r')t<,'jMuaa>:t: Amerjcan EW COMER Book _^_ ,>j 4^_ CopyiightN" 1^0 1 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. p 06 = iJ 2 *- ^- '^i ^ t" CC OC X X CC c» O OS O CO 5 ?-; f: >' 5. y s - '~ - "- IZ '- ''- 1 1 1 1 1 ^ 1 1 g 1 S [^ > § ^ ' \ t^ CO CO o CO ■ CO CO o 1 ■ ■ o T«. ■ 5c' 3 g CO 00 3 1 (N c 3 S S 00 a 1 ^^ C^T ^ 1— i 3 C5 =; '■- 00 g GO 22 ^ o o CO 5x3 5 X V ; 5 2 ^^ ^ ^ S 2 2 ?2 3 .2 I 1 J ^ o j ^ H^ ^ B kJ r* — .. "" — - — ' ' — - -- _ ., . _ ,1 ( I AMEEICAN LITERATURE BY ALPHONSO G. NEWCOMEE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY CHICAGO SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 1901 t \'\ o\ I THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Two Copita Received AUG. 31 1901 Copyright entry CLASS-Q. XXc Nc*. cepf B, Copyright, 1901 By SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY • ♦ " t * •- PREFACE The method of teaching literature exclusively through a historical text-book has for many years been discredited. The substitution, however, of the study of a few selected "master- pieces" has also proved unsatisfactory, both because it leaves literature unrelated to history, and because it leaves the student without any sense of relations and proportion in literature itself. The remedy is sought in a compromise. None will at- tempt to teach literature to-day without requiring liberal read-, ing in the works of important writers ; but at the same time this reading will be regulated and the acquired knowledge set in order by the use of a critical history. Careful organization, therefore, should characterize every such history. There should be adequate recognition both of the various phases of literature and of individual writers. The selection of a few names, however truly representative, will not answer; and no writer may be presented in isolation from the rest. Doubtless, for the purpose of elementary study, in which memory plaj^s so great a part, some sharpness of outline is needed, and this calls for a partial detachment of authors. But relations must still be attended to, and proportion observed. The lesser men may be crowded down, but they should not be thrown out; they are needed to give the right perspective — to show that literature is not an affair of some half a dozen over- topping names, but that it is a wide activity, without definable metes and bounds. At the same time the wise teacher will avoid burdening his pupils' memories with the more colorless names and dates, which are to be seen rather than looked at, 5 6 AMERICAN LITERATURE like the minor features of a landscape that lie outside the focus of the eye. In the matter of critical estimates the writer of a text-book finds himself in a position of uncomfortable responsibility. Immature students, unused to judgment, and unable to test the opinions delivered to them, often take those opinions with- out question, like so much gospel. At first thought, the only safe course would seem to lie in rigidly following ' 'current esti- mates. " But it should be possible to preserve independence of judgment without giving way to personal vagary, and at the worst a little heresy may serve to stimulate the student's crit- ical faculty. After all, only time can determine where the heresy lies. Current criticism, for instance, tends perceptibly to depreciate our native literature. Possibly one who, like the writer of this book, has an honest admiration for our less academic writers, and ventures to set himself against this attitude, may find himself justified in the end. Of course, the writer of a text-book in this field owes much to certain standard critical works. For the early period the books of Professor Tyler, unhappily now concluded, are indis- pensable. For the later period Mr. Stedman's PoeAs of America is a natural guide, though Mr. Stedman has such an easy way of winning assent that one who values his own independence will use him charily. Professor Richardson's American Liter- ature is valuable for the whole field. Professor Wendell's Literary History of America has come too late to be of service to the present work, but it is included among the books of reference. All are commended to the student with the simple advice to make the usual allowance for per- sonal and local influences. Mr. Stedman, for instance, though he never fails to do justice to the Cambridge men, is disposed to make more of the New York poets — Baj^ard Taylor and others — than their merit seems to warrant; while on the other JPliEMOE 7 hand Professor Wendell of Harvard, though certainly never prejudiced in praise of New England genius, treats with scant courtesy the Muses of the Crotonian fount. The list of late writers included in the appendix of this book is to be regarded chiefly as a directory. Upon many of these writers it is altogether too early to pass judgment, and many of the names have been admitted principally for the reason that they are likely to be sought for, or to make a more complete exhibition of the tendencies of a time or a locality. The somewhat full references and suggestions for study are in- tended for aids in the class room. Thanks are due to Mr. Lindsay T. Damon, of the Univer- sity of Chicago, for most helpful criticism both upon organization and upon details. Acknowledgment is also due to Messrs. D. Appleton and Co., of New York, the publishers of Bryant's works, and to Mr. David McKay, of Philadelphia, the publish. er of Brown's and Whitman's works, for permission to make extracts from books of which they hold the exclusive copy- right. Stanford University, Cal. A. G. N. May 18, 1901. CONTENTS. Preface .5 Introduction 11 PART I. BEGINNINaS From the Settlement of Virginia in 1607 to the End oe the Eighteenth Century I. The Colonial Period ....... 17 History 19 Poetry 22 Theology ^ . . .25 XL Transition. — Benjamin Franklin .... 32 III. The Revolutionary Period 38 Oratory and Political Prose 40 Poetry ,42 PART IT. THE CREATIVE IMPULSE From Maine to Georgia— 1800-1860 IV. The New Environment 55 Charles Brockden Brown 65 Minor Early Fiction 61 Washington Irving . , 64 James Fenimore Cooper 77 Early Poetry 93 William Cullen Bryant 100 V. Romance Ill Edgar Allan Poe 112 From South'.to North 127 Nathaniel Hawthorne 129 Harriet Beecher Stowe 146 9 10 CONTENTS VI. The Transcendental Moye^fent .... 149 Religion and Philosophy in New England . . . 149 Ralph Waldo Emerson 155 Henry David Thoreau 168 VII. National Life and Culture Oratory History and Criticism .... -a- Henry AVadsworth Longfellow -Jw John Greenleaf Whittier — James Russell Lowell Oliver Wendell Holmes .... Minor Poetry and Miscellaneous Prose Walt Whitman 180 180 186 190 204 215 230 241 252 PART III. LATER ACTIVITY From the Atlantic to the Pacific — 1860-1900 VIII. Poetry in the South 270 IX. Prose and Poetry in the West 276 X. Poetry and Criticism in the East .... 286 XL Late Move.aients in Fiction . . . . . 293 Conclusion 305 Appendix A Classified List of Late and Contemporary Writers . 311 Chronological Outline 328 References ^ 336 Suggestions for Reading and Study .... 340 Index .,,... 355 INTRODUCTION The English colonies on the western Atlantic seaboard, and their political successors, the United States of America, have won, by many and varied achievements, a conspicuous place in the histor}^ of civilization. But no form of art stands high among those achievements, and American literature cannot 3^et take rank with the great literatures of the world. It could scarcely be otherwise. Before the arts can flourish, there must be a certain security of social and political life. This security can come only after its foundations have been laid in the struggle for existence itself, in the successful pro- viding of food, clothing, and shelter. The occupants of the New World have been busy bringing the wilderness under cul- tivation, experimenting with a bewildering variety of soil and climate, and exploring the countless sources of material wealth. Above all, a population nominally English, but really of diverse nationalities, has been learning the hard lesson of self-government under novel and trying conditions. There has been little leisure to devote to art. It is further to be considered that the brief life of the nation, as such, has fallen in an age of remarkable scientific and material advance. What other centuries were content to refer to vaguely as "wonders of nature" have in the nineteenth century been searchingly investigated, to the opening up of new and apparently boundless fields of knowledge. The impulse once given, it is not surprising that men should neglect the more abstruse creations of their brains for the absorbing study 11 12 AMEHICAN LITERATURE of the creations around them and the utilization of their dis- coveries in the practical concerns of life. Energies that in another age would have gone to the making of a statue or a poem have been steadily diverted to science and the mechanic arts. And a nation like our own, young and eager, with all the means for scientific investigation and material progress and none of the stimulus of ancient art, would of all nations feel this impulse most keenly. The effects upon our literature are evident. During only one of the three centuries since the permanent occupation of America by the English people has any literature worthy of the name been produced. Few of our writers have been writers primarily, and few of them have left any such volume of work as we are accustomed to associate with the names of great European authors. In quality, too, our literature is often like a thin wine, without body. Many things are lacking to it. A transplanted people, we are not as a race that is born to the inheritance of its land and bound together by long community of interests and of purpose. We have no barbarous or legendary past to enrich our chronicles and fire our imaginations. Chivalry and feudalism have no direct part in us. We have no national deities or patron saints ; no ancient and mystic priesthood; no fairies, no knights, no cour- tiers, no kings. We have not even a distinct national name about which traditions might gather and which, like Merrie England or la helle France, would serve to conjure with in the realm of art. Thus our literature quite lacks the peculiar flavor sometimes known as race. It lacks, too, the atmosphere of aristocracy, and, in a sense, the atmosphere of religion.* Worst of all, perhaps, it lacks the feeling for artistic repose, the sense for proportion and beauty; for the strenuous moral and intellectual life of our ancestors has left us a heritage aesthetically barren. * Charles Johnston, in the Atlantic Monthly, July, INTRODUCTION 13 Still, there are compensations. A new world is at least new, and its writers may find novel themes and fresh inspira- tion just over their thresholds. Our colonial and national history has not been uneventful. There have been religious crusades, financial and industrial panics, and wars both for- eign and domestic. The very social chaos which paralyzes art, the conflict and tumult of diverse races struggling towards unit}', is, to one who can detach himself and observe, a highly dramatic spectacle. Besides, the world of nature does not materially change. In a new country, indeed, the lure of out- door life is peculiarly strong. And in variety of natural features, in charm of landscape, in diversity of seasons, in wealth of flora and fauna, the old world has no advantage over the new. Still less does human nature change, and wherever two men find room to stand together, the primal passions will assert themselves and the poet find his song. It was only a question of time when there should be an American literature, and the time was not unduly long in coming. Now, indeed, some portion of our literature is safely en- shrined as classic, and it is possible for us to look back upon a fairly definite and complete epoch. The literary spirit, the instinct to record the thoughts, feelings, and observations of men, has its fiuctuations. At times it is strong and fertile, at other times weak, at still others barren. But at no time in our history has the literary spirit been absolutely barren, and through one period it was strong enough to leave a record at once great and worthy — great in insight and originality^ and of adequate art. Now that that period seems to be passed and that its leaders are gone with it, the history of American literature may be written without fear or apology. Manifestly there can be no elaborate time-division of a literature that has had but one era of high accomplishment. The simple facts stand out clearly: first, that down to the very beginning of the nineteenth century scarcely a book was 14 AMERICAN LITERATURE published in America that is read to-day for its imaginative or artistic qualities; second, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century letters were first recognized in America as a profession, and that though the work of the best writers was still, for several decades, either slender or crude, the literature of the nation grew steadily in breadth and quality until, toward the middle of the century, we had in the East a group of writers who were recognized as great both at home and abroad, and whose work we still rank clearly above all that has been produced since; and third, that in the last few decades, or since our civil war, the literary impulse has betrayed itself in every corner of our land, sending forth a wealth of literature of which some account must be taken, but upon which judgment cannot yet be final. These three large and well defined periods may be indicated thus: I. The Beginnings, extending from the founding of the colony at Jamestown in 1607 down to about 1800. II. The Creative Impulse, extending from the first decade of the nineteenth century to the civil war. III. The Period of Later Activity, extending from the civil war to the present time. It will be well, at this point, to note also some geographical distinctions. Before the wide diffusion of our literature with the growth of our territory and population, it flourished only along the Atlantic seaboard. That region may be conven- iently divided into three sections: the North, or Massachu- setts Bay region — New England — with a literary capital at Boston ; the South, or the region about the James River and Chesapeake Bay, with literary capitals (in the later time) at Richmond, Baltimore, and Washington; and the somewhat vaguely defined intermediate region of the Hudson and Dela- ware Rivers, with capitals at New York and Philadelphia. We shall find first one and then another of these sections the centre of the highest literary activity. PAET I BEGINI^mGS FROM THE SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA IN 1607 TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 15 CHAPTER I THE COLONIAL PERIOD.— CAVALIEE, PURITAN, AND QUAKEB 1607—1765 Our forefathers did not find it easy to cultivate simul- taneously the soil and the Muses. Their situation, like that of most colonists, was an unnatural one. There was a lack of harmony between themselves and their surroundings which only generations of slow adjustment could remedy. On the one hand they were far too civilized to develop a folk- literature of song and legend, while on the other hand their environment was too primitive to foster that literature of culture which the educated element among them was fitted to enjoy. Tn England the era immediately before and after the colonization of America was eminently an era of court literature. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, warrior, romancer, and poet, was the ideal of the early Elizabethans. Spenser never ceased to mourn his half-enforced banishment to the wilds of Ireland. The dramatists flocked to London. Bacon rose to be lord chancellor and a peer. Milton, half a century later, was secretary to the Commonwealth. Dryden was poet laureate. Addison was secretary of state. Pope was a London "wit," who throve, like his predecessors, under a system of liberal patronage. It was too much to expect that the men who crossed the sea and changed their sky should change also their nature and find in their strange surroundings inspiration to some new kind of song. Of course, an original genius might have arisen here. 17 18 THE COLONIAL PERIOD But original geniuses are rare, and the actual numbers of the new inhabitants were so small that the law of chance was against such an event. Besides, men or families with a strong bias toward literature and art were not likely to cast in their lot with bands of adventurers. The charms of nature were little felt or understood. The modern romantic spirit was not yet rife, and poets did not fly to the wilderness to assuage their woes or minister to their love of the picturesque. Not for more than a century was a Chateaubriand to visit our shores, penetrate the "forest primeval," and stand in rapt admiration on the banks of the Mississippi while the trunks of fallen oaks and pines floated past him between the islands of yellow water- lilies. Moreover, those of Puritan faith, coming here for freedom to worship God after their own manner, were almost wholly bound up in that worship. The emotional side of their nature, finding the satisfaction of its needs in their religion, led them neither to the solace of the fields and the sky nor to the delights of art. Of art, indeed, they were suspicious, as something concerning itself more with form than with spirit, a worship, as it were, of graven images, and intimately connected with Rome and Romanism, the objects of their most deadly hatred. Yet almost from the first day of the landing of the colo- nists, at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, writing went on; for many of the colonists were, after the manner of their time, educated people, and the leaders at least were lettered men. The first books, of course, remained long in manuscript or were sent to England for publication. By 1639, however, a printing-press was imported and set up at Cambridge. On it were printed, first a sheet or pamphlet. The Freeman s Oath, and second, Pierce's Almanach. The Bay Psalm Book, 1640, was the first printed book. In 1636 a college (now Harvard University) was founded and two years later named after the man who endowed it with one-half HISTORY 19 of his estate and a library of three hundred volumes. By the middle of the century public instruction was compulsory in most of the colonies. A translation of the Bible into the Algonkin tongue, made hj John Eliot, the "apostle to the Indians," was published in 1661-1663, the first Bible printed m British America. Just when the quaint little JSfew England Primer began its long career of usefulness is not known; there is a notice of a second impression of it in an almanac of 1691.* In 1704 the Boston News-Letter marked the advent of American journalism, the power which has grown to such gigantic proportions. Such were a few of the significant events during the first century of literary industry in America, an industry that for full another century was to continue producing books which, in Charles Lamb's sense, are no books, literature that is not literature. Our review of this product may not be extended or searching; the books themselves are for the most part not easily accessible, sufficient proof that they are not live books. The entire portion of the colonial literary product that either aimed at or in any measure deserved permanence falls into a simple classification under three heads — history, poetry, and theology. HISTORY The history comprises all the prose of a narrative or descriptive nature. It was but natural that some of the „ , . colonists should write down a record of their Captain John Smith, doings from day to day, in the form either of 15/0-1632. diaries or of reports to the promoters of the colo- nies in the mother country. Sometimes these records became ♦Extract from '-.4/1 Alphabet of Lessons for Youtli": '^TTOLINESS becomes God's house for- "T7-EEP thy heart with all diligence, ever. for out of it are the issues of life. "TT is good for me to draw near unto "T lARS shall have their part in the God, lake which burns with fire and brimstone." 20 THE COLONIAL PERIOD more ambitious and took on the organized form and propor- tions of a professed history. Captain John Smith, the lead- ing spirit of the Jamestown colony, whose affections seem to have been evenly divided between his sword and his pen, has the honor of inscribing his plain name first on the roll of the English writers of this new land. In 1608 he sent back to England his Trite Relation of occurrences in Virginia, and sixteen years later, while he was living in England, he published his General History of Virginia, a more comprehensive account of those matters relating to the New World with which he was familiar. It must be remembered, however, that Smith was in no rightful sense an American, but an Englishman, a fair type of the courtly, worldly royalists who came to be known a little later in English history and in Virginian colonization as "cavaliers." He had travelled eastward as well as westward, and he wrote much that had nothing to do with America. He spent less than three years, all told, in this country. His name and his works belong to England, where, of course, their little lustre was even in his own day quite eclipsed. Yet we are not ashamed to lay part claim to those two works, the first literary fruits of the inspiration of the wilderness. They may not be accurate as history, but they are a voice out of momentous days and deeds. For Smith put into his work no slight measure of the heroic, the Homeric quality, which gives vitality to work in any age. Even when he was not true to facts he could not help being true to him- self, and he unconsciously portrays himself with all his virtues and vices, his energy, his bluntness, his bravado, and his egotism. There is no reason, however, to suppose, as has often been charged, that he was deliberately untruthful. The pretty story of Pocahontas, for example, was for awhile discred- ited. But there is more reason to believe the story than to doubt it. We must simply remember the romantic spirit of the man and HISTORY 21 read him by that light. When we hear his tales of the gigantic Susquehannocks whose language ' 'sounded from them as a voice in a vault" and whose calves were "three-quarters of a yard about," we recognize the writer for a man of imagination and a worthy member of the literary guild. He was bound to magnify a little his deeds, and through them the deeds of his patrons, the "most noble Lords and worthy Gentlemen" of King James's court; and though he chose to call his book a history and not a romance, he was not the man to hang upon any subtle distinction between the words liistory and story. He tells his story as an "honest Souldier" should, with due regard to the entertainment of his readers. He can be prac- tical, too, as well as romantic. He studies the winds and the clouds in their relation to seasons and harvests. He counts the ears on a stalk of corn and the grains on an ear. He describes in one place, with minutest detail, the methods of cooking maize, but protests that burnt and powdered corn-cob "never tasted well in bread nor broth." On this last point, indeed, none will question his veracity. Of other writers in the South, both in Smithes time and later, honest chroniclers enough, the names belong to history and not to literature. An exception might be strachey ^lade in the case of one William Strachey, who in his passage to Virginia in the fleet of Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates was wrecked on the Bermuda Islands. His True Reportory of the Wrack, probably written in Virginia in 1610 and published in England in 1612, is a really graphic and imaginative account, and criticism has almost certainly determined that from it, or from Strachey himself, Shakespeare drew some of the pictures and phrases used in the description of Prospero's island in Tlie Tempest. So slender is the link which connects American letters with the highest of England's names. But the South, always conservative and always careless about education, 22 THE COLONIAL PERIOD has never been prolific of writers, and with this short notice of John Smith and William Strachey we take a long leave of that region. The historical writers of colonial New England, from G-overnor William Bradford in the seventeenth century to Thomas Prince in the eighteenth, were likewise of Samuel the plodding, sedate chronicler type. One rather Seicall, . . , , 1 1652-1730. more than the rest, however, writing with the hum- blest intentions, succeeded in touching to a little life the record of his times. This was Chief Justice Samuel Sew- all, of Massachusetts, the publication of whose diary onl}" a few 3^ears since has given him a new interest in our eyes. He is mem- orable for several things. He was a judge in the witchcraft trials of 1692, passing sentence for which he afterward made a public confession of repentance. He published perhaps the first American tract against slaveiy. And of one of his prophecies Whittier has made a touching poem, praying that "Green forever the memory be Of the Judge of the old Theocracy." But it is the diary, faithfully kept through a long lifetime, that forces itself most upon our attention, and while we can not take a profound interest in its minute, gossipy, and unimaginative record — in the fact that the Judge period- ically had his hair cut, or that his pussy-cat died in her thirteenth year — the book makes j^et its appeal to our human sympathies and will he read by many who could not be persuaded to look into the more scholarly works of Bradford and Prince. POUTRY Poetry in early New England throve even less than ''Bay Psalm narrative and descriptive prose. Indeed, to call Book.'' any of the verse of that time poetry, argues a lack of humor. The Bay Psahn Bool-, for instance, was a POETRY 23 heroic attempt, conspired in by three worthy divines, to set the Psalms to metre and, by great good fortune, rhyme. The verses were intended to be sung to the five or ten tunes which the churches possessed. Here is one of the more successful stanzas : '*Yee gates lift-up your heads and doors everlasting, doe yee lift-up: & there into shall come the glorious-King." Few will succeed in reading even this stanza smoothly at the first attempt. Such utter uncouthness of form, as far removed from Miltonic harmonies as "from the centre thrice to the utmost pole," shows how small apart even the mere reading of poetry can. have pla3^ed in the culture of the New World Puritans. Nevertheless, the Puritans raised up poets according to their tastes and abilities. The poems of one of these, Mistress Anne Bradstreet, were introduced to the Bradstreet. British and American public of 1650 under this allur- Michaei j^g title, devised doubtless by her London printer: Wiggleswarth. rni m i -ir i i • t - llic lentil Muse lately sprung up in America; or, Several Poems, compiled with great variety of loit and learn- ing, full of delight. Whatever delight may lie concealed in the rather voluminous verses, — The Four Monarchies, The Four Elements, Contemplations (published later), and other such physical and metaphysical speculations, — is not worth seeking for to-day. Some genuine terror, however, may still be extracted from the verses of one of Mrs. Bradstreet's contemporaries, Michael Wigglesworth, who in his Day of Doom (1662) set to a lilting, double-rhymed. Yankee Doodle sort of measure his conception of a Calvinistic Judgment, infant damnation and all. The following is a fair example of the product of the Reverend Mr. Wigglesworth's poetic frenzy: 24 THE COLONIAL PERIOD "They wring their hands, their caitiff-hands and gnash their teeth for terrour; They cry, they roar for anguish sore, and gnaw their tongues for horrour. But get away with out delay, Christ pities not your cry: Depart to Hell, there may you yell, and roar Eternally." Sad to relate, the poem was as popular in its day (and its day lasted a hundred years) as the Psalm of Life has been in ours. Of some thirty pre-revolutionary writers of verse whose names stand recorded in the more elaborate histories of our literature, one more may be mentioned here. This Godf^^ was Thomas Grodfrey, a watchmaker's apprentice of Philadelphia, who died in the South in 1763 at the age of twenty-seven. His poems were published two years later. The most notable among them was The Prince of Parthia^ a blank-verse tragedy, which, though like the rest crudely juvenile, points at least to an intimate acquaintance with the dramas of Shakespeare. The imitation is sometimes very bald. These lines, for example, are a clear echo of Horatio's: "E'en the pale dead, affrighted at the horror, As though unsafe, start from their marble jails. And howling through the streets are seeking shelter." And these, of Lear's: "Dead! she's cold and dead! Her eyes are closed, and all my joys are flown, Now burst, ye elements, from your restraint, Let order cease, and chaos be again. Break! break, tough heart!"* But there are also passages that show a power quite inde- pendent of imitation, and Thomas Grodfrey deserves to be * See Hamlet, I., i., 115; Lear, III., ii. THEOLOGY 25 remembered as the first of America's few adventurers into the dramatic field. His drama was a closet drama only. The first native play to be regularly staged and acted was (probably — it is never safe to be positive about such matters) Royall Tyler's satirical comedy, The Contrast^ 1786. THEOLOGY History, poetry, and theology, — these three were the forms in which colonial literature chiefly enshrined itself, and the greatest of these was theology. The Puritans who settled New England were practically religious refugees, men seeking a land where they should be free to worship as their consciences dictated. Their government was essentially theocratic — God was their great law-giver and the Bible their chief statute-book. The New England Primer was half catechism and prayer-book. The church, or meeting- house, was the centre of the community, and the ministers were the most learned men. It was inevitable that literature, which always reflects the highest intellectual and spiritual interests of a people, should take on a strong theological cast. This theology — by which of course is meant, not religion itself, but a special system and doctrine of religion (in this case chiefly Calvinism) — appears first in the unlovely guise of controversy. The persecution which the Puritans had en- dured had not chastened them. They could be as Intolerant of those who did not agree with them as ever their own perse- cutors had been, and in their course they saw no inconsistency. The profound conviction that they alone were right justified them — left, indeed, no other course open. In 1637 the Synod of Massachusetts took a definite stand against religious tolera- tion. In the same year Anne Hutchinson was banished for heresy; and Roger Williams, the great apostle of toleration, had been banished two years before. Heresy ])ecame the crime of the age, and ministers thundered from the pulpit, while laymen poured out vials of printed wrath. 26 THE COLONIAL PERIOD Perhaps the most striking book of this earlier period was Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cohhhr o/Agawam, published at Lon- don in 1G47. Ward had himself been driven out of fvard^^^^ England for heresy by Archbishop Laud, and, to judge from his book, he found solace in America by attacking everything that offered a fair mark, from the doc- trines of the Baptists to the Parisian millinery of the women. ' 'I dare take upon me to be the herald of New England so far as to proclaim to the world, in the name of our colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free liberty — to keep away from us ; and such as will come — to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better To tell a practical lie is a great sin, but j'et transient; but to set up a theoretical untrath is to warrant every lie that lies from its root to the top of every branch it hath, which are not a few!" Such proclamations would hardly win converts — the spirit is too warlike to be Christian. Yet the force and picturesqueness of the style suit well with the independence of the opinions, and it is eas}' to see behind them the earnestness of the man. Greater men than Ward took part in this theological con- flict. There was John Cotton, one of the greatest pulpit orators of the time, who had likewise been driven John Cotton, f^^jj^ Ensiand by Laud, and who came from the 15S5-1652. iD J J Roger old Boston to the new, which was named in his Williams. j^ ^y-^1^ 2-^^lg Qf Ward's fiery and contro- {?) 1604-1683. -^ versial temper, he had yet attempted to justify the banishment of Roger Williams, and when the latter, in defence, published his Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Con- science (1644), Cotton felt bound to reply to it with The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb (1647). Whereupon Williams naturally came forward again — but the very titles of the books are no longer worth reprinting. In some respects this theological literature grew in time THEOLOGY . 27 even more stern, less beautiful. An age of fanatieism followed, marked by several manifestations, such as the Salem witch- craft craze of 1692 and the great religious revival of 1740-1745. It almost seems as if the Puritans, left to themselves in the wilderness (for there were few recruits from the old world after 1640), were in danger of reverting to the gross supersti- tions of primitive peoples. Their history proves at least that there can be education without enlightenment. Toward the end of the seventeenth century we find such book-titles as Discourse Concerning Comets; Illustrious Providences; Memor- able Providences relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, with a Discourse on the Poioer and Malice of Devils; Wonders of the Invisible World. All the books just named were written by Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son, both eminent divines, and both indefatioable writers. Cotton Mather, indeed, Cotton ^ ' ' Mather, stands clearlj" at the head of the writers of colonial 1C63-1728. ^^^ England. His grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, had been, like his father, preachers and writers before him, and his son was a preacher and writer after him. He was a prodigy of learning, who spent ten hours a day in his study, and who published in one year fourteen books and pamphlets, and in his life-time nearly four hundred. His great book, over which he prayed and fasted and wept, and which was published in folio — the only folio in our literature — in 1702, is entitled 3Iagnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesias- tical History of New England from its First Planting in the Year 1620 unto the Year of our Lord 1698. It is primarily a church history, as the title and introduction indicate : "I WRITE the Wonders of theCrmisTiAN Religion, flying from the depravations of Europe, to the American Strand; and, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do with all conscience of Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, report the won- derful displays of His infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faith- 28 THE COLONIAL PERIOD fulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian Wilderness." The book is difficult to describe, difficult indeed to read, though as students of xlmerican literature we are bound to hold it in reverence; "the one single literary landmark," says Charles Francis Adams, ' 'in a century and a half of colonial and pro- vincial life — a geologic record of a glacial period." Our great New England writers have all been more or less familiar with it. Longfellow, for example, drew from it the legend versified in his poem, The Phantom Ship. But as a historical document it is quite untrustworthy in details ; its chief value lies in the light which it throws upon the theological interests and the supersti- tious temper of the times. Its literary value, too, is slight. Beau- tiful and imaginative phrases may be found in it, but in a larger sense it can scarcely be said to have any style of its own, such a conglomeration is it of the fragmentary learning of all ages gathered together to embellish the plain statements beneath. All the pedantic Aices of the fantastic school of folio writers are here in their most exaggerated form. The pages are sprinkled with learned allusions, G-reek, Latin, and Hebrew- phrases, quotations, italics, puns, Bible references, etc., etc. Thus, for example, runs the account of the presidents of Har- vard College: 'O' "After the death of Dr. Hoar, the place of President pro tempore, was put upon ]Mr. Urian Oakes, the excellent Pastor of the Church at Cambridge; who did so, and would no otherwise accept of the place; though the offer of a full settlement in the place was afterwards im- portunately made unto him Reader, let us now upon another account behold the students of Harvard-Colledge, as a ren- dezvous of happy Druids, under the influence of so rare a President. But, alas! our joy must be short lived; for, on July 25, 1681, the stroak of a sudden death fell'd the tree, Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes Mr. Oakes, thus being transplanted into the better world, the Presidentship was immediately tendered unto Mr. Increase Mather; but his Church, upon the application of the overseers unto THEOLOGY 29 them to dismiss him unto the place whereto he was now chosen, refusing to do it, he decHned the motion. Wherefore, on April 10, 1682, Mr. John Rogers was elected unto that place He was one of so sweet a temper, that the title of delicise humani generis might have on that score been given him; and his real pietij set off with the accomplishments of a gentleman, as a gem set in gold. In his Presidentship, there fell out one thing particularly, for which the Colledge has cause to remember him. It was his custom to be some- what long in his daily prayers (which our Presidents use to make) with the scholars in the Colledge-hall. But one day, without being able to give reason for it, he was not so long, it may be by half, as he used to be. Heaven knew the reason! The scholars, returning to their chambers, found one of them on fire, and the fire had pro- ceeded so far, that if the devotions had held three minutes longer, the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes, which now was happily preserved. But him also a praemature death, on July 2, 1684, the day after the Commencement, snatcht away from a society that hoped for a much longer enjoyment of him, and counted them- selves under as black an eclipse as the Sun did happen to be, at the hour of his expiration." Imposing as this book was in its day, and important as it still is, it finds almost no readers now but students of history. The third and latest edition was published in 1852. Theology took yet another turn, — from controversy, through fanaticism and superstition, back to abstract disquisition. In Jonathan ^^^^ last-named phase we see it most strikingly Edwards, exhibited by the career and works of Jonathan 1703-1/58. Edwards, who was for twenty-three years pastor of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts, subsequently missionary to the Indians, and finally for a short time president of the college of New Jersey (Princeton). Edwards was a man of remarkable intellect, a born reasoner, and, living when and where he did, he naturally turned the powers of his brilliant mind to theology. He took the literal statements of the Bible, and with unshrinking logic pushed them to the most terrible conclusions. He could depict 30 THE COLONIAL PERIOD — for with all his logic he had a poetic imagination — the glories of heaven and the happiness of the saints, but he be- came most notorious for those sermons which were devoted to portraying the miseries of the damned. The religious excite- ment of 1740-1745, known as "the Great Awakening," during which the English preacher Whitefield preached to assemblies of thirty thousand people on Boston Common, took its origin in Edwards's church. Edwards is best remembered, however, not for his sermons, but for his monumental work on the Free- dom of the Will, published in 1754, In this he tried to prove that man is not a free agent and yet is responsible and punish- able for all his misdeeds, and he argued so well that few have tried to confute him. Nevertheless, common sense to-day generally refuses to be troubled by such speculations, and the once famous treatise is more often alluded to than read. Jonathan Edwards stands simply as the one great meta- physician, or builder of a systematic philosophy, that America has produced. Emerson, in the next century, is a philosopher of a very different t3'pe. There is one other writer who must be named in this con- nection, though his life touches the Revolutionary period and his work is not properly theology. This is wooiman, John Woolman, of whom Charles Lamb said, 1720-1772. "Gret the writings of John Wooiman by heart, and love the early Quakers." He was a New Jersey tailor and itinerant Friend who in his life-time published several tracts in opposition to the "Keeping of Negroes" and who died in 1772, lea^ing behind a Journal which was published in 1774. There have been many editions of the Journal since, one of the last having been edited by Whittier, and it would not be quite fair to say that Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is the only American book of the eighteenth century that lives to-day. TToolman's book lives, although obscurely; indeed it has in it a simplicity and religious sincerity that will remind THEOLOGY 31 one of Bunyan, together with a sweetness and tenderness even beyond Bunyan and sufficient to account for its hold upon life. One does not readily forget, for example, such a con- fession of youthful thoughtlessness and remorse as this : "Once going to a neighbor's house, I saw on the way a robin sitting on her nest, and as I came near she went off, but having young ones, flew about, and with many cries expressed her con- cern for them. I stood and threw stones at her, till one striking her she fell down dead. At first I was pleased with the exploit, but after a few minutes was seized with horror, as having, in a sportive way, killed an innocent creature while she was careful of her young. I beheld her lying dead, and thought those young ones, for which she was so careful, must now perish for want of their dam to nourish them; and after some painful considerations on the subject, I climbed up the tree, took all the young birds, and killed them, supposing that better than to leave them to pine away and die miserably. And I believed in this case that Scripture proverb was fulfilled, 'The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.' I then went on my errand, but for some hours could think of nothing else but the cruelties I had committed, and was much troubled." It is pleasant to relieve the impression left by the stern theologians of New England with this humble Christian diary of a New Jersey Quaker. CHAPTER II TKAXSITION .—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 1706-1790 The figure of one o-reat xlmerican looms lar^e throug-h the eighteenth centnrv. Born but three years after the birth of Jonathan Edwards, and dying but nine years before the death of Washington, Benjamin Franklin spans with his career the entire transition from American colonial dependence tx) inde- pendence, union, and nationality. The story of this poor tallow-chandler's son and printer's apprentice, migrating from Boston to Philadelphia, and growing and expanding with the fortunes of his country until he came to be a lion of the social centres of Europe and ambassador to the coui'ts of kings, reads like a romance. But stripped of its glamour it is seen to be a plain tale of sterling worth and tireless industry. We shall not repeat it here: it is best read in his own words in the famous Autohiography. Xor does it come prop- A Mam sided ^^^- witMn the scope of a history of literature to Character. enumerate the ser\ices which this many-sided man rendered to America and the world during his long career, — services which range from the invention of stoves to the demonstration that lightning and electricity are the same, and from the development of newspaper advertising to the drawing up of the first plan for the union of the American colonies. For Franklin was journalist, scientist, philosopher, statesman, diplomatist, and philanthropist in one. As for the writings 32 "-^ JOISTAXHAN EDWARDS BENJAMIN FRANIiX>IN COXXON MAXHER PHILIP FRENEAU BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 33 which he left behind him, though they fill nine volumes, they were produced incidentally, and were quite the least part of his life-work. His name does not primarily belong to literature. Yet Franklin is for more than one reason exceedingly interesting to the student of literature. In the first place, his writings, like his life, mark a transition. He represents a new spirit in American letters — the change that had come over the people in the generations of their existence in the New World. The practical instincts, — self-reliance, shrewdness, humor, thrift, — all of those qualities that we sum up in the word Yankee, were being surely developed by a life of constant hardship and enforced self-denial. And Franklin is the first great exponent of them. While he still held to many of the sterner virtues of the Puritans, he found the mainspring of those virtues on earth rather than in heaven. He preached, not godliness, but honesty, charity, and manliness; and he accomplished quite as good results as the Puritans, by ordering his life, not as if he were going to die to-morrow, but rather as if he were going to live a hundred years. Such is the gospel of his Poor Richard's Almanac, through which he first came to fame ; and the new American spirit at its best — and at its worst, too, for it was provincially rude and unenlightened, — is to be found reflected in the pages of that curious annual. It will be remembered that an almanac was one of the first publications of the American press. Indeed it is only in our own day of cheap books and newspapers B'^h^ d " ^^^^ *^^^ particular form of light literature, com- bining information and advice with amusement, has lost its popularity. But it is safe to say that no almanac issued as a private enterprise was ever better adapted to its patrons or became more justly celebrated than that which Franklin began to issue in Philadelphia in the year 1732 and continued, mainly under his own supervision, for twenty-five years. The price of it was five pence, and the sales ran up to 34 TEANSITION ten thousand copies a year. Such is its fame that to-day a single copy of the original will sell for twenty dollars. The Almanac professed to be written by "Richard Saunders, Philomath." There had been an English philomath of the same name, and there was also a famous English almanac called "Poor Robin." Of course the name "Poor Richard" was only a mask for Franklin, who openly announced himself as the printer of the pamphlet. That the philosoph}^ of Poor Richard was not always original, "but rather the gleanings of the sense of all ages and nations," imports little. That was only to be expected in a publication of such a nature. Franklin's genius showed itself in the way in which his philos- ophy was gathered and adapted to the tastes and needs of his readers. Poor Richard, who, according to his own description, was "excessive poor" and his "wife, good woman, excessive proud," became a very real personage to the thousands of people in all stations of life who quoted his pithy maxims and recited his homely verses. These were given the readier cur- rency for the humor that so often accompanied them. Indeed, the comic feature of the Almanac became easily its distinctive one, so that Poor Richard stands as a kind of forebear to a long line of droll philosophers, from Diedrich Knickerbocker to Tom Sawyer. The humor is frequently of a kind that the taste of the present age would denounce as vulgar or even obscene, but the general tone of the maxims is as wholesome as it is hearty. "God helps them that help themselves." *'He that drinks fast pays slow." "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright." "Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets, put out the kitchen fire." "The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich man to get a stomach to his meat." BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 35 *'Tliree may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." "A good conscience is a continual Christmas." "He that by the jdIow would tlirive Himself must either hold or drive." And so they r.uu ou : "Keep thy shop," '-Early to bed," — nearly every tongue will finish them of its own accord, so familiar are they. This is literature only by a very liberal defini- tion indeed, but it is such literature as everybody could and did read, and its influence for good is beyond all calculation. The sajings were gathered together into a kind of running sermon for the preface of the edition of 1758, and this preface, under such titles as "Father Abraham's Speech," "The Way to Wealth," "La Science du Bonhomme Richard,"* has been printed literally hundreds of times and translated into more than a dozen lanouao-es. The Almanac, which afforded Franklin fame and competence in his early manhood, was late in life supplemented by a work of greater literary importance. This is his Auto- ' Auto- hioqraphy, the only American book written before biography. ' u i ui j the nineteenth century that is still widely known and read. Its history is interesting. Franklin of course did not mean to write a book — we have said that he was not primaril}^ a man of letters. It was in 1771, while he was at the country home of the Bishop of St. Asaphs, in Hampshire, England, that he occupied some moments of leisure in writing- out an account of his early life in the form of a letter to his son, then Grovernor of New Jerse}^ Thirteen years later, after the manuscript had been actually thrown into the street in Philadelphia and picked up by a friend, who begged the author to complete it, Franklin, then at Passy, France, added * The Bon Homme Richard (that is, "Goodman Richard"), the famous flag- ship of Paul Jones, was named by Jones in honor of Franlclin at the time when Jones was put in command of it through Franklin's advice to the French gov- ernment. 36 TRANSITION another chapter. And four years later still, at Philadelphia, only two years before his death, he continued the narrative, bringing it down to 1757, the year of the beginning of his public services abroad. A copy of this account having been sent to a friend in France, a portion of it was there translated into French and published, shortly after Franklin's death. This, it seems, — though the whole history is somewhat obscure, — was turned into English again and published at London in 1793. Not till 1817 was there a direct publication of the manuscript, and not till 1868 of the original first draft. The book, though composed in this haphazard manner, and though incomplete and ill proportioned, is not without merits of style. Franklin has told us himself how studiously he cultivated his style, taking for his model Addison. But it is simplicity, rather than any studied grace, that gives the Auto- biography its charm. To this must be added a resolute moral purpose, everywhere apparent yet never morbid or offensive. The work was frankly intended for the instruction of Franklin's son, and it was a most happy accident that so incalculably widened its oflSce. Boys are no longer in demand to cut wicks for tallow candles ; even typesetting is a languishing trade ; but "self-made men" are still held in honor, and America will not soon reach the stage when her youth can afford to omit the reading of this simple life-story of one of her greatest men. Franklin wrote nothing else of large significance, though he wrote many things, both in jest and in earnest, both to serve his country's need and to afford an outlet for energies that scarcely knew how to pass an idle hour. Many trifles written while he was in France, like "The Ephemera," "The Whistle, " and the "Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout," designed for the amusement of the circle of wits who gathered about one Madame Brillon, or like the dream of the Elysian Fields in his letter to Madame Helvetius, show a French delicacy of fancy, a gayety and wit, that are suflS- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 37 cientlj rare in American letters and that are quite remarkable as coming from Franklin. They set one to wondering what this man might have done in literature had he chosen to be less of a statesman and philosopher. Such work as he did do, however, is on the whole purely American, — virile, blunt almost to rudeness, with only sufficient polish to give it cur- rency. He inculcated, as we have seen, a practical morality only, and he did this best in plain, unvarnished prose. We can see his limitation clearly enough, — not exactly that he was no visionary, but that he was blind on the side of enthusiasm and idealization, that his eyes were shut to the poetry of life. His great defect was a defect of spirituality, and he stands in strong contrast to even such feebly poetical men as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. ' 'There is a flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of chivalry," says Sainte-Beuve, ''that you must not require of Franklin." Of course we remember the age. His life was fairly contemporaneous with that of the great French sceptic, Voltaire. And the eighteenth century in England was notoriously an age of prose, dull and unimaginative in comparison with the centuries before and the century after. CHAPTER III THE EEVOLUTIONAKY PERIOD. — INDEPENDENCE AND NATIONALITY 1765-1800 The review of colonial literature in the first chapter closed with the work of the theologians. It must not be supposed that theology died out in 2sew England. It will be found after another century tinffeino; still the writings even of those who openly rebelled against the Puritanism of their forefathers. But interest in it had to give way before new and more vital issues. Men cease to speculate on the freedom of the will when their actual freedom of thought and deed is threatened. The colonies were steadily grovdng. from Xew Hampshire on the north to G-eorgia on the south. They were becoming com- mercially and politically important. They found themselves far away from the powers that governed them, and they felt those powers to be often sadly out of sympathy with their wishes and needs. There arose discontent, rebellion, revolu- tion. To trace in detail the growing sentiment among the colo- nies in favor of union, and the growing dissatisfaction with British rule, which led to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, is the business of the historian, and here a very few facts must suffice. The French and Indian War (175-1-1763) had indirectly much to do with the movement by showing the necessity for union, perhaps also by proving the prowess of American arms ; and the very year in which Edwards published his Freedom of the WiU the youthful AVashington marched with a regiment of soldiers into the western wilderness to 38 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 39 resist the claims of tlie French. But the more direct causes were the various measures passed by Parliament for the taxa- tion of the colonies, from the Importation Act of 1733 to the Stamp Act of 1765. Some of the earliest and bitterest opposi- tion came from Massachusetts, where, in 1761, we find the oratory of James Otis inciting among the people hints of resistance by arms. Fourteen years later, too, the first armed resistance came from Massachusetts. But the movement centralized farther south. In 1765 the young mountaineer Patrick Henry startled the Virginia House of Burgesses with his resolutions against British taxation. The First Colonial Congress met in 1765 at New York, the Second in 1774 at Philadelphia; the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia; the man chosen for commander-in-chief of the army and destined to become first President of the Union was a Virginian. The literature of the time might be expected to follow the course of these events, and in large measure it does. But this period, like the century and a half that had gone before, was not fruitful of good literature. For the most part it produced only the fleeting record of its own immediate con- cerns, in the form of revolutionary speeches, state documents, patriotic songs. These are all sincere enough and touch some of the noblest passions of humanity, but they lack art; and it takes art as well as sincerity to make any work lasting. The calm, the impartiality, the sense of perspective which art requires, are not at the command of one who celebrates contem- porary events. Franklin in his old age could write with masterly skill the story of his youth, but not even Franklin, granting him the poetic powers which he lacked, could have fitly sung our nation's birth. It was reserved for Hawthorne, in the nine- teenth century, to transfer Puritanism from history to literature, and our romancers are onl}^ just beginning to busy themselves seriously with our revolutionary age. 40 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE It would be idle to review at length the orator}- of the period, or to single out the merits of this or that orator, from James Otis of Massachusetts, whom John Adams likened to a ' 'flame of fire, " to Patrick Henry of Virginia, who spoke, thought Jefferson, "as Homer wrote." These men spoke for their time, and not ineffectualh' ; and their speeches, devoutly preserved, fired the youthful patriotism of several generations and served as models to orators whose fame has since partially eclipsed their own. But we scarcely revert to their speeches now. If we do, we find them often painfully "academic"; the ideas are couched in stately and pompous phrase — long, balanced sentences, resonant. Latinized diction, elaborate figures. We half fancy the orators must have been cold and unimpassioned weighers of words and polishers of periods. It was not so. Their style was the only style taught and approved in their day. Precisely such oratory was to be ex^^ected of an age which in England elevated almost to the position of a literary dictator Samuel Johnson. Yet a few of the words then uttered echo still. We shall be slow indeed to forget that cry of Patrick Henry, the most gifted, least academic speaker of them all — that cry which is the largest and deepest expression of the spirit of the age: "G-ive me liberty or give me death." But our Revolution brought forth no Edmund Burke, eloquent, cultured, and profound, to measure himself with Demosthenes and Cicero of old. With the noble Farewell Address of Wash- ington in 1796, the old issues were fairly closed. Daniel Webster, our greatest orator, belongs wholly to another era. On the documentary side the literature was good, as such literature goes. The Declaration of Independence easily takes rank with the great state papers of history, not Jefferson, alone because of its political significance but also 1743-1826. because of its lofty theme and its earnest and dignified expression. It was composed, of course, with the im- ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE 41 mediate object of making a wide popular appeal, — <'a kind of war-song" says Professor Tyler, — and it was but natural that it should contain some " glittering generalities" and that its elo- quence should approach grandiloquence. But it has stood a long and severe test, and stood it well ; and no one, whether in youth or age, can read it to-day without some stir of emotion. To Thomas Jefferson belongs the chief credit of composing it, and Jefferson was a writer of considerable ability. His Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, attracted contemporary attention in England, where it was republished by Edmund Burke. Moreover his voluminous and scholarly letters, which make up the bulk of his collected works, give him a respectable rank among writers of a class of literature that has been much neglected since his day. A most picturesque figure of this period, and one closely associated in ideas with Jefferson, was Thomas Paine, an Eng- ^^ lishman who came to x\merica in 1774, at the aee of Thomas ' ° Paine, thirty-scven. He had neither the solid attainments 1737-1809. jj^j. ^j^g cultivated tastes of Jefferson, but he had all of Jefferson's radicalism and was utterly fearless in parad- ing it. Jefferson had written on the Eights of America. Paine wrote later, in England, on the Rights of Man. He was an open sceptic and scoffer, at war generally with the established order of things. Such a revolutionary spirit belongs to no land, and when the American cause was won, Paine followed the torch of revolution to France, declaring, ' 'Where Liberty is not, there is my home." After spending a considerable time there and in England he returned to America, where he died in 1809. On the whole, Thomas Paine has been too persistently remembered for his violence and his so-called atheism, too little for his naturally humane instincts. His coarse and superficial Age of Reason may well be neglected. Besides, that book, like the Rights of Man, was not written in America. What Americans should remember him for are his 42 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 'seventy-six pamphlet, Common Sense, which may have tiimecl the tide of popular sentiment toward independence, and the series of tracts, entitled The Crisis, which he published through the long and terrible struggle that followed. Comm.on Sense was said to have been worth an army of twenty thousand men to the American cause, while the sixteen successive numbers of The Crisis, widely distributed among the soldiers, did price- less service in keeping alive their patriotism through the dark- est hours of Long Island and Valley Forge. It was in Com- mon Sense that Paine called George the Third the ' ' royal brute of Britain," and it was the first number' of The Crisis that opened with the still famous sentence, '-These are the times that try men's souls." Conspicuous among the statesmen who stood in opposition to the extreme democratic views of men like Jeflferson, were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Federaii t " '^^^ " ^ tiil^ the adoption of the Constitution was still in debate and strongly opposed bj^ the " State - rights " theorists, these men ably supported it in a series of eightj'-five papers published anonymously in a Xew York journal and issued collectively in 1788 under the title of The Federalist. The papers are political essays of a high t^-pe, broad in principle, sound in argument, and stately in style, and are well worth the study of those who would cultivate that kind of writino-. POETRY The verse of the period, like the prose, rarely succeeded in detaching itself from current CA'ents ; that is to say, its inspira- tion was fitful and its aims were immediate and BaiiadJ"^ practical rather than ultimate and artistic. Patriotic songs and ballads, satires, squibs for the comers of newspapers, were the staple verse products. Tankte Doodle, of somewhat obscure origin, sprang then into a popularity that has POETRY 43 waned only with the elevation of popular taste. Even then, it was carried chiefly by its air, and belongs rather to music than to literature. Music and patriotism together carried many a song of slender literary merits, such as Timoth}' Dwight's hj'mn, Columbia, Qolumbia, to Glory Arise, composed while its author was chaplain in the army during the campaign against Burgoj'ne in 1777, and Joseph Hopkinson's Hail Colunihia, first sung at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1798, to the popular air of "President's March." In 1775, 1776 John Trumbull, a Connecticut lawj^er, pub- lished a burlesque epic with the title of M' Fin gal, which he expanded into four cantos in 1782. It was a vigorous satire upon the Tories, and proved a powerful support to the Revolution in that divided age, running to thirty editions. In outward form it was modelled pretty closely after Butler's Hudihras, the famous English satire upon the Puritans. Bom- bast, coarse wit, a lilting measure, and bad double rhymes are almost necessarj' ingredients of a poem whose hero, Squire M'Fingal, "the vilest Tory in the town," is tried, condemned, tied to a pole, tarred, and subjected to a shower of down until •* Not Milton's six- wing' d angel gathers Such superfluity of feathers. ' ' Unquestionablj^ the best ballad of the time that has come down to us is an anon3^mous production, Hale in the Bush, composed in memory of the fate of young Nathan Hale, who was executed as a spy in September, 1776: ** The breezes went steadily through the tall pines, A saying ' oh hu-ush !' a saying ' oh hu-ush !' As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse, For Hale in the bush, for Hale in the bush." The haunting quality of this opening stanza will be readily felt, and the entire poem is much superior to the earliest recorded and once famous American ballad of LovewelVs Fight (composed 44 THE REVOLUTIOXARY PERIOD about 1724). In poiot of popularity, however, there was nothing among Revolutionary ballads to compete with the humorous Battle of the Kegs — hags the word must have been pronounced, if rhyming it with hags be trustworthy evidence. It was written in 1778 by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphia lawyer and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and father of the writer of Hail Cohimhia. Some kegs filled with powder and provided with a lighted fuse had been sent floating down among the British ships at Philadelphia and were promptly fired upon "with amazing courage." " The kegs, 'tis said, the' strongly made Of rebel staves and hoops, Sir, Could not oppose their powerful foes, The conquering British troops, Sir." All this popular verse barely escapes being dismissed as doggerel. The kind of height to which it could rise may be illustrated, perhaps, by one final example from Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding. Barlow, like Dwight and Trumbull, was a Yale man of poetic proclivities, and in 1793, while he was abroad in Savoy, a dish of savory po/e?2^a stirred the memories of his palate and provoked his muse : *'I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel, My morning incense, and my evening meal. The sweets of Hasty Pudding. Come, dear bowl, Glide o'er ray palate, and inspire my soul. The milk beside thee, smoking from the kine, Its substance mingled, married in with thine, Shall cool and temper thy superior heat And save the pains of blowing while I eat." He dedicated the poem, which was published in 1796, to Mrs. Washington, without any fear that the "first lady of the land" might be above taking interest in the homely concerns of a housewife. The flavor of the poem, like that of the corn-meal which goes to make the pudding, is a little strong, but our grandfathers relished it. POETRY 45 There were more serious attempts at poetry than these — some, indeed, most serious. Dr. Dwight, of Columbia fame, tried his hand at an epic in eleven books and ten Heroic thousand lines, The Conquest of Canaan (1785); and Joel Barlow wrote a Vision of Columbus (1787) which was afterwards expanded into the ten books of The Columbiad (1807). But in both style and spirit these poems were weakl}^ imitative of a school of English poetry already defunct. The curse of conventionality is over them. War- riors, for example, are never said to come to swords' points, but one hero on another "pours the tempest of resistless war." If the night is bright, the moon is ' 'sole empress on her silver throne"; if dark, a cloud "involves the moon and wraps the world in shade." Perhaps no American poem has aspired higher or fallen lower than The Columbiad^ which at the very outset challenges comparison with the Iliad and the Aeneid: " I sing the mariner who first unfurled An eastern banner o'er the western world, And taught mankind where future empires lay In these fair confines of descending day." And the poem proceeds, in ponderous fashion, to uphold juster ideas of honor than those of old Homer, whose existence, the author stoutly maintained, ' 'had proved one of the signal misfortunes of mankind." Barlow's purpose was good. " This," he declared, " is the moment in America to give such a direction to poetry, painting, and the other fine arts, that true and useful ideas of glory may be implanted in the minds of men." But the poetry was not good, and the minds of men refused to take kindly to such implanting. Epics have not flourished on American soil. There was, however, one American who before 1800 produced poetry that can still be read for its own Freneau, Sake. This was Philip Freneau. Freneau was 1752-1832. ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ York in 1752, of a family that had originally been French Protestant refugees. He was gradu- 46 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD ated from Princeton several years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and immediately entered upon an active and varied career, becoming journalist, editor, trader, sea-captain, and government clerk l)y turns. His voyages took him to the Madeiras and the West Indies ; and at one time he suffered the horrors of imprisonment on a British prison-ship at New York. He was still a hale man of eighty when, having set out one December evening to walk to his home, about two miles from Monmouth, New Jersey, he lost his way in a violent snow-storm and perished. Freneau was best known in his own day as a •• patriot poet," having contributed to the newspapers, especially during the war, numerous occasional verses inspired by his hatred of the British and the royalists. The character of these, as of a whole flood of similar verse of the time, may be judged from the opening lines of ^-1 Propliecy (1782): " When a certain great king, whose initial is G, Shall force stamps upon paper and folks to drink tea; When these folks burn his tea and stampt paper like sfubble, You may guess that this king is then coming to trouble. But when B and C with their armies are taken, This king will do well if he saves his own bacon. In the year seventeen hundred and eighty and two, A stroke he shall get that will make him look blue; In the years eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five, You hardly shall know that the king is alive; In the year eighty-six the affair will be over, And he shall eat turnips that grow in Hanover." These verses, though rather above the average of the age, are still only such as we might expect from a man of Freneau" s restless and adventuresome spirit, and were probably written with a galloping pen. They have long since become obsolete. But in calmer moods Freneau produced work of more lasting qualities. A few of his poems deal with native American POETRY 47 scenes and themes, and two or three among these, such as Eiitaio /Springs* and The Indian Burying- Ground ^ are usually selected as examples of his poetic genius at its best. Scott gave testimony to his appreciation of the former by adopting, with a slight change, one of its lines for his Marmion (Introduc- tion to Canto III.), — *' And took the spear, but left the shield;" while Campbell borrowed for his O'Connors Child the fine fancy at the close of the following stanza from The 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." Freneau's most ambitious poem is The House of JSfight, written while he was in Jamaica, at the age of twenty-four. It is grimly imaginative, and possibly, in places, foreshadows the genius of Poe, but it is a very uneven production and has been overpraised. Far better is the little lyric of four stanzas, The Wild Honey suclde {Poems, 1795), in which this native flower is apostrophized in all its modest, evanescent beauty: " Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, Hid in this silent, dull retreat, Untouched thy honeyed blossoms blow, Unseen thy little branches greet; No roving foot shall find thee here, No busy hand provoke a tear. '* From morning suns and evening dews At first thy little being came; If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower." * Freneau's title was " To the Memory of the Brave Americans, under General Greene, who Fell in the Action of September 8, 1781." 48 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD Most critics have cared to remember of Freneau only this one lyric, but he essayed another and rather more difficult kind of verse "svith such success that it should not be overlooked. This is ''social verse," — a somewhat inexact and general term for various kinds of sentimental effusions that are light without levity and grave without gravity, that, in other words, range freely all the way from laughter to tears without quite touch- ing upon either. Freneau could write a most pathetic tribute To the Dog SancJio who nearly lost his life defending his mas- ter's cabin against midnight robbers; or he could compose a graceful ditty on A Lady's Singing Bird, or on Peicter Platter Alley; but his best efforts in this direction are distinctly bacchanalian, celebrating the praises of wine and the joys of tavern life. The Parting Glass, On the Ruins of a Country Inn, To a Honey Bee, are poems that should not be allowed to drop out of our anthologies, all the more because we have so few of the kind. The last named is especially happy. The tippler addresses a wandering bee that has alighted on his glass: *'T\"elcome !— I hail you to my glass; All welcome here you find; Here let the cloud of trouble pass, Here be all care resigned. This fluid never fails to please, And drown the griefs of men or bees." But the bee finally succeeds in drowning itself as well as i:;3 griefs : "Do as you please, your will is mine; Enjoy it without fear, And your grave will be this glass of wine, Your epitaph — a tear. Go, take your seat in Charon's boat; "V\>'11 tell the hive, you died afloat." William Clifton, a young Philadelphian of promise who POETRY 49 died in 1799, also produced a few occasional poems, which , were published in 1800, the best one of which Occasional — a bit of melodious social verse with the refrain Verse. ^£ "Friendship, Love, Wine, -and a Song" — scarcely suffers by comparison with the lyrics of Freneau. And in 1780, while the result of the Revolution still hung in the balance, there appeared an anonymous drinking song with a strong patriotic ring. The Volunteer Boys, of which it seems worth while to preserve still an echo, if only that we may catch at this distance a little of the spirit of our forefathers : ''Hence with the lover who sighs o'er his wine, Chloes and Phillises toasting; Hence with the slave who will whimper and whine, Of ardour and constancy boasting; Hence with love's joys, Follies and noise, — The toast that I give is the Volunteer Boys." From this time on the echoes of the Revolution grew rapidly more and more faint, and though they did not cease until well into the next century, we shall find, when we take up the thread of poetry again, that the character of the poetry was materially changed. PART II THE CREATIVE IMPULSE FEOM MAINE TO GEOEGIA 1800-1860 51 Independence was won. A federal constitution had been adopted and a government organized under its provisions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the capital had been permanently fixed at Washington, a second president had quietly given way to a third of a different party, and the United States were a political fact to be reckoned with in the councils of nations. It remained for them to prove themselves worthy of the position they held, and to carry on in America the work of European ci\alization and culture. Foreign trade existed of course — in ten years the exports had increased from twenty to seventj^ millions of dollars; here and there, too, a man of an investigating and inventive turn of mind, like Ben- jamin Franklin, had contributed something to the practical knowledge of mankind; but in that higher kind of commerce of which trade reviews and public records take little note, the New World had as yet given really nothing in exchange for what it received. Would it ever have anything to give? European critics of art and literature dared to ask the question, for it was the common belief in Europe that, as Irving humorously put it, ' • all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number." The answer to their question did not come at once — it is not even yet such as we should like to make — but it came. The cause of popular education, so cherished by the Americans from the first, was taken up with new zeal. Noah Webster's famous Speller appeared in 1783, Lindley Murray's English Grammar in 1795, and Webster's Compendious Dictionary in 1806. And in literature proper, the creative impulse was plainly asserting itself. From the beginning of the century, when Charles Brockden Brown of Philadelphia deliberately 53 54 AMERICAN LITERATURE took up the profession of letters, there was a conscious awaken- ing of literary activity. The manifestations of that activity were most marked in New York, and that city, within ten years, had among her ninety thousand inhabitants an author — Irving — who was destined to win for American letters some recognition in the literary circles of Europe. Still, progress was slow. For after the decade that passed between Brown's first novel in 1798 and Irving's Knickerbocker History in 1809, it was almost another decade before there was anything worth adding to the record. Then, in 1817, came Brj'ant's Thanatopsis; in 1818, Paulding's Backwoodsman; in 1819, the poems of Drake and Halleck; in 1819, 1820, Irving's JSketch-Book; in 1821, Cooper's Spy. Ten years more found some of these writers distinguished. In 1832 Bryant, then editor of the New York Evening Post, was bringing out his second volume of poems, Cooper's tales were being widely translated in Europe, and Irving was at length come back from his seventeen years' residence abroad to receive the highest honors from his countrymen. By that time, too, Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell were either appearing or soon to appear above the literary horizon. Another thirty years and the United States had a respectable body of national literature, that body of literature which, as we said at the outset, has now became classic. "We need not deceive ourselves as to its relative im- portance. America has no world-names, no literature or art that are secure in the sense in which Plato and Shakespeare, the Iliad and the Song of Solomon, the Parthenon and the Laokoon, are secure. But the United States have built up a nationality through years of trial and heroic endeavor, and have brought forth men spiritually gifted to tell the story. It is the record of those years, sixty or seventy roundly speaking, years in which, said Cooper, the nation was passing from the gristle into the bone, that we now purpose to review in detail. CHAPTER IV THE NEW ENVIEONMENT. BROWN, IRVING, COOPER, BRYANT To the inhabitants of the United States of one hundred years ago, the New World was in some respects quite as old as it is to us. It had always been their home and their fathers' home. It had a continuous history of two hundred 3^ears, and the Pilgrim Fathers were as remote to Irving and Bryant as Cotton Mather is to us — that is, if we measure by time alone. But if we measure by achievements, we must alter our per- spective. In its unexplored area, its untamed natives, its undeveloped resources, the country was still new, and it was consciously so. It w^as consciously new, too, in its dearth of art and literature. The ocean and the wilderness, the motley- peopled sea-ports, the vast inland lakes, the pine forests, the stubborn New England soil and climate, the little log school- house, the quaint Dutch burgher, the southern planter, the prowling Indian, were all accepted in a matter-of-fact spirit, and scarcely a poet or painter had looked upon them yet with an imaginative eye. Two centuries of the primitive, heroic age of America had already passed, and there was no epic song. But at last, in the peace of established nationhood, the new environment, so fast becoming old, was yielding its inspiration to native art. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 1771-1810 Philip Freneau failed to follow up worthily in days of peace the gift which he had exercised in more eventful times, and as he had no contemporary of similar gifts, poetry lay 55 56 THE XEW ENVIROKMEXT dormant. The new impulse was to be felt first in prose, — as it chanced, in prose fiction, a form of art that was being rapidly developed in England. That novels had been in free circulation in America for some time is attested by Noah Webster, who. in an essay on woman's education, written about 1790, complained that '-a hundred volumes of modern novels may be read without acquiring a new idea. " They must have been the products of English pens. Of American writers in this field during the eighteenth century, one might almost say that the names of but two are remembered — Mrs. Susanna Rowson and Mrs. Tabitha Tenney; and their numerous novels may be dismissed as unworthy of record, though one of Mrs. Rowson's. Charlotte Temple, a crude hysterical production published in 1790 (declared, by the way, to be '-a tale of truth"), may still be found in pamphlet issues and doubtless has still some power of drawing tears. The year 1798, however, marked the advent of a romancer of somewhat more than passing worth — Charles Brockden Brown. Brown was bom at Philadelphia in 1771 and died there in 1810. Sickly in body from childhood, he somewhat illogically determined to devote his energy to the cultivation of his mind. He became a diligent student of language and literature, laboring to make himself a master of style, and, after some dallying with the law, adopted the profession of letters outright — the first man in America to take such a step and succeed well enough to be remembered for it. Though he came of a Quaker family, he held very liberal views: his first publication, Alcuiii (1797), was a dialogue on the rights of women. His sensitive and imaginative tem- perament was one to respond quickly to the extravagances of the age, and it was an age of revolutionary ardors and aspira- tions, an age which produced Shelleys and • -iridescent dreams." Browns nature, however, was not long in finding the proper field of its activity in fiction. In the brief space of four years, from BROCKDEN BROWN 57 1798 to 1801, he published six novels, or romances,^ of con- siderable length. But with this outburst his creative power seems to have exhausted itself, for he devoted the remainder of his short life to journalism. Brown had much talent and some of the marks of genius, and there can be little doubt that, if he had lived at a later period in the development of fiction and had (Procter of i^ggjj given a stronger constitution, he would have his JVorks. ^ & ' produced work of a high order. As it is, his Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, and the rest, can command only a qualified praise. Their strength is great, but their weakness is greater, and while there will always be some to read them with an interest mounting to absorption, most people will be repelled by the sheer horror of their themes and their grave ofl^ences against art. To begin with, they are written in a strange style, at once nervous and stilted. The sentences are short, hammering, and monotonous, — quite unlike the elaborate and carefully modulated sentences affected by the political orators and essayists of the time. The phrases, on the contrary, are roundabout, and the words are the same long Latin derivatives that the lawyers and the statesmen loved to roll under their tongues. The result is a peculiar compound of abruptness and formalism. For example, the first three paragraphs of Wieland open thus : ' 'I feel little reluctance in complying with your *It is well to use these names carefully. Fiction is a general term for imaginative prose. 7"ale is an old word, once applied to almost any kind of story, true or false. It is now chiefly limited to stories of adventure, stories in which the interest lies in the events. A romance is a kind of elaborated and heightened tale, drawing its interest largely from the picturesque, the marvel- lous, the supernatural. The novel, of later development, aims to keep more closely to actual or possible life, and to portray character as affecting or affected by circumstances. The short story corresponds to the novel somewhat as the tale does to the romance, in being less elaborate. All the terms overlap, however, tale and romance in particular being still often used interchangeably; and even though we ly, through the deviltries of the Dutchers, who wished to disarm tlie natives that had the best right to the country, where they had s Itled them- selves. The Mohicans, though a part of the same nation, having to deal with the English, never entered into the silly bargain, but kept to their manhood; as in truth did the Delawares, when their eyes were opened to their folly. You see before you a chief of the great Mohican Sagamores! Once his family could chase their deer over tracks of country wider than that which belongs to the Albany Pat- terroon, without crossing brook or hill that was not their own; but what is left to their descendant! He may find his six feet of earth when God chooses, and keep it in peace, perhap?, if he has a friend who will take the pains to sink his head so low that the plowshares cannot reach it!" Coopers place is clear as a writer in the field of strictly legitimate romance — the romance of real life, of stirring ad- venture and daring deeds, made romantic simply by their in- accessibility to most men at most times. His kinship is with Scott and Stevenson and all large, healthy, out-of-door na- tures. Moreover, he has some claim to consideration among writers of universal interest in virtue of the elemental passions with which he deals, for the fashions of human heroism do not change. Had his insight and his art been equal to his idealizing imao-ination, he would have been second to no writer of mod- em romance. His old trapper stands upright in the death- hour and answers "Here" as Colonel Newcome answers "Adsum!" David G-aunt goes forth to battle like David of old, with a sling in his hand and a song on his lips. The mourning of the Delawares over the body of Uncas reminds EARLY POETRY 93 us of the mourning of the Trojans over the body of Hector. Leather-Stocking straps the aged Chingachgook on his back and carries him out of the forest-fire as iEueas carried An- chises out of burning Troy. Indeed, the fundamental concep- tion of Leather-Stocking and his rifle Kill-deer suggests a comparison with Odysseus and his bow or King Arthur and his good sword Excalilnir. But we may not make the compar- ison. We can only deplore the fatal defects that marred a genius which might otherwise have set at the beginning of our literature an epic worthy to stand by the epics of the old world. EARLY POETRY That the genius of poetry in America was even more slow to respond to the creative impulse than the genius of prose romance, is made evident by the story of the publication of Bryant's Thanatopsis. When, in 1817, the manuscript of that poem appeared in the office of the North American Review of Boston — a magazine then but two j^ears old, 3'et already a cri- terion of literary taste — it caused no little commotion. Mr. Dana, the most sagacious of the young editors, declared that it could not have been written in America, and would consent to publish it only upon the mistaken assurance of his colleague that Dr. Bryant, the poet's father, then at Boston as senator to the state legislature, was its author. Nor was Mr. Dana's caution unjustified. It is true that nothing could be greatly better in its modest way than Freneau's Wild Honeysuckle, written long before, but it is also true that that lyric was, as one of its admirers has called it, little more than a "first stammer."* American poetry became fairly articulate only with Thanatojysis. But the young author of 1817 was still quite unknown to fame, and the part that he was to play in American poetry reaches so far through the nineteeuth cen- *Greenough White: Philosophy of American Literature. 94 THE NEW ENVIRONMEN'T tury that it will be well here, before considering him. to glance at a few of his contemporaries whose work was associated exclusively with the earh^ decades. There is perhaps little to keep alive in literary histor}- the names of such men as Washington Allston and John Pierpont except the fact that they puljlished collections of poetry be- fore Bryant. Allston, who is remembered still as Washington a painter, studied art abroad, and had the good Allston. - ._ . . ^ 1779-1843. lortune while at Kome to become intimate with John Pier- Coleridge. At Boston, where he resided, he exer- 1785-1866. cised a deep influence upon early art and culture in New England. He published a volume of refined verse, The Sylphs of the Sca.• had a talent for solitude and silence. "" Though by no means a man of gloomy disposition, he was over- given to melancholy musings; in spite of his beautiful lyric of June, he was the poet of October and November. " Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere." And he was, in his poetry at least, almost passionless ; he gives BRYANT 109 but few evidences in it of strong human interests or sympa- thies, and altogether too few words of hearty, hopeful cheer. His very love of nature was in part a distaste for society— he sought and found in woods and fields a refuge from the turmoil of life and the sordidness of the world. If we did not know so well his character and deeds, we should have imagined him like the river he has described on its night journey, stealing away from the pollution of human abodes to the stainless sea, or like his Wind of Night, ** A lonely wanderer between earth aud cloud, In the black shadow and the chilly mist, Along the streaming mountainside, and through The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields, Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets A welcome or a friend, and still goes on In darkness. ' ' Thanatopsls remains, first and last, his great achievement in form a perfect example of English blank verse, of which he alone among American writers has attained to any real mastery ; in substance an epitome of his powers, with its lofty ' imagination and its musings upon the themes of nature and death. It barely escapes, too, his besetting melancholy, though, on the whole, it is more consoling than depressing, with the benign presence of Nature felt through it all, and sweet, * * Strange intimations of invisible things Which, while they seem to sadden, give delight, And hurt not, but persuade the soul to prayer." * It has been called a pagan poem, with no ray of Christian hope or promise of immortality. The mere absence of these things does not make it pagan; yet if any one is left unsatisfied with the spirit of reverence that breathes through its lines, he may * R. H. Stoddard: The Dead Master. 110 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT find a complement in The Flood of Years, that majestic chant ■written in the poet's eighty-second year. Together the two poems make a perfect confession of faith, and mark both verges of a life and genius that for purity and consecration it would be hard to find excelled. CHAPTER V ROMANCE. POE, HAWTHOKNE The dearth of American literature for nearly two hundred years was essentially a dearth of romance. The cause may be traced in part to Puritanism. The Puritan temperament was not one to indulge visions save such as were born of religion or superstition, and the New England writers rarely turned to fictitious themes. The early chroniclers, for instance, were content to remain chroniclers ; they showed no such tendency as John Smith of Alrginia to infuse imagination into their nar- ratives. In the non-Puritan South, indeed, had the South been studious of the literary art, romance might have appeared early. As it was, we have seen that the beginnings were made at Philadelphia by Charles Brockden Brown, though not until about 1800. Shortly after that, the romantic spirit, in a poetic guise, could be detected in the ephemeral work of such New York writers as Drake and the elder Dana, or in the poems of Mrs. Brooks, written largely in Cuba. With Irving and Cooper, both also of New York, the creative imagination was finally unfettered and American literature came into being. Little then remained but to refine upon the work of these two prolific writers, — to combine the art of the one with the inventive faculty of the other, and to make those further excursions into the regions of the supernatural or the spiritu-^l that afford the final test of the romancer's power. This Is virtually what was done by two writers of the second third of the century, Poe and Hawthorne — the greatest representatives of our literature. on its purely creative side. And of these it may be noted that the one to come earliest to fame belonged 111 112 ROMANCE externall}', by everything but the accident of birth, to the South. EDGAR ALLAX POE, 1809-1849 It is a striking commentary upon the transitor}' and un- reliable nature of human records that a man should be able to live, as Edgar Allan Poe did, for many years in the public eye, and in an age when everything seems to go on record, and yet leave the simplest facts of his biography surrounded with mystery. Poe"s ancestry, the place and date of his birth, his character and manner of life, and the cause and manner of his death, have all been subjects of doubt and sometimes of -violent dispute. This is due in some measure to the irregu- larity of his life, which made mystification on his part possible or even desirable, and in some measure to the prejudices of his critics. The main facts and dates seem to be now settled, but in the more delicate matter of character and habits we must still speak in qualified terms. Edgar Allan Poe was born, the second of three children, at Boston, January 19, 1809. His father was a Baltimorean, the son of a Eevolutionary patriot, possibly of Irish descent. His mother was of English birth. Both were members of a theatrical company then placing at Bos- ton. Nearly three years later, by the death of the mother, at Richmond. Virginia, the children were left orphans. Edgar was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Scotchman who had made a fortune in Virginia in the tobacco trade. He was brought up in luxury, a much spoiled child — petted for his beauty and precocity, amusing himself with dogs and ponies at summer resorts, and declaiming on the table for Mr. Allan's guests while they drank their wine. In his seventh year he was taken to England and put into school in a London suburb, an experi- ence which afterward furnished a setting for the story of William Wilson. Five years later he returned with his adoptive parents to Richmond. At the age of seventeen, a proud, POE 113 reserved, half-melancholy and wholly self-willed youth, he entered the University of A^irginia. There he studied the ancient and modern languages and practiced athletics and the several " gentleman 1}^" forms of dissipation. He was with- drawn by Mr. Allan for incurring gambling debts. From the tedious routine of Mr. Allan's counting-room he ran away to Boston, published there an anonymous little volume of forty pages — the Byronic Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) — and enlisted in the army under an assumed name. * Poe afterward allowed the story to be circulated that during this period he had gone abroad to assist the Greeks in their struggle for liberty, like Byron, and that he had spent part of the time in St. Petersburg. Mr. Allan, discovering his whereabouts, secured his discharge from the army, and obtained his ap- pointment, as a cadet, to West Point. A few months of the severe discipline of that school, however, sufficed for Poe's restless nature, and it is probable that he deliberately brought upon himself the dismissal which followed. He found himself adrift, at the age of twenty-two, with nothing further to expect from Mr. Allan. Literature presented itself as his most natural vocation. Poe had, indeed, begun to take himself very seriously as a poet before he was twenty, and he had published a Manhood. -r.i. ..i .. ^, second volume at Baltimore while waiting for his cadetship. This volume contained, in addition to a revision of the ambitious Tamerlane and some minor poems, the mystical and scarcely intelligible Al Aaraaf. A second edition, issued at New York shortly after his expulsion from West Point, contained several new poems of real promise, like Israfel and To Helen. But poverty and the maturing of his powers con- * spired to turn his attention to prose, and his first success of note was made through that medium. In 1833 a Baltimore * Woodberry's Poe, American Men of Letters Series. 114 ROMANCE weekly, The Saturday Visiter, offered a prize of one hundred dollars for the best prose tale submitted. Poe, then in desper- ate straits, submitted half a dozen. A MS. Found in a Bottle was awarded the first prize. John P. Kennedy, the novelist, who was one of the judges, took a kindly interest in the author, securing him some work in journalism, and probabl}^ providing even food and clothing. Poe was then living at Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. Two years later he went to Richmond to assist in editing the Southern Literary Messenger, and about the same time married Virginia Clemm. She was a mere child, scarcely fourteen, but Poe, whose reverence for women was his noblest trait, loved and cared for her devotedly through all the vicissitudes of poverty and ill health that ensued, until her death eleven years later, a short time before his own. The inspiration of some of his finest creations — the child lovers of Eleonora, for instance — is to be found in this tender and ill-fated attachment. It is a melancholy history to follow, a history of fierce struggle and final defeat. That Poe should be blamed for waging war upon society as he sometimes did, is not clear; on the principle of retaliation there was much to justify him. Yet we must feel that if he had onl}^ spent the little moral strength that was given him in waging war upon his own weaknesses, the end might have been happier. AYhen fame did come to him, it was accompanied with envy and detraction, and he never had any measure of real prosperity. His wilful and erratic temperament, further perverted by his more or less frequent yielding to the temptations of liquor and opium, made any continued effort impossible. One career after another was opened to him only to be closed again ; one enterprise after another was undertaken onlj^ to fail or be abandoned. The eighteen months at Richmond were followed by seven years at Philadelphia, where he edited successively The Gentle- man's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. In the editorship POE 115 of the latter he was succeeded by Rufiis W. Glriswold, who became, after Poe's death, his hostile biographer. This was the period of his greatest productiveness. In 1838 was published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pi/m, a fantastic and horrible but professedly realistic sea -tale. In 1839 appeared Talcs of the Grotesque and Arahesque. Through this period, too, must have been written many of the poems that were published in the A'olume of 1845, The Raven and Other Poems. In 1844 he went to New York, and finally took up his residence at a cottage at Fordham, on the outskirts of the city. There, in Januar}^, 1847, his wife died, and he fol- lowed her bod}' to the grave wrapped in the military cloak that had been her last coverlet against the winter" s cold. A severe illness succeeded, from which he recovered physically, but the Poe of the remaining two jesiYS was searcely the same man, — the wreck of a wreck, though able yet to compose such mon- odies of madness as Eureka and The Bells and Ulahnne. The end came tragicall}'. He was returning to New York from a visit to Richmond in the autumn of 1849, when chance brought him and election day together in the city of Baltimore. He was found in an election booth intoxicated, or drugged, or both, and was taken to a hospital where he died in a delirium several days later. Immediately men's fancies began to play with the memory of the erratic genius, and a process of myth-making began His Character ^'^^^^ ^^^ gone on for half a century, transforming Poe into a kind of superhuman creature, angelic or diabolic according to the prejudices of the myth-maker. The mere seeker for facts is everywhere met by such maundering as that of Griswold, who, shortly after Poe's death, described him as one who ' ' would walk the streets, in madness or mel- ancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer,"" or who, "with his glances in- troverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face 116 EOMANCE shrouded in gloom, would brave the wildest storms, and all night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn. " It is almost impossible now to get behind this veil of tradition and see the man Poe face to face as his fellows saw him, a desperate struggler for his dail}^ bread. Even with the clearest light, so complex a character as his would be hard to analyze and still harder to judge. We must admit that, with all his genius, he >was morally delinquent on many counts. He lacked a fine sense of honor. He had no adequate conception of a man's duties either to himself or to his fellows, and though many stood ready to befriend him, he lived in spiritual soli- tude, the friend of no man. He did not exactly lack will, as has been so often said, for he acted vigorously through his short life; but he seemed not to recognize an}' specific moral ends toward which a man should bend his activity. He was full of contradictions. Though possessed of a keen, cool, logical mind, he was always toying with speculations that sober science repudiates. His exalted dreams of purit}' and good- ness were in strong contrast to the perversity of his deeds. It is doubtful whether he knew the meaning of the word morality, and the judge of his character must feel that if there be such a thing as a man who can do evil deeds without being himself evil, Poe was that man. At any rate, between his admirers and his detractors one may most safely take the middle ground that his was not a case for either praise or blame, but only pity. Heredity and training were against him, the very con- ditions of x\merican life were adverse, and the tragedy of his career is best remembered in sorrow. After all, his works are our permanent possession, and the highest of them were touched only with the misery and pathos of his life, never with its dishonor. Poe's work as a journalist and critic does not call for much POE 117 comment. In the circle of his authorit}'' he came to be well known and feared; and the independence of his views and his frankness in expressing them did a real service Minor Prose. n . <> -, ..... to the profession or literary criticism in America, which had degenerated to mere idle compliment and mutual admiration. But his critical method was not the method of . calm inquiry which sets up standards and judges fearlessly and honestly by them. He was fearless enough, but unfair. He had critical acumen and exquisite literary sensibilities, and so long as he depended on these he did well. He knew the marks of genius; a Tennyson or a Hawthorne, even though unknown to fame, was immediately known to Poe. But his foolish prejudices and personal jealousies often rendered his judgments worthless. A man who could write an article on Longfellow and Other Plagiarists was not likely to carry with him either sympathy or conviction. He was too extravagant and too fond of the sensational. The charge of literary theft in particular he liked to make, though he rarely proved any thing- more than a measure of indebtedness which the authors them - selves would have been ready to acknowledge. Efforts have since been made to show that he was himself not innocent of plagiarism. But these efforts have succeeded scarcely better than his own. That he should have gone to Macaulay's War- ren Hastings instead of to an encyclopaedia for a description of the holy cit}^ of Benares, which he needed in his Tale of the Ragged Mountains^ counts for little. And as for the many striking parallels between his poems and those of a certain Dr. Chivers, of Georgia,* the only conclusion an impartial student can reach is that Chivers owed far more to Poe than Poe ever owed to Chivers. Probabl}^ Poe has been the least "in- fluenced " of all melodious poets since Spenser. Poe's best criticisms of a general nature are his essays on * .Joel Henlon: In the Poe Circle. 118 ROMANCE Jlie Poetic Principle and TJie Pliilosophij of Composition, though both must be read guardedly. One of the theories h\id down in the first, that there can be no such thing as a long poem, may be supported only l)y assuming that there is no poetry but lyrical or emotional poetry. The second essay is occupied with an explanation of the mechanical way in which The Raven was constructed — a very entertaining explanation, but one that no one who knows Poe or who knows poetry will accept as final. His so-called scientific or philosophical works, Eureka and the rest, are worthless. He loved to make a great show of learn- insr by all sorts of obscure references, but he had little real scholarship, and though he was a subtle analyst he was not a profound reasoner. His greatness lay in his imaginative work — his tales and his poems. The tales may be said to constitute a distinct addition to the world's literature. From time immemorial there have been tales in prose and in verse, tales legendary, roman- The Tales. ^ ^ ' & J? tic, and humorous, but never any quite like Poe's. How difficult it is to find any derivation for them ma}' be seen from the fact that the writers most commonly mentioned as ha\ing given some direction to Poe"s genius are Defoe and Bulwer! Godwin and the German Hofiman would be nearer the mark, yet very distant still. '-Bizarre" and "terrific" are the words which Kennedy in his helplessness applied to the tales; and the words represent fairly the first impression which they will always make, for the two qualities of strange- ness and power are to be found in nearly all. A few are gro- tesque only, but they are among the weakest and are seldom read. Perhaps we may venture to divide the important ones, according to their dominant motives, into analytical tales, alle- gorical or moral tales, and tales of the supernatural. The analytical tales are tales embracing situations that call for the acutest exercise of the human reason — the unravel- ling of a mystery, the detection of some obscure law of nature, POE 119 or the achievement of some difficult feat by the resources of science. 7Vie 6^o?c/-5«^is one of thebest of this type. It has in it a strong element of adventure, but that Poe's chief inter- est did not lie in this is shown by the fact that the climax of the story is not the finding of Captain Kidd's treasure, but the deciphering of the cryptogram through which the treasure was found. Other writers of such stories, Jules Verne, for instance, in his Journey to the Centre of the Earthy invert this order. The Murders in the Rue Morgue^ The Mystery of Marie Roget^ and The Purloined Letter are all what we should call "detective stories," and are the forerunners of many stories of their kind from sensational novels up to novels of elaborate mystery and skill, like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone. To be convinced of Poe's infiuence in this field one needs only to read his Purloined Letter and then A Scandal in Bohemia in Dr. Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Several of the analytical tales have subsidiary elements of interest, notably horror in the baboon murderer of the Rue Morgue, an element which Mr. Kipling, with questionable art, has ventured to make the sole theme of his gruesome Bimi. Among the tales of adven- ture with a back-ground of semi-scientific speculation are Hans Pfaal (the story of a trip to the moon), A MS. Found in a Bottle., and A Descent into the Maelstrom. In the two latter, however, the interest of mere ingenuity is overshadowed hy the interest of the narratives themselves, enriched, as they are, with all the resources of Poe's imagination. It may well be that the wild fancy of a descent into the maelstrom grew pri- marily out of a mathematical theorem concerning the action of cylinders in a vortex, but the qualities that give that tale its distinction and its power, lifting it entirely out of its class, are higher than this. It is in such passages as the following, where subtlet}'' of analj^sis gives way before the splendor and majesty of the pictured scene, that we find the real genius of Poe: 120 ROMANCE " *We are now,' he continued in that particularizing manner which distinguished him — ' we are now close upon the Norwegian coast — in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude — in the great province of Nordland — and in the dreary district of Lofoden, The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher — hold on to the grass if you feel giddy— so — and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea. ' ''I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. . . . "As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and graduallj^ increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rap- idly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed— to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea as far as Vurrgh was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convul- sion — heaving, boiling, hissing, — gyrating in gigantic and innumer- able vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents. *' In a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools one by one disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent w^here none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into com- bination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Sud- denlv — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl POE 121 was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray*; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet- black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half-shriek, half-roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. The mountain trem- bled to its very base, and the rock rocked." The allegorical tales, comparatively few in number, are weak- ened in point of art by their moral intent. William Wilson is an allegory of the two-fold nature of man — of the conflict be- tween the upward tendency to good and the downward tendency to evil. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jehyll and Mr. Hyde is another story with the same theme. But William Wilson, though written in a flowing style and with patient, deliberate art, is not a great tale. The moral is crystallized, not held in solution. What should be the undermeaning is on the sur- face: the tale yields to the homil}^ We note, too, an incon- gruous mixture of things real and things unreal. The details of the background are faithfully given only to be completely lost sight of again: they are not organic. Hence the story, as a story, fails. The Black (7a Hs much better, and is, indeed, one of Poe's best known tales. It is possible to read it and scarcely perceive the underlying motive of the accusing con- science. Its only weak point is one common to all the tales — a lack of characterization. Poe's characters are never real human beings, and no matter what atrocities they commit or what agonies they sulTer, we feel neither disgust nor sympathy, we are moved purely by the abstract horror of the situation. Poe lacked the tear-compelling power which even a caricaturist like Dickens possessed. But for naked horror The Black Cat is hardly to be surpassed. It certainly produces an efl'ect, and that, Poe declared, was the main object in most of his tales. The Man of the Crowd and The Tell- Tale Heart are also tales IL'2 ROMANCE of conscience, fhougii less distinctly allegorical. The Masque of the Rid Death is allegorical, but without moral significance, — the fear it symbolizes is purely physical. Bat this is another of Poe's most successful fantasies, at once gorgeous and spectral, ridiculously impossible yet awfullj^ real. In these several forms of narrative — the detective story, the tale of pseudo-science, the moral allegory — Poe's influence has been both wide and deep. But there is another domain in which his unique genius found a still higher expression and in which he has had no successful imitators. This is the domain of the supernatural. Here belong the tales of Berenice, Mor- cJIa, Shadow, Poe's own favorite Ligeia. and that tale which critical opinion commonly ranks highest — The Fall of the House of Usher. The motive of the two last is one of the most fan- tastic and terrible in the field of romance. It is the idea, which seems to have l)een almost a hallucination with Poe, of the possible life of the spirit, that is, of the thinking, sentient part of man, after the death of the body — not immortality, be it understood, but a temporary prolonging of spirit life by sheer power of will. Yet the motive, gruesome as it is, is saA^ed liy the cunning of the artist from being repulsive or ridiculous ; for Poe builds up, with unerring skill, his effects of transcendent beauty and at the same time transcendent horror and awe. It would be almost as difficult to say how the effects are produced as it would be to say why a A'iolin fan- tasia has the power to move or fascinate, but the perfection of the art that produces them is no more to be questioned in the one case than in the other. The deficiencies of the tales we must grant, though we need not hold the deficiencies to be defects. They contain nothing refreshing, nothing morally uplifting or sweetl}' humanizing. The sunshine is not the broad sunshine of the fields, — it comes sifted through dense foliage or colored glass. The winds blow from caverns and vaulted tombs. The color on the cheeks is POE 123 hectic, the mirth is hysterical. Everywhere are grief and madness, disease and death. But the aesthetic passion, whicli supplied in Poe the place of the ethic passion, works a trans- figuration, making beauty even out of ugliness and ghastli- ness. Two or three impressions, indeed, must be left abidingly upon every reader of Poe's prose. First, there is the charm of the language itself, sometimes swift and strong, as in the description of the setting sun that, "a dim, silver-like rim alone, rushed down the unfathomable ocean," sometimes lyric in its melody, as in the description of ' ' Venice, a star-beloved Elj^sium of the sea, the wide windows of whose Palladian pal- aces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters." With this goes the fascination of the vivid scenes, ranging from terror to beauty and sublimity. What a picture is that of the spectral crew: — "their knees trembled with infirmit}^ ; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of j^ears ; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest." Or who that has once seen in imagination ever forgets the "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass," the noble hall "in a dim city called Ptolemais, " the "black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre" by the melancholy house of Usher? Lastly, there is the magic touch, the necro- mancer's wand, w^hich removes all these scenes into the un- charted realm of the supernatural and invests them with a kind of sacred awe, so that one who has wandered for an hour in the country of Poe comes back to this every-day world like a dreamer and an alien. The poetry of Poe's mature years has the same attributes, only it is, as poetry should be, still more ethereal. If we had not come to demand so much of poetry, there could His Poetry. -, ,. , , . . , -^ be little hesitation m ranking Poe s with the veiy greatest in any language. But cultivated readers have fallen 124 ROMANCE into the habit of searching beneath emotions for moral and intellectual stimulus. They want, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, a "criticism of life," and failing to find that, they are dissatis- fied. Now that, Poe cannot be said to afford — life as we know it he scarcely touches at all. But youth, that is always a poet and that knows little of definitions, reads Poe and says, ' ' This is pure poetry." And the test should satisfy us about Poe and make us doubt our definitions. Bej'ond all question, whatever Poe lacked — and he lacked many things — he pos- sessed the two fundamental attributes of a poet, melody and imagination, in a supreme degree. They are attributes, too, that speak for themselves, requiring no proof or argument. When TJie Raven was published in Willis's Evening Mirror in January, 1845, America knew for a certainty that English lit- erature had another poet to reckon with. The Raven immedi- ately became, and remains, one of the mostly widely known of English poems ; it can be mentioned anywhere without apology or explanation, and there is scarcely a lover of melodious verse who cannot repeat many of its lines and stanzas. Strange it seems that Poe's poetic genius should ever require vindication. It is true, the product is meagre. The Raven, The Bells, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, Israfel, To Helen, To One in Paradise, The City in the Sea — one can almost count on the fingers his great poems. But that is true of many notable poets, even where the product is large. Poe's trash (certain stanzas, for instance, in For Annie) is very sorry trash, but there is not a great deal of it, and there is practically no mediocre verse. What is good touches the high watermark of excellence. And its quality is unmistakable. Its appeal is to the sen- timent of Beauty — the one appeal which, according to Poe's theory, is the final justification of any poem. Language is made to peld its utmost of melody. From words, even from letters, one might say — for Poe actually fabricated words POE 125 whose sounds would suit his purpose— effects are wrested such as had never been wrested before. '' The skies they were ashen and sober; Tlie leaves they were crisp&d and sere, — The leaves they were withering and sere, — It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid-region of AVeir, — It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." This is haunting music, though here again, as in the tales, if we seek to know precisely how the effect is secured, we are baffled. The ordinar}^ devices of alliteration, refrains, and repetends, are freely used, but no mere resort to those de\ices can parallel the effect. The truth is, the verse is not only haunting, but haunted. In it is the strange, unearthly imagery, and over it is the spectral light, that only Poe's imagination could create. To a beauty of language, by its very nature as indescribable as music, is added a weird enchantment of scene that vanishes before any attempt to reclothe it in other words. Anah'sis and criticism are helpless before this final achieve- ment of Poe's art — the creation of that "supernal loveliness" which, he declared, it is the struggle of all fit souls to appre- hend. Beyond this we may scarcely go. There are dark hints of other things in Poe's poetry. The Raven of his dreams is, in the words of Mr. Stedman, ' ' an emblem of the Irreparable, the guardian of pitiless memories." The Haunted Palace and the Conqueror Worm have a direct and almost frightful alle- gorical significance. And what music may not come from the lute of Israfel, what hopes are not barred by the legended tomb of Ulaluijie? But we gain little from the study of these things, indeed we almost resent any covert significance. For of Poe's poetry, as of his highest prose, it must be said that it 126 ROMANCE makes almost no moral appeal. Nothing is conceived on a moral plane. He has nothing to teach us — no mission, no message. But the sounds and the visions remain, the poet's mastery over the secrets of the terrible, the mysterious, the sublime, and the beautiful; and we may well rest content to listen without questions to the wild measures of Israfel's lute, to gaze awe-stricken upon the city in the sea, or to pass speech- less by the dim lake of Auber and through the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. By all that has been said, Poe's romantic temper is made plain. It does not betray itself in any dominant love for nature, nor in any tender sentimentalizing, but rather in a oes Position pg^ggJQjj f^^, ^^^ antique, the highly adorned, the odd, m Literature. ^ u 5 & j 5 j the gloomy, the marvellous, — in a word, for that "strangeness in beauty" which Mr. Pater, borrowing a phrase from Bacon, has declared to be the distinctive romantic note. Poe was passionately fond of mystery, and he was drawn irre- sistibly to the supreme mysteries of life and death. In so far as his work is morbidly psychological, it allies him with Charles Brockden Brown, and through him with the metaphysical school of Grodwin, though Poe's imagination was of a higher order. If we must name any prototype, it would be Coleridge. But Poe was Poe. We may account for Longfellow, for Haw- thorne, for Emerson; but the individual note, the "inexpress- ible monad" which evolutionary science itself as yet fails to account for, was peculiarly strong in Poe, and we must leave him underived. Abroad he has long been considered as a creative writer of the first rank. It is to the shame of Ameri- cans that they have seldom been able to take quite his full measure ; but our best critics have been instinctively attracted to him, and it is worthy of note that his works have lately been honored with a scholarly and fairly definitive critical edi- tion — an honor which, not to consider statesmen, like Franklin, FROM SOUTH TO NORTH 127 or the earl}" historians or theologians, has fallen to no other American man of letters. FROM SOUTH TO NORTH Our review of the minor fiction that was produced contem- poraneously with the earliest and, in general, the best work of Cooper closed with the record of one writer of the region south of New York — John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore. Ac- companying and following Kennedy, whose activity in fiction was not long continued, were several writers who availed them- selves, like him, of the romantic possibilities of their environ- ment, and so became, in their modest way, more distinctively romancers of the South than Poe, whose genius was really of no land or clime. One of these was a certain Dr. Bird, of Del- aware and Philadelphia, an early explorer of the gomery Bird, Mammoth Cave, and an industrious writer of i803-i8o4. tragedies and tales. Two romances of Mexico — Calavar (1834) and The Infidel (1835) — received high praise from Prescott; and the once famous Kentucky romance, Nick of the Woods, or the Jihhenalnosay (1837), had the merit of por- traying the North American savages without any of Cooper's idealization. The writer of the South, however, who was most genuinely moved by its romantic scenes and legends, and who succeeded William Gil- ^^ doing for colonial and border life there a service more simms, similar to that Cooper did for the North, was Wil- liam Grilmore Simms, of Charleston, South Carolina. Simms began his career as a lawyer, but soon adopted the pro- fession of journalism and literature. To the end he remained a professional author, writing both poetry and prose with great facility — romance, drama, history, and criticism. His published works number over sixty titles. Perhaps the best of his romances is The Yemassce, published in 1835, a tale of the war in 1715 between the early CaroUna settlers and the 128 ROMANCE Indians. Others are Guy Rivers (1834), a tale of Georgia; The Partisan (1835), a tale of Marion's men; Mellicha.mpe (1836), another tale of the Revolution; and Beauchamj)e (1842), a tale of Kentucky. Hastily written, his stories are naturall}' deficient in the higher qualities of construction and style, but they have plenty of vigor and imaginative color, and their A^ogue is still great enough to warrant their publication in fairly complete editions. To New York belonged several writers of tales of adventure whose scenes were laid on shipboard or in remote quarters of wir mst ^^^ earth. One of these was Dr. Mayo, the author buck Mayo, of KaloolaTi (1849), an extravagant story of Yankee 1812-1895. exploration in the wilds of Africa. Another, and Herman Mel- ^ ' viiie, 1819- more important, was Herman Melville, who in his 1891. youth embarked upon a whaling vessel bound for the Pacific and spent several years, a portion of the time in captivity, among the South Sea Islands. The series of partly fanciful tales founded upon his experiences — Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mohy Dick, or the White Whale (1851), etc.,— had a wide circulation, and an occasional* admirer can still be found who will pronounce them superior to Cooper's. They differ from Cooper's tales of the sea in that thej^ portray, not the life of the merchant or the naval officer, but the life of the common sailor who ships " before the mast." Superior, however, to all these tales in quality, and scarcely inferior in romantic interest, is the wholly truthful narrative „. ^ ^ ^ of Two Years Before the Mast. It was written by Richard Henry '' "^ Dana, Jr., Richard Henry Dana, Jr. , son of the author of The 1815-1882. Buccaneers, and was published in 1840. Obliged by some weakness of the eyes to suspend his course of studies at Harvard, Dana went to sea in the American merchant ser- Adce, and of the faithful record of his experiences in the journey around Cape Horn and trading up and down the coast of California he made a book that in its fascination for youth- HAWTHORNE 129 ful readers is a rival not only of Cooper's stories but almost of Rohiason Crusoe itself. Few romances of the extravagant type came out of New England. Even Dana's narrative — for Dana was a New Eng- lander — had the warrant of truth. For the justification of fiction the warrant of a moral purpose might serve, but pure physical adventure for the mere entertainment of it was little likely to be tolerated. And so, as we search among the minor romancers of New England, we find only such writers as Wil- liam Ware and Sylvester Judd, both Unitarian 1797-1852. ministers, and both writers who enlisted romance Sylvester judd,\ji the cause of religion. Ware's books — Zenobia {Qrst printed as Letters from Palmyra, 1837), Aure- lian (first printed as P7'o6zlishers without success. One hundred dollars secured the publication of FansJiaice in 1828. but afterward all the copies of this '-literary folly'" that could be found were destroyed. Some later tales HAWTHORNE 133 fared better. Goodrich published The Gentle Boy and three others anonymously in his annual, The Token^ for 1832. Others appeared in succeeding issues of that annual and in various other magazines. This, added to the help of his friend Bridge, paved the way for the publication, in 1837, of the first series of Twice- Told Tales. Longfellow wrote a f aA^orable review of the volume for the North American Review (July, 1837), and six hundred copies of the book were sold. The encouragement of this modest success, which yielded him, by the way, no money, had something to do with drawing him out of his seclusion, though it may be imagined Ventures ^^^^ ^^® process was not easy. ' 'I have made a captive of myself, ' ' he wrote to Longfellow, ' ' and put me into a dungeon ; and now I cannot find the key to let myself out." But the key was found. For a hint of the man- ner, read the entry in the American Note Books under October 4, 1840. Miss Elizabeth Peabody had discovered Hawthorne through his writings, and Hawthorne, through Miss Elizabeth Peabody, had discovered her beautiful and gifted young invalid sister, Sophia Peabody. The deep affection that sprung up be- tween these two was the spur so much needed. The first result was decidedly practical. Hawthorne secured a position, which he held for two years, as weigher and ganger in the Boston Custom House under G-eorge Bancroft, — a position in which he learned with a kind of amused surprise that there are other "duties" in this world besides moral and religious ones. The next result was more visionary. In 1841 he joined the experi- menters at Brook Farm, an agricultural community established under the leadership of George Ripley.* He spent a fairly happy 3^ear there, but abandoned his investment of a thousand dollars the second spring, satisfied that it was not the life for him. He learned a little about farming — that is to say, he * See Chapter VI. 134 ROMANCE hoed potatoes and milked cows — and a gi'eat deal about human nature, and he carried away experiences that were later woven into The BUtliedalc Romance. In 1842 he manied Sophia Peabody and took up, courage- ously enough, a life of poverty, hard literary work, and per- fect domestic happiness at Concord.* in the Old Manse, which had already been Emerson's home. There he came to know and value the friendship of Emerson, who, we may well believe, was the inspiration of the allegory of The Great Stone Face. Thoreau on a time sold him a boat; and there are memories of all three skatins; on the river — Emerson wearily. Hawthorne gracefully. Thoreau fantastically. There, too, he was brought into some contact with Alcott and Margaret Fuller and. in short, the whole circle of Concord • • philosophers. '" He published a second volume of Ticice-Told Tales in 1842 and Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846. In the latter year an appointment to the Custom House at Salem, under the Democratic administration of Polk, took him back to his native town. His duties there gave him little time for writing, and when, three years later, a change of administra- tion left him again without a position, his wife said to him encouragingly. --Now you can write your book 1"' The book thus referred to was promptly written, and early in 1850 ten thousand people, in America and England, were reading The Scarlet Letter — up to the present day, it is scarcely too much to affiiTQ, the central book of American literature. It is possible that, if this success had been anticipated — and there was nothing in Hawthorne's earlier experience to lead to such an anticipa- tion — he would have touched more liglitly certain passages in the introductory sketch of the Custom House. However that be, *Ttiis Concord, so famous in American letters, is the Massachusetts Concord, also famous in American history, and is not to be confounded with the Xew Hampshire capital. HAWTHORNE 135 the sketch gave considerable offense to his Salem fellow-towns- men, and it was therefore not without satisfaction on his part that he carried out plans already made for a final removal from the place. He cherished no ill-will; and Salem, on her part, has since been proud to point out the site of the Town Pump and the House of the Seven Gables. The story of the remainder of his life may be briefly told. With his family (there were two children, Una and Julian — Rose was born shortly afterward), he removed first Wanderings ^^ Lenox, among the Berkshire Hills in Western and Death. ' ^ Massachusetts. The House of the Seven Gables, pub- lished in 1851, was written there; there too w^ere written and read and re-read to the children before publication The Wonder-Book and The Snow Image and Other Twice- Told Tales. The next move was to West Newton, a suburb of Boston, and thence, in 1852, back to Concord, where he had purchased Alcott's house, which he named "The Wayside." The Blithedale Romance appeared in that j^'ear, and Tanglewood Tales in the following. Then came his appointment as consul at Liverpool under the administration of his old friend, Franklin Pierce. After four years in England he resigned his consulship and spent several years in travel on the continent, passing two winters at Rome. Here The Marble Faun was conceived (his own daughter, Una, was the model of the spiritual Hilda), to be written out at Florence and in England, and published at London and Boston in 1860. The title of the English edition was Transformation, In June of 1860 he returned to Concord. More literary work was projected — Septimius Felton, The Dol- liver Romance, Dr. Grimshawe^s Secret — but it was not his for- tune to write any more in peace, and nothing was completed. He was deeply agitated by the Civil War, the more so because his sympathies were not wholly with his Northern friends ; he was in constant concern for the health of his idolized Una ; and his own health was rapidly failing. In March, 1864, at 136 KOMANCE the urgent desire of his friends, he set out for the South in the companionship of his publisher, W. D. Ticknor, only to see Ticknor die suddenly at Philadelphia. A few weeks later he and ex-President Pierce started northward on a similar excur- sion. But Ticknor's fate became also his own. He died peace- fully, on the nineteenth of May, in a hotel at Plymouth, New Hampshire. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Pierce, Agassiz, Lowell, Holmes, and many other friends stood by the grave where he was buried at Concord, on the "hill- top hearsed with pines." The unfinished Dolliver Romance lay on his coffin dur- ing the funeral; and shortly afterward Longfellow wrote his beautiful tribute: — *' Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished wdndow in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain." As the years go by, it becomes more and more apparent that Hawthorne's is quite the rarest genius that has been fostered on the bleak New England shore. To analyze that f/Iim^^^^^^ genius, or even to appraise it rightly, is no easy task. Yet the task is rendered less difficult by the essen- tially simple nature of the man. From first to last Hawthorne worked steadfastly in a single direction. One concession to friendship he made when he wrote a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, and another later when he dedicated to the same friend the fruits of his consular experience — the charm- ing sketches of English life and scenery in Our Old Home. Apart from these, he never allowed himself to be enticed from the path along which his genius urged him. He seemed to understand precisely the nature, if not entirely the scope, of his powers; and he never felt around for something better or easier or pleasanter to do. He burned many manuscripts, but they were all experiments in the one direction of prose, romance, HA.WTHORNE 137 the necessary apprentice work by which he perfected himself in his difficult art. Even the various Note Books that were published after his death were but gathered threads of experi- ence to be woven at a favorable opportunity into the magic web of his dreams. On the basis of form it is possible to make a division of his imaginative work into short tales and long romances, though their substantial singleness of character Tales remains. The tales were written and published at intervals through the early and middle portions of his life. Some of the lightest and brightest were directly addressed to children — the pleasant little histories and biographies of Grandfather's Chair ^ and the delightful modernized versions of Greek and Roman myths in the Wonder-Book and Tangle- wood Tales. Stronger, and higher in aim, are the eighty or more narratives and sketches that make up the several volumes of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Very slight is the material of which most of them are constructed — an image of snow, a profile-shaped mass of rock, a toll-gatherer on his bridge, an old witch and her pipe, an artist making a mechanical butterfly. Yet they hold us both by the variety of their outward charm andjby their deep inner significance. They run through the whole gamut of fancy, from the wildly whimsical and humorous to the intensely sombre and pro- foundly sad. And woven into them, as the very life and sub- stance of them, are speculations upon many of the gravest problems of existence. Indeed, more of the spiritual history of New England may be found in a single tale like Young Goodman Broian or The Minister's Black Veil, than in a hun- dred sermons of the theologians. The material setting is soon discovered to be only a screen upon which to throw the spirit- ual portrait. The long romances, of which but four stand completed. 138 ROMANCE differ from the tales chiefly in their greater elaborateness and sharper delineation of character. The Scarlet Letter was the first to be written and published. Poking among the documentar}^ rubbish of the custom house at Salem, the author had brought to light a mysterious scrap of old scarlet cloth with a few pages of explanatory record. Im- mediately his imagination began to work. Out of the haze of two centuries the New England of the days when Richard Bellingham sat in the governor's chair gradually arose; the streets of Boston were peopled with hooded women, and bearded men in steeple-crowned hats; the jail, the pillory, the whip- ping-post, the finger of scorn, the badge of dishonor — all the grim accessories of the Puritan tribunal of justice, became once more as things of reality ; and upon this background was projected the sorrowful drama of two sinning human hearts, the one persecuted and the other self-tormented even beyond their sinnins^. Such was the substance of Tlie Scarlet Letter. a chapter out of old Puritan life in New England, the work of a professed romancer, creating and analyzing rather than recording, yet more compelling in its truthfulness than the most painstaking of histories. Perhaps no one of the three other romances quite equals The Scarlet Letter in imaginative insight or dramatic intensity, though taken together they show better the range of the author's genius. The House of the Seven Gables, which is likely to yield greater pleasure to the ordinary reader, pre- sents a more modern phase of the old New England life, with somewhat less of analysis and more of movement. The Blithedale Romance strikes farthest out of the Hawthomian track, coming humanly near to our work-a-day world and presenting characters that seem almost more real than the real men and women, now fading into shadows, who once peopled the high-hearted community at Brook Farm. The Marhle Faun, which was written last, during the years abroad, i HAWTHORNE 139 differs outwardly from the others in having its scene laid in Italy, and the story resolves itself into what, for those who do not understand the purposes of Hawthorne, is only tantaliz- ing mystery. Yet it, like the others, is devoted to the illum- ination of moral problems, and the characters are delineated with the same strength and delicacy, while in some of its aspects it reveals the handiwork of a man still further enriched by knowledge and ripened by experience. The final seal of security upon Hawthorne's work is the style in which it is written. Airy, sparkling, graceful, flowing, pellucid — the style is all these and much more. style. fl -^ Hawthorne plays upon language as upon an instru- ment of many stops, and the swiftest changes, from irony to pity and from humor to pathos, are made without a discordant note. Better, however, than any description will be an example; and we choose, from The House of the Seven Gables^ the picture of the hard-hearted Judge Pj^ncheon overtaken by the ancestral curse and sitting dead in his chair while one by one the hours of his appointments to business duties or social pleasures creep steadily by: "Well! it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog, woodcock, boiled turkey, Southdown mutton, pig, roast beef, have vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and gravies crusted over with cold fat. The judge, had he done nothing else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he, you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding time. But, for once, the judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear, even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry; they have given up the judge; and, concluding that the free-soilers have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer. Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, 140 ROMANCE generally so scrupulous in his attire, to show himself at a dinner- table with that crimson stain upon his shirt-bosom. By-the-by. how came it there? It is an ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the judge is to button his coat closely over his breast, and, tak- ing his horse and chaise from the livery-stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beef-steak, a broiled fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had better sx)end the evening by the fire-side. He must toast his slippers a long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this vile old house has sent curdling through his veins. *'U"p, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up I You have lost a day. But to-morrow will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it? To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow! We, that are alive, may rise betimes to-morrow. As for him that has died to- day, his morrow will be the resurrection morn. "Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were, that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without; it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own in- evitable time, will possess itself of everything. Tlie judge's face, indeed, rigid, and singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double handful of darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray, but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,— any phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No! — yes! — not quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness — we shall venture to marry these iU-agreeing words — the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon' s face. The features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An in- finite inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! "Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift, in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmur- ing about in quest of what was once a world!" HAWTHORNE 141 Hawthorne's romanticism, to turn from his style to the atmos- phere which envelops tales and romances alike, is of a peculiar type, strangely linking the past with the present and the re- „. .,,., , mote with the near. The German romantic move- IIi8 Attitude foimrd ment, with its return to feudalism and mysticism, and Longfellow, under the enchantment of medijeval history and legend. True, he named his eldest daughter "Una", after Spenser's heroine, but only "to take the name out of the realm of Faery." Certain old superstitions had a charm for him — witchcraft, for instance, and demonology; and his fancy was continually playing with the pseudo-science of alchc^my. JJut these things were used only for tlusir symbolism — he never took them seriously; he might have borrowed from Ariosto or Cervantes the suspicion of bantc^r in his tone. We might liken him to Brockden Brown, if Brown had not attempted to construct spiritual dramas out of such forced and mechanical situations. Or we might liken him to Poe, who was fully his equal in art, if only Poe had imported more of the human element into his eerie fancies. Two points of con- tact with those strange spirits he certainly had, — his proneness to psychological analysis, and his preference of that mysterious border land of human life which, if we may not call it the super- natural, we must yet call the preternatural. * He felt assured that there are more things in heaven and (uirth than were dreamed of in the philosophy of the utilitarians. The world of hard matter-of-fact, of cold calculation of daily needs, of supply and demand, of use, of convenience, of profit, was not the world to engage his fancy. We cannot imagine him making a novel out of a journalist's career or laying his scenes *It Is Interesting to note that one of two poems which ho appears to have written Is In the measure and much in the spirit of ColcridsQ' s Ancient Mariner. See Stedman's American Anthology. 142 ROMANCE in the wheat pit or the divorce court. The realists might have the real world and welcome ; he preferred that twilight world of the fancy where objects take on all the strange shapes imaginable, and where, if beauty is not, we can still create it at will. Yet his work, as has been hinted, is never without ground in actuality. He may see fantastic visions in the clouds, but his feet are always on the earth. He treads airily but Both Idealist securely. He was afraid of mysticism; he shied at and Realist. "^ -^ ' transcendentalism, though caught for a time by one of its vagaries. Dreams were very fine, as dreams, but he soon saw the mistake of confounding them with realit}^ — a lesson learned possibly at Brook Farm. At any rate, he came to know accurately the line that divides the ideal from the real. It is true there are many things in his tales that will not square with experience. Whoever reads for the first time Featliertop, or Young Goodman Brown, or The Snow Image^ or The Birth-3fark, or Rappaccini's Daughter, is likely to rub his eyes to see if he is awake. Donatello's ears are a perpetual mystery. But we soon learn the symbolic intent of these wild fancies. Often, indeed, Hawthorne entirely rationalizes the fancies, or leaves them with but a faint suggestion of the mir- aculous. Maule's well turned bitter when a house was built over Maule's unquiet grave ; but we are reminded that the sources might have been disturbed in digging the deep foundations. It is to such methods as this, of which our example is but one of a hundred, methods which Brown used so bunglingly, that Hawthorne owes his secure tread. However wide the excursion of his fancy, he is careful not to lose the way; and so he never loses even the most prosaic reader's confidence. This is his immense advantage over Poe. A further proof of Hawthorne's foot-hold in actuality is to be found in some of his chosen themes and scenes. His love for nature never amounted to a passion, whether sentimental or HAWTHORNE 143 scientific, but he was acutely sensitive to the charms of outdoor life, as a dozen sympathetic sketches like Buds and Bird Voices and The Old Manse testify. He localizes strongly, too. His Old Manse stands in marked contrast to the Domain of Arnheim or the Landor's Cottage of Poe's dreams. Ethan Brand, we know, was, in spite of his diabolical laugh, a plain man who burned lime in the New England hills; but who was Roderick Usher and where did he dwell? The Great Stone Face may be seen to-da}^ ; who but Poe ever saw the Masquers of the Red Death? And there are the Town Pump and the Salem Custom House and the Catacombs of Rome. Assuredly, in its exter- nal features, this world of Hawthorne's romances is our world, though it must be admitted, too, that there is always some- thing added or something taken away that makes it seem like another world. Of course there is idealization. We are not to suppose that Blithedale is an absolutely faithful picture of Brook Farm. Donatello the Faun bears little resemblance to Maurice Hewlett's Italians. And The Scarlet Letter^ with its scene laid at the author's very door, reverts to the New Eng- land of the past, where the fancy can at need escape from the bounds of the actual. We readily perceive the difference when we pass from the prologue of the Custom House to the story proper. Yet The Scarlet Letter is a tale that by idealizing attains a more perfect verisimilitude than is ever attained by photographic realism, becoming, one must almost think, the final portrayal of Puritanism. The characters of the stories, which are always few in number, may be best described as possessing precisely this same peculiarity of seeming at once real and unreal. They act normallj" and rationally. They move amid natural surround- ings. They say "Grood morning," and "Ah, I see," and "Shut the door." They are neither like the caricatures of Dickens nor like the impossible creatures of the old romances, who are alwa5's doing impossible things. But neither are 144 ROMANCE they like the characters of the realists; that is to say, they are not exactly the sort of people we have met or ever quite expect to meet. It is because, as we have seen, Hawthorne preferred to move in that border land of spiritual life where fancy and speculation will always run in advance of observa- tion and knowledge. He does not shun the actual; he simply rejects a large part of the actions and motives that enter into every-day life as unsuited to his purpose, and allows his characters to be governed in every thought and deed by those principles of good or evil conduct which the ordinary man knows well enough, but of which he is most of the time scarcely conscious. There is in his characters so much of the truth of inner life that they seem to be untrue to outer life without reall}^ being so. One wonders how, shyly and aloof as he lived, he came to understand so well the heart of man. One is • tempted to say that by some special dispensation he was given worldly wisdom without contact with the world. Contact he undoubtedly had in his unobtrusive way — in his walks through New England and in his Custom House and consular life. But it need not have been extensive ; one exper- ience would enrich him more than a dozen would enrich other men. His Note Books, the great key to his character, show this: his habit of noting and meditating made each single experience fruitful. His imagination, too, enabled him to learn as by divination. He did not need to fight a duel; his friend Cilley fell in a duel and he got the whole spiritual experience. We know that he had, however it was obtained, that admix- ture of worldliness so necessary to breadth of genius. Yet catholic as were his sympathies, it was the darker phases of the interior drama that moved him when he came to write. Balzac wrote what he called the Human Comedy. The Shadow Hawthome's work, so much narrower in scope and of Puritamsm. ' ^ ^ SO much more intense in its seizure of sin and sor- row, grappling with moral problems often to the exclusion of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE RALPH WALDO EMERSON HENRY DAVID THOREATJ EDGAR ALLAN POE HAWTHORNE 145 intellectual and aesthetic ones, might well be called the Human Tragedy. He has sometimes been described as morbid, but that is not the right word. His own tone and attitude are thoroughly healthy, though he does not always keep in the sunshine. There is a large leaven of humor in his work, and humor of the most genuine, spontaneous kind. It would be interesting, if we had space, to follow it through such a book as The House of the Seven Gables, from the early chapters where it bubbles genially over the little boy and his weakness for gingerbreads, to the final phases of its subdued yet pitiless play about the stricken Judge. Yet even there it only serves to throw the overhanging shadow of the book into darker relief. And Hawthorne knew it. He longed to write "a sunshiny book." It was not that he loved the gloom, as the term " morbid" would seem to imply, but only that he could not shut his eyes to it. Beyond question, the one fact of life and the world which to Hawthorne looms larger than all others, is the fact of sin. This, too, is the Puritan inheritance, though he is so far emancipated as to see the sin of Puritanism itself, and in The Scarlet Letter the sin of Hester Prynne pales before the sin of her Puritan persecutors. But the shadows have only shifted — in one form or another the problem of evil holds for him an unconquerable fascination. In Ethan Brand he plays with the idea of the Unpardonable Sin, which he logically enough makes to be the continual barring out of good influences. In The House of the Seven Gables it is the problem of inherited evil tendencies, made into romance by the fiction of an ancestral curse. In The Scarlet Letter it is the sin of nature against conscience, offset by the sins of social and religious creed against nature, and complicated by the sins of hypocrisy and reveno;e. In The Marble Faun it is the old drama of the temptation and the fall of man. Yet these sombre themes are not used to morbid ends. Sin itself is clearly shown 146 ROMANCE to be educative, pla3'ing a useful part in the beneficent plan of the world. It does not, of course, lead to happi- ness, for the suffering and sorrow are uecessarj' parts of the education; but we mark Hester Prynue's broadened and sweetened nature, and we know that Arthur Dimmesdale the innocent would never have attained to the spiritualitj^ of Arthur Dimmesdale the guilt3\ And Donatello, the happ}', the ignorant, the child-like, the faun-like, loves, commits mur- der, and steps at once into the common human inheritance of knowledge and sorrow and hope. It is of such material as this that the world's great books are made. We have alread}" spoken of Hawthorne's style. Let a final word be said of his art in its larger aspects. The secret of its greatness lies in the fact that it is not something His Art. added to the man, but that, however carefully culti- vated, it is at bottom a genuine self-expression. When a Long- fellow writes a poem like Hiawatha we admire the art, but we know it to be largely mechanical — a thing of much stud}' and experiment. A Hawthorne writes as he must. It was one of Emerson's theories that worthy matter may safely be left to find its own form. Hawthorne wrote greatl}' and nobly because he felt greatly and nobly. He invested art with an almost religious sanctity. He could stoop to no tricks; he could not even try to meet the taste of the public. He envied Longfel- low for his popularity-, but he felt that he must go his own way even though he hardly knew where food for his family was to come from. Fame or popularity did not enter into his calculations. He was one more artist who, after Emerson's ideal, "wrought in a sad sincerit}'. " HAERIET BE EC II EH ST OWE, 1S12-1896 It would be in some degree an abuse of terms to include in a chapter on romance such distinctly moral and instructive tales as the once popular story of The Lamplighter (1853), by HARRIET BEECHER STOWE 147 Maria S. Cummins, of Salem, or the juvenile Rollo and Lucy Books which from 1830 onward Jacob Abbott, a Maine clergy- man, used to turn out by the score. Nor is a history of litera- ture imperatively called upon to take account of such as these. But they are at least interesting as showing the purposeful nature of the New England temperament — so purposeful that even its popular fiction, no less than its creations of a finer art, moved along sober lines to didactic ends. It is precisely this nature that was brought to the creation of a book which not only far transcended these and all other American novels in popularity, but which rose almost to the level of great literature. That book, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cahin, and its author was Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is not to be understood that Mrs. Stowe wrote very con- sciously toward the end she served, but only that when she came to write she brought to the work all the moral conviction which arose from New England birth in a family of divines. As a matter of fact, her book was produced in a rather haphazard fashion. Her early married years were spent at Cin- cinnati, where she had some opportunities of becoming ac- quainted with Southern life, including the institution of slave- holding. It was later, in 1851, when she was living at Bruns- wick, Maine, where her husband was a professor in Bowdoin College, that she was asked by the editor of the Washington National Era to write for his paper a sketch of slave life. She wrote out and sent him the scene of ' ' The Death of Uncle Tom. " The attention which this sketch excited moved her to add other scenes, and in 1852 the entire novel, thus irregularly put to- gether, was published. The sales ran at once into the hundreds of thousands, and the influence which the book had in helping to crystallize the slowly gathering sentiment against slave-holding is quite incalculable. The characters of Uncle Tom, Topsy, little Eva, Miss Ophelia, St. Clair, Marks, Legree, fixed them- selves at once in the popular fancy as so many real persons. Indeed, the book was in intent more a novel than a ro- 148 ROMANCE mance, for Mrs. Stowe aimed to set forth life as it really was. Readers of course made the mistake of assuming that all slavery was as bad as the one picture of it which she drew, and so she was often charged with exaggeration. But that she meant to be just, and that she was aiming, not at a section of people, but at a national crime, is shown by the fact that some of the best characters in the book are Southerners, while the brutal slave- driver is of the North. The story is deficient in many points of art, but it has the art of life — real people and real passions, humor, pathos, dramatic situation and action — and this, even apart from its political and social interest, would doubtless have carried it well into favor. Yet the strength of the book on this point is scarcely suffi- cient to insure its future vitality. If the extent of a writer's audience and the measure of his immediate influence were the final tests, and not artistic excellence and the measure of his insight into the eternal verities of the human spirit, Mrs. Stowe w^ould deserve to stand with the major novelists of her time. But the book to which her fame is in- separably bound grew out of a single social movement, and it will surely suffer the final eclipse that overtakes all such productions. The movement, as it chanced in this case, was of extraordinary significance, and the fate of the book is there- fore indefinitely postponed, but already it has long been more like a historical document than a living force. Mrs. Stowe continued to exercise her gift for drawing character, and some of her later stories — such sketches of New England village life, for instance, as The Minister s Wooing (1859) and Oldtown Folks (1869)— would in them- selves give her a respectable place among writers of fiction. But these books are in no sense romances. With Mrs. Stowe's later work, indeed, those phases of romantic activity which it has been the purpose of the present chapter to set forth, are practically lost sight of, and the realistic novel of the post-bellum period begins to appear. CHAPTER VI THE TEANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT. EMERSON, THOREAU There has been in American literature but one instance of anything like a conscious and organized intellectual ' 'move- ment. " The groups of writers we have thus far considered are groups made by the historian of literature who, looking back over the field, tries to bring men and events into some definite relations. Writers have been discussed together, not because they consciously worked together, but because they were contemporaries or because they chanced to possess similar traits. But about a decade before the middle of the nineteenth century a few men and women in New England, holding cer- tain views of life and morals, made a deliberate attempt to unite for the defence and spread of their views ; and though they never effected any organization that could be called a church, nor even established a permanent school of philos- oph}^ they did make a strong impression upon the intellectual life of their time, and their theories had issue in a small but very vital body of literature. The history, therefore, of Tran- scendentalism — a ponderous but not unfitting name which these thinkers themselves imported from abroad and which, though it was often employed by others in ridicule, they always treated gravely — belongs peculiarly to the history of American literature. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN NEW ENGLAND In the theology of New England, Calvinism had for two centuries held its own almost unchallenged. But the spirit of revolution and free thought that, about 1800, was working 149 150 THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL MOVEMENT such changes in Europe, made itself felt also in America, and the sterner features of the religion of the Puritans had to give way before it. Mam' found it no longer possible to subscribe to the old doctiines, which taught, among other things, that human nature is totally depraved and that only certain '''elect" are marked for salvation. They began to declare more liberal views, and their declarations rapidly crystallized into what is now familiarly known as Unitarianism. This was a form of faith which practicalh' ignored all revelation outside of con- science, holding that man must look for guidance solely to the moral nature within, belie\iug it to be good, and so between himself and the one God work out his salvation. The new theology spread, if not far, at least so effectually that it was soon established at the DiAinity School at Harvard and in many of the prominent churches in and about Boston. Its growth and influence were largely due to that great vindicator of personal character as against pro- fessed creed, Dr. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), who was regarded thi'ough the thirty-odd years of his ministry at Boston as the most eloquent pulpit orator in America, and whose works are still held in high respect. Other prominent advocates were Theodore Parker (1810-1860), who gave to the cause his youthful zeal, and James Freeman Clarke (1810- 1888), one of the foremost of the later Unitarians, both in the pulpit and in letters. Of course, the old church was not overthrown. Congrega- tionalism, though of a liberalized tj'pe, still prevailed in many parts of New England as it did elsewhere. And in Horace Bushnell (1802-1876), who preached at Hartford, and Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), who preached at Brooklyn, Con- gregationalism had, thi'ough the middle of the centmy, expon- ents nearly or quite as distinguished as Channing. But though these two published as well as preached— Beecher even wrote RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IX NEW ENGLAND 151 a novc4 — the}' scarcel}^ concern us here. Neither Congrega- tionalism nor Unitarian ism, as such, produced an3'thing in the nature of enduring literature, and their progress has been glanced at here only because it will assist to an understanding of the half-religious and half-philosophical Transcendental movement, which, as was said, does touch literature closely enough to demand our attention. Into the precise origin of this movement we need not inquire. Doubtless the underlying philosophical ideas are older than Plato or Buddha, and were transmitted from the far East. The immediate impulse came from the philosophers of Germany, through many agents, conspicuously the English Coleridge and Carlyle. Beginning as a speculative philosophy only, it struck in New England upon very ardent moralists and very practical- minded men, among whom had already been sown the seeds of liberalism, and who, dissatisfied with their old forms and creeds, caught up this attractive philosophy and proceeded at once to erect it into a kind of gospel and guide of life. At the base of it lay what is called idealism — the reliance, as the word implies, upon ideas, or the world within, as the only sure testimony we can have of matter, or the world without. Tran- scendentalism (as understood in New England — not the Tran- scendentalism of the German Kant) meant the belief that within the mind are certain intuitions, or knowledge of truth and right, that transcend, that is to say, go beyond, are inde- pendent of, all experience. Whence these intuitions come we do not know; nor can we logically prove their validity — "truths which pertain to the soul cannot be proved by any external testimony whatsoever." We can only follow, with implicit trust, the "inner light." This, of course, is sheer individual- ism, the doctrine of the Unitarians pushed to its extreme, mak- ing every man his own moral guide and sweeping away at a blow all theological systems. It is therefore no matter for sur- 152 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT prise that many men, like Emerson and Theodore Parker, were carried completely outside of the Unitarian church. The movement, however, was not of a nature to attract the masses. It differed from "The Great Awakening," that re- ligious revival of a century earlier,* in being less sudden, less violent, and in every way more restricted. It dif- fered radically, too, from the temperance and abolition movements of its own time, both of which owed much to it, in that these, being more definite "causes," could be fought out on the platform or by the people at the • polls. Tran- scendentalism was a cult of the cultured, and the other classes scarcely knew of its existence. Yet, though stripped of emotional and popular elements, it was none the less a wave of sentiment and reform — a genuine quickening of spiritual life. It had a large element of religion in it. Nothing could lightly shake the moral earnestness of the New Englanders, deepened as it was by more than two centuries of persecutions, hardships, and wars. The Unitarianism that came to divide the old church was altogether reverent and serious. And when new doctrines came to burst even the wide bonds of Uni- tarianism, there was still never any thought of giving up the fundamental principles of morality and religion. Men concerned themselves no longer about special schemes of salvation. But they were all the more deeply concerned about right living and thinking; and the common definition of Transcendentalism as a doctrine of "plain living and high thinking," loose as it is, is by no means bad. Some definite facts may serve to set the movement in a clearer light. Some time in 1836 a little knot of men and women began to meet in Boston, drawn together by a common interest * See page 30. RELIGION AND nilLOSOrilY IN NEW ENGLAND 153 in matters that affected religion, and especially the condition of the Unitarian Church. This knot, though never definitely organized, came to be known in time as the Transcendental Club. Among those who took part in its meetings were Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, the Ripleys, the Channings, Theo- dore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, George Bancroft, Haw- thorne, Cranch, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Sophia Peal)ody. In 1840 The Dial ^ a quarterly mag- azine, was established as the organ of the movement. For the first number Emerson wrote the introductory words, remarking upon what he called ' ' the progress of a revolution " in the society of New England, and dedicating the magazine to all who were "united in a common love of truth and love of its work," who had "given in their several adherence to a new hope," and who had ' ' signified a greater trust in the nature and resources of man than the laws or the popular opinions would well allow. " The editorship was held by Margaret Fuller for two years and then passed to Emerson for two years more, when the paper died for lack of support. The numbers were freely given away or destroyed, so that to-day a complete file is exceedingly difficult to obtain. It contained much literature of high qual- ity, notably Emerson's contributions, and also a great deal of mystical jargon. Of the more practical outcomes of this new- world attempt to bring philosophy down from the heavens to the earth, the most famous was the Brook Farm experiment. In 1 840 George Ripley, later known as a literary editor and critic, resigned from the min- istry and purchased a farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, persuading a number of others to co-operate with him in estab- lishing there an agricultural association. Their object was to see whether the brain and the hand could not be made to work advantageously together; whether the same individual might not be both thinker and worker, and thus find for himself a 154 THE TRAXSCEXDENTAL MOVEMEXT simpler, freer, and happier life. They proposed also to conduct for the younger memlKn's a school in accordance with these Arcadian principles. The Transcendental Club had no direct part in Brook Farm ; most of the members of the club, indeed, ■were rather opposed to it. But Bipley and his dozen or more associates (Hawthorne, we have seen, was one, and Charles A. Dana, late of the A'e^c Yorh Sun. another) moved to the farm in the spring of 1841 and set to work in high spirits. For sev- eral years the enterprise was conducted with some measure of suc- cess. Alcott, Emerson, ^larsaret Fuller, W. H. Channinor. Cranch, Horace Greeley, were all occasional visitors, interested and sometimes sympathetic ; Higginson and Lowell also passed that way; George William Curtis was there as a student. But the experiment changed form, and ended, after a few more years, in failure. Doubtless there were at this period, when reform was ' • in the air,'' many reformers who expected too much of human nature. They fancied that wonderful revolutions could be brought about in a day. as if a man could, by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature. And many of the methods pro- posed were extravagant in the extreme. Manual labor was all very well ; even a vegetarian diet might be tolerated ; but wherein lay the peculiar virtue of white garments, which Alcott insisted upon wearing ? ' • Some, " says Lowell, in his essay on Thoreau. • -had assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons."' But in spite of mistakes and extravagances, and a host of beliefs and incidents that the pen of a Lowell could readily turn to ridicule, there was in Transcendentalism so much faith and nobility and unselfish en- deavor, and Xew England life was so much a gainer from it, that it is impossible to regard it uncharitably. The reformers spent their energies in various ways, as Parker in the pulpit, Eipley on the farm, Greeley and Dana EMERSON 155 through the press ; but for the most part their individual influ- ences have long since been lost in the great current of human endeavor. A few worked in letters to scarcely more enduring fame. There was Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the re- puted head of the movement, the originality of whose methods of teaching; earned for him the title of ' ' the American Pesta- lozzi," and who contributed to The Dial "Orphic Sajings" of oracular sound and unfathomable meaning. There was the ill- fated Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-1850), friend of Emerson and editor of The Dial, perhaps the one American woman of her day fitted by intellect and training to associate with the men of her set upon equal terms, but who lost her life in a ship- wreck just when her powers, chiefly critical, were fully ripened. There were poets, too — William Ellery Channing, the younger (1818- ), of Concord, the friend and elegiast of Thoreau, and Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), a landscape painter of Cambridge, translator of Vergil's Aeneid (1872), and author of the familiar lines : — " Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought." Both of these were contributors to Tlie Dial. Another poet, somewhat further removed from the Concord circle, was Jones Very, of Salem (1813-1880), a strange religious recluse and mj^stic, who wrote many poems and sonnets of a merit quite out of proportion to their slender fame. But these names all pale before the name of him in whom for us Transcendental- ism virtually has its beginning and end, and mainly because of whom this history has been revived. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882 Hawthorne inscribed on the walls of his tower-study at the Wayside, "There is no joy but calm," and the motto would have suited well most of that coterie of men whose dreams were 156 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT nurtured by the quiet Concord — the old Glrass-ground or Mead- ow River — and in the Massachusetts town whose name means peace. It would have suited none better than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, placid in temperament even beyond the others, lived alwaj^s the simple life of the philosopher that he was. He was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. The blood of seven generations of clergymen ran in his veins. One of those clergymen, Peter Bulkeley, founded and named the town of Concord; another, ^Yilliam Emerson, was the builder of the Old Manse, and a patriot of the Revolution who preached to the minute-men. All were in their way heroic men. One prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; one gave away his wife's only pair of shoes to a woman who appeared at the door barefoot on a frosty morning. Ralph Waldo himself was reared hardil3\ His father died when he was but eight years old, and his mother was forced to take in boarders. An aunt was once overheard YoutJi. consoling the children for want of food with "stories of heroic endurance." He and his brother had but one overcoat between them, and — hard lot for a New England boy — he never had a sled. Later in life he wrote glowingly of ' 'the Angels of Toil and Want, ' ' and extolled ' 'the iron band of poverty, the hoop that holds men staunch. ' ' At school he was quiet and studious, taking little interest in sports and mak- ing but moderate progress in his studies. It has been said of him that ' 'he never had an}^ talent for anything — nothing but pure genius;" and the genius was certainly slow to manifest itself. The hopes of the family centred in a younger and more brilliant brother, whose mind and body, however, broke early under their severer strain. He entered Harvard, mostly working his way, and taking his degree in 1821. For the next few years he taught, rather indifferently. One of his pupils was young Dana, and Emerson EMERSON 157 wi'ote afterwards of Two Years Before the Mast: "Have you seen young Dana's book? Good as Robinson Crusoe, and all true. He was my scholar once, but he never learned At School. this of me, more's the pity." At this stage Emer- son was ambitious to become a pulpit orator, but he was growing more and more dissatisfied with himself, feeling that his abilities were in no direction adequate to his ambitions. The reasoning faculty seemed to be denied him, and its place was but ill supplied by imagination and a keen relish for poetry. He called himself an intellectual saunterer, ' 'sinfully strolling from book to book, from care to idleness." Fortunately, he was a stroller, too, in another sense ; he more than once declared that nothing jielded him so much pleasure as to steal away over the meadows and through the bushes, "picking blueberries and other trash of the woods, far from fame behind the birch trees." And he adds — a strange commentary upon the atti- tude of his fellows toward nature — : "I do not think I know a creature w^ho has the same humor, or would think it respect- able." He had to "slink" away. One of his earliest poems, the familiar "Grood-bye, proud world! I'm going home," was written at the time when, toward the end of his school- teaching, he went with his mother to her new home in the wooded seclusion of Canterbury Lane, where for a time he sought to put himself "on a footing of old acquaintance with Nature, as a poet should." The teaching paved the way to a course in Divinity, which followed. After several interruptions caused by a weak chest, which drove him once to South Carolina and Florida, Tt), the Church. Emerson was licensed to preach, and in 1829 was or- dained minister of the Second Church of Boston, the old North Church of Cotton Mather. In the same year he married, but his wife died within eighteen months. His relations with the people of his church were most cordial and his future 158 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT looked brigM, if not exactly brilliant. But certain conscientious scruples, which had all along troubled him, would not let him rest. Even the slight formalism of his church, already liberalized beyond Cotton Mather's most uneasy dreams, he found too great. Forms seemed to stand between him and pure religion. To administer the Lord's Supper while regarding it as an ob- solete rite, perhaps worse than useless, seemed, to one of his sincere mind, a kind of sacrilege. In 1832 he withdrew from the church. His friends feared that he was mentally deranged. He was following an inner light that had not yet shone clearly enough for them to see. Meanwhile, he went to Europe, not for art or scenery, but to meet men,— Coleridge, Landor, Wordsworth, above all Carlyle, another man maturing slowly and still misunderstood and almost unknown. He spent an even- ing of quiet thought with Carlyle at his lonely Craigenput- tock home, and the next morning Carlyle watched him mount the hill and "vanish like an angel." Two obscure men of genius had met and recognized each other. Several years later Emerson introduced Carlyle's gresit sc^re-hook, Sartor Resartus, to American readers while English readers were still looking askance. The two never afterward lost touch, and their life- long correspondence makes a book of rare interest. The year 1835 found Emerson living with his mother in the Old Manse at Concord, meditating and writing, rather aimlessly, as Hawthorne was doing at Salem. He soon mar- At concord, ried again, and buying a house of his own, settled in Concord for the rest of his life. At the second centennial anniversary of the town, in 1835, he delivered an address, and on the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, April 19, 1836, at the completion of the Battle Monument, was sung his now famous hymn: — *' By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, EMERSON 159 Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world." His mornings were spent in the study, his afternoons in walk- ing or gardening. He did some lecturing at Boston and else- where. For the rest, his half idj'llic life suited him, and he indulged his rural fancy by buying several tracts of woodland on the shores of Walden Pond. In the yesiV and the month in which the Transcendental Club came into being, September, 1836, Emerson published his first book, the slow growth of three years or more. Nature^ he entitled it, showing already his liking for brief titles, which allow the widest latitude of treatment. It was but a small book, as space-measurements go — eight short chapters, that would have made one good lecture in all. But almost every sentence had the weight of a lecture. ' ' Nature always wears the colors of the spirit." "The eye is the best of artists. " "Beauty is the mark Grod sets upon virtue." " Every natural action is graceful." "A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world." "All things are moral." "A man is a god in ruins." " It is a sufficient account of that appearance we call the world that G-od will [/. e. , wills to] 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." "Build, therefore, your own world." It is readily seen that this was a declaration of the idealistic philosophy, or rather faith. External nature is conceived of as none other than Grod apparent, Grod making himself mani- fest. There is little philosophical reasoning, but mainly broad, frank, confident statement. Whoever shall try to analyze the book for logical coherence of thought will be sadly puzzled. " I cannot argue," Emerson would say, " I only know." He distrusted reasoning, and lived and thought by his creed, < ^E.' - vereyour intuitions." And this, as we have seen, is the sub- 160 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT stance of Transcendentalism. Nature, which joined to its mysticism genuine insight, was the foremost document of the new movement, and though the little tract did -not circulate widely, it went deep. Those who could not sympathize with its philosophy could at least feel its poetic beauty : — " I see the spectacle of morning from ths hilltop over against my house from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long, slender bars of cloud float lik3 fishes in the sea of crimson ligh^. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into the silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations ; the active en- chantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements ! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moon- rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." The next year, 1837, Emerson delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at .Cambridge, his address on The American Scholar — "an event, "Lowell declared, in his essay on Thoreau, ' ' without any former parallel in our literary annals." To this high praise of Lowell's may be added the testimony of Holmes, who called the address "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Certainly, one who would know Emerson at his best can do no better than turn to this second great confession of his faith and read it through. Even extracts show its dominant note to be inspiring individuality: — " Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains offoreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years ? . . . EMERSOX 161 "The old fable concerns a doctrine ever new and sublime ; that there is One Man, present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty ; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. ... In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. . . . "Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use ? What is the one end which all means go to effect ? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. . . . In its essence it is pro- gressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look back- ward and not forward. But genius looks forward : the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead : man hopes: genius creates. . . . Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instru- ments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. . . "In self-trust all tha virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. . . . The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of ^tna, lightens the Capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesu- vius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men." An address, delivered the next year before the Divinity class at Cambridge, helped to fix the impression that a new leader had arisen, though even then few realized what a revolution he was 162 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT leading. Emerson's manner was so quiet, his ideals were so lofty, and his faith was so serene, that he won his way almost unop- posed. Holmes said that he was "an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so ten- derly that it seemed like an act of worship." His first volume of Essays was published in 1841; and to-day there are few readers who do not know something of "History," "Self- Reliance," "Compensation," "Heroism, "or "The Over-Soul. " The second series, of a more practical, less seer-like nature — "Character," "Manners," "G-ifts," " Politics, "—followed in 1844. This was the period of his editorship of The Dial. Then came Poems, m 1847 ; Representative iJ/e?? (lectures delivered in 1845, a kind of complement to Carlyle's Heroes), in 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, ISQO; May- Day and Other Pieces (poems), 1867; Society and SoIitude,lS7Q. Mean- while, he carried on his lecturing in the East, went to Eng- land and lectured in 1847, and between 18q0 and 1870, dur- ing the flourishing period of the "Lyceum" or Lecture Bureau system, made regular winter tours as far west as the Mississippi. Indeed, his early Boston lectures marked almost the beginning of that system which grew in this country to such great pro- portions, carrying into nearly every tillage of the North the best products of the country's culture through speakers of such emi- nent worth as Emerson, Everett, Phillips, Gough, Beecher. Holmes, Agassiz, Taylor, and Curtis. By 1870 Emerson's work was nearly done. He was accepted everywhere as one of those rare and essentially great men who, by simply being themselves and uttering what they ^^^' feel, show what a gulf of superiority is fixed between them and all who strive and climb. He was some- thing more than lecturer, or essayist, or poet; he was the " Sage of Concord, " whom all delighted to honor. When his house burned, in 1872, his friends sent him off to Europe EMERSON 163 and Egypt and rebuilt the house. People would still insist upon hearing him speak, though he but repeated old speeches. His mind was clear, but his memory and vitality were both failing. "My memory hides itself," he would say. He read as late as 1881 .before the Concord School of Philos- ophy. He attended Longfellow's funeral in February, 1882, but, it is said, could not recall Longfellow's name. His own death came a month later; and he w^as buried near Haw- thorne and Thoreau in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, on the pine ridge where a piece of unhewn granite marks his grave. It has been said that Emerson spent his life in teaching one thing — a statement, indeed, that will hold of most great teachers, but of none more literally. In Emerson's doctrine of the transcendent value of the inner rev- elation is to be found the key to his life and thought. It explains, for example, his attitude toward science and nature. Nature without is as nature within, and, in his conception, is but an infinite variation of the lesson of beauty and order that the Great Spirit will have us learn. He cared nothing for details. Details, he said, are melancholy. The large significance is the main thing. And the smallest life includes all : understand one, you understand all. ' 'Who telleth one of my meanings, " says the Sphinx, "is master of all I am," Thus all things in life are unified, and everything, down to the humblest organism and the humblest occupation, is glorified. Hence, too, the doctrine of self-reliance, which is only intuitionalism and individualism in other words. This doctrine he carried so far that he distrusted all concerted ef- forts for the betterment of societ3^ He rejected Ripley's invitation to join in the Brook Farm experiment. "At the name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen." What was the need of men standing together when they could stand alone? He was stirring up a nation's 164 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT moral heroism by giving to each man the courage of his opinion. AYe talk of disciples of this man or that, but ' 'a disciple of Emerson" would be a contradiction of terms. For Emerson's very teaching frees the pupil from allegiance. He never said, "Follow me," but, in effect, "Follow the divinity within your- self, rely on your part in the Over-Soul. Never mind dogmas or other men's opinions ; never mind appearances ; never mind the conclusions of logic; — simpl}^ do what you feel to be right. If you will accept the place that Providence has given you, living your own life without env}' or self-effacing imitation, all w411 be well." A noble philosophy indeed for the inherently noble, though one is often made to feel that its serene assurance does not take a sufficient account of sin and the weakness of unaided human nature. The style in which Emerson wrote was of a piece with his sub- stance. It is best described as oracular. Its want of sequence, which puts it in strong contrast, for example, to a style like De Quincey's or Newman's, arises natur- ally, since Emerson did not arrive at truth by subtle reasoning but simply gave forth the ideas as they came to him, in the tersest form. It is almost literally true that some of his essays can be read backward as well as forward. The relation between two sentences may sometimes be discovered by supplying the right connective, but more often there is no close relation. If a paragraph or sentence should fall out of one of his books, no one could tell where to replace it. He was in the habit of se- lecting a subject for a lecture and then throwing together from his note books all the scraps he could find that bore on the subject. Thus the relation of parts is not like that of the links of a chain, but more like that of the spokes of a wheel, which radiate from a central hub. Yet through all there is such a singleness of manner and personality that we are scarce- EMERSON 165 ly aware, as in so many writers of detached thoughts, of any lack of constructiveness. The sentences are short and well turned, the words direct, strong, and often homely, the figures original and quaint, with a play of humor always just beneath the surface. He is the most quotable writer since Bacon. His epigrams are a constant stimulus, his aphorisms a constant satisfaction. He takes particular delight in the paradoxical, often finding the greater truth in inversion. ' 'Books are for the scholar's idle times." "The highest price you can pay for a thing is to ask it." "The borrower runs in his own debt." "Our strength grows out of our weakness." "We are wiser than we know." This is Poor Richard spiritualized at last. We have said too little of Emerson's poetry. In essence a poet, and in methods a seer, he should have spoken in the language of seers. And at times he did so speak, with rare effect. He was happier than Carlyle in hav- ing some gift of song. But the gift was partial only. He had a good ear for melody but not for the higher harmonies of verse. In his poetry lame lines and imperfect rhymes are frequent. Perhaps he followed too implicitly his own theory that truth, uttered under conviction, would find its own per- fect form. He fell most naturally into the simplest of metres, the four-foot couplet, and some of his best thoughts found their final expression in this form. There are two notable qualities in Emerson's poetry, — the half-mystical philosophy of which he oftentimes made it the voice, and the love of nature which we have seen to be so inti- mate a part of the man. Among the poems embodying the former quality, the best are The Sphinx, The Problem, Uriel, Al- phonso of Castile, Merlin, Saadi, Brahma. But philosophy rarely makes so good poetry as do simple perception of beauty and the emotions which beauty stirs. Emerson as a philosopher- poet must fall below Lucretius or even below old Omar Khay- 166 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 3'am, but Emerson as a poet of nature has not many superiors. Take some of his most ragged lines — the song of the pine in Woodnotes: — "Heed the old oracles, Ponder my spells; Song wakes in my pinnacles When the wind swells. Soundeth the prophetic wind, The shadows shake on the rock behind. And the countless leaves of the pine are strings Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. Harken! Harken! If thou wouldst know the mystic song Chanted when the sphere was young." This is pure lyric rapture, uncontainable melody, bom of a heart that beats in tune with the heart of mother Earth. And there is much more as good, or better, in the jo3'ful prelud- ings of May-Day, or the proud boasts of Monadnoc, ' 'moun- tain strong" and '-grand affirmer of the present tense,'" scorner of the little men who daily climb his side, yet patient waiter for the poet who in large thoughts shall ' -string him like a bead." Read also Each and All, Ehodora, The Humhle-Bee, The Snow- Storm, Days, The Titmouse, Two Rivers. The poem of The Humhle-Bee seems almost to shine, so saturated is it with the heat and light of summer. But even in these poems the philosopher is rarely out of sight. Behind the phenomena of nature are always the deep meanings meant to be revealed, — "always," says Mr. Stedman, "the idea of Soul, central and pervading, of which Nature's forms are but the created sj'm- bols." There is one poem, the Threnody, that is almost too sacred to be handled critically, since grief has its own rhythm, and broken utterance obeys a higher law than art's. Emerson's boy Waldo, — J EMERSON 167 ''The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom," — died at the age of five. That memory at least never left the man, who almost the last thing before he died, forty years afterward, said, "Oh, that beautiful boy!" The Threnody croons through the first stages of sorrow, the sense of mere loss and aching memories, — "The painted sled stands where it stood, The kennel by the corded wood ;' ' bursts suddenly into passionate protest against Nature ; grows calm again with consolation; and then rises to the highest note of all — the seer-like vision and the deep Heart's utterance: — ''When frail Nature can no more, Then the Spirit strikes the hour: My servant Death, with solving rite, Pours finite into infinite. Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, Whose streams through nature circling go? Nail the wild star to its track On the half-climbsd zodiac? Light is light which radiates. Blood is blood which circulates. Life is life which generates, And many seeming life is one,— Wilt thou transfix and make it none?" Then comes the confident close, voicing the verdict of the faith of centuries: — "What is excellent As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again." It is doubtful if there be a more exalted strain than this in American poetry. There have been several attempts of late to revalue Emer- 168 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT son and his work, and the tendency is to abate much of the former high estimate. It is a critical tendency, very Security of i . i , , ^ his Fame. natural in a day when the philosophy of experience has the vogue. But Emerson's books continue to sell, and there is little reason to doubt that people are read- ing them with ever fresh delight and inspiration. By their unflinching optimism they keep a strong hold. Emerson was a sage, but a sage for youth. Youth is our perennial idealist, and young readers find in his work precisely the faith and cheer that keep courage and nobility alive in the world. Be- sides, even if the time should come when Emerson shall be no longer actually needed, it seems impossible that he should be forgotten. His service to his own day was too great. By his call to independence and intellectual honesty at a time when Americans were intellectually subservient, he set New England, and through New England, America, finally free. He went him- self straight to the fountain-heads of wisdom and inspiration — to Plato, Confucius, Christ; but even them he treated as brothers, not as masters. For he was no more to be intoxi- cated by the wine of other men's truth than he was to be caught by the glitter of falsehood and sham. Calm, sane, self-cen- tred, undistempered by enthusiasms, on the one hand bowing to no popular idol, on the other standing his ground with our common humanity when many apostles of the Transcendental faith were swept off their feet, he was just such a man as is needed in an age of shifting faith and widening knowledge, — a man to proclaim anew the sanctity of the individual conscience and to declare that things are not in the saddle, but that men are still masters of their fate. HENRY DAVID TUOREAU, 1817-1862 To call Thoreau a Transcendentalist would be somewhat mis- leading. His place in this chapter is determined by the fact that his lot was cast among the Concord thinkers — he was the only THOREAU 100 one of note born at Concord — who made the new philosophy such a potent factor in New England thought and life. He came to manhood precisely at the time when the doctrines were taking definite shape, and it was impossible that he should not come somewhat under their influence. His relations, too, with Emer- son were very close ; but he was severely independent, both as man and as thinker, and, apart from an occasional visit to the meetings of the Transcendental Club and a few contributions to The Vi'alj he was scarcely to be regarded as one of the cir- cle. He was, indeed, a philosopher after Emerson's own heart, living sturdily the doctrine that Emerson preached, and going steadily his self-appointed way. Often puzzling and sometimes repelling, yet always fresh and stimulating, he is one of the most interesting figures in our literary historj^ On his mother's side Thoreau was of old New England stock, and he is said to have drawn most of his traits from that side. His name shows his French extraction. His paternal grandfather came to America from the island of Jersey just before the Revolutionary War. His grandmother bore the good Scotch name of Burns. His father was a pencil-maker, a small, plain, deaf, unobtrusive man. Henry was born in 1817 (the year Emerson entered college) and he spent at Concord nearly all of the forty-five years of his life. As a boy he drove his mother's cow to pasture, as Emerson had done at Boston. He learned the family trade of pencil-making, but abandoned it when he became proficient, not desiring to do again what he had done once. We are re- minded of Carlyle's undertaking law because of the diflficulty of succeeding in it, and then abandoning it because it offered no reward but money. Later, however, Thoreau did sometimes help his father in his business, which grew to be mainly the preparation of plumbago for electrotyping. He was grad- uated from Harvard at the age of twenty, accomplished, as 170 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT scholarship went, in rhetoric, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. After graduation he was school-teacher, lecturer, surveyor, pen- cilmaker, farmer, and recluse, by turns. His biography from twenty to twenty-four he condensed into the following notes: ' ' Kept town school a fortnight ; began the big Red Journal, October, 1837 ; found my first arrow-head; wrote a lecture (my first) on ' Society,' March 14, 1S38, and read it before the Lyceum ; went to Maine for a school in May, 1838; commenced school in the Parkham house in the summer of that year ; wrote an essay on 'Sound and Silence,' December, 1838 ; fall of 1839, up the Merrimac to the White Mountains ; the Red Journal, of 596 pages, ended June, 1840; Journal of 396 pages ended January 31, 1841." It was a life in which the picking up of an arrow-head or the discovery of a richer blueberry patch were events, and the election of a new President but an incident. He lived two or three years in the house of Emerson as mechanic, gardener, and companion of Emerson's children; spent six months at Staten Island as tutor to the children of Emerson's brother William; traversed the length of Cape Cod on foot; and made various expeditions to the Maine woods and Canada. His two years' retreat at Walden, through which he became famous, Avas only in keeping with the general tenor of his life. The man, whose first lecture was upon the subject of " Society," alwaj^s lived on the outskirts of society or avoided it alto- gether. Walden Pond is a small lake in the Walden woods, one mile south of Concord. There, in the spring of 1845, on a piece of Emerson's woodland, Thoreau built a hut, cutting the timbers for it with an ax which he borrowed from Mr. Alcott, and which he returned, he boasted, sharper than he received it. This cabin he made his home for the next two years. Brook Farm was a social experiment; Thoreau's might be called an unsocial one. He was not, however, turning his THOREAU 171 back on family and friends, whom he often visited, but only gratifying his love of wild ways, and putting into practice some of his ideas about economy and simplicity of living. He says himself : "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. " He found in this seclusion full opportunity to do the two things he cared most about — observe and enjoy nature, and reflect upon the ways of men. The expenses of a year's living of this sort he could meet by working about six weeks. The rest of the time was free for rambling, studying, and writing. Thus was written most of his book, WaJden, which, however, he did not succeed in getting published until 1854. Before that he published A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849), the outcome of an expe- dition made with his elder brother shortly after he left college. The larger part of the edition — some seven hundred copies — he had to store in his garret. These two were the only books published during his lifetime. He returned to civilization after his two years' experiment, but continued his explorations a-field, and died in 1862, in some measure the victim of the hardships which his gypsy instincts were constantly leading him to suffer. He died bravely, declaring, as he had declared when he faced life at twenty-four, that he ' ' loved his fate to the very core and rind." His too early loss was fittingly mourned in more than one tender lament by his friend, Ellery Channing, like himself a passionate nature- lover : — " The swallow is flying over, But he will not come to me ; He flits, my daring rover, From land to land, from sea to sea ; Where hot Bermuda's reef Its barrier lifts to fortify the shore, Above the surf's wild roar 172 THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL INIOVEMEXT He darts as swiftly o'er,— But he who heard his cry of spring Hears that no more, heeds not his wing." Thoreau is scarcely to be estimated as other men, from whom he stands so far apart in almost all respects. He was a riddle even to those who knew him well. Hawthorne wrote in his journal: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us. He Is a singular character — a young man with much of wild, oris^inal nature still remainino- in him. He is as ugly as sin — long nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, though courteous manners. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty." Mrs. Hawthorne, after hear- ing him lecture, wrote : ' >Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever." To Eose Hawthorne Lathrop he seemed "sad as a pine tree," though to the few friends to whom he warmed he was all sunshine, and he could both sing and dance, and would play with kittens by the half hour. His unbendino; nature brought him much criticism which a little compliance or a little explanation might have saved him. A schoolmate who knew him for a good whittler once asked him to make a bow and arrow, but he refused with- out giving the reason^ that he had no knife. On another occasion he was accused of stealing a knife. He could easily have proved his absence at the time, but he preferred merely to make denial, letting his companions suspect what they pleased. It is hard to tell whether he simply disliked ordinary social intercourse or whether he feared it. The woods meant to him freedom, and he was like the muskrat, which, he said, "will gnaw its third leg off to be free." He was constantly tempted THOREAU 173 to climb over a back fence and go across lots rather than run the gantlet of the houses fronting each other on the street. Men of convi^ial natures, lil^e Lowell or Stevenson, are re- pelled by such an ascetic spirit, and are likely to prove unsym- pathetic critics. It requires the unruffled tolerance of an Emerson to see all of his good points and none of his bad ; and his habit of contradiction made even Emerson say, " Thoreau is, with difficulty, sweet." But Emerson and a few others, like Ellery Channing, learned to make the right allowances. Manj" of his declara- tions were only half-truth, and much of his profession was bravado. "Blessed are they," he would say, "who never read men's affairs, for they shall see nature, and, through her, Grod. " Yet he took a keen interest in society at large and even in pol- itics, and he could take an active part when he was sufficiently aroused. He w^ent to jail rather than pay his tax, when he felt that the tax was supporting a government that supported slavery. It was his way of protesting against a great wrong ; and when Emerson looked into his cell and said, "Henry, why are j^ou here?" his reply was, "Why are you not here ?" He met John Brown in 1857, and two years later, after the cap- ture of Brown and before his execution, he spoke out boldlj^ in his defence at Concord, Worcester, and Boston. It is unfortunate that Lowell should have found in such a man so much imita- tion, indolence, and selfishness, and so little else. Not many of us will care to accept the philosophy of Walden, so extreme is it, and, on the outside, so bitter, though with much sweetness at the core. Every thoughtful man must see much in our civilization to deplore, but if he be right-minded he will give helpful and not destructive criticism. We shall not remedy the faults by going- back to barbarism. It is easy to corner Thoreau in an argu- ment. He was always afraid he should die without having 174 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT lived; and, according to his own definition, that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can get along with- out, he certain!}' lived like a baron. But his method of liAing deep and • -sucking out all the marrow of life " b}' going back to nature and the barest terms of existence, invoh'ed as much loss as gain. You can get along without a plow if you recog- nize no social obligations and have no wife or children to feed. You can get along without a hoe if you are willing to live on cow-parsnips. But it is the better teaching of ci^ilization to get along icitli as many things as possible. • -Why newspa- pers, and post-offices, and railroads?"' asks Thoreau. But why. then, even an ax. since the beavers used their teeth? The ax and the railroad alike represent expedition and expe- diency. There is a poetic view, too. Thoreau protested against so much hammering of stone, but Emerson celebrated the beauty of man's achievements as being one with the beauty of nature's : — " Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone, And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the pyramids." But we soon learn that Thoreau is deliberately exaggerating, partly for the love of it, though mostly to drive home a truth. The thins; for us to do is to read him intelligentlv. with fair, open minds, not accepting everj'thing, but picking out the grains of truth, and taking innocent pleasure meanwhile in watching the chaff of wit and cynicism fly. There is a characteristic pas- sage in irr/Zc/f/?. for example, upon the -'sleepers"' that sup- port the rails in the bed of a railroad, each one of which. Thoreau says, is a man — an Irishman, or a Yankee man. He is thinking of the workmen whose lives have gone into such labor. ' ' And when they run over a man who is walking in his sleep, a super- numerar}' sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they THOREAU 175 suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. " This is very clever, but very illogical. The laborer's life is not sacrificed to his labor. Action is the law of being, and a man lives the longer and the better for working. Yet the general meaning of the passage is clear, and also true, — that industrialism tends to kill the spirit. Much, indeed, lies in knowing how to read Thoreau. His philosophy is more of a curiosity than a creed to be adopted ; yet many of his ideas hold much truth, and only need sensible modification to be applied to life. Thus prepared, we can read safely and with amusement the sharpest passages of Walden : — "1 would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for cur- tains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet ; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain nature has provided than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, prefer- ring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. " Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual : — 'The evil that men do lives after them.' As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tape- worm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust-holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying de- struction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust-holes, to lie there until their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust." What is all this but teaching in a quaint way what Lowell 176 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT taught in The Vision of Sir Launfal^ that ' 'bubbles we buj' with a whole souFs tasking" and forget that "heaven is given away"? Thoreau himself says: "Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessar}- of the soul." And the whole gospel of Walden might almost be reduced to the formula, ' Simplify your life and elevate your thoughts ;' for everywhere, in one form or another, beneath all the eccentricity and exaggeration, that gospel can be read. The foregoing passage will serve also to illustrate Thor- eau's style. We scarcely think of him as a humorist, j^et there is nearly always some humor lurking behind his His style. .." "i.ii • i t r ' ■, cjmicism, scarcely the less enjoyaiDle lor the tinge of bitterness. His best aphorisms are likely to have a humor- ous twist: "Some circumstantial evidence is yery strong, as when you find a trout in milk." The force of the style is also noteworthy; the paragraphs aboye end with an almost startling abruptness. Indeed, few philosophers, if we may dignify Thor- eau with the term, have written more forcibly — with more terse- ness, directness, and concreteness of imagery. He was a past master in the art of putting things. Emerson praises him for a better rhetorician than himself : ' 'I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and il- lustrates by excellent images that which I should have con- yeyed in a sleepy generalization." And so it is. "Trust thyself," says Emerson: "eyery heart vibrates to that iron string." Says Thoreau: "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." Here is the same thought, the same lesson, only Thoreau, instead of encouraging us to independence, ridicules our conformity, and does it with a force and concreteness that go quite beyond Emerson's. But of course the quiet strength of Emerson is more effective in the end. The parts of Thoreau's work upon which his fame rests most THOREAU 177 securely to-day are his nature studies. He may have boasted A ''Poet over-much of his love for nature and unduly taun- Naturaiistr' ted other men for their indifference, but his own steadfast and reverent love is beyond question. He was a veritable faun, sealed from birth of the most ancient order of Nature's woodmen. Cities he dreaded like a Bedouin's camel, and he was nowhere so happy in Boston as at the railway station waiting for the cars to take him away. ' 'There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wild- ness. " He was prouder to have a sparrow alight on his shoulder than he would have been to wear an epaulet. He prized much less his accomplishments in G-reek and Latin than his ability to find his way through the woods in the darkest night, to take a fish from the water with his hand, to eat a wild crab- apple without making a wry face. Agassiz, for whom he made collections of fishes, praised his sagacity. His attitude toward nature, however, was the poet's rather than the naturalist^ s. He was lured by the charm of her variety and mystery, and cared more to feel than to know. And his wide reading of the best literature only, his command of lan- guage, and his imagination, gave him a power to interpret his feelings that is rare among men of his stamp. It is interest- ing to note how inevitably he passes from observation to sym- pathy: — "Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at Lowell, where they are said to be a montli earlier than the Merrimac shad, on account of the warmth of the water. Still patiently, almost pa- thetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy re- dress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armour to in- quire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter." ITS THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL MOVEMENT Poetry reveals itself everywhere in his phrasing. The haze is '"the sun's dust of travel." The ice of the pond '-whoops'' on a winter's night. Toadstools are • -round- tables of the swamp gods.'' Some taller mast of pine rises in the midst of the woods '-like a pagoda." The crowing of the wild Indian pheasant would --put nations on the alert." Aloreover, there are records of sounds and visions that none but a poet could hear or see: — "The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridgea of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it, Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." '•'Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deep- er; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars." Sometimes he runs into rhyme and becomes a poet confessed ; and though his verse, as such, is very erratic, his delicate lines on Smoke. — ''Light winged smoke, Icarian bird I Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without song, and messenger of dawn," — are worth all the praise they have received. In the four years immediately following Thoreau's death five books were published from the mass of manuscript which he left — Excursions, The Maine ^Yoods, Cape Cod, Letters^ and A Yankee in Canada. To these of late years have been added five more — Spring, Summer, etc. They give him a very dignified place in the library and assure him of a perman- ence of which he little dreamed. In his own day. when the polished N. P. Willis of Xew York was a favorite among the younger writers, few knew his name and none would THOREAU 179 have ventured to prophesy for him any place in American letters. But time has slowly reversed the verdict. Willis's little light is flickering, Thoreau's begins to burn with the steadiness of a fixed star. The day is past, too, for the crit- icism that he was only a reflection of Emerson. Each owed something to the other, and doubtless Thoreau's debt was the greater, for he was the younger man and his was the inferior mind. But the difference between them was greater than the likeness. Emerson's books belong on those shelves w^here we put the philosophical works of Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Mon- taigne, and Bacon. Thoreau's belong with that group of more modest classics of the forest and field that gather about White's Selhorne and Walton's Complete Angler, CHAPTP]R VII NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTUEE. — LONGFELLOW, WHITTIEE, LOWELL, HOLMES, WHITMAN Of the period of our literature now under consideration — the prolific middle of the nineteenth centur}' — four or five major writers and countless minor ones still remain to be treated. Placing them here in a single group is, perhaps, on the ground of coherence, a course not entirely justifiable. Yet to make an}' of the divisions that suggest themselves would seem to be even less justifiable. A separation, for instance, into poets and prose-writers is scarcely possible, since many of the writers were both; and to divide along other lines, as into Cambridge scholars, anti-slavery agitators, and the like, would again be only to work confusion by making divisions that seriously overlap. It seems better therefore to keep the writers together, regarding them broadly as contributors, each in his way, to our national life and character — as co-workers toward the one end of upbuilding a modern nation of political unit}' and of continuous moral and intellectual growth. It is true, the writers we have already treated might be regarded in the same light, but there is at least this difference, that they worked more specificallj' to literary or personal ends, while the men whom we have now to consider were in closer touch with our social organization, and their writings and speeches largely grew out of, or contributed toward, the wide activities among which they moved, ORATORY Orator}' in America, which has perhaps had a more contin- uous history than any other form of letters except theology, 180 ORATORY ' 181 reached its highest development between 1830 and 1860. This is, of course, only another manifestation of the great intel- lectual and artistic energy that attended the development and fixing of our national character, the more direct stimulus in this case being found in the political conditions — in the diffi- cult adjustment of early national principles, and especially in the unsettled and continually vexing issue of slavery. But our oratory scarcely rose to the level attained in other literary forms. It was made illustrious by at least two eminently great men — Webster and Lincoln — but it never united in one man all the original genius and the eloquent and scholarly virtues that have made the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet, and Burke, permanent classics in the world's literature. Daniel Webster we are still disposed to regard as our fore- most exponent of deliberative and forensic eloquence. He had, to begin with, physical advantages that seemed to Webster, proclaim him an even greater man than he was. 1782-1802. Carlyle, a master at portraiture, saw him once and described him in a letter to Emerson : ' ' The tanned complex- ion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of eyebrow, like dull anthracite furnaces, need- ing only to be hJown\ the mastiff mouth, accurately closed. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, ' This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we make in Yankeeland. ' " Born on a backwoods farm in New Hampshire at the close of the Revolutionary War, and gradu- ated from Dartmouth in 1801, Webster rapidly rose in the legal profession, until he was sent to Congress in 1813. He shortly afterward took up his residence at Boston, and from that time on, as representative, senator, secretary of state, and Whig aspirant for the Presidency, he was, as Carlyle put it, ' ' the notablest of our notabilities. " His supremacy in American statesmanship was somewhat comparable to that, in later years, of Gladstone in English or of Bismarck in Prussian. 182 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE "Webster's gi'eat service was done in the stormy Congressional debates of 1S30-1S32, when he came forward in opposition to the principle of state sovereignty, and helped to fix finally the supreme power and authority of the federal constitution. He made himself the champion of the national idea, of complete union, and it is fitting that he should be remembered by those famous words with which he closed the speech in reply tx) Hayne: • -Liberty a ?« J Union, now and forever, one and in- separable." The great blemish upon his career was his weak- ness in nut facing squarely the question of slave-holding when that issue was approaching a crisis. By supporting the com- promise measures of 1850 instead of throwing his influence with the radical opponents of slavery, he added to the confidence of the slave power and contributed much to the final disastrous re- sults. Whittier, in the poem Ichahod, lashed him severely for his defection. But Webster sulTered to the full for his weak- ness, and many years after his death Whittier was glad to do his memory justice, moiuTiing, in The Lost Occasion, that Webster had not been spared till the day of actual disunion, assured that no sti'onger voice than his would have th^n '-' Called out the utmost might of men, To make the Union's charter free And strengthen law by liberty." The best examples of Webster's forensic pleading are to be foimd in the aro'ument on the Dartmouth Collesje Case before the United States Supreme Court in ISIS and in his speech at the White murder trial at Salem in 1829. His great delib- erative speeches in the Senate have already been mentioned — the Eeply to Hayne in 1830, and the '-Seventh of March Speech" in favor of compromise in 1850. His best public ad- dresses include one delivered at the anniversary at Plymouth in 1820 J one at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument and another at its completion, and a eulogy on ORATORY 183 Adams and Jefferson. His oratory was mainly of the old type, only some degrees removed from the half-pedantic clas- sicism that was the ideal of the early academic orators. Yet he was undeniably eloquent, both in the conventional and in the real sense of the word — clear in thought, strong and pure and sonorous in diction, with a beauty of imagery and an animation of style that have set his printed speeches among the select examples of modern oratorical prose. What those speeches must have been in utterance all the enthusiastic ac- counts of their hearers will not suffice for us to realize, since the force of the speaker's personality must have counted for even more than his words, lending impressiveness to his simplest and calmest statements, and enabling him, when deeply stirred, to carry everything before him. Henry Clay, who belonged to Virginia by birth and to Ken- tucky by residence, came into public life somewhat before Web- ster, and rose to be the recognized leader of the Whig 1777-1852. ' pai'ty, and, with the exception of Webster, its f ore- j. c. Calhoun, most man. He was three times a candidate for the 1782-1850 Presidency, and once narrowly missed election. Though opposed to slavery, he was not radical in his views. As the chief promoter of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the author of the compromise measures of 1850, he earned the title of "the great pacificator." As an orator he held and swayed audiences as effectually as ever Webster did, though more exclusively by his personalit}' and his rhetorical magic. He lacked the learning and depth of that great statesman, and his orations are now little read. From farther south, and with wholly southern views and doctrines, came John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina. It was he, then president of the Senate, whom Webster was really attacking in his famous Reply to Hayne in 1830, for Calhoun was an ardent believer in States' Rights and was the author of the doctrine of Nullification. He 184 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE was scarcely eloquent, as we ordinarily understand the term, hut was a great thinker, and the clearness of his logic was con- spicuous in everything he said. This, coupled with his earn- estness and his candor, gave him a clear title to his fame. Massachusetts produced the men who pressed Webster most closely for oratorical honors of the academic kind — Kufus Choate, the lawyer, and Edward Everett, the i7'>9-/«59^^^^^' scholar, statesman, and diplomatist. Choate was Edward never brought into the same great conflicts as Web- 1794-1865 ^^^^' ^^^ eloquence being expended before juries; but he had even more than Webster's scholarship and refinement, and, with a fervid imagination and an inex- haustible flow of words, he exercised over emotional hearers that "spell" which it was long thought to be an orator's highest virtue to exercise. His oratory held much of the poetic qual- ity, and is seen at its best in his eulogies — the eulogy, for ex- ample, on Webster. Everett, who began life as an editor and professor of G-reek, held many high positions : he was governor of Massachusetts, minister to G-reat Britain, president of Har- vard College, Secretary of State, and United States senator. His oratory also was of the finished and scholarly type. It might even be called cold, for Everett lacked the personal force which Choate and Webster possessed. Yet by frequent lec- tures on the platform he came into closer touch with the gen- eral public than most statesmen of his day. Emerson testified to his great influence on the youth of New England; and late in life he delivered his famous eulogy on Washington one hun- dred and fifty times in the interest of the Mount Vernon Asso- ciation. His last important oration was the one delivered at the dedication of the national cemetery at Grettysburg in 1863 — an occasion made most memoral)le l)y another address, the unpretentiously noble speech of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, almost the antithesis of the academic orators, DANIEL WKBSXER EDWARD EVERETT WILLIAM hickli:ng PRESCOXT FRANCIS FARKMAN ORATORY 185 was a potent influence upon what might be called the modern , , school — that school which discards pedantic phrases Abraham ^ ^ Lincoln, and classical allusions, rather avoids rhetorical 1809-1865. climaxes and other eflfects, and depends upon a less impassioned, more conversational manner. Lincoln's training was obtained in actual law-practice, where he had to confront and handle real issues before audiences immediately concerned. His audiences, too, were of the primitive "West, more keen than cultured. He practiced at the Illinois bar as early as 1837; and in 1848, when a candidate for the United States senator- ship from Illinois, he held in that state the series of joint discussions with Stephen A. Douglas, largely on the slavery question, which made him famous. The schooling was pre- cisely suited to the man, and it was a wholly natural result that the more momentous addresses which he was called upon later to deliver — his two inaugural addresses, for instance, or the G-ettysburg address — should be models of simplicity, sin- cerity, directness, and force. AYhatever virtues lie in the Saxon character and may be expressed in the Saxon tongue, these are summed up in the unadorned eloquence of xAbraham Lincoln. The anti-slavery movement brought forth speakers of many kinds in many places, but apart from Lincoln and Grarrison (who was more of a iournalist than a speaker), the Charles Sum- . '' . ^ . ^ -, . , , -i . ner, 1811-1S74. niost conspicuous orators identified with the direct Wendell Phil- issue of abolition were Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, both of Boston, and both again orators of the scholarly type. Sumner's w^ork was done chiefly in Con- gress, where he was recognized for years as the great anti- slaveiy leader. Indeed, the history of Sumner is virtually the history of the anti-slavery conflict. His speeches were marked by soundness of reason and stateliuess of style, and the fifteen published volumes of them make an imposing addition to our 1S6 XATIOXAL LIFE AXD CULTURE literature. The speech on --The True G-randeur of Nations " is best remembered. Wendell Phillips was a platform orator, who made public speaking his life-work. His long service to the abolitionists made his name, like G-arrison's and Sumner's, almost synonymous with their cause. As an orator he added to the learning, grace, and polish of Everett, something more of personal force that grew out of real devotion, however mixed its motives, to a great moral piinciple. After the war he con- tinued in the lecture field. His best-known addresses are those on ••Tonssaint LOuvertiue' and --The Lost Arts. ' As a rule, the oratory of the pulpit leaves a less permanent record than that of the platform, and there is practically noth- ing to be added here to what was said on this subject in the chapter on religion and philosophy in New England. In that place were mentioned the Unitarian ministers, Channing and others, and also the Congregationalists Bushnell of Hart- ford and Beecher of Brooklyn. Doubtless Beecher was, though somewhat erratic, one of our most versatile and brilliant preachers. But even though we extend our survey beyond the time-limit of this chapter to the present day. we can find no other to mention by the side of these, unless it be Phillips Brooks (1835-1S93), late of the Protestant Episcopal church at Boston. The orator}' of the pulpit, as of the platform gener- ally, has distinctly waned. HIS TOBY AXD CRITICISM The historians, so-called, of the days of our earliest literature were scarcely entitled to that name. Whatever history they -wrote was in the natuie of chronicles or annals — dry, ill-con- nected, unexplained relations of occurrences, without the in- sight, imagination, and mastery of expression that were needed to make literature. On the other hand, whatever literature they wrote was the narration of pei^onal experiences, useful and entertaining, but without the breadth of vision and critical HISTORY AND CRITICISM 187 spirit that would have made worthy history. Our real histo- rians — men with a mastery of facts, with a power of arranging and interpreting those facts, and with a definite artistic purpose — appeared only with the nineteenth century. Irving's excellent work in this field has already been de- scribed. Passing over, then, the names of the early and minor writers of the century — Sparks, the biographer, croft, with his worthy lives of Washington and Franklin; 1800-1891. Hildreth, with his discriminating but uninteresting history of the United States; Palfrey, with his very able but also um'omantic history of New England; J. S. C. Abbott, with biographies and a history of the Civil War; and James Parton, a later biographer, with lives of Franklin, Yoltaire, and others, — we come to the name of one who, although by no means the greatest, was long the most conspicuous of our historians — George Bancroft. The publication of Bancroft's History of the United States, in ten successive volumes, ex- tended from 1834 to 1874, with a revised edition in 1883. How careful and exhaustive his researches were may be inferred from this fact, and also from the fact that the portion of our history covered by them extends only to 1789. It was a huge undertaking, to which Bancroft brought all the resources of wealth, training, and social and political influence — every- thing, in short, but genius. He lived at Washington where he had free access to the government archives, and he collected besides an enormous private library of transcripts of documents from all parts of the world. Invaluable, how- ever, as his great work is, its over-patriotic and slightly partisan bias prevents it from being accepted as a final author- ity, while its want of picturesqueness in matter and st3ie makes it hard to read, and puts it quite without the pale of literature. Two of our historians were attracted, like Irving, to foreign 188 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE themes. It was William Hickling Prescott in favor of whom Irvino- crave up his long-cherished plan of writing a 1796-1859. ' history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Pres- j. L. Motley, ^ott, a native of Salem, and a graduate of Harvard, lSU-1877. ^ iT/./.ii-,i devoted a lite oi scholarly leisure and partial blind- ness to that brilliant period of Spain's history when she was extending her empire over the new world. The result was a series of able and fascinating works : Ferdinand and Isabella (1837), The Conquest of Mexico (1843), and The Conquest of Peru (1847). The other of the two, John Lothrop Motley, of Boston, after trying law and feeling his way toward literature with several novels {Morton^s Hope., 1839, and Merry Mount, 1848), turned to history, and spent much of his life abroad in the study of the heroic period of the Netherlands in the days of William of Orange. He published Tlie Rise of the Dutch Republic in 1856. The romantic pict- uresqueness of the periods treated by both these writers was fairly equalled by the grace and animation of their stj^le, and they paralleled the triumph gained by Macaulay in England, of having their works read like so much romance. Schoolboys could turn from Irving and Cooper to Prescott and Motle}^ with scarcely any loss of interest. Prescott, however, was some- w^hat deficient in critical insight ; and Motley, though possessed of ample powers and exercising more restraint in his style than Prescott, treated his theme so narrowly that he was ' 'really not a historian, but a describer of mighty historic deeds." Thus it has come about that the supremacj^ among our historians, which was first awarded to one of these men and then to the other, has been gradually transferred to a successor of both. Francis Parkman, also a Boston and a Harvard man, resolved at the early age of eighteen upon the plan of the his- tory to which he devoted his mature years. He took an American theme, the "Story of the Woods," the tripartite HISTORY AND CRITICISM 189 conflict that lasted for a century and a half between the English, the French, and the Indians, on the frontiers of the . „ , northern new world. In pursuit of his purpose he Francis Park- ^ l l man, undertook a journey to the Rocky Mountains, and 1823-1893. spent some time in a village of the Sioux Indians. The hardships of the trip so impaired his already frail health that his life-work was done with weak and sometimes almost useless eyesight, and under painful nervous affliction. But he knew his ground and his facts with a minute specialist's know- ledge ; he had an intellect of philosophic breadth, acuteness, fairness, and accurac}^; and he was gifted with a delightful stjde. Nor was his theme essentially less attractive than those of his forerunners, while its nearness to the interests of Amer- ican readers gave it an enhanced national value. His first printed work. The California and Oregon Trail (1849), the record of his personal experiences, is read by boys as eagerly as Dana's Two Years Before the 3Iast, and is one of those real stories that are almost better than romances. It is filled with the fragrance of woods and streams and the fresh, free air of the plains and mountains. Parkman's series of histories began with the one that is last in historical order — The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). The publication of the other seven extended from Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) to A Half- Century of Conflict (1892). It is an admirable series, worthy of its great theme, and it sets Parkman, by common consent, among the historians of genius. Besides the formal historians there are certain other workers in the broad field of scholarly research and criticism who might justly claim a share of attention. There was Professor Ticknor, the first incumbent of the chair of French and Spanish which was founded a,t Harvard in 1817, and which was held later by Long- fellow and by Lowell. His important work was a History of Spanish Literature (1849), which was not only a pioneer in its 190 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE field, but was so able and sound that it remains still a stand- ard authority. There was also Edwin Percy Whipple, a Bos- ton lecturer and critic, who in his books {Literature George Tick- and Lift', 1849; Literature of the Age of EJizaheth, ThOT* 1791-1871. 1869; etc.), made some approach toward the kind ^. p. Whipple, of philosophical criticism that is now held in highest 1819-1886. , --T . .-,.■, . -, ,., esteem. Here, too, might be mentioned men like James T. Fields, the veteran Boston publisher and editor, and writer of Yesterdays with Authors ; George P. Marsh, the Ver- mont philologist; and Richard G-rant White, of New York, variously known as a Shakespearean scholar, a music and art critic, and a writer of popular philolog3\ But, though it would be easy to name many more, and some much better scholars than these, the number of men who have successfully combined sound scholarship with literary gifts is not large. The leaders among them were, of course, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, and to these leaders must be accorded a treatment in proportion to their significance. HENBY WADSWOETH LONGFELLOW, 18(y7-1882 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. The maternal line of the Wadsworths goes back to John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, two pas- sengers of 'the Mayflower who have found a quiet fame in The Courtship of Miles Standish. The Longfellows do not trace back quite so far on American soil, but there was a goodly. line of them in Massachusetts and in Maine — colonist, blacksmith, school teacher, judge, and lawyer. Henry Wads- worth, so named for a maternal uncle who had sacrificed his life before Tripoli in the war with Algiers, was the lawyer's son. There was no promise of poetry in his ancestry, perhaps, but some inspiration was to be drawn from his surroundings. For the Portland of his birth was both a beautiful and a busy town LONGFELLOW 191 — a "Forest City" with miles of sea beach, and a port where merchant vessels from the West Indies exchanged sugar and rum for the products of the forests and the fisheries of Maine ; and these scenes, or the memory of them, directly inspired two or three of his best poems, notably My Lost Youth. We are told that he was almost a model boy— "true, high- minded, and noble ;" " remarkably solicitous always to do right ;" handsome, too; "sensitive, impressionable; active, eager, im- petuous, often impatient; quick-tempered, but as quickly ap- peased; kind-hearted and affectionate, the sunlight of the house. " His conduct at school was ' 'very correct and amiable. " He read much, being always studious and thoughtful, though never melancholy. The first book which ' 'fascinated his imagi- nation" was Irving's Sketcli^Booh; and it would be easy to point out more than superfici^ resemblances between Longfellow's poetry and Irving's prose, just as there are certain fundamental characteristics common to Bryant's poetry and Cooper's prose. The resemblance goes back to the character of the men. "The gentle Longfellow"' and "the gentle Irving" we say with equal readiness, nor forget that gentleness implies gentility, inherent nobleness and manhood. Out of such characters grow naturally long and unruffled lives, as out of such a character as Poe's grows almost inevitably a short and tragic one. Longfellow's education was obtained at the Portland Acad- emy and at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, where he had for classmates several youths who were afterward to become famous, — two in the world of letters, J. S. C. Abbott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He began to write pretty, melodious little poems and to contribute both verse and prose to various struggling magazines while still an undergraduate. He was graduated in 1825. His father desired him to study law; he himself spoke, though not very seriously, of turning farmer; but a Chair of Modern Languages was about to be established 192 NATIONAL LIFE AXD CULTURE at Bowdoin, and the trustees proposed that the young gradu- ate of scholarly and literary tastes should fit himself for it. Three years were accordingly spent in delightful study and travel in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, and the founda- tions were laid, not only of his scholarship, but of that pas- sion for the romantic scenery and lore of the old world which followed him, as it followed Irving, through life, and gave color and direction to so much of his work. He returned in 1829 to take the professorship at Bowdoin, a very young man for so dignified a position. He married „ ^ . , in 1831, and thouo;h his domestic life was sad- Professional ' ° Life; Prose dened by misfortunes, the beauty of it ma}' be judged Writings. from such poems as Footsteps of Angels and The Chil- dren's Hour. A second residence in Europe prepared the way for the Professorship of Romance Languages at Harvard, where he took up his duties in 1836. He secured rooms at the historic Craigie House overlooking the Charles River, — a house in which Washington had been quartered for some months when he came to Cambridsie in 1775 to take command of the Conti- nental forces. After his second marriage (his first wife died during his second residence in Europe) the house passed into his possession and became his permanent home. He was thence- forth one of the most prominent members — the real centre, Mr. Higginson declares— of that group of men, including Fel- ton, Sumner, Hawthorne, Agassiz, Lowell, and Holmes, who gave distinction to the Boston and Cambridge of earlier daj^s. He had already published, besides a translation of a French G-rammar and some translations from a Spanish poet, a Sketch- Book-VikQ series of effusions which he entitled Outre- Mer; a Pil- grimage Beyond the Sea (1833, 1834). In 1839 he published a second and more ambitious prose work, Hyperion, in which the experiences of his second journey to Europe were woven into a kind of romance. Inasmuch as the romance itself was largely LONGFELLOW 193 autobiographical, the publication was in rather questionable taste. Besides, the book was sentimental in tone and luxur- iant in stj^le, so much so, Indeed, that it is difficult to under- stand to-day how it could have been the product of a man past thirty. But its translations and criticisms of German literature, which was then little known in America, were ser- viceable, and it can have done no harm l)y setting ' ' hundreds of readers a-dreaming of pleasant wanderings by the song- haunted German rivers." Ten years later he ventured to add to his meagre list of prose writings another romance, Kavanagh — a New England tale somewhat in the manner of Hawthorne but with little of Hawthorne's charm of stjde or spiritual insight. Poetry was as clearly Longfellow's proper medium as prose was Hawthorne's or Cooper's, and to poetry the main energies of his life were dedicated. In the same year in which Hyperion was published, ap- peared also his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Night. The Psahn of Life had been printed anonymously i^-r-^l^ft.c.^^^^ the year before, in the Knickerbocker Magazine, and Night,'' 1839. J ' J } had been circulated so widely that Longfellow took this means of declaring his authorship. The volume contained, in addition to a prelude and his translations, the two collections of verse, of eight poems each, which are now printed in his works under the general titles of "Voices of the Night" and " Earlier Poems." In one way the publication was as remark- able as the publication of Tennyson's early volume in Eng- land nine jenrs before ; for at least six of the eight poems for which the volume was named — Hymn to the Night, A Psalm of Life, The Reaper and the Floioers, Footsteps of An- gels, Floicers, Midnight Mass for the Dying Year — made their way instantly to a popularity that has scarcely diminished in sixty years. This may have been partly due to the dearth of good poetry in America ; yet the poems deserved their success, 194 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE and they were received in England with equal cordiality. True, it is easy to pick flaws in them. Critics will continue to condemn the Psalm of Life for its preaching tone, its incoher- ent structure, its commonplace ideas, its trite phrases, haz}^ figures, and borrowed ornaments. But without shutting our eyes to these defects, which really exist, and without main- taining that the poem is of any high order of greatness, it is still possible to enjo}^ it and to understand why it has made such a wide and deep impression. It is sound at heart. So simple and melodious as to sing itself into the memory, it breathes at the same time an ardent courage and a cheerful faith. Its theme is life, and it is alive with Saxon energy and earnestness. It seems as useless to test it, like a more ambi- tious poem, by the ordinary canons of criticism as it would be to test thus a stray ballad or a religious hymn that has fixed itself in the affections of a whole people. The same is true of most of these early poems. One or two of them, perhaps, — the Prelude, Hymn to the Kiylit, Footsteps of Ai}(;cJ^. — are good by the more formal tests. But the primary reason of their success is plain. It lies in their character — their simple and sincere feeling and their sufficient art. Long- fellow was .faithfull}' following the counsel of the "distant voices" which Sir Philip Sidney heard three centuries ago— " Look, then, into thine heart, and write." And in all but range, this early volume has remained fairly representative of its author. It defined his position as the household poet, the poet of the masses in their better moods, when the common aspirations, joys, and even son'ows of life, come to them as beautiful things to be treasured in beautiful words. Longfellow exercised his powers in many directions afterward, but he did not climb much higher. The next book of verse, the Ballads and Other Poems of LONGFELLOW 195 1841, shows one of the new directions his activity took. He was to be the sino-er of men and deeds as well as Ballads. ^£ musings and exhortations. The earlier tones re- appear in such a poem as Endi/miou, with its oft-quoted lines — • " No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own" — and in the even more familiar Rainy Day, Maidenhood, and Ex- celsior; the new note is to be found particularly in The Vil- lage Blacksmith, like Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night an ex- altation of humble toil and reward, and in the two stirring ballads of The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hes- perus. The difTerence in manner is as marked as the differ- ence in substance: — ' ' And as to catch the gale Round veered the flapping sail. Death! was the helinsman's hail, Death without quarter ! Midships with iron keel Struck we her ribs of steel; Down her black hulk did reel Through the black water ! " Here is the metre of Drayton's Agincourt^ throbbing still with the old martial passion and not greatly excelled by Tennyson himself in the Charge of the Light Brigade. That Longfellow should have shown himself such a good ballad writer was scarcely to be expected when we consider the gentleness of his nature and the even niceness of his technique. In fact, he was not often successful in work that demanded intensity of feeling. His Poems on Slavery (1842) were merely pretty and polished when, to produce any effect worth producing, they should have been strong even to ruggedness. But let him be 196 • NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE siven a storv to tell and he could tell it with both grace and vigor. It is impossible here to follow in detail the long list of vol- umes and separate poems which came from his pen in rapid succession, man}' of which have become household names. There were a few relative failures. The Spanish Student (1842) showed the versatile author in the role of dramatist. But really successful drama in America has thus far refused to be written; and this play of Longfellow's, while it contains pretty lyrics and makes entertaining reading, has little dramatic power and has never been staged. However, the poet's experiments eontinued, and in general met with wide success. The dreamily beautiful and pathetic idyl, EvnngeJine^ appeared in 1847 and immediately won its way to the hearts of a hundred thousand -Evangeiiner readers. A few critics Quarrelled with the hexam- 1847. ^ eter lines because they were not classical hexameters, but their objections were unheeded. The tale of Acadie, of ' ' the forest primeval ' ' and "the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the roe when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman," a tale not dark enough to suit the fancy of Hawthorne, to whom it was first told by a friend of both writers, rightly seemed to Longfellow to have in it precisely those human ele- ments of faith and devotion that make the widest appeal. He accordingly took the story and retold it with picturesque acces- sories of landscape and fireside and with a musical flow of syl- lables that leave it little inferior to its great model, Goethe's Hermann unci Dorothea. It is something more, too, than a piece of literature. One feels that there is always hope for humanity so long as a great wrong like that done to the innocent peasants of Acadia can inspire such a noble protest as really underlies the simple tale of Evangeline. LONGFELLOW 197 The collection of poems entitled The Seaside and the Fire- side, which appeared in 1850, contained, besides Resignation and other domestic and popular pieces, the poem of Longfel- low's highest patriotic reach, the allegory of The Buildi7ig of the Ship'. The lines of its closing apostrophe to the ship of state are known to have brought tears of emotion to the eyes of Lincoln during the anxious hours of his own pilotage: — "Thou, too, sail on, Ship of State ! Sail on, O Union, strong and great ! . . . Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea ! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears. Our faith triumphant o'er our fears. Are all with thee, — are all with thee ! " Five years later came another long poem, this time almost epic in character and scope. Longfellow was so much a lit- erary' craftsman that the critic of his work is constantly tempted to put its form foremost, and there can be no doubt ''Hiawatha,'' ,„,, that he sometimes selected the form beiore the 1855. theme. In point of form The Song of Hiawatha was an even bolder experiment than Evangeline. The metre chosen was that of the Finnish Kalevala^ a poem then almost totally unknown to American readers. The measure is charac- terized b}' a trochaic beat, and by short (octosyllabic) unrhymed lines, constantly pausing, and overlapping by repetition of phrases, so that the narrative progresses slowly. It is pecul- iarly suited to the tales of a primitive people, being well adapted to memorizing, and gratifying to the sense of rhythm so strong in children and the untutored. That Longfellow had again chosen wisely was shown by his success. The worthiest and most picturesque traditions of the American Indians were woven into a connected story, whose charm was greatly height- ened by the novel melody of the verse. The very names were 198 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE as notes of music • • from the lips of Nawadaha, the musician, the sweet singer. ' ' " In the vale of Tawasentha, In the green and silent valley. There he sang of Hiawatha, Sang the Song of Hiawatha, ' Sang his wondrous birth and being, How he prayed and how he fasted, How he lived, and toiled, and suffered. That the tribes of men might prosper. That he might advance his people !" It was not long before the tales of Hiawatha's Fasting, of his Wooing, of Blessing the Cornfields, of The G-hosts and The Famine, were known practically wherever English poetry is read. It is wrong to claim for Hiaicatha any special significance as a poem with a native American theme, sprung from the soil. Longfellow sang, in a purely literary and romantic spirit, the traditions of a race that was to him alien and almost unknown, as an Englishman might turn into poetrj^ the legends of the aborigines of Australia. He idealized, too, far more than Cooper, and bej'ond all warrant. Local color and local truth are not the strong points of the poem. It must be accepted solely for the admirable work of art that it is. A more strictly native theme was that of The Courtship of Miles JSfandisJi, which followed in three years ; but the homel}^ Puritan tale, with its repetition of the manner of Evangeline, did not afford the poet quite the right inspiration, and it frequently lapses into mere prose. In 1854, the year before the publication of Hiaicatha, Longfellow resigned his professorship at Harvard that he might be free to pursue his more congenial, and by that time more profitable, literary work. In 1861 the happi- ness of his home life was broken by a calamitous accident. Mrs. Longfellow, while engaged in sealing up for LONGFELLOW 199 her little daughters some packages containing curls of their hair, set fire to her dress and was fatally burned. The Cross of S710W, a sonnet written eighteen years afterward, gives us some hint of what Longfellow must have suffered. In the un- rest that followed this domestic affliction, further fed hj the anxieties of the Civil War, the poet turned for solace to the more mechanical exercise of writing tales and making transla- tions. The Tales of a Wayside Inn (the inn really existed in the town of Sudbur}^, and the characters introduced were actual friends of Longfellow, in slight disguise) appeared in 1863. Seven years later he had completed and published a work worthy at once of his scholarship and his genius, — a metrical 3'et extremel}' literal translation of Dante's Divina Commedia. It fails, as perhaps all translations must fail, to catch the burn- ing intensity of the original, but all in all it is the most satisfac- tory verse rendering we have in English of a poem for which nothing but an absolutely literal translation will ever suffice. About the same time, too, he completed what he hoped would be his masterwork, the conception of which had in a sense ' 'dom- inated his literary life," namely, a trilogy which aimed to set forth Christianity in its ancient, mediaeval, and modern aspects, and which he entitled CTiristus: a Mystery. But the task was beyond his powers. The middle portion, ' 'The Grolden Legend, " which had been published twenty j^ears before, was fairly suc- cessful, but the other parts, ' 'The Divine Tragedy" and ' 'The New England Tragedies," are so little read that they are not always incorporated in his collected works. After this Longfellow attempted no more poems of large scope, though he continued to write many sonnets and minor pieces, from The Hanging of the Crane and Moritnri Salutanms down to that lyric of serene faith, The Bells of San Bias, writ- ten but a few days before his death. He died on the twenty- fourth of March, 1882, aged seventy-five. In 1884, a bust of 200 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE Mm was placed in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbe}^, near the tomb of Chaucer, — England's gracious tribute to the renown of America" s best loved poet. The parallel between Longfellow and Irving, which has alread}^ been suggested, can be drawn further. Longfellow, also, kept pretty carefully to the beaten track where all could follow him. In the matter of form he knew well enough rificai -^^^ ^^ surprise his public, and he did so again and Summary. r l ■> o again ; but even these seeming novelties always turned out to be something old and approved. He preferred simple themes and simple language, refraining from any innovations that might repel. Thus he established himseff securely in his readers' affections, always meeting their expectations and making his name in a sense synonymous with American poetr}', — though not our greatest yet our leading singer b}" Airtue of his continuous, satisfying song. The supreme poetic gift, imaginative insight, was not his in any marked degree. Much broader than Bryant, his con- templations did not run so deep. Herein, too, he falls far be- low his English contemporary, Tennyson, of whom he was in some other respects so nearly the peer. He had no large visions, whether of the political destiny of America or of the moral and social destiny of man. He had little comprehension of the forces that were working such a change in his own gener- ation — theideasof liberty and equality, the new science, and the new education, that were rapidly emancipating both body and mind. Farther yet from him was it to see the images of beauty or terror which Poe saw beyond the veil of life. He had no power of conjury over the spirit world. Now and then he touched the heights, as in the vision of the majestic Hymn to the Night : — " I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls ! LONGFELLOW 201 I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls ! " — or in the figure inspired by the gun-barrels in the arsenal at Springfield ranged and shining like the pipes of an organ : — " Ah ! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys ! ' ' But these things are too infrequent to be considered character- istic : we do not recognize them as like Longfellow. He was something more than a poet of fancy, but in the fields of the imagination his range was in the lowlands. His faculty is best described as one that was mainly receptive and assimilative. He had a true instinct for beauty, and he showed his appreciation of any beauty in another's work by frankly borrowing it for his own. He never dis- graced it ; usually, unless it came from a very high source, he bettered it in the borrowing. If this was not genius, it was a talent for detecting and advertising genius, for turning to the best account the best that the world's literature could afford. For example, Tennyson published Locksley Hall, and immediately afterward Longfellow composed The Belfry of Bruges in the same metre and with something of the same phrasing. This practice, which came from his habit of com- posing in his study and relying on his books for inspiration, naturally brought upon him charges of imitating. Wide readers and critics, like Poe, knew the sources, and, as they read his poems, could not help being reminded of them. The nature of the imitation may be learned by comparing The Building of the Ship or Keramos with Schiller's Song of the Bell, or, for a minor instance. The Slave in the Dismal Swamp with Moore's Ballad, "They made her a grave, too cold and damp." But Longfellow never answered the charges, both because they were in part true and because, as far as they 202 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE were true, there was nothing in them to cause him shame. He was acting honorably; even when the imitation was most obvious he added enough of his own to justify him, and all right-minded readers were grateful to him for exercising his faculty so happily. Besides, any doubt of his being a poet in his own right could always be allayed by turning to such songs of genuine, spontaneous utterance as The Bridge^ or The Day is Done^ or My Lost Youth. His versatility was greater than that of an}^ other American poet. Though most at ease in lyric poetry, he essayed also, as we have seen, both epic and dramatic, with the minor varie- ties of ballad and pastoral. As a stor3^-teller in verse he belongs to that band of English rhymers led by Chaucer and Scott. He was almost as thorough a romanticist, too, as Scott — steeped in medisevalism and G-ermanism. In form, his range was as wide as in substance. He tried all forms, and seemed to mas- ter one as easily as another, with the single exception of heroic blank verse, which was too stately for his agile Muse. But the mastership, which in blank verse he has to yield to Bryant, he holds in an equally difficult form. As a sonnet writer he has had no rival in America. Indeed, one might s apport the assertion that Longfellow wrote no greater poetry than is to be found in some of his sonnets, as the Divina Commedia series, Three Friends of Mine, Milton, or Nature. Through these things — his simplicity, his breadth, his receptive faculty, his versatility — Longfellow became our great teacher. He was a scholar himself, to begin with, — one of America's earliest and best. He was the first person on this side of the Atlantic to write upon Anglo-Saxon. He led many a student to a knowledge of the modern languages and literatures, and by his translations and adaptations spread far and wide their benignant influence. But most of all he assisted in the spread of culture through the subtle influence of his art. LONGFELLOW 203 He was an artist to the finger-tips. In this respect he far outran Bryant and was a revelation to a Puritan world. And mark how he reached that world. Poe could not do it, for pure art and imagination would not avail. But Longfellow, though there were no theologians among his ancestors, had the strong moral bias of his New England environment; like Bryant, though in less degree, he was given to meditating and moralizing ; and all the while his readers, who went to him for counsel and cheer, were unconsciously succumbing to the witcheries of song and learning to like the very things they had been taught to fear or despise. It was but another step to the drama, to music, to painting and sculpture. Thus it be- came Longfellow's mission to soften the asperities of a nar- row creed and life. Perhaps the slight sentimentalism that clings to his work, as to Irving's, was a necessary part of this disciplinary task. We can pardon his fondness for exclama- tion points and pretty figures of speech when we contemplate the large result. Nor if, after we have learned to like such thinos as "footprints on the sands of time" and "forget-me-nots of the angels," we find that our poetic education is not complete until Tennyson and Shakespeare and Dante have taught us to dislike them again, should we turn with ingratitude from our first teacher, who made the second lesson possible. Finally, and once more like Irving, Longfellow has a high claim to our admiration in his fundamental, serene humanity. Scholarly though he was, bookish, and often getting his inspir- ation at second hand, he was never scholastic, technical, obscure, or dry. Love is more than wisdom, and in every line that Longfellow wrote there beats a kindly human heart. Rarely does he count to us intellectually so much as emotion- ally. He fought shy of analysis, put quietly by the problems and stress of his age, if indeed he felt them, remaining to the 204 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE end an ardent lover of l)eaiity and peace; and over all his poetry broods " A Sabbath sound, as of doves In quiet neighborhoods." JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892 Another poet in whom love of human nature was a marked trait was born north of Boston in the same year as Longfellow — John G-reenleaf Whittier, Little of the scholar, A Farmer however, is to be found in this New England Quak- er, whose lot it was to pass from the plow to politics and from politics to literature. He was born in 1807 in East Haverhill, a rugged, hilly section of Essex County, in the ex- treme north-east corner of Massachusetts. In the southern part of the same county lies Salem, the birthplace of Hawthorne. The home of Whittier was in a country district ; the town of Haver- hill was three miles away, and to this day no roof is in sight from the old homestead. The house, considerably more than a hundred years old at the poet's birth, was built by his great- great-grandfather. The Whittiers were mostly stalwart men, six feet in height, who lived out their three-score and ten years. The poet, though his years were more than any of his immediate ancestors', fell a little short of the family stature and was of slen- der frame. He attributed his delicate health to the hard work and exposure of his youth. He milked cows, "grubbed stumps," built boulder fences, threshed grain with a flail, wore no flan- nels in the coldest weather, and woke often of winter morn- ings to find upon his coverlet siftings of snow. Something of this may be learned from Snow- Bound,yfhiGh. is a faithful picture of the Whittier homestead and household as they were eighty 3^ears ago. It was a life utterly without luxury and with few means of culture. The famil}', however, was one of the most respected WHITTIER 205 in the community, unci could draw to its fireside intelligent ac- quaintances, among them itinerant ministers of the Friends, to which sect it belonged. There were perhaps thirty books in the house, largely Quaker tracts and journals. Of course, there was the Bible, and through all his poetry Whittier reverts to the Bible for phrases and images as naturally as Keats reverts to classical mythology or Longfellow to mediaeval legend. Memorable were the evenings when the school-teacher came and read to the family from books he brought with him — one most memorable when the book was a copy of Burns. On Whittier' s first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat and a l)road-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered with drab velvet, he purchased a copy of Shakespeare. One of the Waverley novels, its author as yet unknown, fell into his hands and was read eagerly, — but the parents did not share in that reading. He attended the district school a few weeks each winter; the nature of his schooling may be judged from the poem To My Old ^Schoolmaster. When he was nineteen he com- c z. 1^ pleted his scanty education with a year at an acad- From School to^ "^ *^ Journalism emy in Haverhill. From the time when the reading and Politics. ^^ Burns woke the poet within him, he was con- stantly writing rhymes, covering his slate with them and some- times copying them out on foolscap. William Lloyd Garrison, soon afterward to be the leader of the abolition movement, had started his Free Press in a neighboring town. Whittier' s father, interested in all philanthropic enterprises, was a subscriber, and to it Whittier' s sister sent, without his knowl- edge, one of his poems. Thus began at once his literary and his political career. Garrison became interested in his new con- tributor, and the story has often been told of how the smart young editor drove out to the country home and Whittier was called 206 ^MTIOXAL LIFE AXD CULTURE in from the field to meet him. It is not quite a parallel to the stoiy of CincinnatuS; but important things came of the meet- ing. Thi'ough the long anti-slaveiy agitation that followed, Gamson and he were close friends, often working side by side. Two yeare after the meeting:. Garrison, who was then editing a temperance paper in Boston, seciu'ed for him the editorship of a political journal there and he was soon in the thick of the tariff discussion, supporting Clay against Jackson in the campaign of 1832. He wrote in one of his letters, ''I would rather have the memory of a Howard, a Wilberforce, and a Clarkson than the und^-ing fame of B\'ron; " and thouo;h he was thinking of Byron's spirit rather than of his poetrw the declaration shows clearly that his interests lay less in literature than in political and social reform. The editorial work begun at Boston was continued at Hart- ford, but proved too trying for his delicate health, and he re- turned to the farm. When the farm was sold four years later. he removed with his mother and sister to Amesbury. Meau- Env d "^liile, he contributed much verse to the newspapers. agaimt But Ms interest in politics more and more over- s avenj. shadowed his other interests. "I have knocked Pegasus on the head," he wrote, '• as a tanner does his bark- mill donkey when he is past service." He was elected to the legislature of Massachusetts, and there were excellent prospects of his being nominated for Congress. The anti-slavery agita- tion, however, was growing, fostered especially by G-arrison's Liherator which was started in 1831, and as Whittier was soon seen to be an ardent supporter of the unpopular cause, his political prospects faded. No selfish considerations could pre- vent a man of his character from speaking out when he felt that the nation was guilty of harboring a great wrong. Quaker though he was, the fighting spirit was strong in him. It could be read in his piercing, deep-set eyes, aud it can be read WHITTIER 207 in his verse. During his school days he had published anony- mously a poem called The Song of the Vermonters, 1779: — "Ho — all to the borders! Vermonters, come down, With your breeches of deerskin and jackets of brown; With your red woolen caps, and your moccasins, come, To the gathering summons of trumpet and drum." He disliked to acknowledge the authorship of so martial a poem, perhaps because he realized that the spirit of it was only too genuine. He flung himself into the new cause, heart and soul. He could not counsel taking up arms ; actual war, indeed, was a thing he dreaded. ' ' For one, I thank Grod that he has given me a deep and invincible horror of human butchery. " But all means short of war were to be tried. Both openly and pri- vately he helped with advice some of the great leaders of the North — Sumner, Seward, Grerrit Smith. Occasionally he took part in public meetings. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman, and was there when Pennsyl- vania Hall was burnt by a mob in protest against an anti-slav- ery convention. He was once pelted with eggs in the streets of Concord, New Hampshire, and thirty years afterward sent the coat which he had then worn, and which had been kept as a relic, to the needy freedmen of the South. But most of all he assisted the cause with his poetry, to which he turned once more with the inspiration born of a noble purpose. The bark- mill donkey was transformed into a knight's charger, and not even the rider himself ever sneered at it again. Here was the real beginning of his career. Such poems as he had already published — Moll Pitcher, a poem of New Eng- land legendary life (1832), and the more ambitious lYprZu^n ^^^^^ ilfe^ojie (1836)— were only conventional and almost worthless exercises in rhyme. It was the Ballads and the Anti- Slavery Poems of 1837 and 1838 that won 208 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE him a hearing and marked him as a poet with a mission — the accepted laureate of the Liberty party. Among the best of these poems were Toussaint U Ouverture, The Slave- Ships, Expostula- tioUj Tlie Hunters of Men, Stanzas for the Times, Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother, The Pastoral Letter. The last named was called forth by a letter written by the Congregational min- isters of Massachusetts in which they pleaded that the per- plexed subject of abolition be not brought up for debate in the churches. Whittier's poem was a scathing rebuke of what he conceived to be most unchristian conduct: — ' ' For, if ye claim the ' pastoral right ' To silence Freedom's voice of warning, And from your precincts shut the light Of Freedom's day around you dawning; ' ' If when an earthquake voice of power And signs in heaven and earth are showing That forth, in its appointed hour, The Spirit of the Lord is going ! And, with that Spirit, Freedom's light On kindred, tongue, and people breaking, Whose slumbering millions, at the sight, In glory and in strength are waking ! "What marvel, if the people learn To claim the right of free opinion ? What marvel, if at times they spurn The ancient yoke of your dominion ?" No stronger or clearer voice for freedom had been raised in American letters since Tom Paine nerved the soldiers at Valley Forge and Philip Freneau hurled his hot verses at the head of George the Third. After 1844 Whittier gave up editorial duties altogether and became an established literary worker in the quiet of his Ames- bury home. In 1847 he began to contribute regularly to the National Era, a weekly organ of the Anti-Slavery Society estab- HEN-RY WADSWORTH LONGFELI.OM' OLIVER ^^•EIs•r)ELL HOLMES JAMES RtJSSELL LOWELL JOMN GREENLEAK AV'HIXXIER WHITTIER 209 lislied at Washington, the paper, it may be remembered, in which Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's C'ai/Ji first appeared. Through this medium many of his better poems were published: Bar- clay of Ury, Angels of Buena Vista, Maud Muller, Burns, Mary Garvin, Ichahod. Ichahod — the meaning of the Hebrew name is "departed glory " — shows well the intensity of the passions aroused by the burning controversies of the time. The poem was published in 1850 shortly after Webster's Seventh of March Speech in support of Clay's compromise measures and the Fugitive Slave Law. In it the great leader was mourned as one already dead, since his weakness in that supreme moment Whittier could not but regard as dishonor and moral death. At such a time, he said, "if one spoke at all, he could only speak in tones of stem and sorrowful rebuke." Out of the war and its issues grew other strong poems, like the hymn Thy Will Be Done, or the ballad of Barbara Frietcliie, or the fervent and ecstatic La,us Deo that burst from him when the bells rang out for the passing of the constitutional amendment which abolished slavery and made ^ ' the cruel rod of war Blossom white with righteous law." But the voice that had grown to such strength and clarity in the cause of liberty was returning again and again to the more purely lyrical notes it had essayed in Legendary youth. Two things always appealed strongly to Whittier's poetic imagination. One is the slender body of legendary lore that has come down from the colonial days of New England, including a few tales of the trials and persecutions of the early Quakers. The Bridal of Pennacooh, Mai^y Garvin, The Ranger, Mahel Martin, Marguerite, Cassandra Southwick, Barclay of TJry, Shipper Iresons Ride, and How the Women Went from Dover are all ballads that have been thus 210 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE inspired. They show a wide range. There is the rude, saga- like \agor of Barclay of Ury (a tale, however, not of New England, but of the Scotch Quakers) ; and there is the homely picturesqueness of *' Old Fkid Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt By the women o' Marble'ead. " Mary Garvin and Mabel Martin touch tender chords of sympa- thy. Marguerite is as pathetic as any poem in our literature, and Tlie Ranger is almost as melodious as any. The other favorite field of Whittier's imaginative exercise was the humble rural life in which his private interests were earliest centred. Lays of My Home, Songs of Labor, Home New England j^aUads, were the titles of some of his successive Idyls. ' volumes. He had himself learned the shoemaker's craft, he had driven cattle, he had worked in the cornfields, and he turned into brave-hearted song the duties and joys of the shoemakers, the drovers, and the buskers. He stands almost as a patron saint to that little man, the ' ' barefoot boy with cheek of tan." He felt, with the poor voter on election day, the full meaning of republican equality: — " Up ! clouted knee and ragged coat ! A man's a man to-day ! " If it was Robert Burns who woke the poet within him, it was because his heart beat with kindred sympathies and ideals, and the question which he asks of Burns, — " Who sweetened toil like him, or paid To love a tribute dearer ? " — might almost be answered with his own name. Doubtless, in the consideration of work of this nature, one is too easily be- guiled into praise and needs to remind himself of Matthew Arnold's protest against the immoderate estimation of Burns. WHITTIER 211 But the critic might well forego his office for a moment in the presence of these idyls of Whittier, in which the simple but universal emotions of the natural man find such simple and natural expression. Surely it seems that the lingering mem- ory of youth's shy romance could call forth no more ten- derly wistful cry than My Playmate, or that time can never take the charm from A Sea Dream, or 31aud Midler, or Tell- ing the Bees, or that poem, In School-Days, which Dr. Holmes cried over and Matthew Arnold himself praised as perfect. Whittier never married. The little romances of his youth slipped quietly into memories and imparted a finer tone to the poetry of his mature years. The passions of his Behgwus manhood were expended in the cause for which he labored, and his affections were given up to his home, and to his mother and sister while they lived. But there was a stronger strain than all these, the strain of devotion to the simple religious faith he cherished and of love for the G-reat Love which he saw ruling the destinies of men and nations. We must therefore add to the three classes of poems we have already described — the poems of freedom, the legendary bal- lads, and the New England idyls — a fourth, the religious poems and hymns. That Whittier knew something of the trials of faith and the heart- shaking questions that assailed the man in the land of Uz is shown by his dramatic My Soul and I, and the yearning Questions of Life : — '* I am : how little more I know ! Whence came I? Whither do I go? A centred self, which feels and is ; A cry between the silences ; A shadow-birth of clouds at strife With sunshine on the hills of life." But these were passing moods. The full confession of his faith — a confession that leaves no place for doubt or despon- 212 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE dency — is rather to be sought in such later poems as My Psalm, Trust, Revelation, The Over-Heart, The Eternal Good- ness. It was after the war. and after the sad break in his domes- tic life caused by the death of his sister Elizabeth, that Whit- tier's mind set like an ebbing tide toward the sea of ^'Snoic-Bound ^^^^ memories ; and then came the composition ''The Tent on of Snow-Bound, an idyl of winter and of home- 1867^'"''^' ^^^ ^ ^^^ Arcadian age of New England. Even for a second generation of readers, description or praise of it seems almost superfluous, so securely has this poem, with its simple rustic pictures and its deep religious faith, maintained itself in the popular afliection. It bids fair to take rank with such classics as The Cotter's Saturday Xight and The Deserted Village; in America it is to-day more widely read than either. The Tent on tJie Beach of the year following was another large composition, but less coherent. It was such a sheaf of stories as an aging poet likes to gather, and makes a kind of companion piece to Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. For just a quarter of a century longer Whittier was spared, to complete mam* other volumes and separate poems. He would not venture to visit that • • night- mare confusion of the world's curiosity shop," the Centennial Exposition ^^■^^.^ of 1876 at Philadelphia, but he wrote the stately hymn that was sung at its opening. His last years were spent quietly with his relatives at various places in the Essex County neighborhood. He died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. September 7, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age ; and Holmes was the only one of the great New England group left to mourn his departure : — " Best loved and saintliest of our singing train, Earth's noblest tributes tothv name belong. WHITTIER 213 A lifelong record closed without a stain, A blameless memory shrined in deathless song. ' ' Whittier's rise to national fame was comparatively slow. He never obtruded himself as a poet, nor made bids for critical appreciation. Those who were most deeply Bard and interested in the abolition of slavery and who Philanthropist. -^ came to know him early and well, scarcely thought of him as a poet but rather as a rhyming champion of the cause they had at heart. But he gradually endeared himself to the hundreds who read poetry for its own sake, and by almost imperceptible degrees, and especially after the estab- lishment of the Atlantic Monthly and his contributions to it, he came to be generally recognized as a worthy member of the New England group who already counted him one of themselves. Finally, the publication of Snow-Bound with its sustained beauty and intense human quality set him quite out of the ranks of occasional singers and left no doubt of his place. His reputation has grown steadily ever since ; and it seems likely to endure, for it rests upon a genuineness that is above all suspicion. However much we may talk of the genuine- ness of Bryant or Longfellow or Lowell, that of Whittier is seen to be of a still finer strain. It was equalled only by Emerson's. And Whittier got closer to the hearts of the people by being free from Emerson's skyey philosophy. If Longfellow was a poet for the people, Whittier was a poet of the people. He was content to use the verj^ dialect of the people he knew and loved, and protested to his publisher that in that dialect war and law^ Martha and swarthy., 'pasture and faster, were good rhymes. Uncultured he might be called; he did not care. He looked at life through no medium of tradition or false education. Standing in what Carlyle would call a close first relation to men and things, his were the ideal conditions of a bard. 214 NATIONAL LIFE AND CtlLTURE Moreover, he brought to those conditions the sufficient gifts, first, the native impulse, and second, the power of song. He was a poet, not by choice and cultivation, as Longfellow, nor by fitful inspiration, as Bryant, Emerson, and Lowell, but always and uncontrollably, by high compulsion. His num- bers were never studied. Like Emerson, he sang instinct- ively in the primitive four-beat measure ; only, rhythmical and musical language came to him far more easily than to Emer- son. He who idealized humble life and toil like Burns, sang with the lyric ease of Burns. The slight valuation he set upon his gifts must itself go to his credit. Bard though he was, he refused to regard himself as such, steadfastly putting life first and poetry second. Thus he came, in mature manhood, to devote his whole energj^ to the eradica- tion of our national crime. It was poetry's loss, possibly, and may account for the fact that we have scarcely any single work of magnitude from his pen; for the fruit of this productive period of his life is to be sought in our social and not in our literary history. The literature that he produced then we must to-day account of minor value: no number of Ichahods or of Pastoral Letters can outweigh one Marguerite or one Sea- Dream. Yet Whittier himself would have been the last to deplore the loss. That his poetry written with a purpose was of less literary value than his products of calmer art he would acknowledge, rejoicing still that his life had come to be domi- nated by such a noble purpose. We have only to read his Proem to discover the modesty of his own claims so far as rank in literature is concerned. He was satisfied if he could be written down as one who loved his fellow-men, one, in the words of the prelude of Among the HiUs, who gave his prayers and strength to lift manhood up " Through broader culture, finer manners, love, And reverence, to the level of the hills." LOWELL 215 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1SW-18D1 Of the writers of first importance whom we have thus far treated, only Thoreau was born later than 1809. With James Russell Lowell, whose birth fell on the twenty- second of February, 1819, we are carried forward a full decade. But Lowell began his work so early and was so closely associated with the other great New England writers that he must be regarded as virtuall}" their contemporar}^, a junior member of the group. One part of his fame, and in all probability the most enduring part, belongs to the ante-bellum period. The early surroundings of Whittier and of Lowell present nearly as striking a contrast as the conditions of New England life could aflford. The two men were alike in being ences. descended from families of sterling worth, but in other respects Lowell was far more favored, having all the means and incentives to culture which Whittier lacked. The Lowell famil}^, in its several branches, has long been prominent in Massachusetts. The city of Lowell was named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle of the poet, who introduced cotton manufacturing into the United States; the Lowell Institute at Boston, with its free lectures on religion, science, and art, was the gift of Fran- cis Cabot's son; the poet's grandfather drafted the anti- slavery clause in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights; his father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, was for more than fifty years a minister of Boston; his elder brother, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, and his sister, Mrs. Putnam, both became writers of some note. James Russell, the youngest son of the family, was born at Cambridge, in the beautiful home known as Elmwood, and lived and died there. In this he was more fortunate than most Americans, Avho, said Holmes, are "all cuckoos — we make our homes in the nests of other birds." The house at Elmwood 216 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE was, like Craigie House, an historic place of Revolution- ary memories ; and the secluded, ample grounds made a fine rural refuge for a youth of poetic fancies. To understand fully what this home meant to the poet, both in youth and in maturity, one should read his Indian Summer Reverie and Under tlie Willows. Nor was there only wealth for the nature- lover out of doors ; there were also treasures for the lover of books within. The Lowell library was the accumulation of several generations of scholarly men, and Lowell, familiar almost from infancy with books that Whittier even in the studious leisure of his old age never looked into, used to fall asleep to the reading of Spenser and the old English dramatists. Possibly these advantages carried with them disadvantages. Lowell in his youth was shy, over-sensitive, and perhaps over- proud. Certainly it is hard to discover in his early letters the manliness and simplicity into which he finally matured. He was sent to Harvard as a matter of course — was a sophomore there in 1836, when Longfellow succeeded Ticknor as Professor of Romance Languages, and heard Emerson's address on The Amer- ican Scholar in the fall of 1837. In the last year of his resi- dence he was one of the editors of the college magazine, Harvardiana. He was elected class poet ; but for some delin- quency or offence, about which mystery seems still to hang, he was "rusticated" by the Faculty. That meant that he was banished to Concord to finish his studies privately, and that he could not be present on Class Day or read his poem, though he was allowed to return on Commencement Day and take his degree. Naturally he conceived a boyish dislike for Concord and for the Transcendentalism with which he came into some contact there. Emerson he regarded as ' 'a good-natured man in spite of his doctrines." At the time of his graduation he was quite as undecided LOWELL 217 upon a "career" as Longfellow had been, and was apparently without Longfellow's bias toward scholarship and literature. He actually thought of all the professions in turn and also of mercantile life. He studied law, and indulged for a while in the delight of paying office-rent, but never really practiced. He did a little aimless contributing to magazines, and he published an unimportant volume of poems, A Year's Life, in 1841. The real turning-point of his life seems to have been his marriage to Maria White in 1844. She was a woman of beauty and of culture, and was possessed moreover of a sensitively humane spirit. The anti-slavery movement, which was just then making rapid headway, engaged her sympathies, and, possibly through hers, Lowell's. The man who in his class poem had ridiculed the abolitionists, was soon found writing on their side; and the history of Lowell from this time on is the his- tory of an earnest, large-hearted, broad-minded man — a poet, a scholar, a statesman, and a patriot. The four years from 1844 to 1848 were among the most productive and happy in Lowell's life. In the first of these years he published a second volume of poems, this irsf iterary ^^j^q attractinoj some favorable attention. Then, Period. ^ ' under the influence of the public excitement aroused by the admission of Texas into the Union, a movement gener- ally regarded as aiming at the extension of slave territory, he wrote The Present Crisis, revealing at once both the moral earnestness and the poetic fire that were latent within him : — " Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side." It was indeed a "dolorous and jarring blast," so charged with indignation as to arouse the most apathetic reader in its own day and so informed with the spirit of righteousness that its echoes ring yet :— 218 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE " Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." The two great products of these years, however, were The BigJow Papers and The Vision of Sir Launfal. The Mexican War followed upon the annexation of Paperf^'^^^ Texas, and all who held Lowell's sentiments of justice and honor were more indignant than ever. In the summer of 1846 a regiment was raised in Boston, and Lowell was moved by the sight of a recruiting officer on the streets to write what he called "a squib" and send it to the Boston Courier : — " Thrash away, you'll hev to rattle On them kittle-drums o' yourn, — 'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle Thet is ketched with mouldy corn." In keeping with its Yankee dialect, it was signed "Hosea Biglow." Other poems of a similar character followed, and they proved so popular that in 1848 Lowell issued the series in a volume, with numerous interesting prefaces and letters purporting to come from one "Parson Wilbur," who played the role of friend and adviser to the young rustic poet, Hosea. The third number, "What Mr. Robinson Thinks," which grew out of a little passage in local politics, had, upon its first appearance, run like wildfire over the reading public of America, and, we are told, of England. Everywhere could be heard the refrain — '' But John P. Robinson he Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. " Another happy hit was "The Pious Editor's Creed," with its declaration — *' I don't believe in princerple, But oh, I du in interest." LOWELL 210 But the hardest knocks were reserved for the war and slav- ery. Lowell's quick native sense of humor — for these papers belong also very distinctly to the literature of humor — did him double service. It afforded an outlet for his feelings, leav- ing him personally even-tempered and happy in most trying times ; and it enabled him to reach an audience that remained unmoved by the sober appeals of men like Glarrison, Phillips, and Whittier. People who, with no particular sympathy for his sentiments, read the Blgloio Papers for the wit and humor that were in them, came often upon passages that compelled them to stop and think : — '* Ef you take a sword an' dror it, An' go stick a feller thru, Guv'ment aint to answer for it, God'll send the bill to you." Such doctrine was sometimes called unpatriotic, but Lowell scarcely needed to answer that charge. Hosea Biglow was thoroughly loyal ; as Parson Wilbur jestingly put it, ' ' In the plowing season, no one has a deeper share in the well-being of the country than he," It was patriotism with conscience added. The conscience of Puritan New England was speaking out, just as it had always spoken, and it was indisputably mak- ing itself heard. A second series of the papers was written during the Civil War, and contained, along with much of the same piercing satire as marked the first series, the beautiful " Suthin in the Pastoral Line." Among the prefatory mat- ter there was published with both series ( revised in the second) that unique picture of Yankee life known as Tlie Courtin\ which an Edinburgh critic has called "one of the freshest bits of pastoral in the language." From The Biglow Papers to The Vision of Sir Laiuifal is a far cry. But Lowell, like Whittier, could turn from the heat and strife of public affairs to the solace of pure poetry, and 220 iSTATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURJE " build a bridge from Dreamland for his lay." One of the most spiritually significant of the legends that have come down from the early days of Christianity, namely. "T'^eFtsiono/ the Quest of the Holy Grail, the cup of emerald from Sir Launfai:' i- , ^ which Christ drank at the last supper, gave Lowell an inspiration, and within forty-eight hours, so we are told, the poem of knightly aspiration and brotherl}^ love was written. The subject was handled freely ; there was not much attempt to preserve the legendary atmosphere. Holmes found fault with the dandelions and the Baltimore oriole '-in the tableau of the old feudal castle." But the freshness, ^igor, and beauty of the poem have been universally praised. It makes one think of the rapturous song of Shelley's skylark that ' ' from heaven or near it" pours his full heart " In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." * Holmes might well forget, as many years later he declared he forgot, -that Lowell was ' • a wit and a humorist, a critic and an essayist," in the presence of such buoyant, palpitating poetry. A third work, published in this same year 1848, but of a much lower order of merit, was A Fable for Critics. It was a long criticism in rhyme of the American writers who ff',-f'^ ^f were then prominent, and it was so penetrating, so illuminating, and so witty, that it is constantly quoted still. To say that it was always temperate or just would be going too far, and we should be on our guard against giv- ing too much weight to its criticisms. We must remember that Lowell was still a young man under thirty, writing in this case anonj'mously, with every temptation to be witty and satirical. He over-praised Willis, as did almost everybodj' else; he could not fairly estimate men without humor, like ♦Professor Wendell, however, in his Literary History of Amejica, says: "One of the traits for which you must search Lowell's volumes long is lyrical spon- taneity." LOWELL 221 Bryant and Cooper; he said altogether too little of Poe, and altogether too much of Margaret Fuller (" Miranda"), whom he scored unmercifully. But his appreciation of Hawthorne before Hawthorne's greatest work was done was much to his credit, and many of his happily-phrased estimates, like that of Emerson as ''a G-reek head on right Yankee shoulders," de- serve to be long remembered. Lowell's wife died in 1853 and he married again in 1857. In the meantime he had made several trips to Europe, and upon his return from the second trip he entered upon LUerary what might be called the second fruitful period of Period. j^.g YiiQ^ He was appointed to the Smith Profess- orship of Romance Languages at Harvard upon Longfellow's resignation, and assumed his duties there, which extended over a period of twenty years, in 1856. In the spring of 1857 he attended a memorable dinner-party given by the pub- lisher, Mr. Moses D. Phillips, and his "literary man," Francis H. Underwood, who were proposing to establish a literary magazine. The arrangement of the table at that party was as follows: Phillips Emerson Longfellow Holmes Motley Lowell Cabot Underwood The next autumn the magazine was duly launched — the third important enterprise of this kind in the annals of Boston pub- lishing. The North American Review., it will be remembered, was established there in 1815, and the short-lived Dial in 1840. The new magazine was named, at the suggestion of Dr. Holmes, The Atlantic Monthly; Lowell was given the editorship; and within six months it was declared, on high authority, to be at that time ' ' unquestionably the best maga- 222 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE zine in the English language." It represented far more than talent — it represented tbe best literary genius that the Atlantic states could boast, and that means the high- est literary genius that America has yet produced. After four years Lowell resigned his editorship to James T. Fields, and a little later became joint editor with Charles Eliot Norton of The North American Review; but he continued to make contri- butions to the Atlantic, both in verse and in prose. At the be- ginning of the war his touching Washers of the Shroud appeared in it, and the second series of The Biglow Papers was published in its pages. The interest with which he followed the events of those terrible years was deepened and saddened by the loss of three nephews who fought on the side of the Union. There are pathetic references to them, both in The Biglow Papers and in the introduction of his essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. At the close of the war, Lowell composed, in another white heat of poetic ardor, and recited at the Harvard Commemoration, his uneven but lofty Commemoration Ode, with its noble tribute to Abraham Lincoln, ' ' Our Martyr- Chief, " and its fervent, benediction- like close, beginning — "Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! " But the chief product of this second period of Lowell's activity is to be sought in his prose essaj^s. Late in life he was ripening into that scholarship of which he had seemed so careless in youth but for which his youth had been such an excellent preparation. In 1864 he pub- lished Fireside Travels; in 1870 and 1876 the two series of Among My Boohs; and in 1871 My Study Windows, — so named (the name was given by the publishers) perhaps because the study windows look not only in upon books but also out upon the garden and the busy world beyond. Most of the essays are critical and find their themes in English and foreign literature — Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Emerson. But there LOWELL 223 is a considerable range outside of literature, and the ordinary reader is likely to care more for the discursive essays on gen- eral themes, such as My Garden Acquaintance^ A Good Word for Winter, and Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. It would be impossible to select from them any single passage that would give a fair idea of either their substance or their manner, so diversified i§ the one and so mutable the other. But to those who would know Lowell at his most centralized and best, — Lowell the man rather than Lowell the scholar, — the opening of the essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners may be commended as revealing something of the interior charm to which occasionally, thrusting aside more showy qualities, he ventured to give expression. The field of Lowell's usefulness was to widen still further. As poet, as essayist, and as editor, he had served the cause both of American nationality and of American literature, and he was called upon to continue this double serv- ice in another capacity. In 1877 he was appointed Minister to Spain, where Irving had been sent more than thirty years before; and in 1880 he was transferred to the court of St. James. There he distinguished himself by tact, courtesy, and wisdom, and won the admiration of the English people. The disinterested character of their admiration was shown by their hearty applause of an act that called for no little courage from him — the delivery at Birmingham of an address on Democ- racy. Critics there had been, on this side of the water, out- spoken in their censure of Lowell's friendliness for the English aristocracy, but they were silenced by this address. It was the mature declaration of his political faith, breathing the purest Americanism, and it constituted a fitting culmination to a life of consistent loyalty. Returning to America in 1885, Lowell continued to deliver addresses, both at the Lowell Institute, and on public occasions 224 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE at various places when his strength would permit. He wrote poems, too, and published in 1888 Heartsease and Rue, a final volume. He died in 1891, at the age of seventy- two. On the publication of his letters by Professor C. E. Norton two years later— the most charming letters that American literature can yet show— something of the Lowell that was known to his friends and companions was revealed to the wider public, to whom his name was already as famiUar as Longfellow's and Emerson's. In quantity, Lowell's poetry compares pretty evenly with Whittier's, considerably exceeding the meagre product of Bry- ant or Poe, but falling short of the fecundity of Eis Poetry. j^^^gf eHo^, In character, too, it occupies a place between the narrow, exalted verse of the two former poets, and the easy charm and universal popularity of the latter's. Lowell was widely popular, almost from the first. The maga- zines were quite as eager to publish his work as they were to publish Longfellow's. But that he satisfied some temporary craving of the people rather than any perennial hunger is shown by the fact that his collected and reprinted works never sold so widely. Longfellow's books lay on every family table, and the family, moreover, was familiar with their contents. Lowell's name was almost as well known, but his books not so intimately. On the other hand, while readers of more dis- cernment were inevitably attracted by his many masterly qual- ities of both mind and heart, it cannot be said that he ever made upon them quite the same depth and intensity of impres- sion that was made by Bryant and by Poe, or even by Whittier at his best. The variety and the high quality of his work m other fields than poetry, however, have helped him to a position of greater conspicuousness than theirs. In any list of Amer- ican writers given off-hand, Lowell's name is pretty sure to be found near the first. LOWELL 225 Although, as just intimated, few of Lowell's minor poems have fixed themselves indelibly in the minds of readers, all will concede to them sterling qualities — the devout worship of nature, for instance, that informs such poems as To the Dande- lion and Pictures from Appledore, the human tenderness and pathos of Tlie First Snoio-Fall and After the Burial, the G-reek beauty of Rhcecus, or the equally compelling if more modern charm of a poem like Hehe: — "I saw the twinkle of white feet, I saw the flash of robes descending ; Before her ran an influence fleet That bowed my heart like barley bending." Doubtless Lowell's pure poetry — and by this is meant poetry written for poetry's sake — is found at its best in the longer Vision of JSir Launfal. It is a poem such as a man must write in youth or not at all — a poem of boundless faith and high ideals, and all-including worship of beauty and purity. And the poem is for youth: teachers know that it is a positive moral force in our schools to-day. We are scarcely willing to accept it, however, as a product of high poetic genius. It is conceived so much in the artistic spirit, makes so much of form, that we cannot, as in the case of Emerson's Threnody, waive the tests of art; and yet it is defective in art. It is marred by haste and carelessness, it has faulty figures and discordant lines. It was not to be expected, perhaps, that Dr. Holmes should take kindl}' to its metre — the "rattlety bang sort of verse," he called it, that was revived in Coleridge's Christahel. But Christahel is everywhere musical; it contains no such lines as " Hang my idle armor up on the wall," — "And through the dark arch a charger sprang," — "And the wanderer is welcome to the hall." This last line may be read in three, five, or six feet, but scarce- ly in four, the number it should have. Even the first four lines 226 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE of the famous description of June, wiiich as a whole is scarcely to be surpassed for intoxicating rapture, are confusing in im- agery and unsatisfying in rhythm. Fine as the poem is, it is not quite fine enough. It needed, in addition to its genuine inspiration, the perfect art of a Tennyson, and it lacks that art. Lowell was confessedly indolent in such matters, but it seems more than likeh' that the defect was an inherent one ; he never acquired the perfect art. Late in life he wrote his longest and most ambitious poem. The Cathedral. It was as distinctive as a poem could well be — no one but Lowell could have written it. It was brilliant, profound, stimulating; but it was over- weighted with thought, and the adornments of wit were made to supply the place of the adornments of art. Besides, the earh' spontaneit}" was missing. At its best the poem was sensuous and even passionate, but it was almost never fresh or simple. Emerson, who was asked to review it, refused, seeing too clearly that the Muses' well had ceased to flow and that the poet '-had to pump." G-reatest after all are his occasional poems — The Bigloio Pa- j3e?'5 and the Commemoration Ode. Lowell had a rare knack of penetrating to the heart of men and events. He saw the uni- versal beneath the local, the eternal beneath the temporal. And so out of a country courtship he made a national poem, and created lasting types of character out of an unscrupulous politi- cian, a cowardly Congressman, a fawning candidate, a time- serving editor. In spite of the fact that he was a scholar he almost paralleled the achievement of Burns and became the mouth-piece of a clan. The BigJoio Papers are Yankee to the core, perpetuating the dialect with its racy idiom, and the character with its shrewd wit and homely wisdom. As satire they rank with the best in literature, and the}' rise above most satire in the manliness of their tone and the sacredness of their cause. The Commemoration Ode^ too, though marred by some LOWELL 227 of the same defects as The Vision of Sir Launfal^ is the best poem evoked by the Civil War and its consequences. It is Northern, yet national, — patriotic with a patriotism chastened by sorrow into something inexpressibly noble. Lowell's abundant wit and his broad and sufficient, even if not remarkably deep or- sound, scholarship, show to best advantage in his prose. He read much and remem- bered all, and could marshal his knowledge at any moment to serve his immediate ends. The richness of his prose, both in substance and style, is amazing. The variety of knowledges he lays under contribution for the illustration and adornment of his ideas exceeds, one is almost tempted to say, that of Macaulay and Carlyle combined. There is one sentence in his essay on Swinburne's Tragedies that draws on G-reek, Latin, philology, ps3''chology, optics, inebriation, and Mississippi steamboat navigation. The sentence just before it has a tech- nical term from metrics, the sentence before that a figure from free-masonry, and the sentence before that a technical term from the Old French law. Every one who knows Lowell's prose know^s, too, that this is scarcely an extreme instance. The allusions are often so profuse as to discourage all but very well-informed readers, while for those who can understand and enjoy them the reading is turned into a kind of intellectual debauch. Allusion is packed within allusion, metaphor within metaphor, like a Chinese wooden-egg. Or, to change the figure, his fancies loom up one behind the other like the roofs, towers, and steeples of a distant city. You never know when you have found all that is hidden in one of Lowell's pages. Again, his Qtj\Q is a st3'le of infinite paraphrase. The com- monest ideas take on most fanciful disguises and seldom does anything reappear without changing its form. Holland gin becomes a "Batavian elixir," a negro minstrel an "Ethi- opian serenader;" a coat of whitewash is a " candent baptism ;" 228 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE a lying tramp is a "beggar." a ••vagrant." a •• heroic man on an imaginary journey," a "seeker of the unattainable," an "abridged edition of the Wandering Jew;" the barber who makes a slip 6f the shears " oversteps the boundaries of strict tonsorial prescription and makes a notch through which the phrenological developments can be distinctly seen"! More- over, Lowell sees the humorous side of everything, and wit spark- les everywhere — sometimes indeed to the offence of good taste. He is an inveterate punster. It would be difficult to find anywhere else in the same space as large a number of good puns as may be found in his published letters. But when we find the same sort of thing in serious essays, we cannot ap- prove. Wit is for the passing moment and looks ghastly graven on a monument. True, these are lordly, generous qualities, and they have the additional grace of coming unsought; for Lowell does not strive to be affluent — he cannot avoid being so. Mr. Stedman has somewhere said, speaking of poetry, that •• Lowell has sprinkled the whole subject with diamond dust." So he has sprinkled everything: to be spendthrift is his function. But while we envy him his brilliant gifts we cannot help wishing that he had learned and exercised greater restraint, or that he had cultivated more sedulously certain finer qualities. Now and then he curbs his high spirits and tempers his exuberance with a quiet, pensive strain. But in general the temptations to adornment and to mirth are too strong for him. The result shows in that want of fine texture and harmonious tone for which his work is often criticised. Nothing, for example, could well be better than the first paragraph of the essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners; and, so far as a sense for harmony of style is concerned, few things could be worse than the four- teenth paragraph of the same essay. The balances of dignity, refinement, grace, pathos, and all the qualities that make for LOWELL 229 beauty and elevation, are too often wanting. Tn these things the great English humorists of his century, Lamb and De Quincey, are both his superiors. Somewhat similar defects attach to the substance of his essays. The discursive essays, those that pretend to little beyond entertainment^ make some of the most delightful reading in modern letters. It is impossible to resist their varied charms, all going back to the author's magnetic personalit3^ And much the same is true of the more serious essays. But these latter suffer in their lack of ceutrality, of a guiding principle and a definite purpose. Lowell's best poetry came of profound con- victions ; but when later in life he turned to the writing of prose, he was not inspired by the same sort of convictions — he wrote as a professional journalist, rather because he found that he could than because he felt that he must. Onty perhaps, in one or two addresses of his last years, like Democracy , is it possible to discern behind the written or spoken utterance the kind of consecration that has lifted into such clear light the names of Carlj^le, Emerson, Ruskin, and Arnold. His criticism at its best is constantly in danger of degenerating into witti- cism; at its worst it is unsympathetic and unsound, as when it confronts certain pet aversions like Petrarch, Swinburne, or Thoreau. To quarrel with the method, however, is not to condemn the man. Lowell rarely professes to set up standards — he will not sink the poet in the critic. If we will accept him for what he is, a kind of eighteenth century critic fortified with nineteenth century learning, browsing in the fields of literature when and where he pleases, resolved to like with a zest and to dislike with a zest, and even to trample under foot what is not to his taste, we shall get our profit from him. His insight always keeps pace with his sympathy. A late writer on style, Mr. Walter Raleigh, has said: "The main business 230 KATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE of criticism, after all, is not to legislate, but to raise the dead." Just so far as this is true, Lowell is a great critic. The writers whom he loves he makes live again. Taken all iu all, there- fore, as critic and as poet, we know prett}' clearl}' how to esti- mate him. — not, perhaps, as our greatest scholar, certainly not as our greatest man of letters, but as our best example of the two combined. Or if Longfellow and Holmes be allowed to share in this pre-eminence, we m.ixy yet add to Lowell's credit a devotion to national and moral principles like that of Whittier, which joins to the breadth of his character a depth the}' can scarcely claim. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, lSOO-1894 Oliver Wendell Holmes was another native of Cambridge, who, however, opened his eyes upon the beauty of its elms nearly ten years before Lowell. He was born in the prolific first decade of the century, — in the year 1809, made Nativity. memorable on both sides of the Atlantic by the births of Lincoln, Poe, Tennj'son, Darwin, and Gladstone. His grandfather was a captain in the ' ' Old French War" and a surgeon in the Revolutionary army. His father, Abiel Holmes, was a Congregational minister at Cambridge and an author in a modest way. On his mother's side — the Wendells — he was of Dutch descent. On this side, too, he counted among his ancestors that "tenth Muse" who sprang up in America nearl}' two centuries before, Mistress Anne Bradstreet; but as she was onl}' one of his sixty-four great- great-great-great-grandparents, the Bradstreet poetry that flowed in his veins, thin to begin with, must have been but the weakest trace — a homeopathic high-dilution that the Doctor, with all his faith in heredity, would probably have laughed to scorn. There is almost nothing of note to be recorded of his boy- HOLMES 231 hood, nor indeed of any period of bis life. He was brought up very simply in the old gambrel-roofed house, half Youth and parsonage, half farmhouse, described in The Poet at the Breakfast Ta6?e; heard the rustic Yankee dialect used by the hired "help" of the family— "nater" for nature, "haowsen" for houses, and " musicianers " for musi- cians; read the New England Primer^ Pilgrim^ s Progress^ Pope's Homer, and such poems of Gray, Cowper, Bryant, Drake, etc. , as were to be found in school books; showed some in- genuity in working with tools; went to a "dame's school " first, and then to Phillips Academy at Andover (see The School-Boy)^ whence he should have become a minister like his father but did not; and finally to Harvard, where he was undecided whether to look toward "law or physick," but very decided that author- ship was not suited to that particular meridian. The class of '29, in which he graduated, while not to be compared for liter- ary genius with the Bowdoin class of '25, was one of Harvard's most famous classes. James Freeman Clarke, over whom Holmes was chosen class poet, was one of its members, and the future author of America was another — the youngster whom "fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith." The class not long after began to hold annual dinners, and Holmes was regularly called upon to furnish an ode for the occasion. It was on the thirtieth anniversary that he wrote and recited the familiar poem, ' ' Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys." After graduation he studied law for a while and then turned to medicine and surgery — a choice which made it advisable for him to spend some time in the hospitals of Europe. He accordingly passed two years in study at Paris, travelling a little about Europe during vacations. The year 1836 found him equipped with his doctor's degree and established in an office at Boston. Two years later he received an appointment to the Professorship of Anatomy at Dartmouth College, and he 232 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE lectured there for several terms. In 1840 he married. In 1847 he was appointed Professor of An atom}' and Ph3'siology in the Harvard Medical School, and he remained on the Har- vard Faculty for thirty-five years. As he gave instruction also in microscopy and ps3'chology he used to sslj that he occupied, not a professor's chair, but a whole settee. In these duties he found his life work, less as a practitioner than as an investigator, teacher, and writer in his chosen profession. Some of his contributions to medical science were of the highest value, one in particular establishing the contagious character of a certain fever. Until the launching of the Atlantic MontliJy. well after the middle of the century, literature played but a minor part in Holmes's life. He delivered a course of lectures on the English poets before the Lowell Institute, and Early Verse, he also went out Occasionally, like Emerson and Lowell, on the Lyceum platform. In his college days he had written verses for girls' albums, and he had been class poet; but it was only in the j'ear after his graduation, when he was asked by the undergraduates to contribute to a college paper, that his verses went into type, and then, he says, he had his first attack of "lead-poisoning." It was in September of that year, 1830, that he chanced to read in a newspaper of the proposal of the Navy Department to disman- tle the frigate Constitution, which had done such good service in 1812, but which was then lying, old and unseaworth}', in the navy yard at Charleston. He wrote at once with a lead- pencil on a scrap of paper the stirring and indignant stanzas. Old Ironsides, and sent them to the Boston Daily Advertiser. They were copied in all the papers of the country, and the feeling aroused was so strong that the Secretary of the Nav}', who of course had been guilty of nothing but a want of senti- ment, allowed the "tattered ensign " to remain and the frig- HOLMES 233 ate was converted into a school-ship. And thus Oliver Wendell Holmes, a meek-minded, modest-mannered, under- sized law student just turned twenty-one, became measurably noted as a poet. Six years later, when he began his medical prac- tice in Boston, he published a small volume of verse, containing of course Old Ironsides, together with a few such ever-delightful poems as The Dilemma and J/?/ Aunt, and best of all. The Last Leaf. This was the year of Emerson's Nature, the year be- fore Hawthorne's Twice- T
/ Lost Youth, 191, 202. My Study Windoivs, 222, 227-229, "Nasby', Petroletoi V." See Locke. Nation, The, 296, National Era, 147, 208. Nature, 159, 233. INDEX 361 Neal, John, 61. Nearer Home, 248. Negro Melodies, 248. Newcomb, Simon, 306. New England Nun, A, 300. Neiu England Primer, 19,25, 231. Newman, John Henry (1801-1890), 164. New York Evening Post, 104. New York Home Journal, 98. New York Mirror. 98, 124, 254. North American Pevieiv, 93, 102, 221 222. Norton, Charles Eliot, 242-3, 222, 224, 247. O'Brien, Fitz- James, 316. Captain, My Captain, 258, 262. Old Creole Days, 303. Old Folks at Home, 248. Old Ironsidesy 232, 240. Old Oaken Bucket, 99. Omar Khayyam (d. 1123), 165. Onioo, ]28. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 222, 223, 228. O'Reilly, John Boyle, 311. Ossian (about 3d century), 253, 258. OssoLi, Margaret Fuller (oe^so li), 155, 134, 153, 154, 221. Otis, James, 39, 40. Outcasts of Poker Flat, 281. Outlook, The, 291. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- ing, 263. Overland Monthly, 279. Page, Thomas Nelson, 319, 302. Paine, Thomas, 41, 208. Palfrey, John G. (pawKfri), 187. Pan in Wall Street, 290. Parker, Gilbert, 321. Parker, Theodore, 150, 152- 154. Parkman, Francis, 188-9, 267. Parsons, Thomas W., 242-3, 247. Parton, James, 187. Party and Patronage, 251. Pastoral Letter, The, 208, 214. Pater, Walter (1839-1894), 126. Paulding, James K., 62, 54, 63, 65, 77, 98 Payne, John Howard, 99, 245 248. Peck, Samuel Mi n turn, 313. Percival, James G. , 99. Perkins, William Rufus, 314. Petrarch (1304-1374), 76, 229. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, see Ward. Phillips, Wendell, 185-6, 162, 219, 250, 251. Piatt, John James, 313, 285, 296. Piatt, Sarah M. B., 315, 285. PiERPONT, John, 94. Pilot, The, 87, 81. PiNKNEY, EdW^ARD C, 99. Pioneers, The, 78, 81, 85, 86. Plain Language from Truthful James, 279. Plato (b. c. 429-347), 54, 89, 151, 168, 179. Plutarch (50-120?), 100. PoE, Edgar Allan, 112-127, 47, 54, 60, 63, 98, 111, 130, 131, 141, 142, 143, 191, 200, 201, 203, 221, 224, 230, 23 ^>, 244, 248, 254, 263, 268, 270, 272, 274, 294, 295. Poet at the Breakfast Table, 231, 236. Poets of America, 290. Poor Richard's Almanac, 33. Poor Voter on Election Dav, 210. Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 17, 231. Prescott, William Hickling, 188, 71, 74, 127. Present Crisis, The, 217. Prince, Thomas, 22. Prince of Parthia,2i. ' Professor at the Breakfast Table, 236. Prophecy, A, 46. Prue and 1, 250. Psalm of Life, 193, 194. Purloined Letter, The, 119. Questions of Life, 211. 362 INDEX Rabelais (14S3-1553). 27S. Radcliffe, Ann (1754-1823), .'8. Rain upon the Roof, The, 248. Ealeigh, Walter (of University of Glasgow), 229. Ramona, 284. Raven, The, 115, 118, 124, 125. Read, Thomas Buchaxax, 244-5, 247. Realf, Richard (Ralph), 313, 285, Reese, Lizette W., 313. Reply to Hayne, 182. Repplier, Agxes, 327. Reveries of a Bachelor, 244. Rhodes, James Fokd, 323, 305. RiCHAEDSox, Charles F., 32i, 6. RiDPATH, John Clark, 323. Riley, James Whitcomb, 314, 285. Riplet, George, 153-4, 133, 163, 2i9. iii.se of Silas Lapham, 297. Rives, Amelie (reevzl, see Troi^etskoy. Roberts, Charles G. D., 315, 306. Roe, Edward P., 316. Rollo Books, 147. Roosevelt, Theodore, 323. Rossetti, William M.( 1829— ), 256. ROWSEN, SUSANXA, 56, 61. ROYCE, JOSIAH, 306. Rodder Granqe, 301. Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 229. Rya!v, Abram J.. 313. Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), 37. Salmagundi Papers, 65, 62. Saxtayaxa, George, 312. Saturday Visitor, 114. Saxe, JohnG., 243. Scarlet Letter, The, 134, 138, 143, 145. Schiller (1759-1805), 201. Schouler, James (skoo^ler), 322, 305. SCOLLARD, ClIXTOX, 312. Scott, Dcxcax C, 316. Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 47, 60-71 passim, 86-95 passim, 107, 202, 205, 253, 277, 294. Scrihner's Monthly, 249. Sedgwick, Catharine ^I., 61, 77. Seton-Thompson, Ernest E., 326, 308. Seventh of March Speech, 182, 109. Sewell, Samuel, 22. Shakespeare, William( 1564-1616), 21, 24, 54, 100, 203, 205, 222, 253,254. Shaler, Nathaniel S., 306. Shellev, Percv Bvsshel 1792-1822), 56, 58, 105,' 220. Sherman, Frank D.. 312. Sidnev, Sir Philip (1554-15S6), 17, 194.' Sill. Edward Rowland, 282, 283. SiMMS, William Gilmore, 127, 84, 270, 271, 301. Simple Cobbler of Agawam, 26. SMch Book, The, 69, 54,75,76,191. Shipper Treson's Ride, 210. Smith, F. Hopkinson, 319, 301. Smith, Goldwin, 322, 305. Smith, Capt.ain John, 19-21, 111. Smith, Samtel F., 243, 231, 238. Smoke. 178. Smollett, Tobias George (1721- 1771), 87. Snou-Bound, 204, 212, 213, 241, 249. Snow Image, The, 132, 135, 142. Song of the Camp, 247. Songs of the Sierras, 281. Southern Literarij Messenger, 114. Southev, Robert (1774-1843), 99, 102. ' Spanish Student, The, 196. Sparks, Jared, 187. Specimen Days, 257. Spenser, Edmund (1552-1599), 17, 105, 117, 141, 216. Spofford, H.arriet Prescott, 318, 289. Spy, The, 84, 54, 80, 82. Stanton, Frank L., 313. Star -Spangled. Banner, 99. Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 289 290, 6, 125, 166, 228, 241, 247, ^^252, 272, 287, 296 307. INDEX 363 Sterne, Laurence (1713-176S), 67. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850- 1894), 92, 121, 173, 307. Stockton, Frank R., 300, 301. Stoddard, Charles W., 314. Stoddard, Richard Henry, 247-8, 98, 109, 244, 287, 289. Story, William W., 242. Story of a Bad Boy, 288. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 146- 148, 209, 250, 284, 294, 300. Strachey, William, 21. Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 319. Sumner, Charles, 185-6, 192, 207. Swallow Barn, 63. Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 67, 278. Swinburne, Algernon C. (1837- ), 227, 229, 256, 274. Symonds, John Addington (1840- 1893), 256. Symphony, The, 274. Tabb, John B., 313. Tales of a Traveller, 70. Tales of a Wayside Inn, 199. Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- besque, 115. Taylor, Bayard, 245-247, 6, 98, 162, 242, 244, 248, 267, 273, 277, 287, 289, 296. Tenney, Tabitha, 56, 61. Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892) 105, 106, 117, 200, 201, 203, 226, 230, 263, 274. Tenth Muse, The, 23, 230. Tent on the Beach, 212. Terhune, Mary Virginia, 302. Thackeray, William M. (1811- 1863), 63, 88, 90, 92, 294. Thanatopsis, 102, 54, 93, 107, 109, 283. "Thanet, Octave," see French. Thaxter, Celia, 312, 289. Thomas, Edith M., 312. Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 84. Thompson, Maurice, 325, 308. Thoreau, Henry David (tlio^ro), 168-179, 130, 134, 153-155, 163, 215, 229, 241, 257, 291, 308. Threnody, 166, 225. Thwing, Charles Franklin, 306. TicKNOR, Francis 0., 271. TiCKNOR, George, 189 190, 216. Timothy Titcomb Letters, 24; ». TiMROD, Henry, 270-272, 273, 274. To a Honeybee, 48. To a Waterfowl, 103, 107. Tolstoi (1828 ), 297. ToRREY, Bradford, 325. Tourgee, Albion W. (toor zhay''), 319. Troubetskoy, Princess Amelie, 320. Trumbull, John, 43, 44. Turgenieff (1818-1883', 297. "Twain, Mark," i-ee Clemens. Twice-Told Tales, 133, 134, 137, 233. Two Years Before the Mast, 128, 157, 189. Tyler, Moses Coit, 323, 6, 41, 305. Tyler, Royall, 25. Typee, 128. Ulalume, 115, 125. Uncle Remus, 302. Uncle Tom's Cabin, 147, 284. Van Dyke, Henry, 326, 307. Venus of Milo, The, 283. Vergil (B. c. 70-19), 45, 93, 155, 247. Verne (1828 ), 119. Very, Jones, 155, 153. Victorian Poets, 290. Views Afoot, 245. Village Blacksmith, The, 195. Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 219, 220, 225, 175, 263. Voiceless, The, 240. Voices of the Night, 193, 233. Voltaire (1694-1778), 3^, 187. Volunteer Boi/s, The, 49. VoN Holst, Herman E., 323, 305. Waiting by the Gate, 106. Walden, 171, 173-176, 178. Walker, Francis A., 324, 306. S64 INDEX Wallace, Lewis, 320. Walpole, Horace (1717-1797), 58. Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 179. "Ward, Artemus," see Browne. AVard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 318, 300. Ward, Nathaniel, 26. Ware, William, 129. Warner, Charles Dudley. 251, 249, 252, 288, 296. Washington, George, 40, 32, 187. Webster, Daniel, 181-183, 40, 84, 130, 184, 209, 254, 268, 271. Webster, Noah, 53, 56. Week on the Concord and Merri- mac Rivers, 171, 177. Wendell, Barrett,324, 6, 7,220,305 Wharton, Edith, 318. Whipple, Edwin P., 190. White, Andrew Dickson, 322. White, Gilbert (1720-1793), 179. White, Henrv Kirke (1785-1806), 102. White, Richard Grant, 190. Whitefield, George (1714-1 770), 30. Whitman, Walt, 252-264, 108, 242, 267, 269, 276, 277, 291. Whitney, Mrs. A. D. T., 317. Whittier, John Greenleaf, 204- 214, 22, 54, 79, 130, 136, 182, 215, 216, 219, 224, 230, 233, 238, 241, 242, 249, 250, 252, 257, 260. Wieland, 57, 59. - WiGGiN, Kate Douglas, 318. Wigglesworth, IMiciiael, 23. AViLcox, Ella Wheeler, 315. Wilde, Eichard Henry, 99, 270. Wild Honeysuckle, The, 47, 93. WiLKiNS, Mary E., 299, 300. Williams, Roger, 25, 26. William Wilson, 121, 112. Willis, Nathaniel P., 98, 124, 178, 179, 220, 245, 248, 287. WiLLsoN, Forceythe, 271. Wilson, Woodrow, 323, 305. WiNSOR, Justin, 322, 305. AViNTER, William, 326. Winthrop, Theodore, 316, 84. Woodberry, George E., 311, 113, 291, 307. Woodnotes, 166. AVooDwoRTH, Samuel, 99, 248. AVooLMAN, John, 30. AA^ooLsoN, Constance Fenimore, 321, 304. AA^ords worth, AA^illiam (1770- 1850), 100, 107, 158, 261. Wreck of the Hesperus, 195. Yankee Doodle, 42. Yemassee, The, 127. Youth'' s Companion, 98. Zenohla, 129. Sept 28 1901 w, ^ P •- •