental reformers will be acceptable 
 to scholars and literary people of all classes." — Chicago Tribune. 
 
 THOMAS NELSON PAGE. 
 
 The Old South, Essays Social and Poli- 
 tical. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 "They afford delightful glimpses of aspects and conditions of 
 Southern life which few at the North have ever appreciated fully." 
 
 — Congregationalist . 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 
 
 My Note-Book : Fragmentary Studies in 
 Theology and Subjects Adjacent thereto (i2mo, 
 $1.50) — Men and Books ; or, Studies in Homi- 
 letics (8vo, $2.00) — My Portfolio (i2mo, 
 $1.50)— My Study, and Other Essays (i2mo, 
 $1.50). 
 
 " His great and varied learning, his wide outlook, his profound 
 sympathy with concrete men and women, the lucidity and beauty 
 of his style, and the fertility of his thought, will secure for him a 
 place among the great men of American Congregationalism." 
 
 — N. Y. Tribune. 
 
io SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 
 
 NOAH PORTER, LL.D. 
 
 Books and Reading. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 
 
 "It is distinguished by all the rare acumen, discriminating; 
 taste and extensive literary knowledge of the author. The chief 
 departments of literature are reviewed in detail."— JV. Y. Times. 
 
 PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D. 
 
 Literature and Poetry. (With portrait. 
 8vo, $3.00.) 
 
 "There is a great amount of erudition in the collection, but the 
 style is so simple and direct that the reader does not realize that 
 he is following the travels of a close scholar through many learned 
 volumes in many different languages." — Chautauquan. 
 
 EDMOND SCHERER. 
 
 Essays on English Literature. (With por- 
 trait. i2mo, $1.50.) 
 
 " M. Scherer had a number of great qualities, mental and 
 moral, which rendered him a critic of English literature, in par- 
 ticular, whose views and opinions have not only novelty and 
 freshness, but illumination and instruction for English readers, 
 accustomed to conventional estimates from the English stand- 
 point." — Literary World. 
 
 WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, D.D. 
 
 Literary Essays. (8vo, $2.50.) 
 
 "They bear the marks of the author's scholarship, dignity and 
 polish of style, and profound and severe convictions of truth and 
 righteousness as the basis of culture as well as character." 
 
 — Chicago Interior. 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 Across the Plains, with Other Essays and 
 Memories. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 Contents : Across the Plains : Leaves from the Note- 
 book of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco 
 — The Old Pacific Capital — Fontainebleau : Village Com- 
 munities of Painters — Epilogue to an Inland Voyage — Con- 
 tribution to the History of Life — Education of an Engineer — 
 The Lantern Bearers— Dreams— Beggars — Letter to a Young 
 Man Proposing to Embrace a Literary Life — A Christmas 
 Sermon. 
 
SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. n 
 
 Memories and Portraits. (i2mo, $1.00.) 
 
 Contents : Some College iMemories — A College Magazine 
 — An Old Scotch Gardener — Memoirs of an Islet — Thomas 
 Stevenson — Talk and Talkers — The Character of Dogs — A 
 Gossip on a Novel of Dumas — A Gossip on Romance — A 
 Humble Remonstrance. 
 
 Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers. 
 (i2mo, $1.00 ; Cameo Edition, with etched 
 portrait, $1.25.) 
 
 Familiar Studies of Men and Books. (i2mo, 
 $1.25.) 
 
 " If there are among our readers any lovers of good books to 
 whom Mr. Stevenson is still a stranger, we may advise them to 
 make his acquaintance through either of these collections of essays. 
 The papers are full of the rare individual charm which gives a 
 distinction to the lightest products of his art and fancy. He is a 
 notable writer of good English, who combines in a manner 
 altogether his own the flexibility, freedom, quickness and sug- 
 gestiveness of contemporary fashions with a grace, dignity, and 
 high-breeding that belong rather to the past." — N. V. Tribune. 
 
 CHARLES W. STODDARD. 
 
 South Sea Idyls. (i2mo, $1.50.) 
 
 " Neither Loti nor Stevenson has expressed from tropical life 
 the luscious, fruity delicacy, or the rich, wine-like bouquet of these 
 sketches." — The Independent. 
 
 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. 
 
 Under the Evening Lamp. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 " A very charming volume of gossipy criticism on such poets 
 as Burns, Motherwell and Hartley Coleridge." — Public Opinion, 
 
 HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D. 
 
 The Poetry of Tennyson. {New and en- 
 larged Edition, with portrait. i2mo, $2.00.) 
 
 Contents : Tennyson's First Flight — The Palace of Art : 
 Milton and Tennyson — Two Splendid Failures — The Idylls 
 of the King— The Historic Triology — The Bible in Tennyson 
 
12 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 
 
 — Fruit from an Old Tree — On the Study of Tennyson — 
 Chronology — List of Biblical Quotations. 
 
 "The two new chapters and the additional chronological mat- 
 ter have greatly enriched the work." — T. B. Aldrich. 
 
 JOHN C. VAN DYKE. 
 
 Art for Art's Sake. (With 24 illustrations. 
 i2mo, $1.50.) 
 
 "The clear setting forth of the facts and theories of painting 
 has its advantages in these days when there is so much art analysis 
 that nobody can understand. This essayist deals with the subtle- 
 ties, but in so doing he illuminates them. Moreover he is very 
 interesting. His book 'reads itself,' as the phrase is." 
 
 — New York Sun. 
 
 BARRETT WENDELL. 
 
 Stelligeri, and Other Essays Concerning 
 America. (i2mo, $1.25.) 
 
 A series of interesting and suggestive papers on historical 
 and literary themes, thoroughly American in spirit. 
 
 WOODROW WILSON. 
 
 An Old Master, and Other Political Es- 
 says. (i2mo, $1.00.) 
 
 These essays, revealing a fine literary taste, deal in a very 
 human and popular way with some important political prob- 
 lems. 
 
 j®iSIP THE FOREGOING VOLUMES OF 
 ESSAYS ARE FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS, OR 
 WILL BE SENT POSTPAID, ON RECEIPT OF PRICE, 
 BY THE PUBLISHERS, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
 743-745 BROAD WA Y, NEW YORK'^^^^ 
 


 
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