LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
AN 
 
 OUTLINE SKETCH 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY A. BEERS, 
 
 // 
 
 Frofcssor of English in Yale College. 
 
 Author of "An Outline Sketch of English Literature," "A 
 
 Century of American Literature," "■ Life of N. P. 
 
 Willis," "The Th/^nkless JNIuse," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 
 
 C. L. S. C. Department, 
 
 805 Broadway. 
 1887. 
 
The required books of the C. L S. C. are reeom- 
 mended by a Council of six. It must, however, be 
 understood that reoemmendation does not involve 
 an approval by the Council, or by any member of 
 it, of every principle or doctrine contained in the 
 book recommended. 
 
 Copyright 1887, by Phillips & Hunt, 805 Broadway, New York. 
 

 u 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This little volume is intended as a com- 
 panion to the Outline Sketch of English Lit- 
 erature^ published last year for the Chautau- 
 qua Circle. In writing it I have followed the 
 same plan, aiming to present the subject in a 
 sort of continuous essay rather than in the 
 form of a "■ primer" or elementary manual. I 
 have not undertaken to describe or even to 
 mention every American author or book of 
 importance, but only those which seemed to 
 me of most significance. Nevertheless I be- 
 lieve that the sketch contains enough detail 
 to make it of some use as a guide-book to our 
 literature. Though meant to be mainly a his- 
 tory of American belles-lettres it makes some 
 mention of historical and political writings, 
 
4 * Preface. 
 
 but hardly any of philosophical, scientific, and 
 technical works. 
 
 A chronological rather than a topical order 
 has been followed, although the fact that our 
 best literature is of recent growth has made it 
 impossible to adhere as closely to a chrono- 
 logical plan as in the English sketch. In the 
 reading courses appended to the different 
 chapters I have named a few of the most im- 
 portant authorities in American literary his- 
 tory, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and 
 
 Richardson, 
 
 Henry A. Beers. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Colonial Period, 1607-1765 • 7 
 
 II. The Revolutionary Period, 1765-1S15 51 
 
 III. The Era of National Expansion, 1815-1S37. 86 
 
 ^y. The Concord Writers, 1837-1S61 120 
 
 V. The Cambridge Scholars, 1837-1861 158 
 
 VI. Literature in the Cities, 1837-1861 197 
 
 VII. Literature Since 1S61 240 
 
 Index 280 
 
OUTLINE SKETCH 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE COLONIAL PERIOD. 
 
 1607-1765. 
 
 The writings of our colonial era have a much 
 greater importance as history than as literature. 
 It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual 
 vigor of the English colonists in America by the 
 books that they wrote; those " stern men with em- 
 pires in their brains " had more pressing work to 
 do than the making of books. The first settlers, 
 indeed, were brought face to face with strange 
 and exciting conditions — the sea, the wilderness, 
 the Indians, the flora and fauna of a new world — 
 things which seem stimulating to the imagination, 
 and incidents and experiences which might have 
 lent themselves easily to poetry or romance. Of 
 all these they wrote back to England reports which 
 were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon 
 the whole, hardly rise into the region of literature. 
 " New England," said Hawthorne, *' was then in a 
 
8 American Literature. 
 
 state incomparably more picturesque than at pres- 
 ent." But to a contemporary that old New En- 
 gland of the seventeenth century doubtless seemed 
 any thing but picturesque, filled with grim, hard, 
 worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia 
 and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and 
 starvation, constantly threatened«by Indian wars, 
 and troubled by quarrels among themselves and 
 fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles 
 between the royal governors and the House of 
 Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the theolog- 
 ical squabbles in New England, which fill our 
 colonial records, are petty and wearisome to read 
 of. At least, they would be so did we not bear in 
 mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts 
 were slowly educating the little communities which 
 had hardly as yet secured a foothold on the edge 
 of the raw continent. 
 
 Even a century and a half after the Jamestown 
 and Plymouth settlements, when the American 
 plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and 
 commerce was building up large towns, and there 
 were wealth and generous living and fine society, 
 the " good old colony days when we lived under 
 the king," had yielded little in the way of litera- 
 ture that is of any permanent interest. There 
 would seem to be something in the relation of a 
 colony to the mother country which dooms the 
 thought and art of the former to a hopeless pro- 
 vincialism. Canada and Australia are great prov- 
 inces, wealthier and more populous than the thir- 
 
The Colonial Period. 9 
 
 teen colonies at the time of their separation from 
 England. They have cilies whose inhabitants 
 number hundreds of thousands, well equipped 
 universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public 
 buildings, all the outward appliances of an ad- 
 vanced civiUzation; and yet what have Canada 
 and Australia contributed to British literature ? 
 
 American literature had no infancy. That en- 
 gaging naivete and that heroic rudeness which give 
 a charm to the early popular tales and songs of 
 Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. 
 Instead of emerging from the twilight of the past, 
 the first American writings were produced under 
 the garish noon of a modern and learned age. 
 Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark 
 of a colonial literature. The poets, in particular, 
 instead of finding a challenge to their imagination 
 in the new life about them, are apt to go on imi- 
 tating the cast off literary fashions of the mother 
 country. America was settled by Englishmen who 
 were contemporary with the greatest names in En- 
 glish literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, 
 nine years before Shakspeare's death, and the hero 
 of that enterprize. Captain John Smith, may not 
 improbably have been a personal acquaintance of 
 the great dramatist. " They have acted my fatal 
 tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many cir- 
 cumstances in The Tempest were doubtless sug- 
 gested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on " the 
 still vext Bermoothes," as described by William 
 Strachey in his True Reportory of the Wrack and 
 
10 American Literature. 
 
 Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at James- 
 town, and published at London in 15 lo. Shak- 
 spere's contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet 
 of the Polyolbion, addressed a spirited valedictory 
 ode to the three shiploads of " brave, heroic 
 minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to col- 
 onize Virginia ; an ode which endSd with the 
 prophecy of a future American literature: 
 
 " And as there plenty grows ■ 
 
 Of laurel every-where, — 
 
 Apollo's sacred tree — 
 
 You it may see 
 
 A poet's brows 
 
 To crown, that may sing there." 
 
 Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author 
 of the Civil Wars, had also prophesied in a similar 
 strain: 
 
 " And who in time knows whither we may vent 
 
 The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . 
 
 What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
 May come refined with accents that are ours." 
 
 It needed but a slight movement in the balances 
 of fate, and Walter Raleigh might have been reck- 
 oned among the poets of iVmerica. He was one 
 of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, 
 and he made voyages in person to Newfoundland 
 and Guiana. And more unlikely things have hap- 
 pened than that when John Milton left Cambridge 
 in 1632, he should have been tempted to follow 
 Winthrop and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, 
 
The Colonial Period. ii 
 
 who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane, 
 the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend — 
 
 " Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old" — 
 
 came over in 1635, and was for a short time Gov- 
 ernor of Massachusetts. These are idle specula- 
 tions, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver Crom- 
 well was on the point of embarking for America 
 when he was prevented by the king's officers, we 
 may, for the nonce, " let our frail thoughts dally 
 with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a 
 chance Paradise Lost missed being written in Bos- 
 ton. But, as a rule, the members of the literary 
 guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the 
 feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, 
 a state of society which America has only begun 
 to reach during the present century. 
 
 Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were 
 the " two great distributing centers of the English 
 race." The men who colonized the country be- 
 tween the Capes of Virginia w^ere not drawn, to 
 any large extent, from the literary or bookish 
 classes in the Old Country. Many of the first 
 settlers were gentlemen — too many, Captain Smith 
 thought, for the good of the plantation. Some 
 among these were men of worth and spirit, " of 
 good means and great parentage." Such was, for 
 example, George Percy, a younger brother of the 
 Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the orig- 
 inal adventurers, and the author of A Discoiuse of 
 the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia^ 
 
12 American Literature. 
 
 which contains a graphic narrative of the fever 
 and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But 
 many of these gentlemen were idlers, " unruly gal- 
 lants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill 
 destinies;" dissipated younger sons, soldiers of 
 fortune, who came over after the gold which was 
 supposed to abound in the new country, and who 
 spent their time in playing bowls and drinking at 
 the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With 
 these was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, 
 indented servants, and the off-scourings of the 
 London streets, fruit of press gangs and jail deliv- 
 eries, sent over to " work in the plantations." 
 
 Nor were the conditions of life afterward in 
 Virginia very favorable to literary growth. The 
 planters lived isolated on great estates, which had 
 water fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesa- 
 peake. There the tobacco, the chief staple of the 
 country, was loaded directly upon the trading ves- 
 sels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the 
 plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited 
 occasionally by a distant neighbor, the Virginia 
 country gentleman lived a free and careless life. 
 He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and 
 cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and 
 the planters met each other mainly on occasion of 
 a county court or the assembling of the Burgesses. 
 The court-house was the nucleus of social and po- 
 litical life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in 
 New England. In such a state of society schools 
 were necessarily few, and popular education did 
 
The Colonial Period. 13 
 
 not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the 
 royal governor of the colony from 1641 to 1677, 
 said, in 1670, " I thank God there are no free 
 schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have 
 these hundred years." In the matter of printing, 
 this pious wish was well-nigh realized. The first 
 press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon 
 suppressed, and found no successor until the year 
 1729. From that date until some ten years before 
 the Revolution one printing-press answered the 
 needs of Virginia, and this was under official con- 
 trol. The earliest newspaper in the colony was the 
 Vin-inia Gazette, established in 1736. 
 
 In the absence of schools the higher education 
 naturally languished. Some of the planters were 
 taught at home by tutors, and others went to En- 
 gland and entered the universities. But these were 
 few in number, and there was no college in the 
 colony until more than half a century after the 
 foundation of Harvard in the younger province of 
 Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary 
 was established at Williamsburg chiefly by the ex- 
 ertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch divine, 
 who was sent by the Bishop of London as " com- 
 missary " to the Church in Virginia. The college 
 received its charter in 1693, and held its first-com- 
 mencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of 
 the difference between the Puritans of New En- 
 gland and the so-called " Cavaliers " of Virginia, 
 that while the former founded and supported 
 Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of 
 
14 American Literature. 
 
 their own motion, and at their own expense, Will- 
 iam and Mary received its endowment from the 
 crown, being provided for in part by a deed of 
 lands and in part by a tax of a penny a pound on 
 all tobacco exported from the colony. In return 
 for this royal grant the college was to present 
 yearly to the king two copies of Latin verse. It 
 is reported of the young Virginian gentlemen who 
 resorted to the new college that they brought their 
 plantation manners with them, and were accus- 
 tomed to " keep race-horses at the college, and 
 bet at the billiard or other gaming tables." Will- 
 iam and Mary College did a good work for the 
 colony, and educated some of the great Virginians 
 of the Revolutionary era, but it has never been 
 a large or flourishing institution, and has held no 
 such relation to the intellectual development of its 
 sectior^ as Harvard and Yale have held in the col- 
 onies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even 
 after the foundation of the University of Virginia, 
 in which Jefferson took a conspicuous part, south- 
 ern-youths were commonly sent to the North for 
 their education, and at the time of the outbreak of 
 the civil war there was a large contingent of south- 
 ern students in several northern colleges, notably 
 'in Princeton and Yale. 
 
 Naturally, the first books written in America 
 were descriptions of the country and narratives of 
 the vicissitudes of the infant settlements, which 
 were sent home to be printed for the information 
 of the English public and the encouragement of 
 
The Colonial Period. 15 
 
 further immigration. Among books of this kind 
 produced in Virginia the earliest and most note- 
 worthy were the writings of that famous soldier of 
 fortune, Captain John Smith. The first of these 
 was his True Relation^ namely, ''of such occur- 
 rences and accidents of note as hath happened in 
 Virginia since the first planting of that colony," 
 printed at London in 1608, Among Smith's other 
 books, the most important is perhaps his General 
 History of Virginia (London, 1624), a compilation 
 of various narratives by different hands, but pass- 
 ing under his name. Smith was a man of a rest- 
 less and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of 
 contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious na- 
 ture, with an appetite for the marvelous and a dis- 
 position to draw the long bow. He had seen 
 service in many parts of the world, and his won- 
 derful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It 
 was alleged against him that the evidence of his 
 prowess rested almost entirely on his own testi- 
 mony. His truthfulness in essentials has not, per- 
 haps, been successfully impugned, but his narra- 
 tives have suffered by the embellishments with 
 which he has colored them, and, in particular, the 
 charming story of Pocohontas saving his life at 
 the risk of her own — the one romance of early 
 Virginian history — has passed into the realm of 
 legend. 
 
 Captain Smith's writings have small literary 
 value apart from the interest of the events which 
 they describe, and the diverting but forcible per- 
 
i6 American Literature. 
 
 sonality which they unconsciously display. They 
 are the rough-hewn records of a busy man of ac- 
 tion, whose sword was mightier than his pen. As 
 Smith returned to England after two years in Vir- 
 ginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with 
 the settlement of which he had been for a time the 
 leading spirit, he can hardly be claimed as an 
 American author. No more can Mr. George San- 
 dys, who came to Virginia in the train of Governor 
 Wyat, in 1621, and completed his excellent metri- 
 cal translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, 
 in the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, 
 " limned " as he writes " by that imperfect light 
 which was snatched from the hours of night and 
 repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to 
 light instead of the muses." Sandys went back 
 to England for good, probably as early as 1625, 
 and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the 
 first American poet, on the strength of his para- 
 phrase of the Metamorphoses, than he can be reck- 
 oned the earliest Yankee inventor, because he " in- 
 troduced the first water-mill into America." 
 
 The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the 
 southern colonies which took their point of depar- 
 ture from Virginia, is almost wholly of this his- 
 torical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is 
 concerned with the internal affairs of the province, 
 such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in 1676, one of the 
 most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary 
 annals, and of which there exist a number of nar- 
 ratives, some of them anonymous, and only rescued 
 
The Colonial Period. 17 
 
 from a manuscript condition a hundred years after 
 the event. Another part is concerned with the 
 explorations of new territory. Such were the 
 " Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel William 
 Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the com- 
 missioners to fix the boundary between Virginia 
 and North Carolina, and gave an account of the 
 survey in his History of the Dividing Line, which 
 was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one 
 of the most brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, 
 and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He 
 had been sent to England for his education, where 
 he was admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, 
 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and formed 
 an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl 
 of Orrery. He held many offices in the govern- 
 ment of the colony, and founded the cities of 
 Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were 
 large, and at Westover — where he had one of the 
 finest private libraries in America — he exercised a 
 baronial hospitality, blending the usual profusion 
 of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled 
 scholar and " picked man of countries." Colonel 
 Byrd was rather an amateur in literature. His 
 History of the Dividing Line is written with a jocu- 
 larity which rises occasionally into real humor, and 
 which gives to the painful journey through the 
 wilderness the air of a holiday expedition. Sim- 
 ilar in tone were his diaries of A Progress to the 
 Mines and A Journey to the Land of Eden in North 
 Carolina. 
 2 
 
i8 American Literature. 
 
 The first formal historian of Virginia was Rob- 
 ert Berkeley, '" a native and inhabitant of the 
 place," whose History of Virginia was printed at 
 London in 1705. Beverley was a rich planter and 
 large slave owner, who, being in London in 1703, 
 was shown by his bookseller the manuscript of a 
 forthcoming work, Oldmixon's British Empire in 
 America. Beverley was set upon writing his his- 
 tory by the inaccuracies in this, and likewise because 
 the province "has been so misrepresented to the 
 common people of England as to make them be- 
 lieve that the servants in Virginia are made to 
 draw in cart and plow, and that the country turns 
 all people black," an impression which lingers still 
 in parts of Europe. The most original portions 
 of the book are those in which the author puts 
 down his personal observations of the plants and 
 animals of the New World, and particularly the 
 account of the Indians, to which his third book is 
 devoted, and which is accompanied by valuable 
 plates. Beverley's knowledge of these matters 
 was evidently at first hand, and his descriptions 
 here are very fresh and interesting. The more 
 strictly historical part of his work is not free from 
 prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, de- 
 tailed, and impartial, but much less readable, work 
 was William Stith's History of the First Discovery 
 and Settle f77ent of Virginia^ i747, which brought 
 the subject down only to the year 1624. Stith 
 was a clergyman, and at one time a professor in 
 William and Mary College. 
 
The Colonial Period. 19 
 
 The Virginians were stanch royalists and church- 
 men. The Church of England was established by 
 law, and non-conformity was persecuted in various 
 ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony 
 in 1642 by the Puritans of New England, two from 
 Braintree, Massachusetts, and one from New Haven. 
 They were not suffered to preach, but many re- 
 sorted to them in private houses, until, being finally 
 driven out by fines and imprisonments, they took 
 refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy 
 wxre not^ as a body, very much of a force in edu- 
 cation or literature. Many of them, by reason of 
 the scattering and dispersed condition of their 
 parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the 
 wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy 
 and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few 
 of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whit- 
 aker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 
 161 1 to preach to the colonists and convert the 
 Indians, and who published in furtherance of those 
 ends Good News from Virginia^ in 16 13, three 
 years before his death by drowning in James 
 River. 
 
 The conditions were much more favorable for 
 the production of a literature in New England 
 than in the southern colonies. The free and ge- 
 nial existence of the " Old Dominion " had no 
 counterpart among the settlers of Plymouth and 
 Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have 
 been rather unpleasant people to live with for per- 
 sons of a different way of thinking. But their in- 
 
20 American Literature. 
 
 tensity of character, their respect for learning, and 
 the heroic mood which sustained them through 
 the hardships and dangers of their great enter- 
 prise are amply reflected in their own writings. 
 If these are not so much literature as the raw ma- 
 terials of literature, they have at least been fortu- 
 nate in finding interpreters among their descend- 
 ants, and no modern Virginian has done for the 
 memory of the Jamestown planters what Haw- 
 thorne, vVhittier, Longfellow, and others have done 
 in casting the glamour of poetry and romance over 
 the lives of the founders of New England. 
 
 Cotton Mather, in his Magfialia, quotes the fol- 
 lowing passage from one of those election sermons, 
 delivered before the General Court of Massachu- 
 setts, which formed for many years the great an- 
 nual intellectual event of the colony: *' The ques- 
 tion was often put unto our predecessors, What 
 went ye out into the wilderness to see 2 And the 
 answer to it is not only too excellent but too no- 
 torious to be dissemble^. . . . We cam.e hither 
 because we would have our posterity settled under 
 the pure and full dispensations of the gospel, de- 
 fended by rulers that should be of ourselves." 
 The New England colonies were, in fact, theoc- 
 racies. Their leaders were clergymen or laymen, 
 whose zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to 
 that of the ministers themselves. Church and 
 State were one. The freeman's oath was only 
 administered to Church members, and there was 
 no place in the social system for unbelievers or 
 
The Colonial Period. 21 
 
 dissenters. The Pilgrim fathers regarded their 
 transplantation to the New World as an exile, and 
 nothing is more touching in their written records 
 than the repeated expressions of love and longing 
 toward the old home which they had left, and 
 even toward that Church of England from which 
 they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was 
 not in any light or adventurous spirit that they 
 faced the perils of the sea and the wilderness. 
 "This howling wilderness," ''these ends of the 
 earth," " these goings down of the sun," are some 
 of the epithets which they constantly applied to 
 the land of their exile. Nevertheless they had 
 come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and 
 Sandys, the early historians and writers of New 
 England cast in their lots permanently with the 
 new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 
 1640 — Mather says some ten or twelve of the min- 
 isters of the first "classis" or immigration were 
 among them — when the victory of the Puritanic 
 party in Parliament opened a career for them in 
 England, and made their presence there seem in 
 some cases a duty. Tlie celebrated Hugh Peters, 
 for example, who was afterv/ard Oliver Cromwell's 
 chaplain, and was beheaded after the Restoration, 
 went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, 
 the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author 
 of a quaint book against toleration, entitled The 
 Simple Cobbler of Agawam^ written in America 
 and published shortly after its author's arrival \x\ 
 England. The Civil War, too, put a stop to fur- 
 
22 American Literature. 
 
 ther emigration from England until after the Res- 
 toration in 1660. 
 
 The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted 
 of men of the middle class, artisans and husband- 
 men, the most useful members of a new colony. 
 But their leaders were clergymen educated at the 
 universities, and especially at Emanuel College, 
 Cambridge, the great Puritan college; their civil 
 magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of 
 education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, 
 who was learned in the law, and Theophilus Eaton, 
 first governor of New Haven, who was a London 
 merchant of good estate. It is computed that 
 there were in New England during the first gene- 
 ration as many university graduates as in any 
 community of equal population in the old country. 
 Almost the first care of the settlers was to establish 
 schools. Every town of fifty families was required 
 by law to maintain a common school, and every 
 town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin 
 school. In 1636, only sixteen years after the land- 
 ing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, Harvard 
 College was founded at Newtown, whose name was 
 thereupon changed to Cambridge, the General 
 Court held at Boston on September 8, 1680, hav- 
 ing already advanced £a^o *' by way of essay 
 towa'rds the building of something to begin a col- 
 lege." " An university," says Mather, '' which hath 
 been to these plantations, for the good literature 
 there cultivated, sal Gentium . . . and a river, 
 without the streams whereof these regions would 
 
The Colonial Period. 23 
 
 have been mere unwatered places for the devil," 
 By 1 701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous off- 
 shoot, Yale College, at New Haven, the settlers of 
 New Haven and Connecticut plantations having 
 increased sufficiently to need a college at their 
 own doors. A printing press was set up at Cam- 
 bridge in 1639, which was under the oversight of 
 the university authorities, and afterwards of li- 
 censers appointed by the civil power. The press 
 was no more free in Massachusetts than in Vir- 
 ginia, and that ^' liberty of unlicensed printing," 
 for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his 
 Areopagitica, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New 
 England until some twenty years before the out- 
 break of the Revolutionary War. '* The Freeman's 
 Oath " and an almanac were issued from the Cam- 
 bridge press in 1639, and in 1640 the first English 
 book printed in America, a collection of the psalms 
 in meter, made by various ministers, and known 
 as the Bay Psalm Book. The poetry of this ver- 
 sion was worse, if possible, than that of Sternhold 
 and Hopkins's famous rendering ; but it is note- 
 worthy that one of the principal translators was 
 that devoted ''Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. 
 John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, translated the Bible 
 into the Algonkin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled 
 a lifetime for the conversion of those *' salvages," 
 *'tawnies," ''devil-worshipers," for whom our early 
 writers have usually nothing but bad words. They 
 have been destroyed instead of converted; but his 
 (so entitled) Alamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up- 
 
24 American Literature. 
 
 Biblum God vaneeswe Nukkone Testament kak 
 wonk WusJzu Testament — the first Bible printed in 
 America— remains a monument of missionary zeal 
 and a work of great value to students of the Indian 
 languages. 
 
 A modern writer has said that, to one looking 
 back on the history of old New England, it seems 
 as though the sun shone but dimly there, and the 
 landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is 
 the impression which one carries away from the 
 perusal of books like Bradford's and Winthrop's 
 Journals, or Mather's Wonders of the Imnsible 
 World : an impression of gloom, of night and cold, 
 of mysterious fears besieging the infant settle- 
 ments, scattered in a narrow fringe " between the 
 groaning forest and the shore." The Indian ter- 
 ror hung over New England for more than half a 
 century, or until the issue of King Philip's War, in 
 1676, relieved the colonists of any danger of a 
 general massacre. Added to this were the per- 
 plexities caused by the earnest resolve of the set- 
 tlers to keep their New English Eden free from 
 the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heret- 
 ical sects in religion. The Puritanism of Massa- 
 chusetts was an orthodox and conservative Puri- 
 tanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops 
 of the movement in the old England found no tol- 
 eration in the new. But these refugees for con- 
 science' sake were compelled in turn to persecute 
 Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, 
 Anti-pedobaptists, and later, Quakers, and still 
 
The Colonial Period. 25 
 
 later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their pre- 
 cincts and troubled the Churches with " prophesy- 
 ings " and novel opinions. Some of these were 
 banished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a 
 few were put to death. Of the exiles the most 
 noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, 
 warm-hearted man, who was so far in advance of 
 his age as to deny the power of the civil magistrate in 
 cases of conscience, or who, in other words, main-* 
 tained the modern doctrine of the separation of 
 Church and State. Williams was driven away 
 from the Massachusetts colony — where he had 
 been minister of the Church at Salem — and with a 
 few followers fled into the southern wilderness, 
 and settled at Providence. There and in the neigh- 
 boring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he 
 obtained a charter, he established his patriarchal 
 rule, and gave freedom of worship to all comers. 
 Williams was a prolific writer on theological sub- 
 jects, the most important of his writings being, 
 perhaps, his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, 1644, 
 and a supplement to the same called out by a 
 reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. 
 John Cotton, minister of the First Church at Bos- 
 ton, entitled The Bloody Tenent Washed a7id made 
 White in the Blood of the Lamb. Williams was 
 also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he 
 thought, should not be taken from them without 
 payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, in 
 1643, a Key into the Language of Af?ierica. Al- 
 though at odds with the theology of Massachu- 
 
26" American Literature. 
 
 setts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence 
 with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he 
 was highly esteemed. He visited England in 1643 
 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John 
 Milton. 
 
 Besides the threat of an Indian war and their 
 anxious concern for the purity of the Gospel in 
 their Churches, the colonists were haunted by su- 
 perstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It 
 seemed to them that Satan, angered by the setting 
 up of the kingdom of the saints in America, had 
 "come down in great wrath," and was present 
 among them, sometimes even in visible shape, to 
 terrify and tempt. Special providences and un- 
 usual phenomena, like earthquakes, mirages, and 
 tlie northern lights, are gravely recorded by Win- 
 throp and Mather and others as portents of super- 
 natural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchin- 
 son, the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, 
 according to rumor, been delivered of a monstrous 
 birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open assembly, at 
 Boston, upon a lecture day, " thereupon gathered 
 that it might signify her error in denying inherent 
 righteousness." " There will be an unusual range 
 of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a little be- 
 fore the second coming of our Lord. The evening 
 wolves will be much abroad when we are near the 
 evening of the world." This belief culminated in 
 the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, 
 that '' spectral puppet, play," which, beginning with 
 the malicious pranks of a few children who ac- 
 
The Colonial Period. 27 
 
 cused certain uncanny old women and other per- 
 sons of mean condition and suspected lives of 
 having tormented them with magic, gradually drew 
 into its vortex victims of the highest character, 
 and resulted in the judicial murder of over nine- 
 teen people. Many of the possessed pretended to 
 have been visited by the apparition of a little black 
 man, who urged them to inscribe their names in ^ 
 red book which he carried — a sort of muster-roll 
 of those who had forsworn God's service for the 
 devil's. Others testified to having been present at 
 meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult 
 now to read without contempt the "evidence" 
 which grave justices and 1-earned divines consid- 
 ered sufficient to condemn to death men and 
 women of unblemished lives. It is true that the 
 belief in witchcraft was general at that time all 
 over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases 
 of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts 
 of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in 
 his Rcligio Medici^ 1635, affirmed his belief in 
 witches, and pronounced those who doubted of 
 them " a sort of atheist." But the superstition 
 came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, 
 and was the more shocking from the general high 
 level of intelligence in the community in which 
 these were held. It would be well if those who 
 lament the decay of " faith " would remember what 
 things were done in New England in the name of 
 faitli less than two hundred years ago. It is not 
 wonderful that, to the Massachusetts Puritans of 
 
28 American Literature. 
 
 the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held 
 no beautiful" suggestion; to them it was simply a 
 grim and hideous wilderness, whose dark aisles 
 were the ambush of prowling savages and the ren- 
 dezvous of those other " devil-worshipers " who 
 celebrated there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis 
 night. 
 
 * The most important of original sources for the 
 history of the settlement of New England are the 
 journals of William Bradford, first governor of 
 Plymouth, and John Winthrop. the second gov- 
 ernor of Massachusetts, which hold a place cor- 
 responding to the writings of Captain John Smith 
 in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober 
 and trustworthy. Bradford's History of Plymouth 
 Plantation covers the period from 1620 to 1646. 
 The manuscript was used by later annalists, but 
 remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, hav- 
 ing been lost during the war of the revolution and 
 recovered long afterward in England. Winthrop's 
 Journal, or History of New England, begun on 
 shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not 
 published entire until 1826. It is of equal author- 
 ity with Bradford's, and perhaps, on the whole, the 
 more important of the two, as the colony of Mas- 
 sachusetts Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly 
 outwent Plymouth in wealth and population, 
 though not in priority of settlement. The interest 
 of Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it 
 records rather than in any charm in the historian's 
 manner of recording them. His style is pragmatic, 
 
The Colonial Period. 29 
 
 and some of the incidents which he gravely notes 
 are trivial to the modern mind, though instructive 
 as to our forefathers' way of thinking. For instance, 
 of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in 
 the view of divers witnesses) a great combat be- 
 tween a mouse and a snake, and after a long fight 
 the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The 
 pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy 
 man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation : that 
 the snake was the devil, th^ mouse was a poor, 
 contemptible people, which God had brought 
 hither, which should overcome Satan here and 
 dispossess him of his kingdom." The reader of 
 Winthrop's Journal covciQ?, every-where upon hints 
 which the imagination has since shaped into poetry 
 and romance. The germs of many of Longfellow's 
 Neiv England Tragedies, of Hawthorne's Maypole 
 of Merrymount, of Endicott's Red Cross, and of 
 Whittier's ^^/2« Under hill and. The Familists' Hymn 
 are all to be found in som.e dry, brief entry of the 
 old Puritan diarist. " Robert Cole, having been 
 oft punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to 
 wear a red D about his neck for a year," to wit, 
 the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to the 
 greatest American romance, The Scarlet Letter. 
 The famous apparition of the phantom ship in 
 New Haven harbor, " upon the top of the poop a 
 man standing with one hand akimbo under his left 
 side, and in his right hand a sword stretched out 
 toward the sea," was first chronicled by Winthrop 
 
 under the year 1648. This meterological phenom- 
 
 A 
 
30 American Literature. 
 
 enon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth 
 some forty years later, as related, with many em- 
 bellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of New 
 Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop 
 put great faith in special providences, and among 
 other instances narrates, not without a certain 
 grim satisfaction, how " the Mary Rose^ a ship of 
 Bristol, of about 200 tons," lying before Charles- 
 ton, was blown in pieces with her own powder, 
 being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of 
 God appeared, "for the master and company were 
 many of them profane scoffers at us and at the or- 
 dinances of rehgion here." Without any effort at 
 dramatic portraiture or character sketching, Win- 
 throp managed in all simplicity, and by the plain 
 relation of facts, to leave a clear impression of 
 many of the prominent figures in the first Massa- 
 chusetts immigration. In particular there gradu- 
 ally arises from the entries in his diary a very dis- 
 tinct and diverting outline of Captain John Un- 
 derhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was 
 one of the few professional soldiers who came over 
 with the Puritan fathers, such as John Mason, the 
 hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, 
 whose Courtship Longfellow sang. He had seen 
 service in the Low Countries, and in pleading the 
 privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon 
 the liberty which all States do allow to military 
 officers for free speech, etc., and that himself had 
 spoken sometimes as freely to Count Nassau." 
 Captain Underbill gave the colony no end of 
 
The Colonial Period. 31 
 
 trouble, both by his scandalous living and his 
 heresies in religion. Having been seduced into 
 Famiiistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, 
 who was banished for her beliefs, he was had up 
 before the General Court and questioned, among 
 other points, as to his own report of the manner of 
 his conversion. *' He had lain under a spirit of 
 bondage and a legal way for years, and could get 
 no assurance, till, at length, as he was taking a 
 pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute 
 promise of free grace with such assurance and joy 
 as he never since doubted of his good estate, nei- 
 ther should he, though he should fall into sin. . . . 
 The Lord's day following he made a speech in the 
 assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to 
 convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., so he 
 might manifest himself to him as he was taking 
 the moderate use of the creature called tobacco." 
 The gallant captain, being banished the colony, 
 betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Ex- 
 eter, N. H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, 
 another adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson, had gath- 
 ered a congregation. Being made governor of 
 this plantation. Underbill sent letters to the Mas- 
 sachusetts magistrates, breathing reproaches and 
 imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it was 
 discovered that he had been living in adultery at 
 Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced, 
 the wife of a cooper, and the captain was forced to 
 make public confession, which he did with great unc- 
 tion and in a manner highly dramatic. '' He came 
 
32 American Literature. 
 
 in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great 
 pride in his bravery and neatness), without a band, in 
 a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and 
 standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs 
 and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course." 
 There is a lurking humor in the grave Winthrop's 
 detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's 
 own personality comes out well in his Journal. 
 He was a born leader of men, a conditor imperii^ 
 just, moderate, patient, wise, and his narrative 
 gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of 
 the general prudence and fair-mindedness of the 
 Massachusetts settlers in their dealings with one 
 another, with the Indians, and with the neighbor- 
 ing plantations. 
 
 Considering our forefathers' errand and calling 
 into this wilderness, it is not strange that their 
 chief literary staples were sermons and tracts in 
 controversial theology. Multitudes of tliese were 
 written and published by the divines of the first 
 generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, 
 John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, 
 the founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said 
 that "when he was doing his Master's business he 
 would put a king into his pocket." Nor were their 
 successors in the second or the third generation 
 any less industrious and prolific. They rest from 
 their labors and tlieir works do follow them. 
 Their sermons and theological treatises are not 
 literature, they are for the most part dry, heavy, 
 and dogmatic, but they exhibit great learning, log- 
 
The Colonial Period. 33 
 
 ical acuteness, and an earnestness which some- 
 times rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New 
 England, and the sermon was the great intellectual 
 engine of the time. The serious thinking of the 
 Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; 
 the other world was all their art. The daily secu- 
 lar events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissi- 
 tude of the seasons, were important enough to find 
 record in print only in so far as they manifested 
 God's dealings with his people. So much was the 
 sermon depended upon to furnish literary food 
 that it was the general custom of serious minded 
 laymen to take down the words of the discourse in 
 their note-books. Franklin, in his Autobiography^ 
 describes this as the constant habit of his grand- 
 father, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his life of the 
 elder Winthrop, says that " tho' he wrote not after 
 the preacher, yet such was his attention and such 
 his retention in hearing, that he repeated unto his 
 family the sermons which he had heard in the 
 congregation." These discourses were commonly 
 of great length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pul- 
 pit hour-glass was silently inverted while the ora- 
 tor pursued his theme even unto «'thly. 
 
 The book which best sums up the life and 
 thought of this old New England of the seven- 
 teenth century is Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi 
 Americana. Mather was by birth a member of that 
 clerical aristocracy which developed later into Dr. 
 Holmes's " Brahmin Caste of New England." His 
 maternal grandfathec was John Cotton. His fa- 
 
34 American Literature. 
 
 ther was Increase Mather, the most learned divine 
 of his generation in New England, minister of the 
 North Church of Boston, President of Harvard 
 College, and author, inter alia, of that character- 
 istically Puritan book, An Essay for the Recording 
 of Illustrious Providences. Cotton Mather himself 
 was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of dili- 
 gence. He was graduated from Harvard at fif- 
 teen. He ordered his daily life and conversation 
 by a system of minute observances. He was a 
 book-worm, whose life was spent between his 
 library and his pulpit, and his published works 
 number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of 
 these the most important is the Magnalia, 1702, 
 an ecclesiastical history of New England from 
 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I. Antiqui- 
 ties; n. Lives of the Governors; HL Lives of 
 Sixty Famous Divines; IV. A History of Harvard 
 College, with biographies of its eminent graduates; 
 V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith ; VI. Won- 
 derful Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord, 
 that is, an account of the Afflictions and Disturb- 
 ances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the 
 Indians. The plan of the work thus united that 
 of Fuller's Worthies of England and Church His- 
 tory with that of Wood's Athence Oxonienses and 
 Fox's Book of Martyrs. 
 
 Mather's prose was of the kind which the En- 
 glish Commonwealth writers used. He was younger 
 by a generation than Dryden; but as literary fash- 
 ions are slower to change in a colony than in the 
 
The Colonial Period. 35 
 
 mother country, that nimble English which Dry- 
 den and the Restoration essayists introduced had 
 not yet displaced in New England the older man- 
 ner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style 
 of Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a 
 style ponderous with learning and stiff with allu- 
 sions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quota- 
 tioris«from the Greek and the Latin. A page of 
 ihe Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with 
 italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and 
 the quaintness which Mather caught from his fa- 
 vorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and mar- 
 ginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his 
 books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker 
 as having ''^angled many scores of souls into the 
 kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs, Hutch- 
 inson's surname into " the non-such;" and having 
 occasion to speak of Mr. Urian Oaks's election to 
 the presidency of Harvard College, enlarges upon 
 the circumstance as follows: 
 
 "We all know that Britain knew nothing more 
 famous than their ancient sect of DRUIDS; the 
 philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted 
 by one Samothes, which is in English as much as 
 to say, an heavenly man. The Celtic name Deru^ 
 for an Oak was that from whence they received 
 their denomination ; as at this very day the Welch 
 call this tree Drew, and this order of men Der~ 
 ivyddon. But there are no small antiquaries who 
 derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the 
 Oaks of Mamre^ where the Patriarch Al?ra/ia?n 
 
36 American Literature. 
 
 had as well a dwelling as an altar. That Oaken- 
 Plain and the eminent OAK under which Abra- 
 ham lodged was extant in the days of Constantiney 
 as Isidore^ Jerom, and Sozamen have assured us. 
 Yea, there are shrewd probabilities that Noah him- 
 self had lived in this very Oak-plain before him ; 
 for this very place was called Oyy?/, which was the 
 name of Noah, so styled from the Oggyan {sWbcin- 
 eritiis panibus) sacrifices, which he did use to offer 
 in this renowned Grove. And it was from this ex- 
 ami)le that the ancients and particularly that the 
 Druids of the nations, chose oake?i retirements for 
 their studies. Reader, let us now, upon another ac- 
 count, behold the students of Harvard College., as 
 a rendezvous of happy Druids., under the influ- 
 ences of so rare a president. But, alas ! our joy 
 must be short-lived, for on July 25, 1681, the 
 stroke of a sudden death felled the tree^ 
 
 " Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes 
 Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi. 
 
 Mr. Oakes thus being transplanted into the better 
 world, the presidentship was immediately tendered 
 unto Mr. Increase Mather." 
 
 This will suffice as an example of the bad taste 
 and laborious pedantry which disfigured Mather's 
 writing. In its substance the book is a perfect 
 thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimpor- 
 tant in the history of the beginnings of such a na- 
 tion as this is and is destined to be, the Magnalia 
 will always remain a valuable and interesting work. 
 
The Colonial Period. 37 
 
 Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second 
 generation of Americans, his grandfather being of 
 the immigration, but his father a native of Dor- 
 chester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and 
 of the writings of his contemporaries with the 
 works of Bradford, Winthrop, Hooker, and others 
 of the original colonists, shows that the simple and 
 heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into for- 
 malism and doctrinal rigidity. The leaders of the 
 Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their intolerance 
 of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-mind- 
 ed men. They were sharers in a great national 
 movement, and they came over when their cause 
 was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the 
 eve of its coming triumph at home. After the 
 Restoration, in 1660, the currents of national feel- 
 ing no longer circulated so freely through this 
 distant member of the body politic, and thought 
 in America became more provincial. The English 
 dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage as 
 compared with the Church of England, had the 
 great benefit of living at the center of national life, 
 and of feeling about them the pressure of vast 
 bodies of people who did not think as they dicT 
 In New England, for many generations, the dom- 
 inant sect had things all its own way, a condition 
 of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. 
 Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear 
 in their writings very much like so many Puritan 
 bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, magnifying 
 their apostolate, and careful to maintain their au- 
 
38 American Literature. 
 
 thority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for 
 the marvelous, and took a leading part in the witch- 
 craft trials, of which he gave an account in his 
 IVo/iders of the Invisible World, 1693. To the 
 quaint pages of the Magnalia our modern authors 
 have resorted as to a collection of romances or 
 fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took from 
 ihence the subject of his poem The Garrison of 
 Cape Anjie; and Hawthorne embodied in Grand- 
 father s Chair the most elaborate of Mather's bi- 
 ographies. This was the life of Sir William 
 Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in 
 his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal 
 governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose 
 wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a 
 Spanish treasure ship, sunk on a reef near Port de 
 la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some 
 ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bul- 
 lion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of eight." 
 
 Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief 
 Justice of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and 
 venerable figure, who is intimately known through 
 his Diary kept from 1673 to 1729. This has been 
 Compared with the more famous diary of Samuel 
 Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential char- 
 acter and the completeness of its self-revelation, 
 but to which it is as much inferior in historic in- 
 terest as '* the petty province here " was inferior in 
 political and social importance to " Britain far 
 away." For the most part it is a chronicle of 
 small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae 
 
The Colonial Period. 39 
 
 of his domestic life and private affairs, even to the 
 recording of such haps as this: " March 23, I had 
 my liair cut by G. Barret." But it also affords in- 
 structive glimpses of public events, such as King 
 Philip's War, the Quaker troubles, the English 
 Revolution of 1688, etc. It bears about the same 
 relation to New England history at the close of the 
 seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's 
 journals bear to that of the first generation. Sewall 
 was one of the justices who presided at the trial of 
 the Salem witches ; but for the part which he took 
 in that wretched affair he made such atonement as 
 was possible, by open confession of his mistake and 
 his remorse in the presence of the Church. Sewall 
 was one of the first writers against African slavery, 
 in his brief tract, The Selling of Joseph^ printed at 
 Boston in 1700. His Phenomena Quoedani Apoca- 
 lyptica, a mystical interpretation of prophecies con- 
 cerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies 
 with America, is remembered only because Whit- 
 tier, in his Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, has para- 
 phrased one poetic passage, which shows a loving 
 observation of nature very rare in our colonial 
 writers. 
 
 Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, 
 in the narrower sense — that is, of the imaginative 
 representation of life — there was little or none in 
 the colonial period. There were no novels, no 
 plays, no satires, and — until the example of the 
 Spectator had begun to work on this side the 
 water — no experiments even at the lighter forms 
 
40 American Literature. 
 
 of essay writing, character sketches, and literary 
 criticism. There was verse of a certain kind, but 
 the most generous stretch of the term would hardly 
 allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early 
 divines of New England relieved their pens, in 
 the intervals of sermon writing, of epigrams, ele- 
 gies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles 
 distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called 
 " metaphysical poets," whose manner was in fash- 
 ion when the Puritans left England; the manner 
 of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the 
 New English muse, the Emblems of Quarles and 
 the Divine Week of Du Bartas, as translated by 
 Sylvester. The Magnalia contains a number of 
 these things in Latin and English, and is itself 
 well bolstered with complimentary introductions 
 in meter by the author''s friends. For example: 
 
 COTTONIUS MaTHERUS. 
 
 ANAGRAM. 
 
 Tttos Tecum Ornasti. 
 
 "While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise 
 Thine, with thyself, thou dost ijumortalize. 
 To view the odds thy learned lives invite 
 'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. 
 But all succeeding ages shall despair 
 A fitting monument for thee to rear. 
 Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace !) 
 Hath given them a lasting 7vrit of ease." 
 
 The epitaphs and mortuary verses were espe- 
 cially ingenious in the matter of puns, anagrams, 
 
The Colonial Period. 41 
 
 and similar conceits. The death of the Rev. Sam- 
 uel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of 
 this sort not to be missed, and his threnodist ac- 
 cordingly celebrated him as a "whetstone," a 
 " loadstone," an " Ebenezer " — 
 
 *' A stone for kingly David's use so fit 
 
 As would not fail Goliah's front to hit," etc. 
 
 The most characteristic, popular, and widely 
 circulated poem of colonial New England was 
 Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (166^, a 
 kind of doggerel Inferno^ which went through 
 nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, 
 "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by 
 which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier rel- 
 ish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." 
 Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of 
 a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language rude 
 and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his ma- 
 terial hell are more likely to move mirth than fear 
 in a modern reader. But there are an unmistaka- 
 ble vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief 
 in his gloomy poem which hold it far above con- 
 tempt, and easily account for its universal cur- 
 rency among a people like the Puritans. One 
 stanza has been often quoted for its grim conces- 
 sion to unregenerate infants of "the easiest room 
 in hell " — a limbus infantum which even Origen 
 need not have scrupled at. 
 
 The most authoritative expounder of New En- 
 gland Calvinism was Jonathan Edwards (1703- 
 
42 American Literature. 
 
 1758), a native of Connecticut, and a graduate of 
 Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years 
 over the Church in Northampton, Mass., afterward 
 missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the 
 time of his death had just been inaugurated presi- 
 dent of Princeton College. By virtue of his In- 
 quiry into the Freedom of the Will, i754> Edwards 
 holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his 
 age. This treatise was composed to justify, on 
 philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines of 
 foreordination and election by grace, though its 
 arguments are curiously coincident with those of 
 the scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are 
 as far asunder from Edwards's "as from the center 
 thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to 
 theology rather than to literature, but there is an 
 intensity and a spiritual elevation about them, 
 apart from the profundity and acuteness of the 
 thought, which lift them here and there into the 
 finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. 
 He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the comfort 
 of the word, and his chosen themes were the dog- 
 mas of predestination, original sin, total deprav- 
 ity, and eternal punishment. The titles of his ser- 
 mons are significant: Men Naturally God's Ene- 
 mies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Utter?nost, llie 
 Final Judgment, etc. *' A natural man," he wrote 
 in the first of these discourses, "has a heart like 
 the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of a natural 
 man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, 
 cold corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most 
 
The Colonial Period. 43 
 
 famous of Edwards's sermons was Sinners in the 
 Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, 
 Conn., July 8, 1741, ''at a time of great awaken- 
 ings," and upon the ominous text, Their foot shall 
 slide in due time. '' The God that holds you over 
 the pit of hell " runs an oft-quoted passage from 
 this powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, 
 " much as one holds a spider or some loathsome 
 insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully 
 provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more 
 abominable in his eyes than the most hateful ven- 
 omous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a slender 
 thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing 
 about it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you, he 
 will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case 
 that he will only tread you under foot. . . . He 
 will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it 
 shall be" sprinkled on his garments so as to stain 
 all his raiment." But Edwards was.a rapt soul, pos- 
 sessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and 
 there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his 
 Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 1746. Such 
 is his portrait of Sarah Pierpont, '' a young lady in 
 New Haven," who afterward became his wife, and 
 who " will sometimes go about from place to place 
 singing sweetly, and no one knows for what. She 
 loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, 
 and seems to have some one invisible always con- 
 versing with her." Edwards's printed works num- 
 ber thirty-six titles. A complete edition of them 
 in te« volumes was published in 1829 by his great- 
 
44 American Literature. 
 
 grandson, Sereno Dvvight. The memoranda from 
 Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and 
 biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even 
 as a school-boy and a college student he had made 
 deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, 
 and, as might have been predicted of a youth of 
 his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, 
 he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the 
 existence of matter. In passing from Mather to 
 Edwards, we step from the seventeenth to the 
 eighteenth century. There is the same difference 
 between them in style and turn of thought as be- 
 tween Milton and Locke, or between Fuller and 
 Dryden. The learned digressions, the witty con- 
 ceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with 
 scraps of Latin, have fallen off, even as the full- 
 bottomed wig and the clerical gown and bands 
 have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress 
 of the modern minister. In Edwards's English all 
 is simple, precise, direct, and business-like. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who was strictly 
 contemporary with Edwards, was a contrast to him 
 in every respect. As Edwards represents the spir- 
 ituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Frank- 
 lin stands for the worldly and secular side of Amer- 
 ican character, and he illustrates the development 
 of the New England Englishman into the modern 
 Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality 
 or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, 
 intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, 
 inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure 
 
The Colonial Period. 45 
 
 became typical of his time and his people. He was 
 the first and the only man of letters in colonial 
 America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame, and 
 impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the 
 mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of com- 
 mon sense and of the useful virtues; with the en- 
 terprise but without the nervousness of his mod- 
 ern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness 
 of mind with the sagacity and quickness of resource 
 of the self-made business man. He was repre- 
 sentative also of his age, an age of aufkldrung, 
 edaircissement , or " clearing up." By the middle 
 of the eighteenth century a change had taken place 
 in American society. Trade had increased be- 
 tween the different colonies; Boston, New York, 
 and Philadelphia were considerable towns; demo- 
 cratic feeling was spreading; over forty newspapers 
 were published in America at the outbreak of the 
 Revolution ; politics claimed more attention than 
 formerly, and theology less. With all this inter- 
 course and mutual reaction of the various colonies 
 upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New 
 England naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on 
 the minds of the laity. When Franklin was a 
 printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his 
 brother's Neiv England Courant^ the fourth Amer- 
 ican newspaper, he got hold of an odd volume of 
 the Spectator^ and formed his style upon Addison, 
 whose manner he afterward imitated in his Busy- 
 Body papers in the Philadelphia Weekly Mercitry. 
 He also read Locke and the English deistical writ- 
 
46 American Literature. 
 
 ers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself a 
 deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when prac- 
 ticing his trade in London, in 1724-26, he made 
 the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of the 
 Fable of the Bees, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, 
 called " The Horns," where the famous free-thinker 
 presided over a club of wits and boon companions. 
 Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified 
 with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a 
 runaway 'prentice boy, " whose stock of cash con- 
 sisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in 
 copper." The description in his Autobiography of 
 his walking up Market Street munching a loaf of 
 bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her 
 father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as 
 the anecdote about Whittington and his cat. 
 
 It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was 
 greatest, as an originator and executor of projects 
 for the general welfare. The list of his public 
 services is almost endless. He organized the 
 Philadelphia fire department and street cleaning 
 service, and the colonial postal system which grew 
 into the United States Post Office Department. 
 He started the Philadelphia public library, the 
 American Philosophical Society, the University of 
 Pennsylvania, and the first American magazine, 
 The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle; so 
 that he was almost singly the father of whatever intel- 
 lectual life the Pennsylvania colony could boast of. 
 In 1754, when commissioners from the colonies met 
 at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, w^hich was 
 
The Colonial Period. 47 
 
 adopted, for the union of all the colonies under 
 one government. But all these things, as well as 
 his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the 
 Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the pro- 
 prietaries; his share in the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence — of which he was one of the signers — 
 and his residence in France as Embassador of the 
 United Colonies, belong to the political history of 
 the country; to the history of American science 
 belong his celebrated experiments in electricity ; 
 and his benefits to mankind in both of these de- 
 partments were aptly summed up in the famous 
 epigram of the French statesman Turgot: 
 
 *^ Erupuit coelo fiihnen sceptrumque tyrattnis.'* 
 
 Franklin's success in Europe was such as no 
 American had yet achieved, as few Americans 
 since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire 
 were among his acquaintances and his professed 
 admirers. In France he was fairly idolized, and 
 when he died Mirabeau announced, " The genius 
 which has freed America and poured a flood of 
 light over Europe has returned to the bosom of 
 the Divinity." 
 
 Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great 
 writer, though as a writer, too, he had many ad- 
 mirable and some great qualities. Among these 
 Avere the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. 
 His more strictly literary performances, such as his 
 essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above medi- 
 ocrity, and are neither better nor worse than other 
 
48 American Literature. 
 
 imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter 
 bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charm- 
 ing playfulness which have won them enduring 
 favor. Such are his famous story of the Whistle, 
 his Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, his 
 letters to Madame Helvetius, and his verses enti- 
 tled Paper. The greater portion of his writings 
 consists of papers on general politics, commerce, 
 and political economy, contributions to the public 
 questions of his day. These are of the nature of 
 journalism rather than of literature, and many of 
 them were published in his newspaper, the Penn- 
 sylvania Gazette, the medium through which for 
 many years he most strongly influenced American 
 opinion. The most popular of his writings were 
 his Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanac. 
 The former of these was begun in 177 1, resumed 
 in 1788, but never completed. It has remained 
 the most widely current book in our colonial lit- 
 erature. Poor Richard's Almatiac, begun in 1732 
 and continued for about twenty-five years, had an 
 annual circulation often thousand copies. It was 
 filled with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, 
 inculcating the virtues of industry, honesty, and 
 frugality.* Some of these were original with 
 Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial 
 wisdom of the ages, but a new force was given 
 
 * The Way to Wealth, Plan for Savi7ig One Hundred 
 Thonsand Pounds, Rules of Health, Adviee to a Voting 
 Tradesman, The Way to Make Money Plenty in Every 
 Mans Pocket, etc. 
 
The Colonial Period. 49 
 
 them by pungent turns of expression. Poor Rich- 
 ard's saws were such as these : " Little strokes 
 fell great oaks;" ''Three removes are as bad as 
 a fire;" '^ Early to bed and early to rise makes a 
 man healthy, wealthy, and wise ;" " Never leave 
 that till to-morrow which you can do to-day;" 
 ''What maintains one vice would bring up two 
 children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand 
 upright." 
 
 Now and then there are truths of a higher kind 
 than these in Franklin, and Sainte Beuve, the great 
 French critic, quotes, as an example of his occa- 
 sional finer moods, the saying, " Truth and sincer- 
 ity have a certain distinguishing native luster about 
 them which cannot be counterfeited ; they are like 
 fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the 
 sage who invented the Franklin stove had no dis- 
 dain of small utilities; and in general the last word 
 of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage of 
 his Autobiography : "Human felicity is produced 
 not so much by great pieces of good fortune, that 
 seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur 
 every day ; thus, if you teach a poor young man to 
 shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may 
 contribute more to the happiness of his life than in 
 giving him a thousand guineas." 
 
 1. Captain John Smith. A True Relation of 
 Virginia. Deane's edition. Boston: 1866. 
 
 2. Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana. 
 Hartford: 1820. 
 
 4 
 
50 American Literature. 
 
 3. Samuel Sewall. Diary. Massachusett's His- 
 torical Collections. Fifth Series. Vols, v, vi, and 
 vii. Boston: 1878, 
 
 4. Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Vari- 
 ous Occasions. Vol. vii. of Edwards's Words. 
 Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829. 
 
 5. Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography. Edited 
 by John Bigelow. Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. 
 Lippincott & Co.] 
 
 6. Essays and Bagatelles. Vol. ii. of Franklin's 
 Works. Edited by Dav44 Sparks. Boston: 1836. 
 
 7. Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American 
 Literature. 1607-1765. New York: 1878. [G. 
 P. Putnam's Sons.] 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 51 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 
 
 1765-1815. 
 
 It will be convenient to treat the fifty years 
 which elapsed between the meeting at New York, 
 in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colo- 
 nies, to protest against the Stamp Act, and the 
 close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, 
 for literary purposes, a single period. This half 
 century was the formative era of the American 
 nation. Historically it is divisible* into the years 
 of revolution and the years of construction. But 
 the men who led the movement for independence 
 were also, in great part, the same who guided in 
 shaping the Constitution of the new republic, and 
 the intellectual impress of the whole period is one 
 and the same. The character of the age was as 
 distinctly political as that of the colonial era — in 
 New England at least — was theological ; and liter- 
 ature must still continue to borrow its interest from 
 history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a 
 better term we call belles lettres, was not born in 
 America until the nineteenth century was well 
 under way. It is true that the Revolution had its 
 humor, its poetry, and even its fiction ; but these 
 
52 jAmerican Literature. 
 
 were strictly for the home market. They hardly 
 penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all, and 
 are not to be compared with the contemporary 
 work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan 
 and Burke. Their importance for us to-day is 
 rather antiquarian than literary, though the most 
 noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due 
 course in the present chapter. It is also true that 
 one or two of Irving's early books fall within the 
 last years of the period now under consideration. 
 But literary epochs overlap one another at the 
 edges, and these writings may best be postponed 
 to a subsequent chapter. 
 
 Among the most characteristic products of the 
 intellectual stir that preceded and accompanied 
 the revolutionary movement, were the speeches of 
 political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, 
 and Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts, and Patrick 
 Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of a free 
 people, and a^ in the forensic assemblies of Greece 
 and Rome, and in the Parliament of Great Britain, 
 so in the conventions and congresses of revolution- 
 ary America it sprang up and flourished naturally. 
 The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a 
 rhetorical age; and the influence of Johnson's oro- 
 tund prose, of the declamatory Letters of Junius^ 
 and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and 
 the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our 
 early congresses. The fame of a great orator, like 
 that of a great actor, is largely traditionary. The 
 spoken word transferred to the printed page loses 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 53 
 
 the glow which resided in the man and the mo- 
 ment. A speech is good if it attains its aim, if it 
 moves the hearers to the end which is sought. 
 But the fact that this end is often temporary and 
 occasional, rather than universal and permanent, 
 explains why so few speeches are really literature. 
 If this is true, even where the words of an orator 
 are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is 
 doubly true when we have only the testimony of 
 contemporaries as to the effect which the oration 
 produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, 
 and Quincy were either not reported at all or 
 very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can 
 judge of them only at second hand. Patrick 
 Henry has fared better, many of his orations being 
 preserved in substance, if not in the letter, in Wirt's 
 biography. Of these the most famous was the de- 
 fiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 
 28, 1775, throwing down the gauge of battle to the 
 British ministry. The ringing sentences of this 
 challenge are still declaimed by school boys, and 
 many of them remain as familiar as household 
 words. " I have but one lamp by which my feet 
 are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I 
 know of no way of judging of the future but by 
 the past. . . . Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, 
 but there is no peace. ... Is life so dear, or peace 
 so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains 
 and slavery! Forbid it, Almighty God' I know 
 not what course others may take, but as for me, 
 give me liberty, or give me death!" The elo^ 
 
54 American Literature. 
 
 quence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than 
 weighty or rich. But if such specimens of the 
 oratory of the American patriots as have come 
 down to us fail to account for the wonderful im- 
 pression that their words are said to have pro- 
 duced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should 
 remember that they are at a disadvantage when 
 read instead of heard. The imagination should 
 supply all those accessories which gave them vital- 
 ity when first pronounced: the living presence 
 and voice of the speaker; the listening Senate; the 
 grave excitement of the hour and of the impend- 
 ing conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the 
 'highly latinized diction ; the rhapsodies about 
 freedom which hundreds of Fourth-of-July ad- 
 dresses have since turned into platitudes — all these 
 coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in 
 the field confirmed the earnestness of their speech 
 — were effective enough in the crisis and for the 
 purpose to which they were addressed. 
 
 The press was an agent in the cause of liberty 
 no less potent than the platform, and patriots 
 such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Han- 
 cock wrote constantly for the newspapers essays 
 and letters on the public questions of the time 
 signed ^'Vindex," '* Hyperion," "Independent," 
 "Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in 
 language which to the taste of to-day seems rather 
 over rhetorical. Among the most important of 
 these political essays were the Circular Letter to 
 each Colonial Legislature^ published by Adams 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 55 
 
 and Otis in 1768; Quincy's Observations on the 
 Bos to ft Fort Bill^ 1774, and Otis's Rights of the 
 British Colonies^ a pamphlet of one hundred and 
 twenty pages, printed in 1764. No collection of 
 Otis's writings has ever been made. The life of 
 Quincy, published by his son, preserves for pos- 
 terity his journals and correspondence, his news- 
 paper essays, and his speeches at the bar, taken 
 from the Massachusetts law reports. 
 
 Among the political literature which is of peren- 
 nial interest to the American people are such 
 State documents as the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence, the Constitution of the United States, and 
 the; messages, inaugural addresses, and other writ- 
 ings of our early presidents. Thomas Jefferson, 
 the third president of the United States, and the 
 father of the Democratic party, was the author of 
 the Declaration of Independence, whose opening 
 sentences have become commonplaces in the mem- 
 ory of all readers. One sentence in particular has 
 been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of 
 faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion : 
 *'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all 
 men are created equal ; that they are endowed by 
 their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that 
 among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
 happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is 
 the following, which an English historian of our 
 literature calls " the most eloquent clause of that 
 great document," and "the most interesting sup- 
 pressed passage in American literature." Jefferson 
 
56 American Literature. 
 
 was a southerner, but even at that early day the 
 South had grown sensitive on the subject of sla- 
 very, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George 
 for promoting the " peculiar institution " was left 
 out from the final draft of the Declaration in def- 
 erence to southern members. 
 
 "He has waged cruel war against human nature 
 itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 
 liberty, in the persons of a distant people who 
 never offended him, captivating and carrying them 
 into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur 
 miserable death in their transportation thither. 
 This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel 
 powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of 
 Great Britain. Determined to keep open a mar- 
 ket where men should be bought and sold, he 
 has prostituted his negative by suppressing every 
 legislative attempt to restrain this execrable com- 
 merce. And, that this assemblage of horrors 
 might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is 
 now exciting those very people to rise in arms 
 against us, and purchase that liberty of which he 
 deprived them by murdering the people upon 
 whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off 
 former crimes committed against the liberties of 
 one people by crimes which he urges them to 
 commit against the lives of another." 
 
 The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun 
 and other southern statesmen afterward adopted 
 on the subject of slavery was not taken by the 
 men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 57 
 
 Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a 
 slaveholder, in his speech on the militia bill in the 
 House of Representatives, December 10, 181 1, 
 said: "I speak from facts when I say that the 
 night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that 
 the mother does not hug her infant more closely 
 to her bosom." This was said apropos of the 
 danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a 
 war with England — a war which actually broke out 
 in the year following, but was not attended with 
 the slave rising which Randolph predicted. Ran- 
 dolph was a thorough-going " States rights " man, 
 and though opposed to slavery on principle, he 
 cried hands off to any interference by the General 
 Government with the domestic institutions of the 
 States. His speeches read better than most of his 
 contemporaries'. They are interesting in their ex- 
 hibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, 
 incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar 
 style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplo- 
 matic language and glittering generalities of most 
 congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to 
 keep its subject always at arm's length. 
 
 Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was 
 his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1801, with its 
 programme of "equal and exact justice to all men, 
 of whatever state or persuasion, religious or po- 
 litical ; peace, commerce, and honest friendship 
 with all nations, entangling alliances with none ; 
 the support of the State governments in all their 
 rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions 
 
58 American Literature. 
 
 of the majority ; . . . the supremacy of the civil 
 over the military authority ; economy in the pub- 
 lic expense ; freedom of religion, freedom of the 
 press, and freedom of person under the protection 
 of the habeas corpus^ and trial by juries impartially 
 selected." 
 
 During his six years' residence in France, as 
 American Minister, Jefferson had become indoc- 
 trinated with the principles of French democracy. 
 His main service and that of his party — the Dem- 
 ocratic or, as it was then called, the Republican 
 party — to the young republic was in its insistence 
 upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom 
 of the individual from all forms of governmental 
 restraint. Jefferson has some claims to rank as an 
 author in general literature. Educated at William 
 and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, 
 Williamsburg, he became the founder of the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, in which he made special pro- 
 vision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which 
 the liberal scheme of instruction and discipline 
 was conformed, in theory at least, to the "univer- 
 sity idea." His Notes on Virginia are not without 
 literary quaility, and one description, in particular, 
 has been often quoted — the passage of the Poto- 
 mac through the Blue Ridge — in which is this 
 poetically imaginative touch : '' The mountain 
 being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, 
 through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue 
 horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain coun- 
 try, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 59 
 
 tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach 
 and participate of the cahii below." 
 
 After the conclusion of peace with England, in 
 1783, political discussion centered about the Con- 
 stitution, which in 1788 took the place of the looser 
 Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The 
 Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise 
 between two parties — the Federalists, who wanted 
 a strong central government, and the Anti-Fed- 
 erals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), 
 who wished to preserve State sovereignty. The 
 debates on the adoption of the Constitution, both 
 in the General Convention 6f the States, which met 
 at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State 
 Conventions called to ratify its action, form a 
 valuable body of comment and illustration upon 
 the instrument itself. One of the most notable of 
 the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's 
 address before the Virginia Convention. " That 
 this is a consolidated government," he said, '' is 
 demonstrably clear ; and the danger of such a 
 government is, to my mind, very striking." The 
 leader of the Federal party was Alexander Ham- 
 ilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the 
 statesmen of our revolutionary era, of whom Tal- 
 leyrand said that he "had never known his equal;" 
 whom Guizot classed with " the men who have 
 best known the vital principles and fundamental 
 conditions of a government worthy of its name and 
 mission." Hamilton's speech On the Expediency 
 of Adopting the Federal Constitution^ delivered in 
 
6o American Literature. 
 
 the Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was 
 a masterly statement of the necessity and advan- 
 tages of the Union. But the most complete ex- 
 position of the constitutional philosophy of the 
 Federal party was the series of eighty-five papers 
 entitled the Federalist^ printed during the years 
 1787-88, and mostly in the Independent Journal 
 of New York, over th© signature ^''Publius!' These 
 were the work of Hamilton, of John Jay, after- 
 ward Chief Justice, and of James Madison, after- 
 ward President of the United States. The Feder- 
 alist papers, though written in a somewhat pon- 
 derous diction, are among the great landmarks of 
 American history, and were in themselves a polit- 
 ical education to the generation that read ihem. 
 Hamilton was a brilliant and versatile figure, a 
 persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury under Washington the fore- 
 most of American financiers. He was killed, in a 
 duel, by Aaron Burr, at Hoboken, in 1804. 
 
 The Federalists were victorious, and under the 
 provisions of the new Constitution George Wash- 
 ington was inaugurated first President of the 
 United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's 
 writings have been collected by Jared Sparks. 
 They consist of journals, letters, messages, ad- 
 dresses, and public documents, for the most part 
 plain and business-like in manner, and without any 
 literary pretensions. The most elaborate and the 
 best known of them is his Farewell Address^ issued 
 on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In 
 
The^ Revolutionary Period. 6i 
 
 the composition of this he was assisted by Madi- 
 son, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance 
 and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expres- 
 sion. The' correspondence of John Adams, second 
 President of the United States, and his diary, kept 
 from 1755-85; should also be mentioned as im- 
 portant sources for a full knowledge of this period. 
 In the long life -and -death struggle of Great 
 Britain against the French Republic and its suc- 
 cessor. Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in 
 this country naturally sympathized with England, 
 and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. 
 The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping ab- 
 stractions of the French Revolution, and clung to 
 the conservative notions of a checked and balanced 
 freedom, inherited from English precedent, were ac- 
 cused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On 
 their side they were not slow to accuse their adver- 
 saries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. 
 By a singular reversal of the natural order of things 
 the strength' of the Federalist party was in New 
 England, which was socially democratic, while the 
 strength of the Jeffersonian s was in the South, 
 whose social structure — owing to the system of 
 slavery — was intensely aristocratic. The war of 
 181 2 with England was so unpopular in New En- 
 gland, by reason of the injury which it threatened 
 to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Con- 
 vention of 1814 was more than suspected of a de- 
 sign to bring about the secession of New England 
 from the Union. A good deal of oratory was called 
 
62 American Literature. 
 
 out by the debates on the commercial treaty with 
 Great Britain, negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the 
 Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and by other 
 pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the 
 downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson 
 to the presidency in 1800. The best of the Fed- 
 eralist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, 
 of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, 
 perhaps, his speech on the British treaty in the 
 House of Representatives, April 18, 1796. The 
 speech was, in great measure, a protest against 
 American chauvinism and the violation of inter- 
 national obligations. "It has been said the world 
 ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in tlie sea ; if 
 where there are now men and wealth and laws and 
 liberty, there was no more than a sand bank for 
 sea- monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of 
 the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . AVhat is patri- 
 otism ? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where 
 a man was born ? Are the very clods where we 
 tread entitled to this ardent preference because 
 they are greener? ... I see no exception to the 
 respect that is paid among nations to the law of 
 good faitl^. ... It is observed by barbarians — a 
 whiff of tobacco smoke or a string of beads gives 
 not merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. 
 Even in Algiers a truce may be bought for money, 
 but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise or too 
 just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames 
 was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished 
 and thoughtful, more literary^ in a way, than those 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 6^ 
 
 of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Wash- 
 ington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather 
 excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in classical 
 allusions. In all the oratory of the revolutionary 
 period there is nothing equal in deep and con- 
 densed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lin- 
 coln's Gettysburg Address, " that we here highly 
 resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." 
 A prominent figure during and after the War of 
 the Revolution was Thomas Paine, or, as he vvas 
 somewhat disrespectfully called, " Tom Paine." 
 He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving 
 himself ill treated by the British Government, 
 came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself 
 heart and soul into the colonial cause. His 
 pamphlet, Common Sense, issued in 1776, began 
 with the famous words : *' These are the times that 
 try men's souls." This was followed by the 
 Crisis, a series of political essays advocating inde- 
 pendence and the establishment of a republic, 
 published in periodical form, though at irregular 
 intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy 
 was of great service to the American patriots. 
 His writings were popular and his arguments were 
 of a kind easily understood by plain people, ad- 
 dressing themselves to the common sense, the 
 prejudices and passions of unlettered readers. 
 He afterward went to 'France and took an active 
 part in the popular movement there, crossing 
 swords with Burke in his Rights of Man, 1791-92, 
 written in defense of the French Revolution. He 
 
64 American Literature. 
 
 was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Con- 
 vention ; but falling under suspicion during the 
 days of the terror, he was committed to the prison 
 of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall 
 of Robespierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he 
 wrote a portion of his best known work, the Age 
 of Reason. This appeared in two parts in 1794 
 and 1795, the manuscript of the first part having 
 been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American poet, 
 who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent 
 to prison. 
 
 The Age of Reason damaged Paine's reputation 
 in America, where the name of *' Tom Paine " 
 became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and 
 a synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book 
 was denounced from a hundred pulpits, and copies 
 of it were carefully locked away from the sight of 
 *' the young," whose religious beliefs it might under- 
 mine. It was, in effect, a crude and popular state- 
 ment of the Deistic argument against Christianity. 
 What the cutting logic and persiflage — the sourire 
 hideiix — of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, 
 with coarser materials, essayed to do for the English- 
 speaking populations. Deism was in the air of 
 the time ; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel 
 Barlow, and other prominent Americans were 
 openly or unavowedly deistic. Free thought, 
 somehow, went along with democratic opinions, 
 and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. 
 Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, 
 or religious feeling. He was no scholar, and he was 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 65 
 
 not troubled by any perception of the deeper and 
 subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. 
 In his examination of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments, he insisted that the Bible was an imposi- 
 tion and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and ob- 
 scenities. Supernatural Christianity, with all its 
 mysteries and miracles, was a fraud practiced by 
 priests upon the people, and churches were instru- 
 ments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This 
 way of accounting for Christianity would not now 
 be accepted by even the most " advanced " think- 
 ers. The contest between skepticism and revela- 
 tion has long since shifted to other grounds. Both 
 the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason 
 belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's 
 downright pugnacious method of attack was ef- 
 fective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and 
 in America well-thumbed copies of his book 
 passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern 
 or store, where the village atheist wrestled in 
 debate with the deacon or the school-master. 
 " When one part of God," exclaims Paine — to give 
 an instance of the method and spirit of his book — 
 ''is represented as a dying man, and another part 
 called the Holy Ghost, by a flying pigeon, it is 
 impossible that belief can attach itself to such 
 wild conceits. The book called the Book of Mat- 
 thew says that the Holy Ghost descended in the 
 shape of a dove. It might as well have said a 
 goose ; the creatures are equally harmless, and 
 the one is as much a nonsensical lie as the other." 
 5 
 
66 American Literature. 
 
 And again: "What is it the Testament teaches 
 us ? — to believe that the Almighty committed de- 
 bauchery with a woman engaged to be married ! 
 And the belief of this debauchery is called faith." 
 When we turn from the political and contro- 
 versial writings of the Revolution to such lighter 
 literature as existed, we find little that would de- 
 serve mention in a more crowded period. The 
 few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the 
 current of time — ran' nanles in giirgite vasto — at- 
 tract attention rather by reason of their fewness 
 than of any special excellence that they have. 
 During the eighteenth century American literature 
 continued to accommodate itself to changes of 
 taste in the old country. The so-called classical. 
 or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne 
 replaced other models of style : the Spectator set 
 the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from 
 Franklin's Busybody down to the time of Irving, 
 who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later 
 than any English writer. The influence of Locke, 
 of Dr. Johnson, and of the Parliamentary orators 
 has already been mentioned. In poetry the ex- 
 ample of Pope was dominant, so that we find, for 
 example, William Livingston, who became gov- 
 ernor of New Jersey and a member of the Con- 
 tinental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on F/iilos- 
 ophic Solitude which reproduces the trick of Pope*s 
 antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the 
 Rape of the Lock^ and the didactic morality of the 
 Imitations from Horace and the Moral Essays : 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 67 
 
 " Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms, 
 Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms ; 
 To shining palaces let fools resort 
 And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. 
 Mine be the pleasure of a rural life. 
 From noise remote and ignorant of strife, 
 Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, 
 The lawless masquerade and midnight show ; 
 From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, 
 Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." 
 
 The most popular poem of the Revolutionary- 
 period was John Trumbull's McFingal, published 
 in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and in complete 
 shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more 
 than thirty editions in America, and was several 
 times reprinted in England. McFi?igal was a 
 satire in four cantos, directed against the Amer- 
 ican Loyalists, and modeled quite closely upon 
 Butler's mock heroic poem, Hudihras. As Butler's 
 hero sallies forth to put down May games and 
 bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out 
 against the liberty-poles and bon-fires of the 
 patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and other- 
 wise ill entreated, and finally takes refuge in the 
 camp of General Gage at Boston. The poem is 
 written with smartness and vivacity, attains often 
 to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor. It 
 remains one of the best of American political 
 satires, and unquestionably the most successful of 
 the many imitations of Hudibras, whose manner it 
 follows so closely that some of its lines, which 
 
6S American Literature. 
 
 have passed into currency as jjroverbs, are gen- 
 erally attribued to Butler. For example : 
 
 Or this: 
 
 " No man e'er felt the halter draw 
 "With good opinion of the law." 
 
 " For any man with half an eye 
 What stands before him may espy ; 
 But optics sharp it needs, I ween, 
 To see what is not to be seen." 
 
 Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable 
 points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit 
 at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted 
 flag of the Confederation : 
 
 " Inscribed with inconsistent types 
 Of Liberty and thirteen stripes." 
 
 Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut 
 literati, who made much noise in their time as the 
 "Hartford Wits." The other members of the 
 group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, 
 Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, and 
 Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Bar- 
 low had formed a friendship and a kind of literary 
 partnership at Yale, where they were contempo- 
 raries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. 
 During the war they served in the army in various 
 capacities, and at its close they found themselves 
 again together for a few years at Hartford, where 
 they formed a club that met weekly for social and 
 literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 69 
 
 ^clat to the little provincial capital, and their writ- 
 ings made it for a time an intellectual center quite 
 as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New 
 York. The Hartford Wits were staunch Federal- 
 ists, and used their pens freely in support of the 
 administrations of Washington and Adams, and in 
 ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 
 1786-87 Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow, and Hum- 
 phreys published in the New Haven Gazette a 
 series of satirical papers endtled the Anarchiadt 
 suggested by the English Rolliad, and purporting 
 to be extracts from an ancient epic on " the 
 Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." 
 These papers were an effort to correct, by ridicule, 
 the anarchic condition of things which preceded 
 the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. 
 It was a time of great confusion and discontent, 
 when, in parts of the country, Democratic mobs 
 were protesting against the vote of five years' pay 
 by the Continental Congress to the officers of the 
 American army. The Anarchiad was followed by 
 the Echo and the Political Green House, written 
 mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dvvight, and similar 
 in character and tendency to the earlier series. 
 Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires, 
 but they were influential in their day, and are an 
 important part of the literature of the old Federal- 
 ist party. 
 
 Humphreys became afterward distinguished in 
 the diplomatic service, and was, successively, 
 embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he 
 
70 American Literature. 
 
 introduced into America the breed of merino 
 sheep. He had been on Washington's staff 
 during the war, and was several times an inmate 
 of his house at Mount Vernon, where he pro- 
 duced, in 1785, the best known of his writings, 
 Mount Vernon^ an ode of a rather mild descrip- 
 tion, which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts 
 a larger figure in contemporary letters. After 
 leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, 
 where he resided for seventeen years, made a 
 fortune in speculations, and became imbued with 
 French principles, writing a song in praise of the 
 Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old 
 friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, 
 and built a fine residence near Washington, which 
 he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary fame, in 
 his own generation, rested upon his prodigious 
 epic, the Columbiad. The first form of this was 
 the Vision of Columbus^ published at Hartford in 
 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged into 
 the Columbiad^ issued in Philadelphia in 1807, 
 and dedicated to Robert Fulton, the inventor 
 of the steamboat. This was by far the most 
 sumptuous piece of book- making that had then 
 been published in America, and was embel- 
 lished with plates executed by the best London 
 engravers. 
 
 The Columbiad was a grandiose performance, 
 and has been the theme of much ridicule by later 
 writers. Hawthorne suggested its being drama- 
 tized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 71 
 
 and thunder and lightning ; and E. P. Whipple 
 declared that " no critic in the last fifty years had 
 read more than a hundred lines of it." In its am- 
 bitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the 
 spirit of the age which was patriotically determined 
 to create, by tour de force, a national literature of 
 a size commensurate with the scale of American 
 nature and the destinies of the republic. As Amer- 
 ica was bigger than Argos and Troy, we ought to 
 have a bigger epic than the Iliad. Accordingly, 
 Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his 
 prison to a "hill of vision," where he unrolls before 
 his eye a panorama of the history of America, or, 
 as our bards then preferred to call it, Columbia. 
 He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; 
 the rise and fall of the kingdom of the Incas in 
 Peru ; the settlements of the English Colonies in 
 North America ; the old French and Indian Wars ; 
 the Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the fu- 
 ture greatness of the new-born nation. The machin- 
 ery of the Vision W3.S borrowed from the nth and 
 1 2th books of Paradise Lost. Barlow's verse was the 
 ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his po- 
 etic style was distinguished by the vague, glittering 
 ^imagery and the false sublimity which marked the 
 epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though 
 Barlow was but a masquerader in true heroic, he 
 showed himself a true poet in mock heroic. His 
 Hasty Pudding, written in Savoy in 1793, and dedi- 
 cated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly Amer- 
 ican, in subject at least, and its humor, though 
 
72 American Literature. 
 
 over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in particular 
 has prevailed against oblivion : 
 
 " E'en in thy native regions how I blush 
 
 To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush ! " 
 
 Another Connecticut poet — one of the seven who 
 were fondly named "The Pleiads of Connecticut'* 
 — was Timothy Dwight, whose Conquest of Catiaan, 
 written shortly after his graduation from college, 
 but not published till 1785, was, like the Colmnbiady 
 an experiment toward the domestication of the 
 epic muse in America. It was written like Bar- 
 low's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic 
 impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduc- 
 tion of our Revolutionary War, by Avay of episode, 
 among the wars of Israel. Greenfield Hill, 1794* 
 was an idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of 
 a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author 
 was for a time the pastor. It is not quite withotit 
 merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, 
 Thomson, and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious 
 and tame. Byron was amused that there should 
 have been an American poet christened Timothy, 
 and it is to be feared that amusement would have 
 been the chief emotion kindled in the breast of the 
 wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the 
 stern dedication to himself of the same poet*s Tri- 
 umph of Infidelity, 1788. Much more important 
 than Dwight's poetry was his able Theology Ex- 
 plained and Defended, 1794, a restatement, with 
 modifications, of the Calvinism of Jonathan Ed- 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 73 
 
 wards, which was accepted by the Congregational 
 churches of New England as an authoritative ex- 
 ponent of the orthodoxy of the time. His Travels 
 in JVetv England and JVew York, including descrip- 
 tions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake 
 George, the Catskills, and other passages of nat^ 
 ural scenery, not so familiar then as now, was 
 published posthumously in 182 1, was praised by 
 Southey, and is still readable. As President of 
 Yale College from 1795 to 181 7, Dwight, by his 
 learning and ability, his sympathy with young 
 men, and the force and dignity of his character, 
 exerted a great influence in the community. 
 
 The strong political bias of the time drew into 
 its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature 
 that was produced. A number of ballads, serious 
 and comic. Whig and Tory, dealing with the bat- 
 tles and other incidents of the long war, enjoyed 
 a wide circulation in the newspapers, or were 
 hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of 
 these have no literary merit, and are now mere 
 antiquarian curiosities. A favorite piece on the 
 Tory side was the Cow Chase, a cleverish parody 
 on Chevy Chase, written by the gallant and unfor- 
 tunate Major Andre, at the expense of " Mad " An- 
 thony Wayne. The national song Yankee Doodle 
 was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the 
 case with Jo/m Brown's Body and many other pop- 
 ular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its 
 origin. The air was an old one, and the words 
 of the chorus seem to have been adapted or cor- 
 
74 American Literature. 
 
 rupted from a Dutch song, and applied in derision 
 to the Provincials by the soldiers of the British 
 army as early as 1755. Like many another nick- 
 name, the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by 
 the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The 
 
 stanza, 
 
 "Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., 
 
 antedates the war ; but the first complete set of 
 words to the tune was the Yankee s Reiur?! from 
 Cajfip, which is apparently of the year 1775. The 
 most popular humorous ballad on the Whig side 
 was the Battle of the Kegs, founded on a laughable 
 incident of the campaign at Philadelphia. This 
 was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadel- 
 phian, and one of the signers of the Declaration 
 of Independence. Hopkinson has some title to 
 rank as one of the earliest American humorists. 
 Without the kee^ wit of McFingal some of his 
 Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, pub- 
 lished in 1792, have more geniality and heartiness 
 than Trumbull's satire. His Letter on White- 
 washi?tg is a bit of domestic humor that foretokens 
 the Danhury News man, and his Modern Learn- 
 ing, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in 
 which a salt-box is described from the point of 
 view of metaphysics, logic, natural philosophy, 
 mathematics, anatomy, surgery and chemistry, long 
 kept its place in school-readers and other collec- 
 tions. His son, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song 
 of Hail Columbia, which is saved from insignifi- 
 cance only by the music to which %t was married, 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 75 
 
 the then popular air of ''The President's March." 
 The words were written in 1798, on the eve c/ a 
 threatened war with France, and at a time when 
 party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by 
 crowds in the streets, and for a whole season by a 
 favorite singer at the theater; for by this time 
 there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, 
 and even in Puritanic Boston. Much better than 
 Hail Columbia was the Star Spangled Batiner, the 
 words of which were composed by Francis Scott 
 Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by 
 the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 
 181 2. More pretentious than these was the once 
 celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., Adajus 
 and Liberty^ recited at an anniversary of the Mas- 
 sachusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale oi 
 this is said to have netted its author over $750, but 
 it is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. 
 Paine was a young Harvard graduate, who had 
 married an actress playing at the old Federal 
 Street Theater, the first play-house opened in 
 Boston, in 1794. His name was originally Thomas, 
 but this was changed for him by the Massachu- 
 setts Legislature, because he did not wish to be 
 confounded with the author of the Age of Reason. 
 ** Dim are those names erstwhile in battle loud," 
 And many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought 
 for liberty with sword and pen is now utterly for- 
 gotten, or consigned to the limbo of Duyckinck's 
 Cyclopedia and Griswold's Poets of America. Here 
 and there a line has, by accident, survived to do 
 
76 American Literature. 
 
 duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context 
 is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing 
 more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than 
 the couplet, 
 
 " No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
 But the whole boundless continent is yours," 
 
 taken from his Epilogue to Caio^ written in 1778. 
 
 Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Fre- 
 neau ; " that rascal Freneau," as Washington 
 called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon 
 his administration in Freneau's National Gazette. 
 He was of Huguenot descent, was a classmate of 
 Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner 
 by the British during the war, and when the war 
 was over, engaged in journalism, as an ardent sup- 
 porter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's 
 patriotic verses and political lampoons are now 
 unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first 
 real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honey- 
 suckle^ Indian Burying Ground, Indian Student, 
 and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace 
 and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French 
 blood. 
 
 Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" 
 hitherto mentioned were nothing but rhymers ; 
 but in Freneau we meet with something of 
 beauty and artistic feeling; something which still 
 keeps his verses fresh. In his treatment of In- 
 dian themes, in particular, appear for the first 
 time a sense of the picturesque and poetic ele- 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 77 
 
 ments in the character and wild life of the red 
 man, and that pensive sentiment which the fad- 
 ing away of the tribes toward the sunset has left 
 in the wake of their retreating footsteps. In 
 this Freneau anticipates Cooper and Longfellow, 
 though his work is slight compared with the 
 Leaf her stocki7ig Tales or Hiawatha. At the time 
 when the Revolutionary War broke out the popu- 
 lation of the colonies was over three millions ; 
 Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and 
 the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance 
 from the sea-board. The Indian had already 
 grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau 
 fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts 
 of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods 
 of the State : 
 
 " From Susquehanna's farthest springs, 
 Where savage tribes pursue their game 
 
 (His blanket tied with yellow strings), 
 A shepherd of the forest eame." 
 
 Campbell " lifted " — in his poem O' Conors Child 
 — the last line of the following stanza from Fre- 
 neau 's Indian Burying Ground: 
 
 *' By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
 
 In vestments for the chase arrayed. 
 The hunter still the deer pursues — 
 
 The hunter and the deer a shade." 
 
 And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to 
 borrow, in Marmion^ the final line of one of the 
 
78 American Literature. 
 
 stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw 
 Springs: 
 
 "They saw their injured country's woe, 
 The flaming town, the wasted fijeld ; 
 Then rushed to meet the insulting foe ; 
 They took the spear, but left the shield." 
 
 Scott inquired of an American gentleman who 
 visited him the authorship of this poem, which he 
 had by heart, and pronouced it as fine a thing of 
 the kind as there was in the language. 
 
 The American drama and American prose 
 fiction had their beginnings during the period 
 now under review. A company of English play- 
 ers came to this country in 1752 and made the 
 tour of many of the principal towns. The first 
 play acted here by professionals on a public 
 stage was the Merchant of Venice^ which was 
 given by the English company at Williamsburg, 
 Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building 
 was at Annapolis, Md., where in the same year 
 this troupe performed, among other pieces, Far- 
 quhar's Beaux Stratagem. In 1753 a theater was 
 built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadel- 
 phia. The Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puri- 
 tans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the 
 acting of plays, and in the latter city the players 
 were several times arrested during the perform- 
 ances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding dra- 
 matic performances. At Newport, R. I., on the 
 other hand, which was a health resort for planters 
 from the Southern States and the West Indies, 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 79 
 
 and the largest slave-market in the North, the 
 actors were hospitably received. The first play- 
 known to have been written by an American was 
 the Prince of Parthia^ 1765, a closet drama, by 
 Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play 
 by an American writer, acted by professionals in 
 a public theater, was Royal Tyler's Contrast^ per- 
 formed in New York in 1786. The former of 
 these was very high tragedy, and the latter very 
 low comedy ; and neither of them is otherwise 
 remarkable than as being the first of a long line 
 of indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no Amer- 
 ican dramatic literature worth speaking of; not a 
 single American play of even the second rank, un- 
 less we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like 
 Mr. Howetl's Elevator and Sleeping-Car. Royal 
 Tyler, the author of the Contrast, cut quite a 
 figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and 
 eventually became Chief Justice of Vermont. His 
 comedy, the Georgia Spec, 1797, had a great run 
 in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, published in 
 the same year, was one of the earliest American 
 novels. It was a rambling tale of adventure, con- 
 structed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's 
 novels and dealing with the piracies which led to 
 the war between the United States and Algiers 
 in 1815. 
 
 Charles Brockden Brown, the first American 
 novelist of any note, was also the first professional 
 man of letters in this country who supported him- 
 self entirely by his pen. He was born in Phila- 
 
8o American Literature. 
 
 delphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New 
 York and part in his native city, where he started, 
 in 1803, \\^^Literary Magazine and American 
 Register. During the years 1798-1801 he pub- 
 lished in rapid succession six romances, Wieland^ 
 Ormonde Arthur Afervyn, Edgar Huntley, Clara 
 Howard, and Jane Talbot. Brown was an invalid 
 and something of a recluse, with a relish for the 
 ghastly in incident and the morbid in character. 
 He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and 
 Hawthorne, though his art was greatly inferior to 
 Poe's, and almost infinitely so to Hawthorne's. 
 His books belong more properly to the contem- 
 porary school of fiction in England which preceded 
 the " Waverley Novels " — to the class that includes 
 Beckford's Vathek, Godwin's Caleb Williams and 
 St. Leon, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, and such 
 " Gothic " romances as Lewis's Monk, Walpole's 
 Castle of Otranto, and Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of 
 Udolpho. A distinguishing characteristic of this 
 whole school is what we may call the clumsy-hor- 
 rible. Brown's romances are not wanting in in- 
 ventive power, in occasional situations that are in- 
 tensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of charac- 
 ter; but they are fatally defective in art. The 
 narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, 
 ^proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elabo- 
 rate dissection and discussion of motives and states 
 of mind, interspersed with the author's reflections. 
 The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural 
 and even monstrous developments of character 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 8i 
 
 are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned pre- 
 ciseness of the language ; the conversations, when 
 there are any, being conducted in t%j|^insipid dia- 
 lect in which a fine woman was called an " elegant 
 female." ■ The following is a sample description of 
 one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his 
 novel of Ormond^ the leading character in which — 
 a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish 
 wickedness — is thought to have been suggested by 
 Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with 
 every feminine and fascinating quality. Her feat- 
 ures were modified by the most transient senti- 
 ments and were the seat of a softness at all times 
 blushful and bewitching. All those graces of sym- 
 metry, smoothness and lustre, which assemble in 
 the imagination of the painter when he calls from 
 the bosom oi her natal deep the Paphian divinity, 
 blended their perfections in the shade, com- 
 plexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Hel- 
 ena's intellectual deQciencies could not be con- 
 cealed. She was proficient in the elements of no 
 science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as 
 disproportionate with her intellects as with those 
 of the mock-bird. She had not reasoned on the 
 principles of human action, nor examined the 
 structure of society. . . . She could not commune 
 in their native dialect with the sages of Rome and 
 Athens. . . . The constitution of nature, the at- 
 tributes of its Author, the arrangement of the 
 parts of the external universe, and the substance, 
 modes of operation, and ultimate destiny of human 
 
82 American Literature. 
 
 intelligence were enigmas unsolved and insoluble 
 by her." 
 
 Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mys- 
 tery on a basis ludicrously weak. Thus the hero 
 of his first novel, Wieland (whose father antici- 
 pates " Nemo," in Dickens's Bleak House^ by dying 
 of spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he 
 mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and 
 children ; and the voices turn out to be produced 
 by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of 
 the story. Similarly in Edgar Huntley\ the plot 
 turns upon the phenomena of sleep-walking. 
 Brown had the good sense to place the scene of 
 his romances in his own country, and the only 
 passages in them which have now a living interest 
 are his descriptions oi wilderness scenery in Ed- 
 gar Huntley^ and his graphic account in Arthur 
 Meriryn of the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadel- 
 phia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer of Brown, 
 and his experiments in prose: fiction, such as Zas- 
 trozzi and Si. Ir-oyne the Rasicruciati^ are of the 
 same abnormal and speculative type. 
 
 Another book which falls within this period was 
 the Journal^ i774i of John Woolman, a New Jer- 
 sey Quaker, which has received the highest praise 
 from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. 
 *' Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,'* 
 wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers." The 
 charm of this journal resides in its singular sweet- 
 ness and innocence of feeling, the '* deep inward 
 stillness " peculiar to the people called Quakers. 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 83 
 
 Apart from his constant use of certain phrases 
 peculiar to the Friends, Woolman's English is 
 also remarkably graceful and pure, the transparent 
 medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and tender 
 and humble in its sincerity. When not working 
 at his trade as a tailor, VVoolman spent his time in 
 visiting and ministering to the monthly, quarterly, 
 and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on 
 horseback to their scattered communities in the 
 backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina, and 
 northward along the coast as far as Boston and 
 Nantucket. He was under a *' concern " and a 
 " heavy exercise " touching the keeping of slaves, 
 and by his writing and speaking did much to in- 
 fluence the Quakers against slavery. His love 
 went out, indeed, to all the wretched and op- 
 pressed ; to sailors, and to the Indians in partic- 
 ular. One of his most perilous journeys was made 
 to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wil- 
 derness of Western Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, 
 and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. Some of 
 the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint 
 7iaivete with which he expresses them, may make 
 the modern reader smile — but it is a smile which 
 is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England — 
 where he died in 1772 — he would not ride nor 
 send a letter by mail-coach, because the poor post- 
 boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter 
 nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. *' So 
 great is the hurry in the spirit of this w^rld, that in 
 aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, 
 
84 American Literature. 
 
 the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, 
 having reflected that war was caused by luxury in 
 dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew uneasy 
 to him, and he got and wore a hat of the natural 
 color of the fur. *' In attending meetings, this 
 singularity was a trial to me . . . and some Friends, 
 who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew 
 shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I gen- 
 erally informed, in a few words, that I believed 
 my wearing it was not in my own will." 
 
 1 . Representative American Orations. Edited 
 by Alexander Johnston. New York : G. P. Put- 
 nam's Sons. 1884. 
 
 2. The Federalist. New York: Charles Scrib- 
 ner. 1863. 
 
 3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. 
 Boston. 1829. 
 
 4. Travels in New England and New York. 
 By Timothy Dwight. New Haven. 1821. 
 
 5. McFingal : in Trumbull's Poetical Works. 
 Hartford : 1820. 
 
 6. Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding. Francis Hop- 
 kinson's Modern Learning. Philip Freneau's In- 
 dian Student^ Indian Burying-Ground, and White 
 Honeysuckle: in Vol. I. of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia 
 of American Literature. New York : Charles 
 Scribner. 1866. 
 
 7. Arthur Mervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. 
 Boston: S. G. Goodrich. 1827. 
 
 8. The Journal of John Woolman. With an 
 
The Revolutionary Period. 85 
 
 Introduction by John G. Whittier. Boston: James 
 R. Osgood & Co. 1871. 
 
 9. American Literature. By Charles F. Rich- 
 ardson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1887. 
 
 10. American Literature. By John Nichol. 
 Edinburgh : Adam & Charles Black. 1882. 
 
86 American Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. 
 
 1815-1837. 
 
 The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological 
 order must here be abandoned. About all the 
 American literature in existence, that is of any 
 value as literature, is the product of the past three 
 quarters of a century, and the men who produced 
 it, though older or younger, were still contempo- 
 raries. Irving's K?iickerbocker s History of New 
 York, 1809, was published within the recollection 
 of some yet living, and the venerable poet, Richard 
 H. Dana — Irving's junior by only four years — sur- 
 vived to 1879, when the youngest of the genera- 
 tion of writers that now occupy public attention 
 had already won their spurs. Bryant, whose 
 Thanatopsis was printed in 181 6, lived down to 
 1878. He saw the beginnings of our national lit- 
 erature, and he saw almost as much of the latest 
 phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1887. 
 Still, even within the limits of a single life-time, 
 there have been progress and change. And so, 
 while it will happen that the consideration of 
 writers a part of whose work falls between the 
 dates at the head of this chapter may be postponed 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 87 
 
 to subsequent chapters, we may in a general way 
 follow the sequence of time. 
 
 The period between the close of the second war 
 with England, in 18 [5, and the great financial 
 crash of 1837, has been called, in language attrib- 
 uted to President Monroe, ''the era- of good feel- 
 ing." It was a time of peace and prosperity, of 
 rapid growth in population and rapid extension 
 of territory. The new nation was entering upon 
 Its vast estates and beginning to realize its mani- 
 fest destiny. -The peace with Great Britain, by 
 calling off the Canadian Indians and the other 
 tribes in alliance with England, had opened up 
 the North-west to settlement. Ohio had been 
 admitted as a State in 1802 ; but at the time of 
 President Monroe's tour, in 181 7, Cincinnati had 
 only seven thousand inhabitants, and half of the 
 State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for 
 most of its course through an unbroken wilder- 
 ness. Chicago was merely a fort. Hitherto the 
 emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it 
 took on the dimensions of a general and almost 
 a concerted exodus. This movement was stimu- 
 lated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 
 and the late spring of 1817, which produced a 
 scarcity of food that amounted in parts of the 
 interior to a veritable famine. All through this 
 period sounded the axe of the pioneer clearing 
 the forest about his log cabin, and the rumble of 
 the canvas -covered emigrant wagon over the 
 primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies 
 
88 American Literature. 
 
 or followed the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Good- 
 rich, known in letters as " Peter Parley," in his 
 Recollections of a Lifetime^ 1856, describes the part 
 of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy 
 in Fairfield County, Conn. : " I remember very well 
 the tide of emigration through Connecticut, on its 
 way to the West, during the summer of 181 7. 
 Some persons went in covered wagons — frequent- 
 ly a family consisting of father, mother, and nine 
 small children, with one at the breast — some on 
 foot, and some crowded together under the cover, 
 with kettles, gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and 
 the family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and 
 Webster's Spelling-book — the lares and penates of 
 the household. Others started in ox-carts, and 
 trudged on at the rate of ten miles a day. . . . 
 Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, 
 and begged their way as they went. Some died 
 before they reached the expected Canaan ; many 
 perished after their arrival from fatigue and priva- 
 tion ; and others from the fever and ague, which 
 was then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, 
 I think, in 1818 that I published a small tract 
 entitled ' Tother Side of Ohio — that is, the other 
 view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was 
 the paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. 
 Hand — a talented young physician of Berlin — who 
 had made a visit to the West about these days. It 
 consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of 
 the accidents and incidents attending this whole- 
 sale migration. The roads over the Alleghanies 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 89 
 
 between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then 
 rude, steep, and dangerous, and some of the more 
 precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with 
 the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which 
 had made shipwreck in their perilous descents." 
 
 But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life, 
 the spirit of that time, as reflected in its writings, 
 was a hopeful and a light-hearted one. 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way," 
 
 runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on 
 America. The New Englanders who removed to 
 the Western Reserve went there to better them- 
 elves; and their children found themselves the 
 owners of broad acres of virgin soil, in place of 
 the stony hill pastures of Berkshire and Litch- 
 field. There was an attraction, too, about the 
 wild, free life of the frontiersman, with all its 
 perils and discomforts. The life of Daniel Boone, 
 the pioneer of Kentucky— that " dark and bloody 
 ground " — is a genuine romance. Hardly less 
 picturesque was the old river life of the Ohio 
 boatmen, before the coming of steam banished 
 their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 
 and 1840 the center of population in the United 
 States had moved from the Potomac to the neigh- 
 borhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the 
 population itself had increased from seven to 
 seventeen millions. The gain was made partly 
 in the East and South, but the general drift was 
 westward. During the years now under review, 
 
90 American Literature. 
 
 the following new States were admitted, in the 
 order named : Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Ala- 
 bama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Ken- 
 tucky and Tennessee had been made States in the 
 last years of the eighteenth century, and Louisiana 
 — acquired by purchase from France — in 1812. 
 
 The settlers, in their westward march, left large 
 tracts of wilderness behind them. They took up 
 first the rich bottom lands along the river courses, 
 the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the val- 
 leys of the Mississippi and Missouri, and the shores 
 of the great lakes. But there still remained back 
 woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the 
 cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a 
 population of more than one hundred thousand in 
 1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, 
 it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who 
 went by canal to Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, de- 
 scribes the houses and stores at Rochester as 
 standing among the burnt stumps left by the first 
 settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of 
 this great water way, the Indian tribes, numbering 
 now about one hundred and thirty thousand souls, 
 were moved across the Mississippi. Their power 
 had been broken by General Harrison's victory 
 over Tecumseh at the battle of Tippecanoe, in 
 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and 
 fragments of the race which had hung upon the 
 skirts of civilization, and disputed the advance of 
 the white man for two centuries. It was not until 
 some years later than this that railroads began 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 91 
 
 to take an important share in opening up new 
 country. 
 
 The restless energy, the love of adventure, the 
 sanguine anticipation which characterized Ameri- 
 can thought at this time, the picturesque contrasts 
 to be seen in each fliushrooin town where civiliza- 
 tion was encroaching on the raw edge of the wil- 
 derness — all these found expression, not only in 
 such well-known books as Cooper's -P/^/'/^<?/-i', 1823, 
 and Irving's Tour on the Prairies, 1835, but in 
 the minor literature which is read to-day, if at all, 
 not for its own sake, but for the light that it throws 
 on the history of national development : in such 
 books as Paulding's story of Westward Ho ! and 
 his poem. The Backwoodsman, 181 8; or as Tim- 
 othy Flint's Recollections, 1826, and his Geography 
 and History of the Mississippi Valley, 1827. It was 
 not an age of great books, but it was an age of 
 large ideas and expanding prospects. The new 
 consciousness of empire uttered itself hastily, 
 crudely, ran into buncombe, " spread-eagleism," 
 and other noisy forms of patriotic exultation ; but 
 it was thoroughly democratic and American. 
 Though literature — or at least the best literature 
 of the time — was not yet emancipated from En- 
 glish models, thought and life, at any rate, were 
 no longer in bondage — no longer provincial. And 
 it is significant that the party in office during 
 these years was the Democratic, the party which 
 had broken most completely with conservative 
 traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was 
 
92 American Literature. 
 
 a pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, 
 and though the FederaHsts returned to power for 
 a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825- 
 1829,) Andrew Jackson received the largest num- 
 ber of electoral votes, and Adams was only chosen 
 by the House of Representafives in the absence 
 of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the 
 close of his term "Old Hickory," the hero of the 
 people, the most characteristically democratic of 
 our Presidents, and the first backwoodsman who 
 entered the White House, was borne into office on 
 a wave of popular enthusiasra. We have now ar- 
 rived at the time when American literature, in the 
 higher and stricter sense of the term, really began 
 to have an existence. S. G. Goodrich, who settled 
 at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in 181 8, 
 says, in his Recollections : " About this time I began 
 to think of trying to bring out original American 
 works. . . . The general impression was that we 
 had not, and' could not have, a literature. It was 
 the precise point at which Sidney Smith had ut- 
 tered that bitter taunt in the Edinburgh Revienf^ 
 'Who reads an American book ? ' . . . It was posi- 
 tively injurious to the commercial credit of a book- 
 seller to undertake American works." Washington 
 Irving (i 783-1859) was the first American author 
 whose books, as books^ obtained recognition abroad ; 
 whose name was thought worthy of mention beside 
 the names of English contemporary authors, like 
 Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also the 
 first American writer whos® writings are still read 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 93 
 
 for their own sake. We read Mather's Magnalia^ 
 and Franklin's Autobiography^ and Trumbull's 
 McFingal — if we read them at all — as history, and 
 to learn about the times or the men. But we read 
 the Sketch Book, and Knickerbocker s History of 
 New York, and the Conquest of Granada for them- 
 selves, and for the pleasure that they give as pieces 
 of literary art. 
 
 We have arrived, too, at a time when we may ap- 
 ply a more cosmopolitan standard to the works of 
 American writers, and may disregard many a minor 
 author whose productions would have cut some 
 figure had they come to light amid the poverty of 
 our colonial age. Hundreds of these forgotten 
 names, with specimens of their unread writings, are 
 consigned to a limbo of immortality in the pages 
 of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia, and of Griswold's Poets 
 of America and Prose Writers of America. We 
 may select here for special mention, and as most 
 representative of the thought of their time, the 
 names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and Channing. 
 
 A generation was now coming upon the stage 
 who could recall no other government in this 
 country than the government of the United States, 
 and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a 
 tradition. Born in the very year of the peace, it 
 was a part of Irving's mission, by the sympathetic 
 charm of his writings and by the cordial recog- 
 nition which he won in both countries, to allay 
 the soreness which the second war, of 181 2-15, 
 had left between England and America. He was~^ 
 
94 American Literature. 
 
 well fitted for the task of mediator. Conservative 
 by nature, early drawn to the venerable worship 
 of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his 
 tastes, with a preference for the past and its his- 
 toric associations which, even in young America, 
 led him to invest the Hudson and the region 
 about New York with a legendary interest, he 
 wrote of American themes in an English fashion, 
 and interpreted to an American public the mellow 
 attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery 
 of Old England. He lived in both countries, and 
 loved them both ; and it is hard to say whether 
 Irving is more of an English or of an American 
 writer. His first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occu- 
 pied nearly two years. From 18 15 to 1832 he was 
 abroad continuously, and his ''domicile," as the 
 lawyers say, during these seventeen years was 
 really in England, though a portion of his time 
 was spent upon the continent, and several succes- 
 sive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the 
 Life of Columbus, the Conquest of Granada, the 
 Companions of Colu?nbus, and the Alhambra, all pub- 
 lished between 1828-32. From 1842 to 1846 he 
 was again in Spain as American Minister at Madrid. 
 Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisoni- 
 ans. His boyish letters, signed "Jonathan Old- 
 style," contributed in 1802 to his brother's news- 
 paper, the Morning Chronicle, were, like Franklin's 
 Busybody, close imitations of the Spectator. To the 
 same family belonged his Salmagundi papers, 1807, 
 a series of town-satires on New York society, written 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 95 
 
 in conjunction with his brother William and with 
 James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and 
 sketches which compose the Sketch Book were 
 written in England, and published in America, in 
 periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which 
 is in some respects his best book, he still main- 
 tained that attitude of observation and spectator- 
 ship taught him by Addison. The volume had a 
 motto taken from Burton, " I have no wife nor 
 children, good or bad, to provide for — a mere 
 spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The 
 Author's Account of Himself" began in true Ad- 
 disonian fashion : '' I was always fond of visiting 
 new scenes and observing strange characters and 
 manners." 
 
 But though never violently "American," like 
 some later writers who have .consciously sought 
 to throw off the trammels of English tradition, 
 Irving was in a real way original. His most dis- 
 tinct addition to our national literature was in his 
 creation of what has been called *'the Knicker- 
 bocker legend." He was the first to make use, 
 for literary purposes, of the old Dutch traditions 
 which clustered about the romantic scenery of the 
 Hudson. Col. T. W. Higginson, in his History of 
 the United States^ tells how " Mrs. Josiah Quincy, 
 sailing up that river in 1786, when Irving was a 
 child three years old, records that the captain of 
 the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or 
 traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain 
 reared its head unconnected with some marvelous 
 
g6 American Literature. 
 
 story.' " The material thus at hand Irving shaped 
 into his Knickerbocker s History of New York, into 
 the immortal story of Rip Van Winkle, and the 
 Legend of Sleepy Hollow (both published in the 
 Sketch Book), and in later additions to the same 
 realm of fiction, such as Dolph Heyliger in Brace- 
 bridge Hall, the Money Diggers, Wolfert Webber, 
 and Kidd the Pirate, in the Tales of a Traveler, 
 and in some of the miscellanies from the Knicker- 
 bocker Magazine, collected into a volume, in 1855, 
 under the title of Wolfert' s Roost. 
 
 The book which made Irving's reputation was 
 his Knickerbocker s History of New York, 1809, a 
 burlesque chronicle, making fun of the old Dutch 
 settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a 
 familiar and now somewhat threadbare device,* to 
 a little old gentleman named Diedrich Knick- 
 erbocker, whose manuscript had come into the 
 editor's hands. The book was gravely dedicated 
 to the New York Historical Society, and it is said 
 to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a 
 certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note 
 on a passage in Thucydides. This story, though 
 well vouched, is hard of belief : for Knickerbocker, 
 though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave 
 irony of Swift in his Modest Proposal or of Defoe 
 in his Short Way with Dissenters. Its mock-heroic 
 intention is as transparent as in Fielding's paro- 
 dies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, 
 
 * Compare Cai'lyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, in Sartor 
 Rcsartus^ the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy." 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 
 
 97 
 
 particularly in the delightfully absurd description 
 of the mustering of the clans under Peter Stuy- 
 vesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Chris- 
 tina. Knickerbocker s History of New York was a 
 real addition to the comic literature of the world ; 
 a work of genuine humor, original and vital. 
 Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of 
 Swift, and had touches resemblmg Sterne. It is 
 ;jot necessary to claim for Irving's little master- 
 piece a place beside Gulliver's Travels and Tris- 
 tram Shandy. But it was, at least, the first Amer- 
 ican book in the lighter departments of literature 
 which needed no apology and stood squarely on 
 its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right 
 time. Although New Amsterdam had become 
 New York as early as 1664, the impress of its first 
 settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was 
 still upon it when Irving was a boy. The descend- 
 ants of the Dutch families formed a definite element 
 not only in Manhattran, but all up along the kills of 
 the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in West- 
 chester County, at Hoboken, and Communipaw, 
 localities made familiar to him in many a ramble 
 and excursion. He lived to see the little provin- 
 cial town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, 
 in which all national characteristics were blended 
 together, and a tide of immigration from Europe 
 and New England flowed over the old landmarks 
 and obliterated them utterly. 
 
 Although Irving was the first to reveal to his 
 countrymen the literary possibilities of their early 
 7 
 
98 American Literature. 
 
 history, it must be acknowledged that with mod- 
 ern American life he had little sympathy. He 
 hated politics, and in the restless democratic 
 movement of the time, as we have described it, 
 he found no inspiration. This moderate and 
 placid gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of 
 fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or for 
 their descendants, the New England Yankees, if 
 we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane, in 
 the Legejid of Sleepy HoUouk His genius was remi- 
 niscent, and his imagination, like Scott's, was the 
 historic imagination. In crude America his fancy 
 took refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, 
 in "survivals" like the Knickerbocker Dutch and 
 the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities 
 on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. 
 He turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the 
 Old World. He was our first picturesque tourist, 
 the first "American in Europe." He rediscovered 
 England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes, 
 memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, 
 and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attrac- 
 tion. With pictures of these, for the most part, 
 he filled the pages of the Sketch Book and Bj-ace- 
 bridge Hall, 1822. Delightful as are these English 
 sketches, in which the author conducts his readers 
 to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the 
 Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the 
 box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with 
 him the Yuletide cheer at the ancient English 
 country house, their interest has somewhat faded. 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 99 
 
 The pathos of the Broken Heart and the Pride 
 of the Village^ the mild satire of the Art of Book 
 Makings the rather obvious reflections in West- 
 minster Abbey are not exactly to the taste of this 
 generation. They are the literature of leisure and 
 retrospection ; and already Irving's gentle elabo- 
 ration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty of 
 his style, and his persistently genial and sympa- 
 thetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers 
 who demand a more nervous and accented kind 
 of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, a little 
 harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures 
 of life. There is, for instance, something a little 
 irritating in tlie old-fashioned courtliness of his 
 manner toward women ; and one reads with a 
 certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages 
 like the following: "As the vine, which has long 
 twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been 
 lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy 
 plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it 
 with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shat- 
 tered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Prov- 
 idence that woman, who is the mere dependent 
 and ornament of man in his happier hours, should 
 be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden 
 calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses 
 of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping 
 head, and binding up the broken heart." 
 
 Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with 
 an imagination sufficiently fertile, and an observa- 
 tion sufficiently acute to support those two main 
 
loo American Literature. 
 
 qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong 
 passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, in- 
 deed, sometimes reached intensity. His humor 
 was always delicate and kindly ; his sentiment 
 never degenerated into sentimentality. His dic- 
 tion was graceful and elegant — too elegant, per- 
 haps ; and in his modesty he attributed the success 
 of his books in England to the astonishment of 
 Englishmen that an American could write good 
 English. 
 
 In Spanish history and legend Irving found a 
 still newer and richer field for his fancy to work 
 upon. He had not the analytic and philosophical 
 mind of a great historian, and the merits of his 
 Conquest of Granada and Life of Cohwibus are 
 rather belleiristisch than scientific. But he brought 
 to these undertakings the same eager love of the 
 romantic past which had determined the charac- 
 ter of his writings in America and England, and 
 the result — whether vv^e call it history or romance — 
 is at all events charming as literature. His Life 
 of WasJmigton — completed in 1859 — was his ma^^- 
 nu77i opus, and is accepted as standard authority. 
 Maho7net and His Successors, 1850, was compara- 
 tively a failure. But of all Irving's biographies, 
 his Life of Oliver Golds7Jiith, 1849, was the most 
 spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not 
 impose it upon himself as a task, but wrote it from 
 a native and loving sympathy with his subject, and 
 it is, therefore, one of the choisest. literary memoirs 
 in the language. 
 
The Era of National Ilxpansion. ioi 
 
 When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he 
 was the recipient of ahnost national honors. He 
 had received the medal of the Royal Society of 
 Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford 
 University, and had made American literature 
 known and respected abroad. In his modest 
 home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river 
 over which he had been the first to throw the 
 witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended 
 *to the last by the admiring affection of his coun- 
 trymen. He had the love and praises of the fore- 
 most English writers of his own generation and 
 the generation which followed — of Scott, Byron, 
 Coleridge, Thackera}', and Dickens, some of whom 
 had been among his personal friends. He is 
 not the greatest of American authors, but the 
 influence of his writings is sweet and wholesome, 
 and it is in many ways fortunate that the first 
 American man of letters who made himself heard 
 in Europe should have been in all particulars a 
 gentleman. 
 
 Connected with Irving, at least by name and 
 locality, were a number of authors who resided 
 in the city of New York and who are known as 
 the Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they 
 were contributors to the Knickerbocker Magazine. 
 One of these was James K. Paulding, a con- 
 nection of Irving by marriage, and his partner 
 in the Salmagimdi Papers. Paulding became 
 Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and 
 lived down to the year i860. He was a volumi- 
 
I02 ' American Literature. 
 
 nous author, but his writings had no power of 
 continuance, and are already obsolete, with the 
 possible exception of his novel, the Dutchman s 
 Fireside, 1831. 
 
 A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rod- 
 man Drake, a young poet of great promise, who 
 died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's 
 patriotic lyric, the American Flag, is certainly the 
 most spirited thing of the kind in our poetic liter- 
 ature, and greatly superior to such national anthems 
 as Hail Columbia and the Star Spangled Ban?ier. 
 His Culprit Fay, published in 181 9, was the best 
 poem that had yet appeared in America, if we ex- 
 cept Bryant's Thanatopsis, which was three years 
 the elder. The Culprit Fay was a fairy story, in 
 which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to 
 throw the glamour of poetry about the Highlands 
 of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem 
 was fanciful rather than imaginative ; but it is 
 prettily and even brilliantly fanciful, and has main- 
 tained its popularity to the present time. Such 
 verse as the following— which seems to show that 
 Drake had been reading Coleridge's C/iristabel, 
 published three years before — was something new 
 in American poetry : 
 
 " The winds are whist and the owl is still, 
 
 The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, 
 And naught is heard on the lonely hill, 
 But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill, 
 
 Of the gauze-winged katydid, 
 And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 103 
 
 Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings 
 Ever a note of wail and woe, 
 
 T.ill morning spreads her rosy wings. 
 And earth and sky in her glances glow." 
 
 Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an 
 American bird, and not the conventional lark or 
 nightingale, although the elves of the Old World 
 seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hud- 
 son. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not 
 only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy 
 written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first 
 stanza of which is universally known: 
 
 *' Green be the turf above thee, 
 
 Friend of my better days ; 
 None knew thee but to love thee. 
 
 Nor named thee but to praise." 
 
 Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, 
 whither he retired in 1849, and resided there till 
 his death in 1867, But his literary career is iden- 
 tified with New York, He was associated with 
 Drake in writing the Croaker Papers^ a series of 
 humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 
 to the Evening Post, These were of a merely 
 local and temporary interest; but Halleck 's fine 
 ode, Marco Bozzaris — though declaimed until it 
 has become hackneyed — gives him a sure title to 
 remembrance ; and his Alnwick Castle^ a monody> 
 half serious and half playful on the contrasts be- 
 tween feudal associations and modern life, has 
 
I04 American Literature. 
 
 much of that pensive lightness which character- 
 izes Praed's best vers de societe. 
 
 A friend of Drake and Halleck was James 
 Fenimore Cooper (i 789-1851), the first American 
 novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which 
 has endured for nearly three quarters of a century 
 is any test, still the most successful of ail Ameri- 
 can novelists. Cooper was far more intensely 
 American than Irving, and his books reached an 
 even wider public. " They are published as soon 
 as he produces them," said Morse, the electrician, 
 in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe. 
 They have been seen by American travelers in the 
 languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantino- 
 ple, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." Cooper 
 wrote altogether too much ; he published, besides 
 his fictions, a Naval History of the United States, 
 a series of naval biographies, works of travel, and 
 a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote 
 over thirty novels, the greater part of which are 
 little better than trash, and tedious trash at that. 
 This is especially true of his tendenz novels and his 
 novels of society. He was a man of strongly 
 marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive 
 to criticism, and abounding in prejudices. He was 
 embittered by the scurrilous attacks made upon 
 him by a portion of the American press, and spent 
 a great deal of time and energy in conducting libel 
 suits against the newspapers. In the same spirit 
 he used fiction as a vehicle for attack upon the 
 abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 105 
 
 his novels, written with this design, are worthless. 
 Nor was Cooper well equipped by nature and tem- 
 perament' for depicting character and passion in 
 social life. Even in his best romances his heroines 
 and his " leading juveniles " — to borrow a term from 
 the amateur stage — are insipid and conventional. 
 He was no satirist, and his humor was not of a high 
 order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, 
 unlike Irving, he had no style. 
 
 Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the 
 invention of incidents and plots, in a power of 
 narrative and description in tales of wild advent- 
 ure whicb keeps the reader in breathless excite- 
 ment to the end of the book. He originated the 
 novel of the sea and the novel of the wilderness. 
 He created the Indian of literature ; and in this, his 
 peculiar field, although he has had countless imi- 
 tators, he has had no equals. Cooper's experi- 
 ences had prepared him well for the kingship of 
 this new realm in the world of fiction. His child- 
 hood was passed on the borders of Otsego Lake, 
 when central New York was still a wilderness, 
 with boundless forests stretching westward, broken 
 only here and there by the clearings of the pio- 
 neers. He was taken from college (Yale) when 
 still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, 
 before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy 
 and did duty on the high seas and upon Lake 
 Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He 
 married and resigned his commission in 181 1, just 
 before the outbreak of the war with England, so 
 
io6 American Literature. 
 
 that he missed the opportunity of seeing active 
 service in any of those engagements on the ocean 
 and our great lakes which were so glorious to 
 American arms. But he always retained an active 
 interest in naval affairs. 
 
 His first successful novel was The Spy, 1821, a 
 tale of the Revolutionary War, the scene of which 
 Was laid in Westchester County, N. Y., where the 
 author was then residing. The hero of this story, 
 Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn 
 figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published the 
 Pioneers, a work somewliat overladen with de- 
 scription, in which he drew for materir# upon his 
 boyish recollections of frontier life at Coopers- 
 town. This was the first of the series of five ro- 
 mances known as the Leatherstocking Tales. The 
 otliers were the Last of the Mohicans, 1826; the 
 Prairie, 1827; the Pathfinder, 1840; and the 
 Deerslayer, 1841. The hero of this series. Natty 
 Bumpo, or " Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one 
 great creation in the sphere of charcter, his most 
 original addition to the literature of the world in 
 the way of a new human type. Tliis backwoods 
 philosopher — to the conception of whom the his- 
 toric exploits of Daniel Boone perhaps supplied 
 some hints ; unschooled, but moved by noble 
 impujses and a natural sense of piety and justice; 
 passionately attached to the wilderness, and fol- 
 lowing its westering edge even unto the prairies 
 — this man of the woods was the first real Ameri- 
 can in fiction. Hardly less individual and vital 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 107 
 
 were the various types of Indian character, in 
 Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron \var- 
 riors. Inferior to these, but still vigorously 
 though somewhat roughly drawn, were the waifs 
 and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope 
 of gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry 
 of crime had driven to the wilderness — the solitary 
 trap23er, the reckless young frontiersman, the offi- 
 .cers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether 
 Cooper's Indian was the real being, or an idealized 
 and rather melo-dramatic version of the truth, has 
 been a subject of dispute. However this be, he 
 has taken his place in tlie domain of art, and it is 
 safe to say that his standing there is secure. No 
 boy will ever give him up. 
 
 Equally good with the Leaihcrstocking novels, 
 and equally national, were Cooper's tales of the 
 sea, or at least the two best of them — the Pilot, 
 1823, founded upon the daring exploits of John 
 Paul Jones, and the Red Rover, 1828. But here, 
 though Cooper still holds the sea, he has had to 
 admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the 
 waves in song, has put in some claim to a share in 
 the domain of nautical fiction in the persons of 
 Mr.W. Clark^ Russell and others. Though Cooper's 
 novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart 
 and the imagination, their appeal to the universal 
 love of a story is perennial. We devour them when 
 we are boys, and if we do not often return to 
 them when we are men, that is perhaps only be- 
 cause we have read them before, and " know the 
 
io8 American Literature. 
 
 ending." They are good yarns for the forecastle 
 and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, 
 though he may put the Deerslayer or the Last of the 
 Mohicans away on the top-shelf, will take it down 
 now and again, and sit up halt the night over it. 
 
 Before dismissing the belles-lettres writings of 
 this period, mention should be made of a few 
 poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have 
 taken a permanent place in popular regard. John 
 Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, a wan- 
 dering actor and playwright, who died American 
 Consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for 
 Covent Garden Theater an opera, entitled Claris 
 the libretto of which included the now famous 
 song of Home^ Sweet Ho7ne. Its literary pretensions 
 were of the humblest kind, but it spoke a true word 
 which touched the Anglo-Saxon heart in its ten- 
 derest spot, and being happily married to a plaint- 
 ive air was sold by the hundred thousand, and is 
 evidently destined to be sung forever. A like 
 success has attended the Old Oaken Bucket, com- 
 posed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and jour- 
 nalist from Massachusetts, whose other poems, 
 of which two collections were issued in 1818 and 
 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, 
 an Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly 
 tastes and accomplishments, who wrote a great 
 deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms 
 in Congress as Representative of the State of 
 Georgia, was the author of the favorite song, My 
 Life is Like the Summer Rose. Another South- 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 109 
 
 erner, and a member of a distinguished Southern 
 family, was Edward Coate5*Pinkney, who served 
 nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at the 
 age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a 
 small volume of lyrical poems which had a fire 
 and a grace uncommon at that time in American 
 verse. One of these, A Healthy beginning 
 
 " I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone," 
 
 though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar 
 Poe, has rare beauty of thought and expression. 
 John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United 
 States (1825-29), was a man of culture and of liter- 
 ary tastes. He published his lectures on rhetoric 
 delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Profes- 
 sorship at Harvard in 1806-09; he left a volumi- 
 nous diary, which has been edited since his death 
 in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is 
 one of considerable merit, entitled the Wants of 
 Man, an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text : 
 
 " Man wants but little here below 
 Nor wants that little long." 
 
 As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of 
 Dr. Holmes's Contentment^ so the very popular 
 ballad. Old Gritnes, written about 1818, by Albert 
 Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown Uni- 
 versity in Rhode Island, is in some respects an 
 anticipation of Holmes's quaintly pathetic Last 
 Leaf. 
 
 The p'olitical literature and public oratory of 
 
no American Literature. 
 
 the United States during this period, although not 
 absolutely of less importance than that which 
 preceded and followed the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and the adoption of the Constitution, 
 demands less relative attention in a history of lit- 
 erature by reason of the growth of other depart- 
 ments of thought. The age was a political one, 
 but no longer exclusively political. The debates 
 of the time centered about the question of *' State 
 Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the 
 old Senate chamber, then made illustrious by the 
 presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The 
 slavery question, which had threatened trouble, 
 w^as put off for awhile by the Missouri Compro- 
 mise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in 
 the debates on the Wilmot Proviso, and the 
 Kansas and Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Aboli- 
 tion movement had been transferred to the press 
 and the platform. Garrison started his Liberator 
 in 1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded 
 in 1833. The Whig party, w^hich had inherited 
 the constitutional principles of the old Federal 
 party, advocated internal improvements at na- 
 tional expense and a high protective tariff. The 
 State Rights party, which was strongest at the 
 South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South 
 Carolina claimed the right to "nullify " the tariff im- 
 posed by the general government. The leader of 
 this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Car- 
 olinian, who in his speech in the United States Sen- 
 ate, on February 13, 1832, on Nullification and the 
 
The Era of National Expansion, hi 
 
 Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the " Caro- 
 lina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but 
 hardly a great orator. His speeches are the argu- 
 ments of a lawyer and a strict constitutionalist, 
 severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in 
 the soundness of his case. Their language is free 
 from bad rhetoric; the reasoning is cogent, but 
 there is an absence of emotion and imagination ; 
 they contain few quotable things, and no passages 
 of commanding eloquence, such as strew the ora- 
 tions of Webster and Burke. They are not, in 
 short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry 
 Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose 
 persuasive oratory is a matter of tradition, dis- 
 appoint in the reading. The fire has gone out of 
 them. 
 
 Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of 
 American forensic orators, if, indeed, he be not the 
 greatest of all orators wlio have used the English 
 tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that 
 have power to move after the voice of the speaker 
 is still. The thought and the passion in them lay 
 hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than 
 the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of 
 Webster's speeches, as of all speeches, that they 
 are knovvn to posterity more by single brilliant 
 passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion 
 is of the essence of the thing, and only those parts 
 of an address which are permanent and universal 
 in their appeal take their place in literature. But 
 of such detachable passages there are happily 
 
112 American Literature. 
 
 many in Webster's orations. One great thought un- 
 derhiy all his public life, the thought of the Union; 
 of American nationality. What in Hamilton had 
 been a principle of political philosophy had be- 
 come in Webster a passionate conviction. The 
 Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any 
 faction which threatened it from any quarter, 
 whether the Nullifiers of South Carolina or the 
 Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought 
 which gives grandeur and elevation to all his ut- 
 terances, and especially to the wonderful perora- 
 tion of his reply to Hayne, on Mr. Foot's resolu- 
 tion touching the sale of the public lands, delivered 
 in the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing 
 words, "liberty and union, now and forever, one 
 and inseparable," became the rallying cry of a great 
 cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous 
 speech of March 7, 1850, On the Constitution and 
 the Union, which gave so much offense to the ex- 
 treme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison 
 that a Constitution which protected slavery was "a 
 league with death and a covenant with hell." It is 
 not claiming too much for Webster to assert that 
 the sentences of these and other speeches, memo- 
 rized and declaimed by thousands of school-boys 
 throughout the North, did as much as any single 
 influence to train up a generation in hatred of 
 secession, and to send into the fields of the civil 
 war armies of men animated with the stern reso- 
 lution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, 
 rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 113 
 
 The figure of this great senator is one of the 
 most imposing in American annals. The mascu- 
 line force of his personality impressed itself upon 
 men of a very different stamp — upon the unworldly 
 Emerson, and upon the captious Carlyle, whose 
 respect was not willingly accorded to any con- 
 temporary, much less to a representative of Amer- 
 ican democracy. Webster's looks and manner 
 were characteristic. His form was massive, his 
 skull and jaw solid, the underlip projecting, and 
 the mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion 
 was swarthy, and his black, deep set eyes, under 
 shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering fire. 
 He was rather silent in society ; his delivery in 
 debate was grave and weighty, rather than fervid. 
 His oratory was massive and sometimes even pon- 
 derous. It may be questioned whether an Amer- 
 ican orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities 
 equal to Webster's — if such a one there were — 
 would permit himself the use of sonorous and 
 elaborate pictures like the famous period which 
 follows: ''On this question of principle, while 
 actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their 
 flag against a power, to wdiich, for purposes of 
 foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the 
 height of her glory, is not to be compared; a 
 power which has dotted over the surface of the 
 whole globe with her possessions and military posts, 
 whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and 
 keeping company with the hours, circles the earth 
 wdth one continuous and unbroken strain of the 
 8 
 
114 American Literature. 
 
 martial airs of England." The secret of this kind 
 of oratory has been lost. The present generation 
 distrusts rhetorical ornament, and likes something 
 swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. 
 Bat every thing, in declamation of this sort, de- 
 pends on the way in which it is done. Webster 
 did it supremely well ; a smaller man would mere- 
 ly have made buncombe of it. 
 
 Among the legal orators of the time the fore- 
 most was Rufus Choate, an eloquent pleader, and, 
 like Webster, a United States Senator from Mas- 
 sachusetts. Some of his speeches, though exces- 
 sively rhetorical, have literary quality, and are 
 nearly as effective in print as Webster's own. An- 
 other Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who 
 in his time was successively professor in Harvard 
 College, Unitarian minister in Boston, editor of the 
 North American Revieiu, member of both houses of 
 Congress, Minister to England, Governor of his 
 State, and President of Harvard, was a speaker 
 of great finish and elegance. His addresses were 
 mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and 
 were rather lectures and <I>. B. K. prolusions than 
 speeches. Everett was an instance of careful 
 culture bestowed on a soil of no very great natu- 
 ral richness. It is doubtful whether his classical 
 orations on Washington, the Republic, Bunker 
 Hill Monument, and kindred themes, have enough 
 of the breath of life in them to preserve them 
 much longer in recollection. 
 
 New England, during these years, did not take 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 115 
 
 that leading part in the purely literary develop- 
 ment of the country which it afterward assumed. 
 It had no names to match against those of Irving 
 and Cooper. Drake and Halleck — slender as v/as 
 their performance in point of quantity — were bet- 
 ter poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, 
 whose Shakespere Ode, delivered at the Boston 
 theater in 1823, was locally famous; and Richard 
 ^Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the 
 Buccaneer, 1827, once had admirers. But Boston 
 has at no time been without a serious intellectual 
 life of its own, nor without a circle of highly edu- 
 cated men of literary pursuits, even in default of 
 great geniuses. The North American ^Review, 
 established in 1815, though it has been wittily de- 
 scribed as "ponderously revolving through space " 
 for a few years after its foundation, did not exist 
 in an absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if some- 
 what heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a Massa- 
 chusetts man — as were Everett and Choate — but 
 his triumphs were won in the wider field of national 
 politics. There was, however, a movement at this 
 time in the intellectual life of Boston and Eastern 
 Massachusetts, which, though not immediately con- 
 tributory to the finer kinds of literature, prepared 
 the way, by its clarifying and stimulating influences, 
 for the eminent writers of the next generation. This 
 was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, 
 in which William EUery Channing was the prin- 
 cipal leader. In a community so intensely theo- 
 logical as New England it was natural that any 
 
ii6 American Literature. ■ 
 
 new movement in thought should find its point of 
 departure in the churches. Accordingly, the pro- 
 gressive and democratic spirit of the age, which 
 in other parts of the country took other shapes, 
 assumed in Massachusetts the form of " liberal 
 Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and 
 other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been 
 latent in some of the Congregational churches" of 
 Massachusetts for a number of years. Bui about 
 1 812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a 
 few years from that date most of the oldest and 
 wealthiest church societies of Boston and its 
 vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Har- 
 vard College had been captured, too. In the 
 controversy that ensued, and which was carried 
 on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and 
 periodicals, there were eminent disputants on both 
 sides. So far as this controversy was concerned 
 with the theological doctrine of the Trinity, it has 
 no place in a history of literature. But the issue 
 went far beyond that. Channing asserted the dig- 
 nity of human nature against the Calvinistic doc- 
 trine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights 
 of human reason and man's capacity to judge of 
 God. "We must start in religion from our own 
 souls," he said. And in his Moral Argument 
 against Calvinism, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is 
 gained to piety by degrading human nature, for in 
 the competency of this nature to know and judge 
 of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition 
 to Edwards's doctrine of necessit}^, he emphasized 
 
The Era of National Expansion. 117 
 
 the freedom of the will. He maintained that the 
 Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, foreordination, 
 election by grace, and eternal punishment were 
 inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made 
 God a monster. In Channing's view the great 
 sanction of religious truth is the moral sanction, 
 is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He 
 was a passionate vindicator of the liberty of the 
 individual not only as against political oppression 
 but against the tyranny of public opinion over 
 thought and conscience : " We were made for free 
 action. This alone is life, and enters into all that 
 is good and great." This jealous love of freedom 
 inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to 
 join the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in 
 his elaborate arraignment of Napoleon in the Uni- 
 tarian organ, the Christian Examiner^ for 1827-28; 
 in his Remarks on Associations^ and his paper On 
 the Character and Writings of Joh?i Alilton, 1826. 
 This was his most considerable contribution to 
 literary criticism. It took for a text Milton's 
 recently discovered Treatise on Christian Doctrine 
 — the tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian — but 
 it began with a general defense of poetry against 
 " those who are accustomed to speak of poetry as 
 light reading." This would now seem a some- 
 what superfluous introduction to an article in any 
 American review. But it shows the nature of the 
 milieu through which the liberal movement in 
 Boston had to make its way. To assert the dig- 
 nity and usefulness of the beautiful arts; to show 
 
ii8 American Literature. 
 
 that novels and plays and games and dances were 
 not necessarily sinful, and might even be improv- 
 ing, was a part of the work of preparation done by 
 the Unitarians in Massachusetts. People in other 
 parts of the country had gone freely to the theater 
 or the ball. Some people had even done so in 
 Boston, but not with the approval of the clergy. 
 The narrow traditions of provincial Puritanism 
 had to be broken and a more cheerful type of 
 religion preached before polite literature in Mas- 
 sachusetts could find a congenial atmosphere. In 
 Channing's Remarks on National Literature, re- 
 viewing a work published in 1823, he asks the 
 question, " Do we possess what may be called 
 national literature?" and answers it, by implication 
 at least, in the negative. That we do now possess 
 a national literature, is in great part due to the 
 influence of Channing and his associates, although 
 his own writings, being in the main controversial 
 and, therefore, of temporary interest, may not 
 themselves take rank among the permanent treas- 
 ures of that literature. 
 
 1. Washington Irving. Knickerbocker's History 
 of New York. The Sketch Book. Bracebridge 
 Hall. Tales of a Traveler. The Alhambra. Life 
 of Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 2. James Fenimore Cooper. The Spy. The Pilot. 
 The Red Rover. The Leather-Stocking Tales. 
 
 3. Daniel Webster. Great Speeches and Ora- 
 tions. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 1879. 
 
♦ The Era of National Expansion. 119 
 
 4. William Ellery Channing. The Character 
 and Writings of John Milton, The Life and 
 Character of Napoleon Bonaparte. Slavery. 
 [Vols. I. and II. of the Works of William E. 
 Channing. Boston: James Munroe & Co. 1841.] 
 
 5. Joseph Rodman Drake. The Culprit Fay. 
 The American Flag. [Selected Poems. New York. 
 
 1835] 
 
 6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. Marco Bozzaris. Aln- 
 wick Castle. On the Death of Drake. [Poems. 
 New York 1827.] 
 
I20 American Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE CONCORD WRITERS. 
 
 1837-1861. 
 
 There has been but one movement in the his- 
 tory of the American mind which has given to 
 literature a group of writers having coherence 
 enough to merit the name of a school. This was 
 the great humanitarian movement, or series of 
 movements, in New England, which, beginning in 
 the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later 
 phase in Transcendentalism, and spent its last 
 strength in the antislavery agitation and the 
 enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage 
 of this intellectual and social revolt was Transcen- 
 dentalism, of which Emerson wrote, in 1842: " The 
 history of genius and of religion in these times 
 will be the history of this tendency." It culmi- 
 nated about 1840-41 in the establishment of the 
 Dial and the Brook Farm Community, although 
 Emerson had given the signal a few years before in 
 his little volume entitled Nature^ 1836, his Phi- 
 Beta Kappa address at Harvard on the A7nerican 
 Scholar, 1837, and his address in 1838 before the 
 Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Em- 
 erson ( 1 803-1 882) was the prophet of the sect, and 
 
The Concord Writers. 121 
 
 Concord was its Mecca; but the influence of the 
 new ideas was not confined to the little group of 
 professed Transcendentalists ; it extended to all 
 the young writers within reach, who struck their 
 roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and 
 freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not 
 merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and 
 Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and 
 Holmes. 
 
 In its strictest sense Transcendentalism was a 
 restatement of the idealistic philosophy, and an 
 application of its beliefs to religion, nature, and 
 life. But in a looser sense, and as including the 
 more outward manifestations which drew popular 
 attention most strongly, it was the name given to 
 that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal in- 
 quiry and experiment, which marked the third 
 and fourth decades of this century in America, 
 and especially in New England. The movement 
 was contemporary with political revolutions in 
 Europe and with the preaching of many novel gos- 
 pels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, 
 medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, 
 like the Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritual- 
 ists, Millerites, Second Adventists, Shakers, Mor- 
 mons, and Come-outers, same of whom believed 
 in trances, miracles, and direct revelations from 
 the divine Spirit; others in the quick coming of 
 Christ, as deduced from the opening of the seals 
 and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse ; 
 and still others in the reorganization of society and 
 
122 American Literature. 
 
 of the family on a different basis. New systems 
 of education were tried, suggested by the writings 
 of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. 
 The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phre- 
 nology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had 
 numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, 
 hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls " kindred 
 delusions," made many disciples. Numbers of 
 persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham 
 and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal 
 food, as injurious not only to health but to a finer 
 spirituality. Not a few refused to vote or pay 
 taxes. The writings of Fourier and St. Simon 
 were translated, and societies were established 
 where co-operation and a community of goods 
 should take the place of selfish competition. 
 
 About the year 1840 there were some thirty of 
 these "' phalansteries " in America, many of which 
 had their organs in the shape of weekly or monthly 
 journals, which advocated the principle of Asso- 
 ciation. The best known of these was probably 
 the Harhiugei', the mouth -piece of the famous 
 Brook Farm Community, which was founded at 
 West Roxbury, Mass., in i84i,and lasted till 1847. 
 The head man of Brook Farm was George Ripley, 
 a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pul- 
 pit in Boston to go into the movement, and who 
 after its failure became and remained for many 
 years literary editor of the New York Tribune. 
 Among his associates were Charles A. Dana — now 
 the editor of the Sun — Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel 
 
The Concord Writers. 123 
 
 Hawthorne and others not unknown to fame. 
 The Harbinger^ which ran from 1845 to 1849 — two 
 years after the break up of the community— had 
 among its contributors many who were not Brook 
 Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with 
 the experiment. Of the number were Horace 
 Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge — who did so much to 
 introduce American readers to German literature 
 — J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, 
 the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and 
 T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking 
 into an odd volume of the Hai'binger^ will find in 
 it some stimulating writing, together with a great 
 deal of unintelligible talk about " Harmonic 
 Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters 
 now fallen silent. The most important literary 
 result of this experiment at " plain living and high 
 thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and 
 agriculture, was Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance^ 
 which has for its background an idealized picture 
 of the community life, whose heroine, Zenobia, 
 has touches of Margaret Fuller ; and whose hero, 
 vv^ith his hobby of prison reform, was a type of 
 the one-idead philanthropists that abounded in 
 such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was 
 always in part one of reserve and criticism, an 
 attitude which is apparent in the reminiscences of 
 Brook Farm in his American Note Books ^ wherein 
 he speaks witli a certain resentment of " Miss 
 Fuller's transcendental heifer," which hooked 
 the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's 
 
124 AxMERiCAN Literature. 
 
 mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Ful- 
 ler herself. 
 
 It was the day of seers and *' Orphic " utter- 
 ances ; the air was full of the enthusiasm of hu- 
 manity and thick with philanthropic projects and 
 plans for the regeneration of the universe. The 
 figure of the wild-eyed, long-haired reformer — the 
 man with a panacea — the " crank " of our later 
 terminology — became a familiar one. He abound- 
 ed at non-resistance conventions and meetings 
 of universal peace societies and of woman's 
 rights associations. The movement had its 
 grotesque aspects, which Lowell has described in 
 his essay on Thoreau. " Bran had its apostles 
 and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its mar- 
 tyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar- pot. . . . Not 
 a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money 
 (unless earned by other people), professing to live 
 on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . Com- 
 munities were established where every thing was 
 to be common but common sense." 
 
 This ferment has long since subsided and much 
 of what was then seething has gone off in vapor or 
 other volatile products. But some very solid mat- 
 ters also have been precipitated, some crystals of 
 poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The 
 immediate practical outcome was disappointing, 
 and the external history of the agitation is a 
 record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, 
 L^topian philosophies, and sects founded only to 
 dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form of 
 
The Concord Writers. 125 
 
 orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the 
 worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could 
 not understand the enigmatic utterances of the re- 
 formers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of tran- 
 scendentalism were naturally uppermost. Never- 
 theless the movement was but a new avatar of the 
 old Puritan spii-it; its moral earnestness, its spirit- 
 uality, its tenderness for the individual con- 
 science. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into 
 grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the 
 same relation to the absurder outcroppings of 
 transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New 
 Lights, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his 
 time. There is in him that mingling of idealism 
 with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee shrewd- 
 ness, which characterizes the race. The practical, 
 inventive, calculating, money-getting side of the 
 Yankee has been made sufficiently obvious. But 
 the deep heart of New England is full of dreams, 
 mysticism, romance : 
 
 "And in the day of sacrifice, 
 
 When heroes piled the pyre, 
 The dismal Massachusetts ice 
 
 Burned more than others' fire." 
 
 The one element which the odd and eccentric 
 developments of this movement shared in common 
 with the real philosophy of transcendentalism was 
 the rejection of authority and the appeal to the pri- 
 vate consciousness as the sole standard of truth and 
 right. This principle certainly lay in the ethical 
 
126 American Literature. 
 
 systems of Kant and Fichte, the great transcend- 
 entalists of Germany. It had been strongly as- 
 serted by Channing. Nay, it was the starting 
 point of Puritanism itself, which had drawn away 
 from the ceremonial religion of the English Church 
 and by its Congregational system had made each 
 church society independent in doctrine and wor- 
 ship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New 
 England had grown rigid and dogmatic, it had 
 never used the weapons of obscurantism. By en- 
 couraging education to the utmost it had shown 
 its willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest 
 discussion and had put into the hands of dissent 
 the means with which to attack them. 
 
 In its theological aspect transcendentalism was 
 a departure from conservative Unitarianism, as 
 that had been from Calvinism. From Edwards to 
 Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theo- 
 dore Parker, there was a natural and logical unfold- 
 ing. Not logical in the sense that Channing ac- 
 cepted Edwards' premises and pushed them out to 
 their conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of 
 Channing's premises, but in the sense that the rigid 
 pushing out of Edwards' premises into their con- 
 clusions by himself and his followers had brought 
 about a moral i-edudio ad ahsurdum and a state of 
 opinion against which Channing rebelled; and 
 that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped 
 short in the carrying out of his own principles. 
 Thus the "Channing Unitarians," while denying 
 that Christ was God, had held that he was of di- 
 
The Concord Writers. 127 
 
 vine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed 
 before he came into the world. While rejecting 
 the doctrine of the " Vicarious sacrifice " they 
 maintained that Christ was a mediator and inter- 
 cessor, and that his supernatural nature was testi- 
 fied by miracles. For Parker and Emerson it was 
 easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ 
 was a good and great man, divine only in the sense 
 that God possessed him more fully than any other 
 man known in history ; that it was his preaching 
 and example that brought salvation to men, and 
 not any special mediation or intercession, and that 
 his own words and acts, and not miracles, are 
 the only and the sufficient witness to his mission. 
 In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as 
 human as Buddha, Socrates or Confucius, and the 
 Bible was but one among the " Ethnical Script- 
 ures " or sacred writings of the peoples, passages 
 from which were published in the transcendental 
 organ, the Dial. As against these new views 
 Channing Unitarianism occupied already a con- 
 servative position. The Unitarians as a body 
 had never been very numerous outside of 
 Eastern Massachusets. They had a few churches 
 in New York and in the larger cities and 
 towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, was a local 
 one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against tlie 
 heresy, under leaders like Leonard Woods and 
 Moses Stuart, of Andover, and Lyman Beecher, 
 of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of Con- 
 necticut, for example, there was until lately, for 
 
128 American Literature. 
 
 a period of several years, no distinctly Unitarian 
 congregation worshiping in a church edifice of its 
 own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, 
 with justice, that their opinions had to a great 
 extent modified the theology of the orthodox 
 churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of 
 Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational 
 divines, approach Unitarianism in their interpreta- 
 tion of the doctrine of the Atonement; and the 
 " progressive orthodoxy " of Andover is certainly 
 not the Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jona- 
 than Edwards. But it seemed to the transcend- 
 entalists that conservative Unitarianism was too 
 negative and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller 
 complained of the coldness of the Boston pulpits. 
 While contrariwise the central thought of tran- 
 scendentalism, that the soul has an immediate 
 connection with God, was pronounced by Dr. 
 Channing a "crude speculation." This was the 
 thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the 
 Cambridge Divinity School, and it was at once 
 made the object of attack by conservative Uni- 
 tarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. 
 The latter in an address before the same audience, 
 on the Latest Form of Infidelity^ said : " Nothing 
 is left that can be called Christianity if its miracu- 
 lous character be denied. . . . There can be no 
 intuition, no direct perception of the truth of 
 Christianity." And in a pamphlet supporting the 
 same side of the question he added : " It is not an 
 intelligible error but a mere absurdity to maintain 
 
The Concord Writers. 129 
 
 that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowl- 
 edge, of the being of God, of our own immortality 
 . . . or of any other fact of religion," Ripley 
 and Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but 
 Emerson himself would never be drawn into con- 
 troversy. He said that he could not argue. He 
 announced truths ; his method was that of the seer, 
 not of the disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was 
 a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight 
 generations of clergymen, had resigned the pas- 
 torate of the Second Church of Boston because 
 he could not conscientiously administer the sacra- 
 ment of the communion — which he regarded as a 
 mere act of commemoration — in the sense in which 
 it was understood by his parishioners. Thence- 
 forth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian 
 pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of '' lay 
 preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a 
 church. The representative of transcendentalism 
 in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent 
 preacher, an eager debater and a prolific writer on 
 many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen 
 volumes. Parker was a man of strongly human 
 traits, passionate, independent, intensely relig- 
 ious, but intensely radical, who made for him- 
 self a large personal following. The more ad- 
 vanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after 
 him, " Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian 
 churches refused to *' fellowship " with him; and 
 the large congregation, or audience, which as- 
 sembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was 
 9 
 
130 American Literature. 
 
 stigmatized as a " boisterous assembly " which 
 came to hear Parker preach irreligion. 
 
 It has been said that, on its philosophical side, 
 New England transcendentalism was a restate- 
 ment of idealism. The impulse came from Ger- 
 many, from the philosophical writings of Kant, 
 Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works 
 of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated 
 German thought in England. In Channing's Re- 
 marks on a National Literature^ quoted in our last 
 chapter, the essayist urged that our scholars should 
 study the authors of France and Germany as one 
 means of emancipating American letters from a 
 slavish dependence on British literature. And 
 in fact German literature began, not long after, 
 to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson 
 published an American edition of Carlyle's Mis- 
 cellanies^ including his essays on German writers 
 that had appeared in England between 1822 and 
 1830. In 1838 Ripley began to publish Specimens 
 of Foreign Standard Literature^ which extended 
 to fourteen volumes. In his work of translating 
 and supplying introductions to the matter selected 
 he was helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John 
 S. Dwight and others who had more or less con- 
 nection with the transcendental movement. 
 
 The definition of the new faith given by Emer- 
 son in his lecture on the Transcendentalist, 1842, is 
 as follows: '^ What is popularly called transcend- 
 entalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism 
 of the present day acquired the name of transcend- 
 
The Concord Writers. 131 
 
 ental from the use of that term by Immanuel 
 Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of 
 Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in 
 the intellect which was not previously in the ex- 
 perience of the senses, by showing that there was a 
 very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, 
 which did not come by experience, but through 
 which experience was acquired ; that these were 
 intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated 
 them tra?iscendenial forms." Idealism denies the 
 independent existence of matter. Transcendent- 
 alism claims for the innate ideas of God and the 
 soul a higher assurance of reality than for the 
 knowledge of the outside world derived through 
 the senses. Emerson shares the "noble doubt" 
 of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a 
 dream, " this great apparition." " It is a sufficient 
 account of that appearance we call the world," he 
 wrote in Nature, " that God will teach a human 
 mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain 
 number of congruent sensations which we call sun 
 and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In 
 my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the 
 report of my senses, to know whether the im- 
 pressions on me correspond with outlying objects, 
 what difference does it make whether Orion is up 
 there in heaven or some god paints the image in 
 the firmament of the soul ? " On the other hand 
 our evidence of the existence of God and of our 
 own souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, 
 are immediate, and are independent of the senses. 
 
132 
 
 American Literature. 
 
 We are in direct communication with the "Over- 
 soul," the infinite Spirit. " The soul in man is 
 the background of our being — an immensity not 
 possessed, that cannot be possessed." " From 
 within or from behind a light shines through us 
 upon things, and makes us aware that we are 
 nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is *'an 
 influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an 
 ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing 
 surges of the sea of life." In moods of exaltation, 
 and especially in the presence of nature, this con- 
 tact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. 
 "All mean egotism vanishes. I become a trans- 
 parent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the cur- 
 rents of the Universal Being circulate through me; 
 I am part and particle of God." The existence 
 and attributes of God are not deducible from his- 
 tory or from natural theology, but are thus directly 
 given us in consciousness. In his essay on the 
 Transceiidentalist^ Emerson says : " His experience 
 inclines him to behold the procession of facts you 
 call the world as flowing perpetually outward from 
 an invisible, unsounded center in himself; center 
 alike of him and of them and necessitating him to 
 regard all things as having a subjective or relative 
 existence — relative to that aforesaid Unknown 
 Center of him. There is no bar or wall in the 
 soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the 
 cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the 
 deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of 
 God." 
 
The Concord Writers. 133 
 
 Emerson's point of view, though familiar to 
 students' of philosophy, is strange to the popular 
 understanding, and hence has arisen the complaint 
 of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and 
 expressed these ideas as a poet, in figurative and 
 emotional language, and not as a metaphysician, in 
 a formulated statement. His own position in rela- 
 tion to systematic philosophers is described in 
 what he says of Plato, in his series of sketches en- 
 titled Representative Men, 1850 : " He has not a 
 system. The dearest disciples and defenders are 
 at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, 
 and his theory is not complete or self-evident. 
 One man thinks he means this, and another that ; 
 he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse 
 of it in another place." It happens, therefore, that, 
 to many students of more formal philosophies 
 Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears 
 to write from temporary moods and to contradict 
 himself. Had he attempted a reasoned exposition 
 of the transcendental philosophy, instead of writ- 
 ing essays and poems, he might have added one 
 more to the number of system-mongers ; but he 
 would not have taken that significant place which 
 he occupies in the general literature of the time, 
 nor exerted that wide influence upon younger 
 writers which has been one of the stimulating 
 forces in American thought. It was because Em- 
 erson was a poet that he is our Emerson. And 
 yet it would be impossible to disentangle his pe- 
 culiar philosophical ideas from the body of his 
 
134 American Literature. 
 
 writings and to leave the latter to stand upon tlieir 
 merits as literature merely. He is the poet of 
 certain high abstractions, and his religion is central 
 to all his work — excepting, perhaps, his English 
 Traits, 1856, an acute study of national charac- 
 teristics, and a few of his essays and verses, which 
 are independent of any particular philosophical 
 standpoint. 
 
 When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he 
 made a short trip to Europe, where he visited Car- 
 lyle at Craigenputtoch, and Landor at Florence, On 
 his return he retired to his birthplace, the village 
 of Concord, Massachusetts,and settled down among 
 his books and his fields, becoming a sort of "glori- 
 fied farmer," but issuing frequently from his retire- 
 ment to instruct and delight audiences of thought- 
 ful people at Boston and at other points all through 
 the country. Emerson was the perfection of a ly- 
 ceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but forcible* 
 his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation 
 clean cut and refined. The sentence was his unit 
 in composition. His lectures seemed to begin any- 
 where and to end anywhere, and to resemble strings 
 of exquisitely polished sayings rather than continu- 
 ous discourses. His printed essays, with unimpor- 
 tant exceptions, were first written and delivered as 
 lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, iV^/- 
 ure, which remains the most systematic statement 
 of his philosophy. It opened a fresh spring-head in 
 American thought, and the words of its introduc- 
 tion announced that its author had broken with 
 
The Concord Writers. 135 
 
 the past. '' Why should not we also enjoy an orig- 
 inal relation to the universe ? Why should not we 
 have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not 
 of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and 
 not the history of theirs?" 
 
 It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies 
 of this little book. But the year following its pub- 
 lication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa address 
 at Cambridge, on the Aviericau Scholar^ electrified 
 the little public of the university. This is de- 
 scribed by Lowell as "an event without any former 
 parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always 
 treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness 
 and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
 aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, 
 what grim silence of foregone dissent ! " To Con- 
 cord came many kindred spirits, drawn by Emer- 
 son's magnetic attraction. Thither came, from 
 Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born a few- 
 years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint 
 and benignant figure, a visionary and a mystic 
 even among the trascendentalists themselves, and 
 one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of 
 the souk Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, 
 Conn., and afterward at Boston on an original 
 plan — compelling his scholars, for example, to flog 
 him, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flog- 
 ging themselves. The experiment was successful 
 until his Conversations o?i the Gospels, in Boston, 
 and his insistence upon admitting colored children 
 to his benches, offended conservative opinion and 
 
136 American Literature. 
 
 broke up his school. Alcott renounced the eating 
 of animal food in 1835. He believed in the union 
 of thought and manual labor, and supported him- 
 self for some years by the work of his hands, gar- 
 dening, cutting wood, etc. He traveled into the 
 West and elsewhere, holding conversations on phi- 
 losophy, education, and religion. He set up a 
 little community at the village of Harvard, which 
 was rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he 
 contributed Orphic Sayings to the Dialy which were 
 harder for the exoteric to understand than even 
 Emerson's Brahma or the Oirer-soul. 
 
 Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the 
 most intellectual woman of her time in America, 
 an eager student of Greek and German litera- 
 ture and an ardent seeker after the True, the 
 Good, and the Beautiful. She threw herself into 
 many causes — temperance, antislavery, and the 
 higher education of women. Her brilliant con- 
 versation classes in Boston attracted many 
 *' minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as lit- 
 erary editor of the New York Ti'ibune, she fur- 
 nished a wider public with reviews and book- 
 notices of great ability. She took part in the 
 Brook Farm experiment, and she editad the Dial 
 for a time, contributing to it the papers afterward 
 expanded into her most considerable book. Woman 
 in the Nineteenth Century. In 1846 she went 
 abroad, and at Rome took part in the revolution- 
 ary movement of Mazzini, having charge of one of 
 the hospitals during the &iege of the city by the 
 
The Concord Writers. 137 
 
 French. In 1847 she married an impecunious 
 Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 
 the ship on which she was returning to America, 
 with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire 
 Island beach and all three were lost. Margaret 
 Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disap- 
 pointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She 
 lives less through her books than through the 
 memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman 
 Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her 
 as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather 
 overbearing individuality made an impression not 
 altogether agreeable upon many of her contem- 
 poraries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her 
 as " Miranda " into his Fable for Critics, and 
 Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in 
 the biography written by his son, has given great 
 offense to her admirers. ''Such a determination 
 to cat this huge universe I " was Carlyle's charac- 
 teristic comment on her appetite for knowledge 
 and aspirations after perfection. 
 
 To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 who took up his residence there first at the 
 "Old Manse," and afterward at " The Wayside." 
 Though naturally an idealist, he said that he 
 came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under 
 Emerson's influence. Of that he would have 
 stood in little danger even had he come earlier. 
 He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of 
 Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius 
 always jealously guarded its independence and re- 
 
138 American Literature. 
 
 sented the too close approaches of an alien mind. 
 Among the native disciples of Emerson at Con- 
 cord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, 
 and his friend and biographer, William EUery 
 Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great Channing. 
 Channing was a contributor to the Dial^ and he 
 published a volume of poems which elicited a 
 fiercely contemptuous review from Edgar Poe, 
 Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, 
 many of Channing's verses were distinguished by 
 true poetic feeling, and the last line of his little 
 piece, A Poefs Hope, 
 
 " If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," 
 
 has taken a permanent place in the literature of 
 transcendentalism. 
 
 The private organ of the transcendentalists was 
 the Dial^ a quarterly magazine, published from 
 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and Mar- 
 garet Fuller. Among its contributors, besides 
 those already mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, 
 Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles A. Dana, 
 John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson 
 and William H. Channing, another nephew of Dr. 
 Channing. It contained, along with a good deal 
 of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that 
 have been published in America. The most last- 
 ing part of its contents were the contributions of 
 Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole, it 
 is so unique a way-mark in the history of our lit- 
 erature that all its four volumes — copies of which 
 
The Concord Writers. 139 
 
 had become scarce— have been recently reprinted 
 in answer to a demand certainly very unusual in 
 the case of an extinct periodical. 
 
 From time to time Emerson collected and pub- 
 lished his lectures under various titles. A first 
 series of £ssays canne out in 1841, and a second in 
 1844 ; the Conduct of Life in i860, Society and Soli- 
 tude in 1870, Letters and Social Aims, in 1876, and 
 ^the Fortune of the Republic in 1878. In 1847 he 
 issued a volume of Poems, and 1865 Mayday and 
 Other Poems. These writings, as a whole, were 
 variations on a single theme, expansions and 
 illustrations of the philosophy set forth in Nature, 
 and his early addresses. They were strikingly 
 original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with 
 lofty morality and spiritual religion. Emerson, said 
 Lowell, first ''cut the cable that bound us to En- 
 glish thought and gave us a chance at the dangers 
 and glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it 
 used to be the fashion to find an English analogue 
 for every American writer, so that Cooper was 
 called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney 
 was described as the Hemans of America, a well- 
 worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson with 
 Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from 
 Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Resai'tus is 
 beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and 
 correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men 
 is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's ILero 
 Worship. But in temper and style the two writers 
 were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dis- 
 
I40 American Literature. 
 
 satisfaction with the general drift of things gained 
 upon him more and more, while Emerson was a 
 consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writ- 
 ings published during his life-time, the Fortune of 
 the Republic^ contrasts strangely in its hopefulness 
 with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. 
 Even in presence of the doubt as to man's per- 
 sonal immortality he takes refuge in a high and 
 stoical faith. '' I think all sound minds rest on a 
 certain preliminary conviction, namely : that if it 
 be best that conscious personal life shall continue 
 it will continue, and if not best, then it will not ; 
 and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see 
 that it was better so." It is this conviction tliat 
 gives to Emerson's writings their serenity and their 
 tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the 
 range of his dealings with life. As the idealist de- 
 clines to cross-examine those facts which he re- 
 gards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this 
 outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy 
 to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away 
 his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as 
 merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Haw- 
 thorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little 
 place in Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes 
 not nigh him and Faust disturbs him with its dis- 
 agreeableness. Pessimism is to him '' the only 
 skepticism." 
 
 The greatest literature is that which is most 
 broadly human, or, in other words, that which will 
 square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's 
 
The Concord Writers. 141 
 
 genius was interpretive rather than constructive. 
 The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phe- 
 nomena. He is most the poet who realizes most 
 intensely the good and the bad of human life. 
 But Idealism makes experience shadowy and sub- 
 ordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities 
 of men, with their "frivolous populations," 
 
 "... are but sailing foam-bells 
 Along thought's causing stream." 
 
 Shakespere does not forget that the world will 
 one day vanish " like the baseless fabric of a 
 vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as 
 dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in 
 which he dwells. Again: while it is for the phi- 
 losopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's 
 task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In 
 the great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante 
 and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, 
 the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the 
 type is important, the common element. " In youth 
 we are mad for persons. But the larger experi- 
 ence of man discovers the identical nature appear- 
 ing through them all." "The same — the same!" 
 he exclaims in his essay on Plato. " Friend and 
 foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow and the 
 furrow are of one stuff." And this is the thought 
 in Brahma: 
 
 " They reckon ill who leave me out; 
 
 When me they fly I am the wings: 
 I am the doubter and the doubt, 
 
 And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." 
 
142 American Literature. 
 
 It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this 
 altitude toward "persons " descending to the com- 
 position of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, 
 indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his 
 English Traits and Representative Men and in his 
 memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. There 
 is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of 
 Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway 
 between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to 
 tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like 
 Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system 
 of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of 
 which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English 
 example. He set a high value upon Browne, 
 to whose style his own, though far more senten- 
 tious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for 
 example, "All things are artificial; for nature is the 
 art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose work- 
 manship, for the rest, in his prose essays was ex- 
 ceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be 
 homely and racy in expressing thought of the 
 highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" 
 is a good instance of his favorite manner. 
 
 Emerson's verse often seems careless in tech- 
 nique. Most of his pieces are scrappy and have the 
 air of runic rimes, or little oracular "voicings" — as 
 they say in Concord — in rhythmic shape, of single 
 thoughts on "Worship," " Character," " Heroism," 
 "Art," " Politics," " Culture," etc. The content is 
 the important thing, and the fomi is too frequently 
 awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear- 
 
The Concord Writers. 143 
 
 obscure of. Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of 
 the thought finds its most natural expression in 
 the imaginative simplicity of the language. But 
 though this artlessness in him became too fre- 
 quently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery 
 Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own 
 poems are many that leave nothing to be desired 
 in point of wording and of verse. His Hymn Sung 
 at the Completion of the Concord Monument, in 1836, 
 is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its 
 lines were on every one's lips at the time of the 
 centennial celebrations in 1876, and " the shot 
 heard round the world " has hardly echoed farther 
 than the song which chronicled it. Equally cur- 
 rent is the stanza from Voluntaries : 
 
 " So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, " Thou must,' 
 
 The youth replies, ' I can.' " 
 
 So, too, the famous lines from the Problem : 
 
 " The hand that rounded Peter's dome. 
 And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity. 
 Himself from God he could not free; 
 He builded better than he knew; 
 The conscious stone to beauty grew." 
 
 The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was 
 Henry David Thoreau, "the poet -naturalist." 
 After his graduation from Harvard College, in 
 1837, Thoreau engaged in school teaching and in 
 
144 American Literature. 
 
 the manufacture of lead-pencils, but soon gave up 
 all regular business and devoted himself to walk- 
 ing, reading, and the study of nature. He was at 
 one time private tutor in a family on Staten Island, 
 and he supported himself for a season by doing 
 odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about 
 Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, 
 a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near 
 Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two 
 years. His expenses during these years were nine 
 cents a day, and he gave an account of his experi- 
 ment in his most characteristic book, Walden^ 
 published in 1854. His Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimac Rivers appeared in 1849. From time 
 to time he went farther afield, and his journeys 
 were reported in Cape Cod, the Maine Woods, Ex- 
 cursions, and a Yankee in Canada, all of which, as 
 well as a volume of Letters diVid. Early Spring in 
 Massachusetts, have been given to the public since 
 his death, which happened in 1862. No one has 
 lived so close to nature, and written of it so inti- 
 mately, as Thoreau. His life was a lesson in econ- 
 omy and a sermon on Emerson's text, '' Lessen 
 your denominator." He wished to reduce exist- 
 ence to the simplest terms — to 
 
 " live all alone 
 Close to the bone, 
 And where life is sweet 
 Constantly eat." 
 
 He had a passion for the wild, and seems like 
 an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the Red 
 
The Concord Writers. 145 
 
 Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is 
 his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a " per- 
 fect piece of stoicism." *' Man," said Thoreau^ 
 "is only the point on which I stand." He strove 
 to realize the objective life of nature — nature in 
 its aloofness from man ; to identify himself, with 
 the moose and the mountain. He listened, with 
 his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the 
 earth. ^UVhat are the trees saying.'" he exclaimed. 
 Following upon the trail of the lumberman he 
 asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and 
 
 " saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds. 
 The slight liunaea hang its twiu-boiu heads." 
 
 He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to 
 fathom the meaning o( the billows on the back of 
 Cape Cod, in their indifference to the shipwrecked 
 bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in 
 my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have 
 been out early on a foggy morning and heard the 
 cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a 
 nature behind the common, unexplored by science 
 or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet 
 realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland 
 depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought 
 from their recesses on my comrade*s string, and 
 fancied that their plumage would assume stranger 
 and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, 
 in proportion as I advanced farther into the dark- 
 ness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen 
 such strong and wild tints on any poet's string." 
 10 
 
146. American Literature.' 
 
 It was on the mystical side that Thoreau appre- 
 hended transcendentalism. Mysticism has been 
 defined as the soul's recognition of its identity 
 with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schel- 
 ling's philosophy, and he illustrated it by his famous 
 figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one: 
 they are the positive and negative poles of the 
 magnet. In man, the Absolute — that is, God — • 
 becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, 
 as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The 
 souls of men," said Schelling, " are but the in-, 
 numerable individual eyes with which our infinite 
 World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is 
 also clearly present in Emerson's view of nature, 
 and has caused him to be accused of pantheism. 
 But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the 
 underlying principle of the universe is matter or 
 force, none of the transcendentalists was a pan- 
 theist. In -their view nature was divine. Their 
 poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spirit- 
 ual reality which abides beyond the phenomena. 
 Thus in Emerson's Two Ritrers : 
 
 *' Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,* 
 
 Repeats the music of the rain, 
 But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 
 
 Through thee as thou througli Concord plain. 
 
 " Thou in thy narrow banks art pent : 
 The stream I love unbounded goes ; 
 
 Through flood and sea and firmament. 
 
 Through light, through life, it forward flows. 
 
 * The Indian name of Concord River. 
 
The Concord Writers. 147 
 
 ** I see the inundation sweet, 
 
 I hear the spending of the stream, 
 Through years, through men, through nature fleet. 
 
 Through passion, thought, through power and dream." 
 
 This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The 
 hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent 
 and spiritual, and he sees himself in it — sees God. 
 "This earth," he cries, 'Svhich is spread out like 
 a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost 
 soul exposed." '* In me is the sucker that I see ; " 
 and, of Walden Pond, 
 
 " I am its stony shore, 
 
 And the breeze that passes o'er." 
 
 "Suddenly old Time winked at me — ah, you 
 know me, you rogue — and news had come that it 
 "was well. That ancient universe is in such capital 
 health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . 
 I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that everlasting 
 something to which we are allied, at once our 
 maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." 
 It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in 
 nature. " The other world," he wrote, " is all my 
 art : my pencils will draw no other : my jack- 
 knife will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not 
 scorn, however, like Emerson, to '' examine too 
 microscopically the universal tablet." He was a 
 close observer and accurate reporter of the ways 
 of birds and plants and the minuter aspects of 
 nature. He has had many followers, who have 
 produced much pleasant literature on out-door 
 
148 American Literature. 
 
 life. But in none of them is there that unique 
 combination of the poet, the naturalist and the 
 mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. 
 He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye 
 of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop 
 short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling 
 in the Maine woods was to him " as though a door 
 had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wil- 
 derness." He saw small things in cosmic rela- 
 tions. His trip down the tame Concord has for 
 the reader the excitement of a voyage of explora- 
 tion into far and unknown regions. The river 
 just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood 
 " when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, 
 heaving up the surface into dark and sober bil- 
 lows," was like Lake Huron, " and you may run 
 aground on Cranberry Island," and "get as good a 
 freezing there as anywhere on the North-west 
 coast." He said that most of the phenomena de- 
 scribed in Kane's voyages could be observed in 
 Concord. 
 
 The literature of transcendentalism was like the 
 light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold 
 and high. It had the pale cast of thought, and 
 was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the 
 sense of mortal sight." But it was at least in- 
 digenous. If not an American literature — not 
 national and not inclusive of all sides of Amer- 
 ican life — it was, at all events, a genuine New En- 
 gland literature and true to the spirit of its section. 
 The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a 
 
The Concord Writers. 149 
 
 blossom which compared with the warm, robust 
 growths of English soil even as the delicate wind 
 flower of the northern spring compares with the 
 cowslips and daisies of old England. 
 
 In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the 
 greatest American romancer, came to Concord. 
 He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been 
 married, and with his bride he settled down in the 
 ^' Old Manse " for three paradisaical years. A 
 picture of this protracted honeymoon and this 
 sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on 
 whose banks it was passed, is given in the intro- 
 ductory chapter to his Mosses from an Old Manse, 
 1846, and in the more personal and confidential 
 records of his American Note Books, posthumously 
 published. Hawthorne was thirty-eight when he 
 took his place among the Concord literati. His 
 childhood and youth had been spent partly at his 
 birthplace, the old and already somewhat decayed 
 sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his grand- 
 father's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on 
 the edge of the primitive forest. Maine did not 
 become a State, indeed, until 1820, the year before 
 Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he 
 was graduated in 1825, in the same class with 
 Henry W. Longfellow and one year behind Frank- 
 lin Pierce, afterward President of the United 
 States. After leaving college Hawthorne buried 
 himself for years in the seclusion of his home at 
 Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had 
 withdrawn entirely from the world. For months 
 
150 American Literature. 
 
 at a time Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no 
 other society than that of his mother and sisters, 
 reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, 
 most of which he destroyed as soon as he had 
 written them. At twilight he would emerge from 
 .the house for a solitary ramble through the streets 
 of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem 
 had much that was picturesque in its associations. 
 It had been the scene of the witch trials in the 
 seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient 
 mansions, the homes of retired whalers and India 
 merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a ship 
 captain, and many of his ancestors had followed 
 the sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had 
 been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had 
 sentenced several of the witches to death. The 
 thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination 
 with a pleasing horror and he utilized it afterward 
 in his House of the Seven Gables. Many of the eld 
 Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with 
 now and then the hint of some obscure crime or 
 dark misfortune which haunted posterity with its 
 curse till all the stock died out, or fell into poverty 
 and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Haw- 
 thorne's romance. In the preface to the Marble 
 Faun Hawthorne wrote: "No author without a 
 trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a ro- 
 mance about a country where there is no shadow, 
 no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy 
 wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosper- 
 ity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may 
 
The Concord Writers. 151 
 
 be doubted whether any environment could have 
 been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than 
 this of his native town, or any preparation better 
 calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him 
 than these long, lonely years of waiting and brood- 
 ing thought. From time to time he contributed 
 a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as 
 S. G. Goodrich's Annual, the Token, or the Knick- 
 erbocker Magazine. Some of these attracted the 
 attention of the judicious; but they were anony- 
 mous and signed by various noms de plume, and 
 their author was at this time — to use his own 
 words — " the obscurest man of letters in America." 
 In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his 
 own expense a short romance, entitled Fanskawe. 
 It had little success, and copies of the first edition 
 are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published 
 a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, 
 Twice Told Tales. The book was generously 
 praised in the North American Review by his 
 former classmate, Longfellow ; and Edgar Poe 
 showed his keen critical perception by predicting 
 that the writer would easily put himself at the 
 head of imaginative literature in America if he 
 would discard allegory, drop short stories and 
 compose a genuine romance. Poe compared Haw- 
 thorne's work with that of the German romancer, 
 Tieck, and it is interesting to find confirmation of 
 this dictum in passages of the American Note 
 Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring 
 over Tieck with a German dictionary. The 
 
152 American Literature. 
 
 Tzvice Told Tales are the work of a recluse, who 
 makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his 
 own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, 
 but who has had little contact with men. Many 
 of them were shadowy and others were morbid 
 and unwholesome. But their gloom was of an 
 interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe. 
 It arose from weird psychological situations like 
 that of Ethan Brand in his search for the unpar- 
 donable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited 
 instinct of Puritanism ; he took the conscience for 
 his theme, and in these early tales he was already 
 absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways 
 in which sin works out its retribution, and the 
 species of fate or necessity that the wrong-doer 
 makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of 
 his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward 
 symbols and types, and never quite followed Poe's 
 advice to abandon allegory. The Scarlet Letter 
 and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly 
 allegories, since the characters are men and 
 women and not mere personifications of abstract 
 qualities. Still they all have a certain allegorical 
 tinge. In the Marble Farm, for example, Hilda, 
 Kenyon, Miriam and Donatello have been ingen- 
 iously explained as personifications respectively 
 of the conscience, the reason, the imagination and 
 the senses. Without going so far as this, it is pos- 
 sible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other cre- 
 ations something typical and representative. He 
 uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work 
 
The Concord Wruers. 
 
 ^53 
 
 out certain problems with : they are rather more 
 and yet rather less than flesh and blood individ- 
 uals. The stories in T7C'ice Told Tales and in the 
 second collection, Mosses from an Old Afanse, 
 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later 
 work. Thus the Minister s Black Veil is a sort of 
 anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the Scarlet 
 Letter. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the 
 position of Surveyor of the Custom House of 
 * Salem. In the preface to the Scarlet Letter he 
 sketched some of the government officials with 
 whom this office had brought him into contact in 
 a way that gave some offense to the friends of the 
 victims and a great deal of amusement to the 
 public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, 
 like Irving's, but less genial and with a more 
 satiric edge to it. The book last named was writ- 
 ten at Salem and published in 1850, just before its 
 author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland 
 Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among 
 the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may have 
 hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dis- 
 solved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in 
 coloring as the implication of its title. Hawthorne 
 chose for his background the somber life of the 
 early settlers in New England. He had always 
 been drawn toward this part of American his- 
 tory, and in Tivice Told Tales had given some 
 illustrations of it in Eiidicotfs Red Cross and 
 Legends of the Province ILouse. Against this dark 
 foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester 
 
154 American Literature. 
 
 Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her para- 
 mour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, 
 old Roger Chillingworth, and her illegitimate 
 child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the ele- 
 mentary passions of human nature and its deep 
 and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the 
 heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He 
 never crowded his canvas with figures. In the 
 Blithedale Romanee and the Marble Faun there 
 is the same parti carre ox group of four characters. 
 In the House of the Seven Gables there are five. 
 The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, 
 was of a more subdued intensity than the Scarlet 
 Letter^ but equally original and, upon the whole, 
 perhaps equally good. The Blithedalt Rouianee, 
 published in the same year, though not strik- 
 ingly inferior to the others, adhered more to con- 
 ventional patterns in its plot and in the sensa- 
 tional nature of its ending. The suicide of the 
 heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the 
 recovery of her body, were suggested to the au- 
 thor by an experience of his own on Concord 
 River, the account of which, in his own words, 
 may be read in Julian Hawthorne's Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne and His Wife. In 1852 Hawthorne 
 returned to Concord and bought the " Wayside " 
 property, which he retained until his death. But in 
 the following year his old college friend Pierce, now 
 become President, appointed him Consul to Liver- 
 pool, and he went abroad for seven years. The 
 most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the 
 
The Concord Writers. 155 
 
 romance of the Marble Faun, i860; the longest of 
 his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. 
 The th.eme of this was the development of the soul 
 through the experience of sin. There is a haunt- 
 ing mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil 
 of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There 
 is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preter- 
 natural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as orig- 
 inal as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouquc's Undine, 
 and yet quite on this side the border-line of the 
 human. Our Old Home, a book of charming pa- 
 pers on England, was published in 1863. Mani- 
 fold experience of life and contact with men, 
 affording scope for his always keen observation, 
 had added range, fullness, warmth to the imagi- 
 native subtlety which had manifested itself even 
 in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for 
 cliildren, the Wonder Book and Tatiglewood Tales, 
 in which the classical mythologies were retold,, 
 should also be mentioned in the list of Haw- 
 thorne's writings, as well as the American, English, 
 and Italian Note Books, the first of which contains 
 the seed thoughts of some of his finished works, to- 
 gether with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, de- 
 scriptions, etc., which he never found time to work 
 out. Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and 
 stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually ac- 
 quired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth 
 study as that of any prose classic in the English 
 tongue. 
 
 Hawthorne was no transcendentalist, He dwelt 
 
156 American Literature. 
 
 much in a world of ideas, and he sometimes 
 doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image 
 in the stream were the more real. But this had 
 little in common with the philosophical idealism 
 of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and 
 he held kindly intercourse — albeit a silent man 
 and easily bored — with Thoreau and Ellery Chan- 
 ning, and even with Margaret Fuller, But his 
 sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in 
 the apostles of the new faith. He had little enthu- 
 siasm for causes or reforms, and among so many 
 Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even 
 wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce. 
 
 The village of Concord has perhaps done more 
 for American literature than the city of New York. 
 Certainly there are few places where associations, 
 both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At 
 one side of the grounds of the Old Manse — which 
 has the river at its back — runs down a shaded 
 lane to the Concord monument and the figure of 
 the Minute Man and the successor of " the rude 
 bridge that arched the flood." Scarce two miles 
 away, among the woods, is little Walden — "God's 
 drop." The men who made Concord famous are 
 asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory 
 prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Con- 
 cord Summer School of Philosophy, which meets 
 every year, to reason high of " Go(i, Freedom, and 
 Immortality," next-door to the " Wayside," and un- 
 der the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path, 
 as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. 
 
The Concord Writers. 157 
 
 I Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The 
 American Scholar. Literary Ethics. The Tran- 
 scendentalist. The Over-soul. Address before 
 the Cambridge Divinity School. English Traits. 
 Representative Men. Poems. 
 
 2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. 
 A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. 
 Cape Cod. The Maine Woods. 
 
 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old 
 Manse. The Scarlet Letter. The House of the 
 Seven Gables. The Blithedale Romance. The 
 Marble Faun. Our Old Home. 
 
 4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. 
 B. Frothingham. New York : G. P. Putnam's 
 Sons. 1875. 
 
158 American Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. 
 
 1837-1861. 
 
 With few exceptions, the men who have made 
 American literature what it is have been college 
 graduates. And yet our colleges have not com- 
 monly been, in themselves, literary centers. Most 
 of them have been small and poor, and situated in 
 little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni 
 scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, 
 and even those of them who may feel drawn to a 
 life of scholarship or letters find little to attract 
 them at the home of their a//;ia ma/er, and seek, 
 by preference, the large cities where periodicals 
 and publishing houses offer some hope of support 
 in a literary career. Even in the older and bet- 
 ter equipped universities the faculty is usually a 
 corps of working scholars, each man intent upon 
 his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue 
 merely "literary" performance. In many cases 
 the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind 
 which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism 
 which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of 
 learning and the spirit of theological conformity 
 which suppresses free discussion have exerted their 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 159 
 
 benumbing influence upon the originality and cre- 
 ative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens 
 that, while the contributions of American college 
 teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and 
 philology, metaphysics, political philosophy and the 
 severer branches of learning have been honorable 
 and important, they have as a class made little 
 mark upon the general literature of the country. 
 The professors of literature in our colleges are 
 usually persons who have made no additions to 
 literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem or- 
 dinarily to have been selected to teach students 
 how to write, for the reason that they themselves 
 have never written any thing that any one has ever 
 read. 
 
 To these remarks the Harvard College of some 
 fifty years ago offers a striking exception. It was 
 not the large and fashionable university that it has 
 lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective 
 courses, its numerous faculty and its somewhat 
 motley collection of undergraduates ; but a small 
 school of the classics and mathematics, with some- 
 thing of ethics, natural science and the modern 
 languages added to its old-fashioned, scholastic 
 curriculum, and with a very homogeneous dietitUe, 
 drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of 
 Eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer in- 
 tellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old 
 Cambridge within the years covered by this chap- 
 ter than nowadays at the same place, or at any 
 date in any other American university town. The 
 
i6o American Literature. 
 
 neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial 
 life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual 
 as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a 
 standing advantage to Harvard College. The 
 recent upheaval in religious thought had secured 
 toleration, and made possible that free and even 
 audacious interchange of ideas without which a 
 literary atmosphere is impossible. From these, or 
 from whatever causes, it happened that the old 
 Harvard scholarship had an elegant and tasteful 
 side to it, so that the dry erudition of the schools 
 blossomed into a generous culture, and there were 
 men in the professors' chairs who were no less 
 efficient as teachers because they were also poets, 
 orators, wits and men of the world. In the seven- 
 teen years from 182 1 to 1839 there were gradu- 
 ated from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, 
 Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and 
 Edward Everett Hale, some of whom took up their 
 residence at Cambridge, others at Boston and 
 others at Concord, whicli was quite as much a 
 spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 
 1836, when Longfellow became Professor of 
 Modern Languages at Harvard, Sumner was lect- 
 uring in the Law School. The following year — 
 in which Thoreau took hi^ bachelor's degree — 
 witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta 
 Kappa lecture on the American Scholar in the 
 college chapel and Wendell Phillips's speech on 
 the Murder of Lovejoy in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, 
 whose description of the impression produced by 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. i6i 
 
 the former of these famous addresses has been 
 quoted in a previous chapter, was an undergradu- 
 ate at the time. He took his degree in 1838 and 
 in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of 
 Modern Languages. Holmes had been chosen in 
 1847 Professor of Anatomy and Philosophy in the 
 Medical School — a position which he held until 
 1882. The historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had 
 been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. 
 The former's first important publication, Ferdinand 
 and Isabella, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been 
 a tutor in the college in 1822-23 and the initial 
 volume of his Histojy of the United States w^as is- 
 sued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school 
 of historical writers, Francis Parkman, took his first 
 degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge was still 
 hardly more than a village, a rural outskirtof Bos- 
 ton, such as Lowell described it in his article, Cam- 
 bridge Thirty Years ^igo, originally contributed to 
 Putnam's Mojithly in 1853, and afterward reprinted 
 in his Fireside Travels^ 1864. The situation of a 
 university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an 
 almost ideal one. Within easy reach of a great 
 city, with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, 
 lecture courses, public meetings, dinner parties, 
 etc., he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retire- 
 ment among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gar- 
 dens, the dome of the Boston State-house looming 
 distantly across the meadows where the Charles 
 laid its "steel blue sickle" upon the variegated, 
 plush-like ground of the wide marsh. There was 
 11 
 
i62 American Literature. 
 
 thus, at all times during the quarter of a century 
 embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of 
 brilliant men resident in or about Cambridge and 
 Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and 
 exerting upon one another a most stimulating in- 
 fluence. Some of the closer circles — all con- 
 centric to the university — of which this group was 
 loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as 
 "Mutual Admiration Societies." Such was, for 
 instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members 
 were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, Professor 
 of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of 
 the college ; G. S. Hiilard, a graceful lecturer, 
 essayist and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind ; 
 and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover 
 of books and a writer of them. 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-^1882) the 
 most widely read and loved of American poets — or 
 indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and 
 America — though identified with Cambridge for 
 nearly fifty years was a native of Portland, Maine, 
 and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the same 
 class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 
 1825, he had studied and traveled for some years 
 in Europe, and had held the professorship of mod- 
 ern languages at Bowdoin. He had published sev- 
 eral text books, a number of articles on the Romance 
 languages and literatures in the North American 
 Ranew^ a thin volume of metrical translations from 
 the Spanish, a few original poems in various peri- 
 odicals, and the pleasant sketches of European 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 163 
 
 travel entitled Outre Mer. But Longfellow's 
 fame began with the appearance in 1839 of his 
 Voices of the Night. Excepting an earlier collec- 
 tion by Bryant this was the first volume of real 
 poetry published in New England, and it had 
 more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness 
 and variety than Bryant's work ever possessed. 
 Longfellow's genius was almost feminine in its 
 flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It readily 
 took the color of its surroundings and opened 
 itself eagerly to impressions of the beautiful from 
 every quarter, but especially from books. This 
 first volume contained a few things written during 
 his student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank 
 verse piece on Autu7nn^ clearly shows the influence 
 of Bryant's Thanatopsis. Most of these juvenilia 
 had nature for their theme, but they were not so 
 sternly true to the New England landscape as 
 Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the ivy ap- 
 pear among their scenic properties, and in the best 
 of them. Woods in Winter^ it is the English '* haw- 
 thorn " and not any American tree, through which 
 the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow 
 uses " rooks " instead of crows. The young poet's 
 fancy was instinctively putting out feelers toward 
 the storied lands of the Old World, and in his 
 Hymn of the Moravian Nu7is of Bethlehem he 
 transformed the rude church of the Moravian 
 sisters to a cathedral with "glimmering tapers," 
 swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls and "dim 
 mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe, Long- 
 
164 American Literature. 
 
 fellow returned deeply imbued with the spirit of 
 romance. It was his mission to refine our national 
 taste by opening to American readers, in their own 
 vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures 
 of foreign tongues. The fact that this mission was 
 interpretative, rather than creative, hardly detracts 
 from Longfellow's true originality. It merely in- 
 dicates that his inspiration came to him in the first 
 instance from other sources than the common life 
 about him. He naturally began as a translator, 
 and this first volume contained, among other 
 things, exquisite renderings from the German of 
 Uhland, Salis, and Miiller, from the Danish, 
 French, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon, and a few pas- 
 sages from Dante. Longfellow remained all his 
 life a translator, and in subtler ways than by direct 
 translation he infused the fine essence of European 
 poetry into his own. He loved — 
 
 " Tales that have the rime of age 
 And chronicles of eld." 
 
 The golden light of romance is shed upon his 
 page, and it is his habit to borrow mediaeval and 
 Catholic imagery from his favorite middle ages, 
 even when writing of American subjects. To him 
 the clouds are hooded friars, that " tell their beads 
 in drops of rain ; " the midnight winds blowing 
 through woods and mountain passes are chanting 
 solemn masses for the repose of the dying year, 
 and the strain ends with the prayer — 
 
 " Kyrie, eleyson, 
 Christe, eleyson." 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 165 
 
 In his journal he wrote characteristically : " The 
 black shadows lie upon the grass like engravings 
 in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on the 
 illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and 
 chants like a friar." This in Cambridge, of a 
 'moonshiny night, on the first day of the American 
 October. But several of the pieces in Voices of 
 the Night sprang more immediately from the poet's 
 own inner experience. The Hymn to the Night, 
 the Psalm of Life, the Reaper and the Flowers, 
 Footsteps of Angels, the Light of Stars, and the 
 Beleaguered City spoke of love, bereavement, com- 
 fort, patience and faith. In these lovely songs 
 and in many others of the same kind which he aft- 
 erward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all 
 his countrymen. America is a country of homes, 
 and Longfellow, as the poet of sentiment and of 
 the domestic affections, became and remains far 
 more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic " 
 singer as Whitman, who is still practically un- 
 known to the "fierce democracy " to which he 
 has addressed himself. It would be hard to over- 
 estimate the influence for good exerted by the 
 tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality 
 which the hundreds of thousands of copies of 
 Longfellow's writings, that have been circulated 
 among readers of all classes in America and En- 
 gland, have brought with them. 
 
 Three later collections. Ballads and Other Poems, 
 1842 ; the Belfry of Bruges, 1846 ; and the Seaside 
 and the Fireside, 1850, comprise most of what is 
 
i66 American Literature. 
 
 noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first 
 of these embraced, together with some renderings 
 from the German and the Scandinavian languages, 
 specimens of stronger original work than the au- 
 thor had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful 
 ballads of the Skeleton in Armor and the Wreck 
 of the Hesperus. The former of these, written in 
 the swift leaping meter of Drayton's Ode to the 
 Cainbro Britons on their Harp, was suggested by 
 the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall 
 River — a circumstance which the poet linked with 
 the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport 
 and gave to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking 
 song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the 
 Hesperus was occasioned by the. news of ship- 
 wrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the 
 name of a reef — " Norman's Woe " — where many 
 of them took place. It was written one night be- 
 tween twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, 
 "hardly an effort." Indeed, it is the spontaneous 
 ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Lonfellow's 
 lines, which are their best technical quality. 
 There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his 
 poetry. If there is little passion or intellectual 
 depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often 
 a very high order of imagination and almost in- 
 variably the choice of the right word. In this 
 volume were also included the Village Blacksmith 
 and Excelsior. The latter, and the Psalm of Life, 
 have had a " damnable iteration " which causes 
 them to figure as Longfellow's most popular 
 
• The Cambridge Scholars. 167 
 
 pieces. They are by no means, however, among 
 his best. They are vigorously expressed com- 
 monplaces of that hortatory kind which passes 
 for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of 
 preaching. 
 
 In the Belfry of Bruges and the Seaside and the 
 Fireside, the translations were still kept up, and 
 among the original pieces were the Occultatioti 
 of Orion — the most imaginative of all Long- 
 fellow's poems; Seaweed, which has very noble 
 stanzas, the favorite Old Clock on the Stairs, the 
 Building of the Ship, with its magnificent closing 
 apostrophe to the Union, and the Fire of Drift- 
 wood, the subtlest in feeling of any thing that the 
 poet ever wrote. With these were verses of a 
 more familiar quality, such as the Bridge, Fesig- 
 nation, and the Day Is Done, and many others, all 
 reflecting moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, 
 and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend 
 lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed 
 with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended 
 every thing on its beautiful side. Longfellow was 
 all poet. Like Ophelia m Hamlet, 
 
 ** Thought and affection, passion, hell itself 
 He turns to favor and to prettiness.^' 
 
 He cared very little about the intellectual move- 
 ment of the age. The transcendental ideas of 
 Emerson passed over his head and left him undis- 
 turbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly 
 distaste which the cultivated class in America had 
 
i68 American Literature. 
 
 already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a 
 small volume of Poems on Slavery^ which drew 
 commendation from his friend Sumner, but had 
 nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or Lowell's ut- 
 terances on the same subject. It is interesting to 
 compare his journals with Hawthorne's American 
 Note Books and to observe in what very different 
 ways the two writers made prey of their daily 
 experiences for literary material. A favorite 
 haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge between 
 Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put 
 into verse in his poem, the Bridge. " I always 
 stop on the bridge," he writes in his journal ; 
 *'tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean up 
 into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why 
 the tribute has not been paid. The brooks and 
 rivers answer that there has been little harvest of 
 snow and rain this year. Floating sea-w^eed and 
 kelp is carried up into the meadows, as returning 
 sailors bring oranges in bandanna handkerchiefs 
 to friends in the country." And again : " We 
 leaned for awhile on the wooden rail and enjoyed 
 the silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry 
 comparisons. Among other thoughts we had this 
 cheering one, that the whole sea was flashing with 
 this heavenly light, though we saw it only in a 
 single track ; the dark waves are the dark provi- 
 dences of God ; luminous, though not to us; and 
 even to ourselves in another position." '*\Valk on 
 the bridge, both ends of which are lost in the fog, 
 like human life midway between two eternities; 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 169 
 
 beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an 
 allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and 
 subtler than this, and seldom so openly expressed. 
 Many of Longfellow's poems — the Belcaguerea 
 City, for example — may be definitely divided into 
 two parts; in the first, a story is told or a natural 
 phenomenon described ; in the second, the spiritual 
 application of the parable is formally set forth. 
 This method became with him almost a trick of 
 style, and his readers learned to look for the hcEC 
 fabula docet at the end as a matter of course. As 
 for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view 
 of life — of which the above passage is an instance 
 — it seemed to be in him an affair of temperament, 
 and not, as in Emerson, the result of philosophic in- 
 sight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis opti- 
 mism and pessimism are subjective — the expression 
 of temperament or individual experience, since tlie 
 facts of life are the same, whether seen through 
 Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If 
 there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspi- 
 ration came to him at first hand and not through 
 books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On 
 this theme no American poet has written more beau- 
 tifully and with a keener sympathy than the author 
 of the Wreck of the Hesperus and of Seaweed. 
 
 In 1847 was published the long poem of Evan- 
 geline. The story of the Acadian peasant girl, who 
 was separated from her lover in the dispersion of 
 her people by the English troops, and after weary 
 wanderings and a life -long search found him at last, 
 
lyo American Literature. 
 
 an old man dying in a Philadelphia hospital, was 
 told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. Conolly. 
 who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as 
 a subject for a story. Longfellow, characteristic- 
 ally enough, " got up " the local color for his poem 
 from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of 
 the Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's Geograph- 
 ical Descriptioji of Louisiana and Watson's Amials 
 of Fhiladelphia. He never needed to go much 
 outside of his library for literary impulse and ma- 
 terial. Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's 
 inventive powers as a creator of characters or an 
 interpreter of American life, his originality as an 
 artist is manifested by his successful domestication 
 in Evangeline of the dactylic hexameter, which no 
 English poet had yet used with effect. The En- 
 glish poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a 
 time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example 
 in the use of hexameter in his Bothie of Tober-na- 
 Vuolich^ so that we have now arrived at the time — 
 a proud moment for American letters — when the 
 M'orks of our writers began to react upon the 
 literature of Europe. But the beauty of the de- 
 scriptions in Evangeline and the pathos — somewhat 
 too drawn out — of the story made it dear to a 
 multitude of readers who cared nothing about the 
 technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to 
 whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently 
 " spondaic" to truthfully represent the quantitative 
 hexameters of Homer and Vergil. 
 
 In 1855 appeared Hiawatha^ Longfellow's most 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 171 
 
 aboriginal and ^' American " book. The tripping 
 trochaic measure he borrowed from the Finnish 
 epic Kalevala. Tlie vague, childlike mythology 
 of the Indian tribes, with its anthropomorphic 
 sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, 
 and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from 
 Schoolcraft's Algic Researches^ 1839. He fixed 
 forever, \w a skillfully chosen poetic form, the more 
 inward and imaginative part of Indian character, 
 as C'ooper had given permanence to its external 
 and active side. Of Longfellow's dramatic experi- 
 ments the Golden Legend^ 185 !> alone deserves 
 mention here. This was \x\ his chosen realm; a 
 tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the 
 middle ages, precious, with martyrs' blood and 
 bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It con- 
 tains some of his best work, but its merit is rather 
 poetic than dramatic ; although Ruskin praised it 
 for the closeness with which it entered into the 
 temper of the monk. 
 
 Longfellow has pleased the people more than 
 the critics. He gave freely what he had, and the 
 gift was beautiful. Those who have looked in his 
 poetry for something else than poetry, or for 
 poetry of some other kind, have not been slow to 
 assert that he was a lady's poet ; one who satisfied 
 callow youths and school-girls by uttering com- 
 monplaces in graceful and musical shape, but 
 who offered no strong meat for men. Miss Fuller 
 called his poetry thin and the poet himself a 
 "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, 
 
172 American Literature. 
 
 or of the best of it. But he had a singing and not 
 a talking voice, and in his prose one becomes sen- 
 sible of a certain weakness. Hyperion^ for exam- 
 ple, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, inter- 
 spersed with descriptions of European travel, is, 
 upon the whole, a weak book, over flowery in dic- 
 tion and sentimental in tone. 
 
 The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a 
 translator was his great version of Dante's Divina 
 Cof/uficdia, published between 1867 and 1870. It 
 is a severely literal, almost a line for line, render- 
 ing. The meter is preserved, but the rhyme sac- 
 rificed. If not the best English poem constructed 
 from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful 
 and scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which ac- 
 companied it are among Longfellow's best work. 
 He seems to have been raised by daily communion 
 with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and 
 more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in 
 his poetry. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of 
 Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class 
 of '29 ; a class whose anniversary reunions he 
 has celebrated in something like forty distinct 
 poems and songs. For sheer cleverness and ver- 
 satility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled among 
 American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, 
 humorist, novelist, essayist and a college lecturer 
 and writer on medical topics. Li all of these de- 
 partments he has produced work which ranks 
 high, if not with the highest His father, Dr. 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 173 
 
 Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an or- 
 thodox minister of liberal temper, but the son 
 early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, 
 as was natural to a man of a satiric turn and with a 
 very human enjoyment of a fight, whose youth was 
 cast in an age of theological controversy, he has 
 always had his fling at Calvinism and has pro- 
 longed the slogans of old battles into a later 
 generation ; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon 
 them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of 
 good taste. He had, even as an undergraduate, a 
 reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, 
 and many of his good things in this kind, such as 
 the Dorchester Gianf a.nd the Height of the Ridicii- 
 lous^ were contributed to the Collegian, a students' 
 paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider 
 public by his spirited ballad of Old Ironsides — 
 
 "Ay ! Tear her tatlered ensign down ! " — 
 
 composed about 1830, when it was proposed by 
 the government to take to pieces the unseaworthy 
 hulk of the famous old man-of-war, " Constitution." 
 Holmes's indignant protest — which has been a 
 favorite subject for school-boy declamation — had 
 the effect of postponing the vessel's fate for a great 
 many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was 
 pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, 
 contributing now and then some verses to the 
 magazines. Of his life as a medical student in 
 Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his 
 Autocrat and other writings, as where he tells, for 
 
174 American Literature. 
 
 instance, of a dinner party of Americans in the 
 French capital, where one of the company brought 
 tears of home-sickness into the eyes of his sodales 
 by saying that the tinkle of the ice in the cham- 
 pagne-glasses reminded him of the cowbells in 
 the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 
 he printed his first collection of poems. The 
 volume contained among a number of pieces 
 broadly comic, like the September Gale, the Music 
 Grinders, and the Ballad of the Oyster man — which 
 at once became widely popular — a few poems of a 
 finer and quieter temper, in which there was a 
 quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. 
 Such were My Aunt and the Last Leaf — which 
 Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly touching," 
 and which it is difficult to read without the double 
 tribute of a smile and a tear. The volume con- 
 tained also Poetry : A Metrical £ssay, read before 
 the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa 
 Society, which was the first of that long line of 
 capital occasional poems which Holmes has been 
 spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue 
 and with scarcely any falling off in freshness ; 
 poems read or spoken or sung at all manner of 
 gatherings, public and private ; at Harvard com- 
 mencements, class days, and other academic anni- 
 versaries; at inaugurations, centennials, dedications 
 of cemeteries, meetings of medical associations, 
 mercantile libraries, Burns clubs and New En- 
 gland societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; 
 openings of theaters, layings of corner stones, birlh- 
 
• The Cambridge Scholars. 175 
 
 day celebrations, jubilees, funerals, commemora- 
 tion services, dinners of welcome or farewell to 
 Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, 
 Grant, Farragut, tiie Grand Duke Alexis, the 
 Chinese Embassy and what not. Probably no 
 poet of any age or clime has written so much and 
 so well to order. He has been particularly happy 
 in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic 
 feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the petit coniite 
 — the snug little dinners of the chosen few. His 
 
 "The quaint trick to cram the pithy line 
 That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." 
 
 And although he could write on occasion a So fig 
 for a Tempera7ice Dinner^ he has preferred to chant 
 the praise of the punch bowl and to 
 
 *' feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, 
 The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." 
 
 It would be impossible to enumerate the many 
 good things of this sort which Holmes has written, 
 full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly 
 dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll 
 analogies, sudden puns, and unexpected turns of 
 rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are 
 Nux Postcoenatica^ A Modest Request^ Ode for a 
 Social Meeting^ The Boys, and Rip Van Winkle, 
 M.D. Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer 
 poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's exam- 
 ple seems to have consecrated forever to satiric 
 and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this 
 
176 American Literature. 
 
 meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's 
 epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with 
 facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad 
 stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his 
 drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses 
 manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with 
 the champagne at academic banquets should much 
 outlive the occasion ; or that the habit of produc- 
 ing such verses on demand should foster in the 
 producer that "high seriousness" which Matthew 
 Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. 
 Holmes's poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, 
 excellent society-verse, but even in its serious 
 moments too smart and too pretty to be taken 
 very gravely ; with a certain glitter, knowingness 
 and flippancy about it ^nd an absence of that self- 
 forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme 
 which characterize the work of the higher imagina- 
 tion. This is rather the product of fancy and wit. 
 Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the 
 perception of analogies is the staple of his mind. 
 His resources in the way of figure, illustration, al- 
 lusion and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot 
 wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, 
 and there is as much powder in his latest pyro- 
 technics as in the rockets which he sent up half 
 a century ago. Yet, though the humorist in him 
 rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few 
 things, like the Chambered Nautilus and Hof7iesick 
 in Heaven, which are as purely and deeply poetic 
 as the One-Hoss Shay d^Xi^ the Prologue are funny. 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 177 
 
 Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists 
 and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and 
 a student of science, the facts of the material uni- 
 verse have counted for much with him. His clear, 
 positive, alert intellect was always impatient of 
 mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist 
 and the man of the world for oddities of dress, 
 dialect and manners. Naturally the transcend- 
 ental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, 
 and in his After-Dinner Poem, read at the Phi 
 Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had 
 his laugh at the ''Orphic odes" and "runes" of 
 the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery 
 
 " Who rides a beetle which he calls a ' sphinx.* 
 And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme 
 Of Earth the t(»ngueless, and the deaf-mute Time ! 
 Here babbling ' Insight' shouts in Nature's ears 
 His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres ; 
 There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, 
 "With ' Wlience am I ? ' and ' Wherefore did I come ? ' " 
 
 Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived 
 to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote 
 the Sphinx. There was a good deal of toryism or 
 social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged 
 a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man 
 who owned family portraits, had been brought up 
 in familiarity with books, and could pronounce 
 "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the 
 *' Brahmin caste of New England " have some- 
 times resented as snobbishness Holmes's harping 
 12 
 
178 American Literature. 
 
 on "family," and his perpetual application of cer- 
 tain favorite shibboleths to other people's ways of 
 speech. *'The woman who calc'lates is lost." 
 
 " Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope 
 
 The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . 
 
 Do put your accents in the proper spot ; 
 
 Don't, let me beg you, don't say ' How? ' for ' What ?' . . . 
 
 The things named 'pants' in certain documents, 
 
 A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" 
 
 With the rest of " society " he was disposed to 
 ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of 
 the eccentric and the long-haired. But when the 
 civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, 
 and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the 
 Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings 
 comes in part from their local and provmcial bias. 
 He has been the laureate of Harvard College 
 and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with 
 a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and 
 things — the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil 
 Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunk- 
 er Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town 
 crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful 
 saying that " Boston State House is the hub of the 
 solar system." 
 
 In 1857 was started the Atlantic Monthly, a 
 magazine which has published a good share of the 
 best work done by American writers within the past 
 thirty years. Its immediate success was assured 
 by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 179 
 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ^ 1858, followed at 
 once by the Professor at the Breakfast Table ^ 1859, 
 and later by the Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1873. 
 The Autocrat is its author's masterpiece, and holds 
 the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, 
 his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience 
 of men and cities. The form is as unique and 
 original as the contents, being something between 
 an essay and a drama; a succession of monologues 
 or table-talks at a typical American boarding- 
 house, with a thread of story running through the 
 whole. The variety of mood and thought is so 
 great that these conversations never tire, and the 
 prose is interspersed with some of the author's 
 choicest verse. The Professor at the Breakfast 
 Table followed too closely on the heels of the Au- 
 tocrat^ and had less freshness. The third number 
 of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminis- 
 cent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now 
 (1873) sixty-four years old, and entitled to the 
 gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the 
 Breakfast Table series, such as the landlady and 
 the landlady's daughter and her son, Benjamin 
 Franklin ; the schoolmistress, the young man 
 named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, 
 the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus and the Old Gentle- 
 man who sits opposite, are not fully drawn char- 
 acters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched — as is 
 the Autocrat's wont — by means of some trick of 
 speech, or dress, or feature, but they are quite life- 
 like enough for their purpose, which is mainly to 
 
i8o American Literature. 
 
 furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and 
 wit of the chief talker. 
 
 In i860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of 
 fiction with two "medicated novels," Elsie Venner 
 and the Guardian Angel. The first of these was 
 a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very- 
 fascinating human attributes something of the nat- 
 ure of a serpent ; her mother having been bitten 
 by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth 
 of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the 
 use of powerful antidotes. The heroine of 
 the Guardian Angel inherited lawless instincts 
 from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. 
 These two books were studies of certain medico- 
 psychological problems. They preached Dr. 
 Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the 
 modified nature of moral responsibility by reason 
 of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom 
 of the will. In Elsie Venner^ in particular, the 
 weirdly imaginative and speculative character of 
 the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method 
 in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary 
 figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast 
 with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want 
 of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, 
 in particular, and the satirical pictures of New 
 England country life are open to the charge of 
 caricature. In the Guardian Angel the figure of 
 Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with thor- 
 ough sympathy, and though some of his acts are 
 improbable he is, on the whole, Holmes's most 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. i8i 
 
 vital conception in the region of dramatic crea- 
 tion. 
 
 James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost 
 of American critics and of living American poets^ 
 is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like 
 Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 
 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as Professor of 
 Modern Languages in Harvard College. Of late 
 years he has held important diplomatic posts, like 
 Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Amer- 
 icans distinguished in letters, having been United 
 States Minister to Spain, and, under two adminis- 
 trations, to the Court of St. James. Lowell is not 
 so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Long- 
 fellow. His fame has been of slower growth, 
 and his popularity with the average reader has 
 never been so great. His appeal has been to the 
 few rather than the many, to an audience of 
 scholars and of the judicious rather than to the 
 "groundlings" of the general public. Neverthe- 
 less his verse, though without the evenness, in- 
 stinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Long- 
 fellow's, has more energy and a stronger intellect- 
 ual fiber; while in prose he is very greatly the su- 
 perior. His first volume, A Years Life, 1841, 
 gave little promise. In 1843 he started a maga- 
 zine, the Pioneer, which only reached its third 
 number, though it counted among its contributors 
 Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (after- 
 ward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, 
 printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such 
 
i82 American Literature. 
 
 pieces as the Shepherd of King Adineius^ Rhoecus, 
 a classical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and 
 the same in subject with one of Landor's polished 
 intaglios; and \\\^ Legend of Britaiuiy^ 2i\idLXXdX\VQ. 
 poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in 
 the management of the story. As yet, it was evi- 
 dent, the young poet had not found his theme. 
 This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, 
 which was unpopular in New England, and which 
 the Free Soil party regarded as a slaveholders' war 
 waged without provocation against a sister repub- 
 lic, and simply for the purpose of extending the 
 area of slavery. 
 
 In 1846, accordingly, the Biglow Papers began 
 to a.ppear in the Boston Courier, and were collected 
 and published in book form in 1848. These were 
 a series of rhymed satires upon the government and 
 the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and 
 supposed to be the work of Hosea Biglow, a home- 
 spun genius in a down-east country town, whose 
 letters to the editor were indorsed and accom- 
 panied by the comments of the Rev. Homer Wil- 
 bur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in Jaalam, and 
 (prospective) member of many learned societies. 
 The first paper was a derisive address to a recruit- 
 ing sergeant, with a denunciation of the " nigger- 
 drivin' States" and the "northern dough-faces," 
 a plain hint that the North would do better to se- 
 cede than to continue doing dirty work for the 
 South, and an expression of those universal peace 
 doctrines which were then in the air, and to which 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 183 
 
 Longfellow gave serious utterance in his Occulta- 
 tioii of Orion. 
 
 *• Ez for war, I call it murder — 
 
 There you hev it plain an' flat : 
 I don't want to go no furder 
 
 Than my Testyment for that ; 
 God hez said so plump an' fairly, 
 
 It's ez long as it is broad, 
 An' you've gut to git up airly 
 
 Ef you want to take in God." 
 
 The second number was a versified paraphrase of 
 a letter received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a 
 yung feller of our town that wuz cussed fool 
 enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a drum 
 and fife," and who finds when he gets to Mexico 
 that 
 
 '* This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin.' " 
 
 Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, 
 What Mr. Robinson Thinks, an election ballad, 
 which caused universal laughter, and was cm every- 
 body's tongue. 
 
 The Biglow Papers remain Lowell's most orig- 
 inal contribution to American literature. They 
 are, all in all, the best political satires in the lan- 
 guage, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yan- 
 kee character, with its 'cuteness, its homely wit, and 
 its latent poetry. Under the racy humor of the 
 dialect — which became in Lowell's hands a me- 
 dium of literary expression almost as effective as 
 
184 American Literature. 
 
 Burns's Ayrshire Scotch — burned that raoral en- 
 thusiasm and that hatred of wrong and deification 
 of duty — "Stern daughter of the voice of God" — 
 which, in the tough New England stock, stands 
 instead of the passion in the blood of southern 
 races. Lowell's serious poems on political ques- 
 tions, such as the Present Crisis^ Ode to Freedom, 
 and the Capture of Fugitive Slaves, have the old 
 Puritan fervor, and such lines as 
 
 " They are slaves who dare not be 
 In the right with two or three," 
 
 and the passage beginning 
 
 *' Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," 
 
 became watchwords in the conflict against slavery 
 and disunion. Some of these were published in 
 his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of 
 his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These 
 also included his most ambitious narrative poem, 
 the Vision of Sir Launfal, an allegorical and spir- 
 itual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy 
 Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric 
 and didactic. The merit of Sir Launfal is not in 
 the telling of the story, but in the beautiful de- 
 scriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, 
 
 " And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
 Then if ever come perfect days ; " 
 
 is as current as any thing that he has written. It 
 is significant of the lack of a natural impulse to- 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 185 
 
 ward narrative invention in Lowell, that, unlike 
 Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand 
 at a novel. One of the most important parts of a 
 novelist's equipment he certainly possesses; name- 
 ly, an insight into character, and an ability to de- 
 lineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch 
 of Parson Wilbur, who edited the Bigloiu Papers 
 with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, 
 and notes; in the prose essay On a Certain Conde- 
 scensio7i in Foreigners^ and in the uncompleted 
 poem, Fitz-Adai7is Story. See also the sketch of 
 Captain Underbill in the essay on New England 
 Tivo Centuries Ago. 
 
 The Big low Papers when brought out in a 
 volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of 
 the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, 
 and a reprint from the " Jaalam Independent 
 Blunderbuss," of the first sketch — afterward ampli- 
 fied and enriched — of that perfect Yankee idyl, the 
 Courtin. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series 
 of Biglow Papers appeared, called out by the 
 events of the civil war. Some of these, as, for in- 
 stance, Jonathan to John, a remonstrance with En- 
 gland for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, 
 were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series ; 
 and others were even superior as poems, equal 
 indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that 
 Lowell has written in his professedly serious 
 verse. In such passages the dialect wears rather 
 thin, and there is a certain incongruity between 
 the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power 
 
iS6 American Literature. 
 
 and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas 
 like the following : 
 
 " Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth 
 
 Oa war's red techstone rang true metal, 
 "Who ventered life an' love an' youth 
 
 For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
 To him who, deadly hurt, agen 
 
 Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
 Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 
 
 That rived the rebel line asunder? " 
 
 Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with 
 little sense of humor, wished that the author of the 
 Biglow Papers "could have used good English." 
 In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English 
 adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote A 
 Fable for Critics^ something after the style of Sir. 
 John Suckling's Session of the Poets ; a piece of 
 rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the Amer- 
 ican Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, 
 sharp satire and sound criticism in equal propor- 
 tion. Never an industrious workman, like Long- 
 fellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait 
 for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen 
 years to go by, from 1850 to 1868, before publish- 
 ing another volume of verse. In the latter year 
 appeared Ujider the Willows, which contains some 
 of his ripest and most perfect work ; notably A 
 Winter Evening Hymii to my Fire, with its noble and 
 toucliing close — suggested by, perhaps, at any rate 
 recalling, the dedication of Goethe's Faust, 
 
 *' Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten; " 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 187 
 
 the subtle Footpath and In the Twilight, the love- 
 ly little poems Auf Wiedersehen and After the 
 Funeral, and a number of spirited political pieces, 
 such as Villa Franca, and the Washers of the 
 Shroud, This volume contained also his Ode 
 Recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865. 
 This, although uneven, is one of the finest occa- 
 sional poems in the language, and the most impor- 
 tant contribution which our civil war has made to 
 song. It was charged with the grave emotion of 
 one who not only shared the patriotic grief and 
 exultation of his alma mater in the sacrifice of 
 her sons, but who felt a more personal sorrow in 
 the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front of 
 battle. Particularly noteworthy in this memorial 
 ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third 
 strophe, beginning, "Many loved Truth :" the ex- 
 ordium — ''O Beautiful! my Country! ours once 
 more ! " and the close of the eighth strophe, where 
 the poet chants of the youthful heroes who 
 
 "Come transfigured back, 
 Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
 Beautiful evermore and with the rays 
 Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." 
 
 From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic 
 Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North Ameri- 
 can Review. His prose, beginning with an early 
 volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 
 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on in- 
 dividual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser. 
 
i88 American Literature, 
 
 Emerson, Shakespere, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., 
 together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, 
 like Witchcraft^ New England Two Cejituries Ago, 
 My Garden Acqiuiintance, A Good Word for Winter, 
 Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc. Two volumes of these 
 were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title 
 Among My Books, and another, Aly Study Win- 
 dows, in 1 87 1. As a literary critic Lowell ranks 
 easily among the first of living writers. His 
 scholarship is thorough, his judgment sure, and 
 he pours out upon his page an unwithholding 
 wealth of knowledge, humor, wit and imagina- 
 tion from the fullness of an overflowing mind. 
 His prose has not the chastened correctness and 
 *'low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It is rich, ex- 
 uberant, and sometimes over fanciful, running 
 away into excesses of allusion or following tlie 
 lead of a chance pun so as sometimes to lay itself 
 open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. 
 Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and 
 comparison are endless, and the readiness of his 
 wit and his delight in using it put many tempta- 
 tions in his way. Purists in style accordingly take 
 offense at his saying that " Milton is the only man 
 who ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and 
 that was a cataract in his eye ; " or of his speak- 
 ing of " a gentleman for whom the bottle before 
 him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope and 
 substituted the Gaston v for the b in binocular," 
 which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout 
 fashion of telling us that he had drunk so much 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 189 
 
 that he saw double. The critics also find fault 
 with his coining such words as "undisprivacied " 
 and with his writing such lines as the famous one 
 — from the Cathedral^ 1870 — 
 
 " Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman." 
 
 It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the 
 crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by 
 reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers 
 take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has 
 stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is 
 said in such a way as to recall many other things. 
 Mention should be made, in connection with 
 this Cambridge circle, of one writer who touched 
 its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, 
 a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard 
 Divinity School in 1837 and in 1840 became min- 
 ister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. 
 Judd published several boo«.s, but the only one 
 of them at all rememberable was Alaj-garet, 1845, 
 a novel of which Lowell said in A Fable for Critics 
 that it was *^ the first Yankee book with the soul 
 of Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point 
 of art, and its second part — a rhapsodical descrip- 
 tion of a sort of Unitarian Utopia — is quite un- 
 readable. But in the delineation of the few chief 
 characters and of the rude, wild life of an outly- 
 ing New England township just after the close of 
 the revolutionary war, as well as in the tragic 
 power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a 
 high order. 
 
190 American Literature. 
 
 As the country has grown older and more popu- 
 lous, and works in all departments of thought have 
 multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw more 
 strictly the line between the literature of knowledge 
 and the literature of power. Political history, in 
 and of itself, scarcely falls within the limits of this 
 sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether dismissed; 
 for the historian's art at its highest demands im- 
 agination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity 
 and proportion in the selection and arrangement 
 of his facts, all of which are literary qualities. It 
 is significant that many of our best historians 
 have begun authorship in the domain of imag- 
 inative literature : Bancroft with an early volume 
 of poems; Motley with his historical romances 
 Merry Moicnt and Mortons Hope\ and Parkman 
 with a novel, Vassall Morton. The oldest of that 
 modern group of writers that have given America 
 an honorable position in the historical literature 
 of the world was William Hickling Prescott 
 (i 796-1859.) Prescott chose for his theme the 
 history of the Spanish conquests in the New 
 World, a subject full of romantic incident and sus- 
 ceptible of that glowing and perhaps slightly over 
 gorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal 
 hand. His completed histories, in their order, are 
 the Reig7i of Ferdinand and Isabella^ 1837; the 
 Conquest of Mexico^ 1843 — a topic which Irving 
 had relinquished to him ; and the Conquest of Peru, 
 1847. Prescott was fortunate in being born to 
 leisure and fortune, but he had difficulties of an- 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 191 
 
 other kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, 
 and had to teach himself Spanish and look up au- 
 thorities through the help of others and to write 
 with a noctograph or by amanuenses. 
 
 George Bancroft (1800- ) issued the first vol- 
 ume of his great History of the United States in 
 1834, and exactly half a century later the final 
 volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 
 1789. Bancroft had studied at Gottingen and 
 imbibed from the German historian Heeren the 
 scientific method of historical study. He had ac- 
 cess to original sources, in the nature of collec- 
 tions and state papers in the governmental ar- 
 chives of Europe, of which no American had 
 hitherto been able to avail himself. His history 
 in thoroughness of treatment leaves nothing to be 
 desired, and has become the standard authority on 
 the subject. As a literary performance merely, 
 it is somewhat wanting in flavor, Bancroft's 
 manner being heavy and stiff when compared 
 with Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's 
 services to his country have been publicly recog- 
 nized by his successive appointments as Secretary 
 of the Navy, Minister to England, and Minister 
 to Germany. 
 
 The greatest, on the whole, of American histo- 
 rians was John Lothrop Motley (i 814-1877), who, 
 like Bancroft, was a student at Gottingen and 
 United States Minister to England. His Rise of 
 the Dutch Republic^ 1856, and History of the United 
 Netherlands, published in installments from 1861 to 
 
192 American Literature. 
 
 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thor- 
 oughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in 
 the picturesque brilliancy of the narrative, while it 
 excelled them both in its masterly analysis of great 
 historic characters, reminding the reader, in this 
 particular, of Macaulay's figure painting, The 
 episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of 
 the cathedral, and of the defeat and wreck of the 
 Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's fa- 
 mous description of Cortez's capture of the city of 
 Mexico; while the elder historian has nothing to 
 compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches of 
 Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of 
 Navarre, and William the Silent. The Life of 
 John of Barneveld^ j874> completed this series of 
 studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a 
 theme to which Motley was attracted because the 
 heroic struggle of the Dutch for liberty offered, in 
 some respects, a parallel to the growth of political 
 independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and 
 especially in his own America. 
 
 The last of these Massachusetts historical writ- 
 ers whom we shall mention is Francis Parkman 
 (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage of being 
 thoroughly American. His Oregon Trail, 1847, a 
 series of sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain 
 life, originally contributed to the Knickerbocker 
 Magazine, displays his early interest in the Amer- 
 ican Indians. In 185 1 appeared his first historical 
 work, the Conspiracy of Fontiac. This has been 
 followed by the series entitled Frajice and England 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 193 
 
 i7t North America^ the six successive parts of which 
 are as follows : the Pioneers of France in the New 
 World: the Jesuits in North America: La Salle 
 and the Discovery of the Great West : the Old Re- 
 gime in Ca?iada : Count Frontenac and New France ; 
 and Montcalm and Wolfe. These narratives have a 
 wonderful vividness, and a romantic interest not 
 inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made him- 
 self personally familiar with the scenes which he 
 'described, and some of the best descriptions of 
 American woods and waters are to be found in 
 his histories. If any fault is to be found with his 
 books, indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and 
 "fine writing" are a little in excess. 
 
 The political literature of the years from 1837 
 to 1 86 1 hinged upon the antislavery struggle. In 
 this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts led the 
 van. Garrison had written in his Liberator, in 
 1830, "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncom- 
 promising as justice. I am in earnest ; I will not 
 equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a 
 single inch; and I will be heard." But the Gar- 
 risonian abolitionists remained for a long time, 
 even in the North, a small and despised faction. 
 It was a great point gained when men of educa- 
 tion and social standing like Wendell Phillips 
 (1811-1884), and Charles Sumner (1811-1874), 
 joined themselves to the cause. Both of these 
 were graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly 
 pursuits. They became the representative orators 
 of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform 
 13 
 
194 American Literature. 
 
 and Sumner in the Senate. The former first 
 came before the public in his fiery speech, deliv- 
 ered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a 
 meeting called to denounce the murder of Love- 
 joy, who had been killed at Alton, 111., while de- 
 fending his press against a pro-slavery mob. 
 Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in 
 behalf of the slave. His eloquence was impas- 
 sioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, 
 simple, and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to 
 Demosthenes than any other American orator. 
 He was a most fascinating platform speaker on 
 themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the 
 Lost Arts was a favorite with audiences of all 
 sorts. 
 
 Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who 
 entered politics reluctantly, and only in obedience 
 to the resistless leading of his conscience. He 
 was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur 
 of engravings, for example, of which he made a 
 valuable collection. He was fond of books, con- 
 versation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while 
 still a young man, had made a remarkable impres- 
 sion in society. But he left all this for public life, 
 and in 185 1 was elected, as Webster's successor, to 
 the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he 
 remained the leader of the Abolitionists in Con- 
 gress until slavery was abolished. His influence 
 throughout the North was greatly increased by the 
 brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 
 1856 by " Bully Brooks " of South Carolina. Sum- 
 
The Cambridge Scholars. 195 
 
 ner's oratory was stately and somewhat labored. 
 While speaking he always seemed, as has been 
 wittily said, to be surveying a "broad landscape 
 of his own convictions." His most impressive 
 qualities as a speaker were his intense moral ear- 
 nestness and his thorough knowledge of his sub- 
 ject. The most telling of his parliamentary 
 speeches are perhaps his speech On the Kansas- 
 Nebraska Bill, of February 3, 1854, and On the 
 Crime against Kansas, May 19 and 20, 1856 ; of 
 his platform addresses, the oration on the True 
 Grandelir of Nations. 
 
 1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the 
 Night. The Skeleton in Armor. The Wreck of 
 the Hesperus. The Village Blacksmith. The 
 Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846). By 
 the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of a Wayside 
 Inn. 
 
 2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast Table. Elsie Venner. Old Ironsides. 
 The Last Leaf. My Aunt. The Music-Grinders. 
 On Lending a Punch Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. 
 A Modest Request. The Living Temple. Meet- 
 ing of the Alumni of Harvard College. Homesick 
 in Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Se- 
 ries. The Boys. Dorothy. The Iron Gate. 
 
 3. James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers 
 (two series). Under the Willows and Other 
 Poems. 1868. Rhoecus. The Shepherd of King 
 Admetus. The Vision of Sir Launfal. The Pres- 
 
196 American Literature. 
 
 ent Crisis. The Dandelion. The Birch Tree. 
 Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer : Shakspere 
 Once More: Dryden: Emerson: the Lecturer: 
 Thoreau : My Garden Acquaintance : A Good 
 Word for Winter : A Certain Condescension in 
 Foreigners. 
 
 4. William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest 
 of Mexico. 
 
 5. John Lothrop Motley. The United Nether- 
 lands. 
 
 6. Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The 
 Jesuits in North America. 
 
 7. Representative American Orations; volume v. 
 Edited by Alexander Johnston. New York : G. 
 P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. 
 
Literature in the Cities. 197 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. 
 
 1837-1861. 
 
 Literature as a profession has hardly existed 
 in the United States until very recently. Even 
 now the number of those who support themselves 
 by purely literary work is small, although the 
 growth of the reading public and the establish- 
 ment of great magazines, such as Harper s, the 
 Century^ and the Atlantic^ have made a market for 
 intellectual wares which forty years ago would 
 have seemed a godsend to poorly paid Bohemians 
 like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. 
 About 1840 two Philadelphia magazines — Godefs 
 Ladys Book and Graham's Moiithly — began to pay 
 their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price 
 then thought wildly munificent. But the first 
 magazine of the modern type was Harpers 
 Monthly^ founded in 1850. American books have 
 always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from 
 the want of an international copyright, which has 
 flooded the country with cheap reprints and trans- 
 lations of foreign works, with which the domestic 
 product has been unable to contend on such un- 
 even terms. With the first ocean steamers there 
 
198 American Literature. 
 
 started up a class of large-paged weeklies in New 
 York and elsewhere, such as Brother Jonathan, the 
 New World, and the Corsair, which furnished their 
 readers with the freshest writings of Dickens and 
 Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fort- 
 night after their appearance in London. This still 
 further restricted the profits of native authors and 
 nearly drove them from the field of periodical lit- 
 erature. By special arrangement the novels of 
 Thackeray and other English writers were printed 
 in Harper 5 in installments simultaneously with 
 their issue in English periodicals. The Atlantic 
 was the first of our magazines which was founded 
 expressly for the encouragement, of home talent, 
 and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journal- 
 ism was the profession which naturally attracted 
 men of letters, as having most in common with 
 their chosen work and as giving them a medium, 
 under their own control, through which they could 
 address the public. A few favored scholars, like 
 Prescott, were made independent by the possession 
 of private fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Long- 
 fellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure 
 as they could get in the intervals of an active pro- 
 fession or of college work. Still others, like Emer- 
 son and Thoreau, by living in the country and 
 making their modest competence — eked out in 
 Emerson's case by lecturing here and tliere — suf- 
 fice for their simple needs, secured themselves 
 freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. 
 But in default of some such pou sto our men of 
 
Literature in the Cities. 199 
 
 letters have usually souglit the cities and allied 
 themselves with the press. It will be remembered 
 that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his 
 own account, and that he afterward edited the At- 
 lantic and the North American. Also that Ripley 
 and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to jour- 
 nalism after the break up of the Brook Farm 
 Community. 
 
 In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794- 
 1878), the earliest American poet of importance, 
 whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of na- 
 ture, was compelled to gain a livelihood by con- 
 ducting a daily newspaper; or, as he himself puts 
 it, was 
 
 " Forced to drudge for -the dregs of men, 
 
 And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." 
 
 Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the 
 westernmost county of Massachusetts. After two 
 years in Williams College he studied law, and 
 practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in 
 Plainfield and Great Barrington. Following the 
 line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theo- 
 logical affiliations of Berkshire have always been 
 closer with Connecticut and New York than with 
 Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, Accordingly, 
 when, in 1825, Bryant yielded to the attractions of 
 a literary career, he betook himself to New York 
 city, where, after a brief experiment in conducting 
 a monthly magazine, the New York Revieiv and 
 Athenceuni, he assumed the editorship of the Even- 
 
200 American Literature. 
 
 i?ig Fost,Zi Democratic and Free-trade journal, with 
 which he remained connected till his death. He 
 already had a reputation as a poet when he entered 
 the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his 
 Thajiatopsishdidi been published in iXiQ North Afner- 
 icaii Review^ and had attracted immediate and gen- 
 eral admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two 
 years before, when the poet was only in his nine- 
 teenth year, and was a wonderful instance of pre- 
 cocity. The thought in this stately hymn was not 
 that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected 
 long upon the universality, the necessity, and the 
 majesty of death. Bryant's blank verse when at 
 its best, as in Thanatopsis and the Forest Hymn^ is 
 extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is sur- 
 passed by no English blank verse of this century, 
 though in rich and various modulation it falls be- 
 low Tennyson's Ulysses and Morte d' Arthur. It 
 was characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he 
 came thus early into possession of his faculty. 
 His range was always a narrow one, and about his 
 poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rig- 
 idity, and solemnity. His fixed position among 
 American poets is described in his own Hymn to 
 the North Star : 
 
 " And thou dost see them rise, 
 
 Star of the pole ! and thou dost see them set. 
 Alone, in thy cold skies, 
 
 Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet. 
 Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, 
 Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." 
 
Literature in the Cities. 201 
 
 In 1 82 1 he read the ^e-es, a didactic poem in 
 thirty-five stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa So- 
 ciety at Cambridge, and in the same year brought 
 out his first volume of poems. A second collec- 
 tion appeared in 1832, which was printed in Lon- 
 don under the auspices of Washington Irving. 
 Bryant was the first American poet who had much 
 of an audience in England, and Wordsworth is 
 said to have learned Thafiatopsis by heart. Bry- 
 ant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Words- 
 worth's school, and his place among American 
 poets corresponds roughly, though not precisely, 
 to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no 
 humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with 
 little flexibility or openness to new impressions, 
 but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant 
 became the meditative poet of nature. His best 
 poems are those in which he draws lessons from 
 nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and 
 bracing influences upon the human soul. His 
 office, in other words, is the same which Matthew 
 Arnold asserts to be the peculiar office of modern 
 poetry, "the moral interpretation of nature." 
 Poems of this class are Greeji River^ To a Water- 
 fowl, June, the Death of the Flowers, and the 
 £vemng Wind. The song, "O fairest of the Rural 
 Maids," which has more fancy than is common in 
 Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, 
 has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shade," and 
 both of these nameless pieces might fitly be enti- 
 
202 American Literature. 
 
 tied — as Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's Golden 
 Treasury — *' The Education of Nature." 
 
 Although Bryant's career is identified with New 
 York, his poetry is all of New England. His 
 heart was always turning back fondly to the woods 
 and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was 
 nothing of that urban strain in him which appears 
 in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the 
 poet of autumn, of the American October and the 
 New England Indian Summer, that season of 
 " dropping nuts " and " smoky light," to whose 
 subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the 
 New England disease, consumption, he gave such 
 tender expression in the Death of the Flowers ; 
 and amid whose ''bright, late quiet," he wished 
 himself to pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the 
 melancholy days," as Lowell is of June. If, by 
 chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the 
 exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of 
 bobolinks, and in the summer day that is 
 
 " — simply perfect from its own resource 
 As to the bee the new campanula's 
 Ilhiminate seclusion swung in air." 
 
 Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to 
 Bryant by contrast the thouglit of death; and there 
 is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feel- 
 ing than the closing stanzas of June, in which he 
 speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one 
 
 "Whose pai-t in all the pomp that fills 
 The circuit of the summer hills 
 Is — that his grave is green." 
 
Literature in the Cities. 203 
 
 Bryant is, par excellence^ the poet of New England 
 wild flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian 
 — to each of which he dedicated an entire poem-^ 
 the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in the 
 wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." 
 With these his name will be associated as Words- 
 worth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, 
 and Emerson's with the rhodora. 
 
 Except when writing of nature he was apt to be 
 commonplace, and there are not many such ener- 
 getic lines in his purely reflective verse as these 
 famous ones from the Battle Field : 
 
 " Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; 
 
 The eternal years of God are hers ; 
 But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, 
 
 And dies amonj:; his worshipers." 
 
 He added but slowly to the number of his poems, 
 publishing a new collection in 1840, another in 
 1844, and llihty Poems in 1864. His work at all 
 ages was remarkably even. Thanatopsis was as 
 mature as any thing that he wrote afterward, and 
 among his later pieces, the Planting of the Apple 
 Tree and the Flood of Years were as fresh as any 
 thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. 
 Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, 
 without any tincture of affectation or extravagance. 
 His prose writings are not important, consisting 
 mainly of papers of the Salmagundi variety con- 
 tributed to the Talisman^ an annual published in 
 1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the 
 
204 American Literature. 
 
 Glauber Spa^ 1832; and impressions of Europe, 
 entitled, Letters of a Traveler, issued in two series, 
 in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his 
 blank-verse translations of the Iliad Siud Odyssey, a 
 remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and 
 not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent met- 
 rical version of Homer in the English tongue. 
 Bryant's half century of service as the editor of 
 a daily paper should not be overlooked. The 
 Evening Post, under his management, was always 
 honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, and did much 
 to raise the tone of journalism in New York. 
 
 Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the 
 Boston coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his 
 hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf Whittier.. 
 (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farmhouse near 
 Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his 
 lifejias been passed mostly at his native place and 
 at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local 
 color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is 
 that of the Merrimack from the vicinity of Haver- 
 hill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of hill- 
 side farms, opening out below into wide marshes — 
 " the low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches 
 of Hampton and Salisbury. The scenery of the 
 Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier:^ 
 the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with 
 their factories and dams, the sloping pastures arid 
 orchards of the back country, the sands of Plum 
 Island and the level reaches of water meadow be- 
 tween which glide the broad-sailed " gmidalows "— 
 
Literature in the Cities. 205 
 
 a local corruption of gondola — laden with bay. 
 Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such educa- 
 tion as the district school could supply, supplement- 
 ed by two years at the Haverhill Academy. In his 
 School Days \\Qg\\ts a picture of the little old country 
 school-house as it used to be, the only alma mater 
 of so many distinguished Americans, and to which 
 many others who have afterward trodden the pave- 
 ments of great universities look back so fondly 
 as to their first wicket gate into the land of 
 knowledge. 
 
 " Still sits the school-house by the road, 
 
 A ragged beggar sunning ; 
 Around it still the sumachs grow 
 
 And blackberry vines are running. 
 
 " Within, the master's desk is seen, 
 
 Deep-scarred by raps official; 
 The warping floor, the battered seats. 
 
 The jack-knife's carved initial." 
 
 A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct 
 in the young poet, and he began to contribute 
 verses to Garrison's i^Vv*? Press, published at New- 
 buryport, and to the Haverhill Gazette. Then he 
 went to Boston, and became editor for a short 
 time of the Manufacturer. Next he edited the 
 Essex Gazette, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took 
 charge of George D. Prentice's paper, the New 
 England Weekly Review, at Hartford, Conn. Here 
 he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much 
 promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the Connccti- 
 
2o6 American Literature." 
 
 cut Mirror^ whose " Remains " Whittier edited in 
 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his first 
 book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled Leg- 
 ends of New England, 183T, which is not otherwise 
 remarkable than as showing his early interest in 
 Indian colonial traditions — especially those which 
 had a touch of the supernatural-^a mine which he 
 afterward worked to good purpose in the Bridal 
 of Pennacook, the Witclis £>aughter, and similar 
 poems. Some of the Legends testify to Brainard's 
 influence and to the influence of Whittier's tem- 
 porary residence at Hartford. One of the prose 
 pieces, for example, deals with the famous " Moo- 
 dus Noises " at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, 
 and one of the poems is the same in subject with 
 Brainard's Black Fox of Salmon River. After a 
 year and a half at Hartford, Whittier returned to 
 Haverhill and to farming. 
 
 The antislavery agitation was now beginning, 
 and into this he threw himself with all the ardor 
 of his nature. He became the poet of the reform 
 as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and 
 Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published Justice 
 and Expediency^ a prose tract against slavery, and 
 in the same year he took part in the formation of 
 the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, 
 sitting in the convention as a delegate of the 
 Boston Abolitionists. Whittier was a Quaker, and 
 that denomination, influenced by the preaching of 
 John Woolman and others, had long since quietly 
 abolished slavery within its own communion. The 
 
Literature in the Cities. 207 
 
 Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an 
 earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian 
 movement. But it was a strange irony of fate that 
 had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a Friend. His 
 poems against slavery and disunion have the mar- 
 tial ring of a Tyrtaeus or a Korner, added to the 
 stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They 
 are like the sound of the trumpet blown before the 
 walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denounc- 
 ing woe upon the enemies of God's chosen people. 
 If there is any purely Puritan strain in American 
 poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker " Her- 
 mit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there 
 were three principal collections : Voices of Freedom^ 
 1849 ; the Panorama and Other Poefns, 1856 ; and 
 In War Time, 1863 ; Whittier's work as the poet of 
 freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring 
 for the passage of the constitutional amendment 
 abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid Laus Deo, 
 thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit : 
 
 " Loud and long 
 Lift the old exulting song, 
 
 Sing with Miriam by the sea — 
 He has cast the mighty down, 
 
 Horse and rider sink and drown, 
 
 He hath triumphed gloriously. " 
 
 Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of 
 the civil war, the best, or at all events the most 
 ])opular, is Barbara Frietchie. Ichabod, expressing 
 the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel Web- 
 ster's seventh of March speech in defense of the 
 
2o8 American Literature. 
 
 Fugitive Slave Law, is one of Whittier's b»st polit- 
 ical poems, and not altogether unworthy of com- 
 parison with Browning's Lost Leader. The lan- 
 guage of Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, 
 and many of his purely devotional j)ieces are re- 
 ligious poetry of a high order and have been in- 
 cluded in numerous collections of hymns. Of his 
 songs of faith and doubt, the best are perhaps Our 
 Master., Chapel of the Hennits^ and Eternal Good- 
 ness ; one stanza from the last of which is familiar : 
 
 "I know not where His islands lift 
 
 Their fronded palms in air, 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 
 Beyond His love and care." 
 
 But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly 
 to sing the homely life of the New England coun- 
 try side. His rural ballads and idyls are as genu- 
 inely American as any thing that our poets have 
 written, and have been recommended, as such, to 
 English working-men by Whittier's co-religionist, 
 John Bright. The most popular of these is prob- 
 ably Maud Midler^ whose closing couplet has 
 passed into proverb. Skipper Lresons Ride is also 
 very current. Better than either of them, as 
 poetry, is Telling the Bees. But Whittier's master- 
 piece in work of a descriptive and reminiscent 
 kind is Snow Bound, 1866, a New England fire- 
 side idyl which in its truthfulness recalls tlie 
 Winter Evening of Cowper's Task and Burns's 
 Cotter s Saturday Night, but in sweetness and ani- 
 mation is superior to either of them. Although in 
 
Literature in the Cities. 209 
 
 some thing.T a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier 
 has never forgotten that he is also a Friend, and 
 several of his ballads and songs have been upon 
 the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in 
 Massachusetts. The most impressive of these is 
 Cassandra Southwick. The latest of them, the 
 King's Missive^ originally contributed to the 
 Memorial History of Boston in 1880, and reprinted 
 the next year in a volume with other poems, has 
 been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. 
 The Bridal of Peiinacook, 1848, and the Tent on 
 the Beach, 1867, which contain some of his best 
 work,. were series of ballads told by different nar- 
 rators, after the fashion of Longfellow's Tales of 
 a Wayside Inn. As an artist in verse Whiitier is 
 strong and fervid, rather than delicate or rich. 
 He uses only a few metrical forms — by preference 
 the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet 
 
 — " Maud ^fuller on a summer's day 
 
 Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc. — 
 
 and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes 
 very monotonous, as do some of Whittier's man- 
 nerisms ; which proceed, however, never from af- 
 fectation, but from a lack of study and variety, 
 and so, no doubt, in part from the want of that 
 academic culture and thorough technical equip- 
 ment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. 
 Though his poems are not in dialect, like Lowell's 
 Biglow Papers, he knows how to make an artistic 
 use of homely provincial words, such as " chore," 
 14 
 
2IO American Literature. 
 
 which give his idyls of the hearth and the barn- 
 yard a genuine Doric cast. Whittier's prose is 
 inferior to his verse. The fluency v/hich was a 
 besetting sin of his poetry when released from the 
 fetters of rhyme and meter ran into wordiness. 
 His prose writings were partly contributions to the 
 slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches 
 of English and American reformers, and partly 
 studies of the scenery and folk-lore of the Mer- 
 rimack Valley. Those of most literary interest 
 were the Supernaturalism of New England^ 1S47, 
 and some of the papers in Literary Recreations and 
 Miscellanies^ 1854. 
 
 While Massachusetts was creating an American 
 literatire, other sections of the Union were by no 
 means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too raw 
 to add any thing of importance to the artistic prod- 
 uct of the country. The South was hampered 
 by circumstances which will presently be described. 
 But in and about the seaboard cities of New York, 
 Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond, many pens 
 were busy filling the columns of literary weeklies 
 and monthlies; and there was a considerable out- 
 put, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, 
 travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time 
 has already relegated most of these to the dusty top- 
 shelves. To rehearse the names of the numerous 
 contributors to the old Knickerbocker Magazine, to 
 Godeys, and Grahains, and the New Mirror, and the 
 Southern Literary Messenger, or to run over the list 
 of authorlings and poetasters in Poe's papers on 
 
Literature in the Cities. 211 
 
 the Literati of New York, would be very much 
 like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of 
 an old grave-yard. In the columns of these pre- 
 historic magazines and in the book notices and 
 reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one 
 encounters the handiwork and the names of Emer- 
 son, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell, 
 embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. It 
 would have required a good deal of critical acu- 
 men, at the time, to predict that these and a few 
 others would soon be thrown out into bold relief, 
 as the significant and permanent names in the lit- 
 erature of their generation, wliile Paulding, Hirst, 
 Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores of others 
 who figured beside them in the fashionable peri- 
 odicals, and filled quite as large a space in the pub- 
 lic eye, would sink into oblivion in less than thirty 
 years. Some of these latter were clever enough 
 people ; they entertained their contemporary pub- 
 lic sufficiently, but their work had no vitality 
 or "power of continuance." The great majority 
 of the writings of any period are necessarily 
 ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural 
 selection is constantly sifting out the few repre- 
 sentative books which shall carry on the memory 
 of the period to posterity. Now and then it may 
 be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, 
 even at the moment that it sees the light, that it 
 is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions 
 change, and few things are better calculated to in- 
 spire the literary critic with humility than to read 
 
212 American Literature. 
 
 the prophecies in old reviews and see how the 
 future, now become the present, has quietly given 
 them the lie. 
 
 From among the professional litterateurs of his 
 day emerges, with ever sharper distinctness as 
 time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 
 1849.) By the irony of fate Poe was born at 
 Boston, and his first volume, Tamerlane and Other 
 Foems, 1827, was printed in that city and bore 
 upon its title page the words, " By a Bostonian." 
 But his parentage, so far as it was any thing, was 
 southern. His father was a Marylander who had 
 gone upon the stage and married an actress, her- 
 self the daughter of an actress and a native of En- 
 gland. Left an orphan by the early death of both 
 parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy 
 merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated 
 partly at an English school, was student for a time 
 in the University of Virginia and afterward a cadet 
 in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth 
 was wild and irregular : he gambled and drank, 
 was proud, bitter and perverse ; finally quarreled 
 with his guardian and adopted father — by whom 
 he was disowned — and then betook himself to the 
 life of a literary hack. His brilliant but under- 
 paid work for various periodicals soon brought 
 him into notice, and he was given the editorship of 
 the Southern Literaij Messenger, published at Ricli- 
 mond, and subsequently of the Gentlemen s — after- 
 ward Graham's — Magazine m Philadelphia. These 
 and all other positions Poe forfeited through his 
 
Literature in the Cities. 213 
 
 dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, 
 in 1844, he drifted to New York, where he found 
 employment on the Evening Mirror and then on 
 the Broadway Journal. He died of delirium tre- 
 mens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore. His 
 life was one of the most wretched in literary his- 
 tory. He was an extreme instance of what used to 
 be called the "eccentricity of genius." He had 
 the irritable vanity which is popularly supposed 
 to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so 
 insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow 
 and others were constantly plagiarizing from him. 
 The best side of Poe's character came out in his 
 domestic relations, in which he displayed great 
 tenderness, patience and fidelity. His instincts 
 were gentlemanly, and his manner and conversa- 
 tion were often winning. In the place of moral 
 feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his 
 critical papers, except where warped by passion or 
 prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, de- 
 nouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands 
 and commending obscure merit. The *' impudent 
 literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; 
 the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manu- 
 factured verses for the " Annuals ; " and the twad- 
 dle of the " genial " incapables who praised them 
 in flabby reviews — all these Poe exposed with 
 ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are 
 z/;zmoral, can they be called in any sense /wmoral. 
 His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bry- 
 ant's in its austerity. 
 
214 American Literature. 
 
 By 1 83 1 Poe had published three thin books of 
 verse, none of which had attracted notice, although 
 the latest contained the drafts of a few of his most 
 perfect poems, such as Israfel^ the Valley of Unrest^ 
 the City in the Sea, and one of the two pieces in- 
 scribed To Helen. It was his habit to touch and 
 retouch his work until it grew under his more 
 practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fas- 
 tidious taste. Hence the same poem frequently 
 reappears in different stages- of development in 
 successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the 
 realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intel- 
 lectual nature there was a strange conjunction; an 
 imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, though, unlike 
 Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear 
 and the imagery of ruin ; with this, an analytic 
 power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical in- 
 genuity more usual in a chemist or a mathemati- 
 cian than in a poet. He studied carefully the 
 mechanism of his verse and experimented endless- 
 ly with verbal and musical, effects, such as repeti- 
 tion, and monotone, and the selection of words in 
 which the consonants alliterated and the vowels 
 varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he de- 
 scribed how his best known poem, the Raven, was 
 systematically built up on a preconceived plan in 
 which the number of lines was first determined 
 and the word "nevermore" selected as a starting 
 point. No one who knows the mood in which 
 poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious 
 piece of dissection really describes the way in 
 
Literature in the Cities. 215 
 
 which the Raven was ^conceived and written, or 
 that any such deliberate and self-conscious pro- 
 cess could originate the associations from whi(#h a 
 true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's pride of 
 intellect to assert that his cooler reason had con- 
 trol not only over the execution of his poetry, but 
 over the very well-head of thought and emotion. 
 Some of his most successful stories, like the Gold 
 Bug., the Mystery of Marie Roget^ the Pu?'loined 
 Letter., and the Murders in the Rue Morgue., were 
 applications of this analytic faculty to the solution 
 of puzzles, such as the finding of buried treasure 
 or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a 
 mysterious crime. After the publication of the 
 Gold Bug he received from all parts of the country 
 specimens of cipher writing, which he delighted to 
 work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces 
 of mystification, like Hans Pfaall^ the story of a 
 journey to the moon, or experiments at giving 
 verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful 
 introduction of scientific details, as in the Facts in 
 the Case of M. Valdemar and Von Kenipelens Dis- 
 covery. In his narratives of this kind Poe antici- 
 pated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie 
 Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, 
 though in a less degree, the artfully worked up 
 likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's Man 
 Without a Country^ and similar fictions. While 
 Dickens's Barnaby Riidge was publishing in parts, 
 Poe showed his skill as a plot hunter by publishing 
 a paper in Graham's Magazine in which the very 
 
2i6 American Literature. 
 
 tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled 
 and i\\e finale predicted in advance. 
 
 In his union of imagination and analytic power 
 Poe resembled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his 
 teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse often 
 reminds one of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner^ 
 still oftener of Kubla Khati. Like Coleridge, too, 
 he indulged at times in the opium habit. But in 
 Poe the artist predominated over every thing else. 
 He began not with sentiment or thought, but with 
 technique, with melody and color, tricks of lan- 
 guage, and effects of verse. It is curious to 
 study the growth of his style in his successive 
 volumes of poetry. At first these are metrical ex- 
 periments and vague images, original, and with a 
 fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little mean- 
 ing that some of his earlier pieces are hardly re- 
 moved from nonsense. Gradually, like distant 
 music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry be- 
 comes fuller of imagination and of an inward sig- 
 nificance, without ever losing, however, its myste- 
 rious aloofness from the real world of the senses. 
 It was a part of Poe's literary creed — formed upon 
 his own practice and his own limitations, but set 
 forth with a great display of a p?-iori reasoning in 
 his essay on the Poetic Principle and elsewhere — 
 that pleasure and not instruction or moral exlior- 
 tation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not 
 truth or goodness was its means ; and, furthermore, 
 that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. 
 About his own poetry there was always this in- 
 
Literature in the Cities. 217 
 
 definiteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange 
 country of dream — a ''ghoul-haunted region of 
 Weir," "out of space, out of time" — filled with 
 unsubstantial landscapes, and peopled by spectral 
 shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden 
 significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader 
 feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a 
 kind of language, and that it in some way expresses 
 a brooding thought or passion, the terror and de- 
 spair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an ob- 
 vious allegory, as in the Haunted Palace^ which is 
 the parable of a ruined mind, or in the Rave/i, the 
 most popular of all Poe's poems, originally pub- 
 lished in the American Whig Review for February, 
 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, 
 as in Ulaluvie^ which, to most people, is quite in- 
 comprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic 
 feeling is among the most characteristic, and, 
 therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's 
 creations. 
 
 Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad, Anna- 
 bel Lee^ and To One in Paradise^ the poet emerges 
 into the light of common human feeling and 
 speaks a more intelligible language. But in gen- 
 eral his poetry is not the poetry of the heart, and 
 its passion is not the passion of flesh and blood. 
 In Poe the thought of death is always near, 
 and of the shadowy borderland between death 
 and life. 
 
 " The play is the tragedy ' Man,' 
 And its hero the Conqueror Worm," 
 
2i8 American Literature. 
 
 The prose tale, Ligeia, in which these verses 
 are inserted, is one of the most powerful of all 
 Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of 
 the will to overcome death. In that singu- 
 larly impressive poem, the Sleeper^ the morbid 
 horror which invests the tomb springs from the 
 same source, the materiality of Poe's imagina- 
 tion, which refuses to let the soul go free from 
 the body. 
 
 This quality explains why Poe's Tales of the 
 Grotesque and A?'abesqtie, 1840, are on a lower 
 plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few 
 of them, like William IVilson and the Maji of the 
 Crowd, have some resemblance. The former of 
 these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's peculiar 
 province, the allegory of the conscience. But in 
 general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual 
 one, while Poe calls in the aid of material forces. 
 The passion of physical fear or of superstitious 
 horror is that which his writings most frequently 
 excite. These tales represent various grades of 
 the frightful and the ghastly, from the mere bug-a- 
 boo story like the Black Cat, which makes children 
 afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless ter- 
 ror of the Cask of Amontillado, or the Red Death. 
 Poe's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of 
 the Fall of the House of Usher, with its solemn 
 and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, 
 often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the 
 manner of De Quincey in such passages as his 
 Dream Fugue, or Our Ladies of Sorrow. In de- 
 
Literature in the Cities. 219 
 
 scriptive pieces like tlie Domain of Arnheim, and 
 stories of adventure like the Descent into the Mael- 
 strom, and his long sea tale, The Narrative of Ar- 
 thur Gordon Pym^ 1S38, he displayed a realistic in- 
 ventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. 
 He was not without a mocking irony, but he had 
 no constructive humor, and liis attempts at the 
 facetious were mostly failures. 
 
 Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. 
 ^e took no hold upon the life about him, and 
 cared nothing for the public concerns of his coun- 
 try. His poems and tales might have been writ- 
 ten in vacuo for any thing American in them. 
 Perhaps for this reason, m part, his fame has been 
 so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings 
 have been favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the au- 
 thor of the Fleurs du Mai, translated them into 
 French, and his own impressive but unhealthy 
 poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The 
 defect in Poe was in character, a defect which 
 will make itself felt in art as in life. If he had 
 had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the 
 moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a 
 greater poet than either. 
 
 " If I could dwell 
 "Where Israfel 
 
 Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
 He might not sing so wildly well 
 
 A mortal melody, 
 "While a bolder note than thi^ might swell 
 
 From my lyre within the sky ! " 
 
220 American Literature. 
 
 Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at 
 least by race and breeding, there was nothing dis- 
 tinctly southern about his peculiar genius, and in 
 his wandering life he was associated as much with 
 Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and 
 Richmond. The conditions which had made the 
 southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educa- 
 tional works before the Revolution continued to 
 act down to the time of the civil war. Eli Whit- 
 ney's invention of the cotton gin in the closing 
 years of the last century gave extension to slavery, 
 making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by 
 enormous gangs of field hands working under the 
 whip of the overseer in large plantations. Slavery 
 became henceforth a business speculation in the 
 States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia 
 and Kentucky, a comparatively mild domestic sys- 
 tem. The necessity of defending its peculiar in- 
 stitution against the attacks of a growing faction 
 •in the North compelled the South to throw all its 
 intellectual strength into politics, which, for that 
 matter, is the natural occupation and excitement 
 of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration 
 sought the free States, and there was no middle 
 class at the South. The "poor whites" were ig- 
 norant and degraded. There were people of edu- 
 cation in the cities and on some of the plantations, 
 but there was no great educated class from which 
 a literature could proceed. And the culture of 
 the South, such as it was, was becoming old- 
 fashioned and local, as the section was isolated 
 
Literature in the Cities. 221 
 
 more and more from the rest of the Union and 
 from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by 
 its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on 
 the subject of slavery. Nothing can be imagined 
 more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical 
 editorials in the southern press just before the out- 
 break of the war, or than the backward and ill- 
 informed articles which passed for reviews in the 
 poorly supported periodicals of the South. 
 • In the general dearth of work of high and per- 
 manent value, one or two southern authors may 
 be mentioned whose writings have at least done 
 something to illustrate the life and scenery of their 
 section. When in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday 
 Visiter offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the 
 best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded 
 the prize to Poe's first story, the MS. Found in a 
 Bottle, was John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of 
 Baltimore, who afterward became Secretary of 
 the Navy in Fillmore's administration. The year 
 before he had published Swalloia Barn, a series 
 of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. 
 In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, 
 Horse-Shoe Robinson and Rob of the Bowl, the 
 former a story of the Revolutionary War in South 
 Carolina ; the latter an historical tale of colonial 
 Maryland. These had sufficient success to war- 
 rant reprinting as late as 1852. But the most 
 .popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of 
 fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Car- 
 olinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty 
 
222 American Literature. 
 
 novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, 
 southern life and wild adventure, among the best 
 of which were the Partisan^ i835> ^^d the Yemas- 
 see. Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a differ- 
 ence. His novels are good boys' books, but are 
 crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly 
 southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, 
 the Charleston City Gazette., took part against the 
 Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include 
 several histories and biographies, political tracts, 
 addresses and critical papers contributed to south- 
 ern magazines. He also wrote numerous poems, 
 the most ambitious of which y^-xs Atlantis., a Story of 
 the Sea, 1832. His poems have little value except 
 as here and there illustrating local scenery and 
 manners, as in Southern Passa^^es and Pictures, 
 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not 
 very strong Virginia Comedians was, perhaps, in 
 literary quality the best southern novel produced 
 before the civil war. 
 
 When Poe came to New York, the most con- 
 spicuous literary figure of the metropolis, with the 
 possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was 
 N. P. Willis, one of the edkors of the Evening 
 Mirror, upon which journal Poe was for a time 
 engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, 
 when a student at Yale, by his Scripture Poems, 
 written in smootli blank verse. Afterward he had 
 edited the American Monthly in his native city of 
 Boston, and more recently he had published Pen- 
 cillings by the Way, 1835, a pleasant record of Eu- 
 
Literature in the Cities. 223 
 
 ropean saunterings ; Inklings of Adventure, 1836, 
 a collection of dashing stories and sketches of 
 American and foreign life ; and Letters from Un- 
 der a Bridge, 1839, a series of charming rural let- 
 ters from his country place at Owego, on the Sus- 
 quehanna. Willis's work, always graceful and 
 sparkling, sometmies even brilliant, though light 
 in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly 
 raised him to the summit of popularity. During 
 the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most suc- 
 cessful American magazinist, and even down to 
 the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his hold 
 upon the attention of the fashionable public by 
 his easy paragraphing and correspondence in. the 
 Mirror and its successor, the Home Journal, which 
 catered to the literary wants of the beau monde. 
 Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though 
 clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and 
 sketches, such as F. Smith, The Ghost Ball at Con- 
 gress Hall, Edith Linsey, and the Lunatic's Skate, 
 together with some of the Letters from Under a 
 Bridge, are worthy of preservation, not only as read- 
 able stories, but as society studies of life at Amer- 
 ican watering places like Nahant and Saratoga 
 and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of 
 his simpler poems, like Unseen Spirits, Spring, To 
 M — from Abroad, and Lines on Leaving Europe, 
 still retain a deserved place in collections and 
 anthologies. 
 
 The senior editor of the Mirror, George P, 
 Morris, was once a very popular song writer, and 
 
224 American Literature. 
 
 his Woodman, Spare that Tree, still survives. 
 Other residents of New York City who have writ- 
 ten single famous pieces were Clement C, Moore, 
 a professor in the General Theological Semina- 
 ry, whose Visit fro?n St. Nicholas — *^ 'Twas the 
 Night Before Christmas," etc. — is a favorite ballad 
 in every nursery in the land ; Charles Fenno 
 Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but 
 now remembered only as the author of the song, 
 Sparkling and Bright, and the patriotic ballad of 
 Monterey ; Robert H. Messinger, a native of Bos- 
 ton, but long resident in New York, where he was 
 a familiar figure in fashionable society, who wrote 
 Give Me the Old, a fine ode with a choice Horatian 
 flavor ; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and 
 occasional writer, whose capital satire of Nothing 
 to Wear was published anonymously and had a 
 great run. Of younger poets, like Stoddard and Al- 
 drich, who formerly wrote for the Mirror and who 
 are still living and working in the maturity of their 
 powers, it is not within the limits and design of 
 this sketch to speak. But one of their contem- 
 poraries. Bayard Taylor, who died, American Min- 
 ister at Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by 
 birth and rearing, may be reckoned among the 
 *' literati of New York." A farmer lad from Ches- 
 ter County, who had learned the printer's trade 
 and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses 
 in 1844, he came to New York shortly after 
 with credentials from Dr. Grisvvold, the editor of 
 Grahanis^ and obtaining encouragement and aid 
 
Literature in the Cities. 225 
 
 from Willis, Horace Greeley and others, be set 
 out to make the tour of Europe, walking from 
 town to town in Germany and getting employment 
 now and then at his trade to help pay the ex- 
 penses of the trip. The story of these IVander- 
 jahre he told in his Views Afoot^ 1846. This was 
 the first of eleven books of travel written during 
 the course of his life. He was an inveterate 
 nomad, and his journeyings carried him to the re- 
 motest regions — to California, India, China, Japan 
 and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the 
 Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland and the " by- 
 ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were 
 in New York, where he did literary work for theT'r/- 
 bune. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throw- 
 ing off many volumes of verse and prose, fiction, es- 
 says, sketches, translations and criticism, mainly 
 contributed in the first instance to the magazines. 
 His versatility was very marked, and his poetry 
 ranged from Rhymes of Travel, 1848, and Poems 
 of the Orient, 1854? to idyls and home ballads of 
 Pennsylvania life, like the Quaker Widow and the 
 Old Fennsylvajiia Farmer, and, on the other side, 
 to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems, like 
 the Masque of the Gods, 1872 — written in four 
 days — and dramatic experiments like the Prophet, 
 1874, and Prinee Deukalion, 1878. He was a man 
 of buoyant and eager nature, with a great appe- 
 tite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a 
 talent for learning languages, and a too great readi- 
 ness to take the hue of his favorite books. From 
 15 
 
226 American Literature. 
 
 his facility, his openness to external impressions 
 of scenery and costume and his habit of turning 
 these at once into the service of his pen, it results 
 that there is something " newspapery " and super- 
 ficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's 
 work, though reporting of a high order. His 
 poetry, too, though full of glow and picturesque- 
 ness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not 
 unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited 
 Bedouin Song, for example, has an echo of Shelley's 
 Lines to an Indian Air : 
 
 " From the desert I come to thee 
 
 On a stallion shod with fire ; 
 And the winds are left behind 
 
 In the speed of my desire. 
 Under thy window I stand 
 
 And the midnight hears my cry; 
 I love thee, I love but thee 
 
 With a love that shall not die." 
 
 The dangerous quickness with which he caught 
 the manner of other poets made him an admirable 
 parodist and translator. His Echo Club, 1876, con- 
 tains some of the best travesties in the tongue, 
 and his great translation of Goethe's Faust, 
 1870-71 — with its wonderfully close reproduction 
 of the original meters — is one of the glories of 
 American literature. All in all, Taylor may un- 
 hesitatingly be put first among our poets of the 
 second generation — the generation succeeding that 
 of Longfellow and Lowell — although the lack in 
 him of original genius self-determined to a pe- 
 
Literature in the Cities. 227 
 
 culiar sphere, or the Avant of an inward fixity and 
 concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward 
 impressions, has made him less significant in the 
 history of our literary thought than some other 
 writers less generously endowed. 
 
 Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. 
 They were profuse, eloquent and faulty. John 
 Godfreys Fortune, 1864, gave a picture of bo- 
 hemian life in New York. Han7iah Thurston, 1863, 
 and the Story of Kennett, 1866, introduced many 
 incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of 
 rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in 
 his boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's 
 Blithedale Ro7nance, a satire on fanatics and re- 
 formers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived cliar- 
 acter, though drawn with some exaggeration. The 
 Story of Kemtett, which is largely autobiographic^ 
 has a greater freshness and reality than the others 
 and is full of personal recollections. In these 
 novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial 
 skill is greater on the whole than his power of cre- 
 ating characters or inventing plots. 
 
 Literature in the West now began to have an 
 existence. Another young poet from Chester 
 County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, 
 went to Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study 
 sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one of his 
 best-known poems, Po7is Maximus, was written on 
 the occasion of the opening of the suspension 
 bridge across the Ohio. Read came East, to be 
 sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our sea- 
 
228 American Literature. 
 
 board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a 
 minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastor- 
 als, like the Deserted Road^ have a natural sweet- 
 ness; and his luxurious Drifting, which combines 
 the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popu- 
 lar. Sheridan s Ride — perhaps his most current 
 piece — is a rather forced production and has been 
 over-praised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice 
 and Phoebe Gary, were attracted to New York in 
 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed as- 
 sured. They made that city their home for the 
 remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Gary's 
 Pictures of Memory , and Phoebe's Nearer Home 
 has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing 
 peculiarly Western about the verse of the Gary 
 sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and 
 domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame 
 and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cher- 
 ished by many good women and dear to simple 
 hearts. 
 
 A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro 
 melodies like Uncle Ned, O Susanna, Old Folks at 
 Home, Way Down South, Nelly was a Lady, My 
 Old Kentucky Home, etc., which were the work 
 not of any southern poet, but of Stephen G. 
 Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a resident 
 of Gincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the 
 words and music of these, and many others of a 
 similar kind, during the years 1847 to 1861. Taken 
 together they form the most original and vital ad- 
 dition which this country has made to the psalmody 
 
Literature in the Cities. 229 
 
 of the world, and entitle Foster to the first rank 
 among American song writers. 
 
 As Foster's plaintive > melodies carried the pa- 
 thos and humor of the plantation all over the land, 
 so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin^ 
 1852, brought home to millions of readers the suf- 
 ferings of the negroes in the ''black belt" of the 
 cotton-growing States. This is the most popular 
 novel ever written in America. Hundreds of 
 thousands of copies were sold in this country and 
 in England, and some forty translations were made 
 into foreign tongues. In its dramatized form it 
 still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulat- 
 ing libraries show that even now it is in greater 
 demand than any other single book. It did more 
 than any other literary agency to rouse the public 
 conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of 
 slavery; more even than Garrison's Liberator; more 
 than the indignant poems of Whittier and Lowell 
 or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It pre- 
 sented the thing concretely and dramatically, and 
 in particular it made the odious Fugitive Slave 
 Law forever impossible to enforce. It was useless 
 for the defenders of slavery to protest that the 
 picture was exaggerated and that overseers like 
 Legree were the exception. The system under 
 which such brutalities could happen, and did some- 
 times happen, was doomed. It is easy now to 
 point out defects of taste and art in this master- 
 piece, to show that the tone is occasionally melo- 
 dramatic, that some of the characters are conven- 
 
230 American Literature. 
 
 tional, and that the literary execution is in parts 
 feeble and in others coarse. In spite of all it re- 
 mains true that Uncle Toms Cabin is a great book, 
 the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its 
 opportunity and uttering the thought of the time 
 with a power that thrilled the heart of the nation 
 and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her 
 first success. Some of her novels of New England 
 life, such as the Minister s Wooing^ 185 9i and the 
 Pearl of Orrs Island^ 1862, have a mild kind of 
 interest, and contain truthful portraiture of pro- 
 vincial ways and traits ; while later fictions of a 
 domestic type, like Pi^ik and White Tyranny^ and 
 My Wife and I^ are really beneath criticism. 
 
 There were other Connecticut writers contem- 
 porary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, for 
 example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as 
 " the Hemans of America," but now quite obso- 
 lete; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, a shy and 
 eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of 
 value, and whose memory is preserved by one or 
 two of his simpler poems, still in circulation, such 
 as To Seneca Lake and the Coral Grove. Another 
 Hartford poet, Brainard — already spoken of as an 
 early friend of Whittier — died young, leaving a few 
 pieces which show that his lyrical gift was spon- 
 taneous and genuine but had received little culti- 
 vation. A much younger writer than either of 
 these, Donald G. Mitchell, of Ncav Haven, has a 
 more lasting place in our literature, by virtue of 
 his charmingly written Reveries of a Bachelor, 
 
Literature in the Cities. 231 
 
 1850, and Dreain Life^ 1852, stories which sketch 
 themselves out in a series of reminiscences and 
 lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal 
 freshly to young men because they have that 
 dreamy outlook upon life which is characteristic 
 of youth. But, upon the whole, the most impor- 
 tant contribution made by Connecticut in that gen- 
 eration to the literary stock of America was the 
 Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had been an in- 
 fluential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy de- 
 fender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. 
 Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more or 
 less noted for intellectual vigor and independence, 
 the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry 
 Ward Beecher, the great pulpit orator of Brook- 
 lyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give 
 more than his spare moments to general litera- 
 ture. His sermons, lectures, and addresses were 
 reported for the daily papers and printed in part 
 in book form ; but these lose greatly when di- 
 vorced from the large, warm, and benignant per- 
 sonality of the man. His volumes made up of 
 articles in the Independent and the Ledger^ such as 
 Star Papers^ i^SS? ^^d Eyes and Ears, 1862, con- 
 tain many delightful niorceatix upon country life 
 and similar topics, though they are hardly wrought 
 with sufficient closeness and care to take a perma- 
 nent place in letters. Like Willis's Ephemera, 
 they are excellent literary journalism, but hardly 
 literature. 
 
 We may close our retrospect of American litera- 
 
232 American Literature. 
 
 ture before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the 
 most striking literary phenomena of the time^ 
 the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman, published 
 at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born at West 
 Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, 
 school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had 
 scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary 
 kind, which attracted little attention, but finding 
 conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a 
 vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded 
 them for a kind of rhythmic chant, of which the 
 following is a fair specimen: 
 
 "Press close, bare bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, 
 
 nourishing night ! 
 Night of south winds ! night of the few large stars ! 
 Still, nodding night ! mad, naked, summer night ! " 
 
 The invention was not altogether a new one. The 
 English translation of the Psalms of David and of 
 some of the Prophets, the Poems of Ossian, and 
 some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, es- 
 pecially the Strayed Reveller^ have an irregular 
 rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the old 
 Anglo-Saxon poems, like Beowulf, and the Script- 
 ure paraphrases attributed to Caedmon. But this 
 species of oratio soliita, carried to the lengths to 
 which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty 
 which was displeasing to some, while to others, 
 weary of familiar measures and jingling rhymes, 
 it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. 
 There is no consenting estimate of this poet. 
 
Literature in the Cities. 233 
 
 Many think that his so-called poems are not poems 
 at all, but simply a bad variety of prose; that there 
 is nothing to him beyond a combination of affec- 
 tation and indecency ; and that the Whitman citlte 
 is a passing " fad " of a few literary men, and es- 
 pecially of a number of English critics like Ros- 
 setti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being deter- 
 mined to have something unmistakably American 
 — that .is, different from any thing else — in writings 
 from this side of the water before they will acknowl- 
 edge any originality in them, have been misled into 
 discovering in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." 
 Others maintain that he is the greatest of American 
 poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is 
 "cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end 
 forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up inio 
 metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is for- 
 mally poetry at all or merely the raw material of 
 poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression 
 which it makes on readers of conservative tastes 
 results from his effort to take up into his verse 
 elements which poetry has usually left out — the 
 ugly, the earthy, and even the disgusting ; the 
 " under side of things," which he holds not to be 
 prosaic when apprehended with a strong, mascu- 
 line joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects. 
 The lack of these elements in the conventional 
 poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving 
 out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely 
 pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence 
 the naturalism and animalism of some of the divis- 
 
234 American Literature. 
 
 ions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled 
 Children of Adam ^ which gave great offense by its 
 immodesty, or its outspokenness. Whitman holds 
 that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of 
 the body in healthy exercise are equally clean ; 
 that all, in fact, are divine., and that matter is as 
 divine as spirit. The effort to get every thing into 
 his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it 
 comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cata- 
 loguing objects without selection. His single ex- 
 pressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive 
 beauty and truth. He speaks of ^' the vitreous 
 pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of 
 the '' lisp " of the plane, of the prairies, " where 
 herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the 
 square miles." But if there is any eternal distinc- 
 tion between poetry and prose the most liberal 
 canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept 
 lines like these : 
 
 *' And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck 
 
 and ankles ; 
 He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and 
 
 passed north." 
 
 Whitman is the spokesman of Democracy and of 
 the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving 
 the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and 
 the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. 
 He liked the people — multitudes of people; the 
 swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or 
 a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro 
 
Literature in the Cities. 235 
 
 truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the 
 gentleman and the scholar. " I loafe and invite 
 my soul," he writes: " I sound my barbaric yawp 
 over the roofs of the world." His poem IFaU 
 Whitman^ frankly egotistic, simply describes him- 
 self as a typical, average man — the same as any 
 other man, and therefore not individual but uni- 
 versal. He has great tenderness and heartiness — 
 ''the good gray poet;" and during the civil war he 
 devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded sol- 
 diers in the Washington hospitals — an experience 
 which he has related in the Dresser and else- 
 where. It is characteristic of his rough and ready 
 camaraderie to use slang and newspaper English in 
 his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of W^alter, 
 and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and 
 with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His de- 
 criers allege that he poses for effect ; that he is 
 simply a backward eddy in tlie tide, and significant 
 only as a temporary reaction against ultra civili- 
 zation — like Thoreau, though in a different way. 
 But with all his mistakes in art there is a healthy, 
 virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utter- 
 ance and a great sweep of imagination in his 
 panoramic view of times and countries. One likes 
 to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so 
 fully the play of his senses, and has such a lusty 
 confidence in his own immortality and in the pros- 
 pects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and 
 repetition, his ideas are not many. His indebted- 
 ness to Emerson— who wrote an introduction to 
 
236 American Literature. 
 
 the Leaves of Grass — is manifest. He sings of 
 man and not men, and the individual differences 
 of character, sentiment, and passion, the dramatic 
 elements of life, find small place in his system. 
 It is too early to say what will be his final position 
 in literary history. But it is noteworthy that the 
 democratic masses have not accepted him yet as 
 their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of 
 conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the 
 American people. The admiration, and even the 
 knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, con- 
 fined to the literary class. It is' also not without 
 significance as to the ultimate reception of his in- 
 novations in verse that he has numerous parodists, 
 but no imitators. The tendency among our younger 
 poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and 
 meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza 
 forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in 
 the technique of their art. It is observable, too, that 
 in his most inspired passages Whitman reverts to 
 the old forms of verse; to blank verse, for example, 
 in the Ma?i~of- War-Bird : 
 
 " Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
 Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc., 
 
 and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hex- 
 ameters and pentameters: 
 
 " Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the 
 
 river! . . . 
 Far-swooping, elbowed earth I rich,, apple-blossomed 
 
 earth." 
 
Literature in the Cities. 237 
 
 Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, My Captain^ 
 written after the assassination of Abraham Lin- 
 coln, differs little in form from ordinary verse, as 
 a stanza of it will show: 
 
 " My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; 
 My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; 
 The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and 
 
 done; 
 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
 Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! 
 
 But I, with mournful tread, 
 "Walk the deck, my captain lies 
 Fallen, cold and dead." 
 
 This is from Drum Taps, a volume of poems of 
 the civil war. Whitman has also written prose 
 having much the same quality as his poetry: 
 Democratic Vistas^ Alemoranda of the Civil JVar, 
 and more recently, Speci^nen Days. His residence 
 of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, 
 where a centennial edition of his writings was 
 published in 1876. 
 
 1. William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. To 
 a Waterfowl. Green River. Hymn to the 
 North Star. A Forest Hymn. "O Fairest of 
 the Rural Maids." June. The Death of the 
 Flowers. The Evening Wind. The Battle Field. 
 The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of 
 Years. 
 
 2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra South- 
 
238 American Literature. 
 
 wick. The New Wife and the Old. The Virginia 
 Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay of 
 Ary. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's 
 Ride. Marguerite. Maud Muller. Telling the 
 Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. Icha- 
 bod. Laus Deo. Snow Bound. 
 
 3. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. The Bells. 
 Israfel. Ulalume. To Helen. The City in the 
 Sea. Annabel Lee. To One in Paradise. The 
 Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. The Fall of the 
 House of Usher. Ligeia. William Wilson. The 
 Cask of Amontillado, The Assignation. The 
 Masque of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gor- 
 don Pym. 
 
 4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New 
 York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886. 
 
 5. Mrs. H. B. Stovve. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
 Oldtown Folks. 
 
 6. W. G. Simms. The Partisan. The Ye- 
 massee. 
 
 7. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. 
 Kubleh. The Soldier and the Pard. Sicilian 
 Wine. Taurus. Serapion. The Metempsycho- 
 sis of the Pine. The Temptation of Hassan Ben 
 Khaled. Bedouin Song. Euphorion. The Quaker 
 Widow. John Reid. Lars. Views Afoot. By- 
 ways of Europe. The Story of Kennett. The 
 Echo Club. 
 
 8. Walt Whitman. My Captain. "When Li- 
 lacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed." " Out of 
 the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Pioneers, O Pi- 
 
Literature in the Cities. 239 
 
 oneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at 
 Auction. Sea-shore Memoirs. Passage to India. 
 Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings for 
 Home. 
 
 9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Bos- 
 ton: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. 
 
240 American Literature. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LITERATURE SINCE 1861. 
 
 A GENERATION has nearly passed since the out- 
 break of the civil war, and although public affairs 
 are still mainly in the hands of men who had 
 reached manhood before the conflict opened, or 
 who were old enough at that time to remember 
 clearly its stirring events, the younger men who 
 are daily coming forward to take their places 
 know it only by tradition. It makes a definite 
 break in the history of our literature, and a num- 
 ber of new literary schools and tendencies have 
 appeared since its close. As to the literature of 
 the war itself, it was largely the work of writers 
 who had already reached or passed middle age. 
 All of the more important authors described in the 
 last three chapters survived the Rebellion, except 
 Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, 
 and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the 
 second and fourth years of the war, respectively. 
 The final and authoritative history of the struggle 
 has not yet been written, and cannot be written 
 for many years to come. Many partial and tenta- 
 tive accounts have, however, appeared, among 
 which may be mentioned, on the northern side, 
 
LiTERATIJRE SiNCE 1861. 24I 
 
 Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; 
 Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave 
 Power in America^ and J. W. Draper's American 
 Civil TVar, 1868-70; on the southern side Alexan- 
 der H. Stephens's Confederate States of America^ 
 Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate 
 States of America^ and E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause. 
 These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philo- 
 sophical narrative, have the advantage of being the 
 work of actors in the political or military events 
 which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, 
 therefore, partisan — in some instances passionately 
 partisan. A storehouse of materials for the com- 
 ing historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's 
 great collection, the Rebellion Record ; in numer- 
 ous regimental histories and histories of special 
 armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's 
 Army of the Potomac ; in the autobiographies and 
 recollections of Grant and Sherman and other 
 military leaders ; in the ''war papers," now pub- 
 lishing in the Centuiy magazine, and in innumera- 
 ble sketches and reminiscences by officers and 
 privates on both sides. 
 
 The war had its poetry, its humors and its 
 general literature, some of which have been men- 
 tioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, 
 Whitman, and others ; and some of which remain 
 to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or 
 of writers who had previously made little mark. 
 There were war songs on both sides, few of which 
 had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James 
 16 
 
242 American Literature. 
 
 R. Randall's southern hvi\\3.(\, Afaiyland, My Mary- 
 landj sung to the old college air of Lauriger Ho7'a- 
 tiiis, and the grand martial chorus of John Brown s 
 Body^ an old Methodist hymn, to which the north- 
 ern armies beat time as they went "marching on." 
 Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its 
 fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "min- 
 ions" and "northern scum," the cheap insults of 
 the southern newspaper press. To furnish the 
 John Brown chorus with words wortliy of the 
 music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Batik 
 Hymn of the Republic, a noble poem, but rather 
 too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully 
 accepted by the soldiers. Among the many verses 
 which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of 
 that stern time, which told of partings and home-, 
 comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in 
 country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons 
 who had gone to the war, or which celebrated in- 
 dividual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand 
 private tragedies and' heart-breaks of the great 
 conflict, by far the greater number were of too 
 humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. 
 Among the best or the most popular of them were 
 Kate Putnam 0'E>gooA\ Driving Honie-the Cows, Mrs. 
 Ethel Lynn Beers's All Quiet Along the Potomac, 
 Forceythe Willson's Old Sergeant, and John James 
 Piatt's Riding to Vote. Of the poets whom the war 
 brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy 
 were Henry Timrod, of South Caro.lina, and Henry 
 Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the 
 
Literature Since i86i. 243 
 
 war Tim rod was with the Confederate Army of 
 the West, as correspondent for the Charleston 
 Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor 
 of the So7ith Carolinian, at Columbia. Sherman's 
 ** march to the sea" broke up his business, and he 
 returned to Cliarleston. A complete edition of his 
 poems was published in 1873, six years after his 
 death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is 
 Katie, but more to our present purpose are Charles- 
 ton — written in the time of blockade — and the Un- 
 knoivn Dead, which tells 
 
 " Of nameless graves on battle plains, 
 Wasli'd by a single winter's rains, 
 Where, some beneath Virginian hills, 
 And some by green Atlantic rills, 
 Some by the waters of the West, 
 A myriad unknown heroes rest." 
 
 When the war was over a poet of New York 
 State, F, M. Finch, sang of these and of other graves 
 in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric. The Blue 
 and the Gray, which spoke the word of recon- 
 ciliation and consecration for North and South 
 alike. 
 
 Brownell, whose Lyrics of a Day and War Lyrics 
 were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was 
 private secretary to Farragut, on whose flag-ship, 
 the LLartford, he was present at several great 
 naval engagements, such as the '' Passage of the 
 Forts " below New Orleans, and the action off 
 Mobile, described in his poem, the Bay Fight. 
 
244 American Literature. 
 
 With some roughness and unevenness of execu- 
 tion, Brownell's poetry had a fire which places 
 him next to Whittier as the Korner of the civil war. 
 In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan 
 sense of the righteousness of his cause which 
 made the battle for the Union a holy war to the 
 crusaders against slavery: 
 
 "Full red the furnace fires must glow 
 That melt the ore of mortal kind : 
 
 The mills of God are grinding slow, 
 But ah, how close they grind! 
 
 '* To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 
 
 Are dread apostles of his name ; 
 His kingdom here can only come 
 
 By chrism of blood and flame." 
 
 One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theo- 
 dore Winthrop, hardly known as a writer until the 
 publication in the Atlantic Monthly of his vivid 
 sketches of Washington as a Canip^ describing the 
 march of his regiment, the famous New York 
 Seventh, and its first quarters in the Capitol at 
 Washington. A tragic interest was given to these 
 papers by Winthrop's gallant death in the action 
 of Big Bethel, June lo, 1861. While this was still 
 fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels 
 were published, together with a collection of his 
 stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines. 
 His novels, though in parts crude and immature, 
 have a dash and buoyancy — an out-door air about 
 them — which give the reader a winning impression 
 
Literature Since i86i. 245 
 
 of Winthrop's personality. The best of them is, 
 perhaps, Cecil Dreeme, a romance that reminds 
 one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which 
 is the New York University building on Washing- 
 ton Square, a locality that has been further cele- 
 brated in Henry James's novel of WasJiingtoti 
 Square. 
 
 Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, 
 Fitz James O'Brien, an Irishman by birth, who 
 died at Baltimore, in 1862, from the effects of a 
 wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had con- 
 tributed to the magazines a number of poems 
 and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among 
 which X\\^ Diamojid Lens and What Was It 1 had 
 something of Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another 
 Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the 
 pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many 
 clever ballads of the war, partly serious and partly 
 in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished 
 the magazines with narratives of their experience 
 at the seat of war, among papers of which kind 
 may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's My Search for 
 the Captain^ in the Atlantic Monthly, and Colonel 
 T. W. Higgin son's Ar^ny Life in a Black Regiment^ 
 collected into a volume in 1870. 
 
 Of the public oratory of the war the foremost 
 example is the ever-memorable address of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln at the dedication of the National 
 Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought 
 the nation to its intellectual majority. In the 
 stress of that terrible fight there was no room for 
 
246 American Literature. 
 
 buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers 
 and stump-speakers used to dole out in ante hel- 
 ium days. Lincoln's speech is short — a few grave 
 words which he turned aside for a moment to 
 speak in the midst of his task of saving the coun- 
 try. The speech is simple, naked of figures, every 
 sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility 
 for the work yet to be done and with a stern de- 
 termination to do it. " Li a larger sense," it says, 
 "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we 
 cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living 
 and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it 
 far above our poor power to add or detract. The 
 world will little note nor long remember what we 
 say here, but it can never forget what they did 
 here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedi- 
 cated here to the unfinished work which they who 
 fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It 
 is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great 
 task remaining before us ; that from these honored 
 dead we take increased devotion to that cause for 
 which. they gave the last full measure of devotion; 
 that we here highly resolve that these dead shall 
 not have died in vain: that this nation, under God, 
 shall have a new birth of freedom; and that gov- 
 ernment of the people, by the people, for the peo- 
 ple, shall not perish from the earth." Here was 
 eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous 
 perorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of 
 Everett. As we read the plain, strong language 
 of this brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, 
 
Literature Since 1861. 247 
 
 its "brave old wisdom of sincerity," we seem to see 
 the president's homely features irradiated with the 
 light of coming martyrdom — 
 
 " The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseemg man. 
 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American." 
 
 Within the past quarter of a century the popu- 
 lar school of American humor has reached its cul- 
 mination. Every man of genius who is a humorist 
 at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is 
 no lack of individuality in the humor of Irving and 
 Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but 
 although they are new in subject and application 
 they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have 
 seen, was the literary descendant of Addison. 
 The character sketches in Bracebridge Hall are of 
 the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and 
 the other figures of the Spectator Club. Knicker- 
 bocker s History of New York, though purely 
 American in its matter, is not distinctly American 
 in its method, which is akin to the mock heroic of 
 Fielding and the irony of Swift in the Voyage to 
 LillipHt. Irving's humor, like that of all the great 
 English humorists, had its root in the perception 
 of character — of the characteristic traits of men 
 and classes of men, as ground of amusement. It 
 depended for its effect, therefore, upon its truth- 
 fulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did 
 the humor of Shakspere, of Sterne, Lamb, and 
 Thackeray. This perception of the characteristic, 
 
248 American Literature. 
 
 when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and 
 caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior crea- 
 tions, which are little more than personified single 
 tricks of manner, speech, feature, or dress. Haw- 
 thorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in tem- 
 per but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, 
 to the English variety. Dr. Holmes's more pro- 
 nouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically 
 from the facetice of Thomas Hood, but his prom- 
 inent trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head 
 as humor is of the heart. The same is true, with 
 qualifications, of Lowell, whose Biglow Papers^ 
 though humor of an original sort in their revela- 
 tion of Yankee character, are essentially satirical. 
 It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in 
 the Biglow Papers, their logical, that is, 7i>itiy charac- 
 ter, as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests 
 the attention. They are funny, but they are not so 
 funny as they are smart. In all these writers humor 
 was blent with more serious qualities, which gave 
 fineness and literary value to their humorous writ- 
 ings. Their view of life was not exclusively comic. 
 But there has been a class of jesters, of professional 
 humorists in America, whose product is so indige- 
 nous, so different, if not in essence, yet at least in 
 • form and expression, from any European humor, that 
 it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic 
 literature of the world. It has been accepted as such 
 in England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain 
 are familiar to multitudes who have never read the 
 One-Hoss-Shay or the Coiiriiii. And though it 
 
Literature Since i86i. 249 
 
 would be ridiculous to maintain that either of 
 these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, 
 or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and 
 coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which 
 puts large portions of their waitings below the line 
 where real literature begins, still it will not do to 
 ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict 
 that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is 
 true that no literary fashion is more subject to 
 change than the fashion of a jest, and that jokes 
 that make one generation laugh seem insipid to 
 the next. But there is something perennial in the 
 fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called " the great 
 jester of France;" and though the puns of Shak- 
 spere's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves 
 have not lost their power to amuse. 
 
 The Americans are not a gay people, but they 
 are fond of a joke. Lincoln's " little stories " were 
 characteristically Western, and it is doubtful wheth- 
 er he was more endeared to the masses by his solid 
 virtues than by the humorous perception which 
 made him one of them. The humor of which we 
 are speaking now is a strictly popular and national 
 possession. Though America has never, or not 
 until lately, had a comic paper ranking with Punch 
 or Charivari or the Fliegende Blatter^ every news- 
 paper has had its funny column. Our humorists 
 have been graduated from the journalist's desk 
 and sometimes from the printing-press, and now 
 and then a local or country newspaper has risen 
 into sudden prosperity from the possession of a 
 
250 American Literature. 
 
 new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's 
 Courier- Journal^ or more recently of the Cleveland 
 Plain Dealer^ the Dajibury News, the Burlingto?t 
 Haw key e, the Arkansaw Traveller, the Texas Si fl- 
 ings and numerous others. Nowadays there are 
 even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to 
 supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of 
 course the great majority of these manufacturers 
 of jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are 
 doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain 
 that the best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, 
 will not long continue to be read as illustrative of 
 one side of the American mind, or that their best 
 things will not survive as long as the mots of Syd- 
 ney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One 
 of the earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under 
 the name of Major Jack Downing, did his best to 
 make Jackson's administration ridiculous: B. P. 
 Shillaber's " Mrs. Partington " — a sort of Amer- 
 ican Mrs. Malaprop — enjoyed great vogue before 
 the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the 
 Phoenixiaiia, 1855, and Squibob Papers, 1856, of 
 Lieutenant George H. Derby, '* John Phoenix," 
 one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific 
 coast at the time of the California gold fever of 
 '49. Derby's proposal for A New System of En- 
 glish Grammar, his satirical account of the topo- 
 graphical survey of the two miles of road between 
 San Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his 
 picture gallery made out of the conventional 
 houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway negroes 
 
Literature Since i86i. 251 
 
 and other designs which used to figure in the ad- 
 vertising columns of the newspapers, were all very- 
 ingenious and clever. But all these pale before 
 Artemus Ward — *'Artemus the delicious," as 
 Charles Reade called him — who first secured for 
 this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing 
 and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of 
 Hosea Biglow, an imaginary personage of some 
 ^sort, under cover of whom the author might con- 
 ceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to 
 our humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling 
 showman who went about the country exhibiting 
 a collection of wax "figgers" and whose expe- 
 riences and reflections were reported in grammar 
 and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. 
 His inventor was Charles F. Browne, originally of 
 Maine, a printer by trade and afterward a news- 
 paper writer, and editor at Boston, Toledo and 
 Cleveland, where his comicalities in the Plaindealer 
 first began to attract notice. In i860 he came to 
 New York and joined the staff of Vanity Fair, a 
 comic weekly of much brightness, which ran a 
 short career and perished for want of capital; 
 When Browne began to appear as a public lect- 
 urer people who had formed an idea of him from 
 his impersonation of the shrewd and vulgar old 
 showman were surprised to find him a gentle- 
 manly-looking young man, who came upon the 
 platform in correct evening dress, and '' spoke his 
 piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful manner, 
 stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the 
 
252 American Literature. 
 
 audience laughed at any uncommonly outrageous 
 absurdity. In London, where he delivered his 
 Lecture o?i the Mormons^ in 1866, tlie gravity of his 
 bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had 
 come to the hall in search of instructive informa- 
 tion and were disappointed at the inadequate 
 nature of the panorama which Browne had had 
 made to illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some 
 hitch would occur in the machinery of this and 
 the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few 
 moments to '' work the moon " that shone upon 
 the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return on 
 the ground that he was "a man short" and offering 
 '' to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of 
 good parentage and education who is a good 
 moonist." When it gradually dawned upon the 
 British intellect that these and similar devices of 
 the lecturer — such as the soft music which he had 
 the pianist play at pathetic passages — nay, that the 
 panorama and even the lecture itself were of a 
 humorous intention, the joke began to take, and 
 Artemus's success in England became assured. 
 He was employed as one of the editors of Punch. 
 but died at Southampton in the year following. 
 
 Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced 
 by cacography or bad spelling, but there was 
 genius in the wildly erratic way in which he 
 handled even this rather low order of humor. It 
 is a curious commentary on the wretchedness of 
 our English orthography that the phonetic spelling 
 of a word, as for example, wuz for was^ should be 
 
Literature Since i86i. 253 
 
 in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects 
 of a different kind were among his devices, as in the 
 passage where the seventeen widows of a deceased 
 Mormon offered themselves to Artemus. 
 
 " And I said, ' Why is this thus ? What is the 
 reason of this thusness?' They hove a sigh— 
 seventeen sighs of different size. They said— 
 " ' O, soon thou will be gonested away.' 
 "I told them that when I got ready to leave a 
 •place I wentested.' 
 
 '' They said, ' Doth not like us ? ' 
 " I said, ' I doth— I doth.' 
 
 " I also said, ' I hope your intentions are honor- 
 able, as I am a lone child— my parents being far- 
 far away.' 
 
 '' They then said, ' Wilt not marry us ? ' 
 " I said, ' O no, it cannot was.' 
 "When they cried, *0 cruel man! this is too 
 n^^ich !— O ! too much,' I told them that it was on 
 account of the muchness that I declined." 
 
 It is hard to define the difference between the 
 humor of one writer and another, orX)f one nation 
 and another. It can be felt and can be illus- 
 trated by quoting examples, but scarcely de- 
 scribed in general terms. It has been said of 
 that class of American humorists of which Ar- 
 temus Ward is a representative that their pecul- 
 iarity consists in extravagance, surprise, audacity 
 and irreverence. But all these qualities have 
 characterized other schools of humor. There is 
 the sam^ element of surprise in De Quincey's 
 
254 American Literature. 
 
 anticlimax, '' Many a man has datqd his ruin from 
 some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time 
 he thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that 
 "a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and 
 then." The violation of logic which makes us 
 laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the 
 humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that ''it 
 would have been better than ten dollars in his 
 pocket if he had never been born." Or in his ad- 
 vice, " Always live within your income, even if 
 you have to borrow money to do so ; " or, again, 
 in his announcement that, " Mr. Ward will pay no 
 debts of his own contracting." A kind of ludi- 
 crous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation 
 of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when 
 he says of Brigham Young, " He's the most mar- 
 ried man I ever saw in my life;" or when, having 
 been drafted at several hundred different places 
 where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he 
 says that if he went on he should soon become a 
 regiment, and adds, " I never knew that there was so 
 many of me." With this a whimsical under-state- 
 ment and an affectation of simplicity, as where he 
 expresses his willingness to sacrifice "even his 
 wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or, 
 where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own 
 sins against orthography, he pronounces that 
 " Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell," 
 or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered 
 him by tlie Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It don't 
 agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the 
 
Literature Since i86i. 255 
 
 whole, it may be said of original humor of this 
 kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, 
 that the elements of it are old, but their combina- 
 tions are novel. Other humorists, like Henry W. 
 Shaw (" Josh Billings "), and David R. Locke, 
 ("Petroleum V. Nasby "), have used bad spelling 
 as a part of their machinery ; while Robert H. 
 Newell, {'' Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens, 
 ("Mark Twain "), and more recently "Bill Nye," 
 though belonging to the same school of low or 
 broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of 
 these the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark 
 Twain, who has probably made more people laugh 
 than any other living writer. A Missourian by 
 birth (1835), he served the usual apprenticeship at 
 type-setting and editing country newspapers ; spent 
 seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, 
 and seven years more mining and journalizing in 
 Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia City 
 Entei'prise ; finally drifted to San Francisco, and 
 was associated with Bret Harte on the Calif oniiau., 
 and in 1867 published his first book, the Jumpiii^r 
 Frog. This was succeeded by the Innocents 
 Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp 
 Abroad, 1880, and by otliers not so good. 
 
 Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the 
 same air of innocence and surprise as Artemus 
 Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns 
 of expression, as where he speaks of " the calm 
 confidence of a Christian with four aces." If he 
 did not originate, he at any rate employed very 
 
256 American Literature. 
 
 effectively that now familiar device of the news- 
 paper "funny man," of putting a painful situation 
 euphemistically, as when he says of a man who 
 was hanged that he " received injuries which ter- 
 minated in his death." He uses to the full extent 
 the American humorist's favorite resources of ex- 
 aggeration and irreverence. • An instance of the 
 former quality may be seen in his famous descrip- 
 tion of a dog chasing a coyote, in Roughing It, or 
 in his interview with the lightning-rod agent in 
 Mark Tiuains Sketches, 1875. He is a shrewd ob- 
 server, and his humor has a more satirical side 
 than Artemus Ward's, sometimes passing into 
 downright denunciation. He delights particularly 
 in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing 
 cant. He runs a tilt, as has been said, at "copy- 
 book texts," at the temperance reformer, the tract 
 distributor, the Good Boy of Sunday-school 
 literature, and the women who send bouquets 
 and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. 
 He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical 
 anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington 
 and his little hatchet; burlesques the time-honored 
 adventure, in nautical romances, of the starving 
 crev/ casting lots in the long boat, and spoils the 
 dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying 
 of a discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, "He 
 wanted fresh shad." The fun of Innocents Abroad 
 consists in this irreverent application of modern, 
 common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to 
 the memorable places and historic associations of 
 
Literature Since i86i, 257 
 
 Europe. Tried by this test the Old Masters in 
 the picture galleries become laughable. Abelard 
 was a precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the 
 guide books are parodied without mercy. The 
 tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa 
 he drives the cicerone to despair by pretending 
 never to have heard of Christopher Columbus, and 
 inquiring innocently, " Is he dead .'' " It is Europe 
 vulgarized and stripped of its illusions — Europe 
 seen by a Western newspaper reporter without any 
 "historic imagination." 
 
 The method of this whole class of humorists is 
 the opposite of Addison's or Irving's or Thack- 
 eray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the 
 characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but 
 upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. 
 Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, 
 and turned topsy turvy, so that paradox takes the 
 place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless 
 they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon 
 sentimental excesses, and the world is in their 
 debt for many a hearty laugh. 
 
 In the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, 
 appeared a tale entitled the Man Without a 
 Country, which made a great sensation, and did 
 much to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the 
 darkest hours of the nation's history. It was the 
 story of one Philip Nolan, an army officer, whose 
 head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, 
 having been censured by a court-martial for some 
 minor offense, exclaimed, petulantly, upon men- 
 17 
 
258 American Literature. 
 
 tion being made of the United States Government, 
 ''Damn the United States! I wish that I might 
 never hear the United States mentioned again." 
 Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, 
 and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the 
 navy, being sent off on long voyages and trans- 
 ferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in 
 charge that his country and its concerns should 
 never be spoken of in his presence. Such an air 
 of reality was given to the narrative by incidental 
 references to actual persons and occurrences that 
 many believed it true, and some were found who 
 remembered Philip Nolan, but had heard different 
 versions of his career. The author of this clever 
 hoax — if hoax it maybe called — was Edward Everett 
 Hale, a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who pub- 
 lished a collection of stories in 1868, under the fan- 
 tastic title, //", Ves, and Perhaps^ indicating thereby 
 that some of the tales were possible, some of them 
 probable, and others migiit even be regarded as 
 essentially true. A similar collection. His Level 
 Best and Other Stories was published in 1873, and 
 in the interval three volumes of a somewhat dif- 
 ferent kind, the Inghajn Papers and Sybaris and 
 Other Honies^ both in 1869, and Ten Times One Js 
 Ten, in 187 1. The author shelters himself behind 
 the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, 
 pastor of the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, 
 and the same characters have a way of re-appearing 
 in his successive volumes as old friends of the 
 reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a 
 
Literature SI^■CE 1861. 259 
 
 little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the most orig- 
 inal and ingenious of American story writers. 
 The old device of making wildly improbable in- 
 ventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment 
 of details — a device employed by Swift and 
 Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne — 
 became quite fresh and novel in his hands, and 
 was managed with a humor all his own. Some of 
 his best stories are My Double and How He Undid 
 Me^ describing how a busy clergyman found an 
 Irishman who looked so much like himself that he 
 trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him 
 to do duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, 
 etc., thereby escaping bores and getting time for 
 real work ; the Brick Moon, a story of a projectile* 
 built and launched into space, to revolve in a 
 fixed meridian about the earth and serve mariners 
 as a mark of longitude ; the Rag Man and Rag 
 Woman, a tale of an impoverished couple who 
 made a competence by saving the pamphlets, ad- 
 vertisements, wedding cards, etc., that came to 
 them through the mail, and developing a paper 
 business on that basis ; and the Skeleton in the 
 Closet, which shows how the fate of the South- 
 ern Confederacy was involved in the adventures 
 of a certain hoop-skirt, ''built in the eclipse and 
 rigged with curses dark." Mr. Hale's historical 
 scholarship and his exact habit of mind have 
 aided him in the art of giving vi'aisejublance to 
 absurdities. He is known in philanthropy as well 
 as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy, 
 
26o American Literature, 
 
 practical way with them in consonance with his 
 motto, " Look up and not down, look forward 
 and not back, look out and not in, and lend a 
 hand." 
 
 It is too soon to sum up the literary history of 
 the last quarter of a century. The writers who 
 have given it shape are still writing, and their 
 work is therefore incomplete. But on the slight- 
 est review of it two facts become manifest: first, 
 that New England has lost its long monopoly ; 
 and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period 
 is the growth of realistic fiction. The electric 
 tension of the atmosphere for thirty years preced- 
 ing the civil war, the storm and stress of great 
 public contests, and the intellectual stir produced 
 by transcendentalism seem to have been more fa- 
 vorable to poetry and literary idealism than pres- 
 ent conditions are. At all events there are no new 
 poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, 
 and others of the elder generation, although George 
 H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. Stoddard and 
 E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, 
 first in New York and afterward in Boston, have 
 written creditable verse; not to speak of younger 
 writers, whose work, however, for the most part, 
 has been more distinguished by delicacy of execu- 
 tion than by native impulse. Mention has been 
 made of the establishment of Harper s Monthly 
 Magazine^ which, under the conduct of its accom- 
 plished editor, George W. Curtis, has provided the 
 public with an abundance of good reading. The 
 
Literature Since i86i. 261 
 
 old Putnam s Monthly, which ran from 1853 to 
 1858, and had a strong corps of contributors, was 
 revived in 1868, and continued by that name till 
 1870, when it was succeeded by Scribners MojitJil}\ 
 under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and 
 this in 1881 by the Century^ an efficient rival of 
 Harper s in circulation, in literary excellence, and 
 in the beauty of its wood engraving, the American 
 school of which art these two great periodicals 
 have done much to develop and encourage. An- 
 other New York monthly, the Galaxy^ ran from 
 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant 
 White. During the present year a new Scrib- 
 ners Magazine has also taken the field. The 
 Atlantic^ in Boston, and Lippincotfs, in Philadel- 
 phia, are no unworthy competitors with these for 
 public favor. 
 
 During the forties began a new era of national 
 expansion, somewhat resembling that described in 
 a former chapter, and, like that, bearing fruit 
 eventually in literature. The cession of Florida 
 to the United States in 1845, and the annexation of 
 Texas in the same year, were followed by the pur- 
 chase of California in 1847, and its admission as a 
 State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the 
 California gold fields. San Francisco, at first a 
 mere collection of tents and board shanties, with 
 a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity 
 into a great city; the wicked and wonderful city 
 apostrophized by Bret Harte in his poem, San 
 Francisco : 
 
262 American Literature. 
 
 " Serene, indifferent of Fate, 
 Thou sittest at the Western Gate ; 
 Upon thy heights so lately won 
 Still slant the banners of the sun. . . « 
 I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
 Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." 
 
 The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked 
 to the Pacific coast found there a motley state of 
 society between civilization and savagery. There 
 were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the 
 Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; 
 the wild tribes of the plains — Apaches, Utes, and 
 Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all 
 elements strange to the Atlantic seaboard and the 
 States of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, 
 in stages or caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline 
 deserts dotted with sage brush and seamed by 
 deep canons, and passes through gigantic mount- 
 ain ranges. On the coast itself nature was unfa- 
 miliar : the climate was sub-tropical; fruits and 
 vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding 
 to the enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves 
 and the prodigious scale of the scenery in the val- 
 ley of the Yo Semite and the snow-capped peaks 
 of the Sierras. At first there were few women, and 
 the men led a wild, lawless existence in the mining 
 camps. Hard upon the heels of the prospector 
 followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the 
 dance-hall. Every man carried his "Colt," and 
 looked out for his own life and his ^' claim." 
 Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, 
 
Literature Since i86i. 263 
 
 when it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. 
 In the diggings, shaggy frontiersmen and "pikes" 
 from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern 
 cities and with broken-down business men and 
 young college graduates seeking their fortune. 
 Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, specu- 
 lators in mining stock and city lots set up tlieir 
 offices in the towns; later came a sprinkling of 
 school-teachers and ministers. Fortunes were 
 made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo. 
 To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good 
 "lead " was drinking champagne out of pails and 
 treating the town ; to-morrow he was " busted," 
 and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon 
 his luck. This strange, reckless life, was not with- 
 out fascination, and highly picturesque and dra- 
 matic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret 
 Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic 
 Greek poetry," and sooner or later it was sure to 
 find its poet. During the war California remained 
 loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat 
 of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, 
 and went on independently developing its own re- 
 sources and becoming daily more civilized. By 
 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the 
 Ovei'land Monthly, w^hich ran until 1875. It had a 
 decided local flavor, and the vignette on its title- 
 page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a 
 grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early 
 number of the Overland was a story entitled the 
 Luck of Roaring Camp, by Francis Bret Harte, a 
 
264 American Literature. 
 
 native of Albany, N. Y., 1835, who had come to 
 CaUfornia at the age of seventeen, in time to catch 
 the unique aspects of the life of the Forty-niners, 
 before their vagabond communities had settled 
 down into the law-a^biding society of the present 
 day. His first contribution was followed by other 
 stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, Higgles, and Tennessee s 
 Partner, and by verses, serious and humorous, of 
 which last, Plain Language from Truthful James, 
 better known as the Heathen Chinee, made an im- 
 mediate hit, and carried its author's name into 
 every corner of the English-speaking world. In 
 187 1 he published a collection of his tales, another 
 of his poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, 
 Condensed Novels, which rank with Thackeray's 
 JVovels by Eminent Hands. Bret Harte's California 
 stories were vivid, highly-colored pictures of life in 
 the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific 
 coast. The pathetic and the grotesque went hand 
 in hand in them, and the author aimed to show 
 how even in the desperate characters gathered to- 
 gether there — the fortune hunters, gamblers, thieves, 
 murderers, drunkards, and prostitutes — the latent 
 nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of 
 heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching 
 fidelity. The same men who cheated at cards and 
 shot each another down with tipsy curses were 
 capable on occasion of the most romantic gener- 
 osity and the most delicate chivalry. Critics were 
 not wanting who held that, in the matter of dialect 
 
Literature Since i86i. 265 
 
 and manners and other details, the narrator was 
 not true to the facts. This was a comparatively 
 unimportant charge ; but a more serious question 
 was the doubt whether his characters were essen- 
 tially true to human nature, whether the wild soil 
 of revenge and greed and dissolute living ever 
 yields such flowers of devotion as blossom ia Ten- 
 7iessees Partner and the Outcasts of Poker Flat. 
 However this may be, there is no question as to 
 Harte's power as a narrator. His short stories are 
 skillfully constructed and effectively told. They 
 never drag, and are never overladen with descrip- 
 tion, reflection, or other lumber. 
 
 In his poems in dialect we find the same variety 
 of types and nationalities characteristic of the Pa- 
 cific coast: the little Mexican maiden, Pachita, in 
 the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who 
 tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at euchre and 
 to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery ticket; 
 the geological society on the Stanislaw who settle 
 their scientific debates with chunks of old red 
 sandstone and the skulls of mammoths; the un- 
 lucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while dig- 
 ging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;'| 
 and Flynn, of Virginia, who saves his " pard's " 
 life, at the sacrifice of his own, by holding up the 
 timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are 
 mostly in monologue, like Browning's dramatic 
 lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt in styl(^ and with 
 a good deal of indicated action, as in Jim, where 
 a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old 
 
266 American Literature. 
 
 chum, learns that he is dead, and is just turning 
 away to hide his emotion, when he recognizes Jim 
 in his informant: 
 
 " Well, thar— Good-by— 
 No more, sir — I — 
 
 Eh? 
 What's that you say ? — 
 Why, dern it! — sho! — 
 No? Yes! By Jo! 
 
 Sold! 
 Sold! Why, you limb; 
 You ornery, 
 
 Denied old 
 Long-legged Jim! " 
 
 Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did 
 our newspaper poetry for a number of years abound 
 in the properties of Californian life, such as gulches, 
 placers, divides, etc., but writers further east ap- 
 plied his method to other conditions. Of these 
 by far the most successful was John Hay, a native 
 of Indiana and private secretary to President Lin- 
 coln, whose Little Breeches, Jim Bludso, and Mys- 
 tery of Gilgal have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses 
 in popularity. In the last-named piece the reader 
 is given to feel that there is something rather 
 cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which 
 results in "the gals that winter, as a rule," going 
 " alone to the singing school." In the two former 
 we have ^roes of the Bret Harte type, the same 
 combination of superficial wickedness with inher- 
 ent loyalty and tenderness. The profane farmer 
 
Literature Since i86i. 267 
 
 of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the 
 prophets," and who had taught his Uttle son "' to 
 chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth white," 
 but who believes in God and the angels ever since 
 the miraculous recovery of the same little son when 
 lost on the prairie in a blizzard ; and the unsaintly 
 and bigamistic captain of the Prairie Belle^ who 
 died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his burning 
 boat against the bank 
 
 *' Till the last galoot's ashore." 
 
 The manners and dialect of other classes and 
 sections of the country have received abundant 
 illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's 
 Hoosier Schoolmaster^ 1871, and his other novels 
 are pictures of rural life in the early days of Indi- 
 ana. Western Windows^ a volume of poems by 
 John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had 
 an unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Le- 
 land, of Philadelphia, in his Hans Breitmann bal- 
 lads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of 
 the German-American element in the cities. By 
 the death, in i88r, of Sidney Lanier, a Georgian 
 by birth, the South lost a poet of rare promise, 
 whose original genius was somewhat hampered by 
 his hesitation between two arts of expression, mu- 
 sic and verse, and by his effort to co-ordinate 
 them. His Science of English Verse, 1880, was a 
 most suggestive, though hardly convincing, state- 
 ment of that theory of their relation which lie was 
 working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, 
 
268 American Literature. 
 
 like the Mocking Bird and the Song of the Chatta^ 
 hoochie, are the most characteristically Southern 
 poetry that has been written in America. Joel 
 Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, in Negro 
 dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the 
 plantations, while his collection of stories, At 
 Teague Foteet's, together with Miss Murfree's In 
 the Tennessee Mountains and her other books have 
 made the Northern public familiar with the wild 
 life of the " moonshiners," who distill illicit whis- 
 key in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, 
 and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting 
 in incident, but strong and fresh in their delinea- 
 tions of character. Their descriptions of mountain 
 scenery are also impressive, though, in the case of 
 the last named writer, frequently too prolonged. 
 George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole life 
 in New Orleans attracted attention by their fresh- 
 ness and quaintness when published in the maga- 
 zines and re-issued in book form as Old Creole 
 Days, in 1879. His first regular novel, the Gran- 
 dissinies, 1880, was likewise a story of Creole life. 
 It had the same winning qualities as his short 
 stories and sketches, but was an advance upon 
 them in dramatic force, especially in the intensely 
 tragic and powerfully told episode of " Bras 
 Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of 
 Louisiana types and ways in his later books, but 
 the Grandissimes still remains his master-piece. 
 All in all, he is, thus far, the most important liter- 
 ary figure of the New South, and the justness and 
 
Literature Since i86i. 269 
 
 delicacy of his representations of life speak vol- 
 umes for the sobering and refining agency of the 
 civil war in the States whose " cause " was 'Most," 
 but whose true interests gained even more by the 
 loss than did the interests of the victorious 
 North. 
 
 The four writers last mentioned have all come 
 to the front within the past eight or ten years, and, 
 in accordance with the plan of this sketch, receive 
 here a mere passing notice. It remains to close 
 our review of the literary history of the period 
 since the war with a somewhat more extended ac- 
 count of the two favorite novelists whose work has 
 done more than any thing else to shape the move- 
 ment of recent fiction. These are Henry James, 
 Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their writings, 
 though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in 
 this, that they are analytic in method and realistic 
 in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and sim- 
 ple; he wrote the romance of adventure and of 
 external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, 
 and with a finer spiritual insight dealt with the real 
 passions of the heart and with men's inner experi- 
 ences. This he did with truth and power; but, al- 
 though himself a keen observer of whatever passed 
 before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a pho- 
 tographic fidelity to the surface facts of speech, 
 dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his charac- 
 ters is book talk, and not the actual language of 
 the parlor or the street, with its slang, its colloquial 
 ease and the intonations and shadings of phrase 
 
270 American Literature. 
 
 and pronunciation which mark different sections 
 of the country and different grades of society. 
 His attempts at dialect, for example, were of the 
 slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his romances 
 certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But 
 with the growth of a richer and more complicated 
 society in America fiction has grown more social 
 and more minute in its observation. It would not 
 be fair to classify the novels of James and How- 
 ells as the fiction of manners merely; they are 
 also the fiction of character, but they aim to de- 
 scribe people not only as they are, in their inmost 
 natures, but also as they look and talk and dress. 
 They try to express character through manners, 
 whicli is the way in which it is most often ex- 
 pressed in the daily existence of a conventional 
 society. It is a principle of realism not to select 
 exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take 
 average men and women and their average expe- 
 riences. The realists protest that the moving in- 
 cident is not their trade, and that the stories have 
 all been told. They want no plot and no hero. 
 They will tell no rounded tale with a denouement^ 
 in which all the parts are distributed, as in the 
 fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they will 
 take a transcript from life and end when they get 
 through, without informing the reader what be- 
 comes of the characters. And they will try to 
 interest this reader in " poor real life " with its 
 " foolish face." Their acknowledged masters are 
 Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony 
 
Literature Since i86i. 271 
 
 Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in 
 sociology, honest reports of the writer's impres- 
 sions, which may not be without a certain scien- 
 tific value even. 
 
 Mr. James's peculiar province is the interna- 
 tional novel ; a field which he created for himself, 
 but which he has occupied in company with How- 
 ells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. He was born 
 into the best traditions of New England culture, 
 Jiis father being a resident of Cambridge, and a 
 forcible writer on philosophical subjects, and his 
 brother, William James, a professor in Harvard 
 University. The novelist received most of his 
 schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, 
 with the result that he has become half denation- 
 alized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan indiffer- 
 ence upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, 
 has constituted his opportunity. A close observer 
 and a conscientious student of the literary art, he 
 has added to his intellectual equipment the advan- 
 tage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. 
 He looks at America with the eyes of a foreigner 
 and at Europe with the eyes of an American. He 
 has so far thrown himself out of relation with 
 American life that he describes a Boston horse- 
 car or a New York hotel table with a sort of 
 amused wonder. His starting-point was in criti- 
 cism, and he has always maintained the critical 
 attitude. He took up story-writing in order to 
 help himself, by practical experiment, in his 
 chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on 
 
272 American Literature. 
 
 Fre?ich Poets and Novelists^ 1878, is by no means 
 the least valuable of his books. His short stories 
 in the magazines were collected into a volume in 
 1875, with the title, A Passionate Pilgrim and 
 Other Stories. One or two of these, as the Last of 
 the Valerii and the Madonna of the Future^ suggest 
 Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom 
 James afterward contributed to the " English Men 
 of Letters " series. But in the name-story of the 
 collection he was already in the line of his future 
 development. This is the story of a middle-aged 
 invalid American, who comes to England in search 
 of health, and finds, too late, in the mellow atmos- 
 phere of the mother country, the repose and the 
 congenial surroundings which he has all his life 
 been longing for in his raw America. The pathos 
 of his self-analysis and his confession of failure is 
 subtly imagined. The impressions which he and 
 his far-away English kinsfolk make on one an- 
 other, their mutual attraction and repulsion, are 
 described with that delicate perception of national 
 differences which makes the humor and sometimes 
 the tragedy of James's later books, like the Amer- 
 ican^ Daiiy Miller^ the Europeans^ and A71 Interna- 
 tional Episode. His first novel was Roderick Httd- 
 son, 1876, not the most characteristic of his fictions, 
 but perhaps the most powerful in its grasp of ele- 
 mentary passion. The analytic method and the 
 critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative 
 literature. In proportion as this writer's faculty of 
 minute observation and his realistic objectivity 
 
Literature Since i86r. 273 
 
 have increased upon him, the uncomfortable cold- 
 ness which is felt in his youthful work has become 
 actually disagreeable, and his art — growinc^ constant- 
 ly finer and surer in matters of detail — has seemed 
 to dwell more and more in the region of mere 
 manners and less in the higher realm of character 
 and passion. In most of his writings the heart, 
 somehow, is left out. We have seen that Irving, 
 from his knowledge of England and America, and 
 his long residence in both countries, became the 
 mediator between the two great branches of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of 
 his sympathy with each. Henry James has like- 
 wise interpreted the two nations to one another in 
 a subtler but less genial fashion than Irving, and 
 not through sympathy, but through contrast, by 
 bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and 
 society which have developed under different in- 
 stitutions. In his novel, the American^ 1S77, he 
 has shown the actual misery which may result 
 from the clashing of opposed social systems. In 
 such clever sketches as Daisy Miller, 1879, the 
 Pension Beaurepas, and ^ Bimdle of Letters, he has 
 exhibited types of the American girl, the American 
 business man, the aesthetic feebling from Boston, 
 and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized 
 American campaigners in the Old World, and has 
 set forth the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, 
 and misunderstandings which result from contra- 
 dictory standards of conventional morality and 
 behavior. In the Europeans, 1879, ^^^^ an Inter- 
 im 
 
274 American Literature. 
 
 national Episode^ 1878, he has reversed ihe process, 
 bringing Old Word standards to the test of Amer- 
 ican ideas by transferring his dramatis personcE to 
 republican soil. The last-named of these illus- 
 trates how slender a plot realism requires for its 
 purposes. It is nothing more than the history of 
 an English girl of good family who marries an 
 American gentleman and undertakes to live in 
 America, but finds herself so uncomfortable in 
 strange social conditions that she returns to En- 
 gland for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's 
 sister is so taken with the freedom of these very 
 conditions that she elopes with another American 
 and " goes West." James is a keen observer of the 
 physiognomy of cities as well as of men, and his 
 Portraits of Places^ 1884, is among the most de- 
 lightful contributions to the literature of foreign 
 travel. 
 
 Mr. Howells's writings are not without "in- 
 ternational " touches. In A Foregone Conclusion 
 and the Lady of the Aroostook, and others of 
 his novels, the contrasted points of view in 
 American and European life are introduced, and 
 especially those variations in feeling, custom, 
 dialect, etc., which make the modern English- 
 man and the modern American such objects of 
 curiosity to each other, and which have been 
 dwelt upon of late even unto satiety. But in 
 general he finds his subjects at home, and if he 
 does not know his own countrymen and country- 
 women more intimately than Mr. James, at least 
 
Literature Since i86i. 275 
 
 he loves them better. There is a warmer senti- 
 ment in his fictions, too; his men are better fel- 
 lows and his women are more lovable. Howells 
 was born in Ohio. His early life was that of a 
 western country editor. In i860 he published, 
 jointly with his friend Piatt, a book of verse — 
 Poems of Two Friends. In 1861 he was sent as 
 consul to Venice, and the literary results of his 
 sojourn there appeared in his sketches Venetian 
 Life, 1865, and Italian /ou?-neys, 1S67. In 1871 
 he became editor of the Atlantic MontJily, and in 
 the same year published his Suburban Sketches. 
 All of these early volumes showed a quick eye for 
 the picturesque, an unusual power of description, 
 and humor of the most delicate quality; but as yet 
 there was little approach to narrative. Their 
 Wedding Jouj'ney was a revelation to the public of 
 the interest that may lie in an ordinary bridal trip 
 across the State of New York, when a close and 
 sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon 
 the characteristics of American life as it appears 
 at railway stations and hotels, on steam-boats and 
 in the streets of very commonplace towns. A 
 Chance Acquaintance, 1873, was Howells's first novel, 
 though even yet the story was set against a back- 
 ground of travel — pictures, a holiday trip on the 
 St. Lawrence and the Saguenay ; and descriptions 
 of Quebec and the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., 
 rather predominated over the narrative. Thus, 
 gradually and by a natural process, complete charac- 
 ters and realistic novels, such as A Modern In- 
 
276 American Literature. 
 
 stance, 1882, and Indian Summer, evolved them- 
 selves from truthful sketches of places and persons 
 seen by the way. 
 
 The incompatibility existing between European 
 and American views of life, which makes the 
 comedy or the trcgedy of Henry James's interna- 
 tional fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by 
 the repulsion between differing social grades in 
 the same country. The adjustment of these sub- 
 tle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life 
 in all complicated societies. Thus in A Chance 
 Acquaintance the heroine is a bright and pretty 
 Western girl, who becomes engaged during a pleas- 
 ure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish 
 young gentleman from Boston, and the engage- 
 ment is broken by her in consequence of an unin- 
 tended slight — the betrayal on the hero's part of a 
 shade of mortification when he and his betrothed 
 are suddenly brought into the presence of some 
 fashionable ladies belonging to his own monde. 
 The little comedy, Out of the Question, deals with 
 this same adjustment of social scales; and in many 
 of Howells's other novels, such as Silas Lapham 
 and the Lady of the Aj'oostook, one of the main 
 motives may be described to be the contact of the 
 man who eats with his fork witli the man who eats 
 with his knife, and the shock tliereby ensuing. In 
 Indian Summer the complications arise from the 
 difference in age between the hero and heroine, 
 and not from a diff'erence in station or social an- 
 tecedents. In all of these fictions the misunder- 
 
Literature Since i86i. 277 
 
 standings come from an incompatibility of manners 
 rather than of character, and, if any thing were to 
 be objected to the probability of the story, it is 
 that the climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties 
 which, in real life, when there is opportunity for 
 explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in 
 A Alodcrn Instance Howells touched the deeper 
 springs of action. In this, his strongest work, the 
 catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's 
 great novels, by the reaction of characters upon 
 one another, and the story is realistic in a higher 
 sense than any mere study of manners can be. 
 His nearest approach to romance is in the Undis- 
 covered Country^ 1880, which deals with the Spirit- 
 ualists and the Shakers, and in its study of prob- 
 lems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, 
 in its out-of-the-way personages and adventures, 
 and in a certain ideal poetic flavor about the 
 whole book, has a strong resemblance to Haw- 
 thorne, especially to Hawthorne in the Blithedale 
 Romance, where he comes closer to common ground 
 with other romancers. It is interesting to compare 
 \}i\^Undiscovci'ed Country \N\\}i\ Henry James's Bosto- 
 nians, the latest and one of the cleverest of his 
 fictions, which is likewise a study of the clairvoy- 
 ants, mediums, woman's rights' advocates, and all 
 varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of 
 "causes," for whom Boston has long been noto- 
 rious. A most unlovely race of people they be- 
 come under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cos- 
 mopolitan eyes, which see more clearly the char- 
 
278 AxMERicAN Literature. 
 
 latanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, 
 morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous 
 intensity, and vulgar or ridiculous outside pe- 
 culiarities of the humanitarians, than the no- 
 bility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the 
 surface. 
 
 Hovvells is almost the only successful American 
 dramatist, and this in the field of parlor comedy- 
 His little farces, the Elevator^ the Register^ the Par- 
 lor Car, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an ex- 
 quisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of 
 the Comedies et Froverbes of Alfred de Musset, or the 
 many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the 
 French domestic stage, than of any work of English 
 or American hands. His softly ironical yet affec- 
 tionate treatment of feminine ways is especially 
 admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly 
 illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent woman- 
 hood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than 
 Dickens what Thackeray calls ''that great discov- 
 ery," Mrs. Nickleby. 
 
 1. Theodore Winthrop. Life in the Open Air. 
 Cecil Dreeme. 
 
 2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Life in a 
 Black Regiment. 
 
 3. Poetry of the Civil War. Edited by Richard 
 Grant White. New York : 1866. 
 
 4. Charles Farrar Browne. Artemus Ward — 
 His Book. Lecture on the Mormons. Artemus 
 Ward in London. 
 
Literature Since i86i. 279 
 
 5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The Jumping 
 Frog. Roughing It. The Mississippi Pilot. 
 
 6. Charles Godfrey Iceland. Hans Breitmann's 
 Ballads. 
 
 7. Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes, and Perhaps. 
 His Level Best and Other Stories. 
 
 8. Francis Bret Harte. Outcasts of Poker Flat 
 and Other Stories. Condensed Novels. Poems 
 in Dialect. 
 
 9. Sidney Lanier. Nirvana. Resurrection. 
 The Harlequin of Dreams. Song of the Chatta- 
 hoochie. The Mocking Bird. The Stirrup-Cup. 
 Tampa Robins. The Bee. The Revenge of Ha- 
 mish. The Ship of Earth. The Marshes of Glynn. 
 Sunrise. 
 
 TO. Henry James, Jr. A Passionate Pilgrim. 
 Roderick Hudson. Daisy Miller. Pension Beau- 
 repas. A Bundle of Letters. An International 
 Episode. The Bostonians. Portraits of Places. 
 
 11. William Dean Howells. Their Wedding 
 Journey. Suburban Sketches. A Chance Ac- 
 quaintance. A Foregone Conclusion. The Un- 
 discovered Country A Modern Instance. 
 
 12. George W. Cable. Old Creole Days. Mad- 
 am Delphine. The Grandissimes. 
 
 13. Joel Chandler Harris. Uncle Remus. Min- 
 go and Other wSketches. 
 
 14. Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree). 
 In the Tennessee Mountains. 
 
28o 
 
 American Literature — Index. 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 An Index to the American Authors and Writings, and the Principal 
 American Periodicals mentioned in this Volume. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, i88. 
 
 Adams and Liberty, 74. 
 
 Adams, J. Q., 92, 109. 
 
 Adams, Samuel, 52-54. 
 
 After-Dinner Poem, 177. 
 
 After the Funeral, 187. 
 
 Age of Reason, the, 64-66, 75. 
 
 Ages, the, 201. 
 
 Alcott, A. B., 135, 136. 
 
 Aldrich T. B., 260. 
 
 Algerine Captive, the, 79. 
 
 Algic Researches, 171. 
 
 Alhambra, the, 94. 
 
 All Quiet Along the Potomac, 242. 
 
 Alnwick Castle, 103. 
 
 ^sop, Richard, 68, 69. 
 
 American, the, 272, 273. 
 
 American Civil War, the, 241, 
 
 American Conflict, the, 241. 
 
 American Flag, the, 102. 
 
 American Note-Rooks, 123, 149, 151, 
 
 155, 168. 
 American Scholar, the, 120, 135, 160. 
 Ames, t'isher, 62, 63. 
 Among My Books, 1S8. 
 Anarchiad, the. 69. 
 Annabel Lee, 217. 
 Army Life in a Black Regiment, 245. 
 Army of the Potomac, the, 241. 
 Art of Book Making, the, 99. 
 "Artemus Ward," 248, 251-56. 
 Arthur Mervyn. 80. 
 At Teague Poteet's, 268. 
 Atlantic Monthly, the, 178,187,197- 
 
 I.J9, 244, 245, 257, 261, 275, 
 Atlantis. 222. 
 Aiif Wiederschen, 187. 
 Autobiography, Franklin's, 33, 46, 
 
 48, 49. 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
 
 the, 173, 179, 
 
 Backwoodsman, the, 9T. 
 
 Ballad of the Oysterman, 174. 
 
 Bancroft, George, 161, 181, 190, 191. 
 
 Barbara Frietcliie, 207. 
 
 Barlow, Joel, 68-71. 
 
 I'atile Hymn of the Republic, 242. 
 
 Battle of the Kegs, 74. 
 
 Battlefield, the, 203. 
 
 Bay Fight, the, 243. 
 
 Bay Psalm Book, the, 23. 
 
 Bedouin Song, 226. 
 
 Beecher, Lyman, 127, 231. 
 
 Beecher, H. W., 231. 
 
 Beers, Mrs. E. L.,' 242. 
 
 Beleaguered City, the, 165, 169. 
 
 Belfry of Bruges, the, 165, 167. 
 
 Berkeley, Robert, 18. 
 
 Biglow Papers, the, 182. 183, 185, 
 
 186, 209. 248. 
 Black Cat, the, 218. 
 Black Fox of Salmon River, the, 206. 
 Blair, Jas., 13. 
 Blithedale Romance, the, 123, 154, 
 
 227, 277. 
 Bloody Tenet of Persecution, the, 25. 
 Blue and the Gray, tiie, 243. 
 Boker, G. H.,260. 
 Bostonians, the, 277. 
 Bracebridge Hall, 96, 98, 247. 
 Bradford's Journal, 24, 28. 
 Brahma, 136, 141. 
 Brainard, j. G. C, 205, 206, 230. 
 Brick Moon, the, 259. 
 Bridal of Pennacook, the, 206, 209. 
 Bridge, the, 167, 168. 
 Broken Heart, tlie, 99. 
 Brown, C. B., 79-82. 
 Browne, C. F.. 250, 251. 
 Brownell, H. H., 242-44.' 
 Bryant, W. C., 86, 102, 163, 199-204. 
 Buccaneer, the, 115, 
 
American Literature — Index. 
 
 281 
 
 Building of the Ship, the, 167. 
 Bundle of Letters, A, 273. 
 Burnett, Mrs. F. H., 271. 
 Bushnell, Horace, 128. 
 Busy-Body, the, 45, 66. 
 Butler, W. A., 224. 
 Byrd, Wm., 17. 
 
 Cable, G. W., 268. 
 
 Calhoun, J. C, 56, no, in. 
 
 Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 161. 
 
 Cape Cod, 144. 
 
 Capture of Fugitive Slaves, 184. 
 
 Cary, Alice, 228. 
 
 Can', Phoebe, 228. 
 
 Cask of Amontillado, the, 218. 
 
 Cassandra South wick, 209. 
 
 Cathedral, the, 189. 
 
 Cecil Dreeme, 245. 
 
 Century Magazine, the, 197,241,261. 
 
 Chambered Nautilus, the, 176. 
 
 Chance Acquaintance. A, 275, 276. 
 
 Channing, W. E., iis-18, 120, 126, 
 
 130. 138. 
 Channing, W. E., Jr., 138, 156. 
 Channing, W. H., 13S. 
 Chapel of the Hermits, the, 208. 
 Character of Milton, the, 117, 
 Charleston, 243. 
 Children of Adam, 233. 
 Choate, Rufus, 114, 115. 
 Christian Examiner, the, 117. 
 Circular Letter, by Otis & Quincy,55. 
 City in the Sea, the, 214. 
 Clara Howard, 80. 
 Clarke, J. F., 138. 
 Clay, Henry, no, in. 
 Clemens, S. L., 250, 255-57. 
 Columbiad, the, 70, 71. 
 Common Sense, 63. 
 Condensed Novels, 264. 
 Conduct of Life, the, 139. 
 Confederate States of America, the, 
 
 241. 
 Conquest of Canaan, 72. too. 
 Conquest of Granada, 94. 
 Conquest of Mexico, 190. 
 Conquest of Peru, 190. 
 Conspiracy of Pontiac, the, 192. 
 Constitution and the Union, the, 112. 
 Constitution of the United States, 
 
 the, 55, 59. 
 Contentment, 109. 
 Contrast, the, 79. 
 Conversations on the Gospels, 131;. 
 Conversations on Some of the Old 
 
 Poets, 187. 
 Cooke, J. E., 222. 
 
 Cooper, J. F., 77, 91, 104-8, 114, 171, 
 
 269. 
 Coral Grove, the, 230. 
 Cotton, John, 25, 32. 
 Count Frontenac & New France, 193. 
 Courtin', the, 185, 248. 
 Courtship of Miles Standish, the, 30. 
 Cow Chase, the, 73. 
 Cranch, C. P., 123, 138. 
 Crisis, the, 63. 
 Croaker Papers, the, 103. 
 Culprit Fay, the, 102. 
 Curtis, G. W., 123, 260. 
 
 Daisy Miller, 272, 273. 
 
 Dana, C. A., 122, 138, 199. 
 
 Dana, R. H., 86, ns. 
 
 Danbury News Man, 74, 250. 
 
 Dante, Longfellow's, 172. 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 241. 
 
 Day of Doom, the, 40, 
 
 Death of the Flowers, the, 201, 202. 
 
 Declaration of Independence, the, 55. 
 
 Deerslayer, the, 106, 108. 
 
 Democratic Vistas, 236. 
 
 Derby, G. H., 250. 
 
 Descent into the Maelstrom, 219. 
 
 Deserted Road, the, 228. 
 
 Dial, the, 120, 127, 136. 138. 
 
 Dialogue Between Franklin and the 
 Gout, 48. 
 
 Diamond Lens, the, 245. 
 
 Discourse of the Plantation of Vir- 
 ginia, A, II. 
 
 Dolph Heyliger, 96. 
 
 Domain of Arnheim, the, 219. 
 
 Dorchester Giant, the. 173. 
 
 Drake, J. R-, 102, 103, 115. 
 
 Draper, J. W., 241. 
 
 Dream Life, 231. 
 
 Dresser, the Wound, 235. 
 
 Drifting, 228. 
 
 Driving Home the Cows, 242, 
 
 Drum Paps, 236. 
 
 Dutchman's Fireside, the, 102. 
 
 Dwight, J. S., 123, 130, 138, 
 
 Dwight, Theodore, 68, 69. 
 
 Dwight, Timothy, 68, 72. 
 
 Early Spring in Massachusetts, 144. 
 
 Echo, the, 69. 
 
 Echo Club, the, 226. 
 
 Edgar Huntley, 80. 
 
 Edith Linsey, 22^. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 41-44, 72, 126, 
 
 128. 
 Eggleston, Edward, 267. 
 Elevator, the, 278. 
 
282 
 
 American Literature — Index. 
 
 Fliot, John, 23. 
 
 Elsie Venner, 180. 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 113, 120, 121, 125, 
 147, 156, 160, 169, 208, 235. 
 
 Endicott's Red Cross, 153. 
 
 English Note Books, 155. 
 
 English Traits, 134, 142. 
 
 Ephemerae. 231. 
 
 P'.pilogue to Cato, 76. 
 
 Eternal Goodness, 208. 
 
 Ethan Brand, 152. 
 
 Evangeline, i6y, 170. 
 
 Evening V\'ind, the, 201. 
 
 Everett, Edward, 114, T15, 181. 
 
 Europeans, the, 272, 273. 
 
 Excelsior, 166. 
 
 Excursions, 144. 
 
 Expediency of the Federal Consti- 
 tution. 59. 
 
 Eyes and Ears, 231. 
 
 E. Smith, 223. 
 
 Fable for Critics, A, 137, 187, tBq. 
 Facts in the Case of M 
 the, 215. 
 
 M. Valdemar, 
 
 Fall of the House of Usher, the, 218. 
 
 Familists' Hymn, the, 29. 
 
 Fanshawe, 151. 
 
 Farewell Address, Washington's, 60. 
 
 Faust, I'aylor's, 226. 
 
 P'ederalist, the, 60. 
 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, i6r, 190. 
 
 Final Judgment, the, 42- 
 
 Finch, F. M., 243. 
 
 Fire of Driftwood, the, 167. 
 
 Fireside Travels, 161. 
 
 Fitz Adam's Story, 185. 
 
 Flint, Timothy, gi. 
 
 Flood of Years, the, 203. 
 
 Footpath, the, 187. 
 
 Footsteps of Angels, 165. 
 
 Foregone Conclusion, A, 274. 
 
 Forest Hymn, 200. 
 
 Fortune of the Republic, 139, 140. 
 
 Foster, S. C 228, 229. 
 
 France and England in North Amer- 
 ica, 192. 
 
 Franklin, Ben., 33, 44-49, 66. 
 
 Freedom of the Will, 42. 
 
 French Poets and Novelists, 272. 
 
 Freneau, Philip, 76, 77. 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, 121-23, 128, 130, 
 135-38, 142, 156, 171- 
 
 Galaxy Magazine, the, 261. 
 Garrison,W. r>.,iio, 112, 193,205,229. 
 Garrison of Cape Ann, the, 38. 
 General History of Virginia, 15. 
 
 Geography of the Mississippi Val- 
 ley, 91. 
 Georgia Spec, the, 79. 
 Ghost Ball at Congress Hall,the,223. 
 Ciive Me the Old 224. 
 Godey's Lady's Book, 197, 210. 
 Godfrey, Thos., 79. 
 Gold Bug, the, 215. 
 Golden Legend, the. 171. 
 (iood News from Virginia, 19. 
 Good Word for Winter, A, 188. 
 Goodrich, S. G.. 88, 92, 151. 
 Grandfather's Chair, 38. 
 Grandissimes, the, 268. 
 Greeley, Horace, 123, 225. 
 Green River. 201. 
 (jreene, A. G., 109. 
 Greenfield Hill, 72. 
 Guardian Angel, the, 180. 
 
 Hail, Columbia ! 74. 
 
 Hale, E. E., 160, 215, 257-60. 
 
 Halleck, F. G., 103, 104, 115. 
 
 Halpine, C. G.. 245. 
 
 Hamilton. Alexander, 59-61, 63, 112. 
 
 Hannah Thurston, 227. 
 
 Hans Breitmann Ballads, 267. 
 
 Hans Pfaail, 215. 
 
 Harliinger, the, 122, 123. 
 
 Harper's Monthly Magazine, 197, 
 
 iqS, 260, 261. 
 Harris, J. C, 268. 
 Harte, F. B., 255, 261, 263-66. 
 Hasty Pudding, 71. 
 Haunted Palace, the, 217. 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 154. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7, 29, 38,70, 
 123, 137, 149-156, jfB, 181, 227, 
 240, 247, 248, 269, 272, 277. 
 Hay, John, 266. 
 Health, A, 109. 
 Heathen Chinee, the, 264. 
 Hedge, F. H., 123. 
 Height of the Ridiculous, the, 173. 
 Henry, Patrick, 52-54, 59. 
 Hiawatha, 77, 170. 
 Higginson, T. W., 95, 123, 137, 245. 
 Hisl.evel Best. 258. 
 History of the Dividing Line, 17. 
 History of New England, Win- 
 
 throp''s, 28-32. 
 History of I lymouth Plantation, 
 
 Bradford's. 28. 
 History of the United Netherlands, 
 
 191. 
 History of the United States, Ban- 
 croft's, 161, 191: Higginson's, 
 95- 
 
American Literature — Index. 
 
 283 
 
 History of Vir2;inia, Berkeley's, 18 : 
 
 Stub's, j8. 
 Hoffman, C. F., 224. 
 Holland, J. G., 261. 
 Holmes, O. W., 109, i6o, 161, 172- 
 
 181, 202, 245, 247, 248. 
 Home, Sweet Home, 108. 
 Homesick in Heaven, 176. 
 Hooker, Thos., 32, 35, 128. 
 Hoosier Schoolmaster, the, 267. 
 Hopkins, Lemuel, 68, 6:). 
 Hopkinson, Francis, 74. 
 Hopkinson, Joseph, 74. 
 Horse-Shoe Robinson, 221. 
 House of the Seven Gables, the, 150, 
 
 154- 
 Howe, Mrs. J. W.. 242. 
 Howells, W. D., 269-271, 274-78. 
 Humphreys, David, 6i, 69. 
 Hymn at the Completion of Concord 
 
 IVIonument, 143. 
 Hymn of the Moravian Nuns, 163. 
 Hymn to the Night, 165. 
 Hymn to the North Star, 200. 
 Hyperion, 172. 
 
 Ichabod, 207. 
 
 If, Yes, and Perhaps, 258. 
 
 Iliad, Hryant's, 204. 
 
 Illustrious Providences, 34. 
 
 In the Tennessee Mountains, 268. 
 
 In the Twilight, 187. 
 
 In War Time, 207. 
 
 Independent, the, 231. 
 
 Indian Bible, Eliot's, 23. 
 
 Indian Burying Ground, the, 76, 77. 
 
 Indian Student, the, 76. 
 
 Indian Summer, 276. 
 
 Ingham Papers,. 258. 
 
 Inklings of Adventure, 223. 
 
 Innocents Abroad, 2,5. 256. 
 
 International Episode, An, 272, 273. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 86, gi, 92, 93- 
 
 lor, 201, 247, 248, 257 273. 
 Israfel, 214. 
 Italian Journeys, 275. 
 Italian Note-Books, 155. 
 
 James, Henry, 245, 269-74, 276, 277, 
 
 Jane Talbot, 80. 
 
 Jay, John, 60, 61. 
 
 Jefferson, Thos., 14, 55-59,62. 
 
 Jesuits in North America, the, 193. 
 
 Jim, 265. 
 
 Jim Bludso, 266. 
 
 John Brown's Body, 73. 242. 
 
 John Godfrey's Fortune, 227. 
 
 John PhcEnix, 250. 
 
 John Underbill, 29. 
 
 Jonathan to John, 1S5. 
 
 " Josh Billings," 255. 
 
 Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 17. 
 
 Judd, Sylvester, 189. 
 
 Jumping Frog, the, 255. 
 
 June, 201, 202. 
 
 Justice and Expediency, 206. 
 
 Kansas and Nebraska Bill, the, 195. 
 
 Katie, 243. 
 
 Kennedy, J. P., 221. 
 
 Key, F. S., 75. 
 
 Kidd, the Pirate, 96. 
 
 King's Missive, the, 200. 
 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, the, 96, 
 
 loi, 151, 192, 210. 
 Knickerbocker's History of New 
 
 York, 86, 96, 97, 247. 
 
 Lady of the Aroostook, the, 274, 276. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney, 267. 
 
 La Salle and the Discovery of the 
 
 Great West, 193. 
 Last Leaf, the, 109, 174. 
 Last of the Mohicans, the, 106, 108. 
 Last of the Valerii, the, 272. 
 Latest Form of Infidelity, the, 128. 
 Laus Deo, 207. 
 
 Leatherstocking Tales, 77, 106, 107. 
 Leaves of Grass, 232, 233, 236. 
 Lecture on the Mormons, 252. 
 Legend of Brittany, 182. 
 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 96, 98. 
 Legends of New England, 206. 
 Legends of the Province House, 153. 
 Leland, C. G., 267. 
 Letter on Whitewashing, 74. 
 Letters and Social Aims, 139. 
 Letters from Under a Bridge, 223. 
 Letters of a Traveler, 204. 
 Liberator, the, 110, 193, 229. 
 Life of Columbus, 94, 100. 
 Life of Goldsmith, 100. 
 Life of John of Barneveld, 192. 
 Life of Washington, 100. 
 Ligeia, 218. 
 
 Light of Stars, the, 165. 
 Lincoln, Abraham. 188, 245-47, 249. 
 Lines on Leaving Europe, 223. 
 Lippincott's Magazine, 261. 
 Literary Recreations, 210. 
 i iterati of New York, 211. 
 Little Breeches, 265. 
 Livingston, Wm., 66. 
 Longfellow, H. W., 29, 77, 149, 160- 
 
 172, 183, 198, 231. 
 Lost Arts, 194. 
 
284 
 
 American Literature — Index. 
 
 Lost Cause, the, 241, 
 Lowell, J. R., 124, 135. 137, 139, 160 
 161,168, 181-189, 199,202,247,24^ 
 Luck of Roaring Camp, the, 263, 
 Lunatic's Skate, the, 223. 
 Lyrics of a Day, 243. 
 
 MacFingal, 67, 68, 74. 
 
 Madonna of the Future, the, 272. 
 
 Magnalia, Christi Americana, 20, 
 
 33-36, 40. 
 ]Mahomet and his Successors, 100. 
 Maine Woods, the, 144. 
 " Major Jack Downing," 250. 
 Man of the Crowd, the, 218. 
 Man-of-War Bird, the, 236. 
 Man Without a Country, the, 215, 
 
 257- 
 Marble Faun, the, 150, 152, 154, 155. 
 Marco Bozzaris, 103. 
 Margaret, 189. 
 Mark Twain, 248, 255-57, 
 Maryland, My Maryland, 242. 
 Masque of the Gods, the, 225. 
 Masque of the Red Death, 218. 
 Mather, Cotton, 20, 23, 24, 26, 30, 
 
 33-38, 40. 
 Mather, Increase. 34. 
 Maud Muller, 208. 
 May Day, 139. 
 
 Maypole of Merrymount, the, 29. 
 Memoranda of the Civil War, 236. 
 Memorial History of Boston, 209. 
 Men Naturally God's Enemies, 42. 
 Merry Mount, 190. 
 Messenger, R. H., 224. 
 Miggles, 264. 
 " Miles O'Reilly," 245. 
 Minister's Black Veil, the, 153. 
 Minister's Wooing, the, 230. 
 Mitchell, D. G.. 230, 231. 
 Mocking Bird, the, 268. 
 Modern Instance, A, 275, 277. 
 Modern Learning, 74. 
 Modest Request, A, 175. 
 Money Diggers, the, 96. 
 Montcalm and Wolfe, 193. 
 Monterey, 224. 
 Moore, C. C, 224. 
 Moore, Frank, 241. 
 Moral Argument Against Calvinism, 
 
 the, 117. 
 Morris, G. P., 223. 
 Morton's Hope, 190. 
 Mosses from an Old Manse, 149, 155. 
 Motley, J. L., 160, 190-92. 
 Mount Vernon, 70. 
 " Mrs. Partingten," 250. 
 
 MS. Found in a Bottle, 221. 
 
 Murder of Lovejoy, the, ito. 
 
 Murders in the RueMorgue, the, 215. 
 
 Music Grinders, the, 174. 
 
 My Aunt. 174. 
 
 My Captain, 237. 
 
 My Double and How He Undid Me, 
 
 259- 
 My Garden Acquaintance, 188. 
 My I>ife is Like the Summer Rose, 
 
 108. 
 My Study Windows, 188. 
 My Wife and I, 230. 
 Mystery of Gilgal, the, 266. 
 Mystery of Marie Roget, the, 215. 
 
 Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, the, 
 
 21Q. 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 
 
 XT '5^- 
 
 Nature, 120, 131. 134. 
 
 Naval History of the United States, 
 
 104. 
 Nearer Home, 228. 
 Negro Melodies, 228. 
 New England Tragedies, 29. 
 New England Two Centuries Ago, 
 
 188. 
 New System of English Grammar, 
 
 A, 250. 
 New York Evening Post, the, '^00, 
 
 204. 
 New York Tribune, the, 122, 136. 
 Newell, R. H., 255. 
 North American Review, the, 114, 
 
 J 15, 151, 162, 187, 190, 200. 
 Norton, Andrews, 128. 
 Notes on Virginia, 58. 
 Nothing to Wear, 224. 
 Nux Postccenatica, 175. 
 Nye, Bill, 255. 
 
 O'Brien. F. J., 245. 
 
 Observations on the Boston Port 
 Bill, 55. 
 
 Occulation of Orion, the, 167, 183. 
 
 Ode at the Harvard Commemora- 
 tion, 187. 
 
 Ode for a Social Meeting, 175. 
 
 Ode to Freedom, 184. 
 
 Odj'ssej', Bryant's. 204. 
 
 Old Clock on the Stairs, the, 167. 
 
 Old Creole Days, 268. 
 
 Old Grimes, 109. 
 
 Old Ironsides, 173. 
 
 Old Oaken Bucket, the, 108. 
 
 Old Pennsylvania Farmer, the. 225. 
 
 Old Rc'gime in Canada, the, 193. 
 
American Literature — Index. 
 
 285 
 
 Old Sergeant, the, 242. 
 On a Certain Condescension in For- 
 eigners, 185. 
 One Hoss 5^hay, the, 176, 248. 
 Oregon 'I'rail, the, 192. 
 Ormond, 80, 8r. 
 " Orpheus C. Kerr," 255. 
 Orphic Sayings, 136. 
 Osgood, Mrs. K. P., 242. 
 Otis, James, 52-55. 
 Our Master, 208. 
 Our Old Home, 155. 
 Out of the Question, 276. 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, the, 264, 265. 
 Outre Mer, 163. 
 Overland Monthly, the, 263. 
 Over-Soul, the, 136. 
 
 Paine, R. T., 75. 
 
 Paine, Tom, 63, 66. 
 
 Panorama, the, 207. 
 
 Paper, 48. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 126, 127, 129, 130, 
 
 138. 
 •Parkman, Francis, 161, 190-93. 
 Parlor Car, the, 278. 
 Partisan, the, 222. 
 Passionate Pilgrim, A, 272. 
 Pathfinder, the, 106. 
 Paulding, J. K., qi, 95, loi. 
 Payne, J. H., 108. 
 Pearl of Orrs Island, the, 230. 
 Pencillinss by the Way, 222. 
 Pension Beaurepas, the, 273. 
 Percival, J. G., 230. 
 Percy, Geo., 11. 
 '• Peter Pailev," 88. 
 " Petroleum V. Nasby,'' 255. 
 Phenomena Qusedam Apocalyptica, 
 
 . 39- 
 Phillips, Wendell, t6o, 193, 194. 
 Philosophic Solitude, 66. 
 Philosophy of Composition, 214. 
 Phcenixiana, 250. 
 Piatt, J. J., 242, 267, 275. 
 Pictures of Memory, 228. 
 Pilot, the, 107. 
 
 Pink and White Tyrannj% 230. 
 Pinkney, E. C, 109. 
 Pioneer, the, 181. 
 Pioneers, the, qi, ic6. 
 Pioneers of France in the New 
 
 World, 193. 
 Plain Language fromTruthful James 
 
 264. 
 Planting of the Apple-Tree, the, 203. 
 Poe, E. A., 109, 138, 151, 181, 201, 
 
 210, 212-221, 228, 240, 259. 
 
 Poems of the Orient, 225. 
 
 Poems of 'l\vo Friends, 275. 
 
 Poems on Slavery. 168. 
 
 Poet at the Breakfast Table, the, 179. 
 
 Poetic Principle, the, 216. 
 
 Poetry : A Metrical Lssay, 174. 
 
 Poet's Hope, A, 138. 
 
 Political Cjreen House, the, 69. 
 
 Pollard, E. A, 241. 
 
 Pons Maximus, 227. 
 
 Poor Richard's Almanac, 48. 
 
 Portraits of Places, 274. 
 
 Prairie, the, 106. 
 
 Prentice, G. D., 205. 250. 
 
 Prescott, W. H., 161, 190, 192, 240. 
 
 Present Crisis, the, 184. 
 
 Pride of the Village, the, 79. 
 
 Prince Deukalion, 225. 
 
 Prince of Parthia, the, 79. 
 
 Problem, the, 143. 
 
 Professor at the Breakfast Table, 
 
 the, 179. 
 Progress to the Mines, A, 17, 
 Prologue, the, 176. 
 Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, the, 39. 
 Prophet, the, 225. 
 Purloined Letter, the, 215. 
 Putnam's Monthly, 161, 260. 
 
 Quaker Widow, the, 225. 
 Quincy, Josiah, 52-55. 
 
 Rag Man and Rag Woman, the, 259, 
 
 Randall, J. R., 242. 
 
 Randolph, John, 57. 
 
 Raven, the, 214, 215. 217. 
 
 Read, T. B., 227, 228. 
 
 Reaper and the Flowers, the, 165. 
 
 ReLellion Record, the, 241. 
 
 Recollections of a Lifetime, 88, 92. 
 
 Red Rover, the, 107. 
 
 Register, the, 278. 
 
 Remarks on Associations, 117. 
 
 Remarks on National Literature, 
 
 118, i3o._ 
 Representative Men, 133, 139, 142. 
 Resignation, 167. 
 Reveries of a Bachelor, 230. 
 Rhoecus, 182. 
 Rhymes of Travel, 225. 
 Riding to Vote, 242. 
 Rights of the British Colonies, 55. 
 Ripley, George, 122, 129, 130, 138, 
 
 199. 
 Rip Van Winkle, 96. 
 Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 175. 
 Rise and Fall of the Confederate 
 
 States, 241. 
 
286 
 
 American Literature— Index. 
 
 Rise and Fall of the SlavePo\ver,24i. 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, 191. 
 Rob of the Bo^vl, 221. 
 Roderick Hudson, 272. 
 Roughing It, 255, 256, 
 
 Salmagundi, 04, loi, 203. 
 
 Sandys, George, 16. 
 
 San ^'rancisco, 261. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, the, 29, 152-154. 
 
 School Days, 20^. 
 
 Schoolcraft, H. R., lyr. 
 
 Science of English Verse, 267. 
 
 Scribner's Monthly, 261. 
 
 Scripture Poems, 222. 
 
 Seaside and Fireside, 165, 167. 
 
 Seaweed, 167, 169. 
 
 Selling of Joseph, the, 39. 
 
 September Gale, the, 174. 
 
 Sewall, J. M.. 76. 
 
 Sevvall, Samuel, 38, 39. 
 
 Shakspere Ode, 115. 
 
 Shaw, H. W., 255. 
 
 Shepherd of is.ing Admetiis, the, 182. 
 
 Sheridan's Ride, 223. 
 
 Shillaber, B. P., 250. 
 
 vSigourney, Mrs. L. H., 230. 
 
 Silas Lapham, 276. 
 
 Simms, \V. G.,22r. 
 
 Simple Cobbler of Agawam, the. 2T. 
 
 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
 
 God. 43. 
 Skeleton in Armor, the, 166. 
 Skeleton in the Closet, the, 259. 
 Sketch Book, the, y,, 96, 98. 
 Skipper Ireson's Ride, 208. 
 Sleeper, the, 218. 
 Smith, Elihu, 68. 
 Smith, John, 9. 11, 15, 16. 
 Smith, Seba, 250, 
 Snow-Bound, 20S. 
 Society and Solitude, 139. 
 Song of the Chattahoochie, 268. 
 Song for a Temperance Dinner, 175. 
 Southern Literary Messenger, the, 
 
 2TO, 212. 
 
 Southern Passages and Pictures, 
 222. 
 
 Sparkling and Bright, 224, 
 
 Specimens of Foreign Standard Lit- 
 erature. 130. 
 
 Specimen Days, 236. 
 
 Sphinx, the, 177. 
 
 Spragiie, Charles, 115. 
 
 Spring, 223. 
 
 Spy, the, 106. 
 
 Squibob Papers, 250. 
 
 Star Papers, 231, 
 
 Star Spangled Banner, the, 75. 
 
 Stedman, E. C , 263. 
 
 Stephens, A. H., 241. 
 
 Stith, William. iS. 
 
 Stoddard. R. H., 260. 
 
 Story of Kennett, the, 227. 
 
 Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 229, 230. 
 
 Strachey, Willia.ii, 9, 
 
 Stuart, Moses, 127. 
 
 Sumner, Charles, 160, 162, 168, 186, 
 
 Supernaturalism in New England, 
 
 210. 
 Swallow Barn, 221. 
 Sybaris and Other Homes, 25S. 
 
 Tales of the Glauber Spa, 203. 
 
 Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- 
 besque, 2(8. 
 
 Tales of a Traveler, 95. 
 
 Tales of a Wayside Inn, 209. 
 
 Tamerlane, 212. 
 
 Tanfjlewood Tales, 155. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 224-27. 
 
 Telling the Bees, 20S 
 
 Ten Times One is Ten, 258. 
 
 Tennessee's Partner, -.^64, 265. 
 
 Tent on the Beach, the, 209. 
 
 Thanatopsis, 86, 102, 163, 200, '201, 
 2 -.3. ' . 
 
 The Boys, 175. 
 
 Theology, Dwight's. 72. 
 
 Their Wedding Journey, 275. 
 
 Thirty Poems, 203. 
 
 Thoreau, H. D., 121, 12 j, 13S, 142-. 
 148, i=;6, 160, 235, 240. 
 
 Timrod, Henry, 242, 243. 
 
 To Helen, 214. 
 
 To M from Abroad, 223. 
 
 To One in Paradise, 217. 
 
 To Seneca Lake, 2^,0. 
 
 To a Waterfowl, 201. 
 
 Tour on the Prairies, A, 91. 
 
 Tramp Abroad, A, 255. 
 
 Transcendentalist, the, 130, 132. 
 
 Travels, Dwight's, 73. 
 
 Treatise Concerning Reh"gious Affec- 
 tions, 43. 
 
 True Grandeur of Nations, the, 
 
 True Relation, Smith's, is- 
 
 True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir 
 
 Thomas Gates, 9. 
 Trumbull, John 67-69. 
 Triumph of Infidelity, 72. 
 Twice Told Tales, 151-53. 
 Two Rivers, 146. 
 Tyler, Royal, 79. 
 
American Literature — Index. 
 
 287 
 
 Ullalume, 217. 
 
 Uncle Remus, 268. 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 22g, 230. 
 
 Under the Willows, i86. 
 
 Undiscovered Country, the, 277. 
 
 Unknown Dead, tlie, 243. 
 
 Unseen Spirits, 223. 
 
 Valley of Unrest, the, 214. 
 
 Vanity Fair, 251. 
 
 Vassall Morton, igo. 
 
 Venetian Life, 275, 
 
 Views Afoot, 225. 
 
 Villa Franca, 187. 
 
 Village Blacksmith, the, 166. 
 
 Virginia Comedians, the, 222. 
 
 Vision of Columbus, the, 70. 
 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, the, 184. 
 
 Visit from St. Nicholas, A, 224. 
 
 Voices of F'reedom, 267. 
 
 Voices of the Night, 163, 165. 
 
 Voluntaries, 143. 
 
 Von Kempelen's Discovery, 215. 
 
 Walden, 144. 
 
 Wants of Man, the, 109. 
 
 War Lyrics, 243. 
 
 Ward, Nathaniel, 21. 
 
 Ware, Henry, 128. 
 
 Washers of the Shroud, the, 187. 
 
 Washington, George, 60, 61, 63. 
 
 Washington as a Camp, 244. 
 
 Washington Square, 245. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, no, 111-114, 115, 
 
 Webster's Spelling Book, 88. 
 
 Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
 
 Rivers, A, 144. 
 Western Windows, 267. 
 Westminster Abbej\ gg. 
 Westover MSS., the, 17. 
 
 Westward Ho \ gi. 
 
 What Mr. Robinson Thinks, 183. 
 
 Whistle, the, 48. 
 
 VVhitaker, Alexander, ig. 
 
 White R. G., 261. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 232-37. 
 
 Whiitier, J. G., 2g, 3S, 39, 168, 181, 
 
 204-10, 230, 236, 244. 
 Wieland, 80, "82. 
 Wigglesworth, Michael, 40. 
 Wild Honeysuckle, the, 76. 
 Wilde, R. H., 108. 
 William Wilson, 218. 
 Williams, Roger, 25. 
 Willis, N. P., go, 202, 222, 223, 225, 
 
 231. 
 Wilson, Forceythe, 242. 
 Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, 
 
 186. 
 Winthrop, John. 10, 24. 26, 28-32. 
 Winthrop, Theodore, 244. 
 Witchcraft, i83. 
 Witch's Daughter, the, 206. 
 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 
 
 136. 
 Wonder Book, 155. 
 Wonders of the Invisible World, 24, 
 
 38. 
 Woods, Leonard, 127. 
 Woods in Winter, 163. 
 Woodman, Spare that Tree, 224. 
 Woodvvorth, Samuel, 108. 
 Woolman's Journal, 82-84. 
 Wrath Upon the Wicked, 42. 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, the, 166, 169. 
 
 Yankee Doodle, 73. 
 Yankee in Canada, 144. 
 Year's Life, A, 181. 
 Yemassee, the, 222. 
 
 THE END.