CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 92.H63 
 
 A reader's history of American ilteratur 
 
 3 1924 022 000 016 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022000016 
 
md. 
 
READER'S HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 
 
 AND 
 
 HENRY WALCOTT BOYNTON 
 
 m^^^^m 
 
 BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 ^ht iSibetjiitic ^te^^, "ffamfiriBoe 
 
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 
 
 AND HENRY W. BOYNTON 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
PEEPACE 
 
 This book is based upon a course of lec- 
 tures delivered during January of 1903 be- 
 fore the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their 
 essential plan was that of concentrating atten- 
 tion on leading figures, instead of burdening 
 the memory with a great many minor names 
 and data. Various hearers, including some 
 teachers of literature, took pains to express 
 their approval of this plan, and to suggest 
 that the material might profitably be cast into 
 book form. This necessarily meant a good 
 deal of revision of a kind which the lecturer 
 did not care to undertake ; and he was able 
 to secure the cooperation of a younger asso- 
 ciate, to whom has fallen the task of modify- 
 ing and supplementing the original text, so 
 far as either process was necessary in order 
 to make a complete and consecutive, though 
 still brief, narrative of the course of American 
 
iv PREFACE 
 
 literature. The apparatus necessary for its 
 use as a text-book has been supplied in an 
 appendix, and is believed to be adequate. 
 
 It should be said further that the personal 
 reminiscences, and, in general, aU passages in 
 which the first person singular is employed, 
 are taken over bodily from the original lec- 
 tures. Elsewhere the authorship of the book 
 as it stands is a composite, but, it is hoped, 
 not confused affair. 
 
 Acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Long- 
 mans (of London and New York), who have 
 permitted the use of some passages from 
 Short Studies of American Authors, and 
 to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, who con- 
 sented to similar extracts from a work pub- 
 lished by them, entitled BooJc and Heart 
 (New York and London, 1899), both these 
 books being by the senior author of this 
 work. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAFTEB PAGE 
 
 I. The Puritan Weiteks 1 
 
 II. The Secular "Weitbrs 24 
 
 III. The Philadelphia Period .... 60 
 
 IV. The New York Period 79 
 
 V. The New England Period — Prelim- 
 inary 108 
 
 VI. The Cambridge Group 134 
 
 VII. The Concord Group 167 
 
 VIII. The Southern Influence — "Whit- 
 man 199 
 
 IX. The Western Influence 235 
 
 X. Forecast 257 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a daguerreotype 
 
 TAKEN IN 1859 Frontispiece 
 
 Title-page of Anne Bradstreet's Tents Muse . 10 
 Title-page op Cotton Mather's Wojstders of the 
 
 Invisible World 16 
 
 Titlb-Pagb of Poor Richard's Almanac for 1739 68 
 Letter from William Cullen Bryant to Mrs. 
 
 R. C. Waterston 100 
 
 Postal Card from Francis Parkman to T. W. 
 
 HlGGINSON 118 
 
 Letter from Harriet Bebcher Stowe to Hough- 
 ton, Mifflin & Co 126 
 
 Lines by Emily Dickinson 130 
 
 Lines by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . 140 
 Letter from John GreenlbafWhittier to F. J. 
 
 Garrison 150 
 
 Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to T. W. 
 
 Higginson 158 
 
 Letter from James Russell Lowell to T. W. 
 
 Higginson 164 
 
 Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to T. W. 
 
 Higginson 174 
 
 Letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to C. W. 
 
 Webber 182 
 
 Letter from Henry David Thoreau to T. W. 
 
 Higginson 196 
 
A READER'S HISTORY OF 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTEK I 
 
 THE PURITAJJ WBITERS 
 
 When Shakespeare's Slender in " The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor" claims that his cousin 
 Shallow is a gentleman born, and The Point 
 may write himself armigero, he °* V'«^- 
 adds proudly, " All his successors, gone be- 
 fore him, have done it, and all his ancestors 
 that come after him may." Slender really 
 builded better than he knew ; probably most 
 of the applications at the Heralds' College in 
 London, or at the offices of heraldic engravers 
 in New York, are based on the principle he 
 laid down. Its most triumphant application is 
 that recorded by Gilbert Stuart. While he 
 was in London the painter had a call from an 
 Irishman who had become, through some 
 lucky speculation, the possessor of a castle, 
 and who appealed to Stuart to provide him 
 
2 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 with a family portrait gallery. Stuart natu- 
 rally supposed that there were miniatures or 
 pictures of some kind which he might follow, 
 but on arriving at the castle he found there 
 was nothing of the sort. , 
 
 " Then how am I to paint your ancestors, 
 if you have no ancestors ? " he asked in some 
 indignation. 
 
 " Nothing is easier," said the Irishman ; 
 " you have only to paint me the ancestors 
 that I ought to have had." 
 
 The proposal struck Stuart's sense of hu- 
 mor, and he went to work, soon producing a 
 series of knights in armor, judges in bushy 
 wigs, and fine ladies with nosegays and lambs, 
 to the perfect satisfaction of his patron. Here 
 was Slender's fine conception literally carried 
 out; the ancestors came afterward because 
 their enterprising successor had gone before. 
 
 Something hke this method has been em- 
 ployed by many chroniclers of American lit- 
 erature. Perceiving that America has pro- 
 duced much that is creditable during the 
 past century, they have set about finding a 
 direct American pedigree for it. Yet they 
 would readily agree that almost nothing 
 which has attained permanent fame was writ- 
 
AMERICANISM 3 
 
 ten in America before the nineteenth century ; 
 and they would not deny that, so far as its 
 form, at least, is concerned, most of our later 
 literature confesses an English ancestry. 
 
 But if the spirit of those older writers, the 
 writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, was American, what does Amerioan- 
 the form of their writing matter? '^™' 
 The answer to this question depends upon 
 what we mean by Americanism. Until the 
 very outbreak of the Eevolution there were 
 few persons in the American colonies who 
 were not, in sentiment as well as in mental in- 
 heritance, English. England was " home " to 
 them, as it is now to the British Canadian or 
 Australian. Circumstances were of course 
 bringing about a gradual divergence in man- 
 ners and in special sympathies between the 
 colonist of Massachusetts or Virginia and the 
 Englishman of London. Even the shock of 
 the Revolution could, so far as literature was 
 concerned, only hasten that divergence of 
 type — not transform it into a difference of 
 type. To this day, indeed, the course of that 
 divergence has been so slow that we still find 
 Mr. Howells uttering the opinion, not quite 
 justly, that American literature is merely " a 
 condition of English literature." 
 
4 THE PURITAN WEITEKS 
 
 It would be a remarkable fact if America 
 had, in so short a time, created an altogether 
 new and distinct type of literature. What 
 American Fishcr Ames said nearly a century 
 Literature, ^go is stiU true : " It is uo reproach 
 to the genius of America, if it does not pro- 
 duce ordinarily such men as were deemed the 
 prodigies of the ancient world. Nature has 
 provided for the propagation of men — giants 
 are rare ; and it is forbidden by her laws that 
 there should be races of them." Probably no 
 more wholesome service can now be done to 
 the elementary study of the literature of the 
 United States than by directing it toward 
 the sane and cheerf id recognition of the close 
 relation which has always existed between 
 American writing and EngUsh writing ; and 
 toward a careful weighing of the American 
 authors in whom we properly take pride, upon 
 the same scales which have served us in de- 
 termining the value of British authors. 
 
 With such ends in view, the present book 
 will attempt, not to be a hterary history of 
 America, but simply to give a connected ac- 
 count of the pure literature which has been 
 produced by Americans. It will not assume 
 to be in any sense a minute literary cyclopaedia 
 
PURE LITERATURE 5 
 
 of this work, but will rather attempt to select, 
 as time selects, the best or representative 
 names of each period in its course. The in- 
 trinsic literary importance of these writers will 
 be considered, rather than their merely histor- 
 ical importance. Many minor names, there- 
 fore, which might properly be included in a 
 summary of respectable books hitherto pro- 
 duced in America are here omitted altogether ; 
 and others are given such minor mention as 
 their literary merit appears to warrant. 
 
 But it is time, you may say, to define more 
 specifically what literature is. No definition 
 of it ever yet given has surpassed Pure Liter- 
 that magnificent sentence of Lord **"™- 
 Bacon's which one marvels never to have 
 seen quoted among the too scanty evidences 
 that he wrote the works attributed to Shake- 
 speare : — 
 
 " It [literature] hath something divine in it, because 
 it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by con- 
 forming the show of things to the desires of the soul, 
 instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as rea- 
 son and history do." 
 
 It is only literature then, in Bacon's defi- 
 nition, which truly " raises the mind and 
 hurries it into sublimity." All else is reason 
 (or reasoning) and history (or narrative). 
 
6 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 "Where does literature find its source? 
 Not in thought or feeling alone, else we 
 should look to the cradle for our literature. 
 Not even in the first impulses of speech ; the 
 cradle supplies those, and so, in maturer life, 
 do the street, the railway, the shop. Mere lan- 
 guage is not a deUberate creation, but begins 
 in an impulse ; and those who, like Emerson, 
 have excelled in its use have long siace ad- 
 mitted that language, as such, is the product 
 of the people at large, not of the student. 
 But the word "literature" implies that an- 
 other step has been taken. Language is but 
 the instrument of literature. Literature in- 
 volves not merely impulse, but structure ; it 
 goes beyond the word and reaches " the per- 
 fection and precision of the instantaneous 
 line." Its foundation is thought, but it goes 
 farther and seeks to alter thought in contin- 
 uous and symmetrical form. We must pass 
 beyond the vivid phrase to the vivid line. 
 Thought, emotion, the instinct toward ex- 
 pression — the whole personality of the man 
 and his skill as an artist — must work to- 
 gether in perfect adjustment, in order to 
 gain this end. Very few men are both strong 
 and skillful enough for this ; and that is why. 
 
THE EARLY COLONISTS 7 
 
 out of the great mass of, written and printed 
 matter which the world produces, so little is 
 worth preserving in the treasury of pure liter- 
 ature. 
 
 In proceeding with our account of Ameri- 
 can literature, then, we shall try to keep our- 
 selves within the boundary here set. We 
 shall find occasion from time to time to sug- 
 gest the historical importance of an author 
 or a book, but the final judgment on them 
 will be based upon their relation to litera- 
 ture. Such an account may properly begin 
 with a consideration of the germs or frag- 
 ments of pure literature which were produced 
 in America before, with Franklin, what we 
 may now more properly call American Litera- 
 ture began. 
 
 The earliest writing done in America was 
 the work of persons who not only were of 
 English bixth, but whose stay in The Early 
 America was comparatively short. Coiomsta. 
 Captain John Smith was the first American 
 colonist to write a book, " A True Eelation 
 of Virginia." It was a brilliant and vigorous 
 piece of narrative, and was followed before 
 his return to England by two other books of 
 merit. But it is only in a historical sense that 
 
8 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 we can call him one of the " fathers of 
 American literature." ' He was, in fact, a 
 sturdy and accomplished Englishman of the 
 best Elizabethan type. The famous story of 
 his rescue by Pocahontas apparently repre- 
 sents the instinctive effort of a gallant gen- 
 tleman-adventurer with a turn for expression 
 to embellish his bluff narrative with a roman- 
 tic incident. 
 
 The first person of professedly literary pur- 
 suits to come to America was George Sandys, 
 already a poet of recognized standing when, 
 in 1621, he crossed the ocean as an official 
 under the Governor of Virginia. The first 
 five books of his translation of Ovid's " Meta- 
 morphoses " had just been published in Eng- 
 land, and had been received with enthusiasm. 
 On his departure for America he was sped 
 by a rhymed tribute from Michael Drayton, 
 exhorting him to go on with the same work 
 in Virginia : — 
 
 " Entice the Muses thither to repair ; 
 Entreat them gently ; train them to that air," 
 
 he urges. It was a rude air. To the ordinary 
 privations of the pioneer, and the wearing 
 routine of official duties, were added the 
 
 ' Tyler, History of American Literature, i. p. 7. 
 
ANNE BRADSTREET 9 
 
 sudden horrors of the James River massacre 
 (March, 1622), and the stress of the troubled 
 days which followed. Yet when Sandys re- 
 turned to England in 1625, he brought with 
 him the ten books which completed his ver- 
 sion of the " Metamorphoses." This transla- 
 tion lived to be much admired by Dryden and 
 Pope, and, what is more important, undoubt- 
 edly had great influence upon their method 
 of versification. The not altogether admira- 
 ble distinction, therefore, belongs to Sandys 
 of having laid the foundation for the form of 
 heroic couplet which became a blight upon 
 EngHsh poetry in the eighteenth century. 
 At all events, the accident of his having lived 
 for a time in America gives us a very shadowy 
 claim upon him as an American writer. 
 
 Even from the point of view of the liter- 
 ary historian, the work of Sandys is of 
 little significance. It does not ap- j^^^^ grad- 
 pear that he influenced later Ameri- st^'^et. 
 can writing, good or bad. The situation is 
 very different with Anne Brad street, who, in- 
 deed, represents a second step toward a type 
 of writing which should be in some sense 
 American in quality as well as in birthplace. 
 Though born in England, she became abso- 
 
10 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 lutely identified with American thought and 
 Hfe, exerted an immense influence in her day, 
 and was the ancestor of five especially intel- 
 lectual famiUes in New England, counting 
 among her descendants Wilham EUery Chan- 
 ning, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Henry 
 Dana, Wendell Phillips, and Andrews Nor- 
 ton. She was bom in 1612 of Puritan stock, 
 her father being steward of the estates of the 
 Puritan nobleman, the Earl of Lincoln. She 
 was married at sixteen and came to America 
 with her husband. Governor Bradstreet, in 
 1630. It is evident that, in spite of her 
 Puritan sense of duty, she could not leave 
 England for the raw life of the colonies 
 without a pang. " After a time," she wrote 
 many years later, " I changed my condition 
 and was married, and came into this country, 
 where I found a new world and new man- 
 ners, at which my heart rose. But after I 
 was convinced it was the way of God, I 
 submitted to it." She was of delicate con- 
 stitution and refined instincts, and was to 
 become the mother of eight children. Yet 
 most of her poems were written before she 
 was thirty years old, in the midst of the 
 daily toils of the wife of a New England 
 
I • THE *.' 
 
 I TENTH ryl USE ^^ 
 
 I Lately fprung up in A\i i k i c^a* I 
 
 I OR ^ ^" . I. 
 
 3 Severall Poems, cc».-.piled I 
 
 ^ vdch great variety of V Vic |. 
 
 »| and Lcarning,full of delight. |^ 
 
 I Wherein efpcciaUy is contained ^ com- | , 
 3 pleat difcourfe and defcripcioa of (^ 
 
 \ rBmems, |, 
 
 j C 5'e<7!'oi.J 6 f t be Tear. -T ' 
 
 i Tozcther with an Exait Epitoraic of i' 
 
 the Four Monarchies, vir^. ^ 
 
 ^ Alio aDialogii!.- tu[vvc:en U'J /^?.';'j^?:ti and g* | 
 iS Ncw-concc ni:. Li the lace rroublcs. ^ J 
 
 •2 Wuh Jive!5 :!cher p'-.ii-ncr.rci :.'! ".15 Pctrnc. j^ 
 
 ^ Prin7:J at L'/'~o-.' for .Sf.t •;" Bcwlt;.' at the (lone of the V* 
 ^ 3,b!. ia p^.p.;. He;id;Al!(iyv 160 ^ 
 
 
 ^-) The <- 
 
 The >'^"J'^"' . . ,. , , ^ 
 
ANNE BRADSTREET 11 
 
 farmer, and under her rapidly increasing 
 burden of motherhood. Her work at once 
 gained such attention that she was called 
 "a tenth muse" by her contemporaries. Her 
 poems were published in London in 1650 
 under a title which gives a tabular view of 
 her range of thought and knowledge, being 
 as follows : " The Tenth Muse, lately sprung 
 up in America, or Several Poems Compiled 
 with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, 
 Full of Delight, Wherein especially is Con- 
 tained a Complete Discourse and Description 
 of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages 
 of Man, Seasons of the Year, together with 
 an exact Epitome of the Pour Monarchies, 
 viz., The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman. 
 Also a Dialogue between Old England and 
 New, concerning the late troubles. With 
 divers other pleasant and serious Poems. By 
 a Gentlewoman in those parts." (London, 
 1650.) 
 
 Her name could not be properly mentioned 
 here if her poems were not shorter than her 
 title-pages, which possibly got intertangled 
 with the messages of her husband, the gov- 
 ernor. Her poetry would not now be con- 
 sidered great, or in fact readable, except by 
 
12 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 the special student, though it is in no way 
 behind that of the most distinguished Eng- 
 lish poetess of the same period, Mrs. Katha- 
 rine Phillips. Yet Cotton Mather said of her 
 works that " they would outlast the stateliest 
 marble," and other admirers "weltered in 
 delight " or were " sunk in a sea of bliss " 
 on reading them. Her literary taste was, like 
 that of other Puritans, fatally compromised 
 by religious prejudice. Shakespeare and the 
 other robust Elizabethan spirits were an 
 abomination to her ; and she readily fell 
 under the influence of " fantastic " poets like 
 Herbert, Queries, and Du Bartas, upon whom 
 she formed her own style. It is on the 
 whole remarkable that she should have been 
 able now and then to free herself from these 
 chosen fetters, and speak her own heart in 
 really simple and noble verse. 
 
 Her " Contemplations," not published 
 until after her death, contain verses which 
 suggest that Spenser might have been her 
 master, and require no apology. This is true, 
 for instance, of her poem upon " The Sea- 
 sons " : — 
 
 " When I behold the heavens as in their prime, 
 
 And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, 
 
ANNE BRADSTKEET 13 
 
 The stones and trees, insensible of time, 
 
 Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen. 
 If winter come, and greenness then do fade, 
 A Spring returns, and they more youthful made ; 
 But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he 's 
 laid. 
 
 " Shall I then pi^ise the heavens, the trees, the earth. 
 Because their beauty and their strength last longer ? 
 
 Shall I wish there, or never, to had birth, 
 
 Because they 're bigger and their bodies stronger ? 
 
 Nay, they shall darken, perish, fade, and die, 
 
 And when unmade so ever shall they lie ; 
 
 But man was made for endless immortality. 
 
 " O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things. 
 
 That draws oblivion's curtains over kings ; 
 Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, 
 
 Their names without a record are forgot. 
 Their parts, their ports, their pomp 's all laid in th' dust, 
 Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust ; 
 But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone 
 Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. " 
 
 Anne Bradstreet had the most genuinely 
 poetic gift among our Puritan writers of 
 verse. These formed, however, a surprisingly 
 large class. " Lady Mary Montagu said that 
 in England, in her time, verse-making had 
 become as common as taking snufE ; in New 
 England, in the age before that, it had be- 
 come much more common than taking snuff 
 
14 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 — since there were some who did not take 
 snuff." * The New England divine, who had a 
 horror of fine art, could not keep his hand 
 from the making of bad verses. It was, to be 
 sure, a sort of poetry in Sunday clothes which 
 he allowed himself to cultivate. He loved to 
 record his reKgious fears and ecstasies in 
 thumping doggerel, knd to set his grim ser- 
 mons to a taking jingle. 
 
 The writer who better than Anne Brad- 
 street or any one else represents this class, 
 Michael Wig- is Michael Wigglesworth (1631- 
 giesworth. 1705). His most famous work was 
 " The Day of Doom ; or, A Poetical Descrip- 
 tion of the great and last Judgment." A 
 sufficient taste of its quality may be given 
 by quoting the last words of the verdict 
 upon those who have died in infancy : — 
 
 " A crime it is ; therefore in bliss 
 You may not hope to dwell ; 
 But unto you I shall allow 
 The easiest room in Hell." 
 
 A generation which found it possible to 
 accept such a passage without feeling it to 
 be either revolting or ridiculous, could not 
 be expected to produce real poetry. This 
 
 1 Tyler, ii. p. 267. 
 
PURITAN PROSE 15 
 
 poem, published about 1660, had, it has been 
 claimed, " a popularity far exceeding that of 
 any other work, in prose or verse, produced in 
 America before the Revolution." It had, in- 
 deed, far greater temporary fame than "Par- 
 adise Lost," ■which was written at about the 
 same time by the veritable poet of Puritanism, 
 John MUton. 
 
 The literary instinct of New England Puri- 
 tanism by no means exhausted itself in verse- 
 In prose as well as in poetry the Puritan 
 most effective work of the period ^'■'^^■ 
 was the product of Puritan zeal and Puritan 
 narrowness. Two names stand out promi- 
 nently as representative of this school of 
 prose writing, mighty names in their day 
 which have not yet ceased to echo in our 
 memories : those of Cotton Mather and Jona- 
 than Edwards. 
 
 Cotton Mather was born in 1663, the third 
 and greatest of the four Mathers who mor- 
 ally and intellectually dominated Cotton 
 America for more than a century. Mather. 
 From his cradle he was petted and flattered 
 into what his best critic calls " a vast Uterary 
 and religious coxcomb." He was a Harvard 
 freshman at eleven, a Master of Arts at eigh- 
 
16 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 teen. At twenty-two, as assistant to his dis- 
 tinguished father, he had entered the pasto- 
 rate of the North Church of Boston, in which 
 he remained until his death in 1728. All 
 that was most acute, most pedantic, most 
 rigid in the Puritan faith and practice ap- 
 peared to be embodied in him. He fasted, he 
 forced himself to incredible feats of mental 
 endurance, he deliberately cultivated a habit 
 of decorating the simplest experiences of life 
 with pious reflections : " When he washed 
 his hands, he must think of the clean hands, 
 as well as pure heart, which belong to the 
 citizens of Zion." . . . *' Upon the sight of 
 a tail man, he said, ' Lord, give that man 
 high attainments in Christianity ; let him 
 fear God above many.' " More characteristic 
 than either of these instances, perhaps, is his 
 remark on the occasion of " a man going by 
 without observing him, ' Lord, I pray thee 
 help that man to take a due notice of Christ.' " 
 He was an extraordinarily voluminous 
 writer. He published fourteen books in one 
 year, and a list of his known publications con- 
 tains three hundred and eighty-three titles. 
 Most of these titles, like a large part of his 
 writing, are fearfully and wonderfully made : 
 
g!:!)cOTont>ccsof tl je 3nt)t fitiieTOorlP. : 
 
 OBSERVATIONS 
 
 As well HifioricaUs Theological, upon the NATURE, the 
 ' MUMBER, and the OPERATIONS ofche | 
 
 
 V,, Accompany d with, 
 
 Wl. Some Accounts of the Grievous Moleftations, by D/E- 
 l ' MONSand WITCHCRAFTS, which have lately 
 ' aiinoy'd the Countrey ; and the Trials of feme eminent 
 
 MalefAtlors Executed upon occafion thereof : with feveral 
 
 Remarkable. CuriofiHes therein occurring. 
 
 n. SomeGounfils DireAing a due Impioyement of the ter- 
 rible things, lately done, by the Unulual & Amazing 
 :, - Rangcof EVIL-SPIRITS, in Our Neighbourho-.^ : ^ 
 ■ .' the methods to pre-cent the Wrongs which thofe Evil 
 Angek may iticcnd again!!: all forts of people among us ; 
 eipecially in Accmaupns of the Innocent. 
 
 III. Some Conicaurcs upon the great EVENTS, likely 
 ; to befall,, the WORLD in General, and NEW-EN- 
 • GLAND in. Pardeular; as alfo upon the Advances of 
 ■41 . the TIME,, when v\c lliallfee BETTER DAYES. 
 
 D^:. iV A fhort Narrative of a late Oiitrsge committed by a 
 pC- knot of W (TCHES in Swcdeland, very rnuch Refem- 
 biing, and fo br Explaining, That under which our parts 
 of Jimenez have labeurcd 1 
 : V. THE DEVIL DISCOVER,?:d ; In a Brief Difcourfe upon 
 ■■H|^ thofe TE.MPTATIONS, which arc the more Ordinary De-vicss 
 i of the Wicked One 
 
 ''K 
 
 By Cotton #8^g;;. 
 
 &i?8s_Pnh{;cdijy£f?»^ Sarriikt Sam. Phillips. 169^. 
 
COTTON MATHER 17 
 
 "Christianus per Ignem; or, a Disciple Warm- 
 ing of Himself and Owning his Lord ; " 
 " Nails Fastened ; or, Proposals of Piety Com- 
 plied Withal ; " and so on. No theme ap- 
 peared to be simple enough for Cotton Mather 
 to treat simply ; and in consequence most 
 of his work is now dead. Even that greatest 
 book of his, the formidable " MagnaUa Christi 
 Americana," ^ can now be read only by the 
 special student of history. "He was," says 
 Professor Tyler, "the last, the most vig- 
 orous, and therefore the most disagreeable 
 representative of the fantastic school in lit- 
 erature ; he prolonged in New England the 
 methods of that school even after his most 
 cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown 
 them, and had come to dislike them. The 
 exptdsion of the beautiful from thought, from 
 sentiment, from language; a lawless and a 
 merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the 
 grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, 
 unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, 
 freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase; — 
 these are the traits of Cotton Mather's writing, 
 
 1 Its sub-title was TTie Ecclesiastical History of Nero Eng- 
 land from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of 
 our Lord 1698. It was first published in London in 1702. 
 
18 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 even as they are the traits common to that 
 perverse and detestable literary mood that 
 held sway in different countries of Christen- 
 dom during the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. Its birthplace was Italy ; New 
 England was its grave ; Cotton Mather was 
 its last great apostle." 
 
 However true this may be of Mather at his 
 worst, it is certain that at times he did suc- 
 ceed, like Anne Bradstreet, in forgetting his 
 artifice, and in producing passages of noble 
 prose. Professor WiUiam James, after quot- 
 ing that exquisite passage in which Cotton 
 Mather bids farewell to his young wife, lying 
 dead in the house with her two young chil- 
 dren, also dead, finds in it " the impulse to 
 sacrifice " only. We may see in it also the 
 impulse to expression which, ultimately de- 
 veloped, creates literature. Professor Wendell 
 says truly of Mather that he frequently wrote 
 " with a rhythmical bfeauty which recalls 
 the enthusiastic spontaneity of Elizabethan 
 English, so different from the English which 
 came after the Civil War." It is when a 
 Puritan clergyman ceases to be theological 
 that he is most apt to touch our hearts and 
 delight our ears. We find in Mather, for 
 
COTTON MATHER 19 
 
 instance, this rhythmical beauty when he 
 describes the career of Thomas Shepard, the 
 first minister of Cambridge, as " a trembKng 
 walk with God," or gives this picture (1702) 
 of what he calls " The Conversation of Gen- 
 tlemen : " — 
 
 " There seems no need of adding anything but this, 
 that when gentlemen occasionally meet together, why 
 should not their conversation correspond with their su- 
 perior station ? Methinks they should deem it beneath 
 persons of their quality to employ the conversation on 
 trifling impertinences, or in such a way that, if it were 
 secretly taken in shorthand, they would blush to hear 
 it repeated. ' Nothing but jesting and laughing, and 
 words scattered by the wind.' Sirs, it becomes a gen- 
 tleman to entertain his company with the finest thoughts 
 on the finest themes ; and certainly there cannot be a 
 subject so worthy of a gentleman as this — What good 
 is there to be done in the world ? Were this noble sub- 
 ject more frequently started in the conversation of gen- 
 tlemen, an incredible good might be done." 
 
 Beyond the fact that they were both ar- 
 dent defenders of the Calvinistic doctrine, 
 Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather had 
 really very Uttle in common, as to either char- 
 acter or experience. Edwards was modest 
 and gentle in character, and simple to the 
 point of bareness in style ; and life was not 
 arranged very smoothly for him. 
 
20 THE PURITAN WRITERS 
 
 Jonathan Edwards was born, the son of a 
 Connecticut minister, in 1703. He took his 
 Jonathan degree at Yale in 1720, and there- 
 Edwards, after became college tutor, minister 
 at Northampton, missionary to the Stock- 
 bridge Indians, and finally president of 
 Princeton CoUege. He died in 1758. As a 
 child he showed ability in mental science and 
 divinity. At twelve he displayed the acute- 
 ness and courtesy in speculative controversy 
 which were to be his lifelong characteristics. 
 Until he had fairly entered the ministry he 
 manifested just as keen interest and intelli- 
 gence in other fields. At seventeen he had 
 somehow evolved a system of idealistic phi- 
 losophy much like that which Berkeley was 
 to make famous a few years later. In physics 
 and astronomy, also, he had, before the end 
 of his tutorship at Yale, recorded specu- 
 lative theories very far in advance of his 
 time. Yet at twenty-four he deliberately cast 
 all this intellectual activity behind him, to 
 devote himself for the rest of his life to the 
 championship of a rigid and belated sys- 
 tem of theology. The doctrines that in the 
 handling of Wigglesworth and Mather had 
 often been grotesque, became terrific when 
 
JONATHAN EDWARDS 21 
 
 submitted to the calm and relentless logic o£ 
 Edwards. Accepting without question the 
 stern tenets of his inherited faith, he set him- 
 self the task of giving them their full logi- 
 cal development. He was not an orator, but 
 his directness and earnestness gave him as- 
 tonishing power over his audiences. Many 
 passages from his sermons are almost too 
 terrible to quote : " The God that holds 
 you over the pit of heU, muth as one holds 
 a spider or some loathsome insect over the 
 fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked ; 
 ... he looks upon you as worthy of nothing 
 else but to be cast into the fire. . . . You 
 are ten thousand times more abominable in 
 his eyes, than the most hateful, venomous 
 serpent is in ours." It is one of the stran- 
 gest of facts, only to be accounted for on 
 the ground of that form of insanity which is 
 called bigotry, that so acute a mind and so 
 gentle a heart should have bent themselves 
 to the enunciation of a creed so blind and so 
 brutal. 
 
 No modern audience could now hear, with- 
 out a shudder amounting to detestation, some 
 of those pages in the sermons of Jonathan 
 Edwards by which he felt himself to be best 
 
22 THE PURITAN WRITEKS 
 
 serving God and man; but Jonathan Edwards 
 wrote literature when, in 1725, at the age of 
 twenty-two, he inscribed on the blank leaf of 
 a book this description of Sarah Pierrepont, 
 afterwards his wife : — 
 
 " They say there is a young lady in New Haven who 
 is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules 
 the world, and that there are certain seasons in which 
 this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes 
 to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, 
 and that she hardly cares for anything, except to medi- 
 tate on him — that she expects after a while to be re- 
 ceived up where he is, to be raised up out of the world 
 and caught up into heaven ; being assured that he loves 
 her too well to let her remain at a distance from him 
 always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be 
 ravished with his love and delight forever. Therefore, 
 if you present all the world before her, with the rich- 
 est of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it, 
 and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a 
 strange sweetness in her mind and singular purity in 
 her affections ; is most just and conscientious in all her 
 conduct ; and you could not persuade her to do any- 
 thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the 
 world, lest she should ofEend this Great Being. She 
 is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal 
 benevolence of mind ; especially after this great God 
 has manifested himself to her mind. She wiU some- 
 times go about from place to place, singing sweetly; 
 and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure ; and 
 
JONATHAN EDWARDS 23 
 
 no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walk- 
 ing in the fields and groves, and seems to have some 
 one invisible always conversing with her." 
 
 This may fairly be called the high-water 
 mark of Puritan prose. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SECULAB WRITERS 
 
 So far we have had to do with the strictly 
 Puritan period of Colonial writing. The 
 clergy were stUl for a long time to produce 
 much of the best work ; but by the begin- 
 ning of the eighteenth century took place 
 that rise of the secular instinct which found 
 its best expression somewhat later in Frank- 
 lin ; the humane instinct from which an es- 
 sential part of any strong national literature 
 must spring. At this particular period the 
 impulse expressed itself in three principal 
 forms : the almanac, the diary, and the hu- 
 morous or satirical poem. 
 
 The most striking of the early diarists was 
 Madam Sarah Kemble Knight, who was born in 
 Madam Bostou in 1666, taught school there, 
 Knight. ^g^g reputed excellent as a teacher 
 of English composition, and in 1706 was 
 the instructor of Benjamin Franklin. Her 
 account of a journey on horseback from 
 
MADAM KNIGHT 25 
 
 Boston to New Haven gives us an excellent 
 impression of rustic Colonial Hf e on its homely 
 side. It began on Monday, October 2, 1704, 
 and occupied five days; and the amusing 
 diary was written at odd moments during the 
 journey. A kinsman rode with her as far as 
 Dedham, where she went, as was apparently 
 the custom in that period, to the minister's 
 house to wait for the stage. She declined to 
 stay there over night, but was escorted by 
 Madam Belcher, the minister's wife, to the 
 tavern to seek for a guide. The tavern- 
 keeper's son offered his services, and she 
 thus proceeds : — 
 
 " Upon this, to my no small surprise, son John arose 
 [the landlord's son], and gravely demanded what I 
 would give him to go with me ? ' Give you ? ' says I, 
 ' are you John ? ' ' Yes,' says he, ' for want of a bet- 
 ter ; ' and behold ! this John looked as old as my host, 
 and perhaps had been a man in the last century. 
 ' Well, Mr. John,' says I, ' make your demands.' 
 ' Why, half a piece of eight and a dram,' says John. 
 I agreed, and gave him a dram (now) in hand to bind 
 the bargain. 
 
 " My hostess catechised John for going so cheap, 
 saying his poor wife would break her heart . . . [Here 
 half a page of manuscript is gone.] His shade on his 
 horse resembled a globe on a gate post. His habit, horse 
 and furniture, its looks and goings incomparably an- 
 swered the rest. 
 
26 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 " Thus jogging on with an easy pace, my guide tell- 
 ing me it was dangerous to ride hard in the night 
 (which his horse had the sense to avoid), he enter- 
 tained me with the adventures he had passed by late 
 riding, and imminent dangers he had escaped, so that, 
 remembering the heroes in ' Parismus ' and the ' Knight 
 of the Oracle,' I did n't know but I had met with a 
 prince disguised. 
 
 " When we had rid about an hour, we came into a 
 thick swamp, which by reason of a great fog, very much 
 startled me, it being now very dark. But nothing dis- 
 mayed John ; he had encountered a thousand and a 
 thousand such swamps, having a universal knowledge 
 in the woods ; and readily answered all my inquiries, 
 which were not a few. 
 
 " In about an hour, or something more, after we left 
 the swamp, we came to Billings's, where I was to lodge. 
 My guide dismounted and very complacently helped 
 me down and showed me the door, signing to me with 
 his hand to go in ; which I gladly did — but had not 
 gone many steps into the room, ere I was interrogated 
 by a young lady I understood afterwards was the 
 eldest daughter of the family, with these, or words to 
 this purpose ; viz., ' Law for me ! — what in the world 
 brings you here at this time of night ? I never see a 
 woman on the road so dreadful late in all the days of 
 my 'versal life. Who are you ? Where are you going ? 
 I 'm scared out of my wits ! ' — with much more of 
 the same kind. I stood aghast, preparing to reply, 
 when in comes my guide — to him madam turned, 
 roaring out : ' Lawful heart, John, is that you ? — how 
 de do ! Where in the world are you going with this 
 woman ? Who is she ? ' John made no answer, but sat 
 
SAMUEL SEWALL 27 
 
 down in the corner, fumbled out his black junk, and 
 saluted that instead of Deb ; she then turned again to 
 me and fell anew into her silly questions, without ask- 
 ing me to sit down. 
 
 " I told her she treated me very rudely, and I did 
 not think it my duty to answer her unmannerly ques- 
 tions. But to get rid of them, I told her I came there 
 to have the post's company with me to-morrow on my 
 journey, etc. Miss stared awhile, drew a chair, bade me 
 sit, and then ran up stairs and put on two or three 
 rings (or else I had not seen them before), and return- 
 ing, set herself just before me, showing the way to 
 Beding, that I might see her ornaments, perhaps to 
 gain the more respect. But granam's new rung sow, 
 had it appeared, would have affected me as much. I 
 paid honest John with money and dram according to 
 contract, and dismissed him, and prayed Miss to show 
 me where I must lodge. She conducted me to a parlor 
 in a little back lean-to, which was almost filled with 
 the bedstead, which was so high that I was forced to 
 climb on a chair to get up to the wretched bed that lay 
 on it ; on which having stretched my tired limbs, and 
 laid my head on a sad-colored piUow, I began to think 
 on the transactions of the past day." 
 
 Contemporary with Madam Knight was 
 Judge Samuel Sewall, one of the raciest auto- 
 biographers since Pepys. He will samuei 
 be remembered mainly for his diary, SewaU. 
 but not seldom struck a genuine hterary 
 note elsewhere ; as when he describes the 
 farms and marshes on the Merrimack : — 
 
28 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 " As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the 
 commanded post, notwithstanding all the hectoring 
 words and hard blows of the proud and boisterous 
 ocean ; as long as any salmon or sturgeon shall swim 
 in the streams of Merrimac, or any perch or pickerel 
 in Crane Pond ; as long as the sea-fowl shall know the 
 time of their coming, and not neglect seasonably to visit 
 the places of their acquaintance ; as long as any cattle 
 shall be fed with the grass growing in the meadows, 
 which do humbly bow down themselves before Turkey- 
 HiU ; as long as any sheep shall walk upon Old-Town 
 Hills, and shall from thence pleasantly look down upon 
 the River Parker, and the fruitful marshes lying be- 
 neath ; as long as any free and harmless doves shall 
 find a white oak or other tree within the township, to 
 perch, or feed, or build a careless nest upon, and shall 
 voluntarily present themselves to perform the office of 
 gleaners after the barley-harvest ; as long as Nature 
 shall not grow old and dote, but shall constantly re- 
 member to give the rows of Indian corn their educa- 
 tion by pairs ; so long shall Christians be born there, 
 and being first made meet, shall from thence be trans- 
 lated to be made partakers of the inheritance of the 
 saints in light." 
 
 His diary, like the diaries of Evelyn and 
 Pepys, was intended only for the writer. 
 Samuel SewaU was born in England in 1652, 
 but came to America with his parents when 
 a child and graduated at Harvard in 1671, 
 at nineteen. Till 1730 he was a conspicuous 
 leader in the Massachusetts Colony, and was 
 
SAMUEL SEWALL 29 
 
 the only one of the judges concerned in the 
 ■witchcraft trial who made public confession 
 in later life, standing before the congregation 
 to own that he had been wrong in his rulings, 
 and spending one day in each of the remain- 
 ing thii-ty-nine yeais of his life in fasting and 
 prayer for the wrong he had done. In 1700 
 he wrote a tract against African slavery. In 
 his diary he often wrote with energy and 
 power, but never so quaintly as in describing 
 his love affairs, if such they may be called, 
 with Puritan ladies, in the effort to secure 
 a third wife. His second having died on 
 May 26, 1720, he proceeded Oct. 1 (four 
 months later) to make overtures for a 
 third : — 
 
 8r. 1. [1720] Saturday, I dine at Mr. Stoddard's : 
 ^rom thence I went to Madam Winthrop's just at 3. 
 Spake to her, saying, my loving wife died so soon and 
 suddenly, 't was hardly convenient for me to think of 
 marrying again ; however I came to this resolution, 
 that I would not make any court to any person without 
 first consulting with her. Had a pleasant discourse about 
 7 (seven) single persons sitting in the Fore-seat 7r. 29th, 
 viz. Madm Rebekah Dudley, Catharine "Winthrop, 
 Bridget Usher, Deliverance Legg, Bebekah Loyd, 
 Lydia Colman, Elizabeth Bellingham. She propounded 
 one and another for me ; but none would do, said Mrs. 
 Loyd was about her age. [Mrs. Winthrop herself was 
 
30 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 at this time fifty-six and had had twelve children ; 
 Judge Sewall was sixty-eight and had had fourteen, of 
 whom only three survived him.] 
 
 Octobr. 3. Waited on Madam Winthrop again; 
 't was a little while before she came in. . . . Then I 
 usher'd in discourse from the names in the Fore-seat ; 
 at last I pray'd that Catharine [Mrs. Winthrop] might 
 be the person assign'd for me. She instantly took it up 
 in the way of denial, as if she had catch'd at an oppor- 
 tunity to do it, saying she could not do it before she 
 was asked. Said that was her mind unless she should 
 change it, which she believed she should not ; could 
 not leave her children. I express'd my sorrow that she 
 should do it so speedily, pray'd her consideration, and 
 ask'd her when I should wait on her again. She set- 
 ting no time, I mention'd that day sennight. Gave her 
 Mr. Willard's Fountain Open'd with the little print 
 and verses ; saying, I hop'd if she did well read that 
 book, we should meet together hereafter, if we did not 
 now. She took the book, and put it in her pocket. 
 Took leave. 
 
 8r. 6th. A little after 6 P. M. I went to Madam Win- 
 throp's. She was not within. I gave Sarah Chickering 
 the maid 2 s., Juno, who brought in wood, 1 s. After- 
 ward the nurse came in, I gave her 18 d., having no 
 other small bill. . . . Madam seem'd to harp on the 
 same string. Must take care of her children ; could 
 not leave that house and neighborhood where she had 
 dwelt so long. I told her she might do her children as 
 much or more good by bestowing what she laid out in 
 house-keeping, upon them. Said her son would be of 
 age the 7th of August. I said it might be inconvenient 
 for her to dwell with her daughter-in-law, who must be 
 
SAMUEL SEWALL 31 
 
 mistress of the house. I gave her a piece of Mr. Bel- 
 cher's cake and ginger-bread wrapped up in a clean 
 sheet of paper : told her of her father's kindness to me 
 when Treasurer, and I Constable. My daughter Judith 
 was gone from me and I was more lonesome — might 
 help to forward one another in our journey to Canaan. 
 
 In the evening I visited Madam Winthrop, who 
 treated me with a deal of courtesy ; wine, marmar 
 lade. . . . 
 
 8r. 11th, 1720. I writ a few Lines to Madam Win- 
 throp to this purpose : " Madam, These wait on you 
 with Mr. Mayhew's Sermon, and Account of the state 
 of the Indians on Martha's Vineyard. I thank you for 
 your unmerited favours of yesterday ; and hope to 
 have the happiness of waiting on you to-morrow before 
 eight o'clock after Noon. I pray God to keep you, and 
 give you a joyful entrance upon the two hundred and 
 twenty-ninth year of Christopher Columbus his Dis- 
 covery ; and take leave, who am. Madam, your humble 
 Servt. S. S." 
 
 8r. 12. Mrs. Anne Cotton came to door ('t was 
 before 8.) said Madam Winthrop was within, directed 
 me into the little room, where she was full of work be- 
 hind a stand ; Mrs. Cotton came in and stood. Madam 
 Winthrop pointed to her to set me a chair. Madam 
 Winthrop's countenance was much changed from what 
 't was on Monday, look'd dark and lowering. At last, 
 the work, (bla«k stuff or silk) was taken away, I got 
 my chair in place, had some converse, but very cold 
 and indifferent to what 't was before. Ask'd her to ac- 
 quit me of rudeness if I drew off her glove. Enquiring 
 the reason, I told her 't was great odds between handling 
 
32 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 a dead goat and a living lady. Got it ofE. I told her 
 I had one petition to ask of her, that was, that she 
 would take off the negative she laid on me the third 
 of October ; She readily answer'd she could not, and 
 enlarg'd upon it; . . . Told her the reason why I 
 came every other night was lest I should drink too deep 
 draughts of pleasure. She had talk'd of Canary, her 
 kisses were to me better than the best Canary. . . . 
 
 8r. 19. Midweek. . . . Was courteous to me ; but 
 took occasion to speak pretty earnestly about my keep- 
 ing a coach : I said 't would cost £100. per annum : she 
 said ' twould cost but £40. . . . 
 
 8r. 20. Madam Winthrop not being at Lecture, I 
 went thither first ; found her very serene with her 
 daughter Noyes, Mrs. Bering, and the widow Shipreeve 
 sitting at a little table, she in her arm'd chair. She 
 drank to me, and I to Mrs. Noyes. After awhile pray'd 
 the favour to speak with her. She took one of the 
 candles, and went into the best room, clos'd the shut- 
 ters, sat down upon the couch. She told me Madam 
 Usher had been there, and said the coach must be set 
 on wheels, and not by rusting. She spake something of 
 my needing a wig. Ask'd me what her sister said to 
 me. I told her. She said. If her sister were for it, she 
 would not hinder it. . . . 
 
 She receiv'd me courteously. I ask'd when our pro- 
 ceedings should be made public : She said They were 
 like to be no more public than they were already. 
 OfEer'd me no wine that I remember. I rose up at 11 
 o'clock to come away, saying I would put on my coat, 
 she offer'd not to help me. I pray'd her that Juno 
 might light me home, she open'd the shutter, and said 
 
SAMUEL SEWALL 33 
 
 'twas pretty light abroad ; Juno was weary and gone to 
 bed. So I came home by starlight as well as I could. 
 
 October 24. . . . Told her I had an antipathy 
 against those who would pretend to give themselves; 
 but nothing of their estate. I would a proportion of my 
 estate with my self. And I supposed she would do so. 
 As to a Perriwig, My best and greatest Friend, I could 
 not possibly have a greater, began to find me with hair 
 before I was born, and had continued to do so ever 
 since ; and I could not find in my heart to go to 
 another. 
 
 Nov. 2. Midweek, went again and found Mrs. Al- 
 den there, who quickly went out. Gave her about J 
 pound of sugar almonds, cost 3s. per £. Carried them 
 on Monday. She seem'd pleas'd with them, ask'd what 
 they cost. Spake of giving her a hundred pounds per 
 annum if I died before her. Ask'd her what sum she 
 would give me, if she should die first ? Said I wohld 
 give her time to consider of it. 
 
 Novr. 4th. Friday. I ask'd her Whereabout we left 
 off last time ; mention'd what I had offered to give 
 her ; Ask'd her what she would give me ; She said she 
 could not change her condition : She has said so from 
 the beginning ; could not be so far from her children, 
 the Lecture. Quoted the Apostle Paul afiSrming that 
 a single life was better than a married. I answer'd 
 That was for the present distress. 
 
 . . . Found her rocking little Katy in the cradle. 
 I excus'd my coming so late (near eight). She set me 
 an armed chair and cushion ; and so the cradle was be- 
 tween her arm'd chair and mine. Gave her the rem- 
 nant of my almonds; She did not eat of them as 
 before ; but laid them away ; I said I came to enquire 
 
34 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 whether she had alter'd her mind since Friday, or re- 
 mained of the same mind still. She said, Thereabouts. 
 I told her I loved her, and was so fond as to think that 
 she loved me ; she said had a great respect for me. I 
 told her, I had made her an offer, without asking any 
 advice ; she had so many to advice with, that 't was an 
 hindrance. The fire was come to one short brand be- 
 sides the block, which brand was set up in end ; at last 
 it fell to pieces, and no recruit was made : She gave 
 me a glass of wine. I think I repeated again that I 
 would go home and bewail my rashness in making more 
 haste than good speed. I would endeavour to contain 
 myself, and not to go on to soUicit her to do that which 
 she could not consent to. Took leave of her. As came 
 down the steps she bid me have a care. Treated me 
 courteously. Told her she had enter'd the 4th year of 
 her widowhood. I had given her the News-Letter be- 
 fore : I did not bid her draw off her glove as some- 
 time I had done. Her dress was not so clean as some- 
 time it had been. Jehovah jireh! ["The Lord will 
 provide."] 
 
 Midweek, 9r. 9. Dine at Bror. Stoddard's : were so 
 kind as to enquire of me if they should invite Mm. 
 Winthrop ; I answer'd No. 
 
 About the middle of Deer. Madam Winthrop made 
 a treat for her children ; Mr. Sewall, Prince, Wil- 
 loiighby : I knew nothing of it ; but the same day 
 abode in the Council Chamber for fear of the rain, and 
 din'd alone upon Kilby's pies and good beer. 
 
 In less than a year later, he called on 
 Madam Ruggles, another widow, and says 
 in his diary, " I showed my willingness to 
 
SAMUEL SEWALL 35 
 
 renew my old acquaintance [as a suitor] ; 
 she expressed her inability to be serviceable. 
 Gave me cider to drink. I came home." 
 Eight months later he married Mrs. Mary 
 Gibbs, still another widow, and himself made 
 the prayer at the wedding, as if the time had 
 come to take matters into his own hands. 
 
 This is not, it may seem, a very noble kind 
 of literature ; but it is, at its best, one of the 
 most permanent. The masterpieces in such 
 intimate or first-hand literature, with its tri- 
 umphs of self-revealment, are few. Samuel 
 Sewall was not a Montaigne, or even quite a 
 Pepys, but enough has been quoted to indi- 
 cate his real if inferior success in a vein simi- 
 lar to theirs. 
 
 In judging the early poetry of America, 
 we must remember that the poetic product 
 of England was of secondary value from the 
 death of Milton, in 1674, till the pubhcation 
 of Burns's Scotch poems, in 1786, and of 
 Coleridge's and Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, 
 in 1798. We cannot wonder that in America, 
 during the same period, among all the tasks 
 of colonial and Revolutionary life, no poetry 
 of abiding power was produced. The same 
 year that saw Burns's first poems pubHshed 
 
36 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 (1786) saw also those of the first true Amer- 
 Ptiiip ican poet, Philip Freneau, who, if 
 
 Frenean. lie left a humbler name than Burns 
 as befitted a colonist, at least dictated a line 
 of poetry to each of two leading EngHsh 
 poets. It has been said that there was no book 
 published in America before 1800 which has 
 now a sure place in general literature. But 
 Freneau before that date gave two lines to 
 general literature which in a manner saved 
 his time, although the lines bore to the gen- 
 eral public the names of Scott and Campbell, 
 who respectively borrowed them. 
 
 The first is found in Freneau's Indian 
 Burying-Grround, the last image of that fine 
 visionary stanza : — 
 
 " By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
 In vestments for the chase array'd, 
 The hunter still the deer pursues, 
 The hunter and the deer — a shade." 
 
 Campbell has given this line a rich setting in 
 O'Connor's Child: — 
 
 " Now on the grass-green turf he sits. 
 His tassell'd horn beside him laid ; 
 Now o'er the hills in chase he flits, 
 The hunter and the deer a shade." 
 
PHILIP FRENEAU 37 
 
 There is also a line of Si^ Walter Scott 
 which has its origin in Freneau. In the in- 
 troduction to the third canto of Marmion in 
 the apostrophe to the Duke of Brunswick, we 
 read : — 
 
 " Lamented chief ! — not thine the power 
 To save in that presumptuous hour, 
 When Prussia hurried to the field, 
 
 And snatch'd the spear but left the shield." 
 
 In Freneau's poem on the heroes of Eu- 
 taw, we have this stanza : — 
 
 " They saw their injur'd country's woe ; 
 The flaming town, the wasted field, 
 Then rush'd to meet the insulting foe ; 
 
 They took the spear ■ — but left the shield." 
 
 " An anecdote which the late Henry Bre- 
 voort was accustomed to relate of his visit to 
 Scott, affords assurance that the poet was 
 reaUy indebted to Freneau, and that he would 
 not, on a proper occasion, have hesitated to 
 acknowledge the obligation. Mr. Brevoort 
 was asked by Scott respecting the authorship 
 of certain verses on the battle of Eutaw, 
 which he had seen in a magazine, and had by 
 heart, and which he knew were American. 
 He was told that they were by Freneau, when 
 he (Scott) remarked, ' The poem is as fine a 
 
38 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 thing as there is of the kind in the lan- 
 guage.' " ^ 
 
 Circumstances did not allow Freneau to 
 develop a disinterested poetic art. In those 
 stirring days there was, as he complained, 
 little pubHc favor for anything but satire. 
 He had inherited hatred for tyranny with his 
 Huguenot blood ; and there was a vein of 
 bitterness in him which was ready enough 
 to be worked, no doubt, when the time came. 
 Mr. Tyler calls him " the poet of hatred 
 rather than of love ; " certainly his reputation 
 at the moment was won as a merciless satirist. 
 
 Freneau was a classmate of James Madi- 
 son at Princeton. Contemporary . with him 
 The Hartford Were three men of Connecticut and 
 Wits Yale,— Timothy Dwight, Joel Bar- 
 
 low, and Jonathan Trumbull. Like Freneau, 
 these writers began by tentative experiments 
 in prose and verse, and like him they were 
 swept into the current of the Revolution and 
 into the service of political satire. For a time 
 these three writers, who came to be known 
 as the " Hartford Wits," constituted a gen- 
 uine literary centre in Connecticut. 
 
 ^ Mary S. Austin's Life of Freneau, quoted from 
 Duyckinck, pp. 219, 220. 
 
JOHN TRUMBULL 39 
 
 The period o£ their brief supremacy was 
 a remarkable one. The year 1765 marks the 
 end of the colonial period of Amer- ^ . 
 
 '■ _ Liiterature 
 
 lean writing. Much was stiU to be of the 
 uttered from the colonial point of ReTointion. 
 view, but it could no longer go unchallenged. 
 For the next twenty years little was written 
 which did not concern itself in some way 
 with the question of American rights or 
 American independence. The influence ex- 
 erted during the first half of this period by 
 the satirical verses of Freneau and the Hart- 
 ford group would be hard to exaggerate. 
 We have to do only with the literary quahty 
 of this work ; and from such a point of view, 
 at least, Freneau and Trumbull stand clearly 
 above the rest. 
 
 John Trumbull was born in 1750. He 
 passed his examination for Yale College at 
 the age of seven, sitting in the lap jo^n 
 of an older man to write. When TrumbnU. 
 his body was big enough, he entered college, 
 retaining some sort of connection with the 
 institution for most of the time until 1773. 
 He was a close and intelligent student of 
 English literature, and it is not surprising 
 that his early prose and verse are imitative 
 
40 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 in form. So is most of the prose and verse 
 in any age. The fact remains to be insisted 
 upon that if his essays and his verse are Ad- 
 disonian and Butlerian, they have the un- 
 mistakable quality of literature. His Ode to 
 Sleep, -written at about the close of his New 
 Haven residence, owns a greater master than 
 Pope or Butler : — 
 
 " Descend, and graceful in thy hand, 
 With thee bring thy magic wand, 
 And thy pencil, taught to glow 
 In all the hues of Iris' bow. 
 And call thy bright, agrial train. 
 
 Each fairy form and visionary shade, 
 That in th' Elysian land of dreams. 
 The flower-inwoven banks along. 
 Or bowery maze that shades the purple streams. 
 Where gales of fragrance breathe th' enamor'd 
 song. 
 In more than mortal charms array'd. 
 People the airy vales and revel in thy reign." 
 
 This was written at twenty-three, an age 
 which may be expected to produce imitative 
 work. In the mean time, during 1772 and 
 1773, Trumbull gave unmistakable evidence 
 of his power as a satirist, by producing The 
 Power of Dullness, a long poem in three 
 parts, published separately, and ridiculing 
 
PRINTED ORATORY 41 
 
 the current method of university education. 
 The book is forgotten, but some of its epi- 
 grammatic couplets still linger, like : — 
 
 " For metaphysics, rightly shown, 
 But teach how little can be known." 
 
 Or: — 
 
 " First from the dust our sex began, 
 But woman was refined from man." 
 
 This is the measure of Butler's Hudibras, 
 which Trumbull was to employ again in his 
 masterpiece, McFingal. The first canto 
 of McFingal was published in April, 1775, 
 soon after Lexington and Concord. The hero 
 is a Scottish-American Tory, and the scene 
 is laid at a New England town meeting ; an 
 admirable setting for the most famous of the 
 Eevolutionary satires. It has not become 
 quite a classic ; for, with all his wit and taste, 
 Trumbull lacked the fire of imagination, and 
 the exquisite sense of fitness in expression 
 which belong to creative genius. 
 
 Critics who wish to confine themselves to 
 considering the expression of hfe in litera- 
 ture, must often be embarrassed by Printed 
 the fact, that, in very important his- Oratory. 
 torical periods, life often finds an intense and 
 
42 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 effective, though not in itself permanent, ex- 
 pression outside of literature. At the dawn 
 of our national life, American intellect found 
 its strongest utterance, not like Greece in 
 poetry, but like Eome in oratory. 
 
 It has always been recognized that, as be- 
 tween the two nations from whom all modern 
 European civilization depends, the Uterature 
 of Greece began in poetry, and the intellect- 
 ual life of Kome in oratory and statesman- 
 ship. Cicero points out that literature did 
 not come to the Romans until after their 
 habits were fully formed. " It is natural to 
 associate the idea of poetry with youth, both 
 in nations and individuals. Yet the evidence 
 of their language, of their religion, and of 
 their customs leads to the conclusion that the 
 Romans, while prematurely great in action 
 and government, were in the earher stages 
 of their national life httle moved by any 
 kind of poetical imagination." Cicero ex- 
 pressly points out in his Tusculan Disputa- 
 tions that poets came late to Rome but 
 orators early. All this is singularly true of 
 the United States of America as compared 
 with European states. America had aston- 
 ished Europe with oratory and statesmanship 
 
PRINTED ORATORY 43 
 
 before its literature was born. If it has 
 been often asserted that there was no book 
 pubKshed in America, before 1800, which 
 retains a place in literature, it has also been 
 more than once asserted that since 1800, with 
 the exception of Daniel Webster and Wendell 
 Phillips, America has not produced an orator. 
 Both opinions are one-sided ; but what is 
 true is that in America, as in Rome, ora- 
 tory reached its climax first ; literature came 
 later. 
 
 Europeans did not, of course, hear the 
 early congressional speeches, but they often 
 went across the ocean in the shape of pam- 
 phlets. In many cases, those early orators re- 
 tain their English reputation to this day, 
 but not in aU. My friend, Mr. Ernest Hart- 
 ley Coleridge, grandson of the poet, who is 
 now engaged at the British Museum on an 
 annotated edition of Byron, once crossed the 
 great reading-room to ask me if I had ever 
 heard of any such American name as P. 
 Henry, and showed me such a reference in 
 a note to one of Byron's poems. He ex- 
 pressed pleasure when I told him that there 
 certainly was a man named Patrick Henry, 
 with whom I was not personally acquainted. 
 
44 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 but who had apparently been rather promi- 
 nent during the war of the Revolution. 
 
 It is to be remembered that the newspaper 
 was then practically nothing, but the pam- 
 phlet was everything, and the English Civil 
 War, it was often said, was fought in pam- 
 phlets. We know now what amazement was 
 produced in Europe when the men who had 
 been supposed to be ignorant backwoodsmen 
 showered the world all at once with state- 
 ments and arguments which really had dig- 
 nity, nobility, and force. Such were those 
 four documents sent out by the very first 
 Continental Congress : (1) John Jay's De- 
 claration of Rights and Ghrievances ; (2) 
 Richard Henry Lee's Memorial to the In- 
 habitants of the British Colonies ; (3) John 
 Dickinson's Address to the Inhabitants of 
 Quebec; (4) Lee and Dickinson's Petition 
 to the King's Most Excellent Majesty. 
 These are to be classified not as literature, 
 but rather as printed oratory. An opinion of 
 their high quahty does not rest on American 
 judgment alone, but on the verdict given by 
 Lord Chatham in the House of Lords, on 
 Jan. 20, 1775 : — 
 
 " When your lordships look at the papers transmitted 
 
PRINTED ORATORY 45 
 
 us from America," said Lord Chatham, " when you con- 
 sider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you cannot 
 but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. 
 For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my 
 reading and observation — and it has been my favorite 
 study — I have read Thucydides, and have studied and 
 admired the master-states of the world — for solidity 
 of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclu- 
 sion, — under such a compilation of difficult circum- 
 stances, no nation or body of men can stand in prefer- 
 ence to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust 
 it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to im- 
 pose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism 
 over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, 
 must be fatal." 
 
 This fine intellectual exhibition, if it be- 
 longed rather to statesmanship than to Ktera- 
 ture, should have prepared the way for lit- 
 erature. The more cultivated English people 
 were not unprepared for seeing it in the 
 American colonies ; for Horace Walpole, the 
 most brilliant man of his time, had written to 
 his friend Mason, two years before the Decla- 
 ration of Independence, that there would "one 
 day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xeno- 
 phon at New York." Unfortunately a differ- 
 ent influence came in the way. In New Eng- 
 land, whence much of this intellectual work 
 had proceeded, the prevailing party among 
 
46 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 educated men consisted soon after the war of 
 an essentially conservative class, the Federal- 
 ists, who had lost all faith in popular gov- 
 ernment, on the election of JefEerson. In 
 the Massachusetts circle under that name of 
 which George Cabot was the leader, the ablest 
 Fisher Writer was confessedly Tisher Ames, 
 Ames. -^Ijo ^v^rote the first elaborate and 
 
 reaUy thoughtful essay on American litera- 
 ture (first published in 1809, after his death), 
 in which he cuts o£E all hope of any such 
 product, at least until some future age may 
 have destroyed all free institutions, and the 
 return of despotism may bring in literature 
 and art among its ornaments. Like most 
 men in that day, he believed literature the 
 world over to be in a dying condition ; and 
 at the time when Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 were just beginning to be read, he wrote as 
 follows : — 
 
 " The time seems to be near, and, perhaps is already 
 arrived, when poetry, at least poetry of transcendent 
 merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a 
 long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. 
 If America has not to boast at all what our parent 
 country boasts no longer, it will not be thought a proof 
 of the deficiency of our genius." 
 
PRINTED ORATORY 47 
 
 He looks gloomily upon the future, how- 
 ever, as regards America, and predicts only a 
 social and political ruin, out of which litera- 
 ture may yet revive amid the ruins of freedom. 
 He goes on to say : — 
 
 " But the condition of the United States is changing. 
 Luxury is sure to introduce want ; and the great ine- 
 qualities between the very rich and the very poor will be 
 more conspicuous, and comprehend a more formidable 
 host of the latter. The rabble of great cities is the 
 standing army of ambition. Money will become its 
 instrument, and vice its agent. Every step, and we 
 have taken many, towards a more complete, unmixed 
 democracy is an advance towards destruction: it is 
 treading where the ground is treacherous and exca- 
 vated for an explosion. Liberty has never yet lasted 
 long in a democracy ; nor has it ever ended in any- 
 thing better than despotism. With the change of our 
 government, our manners and sentiments will change. 
 As soon as our emperour has destroyed his rivals and 
 established order in his army, he will desire to see 
 splendour in his court, and to occupy his subjects with 
 the cultivation of the sciences. 
 
 "If this catastrophe of our publick liberty should 
 be miraculously delayed or prevented, still we shall 
 change. With the augmentation of wealth, there will 
 be an increase of the numbers who may choose a liter- 
 ary leisure. Literary curiosity will become one of the 
 new appetites of the nation ; and as luxury advances, 
 no appetite will be denied. After some ages we shall 
 have many poor and a few rich, many grossly igno- 
 
48 THE SECULAR WRITERS 
 
 rant, a considerable number learned, and a few emi- 
 nently learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, 
 will produce some men of genius, who wUl be admired 
 and imitated." ^ 
 
 This despairing kind of hopefulness was 
 the utmost to which this highly cultivated 
 man could attain. 
 
 So deep-rooted was this pessimism among 
 them that in talking in my youth with the 
 survivors of the old Federalists, I was never 
 really able to trace a ray of light among them, 
 or even a word of vivacity, in their days of 
 defeat, except one reported to me as uttered, 
 I am happy to say, by my grandfather, who 
 was one of what were called the "Essex 
 Junto " by Jefferson, and who probably wrote 
 the once noted "Laco" letters, attacking 
 John Hancock. Mr. James Richardson of 
 Rhode Island, perhaps the last survivor of 
 that circle, has testified that once, in George 
 Cabot's house in Brookline, there was a gen- 
 eral moaning among these leaders of a lost 
 cause, and it became a serious question how 
 to treat the victorious Democrats. All were 
 in favor of going down with their colors fly- 
 ing and treating all Democrats as criminals, 
 
 * Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 468, 472. 
 
PRINTED ORATORY 49 
 
 with sternness only ; until Stephen Higgin- 
 son said, " Gentlemen, if you have to live 
 in the house with a cat, you cannot always 
 call her cat, sometimes you must call her 
 pussy." 
 
 Here came in the value of a sunnier clime 
 and sunnier tempers in Philadelphia, which, 
 whatever Horace Walpole may have thought, 
 was destined to be, rather than Boston or 
 New York, the pioneer in American litera- 
 ture, as in social refinement. It may be that 
 Stephen Higginson, who had been for a year 
 a member of the Continental Congress in its 
 closing period, at Philadelphia, may have 
 learned in the society of that city to "call 
 pussy" 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 It is impossible to get the key to the early 
 development of American literature without 
 remembering that for fifty years the nation 
 had no weU-defined capital city, at least for 
 literary purposes ; and it had only a series of 
 capitals, even politically. In the very middle 
 of the nineteenth century, James Russell 
 Lowell was compelled to write as follows: 
 " Our capital city, unKke London or Paris, 
 is not a great central heart. . . . Boston, New 
 York, Philadelphia, each has its literature, 
 almost more distinct than those of the differ- 
 ent dialects of Germany ; and the young 
 Queen of the West has also one of her own, 
 of which some articulate rumor has barely 
 reached us dwellers by the sea." ^ 
 
 In this local development of literature, 
 Philadelphia, the first seat of our govern- 
 ment, naturally took the lead. 
 
 1 " Our Contributors," Graham's Magazine, Feb., 1845. 
 
THE FIRST NATIONAL CAPITAL 51 
 
 The first monthly magazine, the first daily 
 newspaper, the first religious magazine, the 
 first religious weekly, the first penny paper, 
 mathematical journal, juvenile magazine, and 
 illustrated comic paper ever pubHshed in the 
 United States had started on their career in 
 Philadelphia; and that city produced, still 
 more memorably, in Benjamin FranMin the 
 first American writer to gain a permanent 
 foreign reputation ; and America's first imagi- 
 native writer and fii-st professional writer of 
 any description, in Charles Brockden Brown, 
 the novelist. 
 
 In 1774 the first and second Continental 
 Congresses met in that city, which was then 
 the largest in America. In 1776 ,j^ j,j^^ 
 Philadelphia sent forth the Decla- National 
 ration of Independence. In 1787, ^*p'**^- 
 in the same hall which had given birth to 
 the Declaration, the Federal Convention as- 
 sembled and formulated the Federal Consti- 
 tution. The new Constitution met partic- 
 ularly strong opposition in Pennsylvania, 
 which was, however, the second state to ratify 
 it. The first Congress under the Federal 
 Constitution met in New York in March, 
 1789, and Washington was inaugurated there 
 
62 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 a month later. After that event, New York 
 grew rapidly into a supremacy of numbers, 
 of intellectual life, and of literary achieve- 
 ment. A year later, however. Congress re- 
 turned to Philadelphia, there to remain until, 
 in 1800, Washington became the permanent 
 seat of government. 
 
 During and just after the Revolution, then, 
 Philadelphia had the right to be regarded as 
 A Social the American metropolis. Public 
 Centre. j^g^ gathered there from all parts 
 of the country, and cultivated women came 
 with them. French visitors, who soon be- 
 came very numerous, criticised the city, found 
 its rectangular streets tiresome and the hab- 
 its of the people more rectangular still; but 
 Americans thought it gay and delightful. 
 Brissot de Warville declared that the preten- 
 sions of the ladies were " too affected to be 
 pleasing" and the Comte de Rochambeau 
 said that the wives of merchants went to the 
 extreme of French fashions. The sarcastic 
 Talleyrand said "their luxury is frightful " 
 ("leur luxe est affreux"), leaving it an open 
 question whether it was the amount of luxury 
 to which he objected, or the kind of it. Mrs. 
 John Adams, who had lived in Europe, com- 
 
A SOCIAL CENTRE 53 
 
 plained of a want of etiquette, but found 
 Philadelphia society eminently friendly and 
 agreeable. Superior taste and a liveHer wit 
 were habitually claimed for the Philadelphia 
 ladies. It was said by a vivacious maiden who 
 went from that city to make a visit in New 
 York — Rebecca Franks, afterward Lady 
 Johnston — that the Philadelphia belles had 
 " more cleverness in the turn of an eye than 
 those of New York in their whole composi- 
 tion." 
 
 There was in Philadelphia a theatre which 
 was much attended, and which must have had 
 a rather exceptional company of actors for 
 that period, inasmuch as Chief Justice Jay 
 assured his wife that it was composed of "de- 
 cent moral people." In society, habits were 
 not always quite moral, or conversation always 
 quite decent. Gentlemen, according to John 
 Adams, sat till eleven o'clock over their after- 
 dinner wine, and drank healths in that elab- 
 orate way which still amazes the American 
 visitor in England. Nay, young ladies, if we 
 may accept Miss Rebecca Franks as authority, 
 drank each other's health out of punch tank- 
 ards in the morning. Gambling prevailed 
 among both sexes. An anonymous letter- 
 
64 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 writer, quoted in Mr. Griswold's " Kepublican 
 Court," declares that some resident families 
 could not have supported the cost of their 
 entertainments and their losses at loo, but 
 that they had the adroitness to make the 
 temporary residents pay their expenses. At 
 balls people danced country dances, the part- 
 ners being designated beforehand by the host, 
 and usually remaining unchanged during the 
 whole evening — though " this severity was 
 sometimes mitigated," in the language of the 
 Marquis de Chastellux, when supper was 
 served, which was usually at midnight. 
 
 This picture of Philadelphia life sets be- 
 fore us the conditions under which a litera- 
 The First *^^^ ^^^ produccd which obtained 
 Literary immediate recognition, and in some 
 Centre. instances permanent reputation, 
 here and abroad. From Philadelphia had 
 come, at the end of the colonial period, the 
 remarkably effective work of the conserva- 
 tive John Dickinson, and, somewhat later, 
 the trenchant arguments of the radical 
 Thomas Paine, and the brilliant sallies of the 
 Whig humorist, Francis Hopkinson. The 
 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania 
 were written by Dickinson in 1767-1768, 
 
THE FIRST LITERARY CENTRE 55 
 
 and first printed in a Philadelphia newspaper. 
 Later they were published in book form, 
 ■with an introduction by Franklin, and had 
 an astonishing popularity, not only in Amer- 
 ica, but in England, Ireland, and France. 
 They were highly praised by such foreign 
 critics as Voltaire and Burke, and their au- 
 thor was idolized at home until, as the Revo- 
 lution approached, the public grew impatient 
 ■with his temperate policy. He wished for 
 constitutional liberty ; they demanded inde- 
 pendence. Thereafter probably the most in- 
 fluential pieces of Revolutionary prose, out- 
 side of documents, -were Paine's Comvion 
 Sense, Hopkinson's The Battle of the Kegs, 
 and Franklin's Examination Relative to the 
 Repeal of the Stamp Act.^ 
 
 Such writing as this had greater flexibil- 
 ity, and therefore a more promising literary 
 quality, than those pamphlets -which Lord 
 Chatham admired. The long series of vol- 
 umes bearing the names of our early states- 
 men deal mainly with questions now past, and 
 are rarely of interest to the modern reader. 
 
 '■ The title is, in full, The Examination of Doctor Benja- 
 min FranHin, i» the British House of Commons, Relative to 
 the Repeal of the American Stamp Act, in 1766. First pub- 
 lished in Loudon, 1767. 
 
56 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 Fortunately two authors, at least, among them 
 possessed impulsiveness, vivacity, and humor 
 as well as solid statesmanship ; and made, at 
 times, a purely literary use of these qualities. 
 Those two were John Adams and Benjamin 
 Franklin. As the former had a wife of simi- 
 lar quality, their very letters form some read- 
 able literary memorial of that period, even 
 though, after the practice of their time, her 
 epistles were signed with such high-sounding 
 names as " Portia." 
 
 In Frankhn, on the other hand, we come 
 upon a man who could not be said to turn 
 Benjamin *o literature, but by his very nature 
 Franklin, made it a part of his various en- 
 dowments ; and who might justly be called 
 the first great writer in America; the first 
 to produce, in his Autohiography, a book 
 now recognized by the world as classic. He 
 was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, 
 and died on April 17, 1790. He was appren- 
 ticed to his brother, a printer, but ran away 
 to Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He 
 went to London and practiced his trade there 
 for a time, returned to Philadelphia in a year 
 and a half, printed and published newspapers 
 and almanacs there, distinguished himself as 
 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 67 
 
 a founder of libraries, as an investigator of 
 electricity, as postmaster-general, and as agent 
 for the American colonies abroad. After the 
 Kevolution, he represented this country as 
 ambassador to France, where he still stands 
 nearest of all foreigners to the French heart. 
 But he received from temperament, not from 
 French influence, his most striking qualities, 
 — the want of high spirituality, the this- 
 worldly quaUty of his thought, and the cool 
 sanity of his manner. His style has been 
 called Addisonian, but it is primarily Frank- 
 linian. He lived at the period when Dr. 
 Johnson's influence was at its greatest, yet 
 he chose to keep to the simple idioms of 
 common speech. 
 
 During his long life Franklin's genius ex- 
 pressed itself in many ways ; he became 
 famous as a scientist, as a morahst, as (Hke 
 most great moralists) a humorist, as a states- 
 man, and as perhaps the greatest of autobio- 
 graphers. Before the beginning of the 
 Revolutionary period he had gained wide 
 reputation in science and in practical affairs ; 
 yet, says Professor Tyler, " undoubtedly his 
 best work in letters was done after the year 
 1764, and thenceforward down to the very 
 
58 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 year of his death ; for, to a degree not only 
 unusual but almost without parallel in liter- 
 ary history, his mind grew more and more 
 vivacious with his advancing years, his heart 
 more genial, his inventiveness more sprightly, 
 his humor more gay, his style brighter, 
 keener, more deft, more delightful." ^ 
 
 One of the two works of pure literature 
 for which he is now best known, however, 
 Poor Poor Richard's Almanac, belongs 
 
 Eiehard. to the earlier period. The alma- 
 nac was an established institution long before 
 Franklin gave it standing as literature. The 
 first matter of any length to be printed in 
 America was an almanac published in Cam- 
 bridge in 1639 ; and when, nearly a century 
 later (1733), Poor Richard began to ap- 
 pear, it could differ only in degree of excel- 
 lence from many of its predecessors and con- 
 temporaries. Among its most formidable 
 competitors were the Astronomical Diary 
 and Almanac of Nathaniel Ames, a Massa- 
 chusetts man, father of Fisher Ames, and 
 the Rhode Island Almanac of Franklin's 
 brother James. These publications were re- 
 
 ^ Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, ii. 
 365. 
 
; p'oor Richard, 1 7 3^ 
 
 Almanack 
 
 
 :t>r the Ye^r of Chfift 
 
 I 
 
 
 >)t 
 
 4 
 
 Being the Third afterl-E^ivP YE: aU. 
 
 ^rf makfs jlnfe the Crrutien '• : 
 By t&Ci Aj&coum of (lis E-iflcVn Grc.'h 
 j^rBythe 'Latin V harch; wlitn ©^miC;. ^ 
 
 ■'' Bv the Computaii'ii of 'f li '. 
 !iv tllc J'-.oi^nn Chror.fiipcy 
 By the j--'i''/' Rabbics 
 
 /'/ /.\7\-/'/? is C(n:taitied^ ; ^ 
 
 Th- Lunations, Edipit,;s, 'Judgrrtent of 
 
 rlic V^'c.'uil^J■, Sp.iiig 'FitifN-,; Pi3i>ei,s Mntions ^ 
 mu;uil .Mlnftv., Sun and MoonV RiTin»^ ;ini-i Set- 
 rin'j, X-ciij^O-, of Diiy*'i TiiriC o{ High Water, , 
 Fjiri, Cv.i;.;s, and onfciva'pte D.iys ;- !**«(»;- j 
 
 Fitted 10 ih.- Latituik of Furry -Be^ree^^' 
 
 ■ • 31H! li Mciidi. :i «->f Fli'C Hours Wi-ft fiom /.ordo), 
 
 ' but miv witiioiit fcnfiblc Ejtw. feive sit the ad- 
 
 i.ic(.-nc Places, evca ftom Sevjl cKiiJUit^ to South-' 
 
 Ct'rsHK.r ' ' \ 
 
 PHIL AD E L PH JA: 
 
 i^iforcd and I'ol^ by B. FR.il NKL J : l iiibc Kew 
 Piinrinp Office ne'ai the Maiket. ^ '. ; 
 
 r 
 
 '} 
 its 
 
 1 
 
 ■; 
 
 I 
 
POOR RICHARD 59 
 
 spectively eight and five years older than the 
 Philadelphia almanac ; and they have much 
 of the varied humor and wisdom which, 
 touched with the subtle charm of personality 
 that belonged to everything Franklin wrote, 
 made Poor Richard so famous. 
 
 The incidents of the last twenty-five years 
 of Franklin's life cannot be more than 
 touched upon here. His diplomatic career in 
 England and France kept him away from 
 America dinging almost the whole of the Re- 
 volutionary period ; yet his influence both at 
 home and abroad was incalculably great. He 
 did a great deal of writing, with entire indif- 
 ference to literary fame ; for he had always 
 a practical end to gain. During those years 
 of absence he was continually flinging off 
 pamphlets in the American cause, written 
 with imperturbable good-humor and telling 
 irony. From the very beginning of the Re- 
 volution he turned to the advantage of his 
 country the pungency, directness, and humor 
 of his style. On the 16th of May, 1775, he 
 wrote to Priestley this condensed sketch of 
 the battle of Lexington, in which each sen- 
 tence is an epigram : — 
 
 " You will have heard, before this reaches you, of a 
 mai'ch stolen by the regulars into the country by night, 
 
60 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 and of their expedition back again. They retreated 
 twenty miles in six hoars. The governor had called 
 the assembly to propose Lord North's pacific plan, but, 
 before the time of their meeting, he began cutting their 
 throats. You know it was said he carried the sword in 
 one hand and the olire branch in the other ; and it 
 seems he chose to give them a touch of the sword first. 
 . . . All America is exasperated by his conduct, and 
 more firmly united than ever." 
 
 His public career he might perhaps have 
 explained as his friend Lord Dunning did his 
 legal business, when he said, " I do one third 
 of it, another third does itself, and the re- 
 maining third remains undone." Industry 
 ■was, however, the habit of Franklin's nature 
 so thoroughly that it entered into the blood 
 of his race. The Rev. Dr. Furness used to 
 speak with dehght of an aged Philadelphia 
 lady, Franklin's grand-niece, who was in the 
 habit of saying her prayers while coming down 
 stairs to breakfast, in order to ^ave time. 
 
 On the fifth of July he writes to Strahan : 
 " You have begun to burn our towns, and 
 murder our people. Look upon your hands 
 — they are stained with the blood of your 
 relations ! You and I were long friends ; you 
 are now my enemy, and I am, Yours, B. 
 Franklin." 
 
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 61 
 
 On the third of October, Franklin again 
 writes to Priestley : " Tell our dear good 
 friend, Dr. Price, who sometimes had his 
 doubts and despondencies about our firmness, 
 that America is determined and unanimous, 
 — a very few Tories and placemen excepted, 
 who will probably soon export themselves. 
 Britain, at the expense of three million pounds, 
 has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this 
 campaign — which is twenty thousand pounds 
 a head ; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a 
 mile of ground, half of which she lost again 
 by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During 
 the same time sixty thousand children have 
 been born in America. From these data, his 
 mathematical head will easily calculate the 
 time and expense necessary to kiU us all, and 
 conquer our whole territory." 
 
 There we see the literary touch, but it is 
 stiU more clearly to be felt in his autobio- 
 graphy ; as, for example, in the The Auto- 
 account of his first entry into ^^"S'^v^y- 
 Philadelphia : — 
 
 "... I was in my working dress, my best clothes be- 
 ing to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey ; 
 my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings, 
 and I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging. I 
 
62 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest ; 
 I was very hungry ; and my whole stock of cash con- 
 sisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. 
 The latter I gave the people of the boat for my pas- 
 sage, who at first refused it, on account of my rowing ; 
 but I insisted on their taking it, a man being sometimes 
 more generous when he has but little money than when 
 he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to 
 have but little. 
 
 " Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near 
 the market house I met a boy with bread. I had made 
 many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where h.6 got it, 
 I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, in 
 Second Street, and asked for a biscuit, intending such 
 as we had in Boston -, but they, it seems, were not made 
 in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a threepenny loaf, 
 and was told they had none such. So not considering 
 or knowing the difference of money and the greater 
 cheapness, nor the names of his bread, I bade him give 
 me threepenny worth of any sort. He gave me, accord- 
 ingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surprised at the 
 quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my 
 pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm, and 
 eating the other. Thus I went up Market Street as far 
 as Fourth Street, passing by the door of Mr. Bead, my 
 future wife's father ; when she, standing at the door, 
 saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most 
 awkward, ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and 
 went down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, 
 eating my roll all the way, and, coming round, found 
 myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I 
 came in, to which I went for a draught of river water ; 
 and, being filled with one of my rolls, gave the other 
 
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 63 
 
 two to a woman and her child that came down the river 
 in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther." 
 
 Every sentence ends with a snap. Proba- 
 bly Franklin eating his rolls in the street is 
 the best-known figure in American history, 
 after Washington and his little hatchet ; and 
 the fact is due not to any extraordinary 
 character in the situation, but to the literary 
 skiU with which he brings it before us. 
 
 Note the felicity with which he defends 
 in the autobiography that failure to acquire 
 orderly habits with which John Adams re- 
 proached him : — 
 
 " I made so little progress in amendment, and had 
 such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give 
 up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty char- 
 acter in that respect, like the man who in buying an 
 axe of a smith, my neighbor, desired to have the whole 
 of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith con- 
 sented to grind it bright for him, if he would turn the 
 wheel; he turned, while the smith pressed the broad 
 face of the axe hard and heavily on the stone, which 
 made the turning of it very fatiguing. The man came 
 every now and then from the wheel to see how the 
 work went on ; and at length would take his axe as it 
 was, without further grinding. 'No,' said the smith, 
 ' turn on, turn on, we shall have it bright by and by ; 
 as yet it is only speckled.' ' Yes,' said the man, ' but 
 I think Hike a speckled ax/e best.' And I believe this 
 
64 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 may have been the case with many, who, having for want 
 of some such means as I employed, found the difiBculty 
 of obtaining good and breaking bad habits in other 
 points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle, 
 and concluded that ' a speckled axe is best.' For some- 
 thing, that pretended to be reason, was every now and 
 then suggesting to me, that such extreme nicety as I 
 exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in 
 morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridic- 
 ulous ; that a perfect character might be attended with 
 the inconvenience of being envied and hated ; and that 
 a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, 
 to keep his friends in countenance. In truth, I found 
 myself incorrigible with respect to Order ; and now I 
 am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly 
 the want of it." 
 
 It is amusing to notice in this connection 
 that " Order " stands third among the thir- 
 teen practical virtues which Franklin early 
 tabulated and set himself to acquire ; a -whim- 
 sical digest of the system of thrifty morality 
 which he perceived to be at the basis of 
 worldly success. Franklin lacked spiritual 
 power — the imaginative grasp of truth which 
 belongs to creative minds. He had, however, 
 what is perhaps the best working substitute 
 for such power, the ability to state homely 
 truths in such effective form as to offer to im- 
 imaginative minds a practical rule of living. 
 
THE PORTFOLIO 65 • 
 
 His famous saying "Honesty is the best 
 policy " suggests very fairly the range of his 
 power as a moralist, and the secret of his suc- 
 cess as a man. 
 
 Franklin was born in Boston, but his dis- 
 tinctive flavor belonged to a city where the 
 hterary touch was earher recog- The 
 nized. A certain proof of the cul- Portfolio- 
 tivated character of Philadelphia, beyond 
 New York or Boston, at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century, may be found in the 
 remarkable magazine called The Portfolio, 
 a weekly quarto which may fairly be described 
 as the first essentially literary periodical in 
 America. Joseph Denny, the editor, was a 
 Bostonian and a Harvard graduate, and had 
 edited newspapers in New England. He had 
 been nominated for Congress and defeated 
 in New Hampshire, and went to Philadelphia 
 in 1799, as private secretary to Thomas Pick- 
 ering, Secretary of State. The Portfolio 
 was established at the beginning of 1801 ; 
 was for five years a quarto and then for 
 many years an octavo, following precisely 
 the development which periodicals now sus- 
 tain, substituting octavo for quarto, monthly 
 for weekly, introducing illustrations and some- 
 
66 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 times going down hiU. He had for assistant 
 writers John Quincy Adams, whose Letters 
 from Silesia first appeared there, after be- 
 ing pubKshed in London in 1800, and Charles 
 Brockden Brown, the so-called " Father of 
 American Fiction," of whom we shall pre- 
 sently speak. Eeadiag these volumes now, 
 one finds them with surprise to go be- 
 yond similar periodicals even at the present 
 day, in the variety of sources whence their 
 cultivation came. The Portfolio translates 
 portions of Voltaire's Henriade ; recog- 
 nizes the fact that fresh intellectual activity 
 has just begun in England; quotes early 
 poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth and 
 Leigh Hunt, sometimes without giving the 
 names, showing the editors to have been at- 
 tracted by the poems themselves apart from 
 the author. There is no want of color in 
 the criticism. German books are apt to be 
 found rather abhorrent to the Philadelphia 
 critic, which is not surprising when we re- 
 member that it was the age of Kotzebue, 
 whose travels it burlesques and who drives 
 the editor into this extraordinary outburst: 
 " The rage for German literature is one of the 
 foolish and uncouth whims of the time and 
 
THE PORTFOLIO 67 
 
 deserves all the acrimony of the lampooner. 
 We are sick, heart-sick of the rambhng bom- 
 bast, infamous sentiments, and distempered 
 sensibility of the Teutonic tribe." He, how- 
 ever, thinks but little better of William God- 
 win, and prints a burlesque of Dr. Johnson 
 as bitter as if Johnson had written in Ger- 
 man. He states an important truth in say- 
 ing somewhere that punning is an humble 
 species of wit, much relished in America; 
 but in a later issue tones down this assertion 
 by giving three columns from Dean Swift in 
 favor of punning. He often gives letters 
 from Europe, coming from various directions ; 
 discusses the theatre fuUy, both in Boston 
 and Philadelphia ; discloses to us the import- 
 ant fact that books in America still had to 
 be published by subscription at that day and 
 almost never off-hand ; and he finally shows 
 us the limitation of even Philadelphia cultiva- 
 tion by telling us that the Loganian library, 
 pioneer of all American libraries, was then 
 kept shut all the morning and became a mere 
 coffee-house lounge in the afternoon. 
 
 It is one indication of the early leadership 
 of Philadelphia that the first considerable 
 collection of miscellaneous poetry published 
 
68 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 in this country appeared there in 1809, under 
 ™ . . the title of The American Poet- 
 
 The Amen- 
 
 can Poetical icol Miscellauy, Original and 8e- 
 MisceUany. i^Qted. The editor says o£ it, in 
 that florid style which still prevailed in pre- 
 faces : " The volume of poetry is made valu- 
 able by enfolding in its embraces some of 
 the richest and deepest tinted flowers which 
 ever bound the brows of Melancholy, or 
 sparkled under the heavenly gem which drops 
 from Pity's eye. Its pages are also strewed 
 with many a wild and fragrant flower, gath- 
 ered by Genius and Fancy, as they together 
 strolled amid the wild luxuriance of the fields 
 of nature." This belonged to the period 
 when men wrote " Inoculation, Heavenly 
 Maid ! " 
 
 It is worth noticing, however, that the ed- 
 itor's taste is much better than his style, and 
 he shows unquestionably that the best Eng- 
 lish poetry of that day, as was true of the 
 poetry of Tennyson and Browning at a 
 later day, was earlier appreciated in America 
 than at home. The volume opens with 
 Burns's Scots wha hae wi' Wallace hied 
 and closes with Coleridge's Ancient Mar- 
 iner, in its original and more vigorous form ; 
 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 69 
 
 and this at a time when Coleridge's new 
 theory of versification, now generally ac- 
 cepted, that verse should be read by the ac- 
 cents, not by the syllables, was pronounced 
 by the London Monthly Review to yield 
 only "rude unfashioned stuff ; " and Burns's 
 poems were described by it as " disgusting " 
 and "written mostly in an unknown tongue." 
 The Lake poets were described by Jeffrey in 
 the Edinburgh Review as " constituting the 
 most formidable conspiracy that has lately 
 been formed against sound judgment in mat- 
 ters poetical ; " and yet they were eagerly re- 
 ceived, apparently, in America. It must not 
 be supposed, however, that all the contents 
 of this Philadelphia volume represent the 
 same scale of merit; it also includes a poem 
 of a dozen long verses by one Joseph Smith 
 entitled Milogium on Rum. 
 
 After Philadelphia's prestige as a literary 
 centre bad begun to wane, she was still to 
 produce the second American writer charies 
 who commanded the attention of Brockden 
 trans - Atlantic readers. Charles 
 Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, 
 Jan. 17, 1771, and died there of consumption 
 at the age of twenty-nine, Feb. 22, 1810. By 
 
70 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 his own statement, made in a letter written 
 just before his death, we learn that he never 
 in his life had more than one continuous half- 
 hour of perfect health. In spite of his short 
 life and his ill-health, he accomplished much. 
 At first he studied law, but abandoned it for 
 literature. He was a frequent contributor to 
 the magazines of the time, and was himself 
 the editor of the Monthly Magazine and 
 American Review (1799), and the lAterary 
 Magazine and American Register (1803-8). 
 His first published work. The Dialogue of 
 Alcuin (1797), dealt with questions of mar- 
 riage and divorce, and he was also the author 
 of several essays on political, historical, and 
 geographical subjects. His novels followed 
 each other with astonishing rapidity : Sky 
 Walk ; or the Man Unknown to himself 
 (1798, not published), Wieland; or the Trans- 
 formation (1798), Ormond ; or the Secret 
 Witness (1799), Arthur Mervyn ; or Me- 
 moirs of the Year 1793 (1799-1800), 
 Edgar Huntly ; or Memoirs of a Sleep 
 Walker (1801), Jane Talbot (1801), and 
 Clara Howard ; or the Enthusiasm of Love 
 (1801). 
 
 When, thirty years later, in 1834, the 
 
CHAULES BROCKDEN BROWN 71 
 
 historian Jared Sparks undertook the pubH- 
 cation of a Library of Ainerican Biogra- 
 phy, he included in the very first volume — 
 with a literary instinct most creditable to one 
 so absorbed in the severer tasks of history 
 — a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by 
 W. H. Prescott. It was an appropriate trib- 
 ute to the first writer of imaginative prose 
 in America, and also the first to exert a 
 positive influence upon British literature, 
 laying thus early a few modest strands towards 
 an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of 
 this influence, all manner of wheels began to 
 move, in fiction ; concealed doors opened in 
 lonely houses ; fatal epidemics laid cities deso- 
 late ; secret plots were organized ; unknown 
 persons from foreign lands died in garrets 
 leaving large sums of money ; the honor of 
 innocent women was constantly endangered, 
 though usually saved in time ; people were 
 subject to somnambulism and general frenzy ; 
 vast conspiracies were organized with petty 
 aims and smaller results. Brown's books, 
 pubUshed between 1798 and 1801, made 
 their way across the ocean with a promptness 
 that now seems inexplicable ; they represented 
 American literature to England. Mrs. Shel- 
 
72 THE PHILAE^ELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 ley in her novel of The Last Man founds 
 her whole description of an epidemic, which 
 nearly destroys the human race, on "the 
 masterly delineations of the author of Arthur 
 Mervyn." 
 
 Shelley himself recognized his obligations 
 to Brown ; and it is to be remembered that 
 Brown himself was evidently f amiUar with God- 
 win's philosophical writings and with Caleb 
 Williams, and that he may have drawn from 
 Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as 
 to the rights and education of women, a sub- 
 ject on which his first book, Alcuin, provided 
 the earliest American protest. Undoubtedly 
 his tales furnished a point of transition from 
 Mrs. B,adcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to 
 the modern novel of realism, although his 
 immediate influence and, so to speak, his 
 stage properties, can hardly be traced later 
 than the remarkable tale, also by a Philadel- 
 phian, called Stanley ; or the Man of the 
 World, the scene of which was laid in Amer- 
 ica, though it was first published in 1839 in 
 London. This book was attributed, from its 
 profuse literary material, to Edward Everett, 
 but was soon understood to be the work of 
 a young man of twenty-one, Horace Binney 
 
THE STYLE OP THE PERIOD 73 
 
 Wallace. It is now forgotten, except one sen- 
 tence : " A foreign nation is a kind of con- 
 temporaneous posterity." In this book the 
 later influence of Bulwer and Disraeli is pal- 
 pable, but Brown's concealed chambers and 
 aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious 
 deaths also reappear in full force, not with- 
 out some lingering power ; and then vanish 
 from American literature forever. 
 
 Brown's style, and especially the language 
 put by him into the mouths of his charac- 
 ters, is perhaps too severely criti- xhe style of 
 cized by Professor Woodberry as be- *•*» Period, 
 ing " something never heard off the stage of 
 melodrama." What this able critic does not 
 sufficiently recognize is that the general style 
 of the period at which they were written was 
 itself melodramatic, and that to substitute 
 what we should caU simplicity would then 
 have made the picture wholly unfaithful. 
 One has only to read over the private letters 
 of any educated family of that period to see 
 that people did not then express themselves 
 as they do now ; that they were far more or- 
 nate in expression, more involved in state- 
 ment, more impassioned in speech. Even a 
 comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in 
 
74 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 composing Brown's biography only sixty 
 years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. 
 Instead of stating simply that his hero was 
 a born Quaker, he says of him : " He was 
 descended from a highly respectable family, 
 whose parents were of that estimable sect 
 who came over with William Penn, to seek 
 an asylum where they might worship their 
 Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble 
 spirit of their own faith." Prescott justly 
 criticises Brown for saying, " I was fraught 
 with the apprehension that my hfe was en- 
 dangered ; " or " his brain seemed to swell 
 beyond its continent ; " or " I drew every bolt 
 that appended to it ; " or " on recovering 
 from deliquium, you found it where it had 
 been dropped ; " or for resorting to the cir- 
 cumlocution of saying, " by a common appa- 
 ratus that lay beside my head I could pro- 
 duce a light," when he really meant that he 
 had a tinderbox. Nothing is more difficult 
 than to teU, in the fictitious literature of even 
 a generation or two ago, where a faithful de- 
 lineation ends and where caricature begins. 
 The four-story signatures of Micawber's let- 
 ters, as represented by Dickens, go but Uttle 
 beyond the similar courtesies employed in a 
 
THE STYLE OF THE PERIOD 75 
 
 gentlewoman's letters in the days of Anna 
 Seward. All we can say is that within a 
 century, for some cause or other, English 
 speech has grown very much simpler, and 
 human happiness has probably increased in 
 proportion. 
 
 In the preface to his second novel, Edgar 
 Huntly, Brown announces it as his primary 
 purpose to be American in theme, " to ex- 
 hibit a series of adventures growing out of 
 our own country," adding " That the field 
 of investigation opened to us by our own 
 country should difEer essentially from those 
 which exist in Europe may be readily con- 
 ceived." He protests against " puerile super- 
 stition and exploded manners, Gothic castles 
 and chimeras," and adds : " The incidents of 
 Indian hostility and the perils of the west- 
 ern wilderness are far more suitable." All 
 this is admirable, but unfortunately the in- 
 herited thoughts and methods of the period 
 hung round him to cloy his style, even after 
 his aim was emancipated. It is to be remem- 
 bered that all his imaginative work was done 
 in early life, before the age of thirty and 
 before his powers became mature. Yet with 
 all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, 
 
76 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 and had laid the foundation for American 
 
 fiction. 
 
 Notwithstanding his inflation of style, he 
 was undoubtedly, in his way, a careful ob- 
 server. The proof of this is that he has pre- 
 served for us many minor points of life and 
 manners which make the Philadelphia of a 
 century ago now more familiar to us through 
 him than is any other American city of that 
 period. He gives us the roving Indian ; 
 the newly arrived French musician with vio' 
 lin and monkey; the suburban farmhouses, 
 where boarders are entertained at a doUar a 
 week ; the gray cougar amid caves of Ume- 
 stone. We learn from him " the dangers 
 and toils of a midnight journey in a stage 
 coach in America. The roads are knee-deep 
 in mire, vnnding through crags and pits, 
 while the wheels groan and totter and the 
 curtain and roof admit the wet at a thousand 
 seams." We learn the proper costume for 
 a youth of good family, — " nankeen coat 
 striped with green, a white silk waistcoat ele- 
 gantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons, 
 stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that 
 in their softness vie with satin." When 
 dressing himself, this favored youth ties his 
 
THE STYLE OF THE PERIOD 77 
 
 flowing locks with a black ribbon. We find 
 from him that " stage boats " then crossed 
 twice a day from New York to Staten Island, 
 and we discover also with some surprise that 
 negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages 
 in Pennsylvania, although they were liable, 
 hal£ a century later, to be ejected from 
 street-cars. We learn also that there were 
 negro free schools in Philadelphia. All this 
 was before 1801. 
 
 It has been common to say that Brown 
 had no literary skill, but it would be truer to 
 say that he had no sense of literary construc- 
 tion. So far as skill is tested by the power 
 to pique curiosity. Brown had it ; his chap- 
 ters almost always end at a point of especial 
 interest, and the next chapter, postponing 
 the solution, often starts the interest in a 
 wholly new direction. But Hterary structure 
 there is none : the plots are always cumula- 
 tive and even oppressive ; narrative is in- 
 closed in narrative ; new characters and new 
 complications come and go, while important 
 personages disappear altogether, and are per- 
 haps fished up with difficulty, as with a hook 
 and line, on the very last page. There is also 
 a total lack of humor, and only such efforts 
 
78 THE PHILADELPHIA PERIOD 
 
 at vivacity as this : " Move on, my quill ! 
 ■wait not for my guidance. Reanimated with 
 thy master's spirit, all airy Hght. A heyday 
 rapture ! A mounting impulse sways him ; 
 lifts him from the earth." There is so much 
 of monotony in the general method, that 
 one novel seems to stand for all; and the 
 same modes of solution reappear so often — 
 somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, 
 forged letters, concealed money, secret closets 
 — that it not only gives a sense of childish- 
 ness, but makes it very difficult to recall, as 
 to any particular passage, from which book 
 it came, and leaves us quite willing to doubt 
 whether it came from any. It is easy enough 
 to criticise Brown, but he unquestionably had 
 his day and served his purpose. He Hved 
 among a circle of Philadelphians who took 
 habitually a tone like that of Cherbuliez' 
 charming heroine, who declares that for her 
 the world ends at fifty leagues from Paris 
 and she leaves all beyond to the indiscreet 
 curiosity of geographers. He did not live to 
 see the centre of statesmanship transferred 
 in one direction, that of business in another, 
 that of Hterature for a time in a third. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 During the course of the Revolution, as 
 we have seen, Philadelphia's position of au- 
 thority in literary matters became a New 
 gradually less firm. The best verse Centre. 
 of the period had come from Connecticut and 
 New Jersey, and the best prose from New 
 York and Virginia. The removal of the first 
 Congress to New York in 1783 was a sign 
 of waning political prestige ; and when six 
 years later New York was chosen as the scene 
 of the final organization of the American 
 Eepublic, in April, 1789, the transfer of au- 
 thority, political, social, and literary, was 
 made sure. 
 
 At this date what is commonly called the 
 National Period of American literature be- 
 gins; but it will be seen that from this time 
 poKtical belief or practice had very little 
 to do with the substance or quality of the 
 best literature which was produced. Social 
 
80 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 conditions, on the other hand, had much to 
 Social do with the character of this work ; 
 
 Conditions, and it is quite necessary to under- 
 stand the composition of New York society 
 after the Revolution in order to understand 
 its literary product. It was probably both 
 less refined and less provincial than that of 
 Philadelphia had been during its precedence. 
 In its lighter aspects it may be best judged, 
 like all other social matters, by the testimony 
 of women. 
 
 The most brilliant belle of the period, 
 Miss Vining of Philadelphia, — who was a 
 correspondent of Lafayette and was so much 
 admired by the French officers that Marie 
 Antoinette invited her, through Mr, Jeffer- 
 son, to the Tuileries, — complains in a letter 
 to Governor Dickinson in 1783 that Phila- 
 delphia has lost all its gaiety with the re- 
 moval of Congress from the city, but adds, 
 " You know, however, that here alone [i. e., 
 in Philadelphia] can be found a truly in- 
 tellectual and refined society, such as one 
 naturally expects in the capital of a great 
 country." Miss Franks, from whom we have 
 already quoted, speaks in a similar tone : 
 " Few ladies here [in New York] know how to 
 
SOCIAL CONDITIONS 81 
 
 entertain company in their own houses, unless 
 they introduce the card-table. Except the 
 Van Homes, who are remarkable for their 
 good sense and ease, I don't know a woman 
 or girl who can chat above half an hour, and 
 that on the form of a cap, the color of a 
 ribbon or the set of a hoop, stay ovjupon, 
 . . . With what ease I have seen a Chew, a 
 Penn, an Oswald, an Allen, and a thousand 
 others, entertain a large circle of both sexes, 
 [in Philadelphia] the conversation, without 
 the aid of cards, never flagging or seeming 
 in the least strained or stupid ! " We may 
 reasonably suspect that this judgment is 
 somewhat prejudiced. 
 
 For the testimony of a more staid witness, 
 with an eye chiefly for the mascuKne aspect 
 of society, we may turn to a description from 
 a volume called The Talisman purporting to 
 be written by one Francis Herbert, and con- 
 taining very graphic reminiscences of New 
 York by Gulian C. Verplanck and William 
 C. Bryant the poet. This passage, probably 
 by Mr. Verplanck, gives a glimpse at the 
 semi-ofl&cial society of the city in those days. 
 
 " Cedar street, since that day, has declined froni its 
 ancient consequence. I had the pleasure of seeing 
 
82 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 Mr. JefiEerson in an old two-story house in that street, 
 unbending himself in the society of the learned and 
 polite from the labors of the bureau. And there was 
 Talleyrand, whom I used to meet at the houses of Gen- 
 eral Hamilton and of Noah Webster, with his club-foot 
 and passionless immovable countenance, sarcastic and 
 malicious even in his intercourse with children. He 
 was disposed to amuse himself with gallantry too ; but 
 who does not know, or rather, who ever did know Tal- 
 leyrand? — About the same time I met with Priestley — 
 grave and placid in his manners, with a slight difficulty 
 of utterance — dry, polite, learned and instructive in 
 his conversation. At a period somewhat later, I saw 
 here the deputy Billaud de Marennes, who had swayed 
 the blood-thirsty mob of the Faubourg St. Antoine, 
 turned the torrent of the multitude into the Hall of 
 the Legislative Assembly, and reanimated France to a 
 bolder and more vigorous resistance against her foreign 
 enemies. I visited him in the garret of a poor tavern 
 in the upper part of William Street, where he lived 
 in obscurity. But why particularize further ? We have 
 had savans, litterateurs, and politicians by the score, all 
 men of note, some good and some bad — and most of 
 whom certainly thought that they attracted more atten- 
 tion than they did — Volney and Cobbett and Tom 
 Moore, and the two Michaux, and the Abb^ Correa, 
 and Jeffrey, and others : the muster roll of whose 
 names I might call over, if I had the memory of Baron 
 Trenck, and my readers the taste of a catalogue-making 
 librarian. Have we not jostled ex-kings and ex-em- 
 presses and ex-nobles in Broadway ; trod on the toes of 
 exotic naturalists, Waterloo marshals, and g^eat foreign 
 academicians, at the parties of young ladies ; and seen 
 
THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL: IRVING 83 
 
 more heroes and generals all over town than would fill 
 a new Iliad ? " ^ 
 
 It is worth while to lay so much stress 
 upon the composite character of this new so- 
 ciety because it helps to account for the sort 
 of literature New York was to produce. 
 These French exiles could not help impart- 
 ing an additional lightness and vivacity and 
 polish to the manners of their American 
 hosts ; and the most characteristic and gen- 
 uine literary product of New York during 
 the next half-century was to be urbane and 
 elegant in character rather than profound 
 or forcible — a "polite" literature in the 
 narrower sense of the term. 
 
 The father of the " Knickerbocker School," 
 as the most prominent group of New York au- 
 thors came to be called, was Wash- The Kniok- 
 
 . T • mi !_• erboeker 
 
 ington Irvmg. ihe one achieve- g^^^^^. 
 ment of this " school " was a con- Irving. 
 siderable body of light social satire in prose 
 and verse, which is now of value to the stu- 
 dent of past manners. It is an interesting 
 fact that Irving's first work of merit was 
 done in precisely this field, and that never 
 thereafter, though he tried very hard, did he 
 
 ' Griswold's Republican Court, p. 448. 
 
84 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 succeed in producing anything which could 
 be called deeply imaginative. This, how- 
 ever, is equally true of the great English 
 writers to whom (without being in any pro- 
 per sense their imitator) he was most nearly 
 akin. John Trumbull had produced, just 
 before the Kevolution, a series of Addisonian 
 essays of real elegance and acuteness. In 
 the Salmagundi papers, written mainly 
 by Irving and his friend James K. Paulding 
 in 1807, the method of the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury essayists is employed with a much freer 
 hand. It pretends to be nothing but a hu- 
 morous commentary upon town follies, though 
 in the opening number the authors whimsi- 
 cally profess their intention to be " to in- 
 struct the young, reform the old, correct the 
 town, and castigate the age." Whatever we 
 may now think of the limitations of this 
 work — its exuberance not seldom degenerat- 
 ing into facetiousness, its inequaUty, its oc- 
 casional lapses iuto banality, we must own 
 that it did for the New York of that day 
 precisely what Addison and Steele did for 
 the London of a century before, and what 
 nobody appears to be likely to do for the 
 New York or London of a century later. 
 
THE SKETCH BOOK 83 
 
 The Salmagundi papers amused the town 
 for a time, and were suddenly discontinued. 
 The Knickerhocker History of ^he Knick- 
 ^ew York, published two years erbocker 
 later, brought Irving his first real "^ °'^^' 
 fame. He employed his theme, a burlesque 
 history of the three Dutch governors of 
 New York, as a stalking-horse for purposes 
 of light satire. Everybody in New York 
 enjoyed it except a few descendants of the 
 old Dutch ' worthies with whose names he 
 hald made free ; and it won high praise 
 abroad, notably from Walter Scott. The 
 book was a real success. Irving had proved 
 himself master of a fluent humorous style 
 which might have been employed indefinitely 
 in the treatment of similar themes. But for 
 many years he was, according to the New 
 York standard, a man of fashion, with no 
 need and no desire to write for a living. 
 Middle age was at hand, when, ten years 
 later, the pinch of necessity forced him to 
 begin his career as a professional man of let- 
 ters. The Sketch Book was The sketch 
 published in 1819. Two years ^°°^- 
 later Bryant's first volume of poems was 
 published and Cooper's novels had begun to 
 
86 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 appear ; but at this time Irving had the field 
 to himself. The Sketch Book was the 
 best original piece of Hterature yet produced 
 in America. It was followed during the next 
 five years by Bracebridge Hall and Tales 
 of a Traveler. 
 
 In May, 1815, Irving had embarked for 
 Liverpool, with no very distinct plans, but 
 without expectation of being long abroad. 
 It was seventeen years before be saw Amer- 
 ica again. The qualified success of the 
 Tales of a Traveler (1824) led him to 
 feel that his vein was running out, and he 
 began to turn toward the historical studies 
 which were to occupy him mainly during the 
 rest of his life. 
 
 Not long after his return to America, in 
 May, 1832, the Tales of the Alhambra 
 were published. In the somewhat florid con- 
 cert of critical praises which greeted the 
 book, a simple theme was dominant. Every- 
 body felt that in these stories Irving had 
 come back to his own. The material was 
 very different from that of The Sketch 
 Book, yet it yielded to similar treatment. 
 The grace, romance, humor, of this " beauti- 
 ful Spanish Sketch Book," as the historian 
 
HISTORICAL WORK 87 
 
 Prescott called it, appealed readily to an au- 
 dience which had listened rather coldly to 
 the less spontaneous Tales of a Traveler, 
 and had given a formal approbation to 
 the History of Columbus without finding 
 very much Irving in it. Thereafter, except 
 for the Crayon Miscellanies (1835) and 
 Wolfert's Boost (1855), Irving's work 
 was to be almost entirely in biography and 
 history. Of his historical work it Historical 
 is enough to say that he was not W°'''^- 
 eminently fitted for it by nature. Of course 
 he could not write dully ; his historical nar- 
 ratives are just as readable as Goldsmith's, 
 and rather more veracious. But he plainly 
 lacked the scholar's training and methods 
 which we now require in the historian ; nor 
 had he a large view of men and events in 
 their perspective. He had, at least, a faculty 
 of giving life and force to dim historic figures, 
 which gained the praise of such men as Pres- 
 cott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington, 
 for example, had begun to loom vaguely and 
 impersonally in the national memory, a mere 
 great man, when Irving turned him from cold 
 bronze to flesh and blood again. 
 
 Irving's services to America in diplomacy 
 
88 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 were not small. In spite of his long absences 
 abroad, his true patriotism never wavered. 
 The mere existence of such a figure, calm, 
 simple, incorruptible, honored wherever he 
 was known, and known prominently through- 
 out Europe, was a valuable stay to the young 
 republic in that perilous first half of the 
 nineteenth century. But all his career in 
 statesmanship and, perhaps we may add, the 
 very books on which his fame seemed to him- 
 self to be founded, have now become a 
 wholly secondary fact as regards the basis of 
 his fame. They obtained for him his degree 
 at Oxford, but Mr. Warner has well pointed 
 out that the students were more far-seeing 
 when they shouted, by way of applause, on 
 that occasion, the names of Rip Van Winkle 
 and Ichabod Crane. It is after all, in Ed- 
 mund Quincy's phrase, not " specific grav- 
 ity," but "specific levity " which often serves 
 to keep a reputation afloat. 
 
 When Irving came back to New York he 
 might be seen, as George Curtis describes 
 him, about 1850, " on an autumnal aftei^ ' 
 noon, tripping with an elastic step along 
 Broadway, with low-quartered shoes neatly 
 tied, and a Talma cloak — a short garment 
 
IRVING'S ORIGINALITY 89 
 
 that hung from the shoulders like the cape of 
 a coat. There was a chirping, cheery, old- 
 school air in his appearance which was unde- 
 niably Dutch, and most harmonious with the 
 associations of his writings." My only per- 
 sonal observation of Washington Irving was 
 too much like his description of his only 
 glimpse of " the Stout Gentleman," after 
 watching for him through a whole wet Sun- 
 day in a country inn, to be of mucL real 
 value. He came to Cambridge for a hurried 
 visit at the house of his kinsman Henry Van 
 Wart, a singularly handsome young English- 
 man who had married an American wife, a 
 relative of my own. I remember that he 
 called briefly at my mother's house and that 
 I saw him getting in and out of the chaise. 
 I remember the general testimony of the 
 ladies of the house that he was a nice, kindly, 
 elderly gentleman — perhaps about sixty — 
 and did not seem a bit like a man of genius. 
 It is common to criticise Washington Irv- 
 ing as being a mere copyist of Goldsmith, 
 which is as idle as if we were to irving's 
 call Lowell a copyist of Longfellow. OriginaUty. 
 They belonged to the same period, that of 
 the ieighteenth-century essay. Irving equaled 
 
90 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 Goldsmith in simplicity and surpassed him in 
 variety, for the very first number of The 
 Sketch Book had half a dozen papers each 
 of a different type. He struck out paths for 
 himself ; thus Sir Walter Scott, for instance, 
 in his paper on Supernatural and Fictitious 
 Composition, praised Irving's sketch of The 
 Bold Dragoon as the only instance of the 
 fantastic then to be found in the English 
 language. Irving did not create the legends 
 of the Hudson, for as Mrs. Josiah Quincy 
 tells us, writing when Irving was a little boy, 
 the captains on the Hudson had even then a 
 tradition for every hillside ; but he immortal- 
 ized them. Longfellow, Hawthorne, and even 
 Poe, in their short stories, often showed 
 glimpses of his influence, and we see in the 
 Dingley Dell scenes in The Pickwick Pa- 
 pers how much Dickens owed to them. The 
 style is a little too dehberate and measured 
 for these days, but perhaps it never wholly 
 loses its charm. The fact that its character 
 varies little whether his theme be derived from 
 America, or England, or Spain, shows how 
 genuine it was. To this day the American 
 finds himself at home in the Alhambra, from 
 his early reading of this one writer. The 
 
IRVING'S ORIGINALITY 91 
 
 hotels are there named after him, " Wash- 
 ington Irving " or more frequently " Wash- 
 ington," evidently meaning the same thing ; 
 and Spanish gratitude has furnished him 
 with what all America could never give him, a 
 wife. In the reading room of the chief hotel, 
 opposite the Alhambra, there is a portrait of 
 Irving hanging on one side and one of " Mrs. 
 Irving " on the other. 
 
 No opinion of Irving's was more remark- 
 able and perhaps less to be expected than 
 that which he expressed toward the end of 
 his life as the sum of his judgment in regard 
 to the prospects of American letters. After 
 spending the greater part of his mature life 
 in Europe, he wrote to Motley as his con- 
 clusion : " You are properly sensible of the 
 high calling of the American press, that ris- 
 ing tribunal before which the history of all 
 nations is to be revised and rewritten and 
 the judgment of past ages to be corrected or 
 confirmed." ^ This was written on July 17, 
 1857, before the Civil War, and this was 
 the opinion of a man the greater part of 
 whose working Ufe, like Motley's, had been 
 passed in Europe ; and who had thus a right 
 
 ' Motley's Correspondence, i. 203. 
 
92 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 to hazard a guess as to which tribunal was 
 likely to be the tribunal of the future. 
 
 As marked in its triumph over European 
 criticism, though as stormy as Irving's was 
 peaceful, was the career of James Fenimore 
 Cooper. He was not, of course, our earliest 
 Some Popu- novelist, inasmuch as Charles Brock- 
 lar Novels, (jgjj Browu had preceded him and 
 a series of minor works of fiction had inter- 
 vened ; novels commonly of small size but of 
 wide circulation and written usually by women. 
 First of these was The Coquette, or the 
 History of Eliza Wharton, a novel founded 
 on fact by a lady of Massachusetts, this 
 being published in Boston in 1797. It was 
 the work of Hannah Webster of Boston, 
 who married the Rev. John Foster, D. D., 
 and who also wrote The Lessons of a 
 Preceptress in 1798, perhaps to excuse her- 
 self for the daring deed of writing fiction 
 about a coquette. Many editions of her 
 novel were published, the thirteenth appear- 
 ing so lately as 1833, in Boston. 
 
 Another book of similar popularity was 
 Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth, by 
 Mrs. Rowson of the New Theatre, Philadel- 
 phia, 1794. It was a little book containing 
 
SOME POPULAR NOVELS 93 
 
 one hundred and seventy-five pages of un- 
 mixed tragedy for the benefit of the young 
 and thoughtless. If you took the headhnes 
 of a modern " yellow journal " and bound 
 them up in a volume of one hundred and 
 seventy-five pages you could scarcely equal 
 their horrors. Yet Mr. Joseph T. Bucking- 
 ham, the leading Boston editor of that period, 
 describes it as a book " over which thousands 
 have sighed and wept and sighed again, and 
 which had the most extensive sale of any 
 work of the kind that had been published 
 in this country, twenty-five thousand copies 
 having been sold in a few years." Mrs. 
 Eawson's biographer, the Eev. EHas Nason, 
 says of it that " editions almost innumerable 
 have appeared of it, both in England and 
 America." Up to the time of Scott, he says, 
 no fiction had compared to it in England, 
 and he claims that even in America, up to the 
 time at which his memoir was written (in 
 1870), a greater number of persons could be 
 found who had read it than who had read 
 any one of the Waverley novels. It was with 
 her and her alone, that Cooper at the outset 
 had to compete. 
 
 James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789, 
 
94 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 the year of Washington's inauguration and 
 James Feni- ^^^ establishment of the new re- 
 more Cooper, pubhc. Ipviug's first book appeared 
 just twenty years afterward, and Cooper's 
 eleven years later still. It took that much 
 time, not unreasonably, for the long-expected 
 child, literature, to be born. The immediate 
 literary descendants of these two writers were, 
 as is not uncommon, of less merit than their 
 ancestors ; though many of them had their 
 period of popularity and died celebrities be- 
 fore the American public awoke to the fact 
 of their essential triviaUty. Such transitions 
 belong to the literary history of the world ; 
 in no department is it truer than in litera- 
 ture that, as our racy old American proverb 
 says, " It takes but three generations from 
 shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." 
 
 In temperament, Irving and Cooper were 
 as difEerent as possible, except in their com- 
 mon sensitiveness to criticism. Cooper was 
 impatient, opinionated, suspicious of offense, 
 and was in consequence never on very good 
 terms with the world, or the world with him. 
 He was the obnoxious kind of reformer who 
 is disposed to build everything over on theo- 
 retical principles, but seldom gets beyond 
 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 95 
 
 the stage of tearing down. He belabored 
 his fellow- Americans for having ceased to be 
 English, and scolded the English for having 
 remained as they were. As a result, he be- 
 came equally unpopular in both countries. 
 The London Times called him " affected, 
 offensive, curious, and ill-conditioned," and 
 Fraser's Magazine, with a preference for 
 the forcible substantive, pronounced him 
 " a liar, a bihous braggart, a full jackass, an 
 insect, a grub, and a reptile." These tributes 
 might have seemed to take the burden of 
 reproof from American shoulders; yet it re- 
 mained for an American, Park Benjamin, to 
 do the best, or the worst, possible under the 
 circumstances. In Greeley's I^ew Yorker 
 he called Cooper, with sweeping conclusive- 
 ness, "a superlative dolt, and a common 
 mark of scorn and contempt of every well- 
 informed American." Such criticism may 
 safely be left to itself : Cooper was foolish 
 enough to bring it into the courts and to 
 spend much time and money in advertising 
 his traducers. A far keener thrust, touching 
 the very quick of Cooper's weakness, was 
 Lowell's quiet remark : " Cooper has written 
 six volumes to show he's as good as a lord." 
 
96 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 With all his irascibility and his injudicious 
 zeal about trifles, Cooper undoubtedly pos- 
 sessed disinterestedness and nobility of pur- 
 pose. He never puffed his own work, or 
 depreciated the work o£ others for personal 
 reasons. At a time when Americans were dis- 
 posed to confound hyperbole with patriotism, 
 he spoke his mind with a truly patriotic 
 candor. He knew honor and he wished to 
 know justice. His faults were faults of tem- 
 perament, and perhaps inevitable ; for inven- 
 tion has never yet devised an inexplosive 
 gunpowder. 
 
 Cooper's personal unpopularity did not 
 prevent his novels from acquiring immediate 
 success in America and England, and a per- 
 manent fame far beyond the limits of the Eng- 
 lish tongue. It is said that his tales have 
 been translated into thirty-four languages. 
 His first success was made at the height of 
 Scott's fame, and his novels have held their 
 own in popularity beside Scott's, ever since. 
 Indeed, the lists of German booksellers show 
 a greater number of editions and versions to 
 the credit of the American romancer. 
 
 Cooper's childhood was spent at Coopers- 
 town, N. Y,, then on the frontier. After 
 
COOPER'S NOVELS 97 
 
 some years in Yale College, and a dismissal 
 for insubordination, he spent nearly five 
 years at sea, became a midshipman, and in- 
 tended to enter the navy for Hfe. In 1811, 
 however, he married, resigned from the navy, 
 and became a man of leisure. His first 
 strictly American novel appeared cooper's 
 ten years later, and in the thirty Noveb.. 
 years which followed he produced more than 
 thirty novels, of which eight or ten are still 
 widely read. Of these the Leather- Stocking 
 Tales are of course the most famous. 
 
 Lite Scott, Cooper was less successful with 
 his heroes and heroines than with his minor 
 characters. The conversation of his civilian 
 worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has said, 
 in his admirable biography of Cooper, " of 
 a kind not known to human society." His 
 women are particularly uninteresting, though 
 in uniformly describing them as " females " 
 he is simply conforming to the usage of his 
 day. When he says of one heroine that " her 
 very nature is made up of religion and fe- 
 male decorum," and of another that " on 
 one occasion her little foot moved," in spite 
 of the fact that " she had been carefully 
 taught too that even this beautiful portion 
 
98 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 of the female frame should be quiet and 
 unobtrusive " — he is hardly extending the 
 bounds of " decorum " which Scott laid down 
 for his insipid heroines. On the other hand, 
 it must be admitted that he never created a 
 living, breathing woman of any sort ; while 
 Scott, once rid of considerations of etiquette, 
 could create such heroic figures as Jeanie 
 Deans, Meg Merrilies, and Madge Wildfire. 
 Many of Cooper's subordinate mascuUne char- 
 acters, on the contrary, are entirely unconven- 
 tional, strong, fresh, characteristic, human. 
 Harvey Birch the spy, Leather-Stocking the 
 woodsman. Long Tom Coffin the sailor, Chin- 
 gachgook the Indian, are direct and vital 
 creations of genius. In his interpretation of 
 Indian character, moreover. Cooper discerned 
 the presence of a poetic element which was 
 ignored later even by such an historian as 
 Parkman, but which has since been recog- 
 nized as actual fact. 
 
 His long introductions and his loose-jointed 
 plots he had in common with Scott ; but, like 
 Scott, he found it easy to hold his readers 
 when once he had gained their attention. 
 He had, too, Scott's faculty of realism in the 
 treatment of minor incidents and characters ; 
 
COOPER'S NOVELS 99 
 
 and where they led the way, the best literary 
 practice has followed. The Edinburgh 
 Review was severe upon him for his accu-. 
 rate descriptions of costume and localities, 
 declared that they were " an epilepsy of the 
 fancy " and maintained that a vague general 
 account would have been far better. " Why 
 describe the dress and appearance of an In- 
 dian chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and 
 button-holes ? " It now turns out that this 
 very habit has made Cooper's Indian a per- 
 manent and distinct figure in literature, while 
 the so-called Indians of his predecessor, 
 Charles Brockden Brown, were merely shad- 
 owy and unreal. " Poetry or romance," con- 
 tinued the Edinburgh Review, " does not 
 descend into the particulars." Yet Balzac, 
 a far higher authority, arid one who handled 
 the details of buttons and tobacco pipes as 
 fearlessly as Cooper, said of The Path- 
 finder, " Never did the art of writing tread 
 closer upon the art of the pencil. This is 
 the school of study for literary landscape 
 painters." He says elsewhere : " If Cooper 
 had succeeded in the painting of character 
 to the same extent that he did in the paint- 
 ing of the phenomena of nature, he would 
 
100 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 have uttered the last word of our art." 
 Upon such praise as this the reputation of 
 James Fenimore Cooper may well rest. 
 
 The third of the three recognized found- 
 ers of American literature during the New 
 WiUiam c«i- York period was a New Englander 
 len Bryant, by birth, the .poet Bryant. There 
 was never a more curious illustration of the 
 unexpected channels by which literature cre- 
 ates itself in a new country than was offered 
 by the fact that the first recognized Ameri- 
 can poet should be by personal temperament 
 and bearing one of the last men to whom 
 the poetic function would at first be attri- 
 buted. Quiet, prim, grave, reticent, slender, 
 he seemed more like an old-fashioned lawyer 
 or conveyancer, than one through whom a 
 new world of song should come into being. 
 In his actual pursuits, moreover, even as an 
 editor, he was among the more formal and 
 staid of his class, held aU his assistants to 
 the greatest accuracy and hung lists of cor- 
 rect spellings in his countiag room, whereas 
 most newspaper editors are chiefly anxious 
 to accumulate words and trust Providence 
 with the spelling. This was his daily life, 
 and it resulted in founding what must to this 
 
N^"^'^ i. 
 
COOPER'S NOVELS 101 
 
 day be called, all things considered, the best 
 newspaper in the United States, the New 
 York Evening Post. But it is maintained 
 by those who knew him best, that from be- 
 ginning to end he loved to be known as a 
 poet, rather than in any sense a business 
 man. That was the impression made on me 
 when I saw him occasionally, in his later years, 
 in Newport ; especially on one occasion where 
 at some public reception I saw him and Gen- 
 eral Sherman meet. General Sherman, the 
 antipode of General Grant, was the heartiest 
 and most outspoken among noted men, and 
 he stretched out his hand to Mr. Bryant with 
 the most exuberant cordiality. " What," said 
 he, "Mr. Bryant? Why, I have heard of 
 him all my life. He is one of the regular 
 old stagers. Why, he edited a paper as long 
 ago as when I was a boy at West Point," 
 and shook his hand violently. Mr. Bryant 
 drew away his hand quietly with a rather 
 wounded expression, I fancied, as if the pio- 
 neer American poet might perhaps have en- 
 joyed some other recognition. Perhaps it was 
 this life-long and rather prosaic atmosphere 
 which left him less personally impressed upon 
 the public as a poet than those who came just 
 
102 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 after him. But I, who grew up on his poetry 
 as a boy, just before Longfellow stepped into 
 his tracks, can testify that the diet he af- 
 forded, though sparing, was uplifting, and, 
 though it did not perhaps enrich the blood, 
 elevated the ideal of a whole generation. He 
 first set our American landscape to music, 
 named the birds and flowers by familiar 
 names. He first described the beauty of the 
 " Painted Cup," for instance, without calling 
 it Castilleia, and he sang the snowy blos- 
 soms of the " Shad-Bush " which even Whit- 
 tier called the Aronia : — 
 
 " When the Aronia by the river 
 Lighted up the swarming shad." 
 
 Professor Woodberry finely says of the Pu- 
 ritans, " Their very hymns had lost the 
 sense of poetic form. They had in truth for- 
 gotten poetry ; the perception of it as a 
 noble and exquisite form of language had 
 gone from them, nor did it come back imtil 
 Bryant recaptured for the first time its grander 
 lines at the same time that he gave landscape 
 to the virgin horizons of the country." ^ He 
 alone, of all the poets, reached far enough 
 
 1 Harper's Magazine, July, 1902. 
 
COOPER'S NOVELS 103 
 
 into the zenith to touch the annual wonder 
 of migrating wild fowl — what the fine old 
 Transcendentalist, Daniel Ricketson, well calls 
 " the sublime chant of wild geese " — and 
 to bring it into human song. His merely 
 boyish poems sent by his kindred for publica- 
 tion, — the Thanatopsis in particular, writ- 
 ten at seventeen, — have perhaps never been 
 equaled in literature by any boy of that age ; 
 his blank verse was beyond that of any 
 American poet. His fame has not quite held 
 its own, and the latest edition of the Ency- 
 clopmdia Britannica does not mention him 
 at all, but his collected poems, which ap- 
 peared in 1821, — in the same year with ' 
 Cooper's Spy and two years after the Sketch 
 Book, — form the true beginning of our lit- 
 erary annals. In 1825 his verses brought 
 him an invitation to New York which he 
 accepted, and he became thenceforth a part 
 of the New York influence. 
 
 It was said of Mr. Bryant by an accom- 
 plished English critic that " he partook, in 
 an eminent degree, of that curious and al- 
 most rarefied refinement, in which, oddly 
 enough, American literature seems to surpass 
 even the literature of the old world." He 
 
104 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 disliked long poems, pronouncing them with 
 much truth to be, almost without exception, 
 " unspeakably tiresome." " The better the 
 poem is," he said, " the less it is under- 
 stood, as a general rule, by a promiscuous 
 assembly." His translation of the Odyssey, 
 on the whole one of the least valuable of his 
 works, was the only breach of this principle 
 of brevity that he himself formulated. This 
 he began on a voyage to Europe, which he 
 made with a copy of Homer in his pocket and 
 a fixed purpose of rendering at least forty 
 lines out of Greek into English every day. 
 It is a curious fact that he had, like Long- 
 fellow, a special gift for foreign languages 
 and liked to translate, and, also Hke Long- 
 fellow, had an occasional impulse toward hu- 
 mor, though the result was never very happy. 
 Bryant, though sometimes classed among 
 Knickerbocker authors, did not really be- 
 
 TheKniek- ^^^^ *" ^^^^ clique; not being a 
 erbocker native of New York, as were Hal- 
 ™"^' leek and Drake, both of whom 
 wrote poems which were declaimed with de- 
 light and many gestures by the school-boy 
 of fifty years ago, but which perhaps are no 
 longer heard even in school. The group also 
 
THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 105 
 
 included many of those minor writers on 
 ■whom it cannot be our object to dwell. 
 Among these was George Pope Morris — 
 stiU remembered for two or three songs — 
 the editor of the New York Mirror, then the 
 leading literary journal of the nation. Be- 
 sides being an editor, he held the ornamental 
 position of general of the militia and was 
 commonly given the benefit of his title. He 
 was often mentioned by his admirers as " he 
 of the sword and pen," this being perhaps 
 based on the ground that he did about as 
 much execution with the one as with the 
 other. Another was Nathaniel Parker WilHs, 
 once so famous that he boasted to Longfel- 
 low of making ten thousand dollars a year 
 by his writings at a time when Longfellow 
 wished he himself had made ten hundred. 
 He was also the first to demonstrate the truth, 
 long since so well established by others, that 
 the highest circles of English society are only 
 too easily penetrable by any American not 
 hampered with too much modesty. Still an- 
 other was Charles Fenno HofEman, whom 
 Dr. Griswold describes as the "Knicker- 
 bocker Moore," and who wrote the song 
 Sparkling and Bright. There was no doubt 
 
106 THE NEW YORK PERIOD 
 
 a certain imitativeness about these men which 
 may well be called provincial. The Knick- 
 erbocker Magazine, for instance, they Hked 
 to personify as " Maga " after the fashion 
 of Blackwood ; the only bit of such affecta- 
 tion, it may be said, which survived long 
 enough to disfigure even the early Jitlantie. 
 The whole New York school, apart from 
 Irving and Cooper, has undergone a reaction 
 in fame, a reaction perhaps excessive and 
 best exhibited in the brilHant article called 
 Knickerbocker Literature pubhshed many 
 years ago in the Nation^ written by a young 
 Harvard graduate named John Richard Den- 
 nett, long since dead. He sums up his dia- 
 tribe — perhaps rather exaggerated — by say- 
 ing that " all these men were our first crop 
 and very properly were ploughed in, and 
 though nothing of the same sort has come 
 up since, and we may be permitted to hope 
 that nothing of just the same sort will ever 
 come up, yet certainly they did something 
 toward fertiHzing the soil." All this period 
 is now removed by half a century ; and while 
 New York, unlike Philadelphia, has pro- 
 duced no new group of native writers as 
 
 1 Dec. 5, 1867 (XIX. 362). 
 
THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 107 
 
 conspicuous as that of which we had been 
 speaking, yet it has drawn from all direc- 
 tions not only journalists, but accomplished 
 men of letters, who have made of it a na- 
 tional literary centre. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD PRELIMINARY 
 
 Some time before the impulse toward a 
 graceful if shallow " polite " literature ex- 
 The New hausted itselE in New York, a new 
 England im- kind of impulse had begun to make 
 P"^'- itself felt in New England. Up to 
 
 the time of the Revolution an extraordinary 
 ignorance of contemporary European litera- 
 ture and art had prevailed throughout the colo- 
 nies. It is even said that America did not 
 possess a copy of Shakespeare tiU a hundred 
 years after his death. In the eighteenth 
 celitury the colonists were by no means slow 
 in getting the latest fashions and the latest 
 deKcacies from London ; yet they displayed 
 a surprising apathy toward the books which 
 were then to be found on every London table. 
 In 1723 the best college library in America 
 contained nothing by Addison, Pope, Dry- 
 den, Swift, Gay, Congreve, or Fielding. Ten 
 years later Franklin founded the first public 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND IMPULSE 109 
 
 library in America by an importation of some 
 forty-five pounds' worth of English boobs ; 
 among which the work of many of those au- 
 thors was doubtless included. They were, in 
 fact, the authors upon whom the taste of our 
 best writers during the next century was to 
 be formed. They were the fashionable Eng- 
 lish models for the cultivation of " poHte 
 letters." 
 
 But whatever the pursuit of such a practi- 
 cal ideal might be able to do for the Hterary 
 manners of a still provincial people, it could 
 not lead to the production of an original 
 and robust literature. What Americans 
 needed toward the middle of the nineteenth 
 century was to be given contact, not merely 
 with the courtly pens of England and France, 
 but with the great minds of all the world 
 and of all times. It was this impulse toward 
 wider contact, or culture, which was first ap- 
 parent, not unnaturally, in serious New Eng- 
 land. The intellectual movement which fol- 
 lowed. Professor Wendell suggestively calls 
 " the New England Renaissance." " In a few 
 years," he says, " New England developed a 
 considerable political hterature, of which the 
 height was reached in formal oratory ; it de- 
 
110 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 veloped a new kind of scholarship, of which 
 the height was reached in admirable works 
 of history; in religion it developed Unita- 
 rianism; in philosophy, Transcendentalism; 
 in general conduct, a tendency toward reform 
 which deeply affected our national history ; 
 and meantime it developed the most mature 
 school of pure letters which has yet appeared 
 in this country." ^ 
 
 The period at which Boston began to as- 
 sert itself as a literary centre which in some 
 Period of sense rivaled New York may be 
 Transition, get, perhaps, at the year (1830) 
 when Webster and Channing were at the 
 height of their reputation ; when Webster's 
 Reply to Hayne was delivered, and Chan- 
 ning was just entering upon that career of 
 social and political reform which gave him 
 both American and European fame. Boston 
 was then a little city of some sixty thousand 
 inhabitants, still a small peninsula hemmed 
 in by creeks and mud banks, without water 
 pipes or gas, but with plenty of foreign com- 
 merce and activity of brain. The area of 
 the peninsula was then 783 acres ; it is now 
 1829 acres. There was no Back Bay in the 
 
 1 Wendell's Literary History of America, p. 245. 
 
THE ORATORS HI 
 
 present sense, but it was all a literal back 
 bay, without capital letters. Water flowed 
 or stagnated where the Public Garden now 
 blooms; the Common still had room for 
 mihtia drilling and carpet-beating and ball 
 games for boys and even girls. Down by the 
 wharves there were many ships, mainly of 
 small tonnage, yet square-rigged. There, 
 moreover, were foreign sailors sometimes, 
 and rich Oriental odors always; and that 
 family was eccentric or unfortunate which 
 had not sent one of its sons as mate or super- 
 cargo to Rio Janeiro or Canton. This was, 
 externally speaking, the Boston of Channing 
 and of Webster. 
 
 The fact has been already noted that in 
 America, as in Greece and Rome, the first 
 really national impulse toward ex- q^jj^ 
 pression took the form of oratory. Orators. 
 Naturally, then, we find the new spirit of cul- 
 ture in New England uttering itself first 
 through the mouths of men like Edward 
 Everett and Daniel Webster. When, in 1817 
 or thereabouts, Mr. Everett, Mr. Cogswell, 
 Mr. Ticknor (they were followed somewhat 
 later by Mr. Bancroft), went to study in Ger- 
 man universities, they went not simply to 
 
112 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 represent the nation, as they did so well, but 
 to bring back to the nation the standard 
 of intellectual training of those universities. 
 When Edward Everett came back here, it 
 was to exert a very great and beneficent in- 
 fluence. To the American oratory of that 
 day he contributed the charm of training, 
 of precision, of wide cultivation. He had 
 not in a high degree the power of original 
 thought, or of inspired feeling. He had not 
 even the charm of simplicity, though, like 
 Webster, and unlike the other of the great 
 trio of New England orators, Euf us Choate, 
 he strove in later life to rid his style of the 
 florid rhetorical quality which belonged to 
 his early speeches. 
 
 The power of Everett and Choate is past, 
 but Daniel Webster is still far more than the 
 Daniel shadow of a name. His memory 
 Webster. jg yg^ armed, with a certain awe 
 even for the youngest generation. His very 
 physical presence will not be forgotten, the 
 strong, sohd, majestic figure, the great lumi- 
 nous black eyes, the head of massive power. 
 It is easy to see what an effect this magnifi- 
 cent physique must have had upon the ora- 
 tor's audiences; but the need remains for 
 
DANIEL WEBSTER 113 
 
 some other explanation of the interest in his 
 printed speeches which continues fifty years 
 after his death. It is not altogether easy at 
 first to discover the secret of their literary 
 power. Many of his phrases became famous ; 
 but it is astonishing to find upon examina- 
 tion how large a proportion of them are 
 statements of simple truth, such as one would 
 think hardly needed to be made. Here are a 
 few of those which are recorded in Bartlett's 
 Dictionary of Quotations : " Mind is the 
 great lever of all things;" "Knowledge is 
 the great sun in the firmament ; " " Thank 
 God I also am an American ; " " Independ- 
 ence now and independence forever ; " " Jus- 
 tice is the great interest of man on earth ; " 
 and so on. These are universal truths, but 
 unfortunately they are a little too obviously 
 true when we come to take them by them- 
 selves; they are too much what any of us 
 might say. We do npt really go on a great 
 occasion to hear things said just as we might 
 have said them, but to hear them said better 
 than we might have said them. 
 
 On the other hand, a structure built upon 
 a large scale cannot always be condemned 
 for lack of saliency in detail. Webster's ora- 
 
114 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 tory, like his physique, was impressive from 
 its massiveness, not' from its subtlety. More 
 nearly than any other American he ap- 
 proached the fervor and the stately force of 
 classical oratory. He was not a Demosthenes 
 or a Cicero or even a Burke ; but he did find 
 spoken discourse so natural a medium for 
 the expression of his powerful personality as 
 to give the best of his work some security 
 of permanence. 
 
 The first American clergyman, after Jona- 
 than Edwards, to achieve a positive liter- 
 Wiiiiam ^T ^^^'^ upon the English-speaking 
 EUery world was William EUery Chan- 
 
 anning. niug, who must not be confused 
 with his son and two nephews, each bearing 
 the William with a different middle name, 
 and all men of marked intellectual activity. 
 The hold taken at one time by Dr. Channing 
 is seen in the fact that six different reprints 
 of his little book on Self-Culture were pub- 
 lished in England by different publishers in 
 a single year. During his whole life, it is 
 said, Channing never knew a day of unim- 
 paired health, yet during that life, which 
 ended in 1842, he was the recognized leader 
 of New England thought ; known first as a 
 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 115 
 
 theologian in this country, bujb in Europe 
 later as a writer on social questions. His 
 books were pubHshed, either wholly or in 
 part, in the German, Trench, ItaUan, Hunga- 
 rian, Icelandic, and Russian tongues. For 
 some reason, never fully explained, there has 
 been some reaction in his popular fame. 
 Probably the absence of any trace of humor 
 in his work was one of the reasons why its 
 hold has been more short-lived than that, for 
 instance, of Emerson, from whom a delicate 
 sense of humor was as inseparable as his 
 shadow. Yet in the purely literary quaUty, 
 in the power to sum up in words a profound 
 or independent thought, a selection of max- 
 ims from Channing would be scarcely infe- 
 rior to one from Emerson. The little volume, 
 for instance, edited by his granddaughter 
 from his unpublished manuscripts, is a book 
 which bears comparison, in a minor degree, 
 with the work of Rochefoucault or Joubert. 
 Consider such phrases as this : — 
 
 " Great wisdom of God is seen in limiting parental 
 influence. The hope of the world is that parents can 
 not make their children all they wish." 
 
 " We are not to conquer with intellect any more 
 than with arms. Conquest is not kindly, not friendly." 
 
116 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " Avarice is foresight wasted." 
 
 " He who, being insulted, loses self-possession, insults 
 himself more." 
 
 " It is one of the wretchednesses of the great that 
 they have no approved fi-iend. Kings are the most 
 solitary beings on earth.'' 
 
 " When I meet a being whom I cannot serve, I know 
 my ignorance." 
 
 " I am no leveler. I have no favors to gather of the 
 poor. ... I have learned it not from demagogues, but 
 from divine sages. A man who labors is fit for any 
 society." 
 
 " Habit not merely confirms, but freezes what we 
 have gained. It gives a dead stability." 
 
 And this fine saying : — 
 
 " Nothing which has entered into our experience is 
 ever lost.'' 
 
 These are not merely examples of thought, 
 but of expression; they prove their author 
 to have been not only a speculative philoso- 
 pher, but a man of letters. 
 
 One remarkable outcome of the transfer 
 to New England of the literary centre was 
 The Hiato- the development of a school of his- 
 nans. torians who for the first time took 
 
 up the annals of the nation for serious treat- 
 ment. It was Jared Sparks who first chose 
 
THE HISTORIANS 117 
 
 the task of collecting and reprinting succes- 
 sively the correspondence of Washington 
 and of Franklin. He was intimate at my 
 mother's house and used to bring whole 
 basketfuls of letters there ; and I remember 
 weU studying over and comparing the sepa- 
 rate signatures of Washington, as well as 
 the variety of curves that he would extract 
 from the letters Oeo. of his baptismal name. 
 Sparks was the honestest of men, and has 
 been unfairly censured for revising and re- 
 modeling the letters of Washington as he 
 did. His critics overlooked the fact that in 
 the first place it was the habit of the time, 
 and all editors in his day felt free to do it ; 
 and again that Washington did it freely him- 
 self, and often entered in his letter book 
 something quite different from what he had 
 originally written and sent out, which was in 
 fact falsifying the whole correspondence. 
 
 Then followed George Bancroft, with a 
 style in that day thought eloquent, but now 
 felt to be overstrained and inflated ; William 
 H. Prescott, with attractive but colorless style 
 and rather superficial interpretation; Tick- 
 nor, dull and accurate ; Hildreth, extremely 
 dry ; Palfrey, more graceful, but one-sided ; 
 
118 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 John Lothrop Motley, laborious, but delight- 
 ful ; and Francis Parkman, more original in 
 his work and probably more permanent in 
 his fame than any of these. 
 
 But it must be remembered, as the draw- 
 back to historical writing, that very little 
 History and work of that kind can, from the 
 Literature, nature of things, be immortal. Just 
 as the most solid building of marble or gran- 
 ite crumbles, while the invisible and wan- 
 dering air around it remains unchanged for 
 ages, so a narrative of great events is likely 
 to last only until it is superseded by other 
 narrative, while the creations of pure imagi- 
 nation, simply because they are built of air, 
 can never be superseded. The intuitions of 
 Emerson, the dream-children of Hawthorne 
 and of Poe, remain untouched. Systems of 
 philosophy may change and supersede one 
 another, while that which is above all system 
 has a life of its own. The most valuable part 
 of historic work, as such, moreover, consists 
 not in the style, but in the substance. It is 
 the result of research. The books that sell 
 and are quoted are those of the popularizer, 
 those, for instance, of the late John Fiske, 
 which no historical student would for a mo- 
 

 ^fc-1.*^ ^^«>««^ 'U. t^ , 
 
 •<X*M ^'•«'t<«% ««.«.*/r 2C— 
 
 
 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN 119 
 
 ment think of placing beside those of the 
 late Mr. Justin Winsor on grounds of his- 
 torical knowledge, yet which greatly surpass 
 them in attractiveness of style. But the ap- 
 plause thus won is short-lived in comparison, 
 as is seen in the rapid fading of the fame of 
 the late James Parton, who was as popular 
 in his day as Mr. Fiske, and entitled to quite 
 as much recognition, yet added in substance 
 but little to the sum of actual knowledge. 
 As Lord Bacon pointed out, however, histori- 
 cal work is to be ranked rather with science 
 than with Hterature, though it obtains, like 
 scientific writing, additional influence when 
 possessing also a charm of utterance. 
 
 In his Life, of Columbus Washington Ir- 
 ving had produced a narrative which has in 
 the main stood the test of subse- Francis 
 quent investigation, and which is Parkman. 
 also, by virtue of his style, literature. But 
 Irving was a literary man first, and his fame 
 does not rest upon his work in history. 
 America has, indeed, produced only one pro- 
 fessional historian whose work is equally ad- 
 mirable for its accuracy and thoroughness 
 and for its literary charm. Francis Parkman 
 was the product of generations of New Eng- 
 
120 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 land character and cultivation. He was born 
 in Boston, Sept. 16, 1823, and died there, 
 Nov. 8, 1893. Before his graduation at 
 Harvard (1844) his mind had turned toward 
 the long conflict between the Trench and the 
 English in America ; and thereafter for half 
 a century, with a rare union of enthusiasm 
 and constancy, he continued to study and to 
 write upon this theme. The first of the eight 
 volumes of his great work was published in 
 1851, the last in 1892. 
 
 His health was early impaired, and for 
 many years he was practically forbidden to 
 read or write. Fortunately his inherited 
 wealth made it possible for him to employ 
 the services of others ; and the very slow- 
 ness with which he was forced to proceed 
 may have been to the advantage of his work. 
 His style is at once vigorous and stately, as 
 may be seen from the following fragments, 
 the first a description of scenery in the Black 
 HHls: — 
 
 " Yet wild as they were, these mountains were 
 thickly peopled. As I climbed further, I found the 
 broad, dusty paths made by the elk, as they filed across 
 the mountain side. The grass on all the terraces was 
 trampled down by deer ; there were numerous tracks of 
 wolves, and in some of the rougher and more precipi- 
 
FRANCIS PARKMAN 121 
 
 tous parts of the ascent, I found foot-prints different 
 from any that I had ever seen, and which I took to be 
 those of the Rocky Mountain sheep. I sat down upon 
 a rock; there was a perfect stillness. No wind was stir- 
 ring, and not even an insect could be heard. I recol- 
 lected the danger of becoming lost in such a place, and 
 therefore I fixed my eye upon one of the tallest pin- 
 nacles of the opposite mountain. It rose sheer upright 
 from the woods below, and by an extraordinary freak 
 of nature, sustained aloft on its very summit a large 
 loose rock. Such a landmark could never be mistaken, 
 and feeling once more secure, I began again to move 
 forward. A white wolf jumped up from among some 
 bushes, and leaped clumsily away ; but he stopped for 
 a moment, and turned back his keen eye and his bris- 
 tling muzzle. I longed to take his scalp and carry it 
 back with me, as an appropriate trophy of the Black 
 Hills, but before I could fire, he was gone among the 
 rocks. Soon after I heard a rustling sound, with a 
 cracking of twigs at a little distance, and saw moving 
 above the tall bushes the branching antlers of an elk. 
 I was in the midst of a hunter's paradise." ^ 
 
 The second passage is taken from Park- 
 man's account of the capture of Quebec : — 
 
 " It was nine o'clock, and the adverse armies stood 
 motionless, each gazing on the other. The clouds hung 
 low, and, at intervals, warm light showers descended, 
 besprinkling both alike. The coppice and cornfields in 
 front of the British troops were filled with French 
 sharpshooters, who kept up a distant, spattering fire. 
 
 ' The Conspiracy ofPoniiac, chap. i. 
 
122 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 Here and there a soldier fell In the ranks, and the gap 
 was filled in silence. 
 
 "At a little before ten, the British could see thatMont- 
 calm was preparing to advance, and, in a few moments, 
 all his troops appeared in rapid motion. They came 
 on in three divisions, shouting after the manner of their 
 nation, and firing heavily as soon as they came within 
 range. In the British ranks, not a trigger was pulled, 
 not a soldier stirred ; and their ominous composure 
 seemed to damp the spirits of the assailants. It was 
 not till the French were within forty yards that the 
 fatal word was given, and the British muskets blazed 
 forth at once in one crashing explosion. Like a ship at 
 full career, arrested vrith sudden ruin on a sunken 
 rock, the ranks of Montcalm staggered, shivered, and 
 broke before that wasting storm of lead. The smoke, 
 rolling along the field, for a moment shut out the view : 
 but when the white wreaths were scattered on the wind, 
 a wretched spectacle was disclosed ; men and officers 
 tumbled in heaps, battalions resolved into a mob, order 
 and obedience gone ; and when the British muskets 
 were leveled for a second volley, the masses of the 
 militia were seen to cower and shrink with uncontrol- 
 lable panic. For a few minutes, the French regulars 
 stood their ground, returning a sharp and not ineffectual 
 fire. But now, echoing cheer on cheer, redoubling vol- 
 ley on volley, trampling the dying and the dead and 
 driving the fugitives in crowds, the British troops ad- 
 vanced and swept the field before them. The ardor of 
 the men burst aU restraint. They broke into a run, 
 and with unsparing slaughter chased the flying multi- 
 tudes to the gates of Quebec. Foremost of all, the 
 light-footed Highlanders dashed along in furious pur- 
 
MINOR WRITERS 123 
 
 suit, hewing down the Frenchmen with their broad- 
 swords, and slaying many in the very ditch of the 
 fortifications^ Never was victory more quick or more 
 decisive." ^ 
 
 In pure literature the genius of New Eng^ 
 land was now very soon to find its highest 
 expression. During the third quar- Pure 
 ter of the century the two noted literature. 
 groups of literary men which had their re- 
 spective centres in Cambridge and in Concord 
 were to produce a literature which, even i£ 
 not, so far as we can now see, of the very 
 highest type, possessed genuine depth and 
 power. Before actually engaging with this 
 important subject, however, it may be as well 
 to clear the decks by considering some of the 
 minor figures which belong to that period. 
 
 There are plenty of them ; indeed, one who 
 moved in the active literary society of the 
 Boston of that day might well say. Minor 
 as the Duke of Wellington did Writers. 
 when the Honorable Mrs. Norton, the poet, 
 wished to be presented to him, that he had 
 been " very much exposed to authors." No- 
 thing is more striking in history than the rapid 
 concentration of fame upon a few leaders 
 
 * The Conspiracy ofPontiac, chap. iv. 
 
124 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 and the way in which all who represent the 
 second class in leadership fall in£o oblivion. 
 Thus it is in public affairs. In the great lib- 
 eral movement in England men remember 
 only Cobden and Bright, and in the American 
 anti-slavery movement, Garrison and Phillips, 
 and forget all of that large class whom we 
 may call the non-commissioned officers, whose 
 self-devotion was quite as great. It is yet 
 more strikingly true in literature. Walter 
 Savage Landor states it as his aspiration to 
 have a seat, however humble, upon the small 
 bench that holds the really original authors 
 of the world. It is a large demand on fate. 
 The name of E. P. Whipple, for instance, 
 or of Dr. J. G. Holland, or of R. H. Dana, 
 scarcely appeals even to the memory of most 
 young students, and yet these men were at 
 the time potent on the lecture platform and 
 in editorial chairs. We can already see the 
 same shadow of oblivion overtaking the bril- 
 liant George William Curtis, and even a name 
 so recent as that of Charles Dudley Warner. 
 Whipple was peculiarly interesting as tak- 
 Eawin Percy ing an essential part in the liter- 
 Whippie. ary life of Boston at a time when 
 he was almost the solitary instance of the 
 
EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE 125 
 
 self-made man in American literature. He 
 also constituted a link between the literary 
 and commercial Boston of his day. At a 
 time when almost all New England authors 
 came from Harvard College, he stepped into 
 the arena with only the merchants' powerful 
 guild behind him. He was said to have 
 modeled his style upon that of Macaulay, 
 then a popular idol, and was also said to 
 have been complimented by Macaulay him- 
 self. His memory was great, his reading 
 constant, his acquaintance large, his percep- 
 tions ready and clear. What he wrote was 
 so pithy, so candid, so neat, that you felt for 
 the moment as i£ it were the final word. 
 It was only on the second reading that you 
 became conscious of a certain limitation ; the 
 thought never went very deep, there was no 
 wide outlook, no ideal atmosphere. While, 
 therefore, his work had a considerable and 
 wholesome influence upon his immediate au- 
 dience, and was well worth doing, it cannot 
 be considered as a strong original contribu- 
 tion to American letters. 
 
 The same disappearance of secondary fig- 
 ures applied to the women of that period. 
 There was Lydia Maria Child, for instance, 
 
126 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 whose Appeal for that Class of Americans 
 called Africans was the first anti-slavery ap- 
 Women who peal iu book form ; and had very 
 Wrote. marked influence on her younger 
 contemporaries. Mrs. Child's Letters from 
 New York were so brilliant as to be ranked 
 with similar work of Lowell's for quality, but 
 have now almost passed into oblivion. The 
 same is true of Miss Sedgwick; and Miss 
 Alcott's name, though still living and potent 
 with children, no longer counts for much 
 with their elders. Of wider power was the 
 work of three other women, whose names are, 
 for different reasons, still remembered : Har- 
 riet Beecher Stowe, Helen Jackson, and 
 Emily Dickinson. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe was born in New England. If 
 she had spent her life there she might prob- 
 Hamet ^^1 havc been an abolitionist, but 
 Beecher could hardly have written Uncle 
 TorrCs Cabin. As it happened, she 
 lived in Cincinnati from 1832 to 1850 ; and 
 it was during this period that the materials 
 were gathered for her famous book. Before 
 her return to New England she had had plenty 
 of opportunity for actual contact with slav- 
 ery; she had frequently visited the slave 
 

^Ji—:— 0^!<^a-_-<? 
 
 <^,._<2.^^ i^ 
 
 
HELEN JACKSON 127 
 
 States, had sheltered fugitive slaves in her 
 house, and had seen her husband and bro- 
 thers aiding in their escape to Canada. She 
 had lived there during the riots when James 
 G. Birney's press was destroyed and free ne- 
 groes were hunted through the streets ; and 
 Lane Seminary, where her husband taught, 
 had repeatedly been threatened by mobs. 
 Excitement in regard to the fugitive slave 
 law was just then at its height. The book 
 itself may therefore be regarded as in a sense 
 a Western product, though it was written 
 after Mrs. Stowe's return to the East. 
 
 It is a curious fact that Mrs. Helen Jack- 
 son's Raynona, which takes rank with Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin, had a somewhat simi- g^j^^ 
 lar origin, since it was largely her Jackson. 
 life in Colorado which first influenced that 
 brilliant Eastern woman to take the wrongs 
 of the Indians for her theme. These two great 
 novels, moreover, were written from the point 
 of view of the moraHst rather than of the 
 literary artist. Ramona is in all points of 
 literary finish far superior to Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin, of which Mrs. Stowe herself used to 
 say that she left her verbs and nominative 
 cases to be brought together by her pub- 
 
128 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 lishers. I well remember in the latter case 
 the enthusiasm -with which the story was read 
 at the North, first appearing in chapters in 
 the National Era, then edited in part by 
 Whittier; and that this feeling, beginning 
 with those already convinced of the wrong 
 of slavery, extended itself rapidly to others. 
 The reception of Ramona was as decisively 
 cordial, though on a scale less vast ; it indeed 
 reached foreign countries hardly at all. 
 
 So purely in the spirit of a tract was Uncle 
 Tom conceived that it is hard for those who 
 do not remember the absorbing interest which 
 its theme at that time possessed, to under- 
 stand the enthusiasm with which it was re- 
 ceived, both here and abroad. It was the 
 famous book of the century. There are now 
 in the British Museum Library fifty-six dif- 
 ferent editions of Uncle TorrCs Cabin in 
 English, including abridgments, editions for 
 children, etc., with fifty-four in other lan- 
 guages, including more than twenty different 
 tongues, in some of which there are eight 
 or ten separate versions. Mr. Barwick, one 
 of the leading hbrarians at the Museum, told 
 me that Thomas a Kempis was perhaps the 
 only author, apart from the i3ible writers, 
 
HELEN JACKSON 129 
 
 who has been translated so much, although 
 Don Quixote came very near it ; but that 
 neither of these had been rendered into so 
 great a variety of dialects, because neither 
 reached ignorant readers so well, or created 
 such a demand for itself. For this reason 
 especial pains have been taken by the Mu- 
 seum to collect all versions. 
 
 It must be remembered that the tale had 
 the immense advantage, as had Cooper's 
 novels before it, of introducing to the world 
 a race of human beings whom it had practi- 
 cally ignored. The book had also, as the 
 writings of Cooper had not, the advantage 
 of a distinctly evangelical flavor. How much 
 weight has been carried in other cases by this 
 last quality may be seen in the immense cir- 
 culation of such tales as Ingraham's Prince 
 of the House of David in the last genera- 
 tion, and Wallace's Ben Hur in the present, 
 both marked by this attribute. Indeed, Mrs. 
 Browning herself subsequently writes of so 
 mediocre a book as Queechy, which partakes 
 of this quality, that " Mrs. Beecher Stowe 
 scarcely exceeds it, after all the trumpets." 
 
 After all reservations have been made, af- 
 ter we have admitted that the method is too 
 
130 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 plainly that of the preacher, and the verbal 
 style sadly slipshod and commonplace, there 
 is stiU this much to be said of the book; 
 that it is the work of a writer with a genuine 
 though uncultivated talent for novel-writing, 
 and is therefore likely to outlive many books 
 which, while more skillful, are also more 
 artificial. 
 
 Among other New England women of that 
 period perhaps the most remarkable of all 
 EmUy was Emily Dickinson. Though a 
 
 Dickinson, f ellow-towuswoman and schoolmate 
 of Helen Jackson's, she had little else in 
 common with her. She was, in fact, a woman 
 of a far less easily intelligible type : a strange, 
 solitary, morbidly sensitive, and pitifully chUd- 
 hke poetic genius. She shrank with some- 
 thing like terror from contact with the outer 
 world. Her own chosen home was among 
 the clouds, and the nearest point of approach 
 to it was upon her father's estate at Amherst. 
 She could hardly be tempted away from the 
 spacious grounds upon which she knew every 
 bird and bee as a friend. To a friend's re- 
 monstrance upon her unwillingness to meet 
 people, she replied : " Of ' shunning men 
 and women,' — they talk of hallowed things 
 
r^j- ■ 
 
 
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 ^y^:^?^/^, 
 
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 ^ -^ ^ _ 
 
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 ^tr '^Oe^^t^- 
 
 
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 ^^^^ :^?^Z<i^:i^ ^ - ^^ '^^'^ — 
 

 
 .^^ .^^ ^' 
 
THE MAGAZINES 131 
 
 aloud, and embarrass my dog. He and I don't 
 object to tbem, if they '11 exist their side." 
 The reply is indicative of her weakness and 
 of her strength. The woman who could af- 
 ford, in all simplicity, to fall back upon her 
 own companionship, and the companionship 
 of animals, without caring to grow in wis- 
 dom, was of no ordinary character. Emily 
 Dickinson never quite succeeded in grasping 
 the notion of the importance of poetic form. 
 The crudeness which an Emerson could mourn 
 over, she could only acknowledge. With all 
 its irregularity, however, her poetry preserves 
 a lyrical power almost unequaled in her.gen- 
 eration. In remoteness of allusion, in bold- 
 ness of phrase, it stands at the opposite 
 remove from the verse of Longfellow, for 
 example ; but if it can never attain popularity 
 — the last fate which its author could have 
 wished for it — it is likely, in the end, to obtain 
 the attention of the " audience fit, tho ' few," 
 which a greater poet once desired of Fate. 
 
 A word should be said of the periodicals 
 which had their origin in Boston, and which 
 The played, each in its different way, 
 
 Magazines. gQ important a part in the develop- 
 ment of New England literature. The North 
 
132 THE NEW ENGLAND PERIOD 
 
 American Review was founded as early as 
 1815, and for more than half a century gave 
 opportunity for the scholarship of New Eng- 
 land to express itself. Eventually it went to 
 New York, where, published under the same 
 name but governed by a widely different 
 policy, it is still a publication of influence. 
 The Dial (1840-1844), as the organ of the 
 Transcendentalists, was, in a sense, stiU more 
 limited in range. But, however circum-- 
 scribed the boundaries of its practical influ- 
 ence, Transcendentalism was, so far as it 
 knew, quite unbounded in the field of specu- 
 lation ; and the pages of the Dial, like the 
 pages of the Pre-Raphaelite organ, the 
 Germ, are of undying interest as they indi- 
 cate certain important forces which were at 
 work in their respective periods. 
 
 Scholarship and philosophy, however, can 
 make contributions to pure literature only by 
 The Atlantic inadvcrtencc. The establishment 
 Monthly. of ^j^e Atlantic Monthly in 1857 
 marks the attainment of a distinct standard 
 of pure literature among the descendants of 
 the Puritans. The Knickerhocker Maga- 
 zine was breathing its last in New York, and 
 Harper's Magazine (1850) was as yet pro- 
 
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 133 
 
 ducing little literature of power. The Atla7i- 
 tic Monthly, on the other hand, was able to 
 depend at once upon an established consti- 
 tuency of writers. Lowell was its first editor, 
 and his stipulation in accepting the position 
 — that Holmes should be the first contribu- 
 tor engaged — suggests a range of choice 
 upon which no American editor had hitherto 
 been able to rely. In fiction and in verse it 
 must be admitted that the early volumes of 
 the Atlantic do not compare favorably with 
 modern magazine work ; but the essays and 
 editorials were usually excellent. It is not 
 too much to say that for more than forty 
 years the literary standard of this magazine 
 has been maintained upon a higher plane 
 than that of any other American publica- 
 tion. The fact speaks much for the quality 
 of the group of writers which made its ear- 
 lier success. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE GKOUP 
 
 We have now to consider the development 
 of the only purely literary group of a high 
 The Greater class which America has as yet 
 Writers. produced. The best summary of 
 their work is perhaps that made by the late 
 Horace Scudder : — 
 
 "It is too early to make a full survey of the im- 
 mense importance to American letters of the work 
 done by half a dozen great men in the middle of this 
 century. The body of prose and verse created by them 
 is constituting the solid foundation upon which other 
 structures are to rise ; the humanity which it holds is 
 entering into the life of the country, and no material 
 invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional pros- 
 perity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully 
 affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for genera- 
 tions to come.'' 
 
 The highest intellectual centre of this group 
 was to be found of course in Concord, which 
 we shall presently have to consider ; but its 
 social centre was in Boston, or more properly 
 
THE PATH FROM CHARLESTOWN 135 
 
 in Cambridge ; and the house of Longfellow, 
 always hospitable, was its headquarters. 
 
 The literary associations of Cambridge all 
 cluster around a single ancient road, called 
 in the earliest records " The Path r^j^^ p^^y^ 
 from Charlestown to Watertown." from 
 Hunters, trappers, Indians, pio- ^restown. 
 neers, farmers, had all traveled on that road, 
 going westward ; and the hastily gathered 
 and " embattled " farmers marched down it, 
 going eastward, from Cambridge Common 
 to the fight at Bunker Hill. It led through 
 what is now Kirhland Street, passing the 
 house where Holmes was born, through Brat- 
 tle Street, past Longfellow's house, through 
 Elmwood Avenue and Mt. Auburn Street, past 
 the house where Lowell was born and died. 
 It then passed on beyond Mt. Auburn to the 
 original village of Watertown, now marked 
 by a deserted burial-ground only — on whose 
 crumbling stones the curious schoolboy still 
 notices such quaint inscriptions as that of 
 Mr. John Bailey, minister of the gospel, " a 
 pious and painfull preacher," or of his wife 
 described as one who " was good betimes and 
 best at last," " went off singing and left us 
 weeping," and who " walked with God until 
 
136 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 translated." It is a matter of interest to 
 recall the fact that the three poets who have 
 been mentioned were born, lived, or died 
 there, and made it from the point of view 
 of Hterature the most memorable highway 
 in America. 
 
 The American traveler in England who 
 takes pains to inquire in bookstores as to the 
 Lonrfeiiow comparative standing of his coun- 
 and try's poets among English readers, 
 
 Whittier. .g j^gjy ^^ jjg^j. LongfeUow ranked 
 
 at the head, with Whittier as a close second. 
 In the same way, if he happens to attend 
 English conventions and popular meetings, 
 he will be pretty sure to hear these two au- 
 thors quoted oftener than any other poets, 
 British or American. This parallelism in 
 their fame makes it the more interesting to 
 remember that Whittier was born within five 
 miles of the old Longfellow homestead, where 
 the grandfather of his brother poet was born. 
 Always friends, though never intimate, they 
 represented through life two quite different 
 modes of rearing and education. Longfellow 
 was the most widely traveled author of the 
 Boston circle, Whittier the least so ; Long- 
 fellow spoke a variety of languages, Whittier 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 137 
 
 only his own ; Longfellow had whatever the 
 American college of his time could give him, 
 Whittier had none of it; Longfellow had 
 the habits of a man of the world, Whittier 
 those of a recluse ; Longfellow touched re- 
 form but lightly, Whittier was essentially 
 imbued with it; Longfellow had children 
 and grandchildren, while Whittier led a sin- 
 gle life. Yet in certain gifts, apart from 
 poetic quality, they were alike ; both being 
 modest, serene, unselfish, brave, industrious, 
 and generous. They either shared, or made 
 up between them, many of the most estimable 
 qualities that mark poet or man. 
 
 The death of Henry Wadsworth Longfel- 
 low made the first breach in that well-known 
 group of poets which adorned Bos- Henry 
 ton and its vicinity so long. The Wadsworth 
 first to go was also the most widely ""^ * °^' 
 famous. Emerson reached greater depths of 
 thought ; Whittier touched the problems of 
 the nation's life more deeply; Holmes came 
 personally more before the public ; Lowell 
 was more brilliant and varied ; but, taking 
 the English-speaking world at large, it was 
 Longfellow whose fame overshadowed all the 
 others ; he was also better known and more 
 
138 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 translated upon the continent of Europe than 
 all the rest put together, and, indeed, than 
 any other contemporary poet of the English- 
 speaking race, at least if bibhographies af- 
 ford any test. Add to this that his place of 
 residence was so accessible and so historic, 
 his personal demeanor so kindly, his life so 
 open and transparent, that everything really 
 conspired to give him the highest accessible' 
 degree of contemporary fame. There was 
 no literary laurel that was not his, and he 
 resolutely declined all other laurels ; he had 
 wealth and ease, children and grandchildren, 
 health and a stainless conscience ; he had 
 also, in a pecuUar degree, the blessings that 
 belong to Shakespeare's estimate of old age, 
 — " honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." 
 Except for two great domestic bereavements, 
 his life would have been one of absolutely 
 unbroken sunshine ; in his whole career he 
 never encountered any serious rebuff, while 
 such were his personal modesty and kindli- 
 ness that no one could long regard him with 
 envy or antagonism. Among aU the sons of 
 song there has rarely been such an instance 
 of unbroken and unstained success. 
 
 Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 139 
 
 Feb. 27, 1807. Through the Wadsworths 
 and the Bartletts, the poet could trace his 
 descent to at least four of the Mayflower pil- 
 grims, including Elder Brewster and Captain 
 John Alden. His boyhood showed nothing 
 of the unruliness which people commonly as- 
 sociate with the idea of genius ; indeed, the 
 quiet sanity of his whole career was a refu- 
 tation of that idle theory. He was a pains- 
 taking student, and made a very creditable 
 record at Bowdoin College, where he had Na- 
 thaniel Hawthorne for a classmate. Before 
 his graduation, in 1825, he had thoroughly 
 made up his mind what he wanted to do in 
 life : it must be literature or nothing ; and 
 this not merely from a preference for the 
 pursuit, but from an ambition, willingly ac- 
 knowledged, to make a name as a writer. 
 
 He had no dream, however, of taking the 
 world by storm. There seemed at first, in- 
 deed, to be little prospect of his making any 
 direct step toward fitting himself for litera- 
 ture. There had been some question of his 
 undertaking post-graduate work at Cam- 
 bridge, but it had ended for the moment 
 in his beginning the study of law in his 
 father's office. Soon after his graduation. 
 
140 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 however, there was a movement to establish a 
 professorship of modern languages at Bow- 
 doin, and he, being then scarcely nineteen, 
 was sent to Europe to prepare himself for 
 this chair. It is now plain enough that the 
 young poet was reaUy preparing himself, 
 during the three years of travel and foreign 
 residence which followed, for his literary as 
 well as for his professional work. Even at 
 the time, he was turning his experiences to 
 a direct literary end. In 1835, some years 
 after his return to America, appeared Outre- 
 Mer, a book of sketches which did for the 
 Continent what Irving, somewhat too obvi- 
 ously his model, had done for England. In 
 the mean time he had been appointed to the 
 chair of Modern Languages at Harvard Uni- 
 versity. During the second journey to Eu- 
 rope which followed, his young wife died; 
 and not long after Longfellow returned to 
 take up the duties of his professorship in 
 Cambridge, where the rest of his life was to 
 be lived, and the best of his work was to be 
 done. 
 
 Outre-Mer had attained moderate success, 
 but Hyperion, Longfellow's second and final 
 prose work of importance, was destined to 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 141 
 
 attract far more attention. This was due 
 largely to the new atmosphere of German 
 life and literature which it opened to Ameri- 
 cans. The kingdom in which Germany ruled 
 was not then, as now, a kingdom of material 
 force and business enterprise, but, as Ger- 
 mans themselves claimed, a kingdom of the 
 air ; and into that reahn Hyperion gave 
 American readers the first gHmpse. There 
 is no doubt that under the sway of the sim- 
 pler style now prevailing, much of the rheto- 
 ric of Hyperion seems turgid, some of its 
 learning obtrusive, and a good deal of its 
 emotion forced; it was, nevertheless, an 
 epoch-making book. 
 
 The curious fact, however, remains, that at 
 the very time when the author was at work 
 upon Hyperion, his mind was undergoing 
 a reaction toward the simpler treatment of 
 more strictly American subjects. It must be 
 remembered that Longfellow came forward 
 at a time when cultivated Americans were 
 wasting a great deal of sympathy on them- 
 selves. It was the general impression that 
 the soil was barren, that the past offered 
 no material, and that American authors must 
 be European or die. Yet Longfellow's few 
 
142 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 notable predecessors had already made them- 
 selves heard by disregarding this tradition 
 and taking what they found on the spot. 
 Charles Brockden Brown, though his style 
 smacked of the period, found his themes 
 among the American Indians and in the 
 scenes of the yellow fever in Philadelphia. 
 It was not Irving who invested the Hudson 
 with romance, but the Hudson that inspired 
 Irving. 
 
 Longfellow's first book of original verse, 
 Voices of the Night, containing such well- 
 known poems as the Hymn to the Night, 
 The Beleaguered City, and The Skeleton 
 in Armor, gave him immediate popularity 
 as a poet. It was in later work, however, 
 especially m Hiawatha, Evangeline, and 
 The Courtship of Miles Standish, that he 
 best f ufiUed his dream of giving poetic form 
 to material belonging peculiarly to Amer- 
 ica. But in criticising Longfellow's earher 
 poetry, we must not lose sight of that fine 
 remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the 
 poet, who said to Aubrey de Vere, " How- 
 ever inferior the bulk of a young man's poe- 
 try may be to that of the poet when mature, 
 it generally possesses some passages with a 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 143 
 
 special freshness of their own and an inex- 
 plicable charm to be found in them alone." 
 A common ground for criticism on Longfel- 
 low's poetry lay in the simplicity which made 
 it then, and has made it ever since, so near 
 to the popular heart. It is possible that 
 this simplicity was the precise contribution 
 needed in that early and formative period of 
 American letters. Literature in a new coun- 
 try naturally tends to the florid, as had been 
 shown by the novels of Charles Brochden 
 Brown, or even by so severe a work as Ban- 
 croft's History of the United States. In 
 poetry, Poe was to give only too wide a pres- 
 tige to the same tendency. In subsequent 
 years Longfellow published many volumes of 
 verse, in which his experiments with English 
 hexameter are now, perhaps, most famous. 
 There is no doubt that the reading public at 
 large has confirmed the opinion of Dr. OHver 
 Wendell Holmes : " Of the longer poems of 
 our chief singer, I should not hesitate to 
 select Evangeline as the masterpiece, and I 
 think the general verdict of opinion would 
 confirm my choice. . . . From the first line 
 of the poem, from its first words, we read as 
 we would float down a broad and placid river. 
 
144 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 murmuring softly against its banks, heaven 
 over it, and the glory of the unspoiled wil- 
 derness all around." 
 
 After a tenure of eighteen years, Long- 
 fellow resigned his Harvard professorship. 
 During the next few years Hiawatha and 
 The Courtship of Miles Standish were pro- 
 duced, and were received with great enthu- 
 siasm in America and elsewhere. The prin- 
 cipal works of his later years were the Dante 
 translations and Christus : A Mystery. The 
 Ghristus was the fine flowering of Longfel- 
 low's spiritual Hfe. Yet one rarely sees the 
 book quoted ; it has not been widely read, 
 and in all the vast list of Longfellow trans- 
 lations into foreign languages, there appears 
 no version of any part of it except the com- 
 paratively modern Golden Legend. It has 
 simply afforded one of the most remarkable 
 instances in literary history of the utter ignor- 
 ing of the supposed high-water mark of a 
 favorite author, and also perhaps of the fact 
 that an author's early impulses are a safer 
 guide than his maturer judgment. But, apart 
 from any single work, Longfellow's fame was 
 secure, and his death in March, 1882, was 
 recognized as more than a national calamity. 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 145 
 
 In looking back over his whole career, we 
 must see that while his work would have been 
 valuable in any time or place, its worth to a 
 new and unformed literature was priceless. 
 The first need of such a literature was no 
 doubt a great original thinker like Emerson. 
 But for him we should perhaps have been 
 still provincial in thought and imitative in 
 theme and illustration ; our poets would have 
 gone on writing about the skylark and the 
 nightingale, which they might never have 
 seen anywhere, rather than about the bobo- 
 link and the humble - bee, which they knew. 
 It was Emerson and the so-called Transcen- 
 dentalists who really set our literature free ; 
 yet Longfellow rendered a service only sec- 
 ondary, in enriching and refining it, and in 
 giving it a cosmopolitan culture ; leading to 
 an unquestioned standing in the literary 
 courts of the civilized world. It was a great 
 advantage, too, that in his more moderate 
 and level standard of execution there was 
 afforded no room for reaction. The same 
 attributes that keep Longfellow from being 
 one of the greatest poets are likely to make 
 him one of the most permanent. 
 
 Whittier, like Garrison, — who first appre- 
 
146 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 ciated his poems, — was brought up apart 
 from what Dr. Holmes loved to call the 
 Brahmin class in America; those, namely, 
 John ^^^ were bred to cultivation by 
 
 Greenieaf Cultivated parents. Emerson, Long- 
 ^'"'^'- fellow, Hohnes, Lowell, were es- 
 sentially of this class; all their immediate 
 ancestors were, in French phrase, gens de 
 robe ; three of these poets being children of 
 clergymen, and one of a lawyer who was also 
 a member of Congress. All of them had in 
 a degree — to borrow another phrase from 
 Hohnes — tumbled about in libraries. Whit- 
 tier had, on the other hand, the early train- 
 ing of a spiritual aristocracy, the Society of 
 Friends. He was bred in a class which its 
 very oppressors had helped to ennoble ; in the 
 only meetings where silence ranked as equal 
 with speech, and women with men ; where no 
 precedence was accorded to anything except 
 years and saintliness ; where no fear was felt 
 but of sin. This gave him at once the com- 
 panionship of the humble and a habit of 
 deference to those whom he felt above him ; 
 he had measured men from a level and touched 
 human nature directly in its own vigor and 
 yet in its highest phase. 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 147 
 
 Not one of this eminent circle had the keys 
 of common life so absolutely in his hands as 
 Whittier. Had anything been wanting in 
 this respect, his interest in politics would 
 have filled the gap. First thrilled by the 
 wrongs of the slave, and serving in that 
 cause a long apprenticeship, it was instinc- 
 tive in him to be the advocate of peace, of 
 woman suffrage, of organized labor. In such 
 outworks of reform he had an attitude, a 
 training, and a sympathy which his literary 
 friends had not. He was, in the English 
 phrase, " a poet of the people," and proved 
 by experience that even America supplied 
 such a function. The more exclusive type of 
 life he had studied in New England history, 
 — none better, — but what real awe did it 
 impose on him who had learned at his mo- 
 ther's knee to seek the wilderness with Wil- 
 liam Penn or to ride through howling mobs 
 with Barclay of Ury? The Quaker tradition, 
 after all, had a Brahminism of its own which 
 Beacon Street in Boston could not rear or 
 Harvard College teach. 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haver- 
 hill, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1807. His earliest 
 American ancestor, Thomas Whittier, was of 
 
148 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 Huguenot stock, and not, like his descend- 
 ants, a Quaker, though a defender of Qua- 
 kers. Upon the farm and in the homestead 
 inherited from this ancestor, Whittier passed 
 his boyhood. He was as tall as most of his 
 family, but not so strong. He took his full 
 share of the farm duties ; he had to face 
 the winter weather in what we should call 
 scanty clothing : it was before the period 
 had arrived when, in Miss Sedgwick's phrase, 
 the New England Goddess of Health held 
 out flannel underclothing to everybody. To a 
 stronger constitution the life should have been 
 simply invigorating, but Whittier, though he 
 lived to be eighty-five, was all his life a recog- 
 nized invalid. 
 
 There were few books in this Quaker house- 
 hold, but the boy's instinct toward versify- 
 ing asserted itself very early. His father did 
 not encourage his attempts, but at the age 
 of eighteen a piece of his verse sent by his 
 sister to a Haverhill newspaper attracted the 
 attention of its editor, William Lloyd Gar- 
 rison. Garrison was himself only twenty- 
 one, but his lively interest in Whittier's work 
 was of great value to the young poet, and 
 laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. 
 
JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 149 
 
 Garrison urged the elder Whittier to give 
 his son better schooHng, but poverty stood 
 in the way. A chance came a little later 
 to take a few terms in a newly estabUshed 
 " academy " at Haverhill ; and that was all 
 the formal education Whittier ever had. " I 
 have renounced college," he wrote in 1828, 
 " for the good reason that I have no disposi- 
 tion to humble myself to meanness for an 
 education — crowding myself through col- 
 lege at the expense of others, and leaving 
 it with a debt or an obligation to weigh 
 down my spirit hke an incubus, and paralyze 
 every exertion. The professions are already 
 crowded full to overflowing ; and I, forsooth, 
 because I have a miserable knack of rhym- 
 ing, must swell the already enormous num- 
 ber, struggle awhile with debt and difficul- 
 ties, and then, weary of life, go down to my 
 original insignificance, where the tinsel of 
 classical honors will but aggravate my mis- 
 fortune." He was not, however, to return 
 to farm Ufe. Through Garrison he was of- 
 fered the editorship of a weekly temperance 
 paper called the Philanthropist, in Boston. 
 In the letter from which we have just quoted^ 
 he said of this possibility : " Seriously — the 
 
150 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 situation of editor of the Philanthropist 
 is not only respectable, but it is peculiarly 
 pleasant to one who takes so deep an inter- 
 est, as I really do, in the great cause it is 
 laboring to promote. ... I would rather 
 have the memory of a Howard, a Wilber- 
 force, and a Clarkson than the undying fame 
 of a Byron." The final sentence is espe- 
 cially noteworthy, as giving the keynote of 
 Whittier's subsequent career. His life from 
 this time was that of a journalist and a re- 
 former, rather than that of a man of letters. 
 It would be easy, however, to lay too 
 much stress upon his lack of academic train- 
 ing. His formal schooling, says Mr. Pickard,' 
 " was only the beginning of his student life ; 
 by wide and well-chosen reading he was con- 
 stantly adding to his stores of information; 
 while reveling in the fields of EngHsh litera- 
 ture, he became familiar through translations 
 with ancient and current literature of other 
 nations." As a poet Whittier was not only 
 slow in reaching maturity, but, in spite of 
 his fondness for rhyming, very slow in pro- 
 ducing anything of real promise. He him- 
 self was so fully aware of this that in the 
 
 I Pickard, i, p. 72. 
 
f//S //^ 
 
 
 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 151 
 
 final collected edition of his works he pre- 
 served only two or three of the hundred or 
 more experiments in verse which he made 
 before the age of twenty-five. From journal- 
 ism he seemed likely to slip into politics till, 
 once again under the leadership of Garrison, 
 he became identified with the anti-slavery 
 movement, a connection which efEectually 
 debarred him from political success. 
 
 Personally, my first interview with Whittier 
 was in my student days, soon after my gradu- 
 ation from coUege, when I was dining in 
 Boston at an economical restaurant known 
 as Campbell's, then a haunt for two classes 
 of patrons. Harvard students and abolition- 
 ists. When I was nearly through my modest 
 repast, a man near me exclaimed impetuously, 
 " There is Whittier ! " I had lately become 
 an ardent reader of his poems, and looking 
 eagerly in the direction indicated, I saw a 
 man just rising from table, — looking thirty- 
 five years old or thereabouts, — slender, erect, 
 in the straight-cut Quaker coat, a man with 
 rich ohve complexion, black hair and eye- 
 brows, brilhant eyes, and a certain Oriental 
 look. I felt that then or never was the time 
 to make his acquaintance, and rising from 
 
152 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 my seat I shyly made my way across the room 
 to him, and said, when I had reached him, 
 " I should like to shake hands with the au- 
 thor of Massachusetts to Virginia." As I 
 made the remark, he turned with a startled 
 look upon me. " Thy name, friend," he 
 briefly said. I gave it, and then and there 
 began a lasting friendship. 
 
 If Whittier's bent was toward the active 
 service of his feUow men rather than toward 
 the literary life, it is none the less true that 
 he is now known best not as a philanthropist 
 but as a poet. His distinction is to have been 
 more than any other American the poet of 
 familiar life. What Lowell said dramatically, 
 he could say from experience : " We draw 
 our lineage from the oppressed." Compared 
 with him Longfellow, Holmes, even Lowell, 
 were poets of a class. Burns was his favorite 
 poet, and, in later years, he attained, in the 
 naturalness and flow of his song, to some- 
 thing like the lyric power of his master. 
 A few of Longfellow's poems possess this 
 quality, but it pervades the mature work of 
 Whittier. Consequently, though not a little 
 of his poetry lacks compactness and finish, 
 very little of it lacks power. "His rudest 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 153 
 
 shafts of song," as Mr. Stedman has said, 
 " were shot true and far and tipped with 
 flame." It is only in this respect that Whit- 
 tier resembles Burns. His character was as 
 firm, and his life as well ordered, as Longfel- 
 low's. It has, indeed, been the fashion among 
 those who remember the famous phrase, 
 " Great wits are sure to madness near allied," 
 to condemn all these poets as too resp'ectable, 
 too orderly. How could such steady and re- 
 spectable members of society be expected to 
 produce really great poetry? The theory 
 upon which this question is based cannot be 
 discussed here. Let us admit that, for better 
 or worse, the literature of New England has 
 been the wholesome product of a simple and 
 healthy way of living. Longfellow and Whit- 
 tier — who died Sept. 4, 1892 — undenia- 
 bly lacked the flexibility of mind and the 
 buoyancy of spirit which belonged to several 
 of their contemporaries, notably Holmes and 
 Lowell. To Holmes, especially, with his 
 sunny temperament and friendly voice, his 
 ripeness of humor and nicety of phrase, our 
 literature is greatly indebted ; he is hkely 
 to stand, moreover, as one of the few great 
 humorists of the world. 
 
164 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cam- 
 bridge, Aug. 29, 1809. His father was an 
 ouyerWen- Orthodox Congregational clergy- 
 deU Holmes, man, who stuck to his Calvinistic 
 colors throughout the period which saw Uni- 
 tarianism firmly established in Cambridge 
 and Boston. The Unitarian movement is 
 interesting to the student of literature, as 
 one of the signs of the intellectual ripening 
 which made it possible for a powerful litera- 
 ture to spring from the hitherto unpromising 
 SOU of Puritan New England. Dr. Holmes 
 himself early became a Unitarian, in the 
 same spirit of fidelity to his belief which had 
 held his father to the older faith. On his 
 graduation from Harvard in 1829, Holmes, 
 like so many other men of literary tastes at 
 that time, turned first toward the bar. After 
 studying for a year and a half, however, he 
 decided that the law was not for him. As 
 the ministry was uncongenial, only one of 
 the three learned professions then considered 
 respectable remained open to him. He stud- 
 ied medicine in Europe for two years and a 
 half, took his degree at the Harvard Medical 
 School in 1836, became Professor at Dart- 
 mouth in 1838, and Professor at the Harvard 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 155 
 
 Medical School in 1847. He was thus away 
 from Cambridge during most of my boyhood, 
 and my memory first depicts him vividly 
 when he came back to give his Phi Beta 
 Kappa poem in 1836. He was at this time a 
 young physician of great promise, which was 
 thought to be rather impaired by his amusing 
 himself with poetry. So, at least, he always 
 thought ; and he cautioned in later years a 
 younger physician. Dr. Weir Mitchell, to 
 avoid the fault which he had admitted, advis- 
 ing him to be known exclusively as a physi- 
 cian until his reputation in that line should 
 be made. The effect of levity conveyed by 
 this poem — which was in the main a serious, 
 not to say a ponderous one — was due largely 
 to certain passages which he described as 
 " wanting in dignity." Especially criticised 
 was one passage in which he gallantly enu- 
 merated the probable names of the various 
 young ladies in the gallery, mentioning, for 
 instance, 
 
 " A hundred Marys, and that only one 
 Whose smile awaits me when my song is done." 
 
 These statistics of admiration were not 
 thought altogether suitable to an academic 
 poem, and the claim itself with regard to the 
 
156 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 young lady may have proved a little prema- 
 ture, inasmuch as she subsequently married 
 Holmes's friend Motley, the historian. 
 
 At the Phi Beta Kappa dinner which fol- 
 lowed, he appeared under circumstances which 
 gave his humor free play. Presently there 
 was a cry for Dr. Holmes, and a little man 
 was drawn forward not unwillingly and com- 
 pelled to stand in a chair where he could be 
 seen and sing his song; and he sang in a 
 voice high and thin, yet well modulated, this 
 touching lay : — 
 
 " Where, oh where are the visions of morning, 
 Fresh as the dews of our prime ? 
 Gone, like tenants that flit without warning, 
 Down the back entry of Time. 
 
 " Where, oh where are life's lilies and roses. 
 Nursed in the golden dawn's smile ? 
 Dead as the bulrushes round little Moses, 
 On the old banks of the Nile. 
 
 " Where are the Marys, and Anns, and Elizas, 
 Loving and lovely of yore ? 
 Look in the columns of old Advertisers, — 
 Married and dead by the score. 
 
 " Where the gray colts and the ten-year-old fillies, 
 Saturday's triumph and joy ? 
 Gone, like our friend toSos (ukvs Achilles, 
 Homer's ferocious old boy. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 157 
 
 " Yet, though the ebbing of Time's mighty river 
 Leave our young blossoms to die, 
 Let him roll smooth in his current forever, 
 Till the last pebble is dry." 
 
 I had read Nodes Ambrosiance of Black- 
 wood's Magazine, with Christopher North 
 and all the rest of it, but now I felt that I 
 too had at last been admitted to the " nights 
 and suppers of the gods." 
 
 Holmes's singularly boyish appearance was 
 at first against his success in the practice of 
 medicine, and he probably had no very great 
 liking for the incessant duties of the " gen- 
 eral practitioner." That he held his chair of 
 Anatomy at Harvard for many years is suffi- 
 cient proof of his usefulness in his chosen 
 profession ; though its principal value to the 
 world may now seem to have been that it pro- 
 vided him with a scientific arsenal from which 
 to draw literary weapons not accessible to 
 others. 
 
 His success in literature was to be won in 
 an extraordinary way. It is a rare thing for 
 a man nearly fifty years old to strike out a 
 new career, such as in the case of Holmes fol- 
 lowed the publication of the Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast- Table. He had, to be sure, begun 
 
158 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 a similar venture long before. Two articles 
 under the same title had appeared twenty-five 
 years earlier in the New England Magor 
 zine. They had not attracted much attention, 
 and were, as a whole, rather crude, but the 
 general method employed, with its pleasant 
 conversational flavor, and easy discursive 
 style, was the method which best expressed 
 the nature of the author in his maturity. 
 When in 1857 the Atlantic Monthly was 
 founded, and Lowell became its editor, he 
 stipulated that Dr. Holmes should be the first 
 contributor engaged ; and the first instalment 
 of the Autocrat appeared in the opening 
 number. Upon this series of papers Holmes's 
 fame may stand ; they represent the fine flow- 
 ering of his genius for intimate discourse, and 
 include, besides, much of the best of his verse. 
 His later work in the same vein, however, is 
 less delightful only because it is, in a sense, 
 the " second growth " of an extraordinarily 
 fertile mind. 
 
 In poetry his taste was conservative. He 
 disliked modern experiments in irregular ver- 
 sification, and held to the somewhat rigid 
 " correctness " of the school of Pope. His 
 own verses were consequently of uniform 
 

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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 169 
 
 smoothness and elegance ; and as the best of 
 them are marked by fineness rather than depth 
 of feeling, it is not likely that a freer treat- 
 ment would have increased their power. 
 
 Once or twice, in poems like The Cham- 
 bered Nautilus and The Last Leaf, the poet 
 seems to have risen above the grade of the 
 kindly urbanity which made him one of 
 the best of " occasional " verse-writers. Of 
 his novels, it need only be said here that they 
 are likely to hold their own for some time 
 as interesting by-products of powers which 
 found their main expression elsewhere. 
 
 Holmes is important to American literature 
 not only as a singularly approachable and ef- 
 fective personality, but as in every way the 
 product of his time and place. His favorite 
 character, Little Boston, was a fanciful ex- 
 aggeration of his own innocent cockneyism. 
 In his day Beacon Street was still precisely 
 what he called it, " The sunny street that 
 holds the sifted few." More than for Amer- 
 ica, perhaps, he stood for Boston, and for 
 New England " Brahminism." That was not 
 the final type of Americanism, but it was one 
 of the most important nineteenth-century 
 types, and to represent it fitly in literature 
 
160 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 constituted a valuable service to the country. 
 Holmes died Oct. 7, 1894. 
 
 James Russell Lowell was born in Cam- 
 bridge, Feb. 22, 1819. His father was a 
 James Eus- Unitarian minister of old Massa- 
 seu LoweU. chusetts stock. As a schoolboy 
 Lowell showed little regular industry, but a 
 great deal of cleverness and an insatiable 
 himger for good reading. 
 
 The first letter from Lowell which I have in 
 my collection, written somewhere about the 
 age of fourteen, shows how early the quality 
 of humor set in. It was written on the occa- 
 sion of returning to my brother Thacher a 
 volume of Sallust, an author then required for 
 examination by those entering college. 
 
 COPY. 
 
 [ Verbatim ac Literatim.'] 
 Mr DEAE Thach. 
 
 In the course of 
 human events when the mind 
 becomes indued with active 
 spirit with powerfull imagin 
 ation, with extensive enter prise 
 with noble design ty — Then 
 My boy. Then ! is the 
 time to return to you 
 this - Sallust 
 
 Yrs 
 
 J. R. L. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 161 
 
 In this cheery announcement there is a curi- 
 ous foreshadowing of the " imaginings," " en- 
 terprises," and " designties " of his own life, 
 and we can see whence he derived that gay 
 and elastic spirit which made his later lec- 
 tures delightful to his students at the Uni- 
 versity when he " opened a new world to 
 them " in Professor Barrett Wendell's phrase ; 
 or, in the phrase of Mr. Henry James, made a 
 "romance of the hour " for them. " It was," 
 the latter continues, " an unforgettable ini- 
 tiation. He was so steeped in history and 
 Hterature that to some yearning young per- 
 sons, he made the taste of knowledge sweeter, 
 almost, than it was ever to be again." 
 
 Like Irving and Longfellow and Holmes, 
 he first turned to the law for support, and 
 went so far as to be admitted to, the bar ; 
 but he had less heart, even, for the actual 
 practice of law than Holmes for the practice 
 of medicine. He had also a firmer purpose 
 of gaining success in literature, and sedu- 
 lously trained himself to be a writer. In 
 1844 he married Maria White, a gifted and 
 cultivated woman, whose criticism and sym- 
 pathy were of great value to her husband's 
 work, and whose reformatory feeling called 
 
162 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 forth much of that quality in him. Their 
 income was small, but by dint of lecturing 
 and writing for the magazines — which then 
 offered a very limited field even for a Lowell 
 — they made shift to live. Mrs. Lowell died 
 in 1853, and only one of her four children 
 survived her. 
 
 In the meantime Lowell's reputation as a 
 man of letters had become secure, and in 1855 
 he was appointed Longfellow's successor in 
 the chair of Modern Languages and Belles- 
 Lettres at Harvard. The rest of his career is 
 too well known to be enlarged upon in this 
 narrative. He was one of the founders and 
 the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly ; 
 Minister to Spain, and, later, to England; 
 and he died, Aug. 12, 1891, the recognized 
 premier of American letters, and not the least 
 of American men of affairs. 
 
 His standing in literature is probably less 
 easily determinable than that of Holmes ; and 
 this for a reason which at first seems strange. 
 As to fertility of mind, abundance of re- 
 sources, variety of knowledge, there was 
 scarcely any difference in the two persons; 
 the head of water was the same, and why 
 was it that in the case of Holmes the stream 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 163 
 
 flowed so much more sjnoothly? It was 
 Lowell who had accepted literature as his 
 sphere, while Holmes regarded it as a mere 
 avocation ; yet it was Lowell who never quite 
 attained smoothness or finish of utterance, 
 while Holmes easily developed it. Lowell was 
 always liable to entanglement in his own 
 wealth of thought and fancy. His style is 
 rich and often delightful ; yet it must be 
 said both of his prose and his verse, that his 
 immense fertility of mind constantly led him 
 into confused rhetoric and mixed metaphors. 
 He lacked, in short, the pure taste and tire- 
 less " capacity for taking pains " which be- 
 long to the literary artist. 
 
 The permanence of his verse is especially 
 imperiled by this defect. Brilliant and spon- 
 taneous as it is, very little of it possesses the 
 absolute quality of good poetry. His form 
 does not grow inevitably out of his theme, 
 and consequently his style is what a great 
 style never is, the " dress " of his thought. 
 While, therefore, he composed more impul- 
 sively and rapidly than Holmes, he never 
 produced a strain quite so pure and perfect 
 and certain of a place in the treasury of Eng- 
 lish poetry as The Chambered Nautilus. He 
 
164 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 was, for better and worse, more a poet of his 
 own day than Hohnes, Even in The Vision 
 of Sir Launfal, he could not, as Hohnes 
 noted, forget his American landscape or his 
 modern point of view ; and his greater suc- 
 cesses, from The Biglow Papers to the 
 Commemoration Ode, were essentially poems 
 of occasion. 
 
 It was immensely to the advantage of 
 Lowell as a direct human force that he was 
 so frankly a man of the hour. Longfellow 
 in his quiet scholastic life and Holmes in his 
 office of urbane spectator seem a little remote, 
 by comparison, from the more eager questions 
 of their day. Yet Lowell's best work was done 
 in a field of pure letters toward the cultiva- 
 tion of which America had before his time 
 done very little. His criticism of contempo- 
 raries cannot, for the most part, be greatly 
 praised. In the period of Lowell's literary 
 bringing-up the traditions of the English 
 Christopher North had reached over to Amer- 
 ica, and men had learned to measure merit by 
 stings. The Edinburgh Review had set the 
 example, and the Quarterly and Blackwood's 
 Magazine had followed it. The recognized 
 way to deal with a literary heretic was to crush 
 
/(O. 
 
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 t^ ^C&^ >i*<V^ yfe4_^ AjU- /^ ^*>» ^mr'^ , 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 169 
 
 him. Among authors, too, it was a time of 
 defiant and vehement mutual criticism ; it was 
 thought a fine thing to impale somebody, to 
 make somebody writhe, to get even with some- 
 body, and it was hard for the younger men 
 to keep clear of the flattering temptation. 
 Poe in New York proceeded cheerfully with 
 these tactics, and Lowell in Cambridge was 
 only too ready to follow his example. In 
 Lowell's Fable for Critics you find the 
 beginning of aU this : in his prose you will find 
 an essay on " Percival " which is essentially 
 in the line of these English examples, and that 
 on " Thoreau " is Uttle better ; and worse 
 than either, perhaps, is his article on " Mil- 
 ton," nine tenths of which is vehement and 
 almost personal in its denunciation of Profes- 
 sor Masson, a man of the highest character 
 and the most generous nature, though some- 
 times too generous of his words. What makes 
 the matter worse is that Lowell charges the 
 sin of " wearisomeness " upon both Masson 
 and Milton himself, and yet the keen Fitz 
 Gerald selects one sentence of Lowell's in this 
 very essay as an illustration of that same sin. 
 Lowell says of Milton's prose tracts : — 
 
 " Yet it must be confessed that, with the single excep- 
 tion of the Areopagitica, Milton's tracts are weari- 
 
166 THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP 
 
 some reading, and going through them is like a long 
 sea voyage whose monotony is more than compensated 
 for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence leaping 
 before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away 
 behind in winking disks of silver, as if the conscious 
 element were giving out all the moonlight it had garnered 
 in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid 
 regent." 
 
 The criticism on Lowell comes "with force 
 from Fitz Gerald, who always cultivated con- 
 densation, and it also recalls the remark of 
 Walter Pater, that " the true artist may be 
 best recognized by his skill in omission." 
 
 Apart from his bent for personalities, how- 
 ever, and from the question of his ability 
 to practice what he preached, there is in the 
 substance of his best prose work a sound body 
 of criticism such as no other American has yet 
 produced. For scholarship, incisiveness, and 
 suggestiveness, such papers as the essays on 
 Dryden, Pope, and Dante have been surpassed 
 by very little criticism written in English. 
 
 The special service of the New England 
 literature of the middle of the nineteenth 
 century was to achieve an enlargement of the 
 national horizon. In Cambridge, as we have 
 seen, the expansion was primarily mental and 
 aesthetic ; in Concord, as we are about to see, 
 it was mainly speculative and spiritual. ' 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CONCORD GBOUP 
 
 Before proceeding to deal with the indi- 
 vidual members of the Concord group, we 
 must understand what that " Tran- Transcen- 
 scendentalism " was with which we dentaiism. 
 commonly associate their names. Perhaps 
 one ought not to speak of understanding it, 
 for it hardly understood itself. It was less a 
 philosophy than an impulse, and our interest 
 in it must now be due to the fact, first, that 
 it was an impulse most useful to the Amer- 
 ica of that day, and, second, that it was 
 strongly felt by many of the leading spirits 
 of the time. It was, in brief, an impulse 
 toward an absolute freedom, intellectual, 
 spiritual, and social. Naturally, its best re- 
 sults were in the nature of subtle suggestion 
 and inspiration to a generation which greatly 
 needed to broaden its horizon. Its more con- 
 crete experiments were often fantastic and 
 short-lived, though pever ignoble. That 
 
168 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 curious journal of the Transcendentalists, 
 the Dial, lived only four years ; the Brook 
 Farm community held together for seven 
 years. The whole movement had about it 
 much that was visionary and merely odd as 
 well as much that was true and noble ; but 
 it had, on the whole, great power for good 
 in that day, as, through the expression of its 
 spirit by Emerson, it has even now. 
 
 In coming to Emerson we arrive at the 
 controlling influence, if not the creator, of 
 modern American thought. Emerson never 
 could have said what Lady Diana Beauclerc 
 wrote from Bath, one foggy day : " A thou- 
 sand children are running by the window. I 
 should like to whip every one of them for 
 not being mine." In Emerson's case the 
 spiritual children are aU his; they are still 
 running by, and perhaps we must admit that 
 the day sometimes looks foggy, and the chil- 
 dren sometimes deserve whipping. 
 
 Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 
 1803, and had a clerical ancestor for eight 
 Ralph generations back, on one side or 
 
 Waldo the other and sometimes on both. 
 His mother, a widow, was obliged 
 to economize strictly, and it is recorded that 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 169 
 
 Emerson once went without the second vol- 
 ume of a book because his aunt had con- 
 vinced him that his mother could not afford 
 to pay six cents upon it at the Circulating 
 Library. At coUege he was yoimger than 
 most of his classmates, but was apt to be suc- 
 cessful in competition for the few Uterary 
 prizes then offered by the college. His class- 
 mate Josiah Quincy, who gained the first prize 
 in one case where Emerson got the second, 
 on an ethical subject, remarked in his diary 
 that " the dissertation on ethics was dull and 
 dry ; " and as he also regarded Emerson's 
 Class Day poem as " rather poor," it is worth 
 while to remember that there is no known 
 criticism quite so merciless as that of coUege 
 boys upon one another. It was with these 
 credentials, at any rate, that Emerson went 
 forth into the world in 1821 and became 
 himself a clergyman. 
 
 Ten years later he had retired from the 
 pulpit and was on his way to Europe, where 
 he stayed nearly a year. It was during this 
 visit that he made the acquaintance of Landor 
 and Wordsworth, as described in English 
 Traits. He also went to Craigenputtock to 
 see Carlyle, who long afterwards, talking 
 
170 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 ■with Longfellow, described his visit as being 
 like the visit of an angel. This was the be- 
 ginning of that lifelong friendship the terms 
 of which are recorded in their published 
 correspondence. "The dear Emerson," said 
 Carlyle to an American forty years later, " he 
 thinks that the whole world is as good as him- 
 self." After his return to Boston, Emerson 
 entered that secular pulpit called in those days 
 the Lyceum, or lecture platform. For half a 
 century he was one of the leading lecturers 
 of the country. He spoke in forty succes- 
 sive seasons before the Salem Lyceum. Much 
 of the success, of these addresses came from 
 the unique simplicity and dignity of his man- 
 ner. There was a legend of a woman in a 
 town near Concord, who once avowed frankly 
 that she could not understand a word he 
 said, but she loved to watch him lecturing, 
 because he looked so good. His calm and 
 sonorous oratory, once heard, seemed to roll 
 through every sentence of his that the student 
 afterwards read, and his very peculiarities, the 
 occasional pause, accompanied by a deep gaze 
 of the eyes into the distance, " looking in the 
 corner for rats," as an irreverent Boston 
 young lady once described it, or an apparent 
 
KALPH WALDO EMERSON 171 
 
 hesitation in the selection of a word, — felici- 
 tously preparing the way, like Charles Lamb's 
 stammer, for some stroke of mother-wit, — 
 these were a part of the man. It sometimes 
 occurred that his auditors helped him, uncon- 
 sciously, in the effect of his oratory. Thus I 
 can recall the occasion when he exclaimed, in 
 the middle of a lecture, " Beware how you 
 unmuzzle the valetudinarian ! " when a slight 
 bustle was noticed among the seats, and one 
 of the best known men in Boston, a man 
 of striking appearance, was seen bearing out 
 in his arms his wife, one of the best known 
 women in Boston and a good deal of an in- 
 valid, who had apparently been unmuzzled . 
 by that particular sentence. Emerson always 
 shrank from extemporaneous speech, though 
 he was sometimes most effective in its use. 
 He wrote of himself once as " the worst 
 known public speaker and growing continu- 
 ally worse ; " but his most studied remarks 
 had the effect of offhand conviction from the 
 weight and beauty of his elocution. 
 
 It was in the year 1834 that Emerson re- 
 tired to his father's birthplace. Concord, and 
 became a dweller for the rest of his life in 
 what was at first a small rural village. If 
 
172 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 Cambridge was small compared to Boston, 
 Concord was still smaller compared to Cam- 
 bridge ; and, like Cambridge, it held, then or 
 soon after, an unusual proportion of culti- 
 vated people. It is said to have been re- 
 marked by Bret Harte, when he first came 
 to Cambridge from California, that the town 
 was so full of authors " you could not fire a 
 revolver from your front door without bring- 
 ing down a two-volumer." The same state of 
 things soon presented itself at Concord, al- 
 thojigh the front doors were fewer, and the 
 dwellers rarely limited themselves to two 
 volumes. Emerson soon sent forth from this 
 , new retreat his first thin book, entitled Na- 
 ture. From the beginning to the end of this 
 first volume, the fact is clear that it was con- 
 sciously and deHberately a new departure. 
 Those ninety brief pages were an undisguised 
 challenge to the world. On the very first 
 page the author complains that our age is re- 
 trospective, — that others have " beheld God 
 and nature face to face ; we only through 
 their eyes. Why should not we," he says, 
 " also enjoy an original relation to the uni- 
 verse? Why should not we have a poetry 
 and philosophy of insight and not of tradi- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 173 
 
 tion ? " Thus the book begins, and on the 
 very last page it ends, " Build, therefore, 
 your own world ! " 
 
 At any time, and under almost any condi- 
 tions, the first reading of such words by any 
 young person would be a great event in life, 
 but in the comparative conventionalism of the 
 Uterature of that period it had the effect of a 
 revelation. It was six years later, July, 1840, 
 that the first number of the Dial was pub- 
 lished, and on the very first page the editors 
 speak of " a strong current of thought and 
 feeling which for a few years past has led 
 many sincere persons in New England to 
 make new demands on hterature." In Emer- 
 son's paper in the second number of the Dial, 
 he says, " What shall hinder the genius of 
 the time from speaking its thought? It can- 
 not be silent if it would. It will write in a 
 higher spirit and wider knowledge and with 
 a gi'ander practical aim than ever yet guided 
 the pen of poet . . . and that which was 
 ecstasy shall become daily bread." 
 
 From this time he was identified with Con- 
 cord, and his house was for many years what 
 Lord Clarendon called the house of Lord 
 Falkland, " a college situated in purer air " 
 
174 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 and "a university in less volume." Emer- 
 son's books appeared in rapid succession, 
 and his fame extended far beyond his native 
 land. It is probable that no writer of the 
 English tongue had more influence in Eng- 
 land thirty years ago, before the all-absorbing 
 interest of the new theories of evolution 
 threw all the so-called transcendental phi- 
 losophy into temporary shade. This influence 
 has now plainly revived, since the stress of the 
 Darwinian period has passed, and one is sure 
 to see one of Emerson's books on any English 
 or American list of republished classics. 
 
 As a master of language, it may be fear- 
 lessly said that within the limits of a single 
 sentence no man who ever wrote the English 
 tongue has put more meaning into words 
 than Emerson. In his hands, to adopt Ben 
 Jonson's phrase, " words are rammed with 
 thought." In all Hterature you will find no 
 man who has better fulfiUed that aspiration 
 stated in such condensed phrase by Joubert : 
 " To put a whole book into a page, a whole 
 page into a phrase and that phrase into a 
 word." Emerson himself said of the Greeks 
 that they " anticipated by their very lan- 
 guage what the best orator could say ; " and 
 

 
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RALPH WALDO EMERSON 175 
 
 neither Greek precision nor Roman vigor 
 could produce a phrase that Emerson could 
 not match. Who stands in all hterature as 
 the master o£ condensation if not Tacitus ? 
 Yet Emerson, in his speech at the anti-Kan- 
 sas meeting in Cambridge, quoted that cele- 
 brated remark by Tacitus as to the ominous- 
 ness of the fact that the effigies of Brutus 
 and Cassius were not carried at a certain state 
 funeral ; and in translating it Emerson bet- 
 tered the original. The indignant phrase of 
 Tacitus is, " Praef ulgebant . . . eo ipso quod 
 . . . non visebantur," " They shone conspicu- 
 ous from the very fact that they were not 
 seen," thus enforcing a moral lesson in four- 
 teen Latin syllables ; but Emerson gives it in 
 seven English syllables and translates it, even 
 more powerfully : " They glared through their 
 absences." After all it is such tests as this 
 which give literary immortality, — the perfec- 
 tion of a phrase, — and if you say that never- 
 theless there is nothing accomplished unless 
 an author has given us a system of the uni- 
 verse, it can only be said that Emerson never 
 desired to do this ; and, indeed, left on re- 
 cord the opinion that the world is " too young 
 by some ages yet to form a creed." The 
 
176 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 system-makers have their place, no doubt, but 
 when we consider how many of them have 
 risen and fallen since Emerson began to write, 
 — ScheUing, Cousin, Comte, Mill, down to 
 the Hegel of yesterday and the Spencer of to- 
 day, — it is evident that the absence of a sys- 
 tem is not the only thing which may shorten 
 fame. 
 
 Emerson's precise position as a poet cannot 
 yet be assigned. He has been likened to an 
 seolian harp which now gives and then per- 
 versely withholds its music. Nothing can ex- 
 ceed the musical perfection of the lines : — 
 
 " Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
 And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 
 
 Yet within the compass of this same fine 
 poem ( Woodnotes) .there are passages which 
 elicited from Theodore Parker, one of the 
 poet's most ardent admirers, the opinion 
 that " a pine tree which should talk as Mr. 
 Emerson's tree talks would deserve to be 
 plucked up and cast into the sea." His poetic 
 reputation came distinctly later in time than 
 his fame as an essayist and lecturer. Like 
 Wordsworth and Tennyson, he educated the 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 177 
 
 public mind to himself. The same verses 
 which were received with shouts of laughter 
 when they first appeared in the Dial were 
 treated with respectful attention when col- 
 lected into a volume, and it is possible that 
 some of them may take their places among the 
 classic poems of all literature. 
 
 It is evident from Emerson's criticisms in 
 the Dial, as that on EUery Channing's 
 poems, that he had a horror of what he called 
 " French correctness " and could more easily 
 pardon what was rough than what was tame. 
 When it came to passing judgment on the 
 details of poetry, he was sometimes whimsical ; 
 his personal favorites were apt to be swans, 
 and, on the other hand, there were whole 
 classes of great writers whom he hardly re- 
 cognized at all. This was true of Shelley, for 
 example, about whom he wrote " though uni- 
 formly a poetic mind, he is never a poet." 
 About prose writers his estimate was a shade 
 more trustworthy, yet he probably never quite 
 appreciated Hawthorne, and certainly dis- 
 couraged young people from reading his 
 books. He died May 6, 1882. 
 
 There were grouped about Emerson in 
 Concord, or frequently visiting it, several per- 
 
178 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 sons of the Transcendental School whom we 
 Theodore i^^st not pass by. One o£ these 
 Parker. -^ras Theodoie Parker, that eminent 
 heretic, who has had the curious experience 
 of being at last held up to admiration by the 
 very churches which once cast him out. In a 
 literary way, he was the most profitable con- 
 tributor of the Dial, his manner being much 
 more popular than the rest, so that Mr. 
 Emerson used to say that the only numbers 
 which sold well were those which had Theodore 
 Parker's articles in them. He was a syste- 
 matic student on a large scale, which Emer- 
 son was not, and he was also a man of action, 
 wearing himself out by such a variety of la- 
 bors that his lifetime was short. There is no 
 one whom LoweU hits off better in the Fa- 
 blefor Critics : — 
 
 " Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man 
 Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban. 
 
 But the ban was too small or the man was too big, 
 For he reeks not their bells, books, and candles a fig. 
 
 Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced 
 In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest : 
 There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than 
 
 priest, 
 If not- dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least. 
 
MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI 179 
 
 His gestures all downright and same, if you will, 
 As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill ; 
 But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke, 
 Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak ; 
 You forget the man whoUy, you 're thankful to meet 
 With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street, 
 And to hear, you 're not over-particular whence, 
 Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense." 
 
 A more immediate ally of Emerson, as 
 the first leading editor of the Dialy was the 
 most remarkable American woman Margaret 
 up to our time, in the hterary path FuUer 
 at least, Margaret Fuller, after- 
 wards Madame Ossoli. She not only had to 
 edit it for nothing and man it with good con- 
 tributors for nothing, but to criticise even 
 Emerson's contributions, sometimes greatly 
 to his advantage, and to steer between the 
 demands of the popular and matter-of-fact 
 Theodore Parker, on the one side, and the 
 dreamy Alcott, on the other. Of one num- 
 ber she was forced to write eighty-five out 
 of its hundred and thirty-six pages herself, 
 and after two years had to resign the task. 
 Carlyle, who always criticised the American 
 Transcendentalists severely, excepted only 
 her, besides Emerson, among its writers. He 
 . called her writings " the undeniable utter- 
 
180 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 ances of a true heroic mind, altogether 
 unique, so far as I know, among the writing 
 women of this generation." 
 
 The last of Emerson's immediate and clos- 
 est friends, and one whom he always placed 
 Bronson far ahovc himself, was Amos Bron- 
 Aicott. gon Alcott, in one respect a more 
 
 characteristic New England product than any 
 of the others, inasmuch as he rose from a 
 very humble source to be one of the leading 
 influences of the time, in spite of all whims 
 and oddities. Kegarding himself as a fore- 
 ordained teacher and always assuming that 
 attitude to all, he yet left on record utter- 
 ances which show an entire lack of vanity at 
 heart. For instance, he wrote thus from Con- 
 cord in 1865 : " Have been also at Lynn and 
 HaverhiU speaking lately. Certainly men 
 need teaching badly enough when any words 
 of mine can help them. Yet I would fain 
 believe that not I, but the Spirit, the Per- 
 son, sometimes speaks to revive and spare." 
 In the children's stories of his daughter he 
 took a father's satisfaction, however far her 
 sphere seemed from his own. There were 
 one or two occasions when he showed him- 
 self brave where others had flinched. One 
 
BRONSON ALCOTT 181 
 
 of the heroic pictures yet waiting to be 
 painted in New England history is that of 
 the tranquil and high-minded philosopher at 
 the time during a fugitive slave case, when 
 the rear entrance of the Boston Court House, 
 then temporarily used as a slave-pen, had 
 been beaten in, and the few who got inside 
 had been driven out by the police, the mob 
 hesitating to follow them. There was the 
 open door with the gashghts burning brightly 
 upon it and the pistols of the marshal's men 
 showing themselves above the inner stair- 
 way. Outside were the vacant steps and the 
 crowd of lookers-on. Quietly there pene- 
 trated the mob the figure of a white-haired 
 man, like the ghost of an ancient Puritan ; 
 he mounted the steps tranquilly, cane in hand, 
 and pausing near the top said to one of the 
 ringleaders of the attack, pointing placidly 
 forward, " Why are we not within ? " " Be- 
 cause," said the person addressed, " these 
 people win not stand by us." He paused 
 again at the top, the centre of all eyes from 
 within and from without. A revolver was 
 fired from within, and finding himself wholly 
 unsupported he turned and walked down, 
 without hastening a step. Neither Plato nor 
 
182 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 Pythagoras could have done the thing better; 
 and the whole event brought back vividly the 
 appearance of the Gray Champion in one of 
 Hawthorne's tales. 
 
 But Alcott now bids fair to be remembered 
 only for the influence which he had upon 
 greater men. His personality could impose 
 itself upon those who saw him and heard his 
 words, but could find no effective expression 
 in literature. Just the contrary was true of 
 Nathaniel Hawthome. He was, to be sure, a 
 Hawthorne, jjian of Striking presence, and his 
 physical strength and stateliness irresistibly 
 connected themselves in the minds of those 
 who saw him with the seK-contained pur- 
 pose, the large resources, the waiting power, 
 of the great writer. I first met him on a 
 summer morning in Concord, as he was walk- 
 ing along the road near the Old Manse, with 
 his wife by his side, and a noble-looking 
 baby-boy in a little wagon which the father 
 was pushing. I remember him as tall, firm, 
 and strong in bearing ; his wife looked pen- 
 sive and dreamy, as she indeed was, then and 
 always. When I passed, Hawthorne lifted 
 upon me his great gray eyes, with a look too 
 keen to seem indifferent, too shy to be sym- 
 

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 183 
 
 pathetic — and that was all. But it comes 
 back to memory like that one glimpse o£ 
 SheUey which Browning describes, and which 
 he hkens to the day when he found an 
 eagle's feather. 
 
 It is surprising to be asked whether Haw- 
 thorne was not physically very small. It 
 seems at the moment utterly inconceivable 
 that he shoidd have been anything less than 
 the sombre and commanding personage he 
 was. EUery Channing well describes him as a 
 
 " Tall, compacted figure, ably strung, 
 To urge the Indian chase, or point the way." 
 
 One can imagine any amount of positive 
 energy — that of Napoleon Bonaparte, for 
 instance — as included within a small physi- 
 cal frame. But the self-contained purpose 
 of Hawthorne, the large resources, the wait- 
 ing power, — these seem to the imagination 
 to imply an ample basis of physical hfe ; and 
 certainly his stately and noble port is insep- 
 arable, in my memory, from these character- 
 istics. Again I met Hawthorne at one of the 
 sessions of a short-lived Hterary club ; and I 
 recall the imperturbable dignity and patience 
 with which he sat through a vexatious 
 
184 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 discussion, whose details seemed as much 
 dwarfed by his presence as if he had been a 
 statue of Olympian Zeus. 
 
 The events of his life may be briefly given. 
 He was born in Salem, July 4, 1804, of an 
 old Salem family. One of his ancestors was 
 a judge in some of the famous witch trials, and 
 had, according to tradition, brought a curse 
 upon his descendants by his severity. Born 
 of such stock, and bred in such surroundings, 
 it is no'wonder that Hawthorne became early 
 the romantic interpreter of that sombre code 
 and mode of living which we call Puritanism. 
 His boyhood was given more to general 
 reading than to study. He graduated from 
 Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in 1825, and spent 
 twelve quiet years at Salem writing and re- 
 writing; publishing little, and that through 
 the most inconspicuous channels : becoming, 
 in short, as he said, " the obscurest man of 
 letters in America." Not until the pubKca- 
 tion of Twice-Told Tales (1837) did he obtain 
 recognition. A brief residence in the Brook 
 Farm community gave him the materials for 
 The Bliihedale Romance. In 1841 he was 
 married, and settled in the Old Manse at 
 Concord, which, some years later, he made 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 185 
 
 famous in Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 He afterwards held a post in the Salein Custom 
 House for three years ; during which period 
 he wrote little, but The Scarlet Letter grad- 
 ually took shape in his mind. It was pub- 
 Hshed in -1850, to be followed during the two 
 succeeding years by The House of the Seven 
 Gables and The Blithedale Romance. Then 
 followed seven years in Europe, four of them 
 at the Liverpool consulate, and, as a result, 
 his last great romance, The Marble Faun. 
 He died May 19, 1864. 
 
 Hawthorne we all agree to be the greatest 
 American imaginative prose writer ; and his 
 place in the literature of our tongue be- 
 comes every day more sure. If his genius 
 matured slowly, it did really mature. His 
 notebooks are frequently commonplace ; 
 probably because his art was massive and de- 
 liberate, and he had no faculty for spinning 
 delight out of next to nothing. His person- 
 ality, too, was of a subtlety and remoteness 
 which could not be interpreted colloquially ; 
 perhaps it was only in his rarest creative mo- 
 ments that the man was intimate with him- 
 self. Of the originality of his best work we 
 do, at all events, feel more certain than we 
 
186 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 can of any other American's ; and this be- 
 cause its unique quality consists not in queer- 
 ness or cleverness, but in the reflection of a 
 strong and sane and whole personality. 
 Dickens and Bulwer and Thackeray were 
 among Hawthorne's contemporary " EngUsh 
 novelists, but he has far less in common with 
 any of them than they have with each other, 
 either in manner or in spirit. Hawthorne's 
 work was, in fact, the product of two princi- 
 pal impulses : a reaching toward the moral 
 intensity of old New England Puritanism, 
 and toward the spiritual subtlety of modern 
 New England Transcendentalism. But he is 
 not finally to be classified either as Puritan 
 or Transcendentalist, for aU the elements of 
 his nature were fused as they can be only in 
 the great artist ; and it is as an artist in the 
 largest sense of the word that Hawthorne is 
 likely to be known. 
 
 One of the most characteristic of his liter- 
 ary methods is his habitual use of guarded 
 under-statements and veiled hints. It is not 
 a sign of weakness, but of conscious strength, 
 when he qualifies his statements, takes you 
 into his counsels, offers hypotheses, as, " May 
 it not have been ? " or, " Shall we not rather 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 187 
 
 say?" and sometimes, like a conjurer, urges 
 particularly upon you the card he does not 
 intend you to accept. He seems not quite to 
 know whether Arthur Dimmesdale really had 
 a fiery scar on his breast, or whether Don- 
 atello had furry ears, or what finally became 
 of Miriam and her lover. He will gladly 
 share with you any information he possesses, 
 and, indeed, has several valuable hints to 
 offer ; but that is all. The result is, that you 
 place yourself by his side to look with him 
 at his characters, and gradually share with 
 him the conviction that they must be real. 
 Then, when he has you in his possession, he 
 leaves you to discover the profound spiritual 
 truth involved in the story. 
 
 I have always thought him in this respect 
 to have been influenced, or at least antici- 
 pated, by a writer who has been too much over- 
 looked, and whose influence upon htm seems 
 to me quite perceptible, although his biogra- 
 pher. Prof. Woodberry, is disposed to set it 
 entirely aside. This was William Austin, the 
 author of Peter B,ugg, the Missing Man, a 
 delineation more Hawthornesque, in my opin- 
 ion, than anything in Scott, to whom Prof. 
 Woodberry rightfully assigns some slight in- 
 
188 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 fluence over Hawthorne. This tale was first 
 printed in Buckingham's New England Ga- 
 laxy for Sept. 10, 1824 ; and that editor says 
 of it : " This article was reprinted in other 
 papers and books, and read more than any 
 newspaper communication that has fallen 
 within my knowledge." 
 
 The original story purports to belong to 
 the year 1820, and the scene of a later con- 
 tinuation is laid in the year 1825, both these 
 being reprinted in the Boston Book for 
 1841, and in the lately republished works of 
 William Austin. It is the narrative, in the 
 soberest language, of a series of glimpses of 
 a man who spends his hfe in driving a horse 
 and chaise — or more strictly " a weather- 
 beaten chair, once built for a chaise-body " 
 — in the direction of Boston, but never get- 
 ting there, until extreme old age. He is ac- 
 companied by a child ; and it subsequently 
 turns out that he really left Boston about the 
 time of the Boston massacre, before the Revo- 
 lution (1770), and has been traveling ever 
 since, — the explanation being that he was 
 once overtaken by a storm at Menotomy, now 
 Arlington, a few miles from Boston, and that 
 being a man of violent temper he swore to 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 189 
 
 get home that night or never see home again. 
 Thenceforth he is always traveUng ; a cloud 
 and a storm always follow him, and every 
 horse that sees his approach feels abject ter- 
 ror. The conception is essentially Hawthorne- 
 like ; and so are the scene and the accesso- 
 ries. The time to which Rugg's career dates 
 back is that border land of which Hawthorne 
 was so fond, between the colonial and the 
 modern period ; and the old locaUties, dates, 
 costumes, and even coins are aU introduced 
 in a way to remind us of the greater artist. 
 But what is most striking in the tale is what 
 may be called the penumbra, — a word de- 
 fined in astronomy as that portion of space 
 which in an echpse is partly but not entirely 
 deprived of light ; and in painting, as the 
 boundary of shade and light, where the one 
 blends with the other. He seems in a man- 
 ner to consult with the reader as to the true 
 view, and often puts first that which he does 
 not believe. It is this precise gift which has 
 long been recognized as almost pecuUar to 
 Hawthorne among writers, and yet he shares 
 it with the author of Peter Rugg, a book 
 written while Hawthorne was a boy in col- 
 lege. 
 
190 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 For all these merits Hawthorne paid one 
 high and inexorable penalty, — the utter ab- 
 sence of all immediate or dazzling success. 
 His publisher, Goodrich, tells us in his i?e- 
 miniseences, that Hawthorne and Willis be- 
 gan to write together in the Token, in 1827, 
 and that the now forgotten Willis " rose rap- 
 idly to fame," whUe Hawthorne's writings 
 " did not attract the slightest attention." 
 For twenty years he continued to be, accord- 
 ing to his own statement, "the obscurest 
 man of letters in America." Goodrich testi- 
 fies that it was almost impossible to find a 
 publisher for Twice- Told Tales in 1837, 
 and I can myself remember how limited a 
 circle greeted the reprint in the enlarged 
 edition of 1841. When Poe, about 1846, 
 wrote patronizingly of Hawthorne, he added, 
 " It was never the fashion, until lately, to 
 speak of him in any summary of our best 
 authors." Whittier once told me that when 
 he himself had obtained, with some difficulty, 
 in 1847, the insertion of one of Hawthorne's 
 sketches in the National Era, the latter 
 said quietly, " There is not much market for 
 my wares." It has always seemed to me the 
 greatest triumph of his genius, not that he 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU 191 
 
 bore poverty without a murmur, — for what 
 right has a literary man, who can command 
 his time and his art, to sigh after wealth ? — 
 but that he went on doing work of such a 
 quality for an audience so small or so indif- 
 ferent. 
 
 We pass now to the youngest of the well- 
 known Concord authors of that circle, and 
 one who, unlike the others, practi- Henry Da- 
 cally failed to win high apprecia- vidXhoreau. 
 tion during life, and passed into the other 
 world apparently unsuccessful. There is no 
 fame really more permanent than that which 
 begins its actual growth after the death of 
 an author ; and such is the fame of Thoreau. 
 Before his death he had published but two 
 books, A Week on the Concord and Merri- 
 mack Rivers and Walden. Nine more have 
 since been printed, besides two volumes of 
 selected extracts and two biographies, mak- 
 ing fifteen in all. Such things are not 
 accidental or the result of whim, and they 
 indicate that the literary fame of Thoreau is 
 secure. Indeed, it has already survived two 
 of the greatest dangers that can beset repu- 
 tation, — a brilliant satirist for a critic, and 
 an injudicious friend for a biographer. 
 
192 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 This friend, the late EUery Channing, was 
 a man of wayward genius, and of voluntary 
 self-withdrawal from the world. Both he in 
 his memoir and Lowell in his well-known 
 criticism, have brought the eccentricities of 
 Thoreau into undue prominence, and have 
 placed too little stress on the vigor, the good 
 sense, the clear perceptions, of the man. 
 One who has himself walked, talked, corre- 
 sponded with him, can testify that the im- 
 pression given by both these writers is far 
 removed from that ordinarily made by Tho- 
 reau himself. While tinged here and there, 
 like most American thinkers of his time, 
 with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as 
 a companion, essentially original, wholesome, 
 and enjoyable. Though, more or less of a 
 humorist, nursing his own whims, and capa- 
 ble of being tiresome when they came upper- 
 most, he was easUy led away from them to 
 the vast domains of literature and nature, 
 and then poured forth endless streams of the 
 most interesting talk. He taxed the patience 
 of his companions, but not more so, on the 
 whole, than is the case with most eminent 
 talkers when launched upon their favorite 
 themes. 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU 193 
 
 Lowell accepts throughout the popular 
 misconception — and has, indeed, done much 
 to strengthen it — that Thoreau hated civili- 
 zation, and believed only in the wilderness ; 
 whereas Thoreau defined his own position on 
 this point with exceeding clearness, and made 
 it essentially the same with that of his critics. 
 " For a permanent residence," he says, " it 
 seemed to me that there could be no compari- 
 son between this [Concord] and the wilder- 
 ness, necessary as the latter is for a resource 
 and a background, the raw material of all 
 our civiUzation. The wilderness is simple 
 ahnost to barrenness. The partially cultivated 
 country it is which chiefly has inspired, and 
 will continue to inspire, the strains of poets 
 such as compose the mass of any Uterature." 
 
 In the light of such eminently sensible 
 remarks as these, it will by and by be discov- 
 ered that Thoreau's whole attitude has been 
 needlessly distorted. Lowell says that " his 
 shanty-life was mere impossibihty, so far as 
 his own conception of it goes, as an entire in- 
 dependency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes 
 had a sounder bottom." But what a man 
 of straw is this that Lowell is constructing ! 
 What is this " shanty-life ? " A young man 
 
194 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 living in a country village, and having a 
 passion for the minute observation of nature, 
 and a love for Greek and Oriental reading, 
 takes it into his head to build himself a study, 
 not in the garden or the orchard, but in the 
 woods, by the side of a lake. Happening to 
 be poor, and to live in a time when social 
 experiments are in vogue at Brook Farm and 
 elsewhere, he takes a whimsical satisfaction 
 in seeing how cheaply he can erect his hut, 
 and afterwards support himself by the labor 
 of his hands. He is not really banished from 
 the world, nor does he seek or profess ban- 
 ishment : indeed, his house is not two miles 
 from his mother's door ; and he goes to the 
 village every day or two, by his own show^ 
 ing, to hear the news. In this quiet abode 
 he spends two years, varied by an occasional 
 excursion into the deeper wilderness at a dis- 
 tance. He earns an honest living by garden- 
 ing and land-surveying, makes more close 
 and delicate observations on nature than any 
 other American has ever made, and writes 
 one of the few books, perhaps the only book, 
 yet written in America, that can bear an an- 
 nual perusal. Can it be really true that this 
 is a life so wasted, so unpardonable? 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU 195 
 
 Let US not do injustice to Lowell, who closes 
 his paper on Thoreau with a generous tribute 
 that does much to redeem his earlier injustice. 
 The truth is, that Thoreau shared the noble 
 protest against worldliness of what is called 
 the " transcendental " period, in America, and 
 naturally shared some of the intellectual ex- 
 travagances of that seething time ; but he did 
 not, Hke some of his contemporaries, make 
 his whims an excuse for mere selfishness, and 
 his home life — always the best test — was 
 thoroughly affectionate and faithful. His life- 
 long ceHbacy was due, as has been asserted, 
 to an early act of lofty self-abnegation toward 
 his own brother, whose love had taken the 
 same direction as his own. Certainly his per- 
 sonal fortitude amid the privations and limi- 
 tations of his own career was nothing less 
 than heroic. There is nothing finer in literary 
 history than his description, in his unpublished 
 diary, of receiving from his publisher the im- 
 sold copies — nearly the whole edition — of 
 his Week on the Concord and Merrimack 
 Rivers, and of his carrying the melancholy 
 burden upstairs on his shoulders to his study. 
 " I have now a library," he says, " of nearly 
 nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred 
 of which I wrote myself." 
 
196 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 In the late volume giving memorials of one 
 of the last of the Transcendentalists, Daniel 
 Eicketson, of New Bedford, there are inter- 
 esting glimpses of the time when Lowell's 
 article on Thoreau was supposed to have well- 
 nigh suppressed him as an author. Thoreau's 
 sister wrote to Eicketson, it seems, " I have 
 too much respect for Mr. Lowell's powers 
 of discrimination to account at all for his 
 blundering and most unfriendly attack upon 
 Henry's book," and Eicketson himself adds, 
 " Lowell's nature is wholly inadequate to 
 take in Thoreau. Lowell thought Thoreau 
 was posing for effect. I am satisfied that 
 Thoreau could not possibly play a part." 
 He then winds up with one of those seem- 
 ingly daring combinations with which the 
 Transcendentalists innocently startled more 
 decorous ears : " I rank Christ Jesus, Soc- 
 rates, and Thoreau as the sincerest souls that 
 ever walked the earth." 
 
 " In literature nothing counts but genius," 
 yet the length of time which sifts out genius 
 is an uncertain quantity. In the Boston of 
 that period it was fancied quite easy thus to 
 sift it out — but it proved that while men were 
 right in attributing this gift to Emerson, 
 
^^^'^rts^ 
 
 Z' 
 
 
y<^S^^ 
 
 
 "-^ 
 
 :?, 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU 197 
 
 Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier, 
 the critics were quite wrong in denying it to 
 Thoreau, who was generally regarded as a 
 mere reflection of Emerson. Mrs. Thoreau, 
 the mother, thought with quite as much jus- 
 tice that it was Emerson who reflected her 
 son ; but the weight of opinion was on the 
 other side. Many could not understand why 
 anybody should really wish Thoreau's letters 
 to be published ; but the final publication 
 of his journal is acknowledged to be an im- 
 portant literary event ; and it is probable that 
 his fame will for some time increase ; and 
 wfll thereafter safely hold its own. Thoreau 
 died at forty-four, without having achieved 
 fame or fortune. For years his life was 
 commonly spoken of as a failure ; but it 
 now proves, with all its drawbacks, to have 
 been a great and eminent success. Even 
 testing it only by the common appetite of 
 authors for immortahty, his seems already 
 a sure and enviable place. Time is rapidly 
 melting away the dross from his writings, 
 and exhibiting their gold. But his standard 
 was higher than the mere desire for fame, 
 and he has told it plainly. " There is no- 
 where recorded," he complains, " a simple 
 
198 THE CONCORD GROUP 
 
 and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of 
 life, any memorable praise of God. ... If 
 the day and night are such that you greet 
 them with joy, and life emits a fragrance, 
 like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, — is 
 more elastic, starry, and more immortal, — 
 that is your success." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE SOUTHEEN INFLUENCE WHITMAN 
 
 We have had to speak, thus far, mainly of 
 work done within three somewhat narrowly 
 restricted areas, with their respective centres 
 in or about Philadelphia, New York, and 
 Boston. Before the outbreak of the Civil 
 War a distinct type of literary energy mani- 
 fested itself in the South, with Charleston, 
 S. C, as its principal centre. In earlier days 
 the South was the region in which lit- 
 erature had its slowest development. Even 
 then, however, it possessed a single writer 
 who, representing the best type of Southern 
 colonist, should be considered before we ap- 
 proach the work of the thoroughly Ameri- 
 canized Southerner. This writer was Colonel 
 WiUiam Byrd of Westover, Va., whose 
 very interesting papers have recently come 
 to light. Byrd founded the city of Rich- 
 mond, lived in lordly fashion, and had per- 
 haps a larger library than any man in New 
 
200 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 England, its catalogue including 3438 vol- 
 umes. He was also a member of the king's 
 council for thirty-seven years and finally its 
 president. He was a patron of art and sci- 
 ence and a Fellow of the Koyal Society of 
 Great Britain. Colonel Byrd was one of the 
 commissioners to run the Virginia boundary 
 through the Dismal Swamp in 1728, and he 
 attended the actual surveyors half a mile 
 into the then terrible Swamp. No New Eng- 
 land writer at that day could possibly have 
 written so cheery and jaunty a description 
 of their struggle : — 
 
 " The skirts of it were thinly planted with dwarf 
 reeds and gall-bushes, but when we got into the Dis- 
 mal itself, we found the reeds grew there much taller 
 and closer, and to mend the matter were so interlaced 
 with bamboo-briers, that there was no scuffling through 
 them without the help of pioneers. At the same time, 
 we found the ground moist and trembling under our 
 feet like a quagmire, insomuch that it was an easy mat- 
 ter to run a ten foot pole to the head in it, without 
 exerting any uncommon strength to do it. Two of 
 the men, whose burdens were the least cumbersome, 
 had orders to march before, with their tomahawks, and 
 clear the way, in order to make an opening for the 
 surveyors. By their assistance we made a shift to push 
 the line half a mile in three hours, and then reached 
 a small piece of firm land, about one hundred yards 
 wide, standing up above the rest like an island. Here 
 
THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 201 
 
 the people were glad to lay down their loads and take 
 a little refreshment, while the happy man whose lot 
 it was to carry the jug of rum, began already, like 
 ^sop's bread-carriers, to find it grow a good deal lighter. 
 
 " 17th. . . . Since the surveyors had entered the 
 Dismal they had laid eyes on no living creature ; neither 
 bird nor beast, insect nor reptile came in view. Doubt- 
 less the eternal shade that broods over this mighty 
 bog, and hinders the sunbeams from blessing the ground, 
 makes it an uncomfortable habitation for anything that 
 has life. Not so much as a Zealand frog could endure 
 so aguish a situation. It had one beauty, however, 
 that delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the 
 other senses : the moisture of the soil preserves a con- 
 tinual verdure, and makes every plant an evergreen, 
 but at the same time the foul damps ascend without 
 ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for respirar 
 tion. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly 
 over it, no more than the Italian vultures will over the 
 filthy lake Avernus or the birds in the holy land over 
 the salt sea where Sodom and Gomorrah formerly stood. 
 
 " In these sad circumstances the kindliest thing we 
 could do for our suffering friends was to give them 
 a place in the Litany. Our chaplain for his part did 
 his office, and rubbed us up with a seasonable sermon. 
 This was quite a new thing to our brethren of North 
 Carolina, who liye in a climate where no clergyman 
 can breathe, any more than spiders in Ireland." 
 
 It is impossible to read this and not recog- 
 nize in every sentence the jaunty, man-of-the- 
 worldly, almost patrician air with which this 
 
202 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 cheery Englishman pursues his investigations, 
 a tone so absolutely remote from that of any 
 New England excursion into the wilderness ; 
 but North and South at that time never came 
 in contact. A hundred years later — that 
 is, sixty or seventy years ago — relations had 
 begun to exist between the far-off regions — 
 politically at Washington ; socially in Phil- 
 adelphia, where the Virginia ladies did their 
 shopping; educationally in New England, 
 whither the Southern boys came in shoals to 
 the Harvard Law School under Judge Story, 
 and whence tutors and governesses were sent, 
 on very low pay, to teach the white children 
 on the plantations. During my own college 
 days, in 1841, I spent weeks on my uncle's 
 plantation in northern Virginia, where he had 
 married into a prominent Virginia family. 
 The old life prevailed, but impoverished. The 
 cotton planters farther south were still rich, 
 but unceasing tobacco crops had exhausted 
 the land ; they had books also, but old, like 
 the buildings, and they were mainly kept 
 in the little office of the owner, with the door 
 always open, night or day — whole sets of 
 old English reviews and magazines in worn- 
 out bindings, and hardly a book that had 
 
THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 203 
 
 been bought for a dozen years, so that the 
 few new works by Longfellow and Dickens 
 which I carried down were received as they 
 might have been on a desolate island. Indeed, 
 it seemed like an island race living there, with 
 a sweet accent of its own. 
 
 The extreme slowness with which anything 
 like original literature was developed in the 
 South is pretty easUy accounted for. Colonel 
 Byrd represented a class of English gentle- 
 men which had much to do with the making 
 of the South socially and politically, but which 
 could leave to its descendants only a some- 
 what limited intellectual inheritance. The iso- 
 lated, aristocratic life of the Southern whites 
 was founded upon conservatism. Up to the 
 very middle of the nineteenth century their 
 instinct led them to follow tradition in ques- 
 tions of culture and taste, as well as of man- 
 ners. Unfortunately, good taste and achieve- 
 ment in art are far less likely to spring from 
 conservatism and the aristocratic life than 
 are good manners and skill in politics. The 
 greater and better part of Southern literature 
 has been produced since the Civil War. 
 
 There were, however, three or four ante- 
 bellum writers who attempted to give liter- 
 
204 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 ary expression to the Southern life or the 
 Southern spirit. The first of them in point 
 William ^^ *™® ^^^ William Gilmore 
 GUmore Simms. He was in some respects 
 Simms. g^j^j^ ^^ Cooper ; a writer of robust 
 temper, a talent for narrative, and an eye for 
 the picturesque in Southern history. He 
 was, however, even less a finished artist than 
 Cooper, and not one of his many romances 
 has gained a sure place in literature. His 
 work as a whole afEords an interesting pic- 
 ture, but not a great picture, of Southern life 
 and manners. 
 
 Simms was born, and lived for most of his 
 life, in Charleston, which was also the native 
 Hayne and city of the two pocts, Hayne and 
 Timrod. Timrod, who, apart from Lanier and 
 Poe, are now best known among Southern 
 poets. Paul Hamilton Hayne's poetry is nei- 
 ther markedly Southern nor markedly origi- 
 nal. It has a certain smoothness and elegance, 
 but lacks force. A few lines from The Mock- 
 ing Bird may serve to illustrate both its merit 
 and its limitations : — 
 
 " A golden pallor of voluptuous light 
 Filled the warm Southern night : 
 The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene 
 
HAYNE AND TIMROD 205 
 
 Moved like a stately queen, 
 
 So rife with conscious beauty all the while, 
 
 What could she do but smile 
 
 At her own perfect loveliness below, 
 
 Glassed in the tranquil flow 
 
 Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams ? " 
 
 This is evidently the composition of a con- 
 scientious practitioner of English verse rather 
 than the song of a poet who cannot help sing- 
 ing. The verse of Henry Timrod, Hayne's 
 contemporary and friend, is far more rugged, 
 more characteristic of the South, more per- 
 sonal. Even in descriptive passages there is a 
 certain sweep and vigor which Hayne's style 
 altogether lacks : — 
 
 " Through lands which look one sea of billowy gold 
 Broad rivers wind their devious ways ; 
 A hundred isles in their embraces fold 
 A hundred luminous bays ; 
 And through yon purple haze 
 Yajst mountains lift their plumed peaks cloud- 
 crowned." 
 
 These lines are quoted from Timrod's 
 best poem, The Cotton Boll, a rhapsody 
 upon the South, which concludes with a 
 characteristically stirring defiance of the 
 North : — 
 
206 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 " To thy will 
 Resigned, O Lord ! we cannot all forget 
 That there is much even Victory must regret. 
 And, therefore, not too long 
 From the great burthen of our country's wrong 
 Delay our just release ! 
 And, if it may be, save 
 These sacred fields of peace 
 From stain of patriot or of hostile blood ! 
 Oh, help us. Lord ! to roll the crimson flood 
 Back on its course, and, while our banners wing 
 Northward, strike with us ! till the Goth shall cling 
 To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave 
 Mercy ; and we shall grant it, and dictate 
 The lenient future of his fate 
 
 There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays 
 Shall one day mark the port which ruled the western 
 seas." 
 
 If this is not quite great poetry, it is unde- 
 niably strong poetry, and this, we remember, 
 is all that can fairly be said of almost all the 
 poetry which was produced, and applauded, 
 in the North during the same period. Tim- 
 rod and Hayne, like Simms, — who also pro- 
 duced some creditable verse, — shared the pri- 
 vations of the South after the war. 
 
 Of the two men whose names are most pro- 
 minently associated with Southern literature, 
 one had a Southern quality of mind rather 
 than of political faith. In the case of Edgar 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 207 
 
 Allan Poe, nature tried the experiment of 
 bringing extremes together. The outcome 
 o£ the effort was a perplexing per- j.^ 
 sonality, the object of a discussion, -*^™ ^°^- 
 not to say dispute, which has never yet been 
 adjusted. Edgar Allan Poe was bom in Bos- 
 ton Jan. 19, 1809, the child of two wandering 
 actors, and was adopted on their death by a 
 wealthy tobacco merchant of Eichmond, Va. 
 Though sent to school for a time in England, 
 his training, habits, and tastes all belonged to 
 the Virginia of that day, and with a reckless 
 absence of all the qualities of social recti- 
 tude in other respects, he combined strangely 
 enough a singular elevation of mind, a refine- 
 ment amounting to purity, in all his relations 
 with the other sex : a quality perhaps of more 
 redeeming value than any other single virtue, 
 both for the poet and for 'the man. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe was, in fact, so far as his 
 art was concerned, a dweller in a visionary 
 land of his own ; in his life he was for the 
 most part of the earth earthy. His place in 
 purely imaginative prose-writing is as unques- 
 tionable as Hawthorne's. He even succeeded, 
 as Hawthorne did not, in penetrating the 
 artistic indifference of the French mind ; 
 
208 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 and it was a substantial triumph, when we 
 consider that Baudelaire put himself or his 
 friends to the trouble of translating even the 
 prolonged platitudes of Eureka and the wear- 
 isome narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 
 Neither Poe nor Hawthorne has been fully 
 recognized in England ; and yet no Enghsh- 
 man of their time, unless De Quincey, has 
 done any prose imaginative work to be named 
 with theirs. But in comparing Poe with Haw- 
 thorne, we see that the genius of the latter 
 has hands and feet as well as wings, so that 
 all his work is solid as masonry, while Poe's 
 is broken and disfigured by all sorts of ine- 
 qualities and imitations ; he did not disdain, 
 for want of true integrity, to disguise and 
 to falsify, and (I have myself seen proofs of 
 this among the Griswold MSS.) to suggest 
 or even prepare pufEs of himself. 
 
 But, making all possible deductions, how 
 wonderful remains the power of Poe's imagi- 
 native tales, and how immense is the ingenu- 
 ity of his puzzles and disentanglements ! The 
 conundrums of Wilkie Collins never renew 
 their interest after the answer is known ; but 
 Poe's can be read again and again. It is 
 where spiritual depths are to be touched that 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 209 
 
 he shows his weakness ; his attempts at pro- 
 fundity are as unsuccessful as they are rare ; 
 where there is the greatest display of philo- 
 sophic form he is often most trivial, whereas 
 Hawthorne is often profoundest when he has 
 disarmed you by his simplicity. The truth is, 
 that Poe lavished on things comparatively 
 superficial those great intellectual resources 
 ■which Hawthorne reverently husbanded and 
 ^sed. That there is something behind even 
 genius to make or mar it, this is the lesson 
 of the two lives. 
 
 Poe makes one of his heroes define another 
 as " that monstrum horrendum, an unprin- 
 cipled man of genius." It is in the mahce 
 and fury of his critical work that his own low 
 moral tone betrays itself. No atmosphere can 
 be more belittling than that of his New York 
 Literati : it is a mass of vehement dogma- 
 tism and petty personalities ; opinions warped 
 by private feeling, and varying from page to 
 page. He seemed to have absolutely no fixed 
 standard of critical judgment. There was, 
 indeed, little unbiased criticism anywhere in 
 America during those acrimonious days, when 
 the most honorable head might be covered 
 with insidt or neglect, while any young poet- 
 
210 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 ess who smiled sweetly on Poe or Griswold 
 or Willis might find herself placed among 
 the Muses. Poe complimented and rather 
 patronized Hawthorne, but found him only 
 '' peculiar and not original ; " saying of him, 
 "He has not half the material for the exclu- 
 siveness of Uterature that he has for its uni- 
 versality," whatever that may mean ; and 
 finally, he tried to make it appear that Haw- 
 thorne had borrowed from himself. He 
 returned again and again to the attack on 
 Longfellow as a willful plagiarist, denouncing 
 the trivial resemblance between his Midnight 
 Mass for the Dying Tear and Tennyson's 
 Death of the Old Tear, as " belonging to 
 the most barbarous class of Uterary piracy." 
 To make this attack was, as he boasted, 
 " to throttle the guilty ; " and whUe dealing 
 thus ferociously with Longfellow, thus conde- 
 scendingly with Hawthorne, he was claiming 
 a foremost rank among American authors 
 for obscurities now forgotten, such as Mrs. 
 AmeHa B. Welby and Estelle Anne Lewis. 
 No one ever did more than Poe to lower the 
 tone of literary criticism in this country; 
 and the greater his talent, the greater the 
 mischief. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 211 
 
 Poe's criticisms sprang from prejudice and 
 the narrow logical faculty of which his intel- 
 lect mainly consisted, while the poetry upon 
 which his fame rests was the product of true 
 creative power. That poetry is of small bulk 
 and of smaller range. Most of it is based 
 on neither deep thought, nor passionate feel- 
 ing, nor spiritual insight. Its excellence is 
 perhaps harder to account for than in the 
 case of any. other EngHsh poet. Even its sen- 
 timentalism is not quite of a kind to bring 
 about the popularity of The Bells and The 
 Raven, and even its melodiousness is hardly 
 capable of explaining the hold which poems 
 like Israfel maintain upon readers of the best 
 poetry in aU tongues. 
 
 The two most commonplace things that 
 can be said about Poe's verse are, that it is 
 " weird " and that it is " musical ; " but per- 
 haps they say pretty much all that can be 
 said. The real merit in this poetry, the qual- 
 ity which makes it perfect in its kind, is so 
 subtle as to elude definition. A little may 
 be done by comparison : there are passages in 
 Blake, in Beddoes and, above all, in Cole- 
 ridge, which seem to suggest Poe's habitual 
 mood and tone. With what in English verse 
 
212 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 SO naturally as with Kubla Khan does the 
 
 opening stanza of Israfel compare ? — 
 
 " In heaven a spirit doth dwell 
 
 Whose heart-strings are a lute ; 
 
 None sing so wildly well 
 
 As the angel Israfel, 
 
 And the giddy stars (so legends tell), 
 
 Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell 
 Of his voice, all mute." 
 
 It is easy to say that there is nothing in this, 
 any more than in those famous lines : — 
 
 " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 
 A stately pleasure-dome decree 
 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
 In caverns measureless to man 
 Down to a sunless sea." 
 
 And in truth there is nothing in them, no- 
 thing but beauty and wonder and magic. 
 
 It is in this glow of fancy alone that Poe 
 seems in any real sense to represent the South. 
 The fact of his New England birth does not 
 account for this detachment ; it is due rather 
 to his absorption in his own fantastic Ufe of 
 the mind, Poe's career was a sad one, of 
 which the events are too well known to need 
 retailing here. He was a man to pity, rather 
 than admire, the victim of irresponsibility, 
 of impulse, of drink, of opium, — of himself, 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 213 
 
 in short. His best work was not, like that of 
 the greatest, sanest creative spirits, the out- 
 come of a strong and complete personality ; 
 it was reflected from the single clear facet 
 which his nature could present to any ray. 
 
 It happens to us rarely in our lives to 
 come consciously into the presence of that 
 extraordinary miracle we call genius. Among 
 American authors, Poe probably stood next 
 to Hawthorne in the vividness of personal im- 
 pression which he produced upon those who 
 saw him. One may still recall his strange 
 face, with its ample forehead, brilliant eyes, 
 and narrowness of nose and chin ; an ideal 
 face, anything but coarse, yet with the look 
 of over-sensitiveness which, when uncon- 
 trolled, may prove more debasing than coarse- 
 ness. It was a face to rivet one's attention 
 in any crowd, yet a face that no one would 
 feel safe in loving. I remember the impres- 
 sion which he made upon the occasion of his 
 first appearance in Boston. 
 
 After his introduction he stood with a sort 
 of shrinking before the audience, and then 
 began in a thin, tremulous, hardly musical 
 voice, an apology for his poem, and a depre- 
 cation of the expected criticism of the Boston 
 
214 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 public; reiterating this in a sort of persis- 
 tent, querulous way, which did not seem 
 like satire, but impressed me at the time as 
 nauseous flattery. It was not then generally 
 known, nor was it estabUshed for a long 
 time after, — even when he had himself as- 
 serted it, — that the poet was himself born 
 in Boston ; and no one can now tell, per- 
 haps, what was the real feeling behind the 
 apparently sycophantic attitude. When, at 
 the end, he abruptly began the recitation 
 of his perplexing " Al Aaraaf ," everybody 
 looked thoroughly mystified. The verses had 
 long since been printed in his youthful vol- 
 ume, and had reappeared within a few days, 
 if I mistake not, in Wiley & Putnam's edition 
 of his poems ; and they produced no very 
 distinct impression on the audience until 
 Poe began to read the maiden's song in the 
 second part. Already his tones had been 
 softening to a finer melody than at first, and 
 when he came to the verses : — 
 
 " Ligeia ! Ligeia ! 
 
 My beautiful one ! 
 Whose harshest idea 
 
 "Will to melody run, 
 Oh ! is it thy will 
 
 On the breezes to toss ? 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 215 
 
 Or capriciously still, 
 
 Like the lone albatross. 
 Incumbent on night 
 
 (As she on the air) 
 To keep watch with delight 
 
 On the harmony there ? " 
 
 his voice seemed attenuated to the faintest 
 golden thread ; the audience became hushed, 
 and, as it were, breathless ; there seemed no 
 life in the hall but his ; and every syllable 
 was accentuated with such delicacy, and sus- 
 tained with such sweetness, as I never heard 
 equaled by other lips. When the lyric ended, 
 it was Uke the ceasing of the gypsy's chant 
 in Browning's Flight of the Duchess ; and 
 I remember nothing more, except that in 
 walking back to Cambridge my comrades 
 and I felt that we had been under the spell 
 of some wizard. Indeed, I feel much the 
 same in the retrospect, to this day. 
 
 We have treated Poe as representing the 
 Southern mind, though he was born in Bos- 
 ton ; but in reality the only South- Sidney 
 ern poet of leading quahty was i'^,'"'"^- 
 Sidney Lanier. Emerson said unjustly of 
 Shelley, that although uniformly a poetic 
 mind, he was never a poet. As to all the 
 
216 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 Southern-born poets of this country except 
 Lanier, even as to Hayne and Timrod, the 
 question still remains whether they got ac- 
 tually beyond the poetic mind. In Tick- 
 nor's Little Giffen and Pinkney's / Fill this 
 Cupf they did. In Lanier's case alone was 
 the artistic work so continuous and syste- 
 matic, subject to such self-imposed laws and 
 tried by so high a standard, as to make it 
 safe, in spite of his premature death, to place 
 him among those whom we may without 
 hesitation treat as " master-singers." Even 
 among these, of course, there are grades; 
 but as Lowell once said of Thoreau, " To be 
 a master is to be a master." With Lanier, 
 music and poetry were in the blood. Music 
 was at any rate his first passion. As a boy 
 he taught himself to play the flute, organ, 
 piano, violin, guitar, and banjo ; the first- 
 named instrument was always his favorite, 
 or, perhaps, that of his father, who " feared 
 for him the powerful fascination of the vio- 
 lin." But his parents rather dreaded his ab- 
 sorption in music, apparently thinking with 
 Dr. Johnson that musicians were " amusing 
 vagabonds." The same thought caused a 
 struggle in the boy's own mind, for he wrote 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 217 
 
 at eighteen that though he was conscious 
 of having " an extraordinary musical talent," 
 yet music seemed to him " so small a busi- 
 ness in comparison with other things " which 
 he might do, that he wished to forsake the 
 art. It appears from the same note-book that 
 he already felt himself called to a literary 
 career. He was at that time a student at 
 Oglethorpe College, a Presbyterian institu- 
 tion, now extinct, near Midway, Ga. Here he 
 graduated at eighteen, with the first honors 
 of his class, although he had lost a year dur- 
 ing which he was a clerk in the post-office at 
 Macon. Lanier became a tutor in the college 
 on graduating, but left his post to enlist as 
 a private in the Confederate army. 
 
 He enlisted in the Macon Volunteers of 
 the Second Georgia Battalion, the first mili- 
 tary force which left Georgia for the seat 
 of war. He remained in the service during 
 the whole war, and, though three times of- 
 fered promotion, would never accept it, from 
 a desire to remain near his younger brother, 
 who was in the same regiment. He was in 
 the battle of Seven Pines, that of Drewry's 
 Bluffs, and the seven days of fighting about 
 Richmond, Va., including Malvern Hill. 
 
218 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 After this campaign he was transferred with 
 his brother to the signal service, because, as 
 envious companions said, he could play the 
 flute. In 1863 his detachment was mounted ; 
 and later each of the two brothers was detailed 
 to take charge of a vessel which was to run 
 the blockade. Sidney was captured and spent 
 five months as a prisoner at Point Lookout. 
 It was almost at the end of the war (Feb., 
 1865) that he was exchanged, and he re- 
 turned home on foot, having only his flute 
 and a twenty-dollar gold piece which had 
 not been taken from him when his pockets 
 were searched, on his capture. He reached 
 home March 15, and was dangerously ill for 
 six weeks, during which his mother died of 
 the pulmonary disease which he had possibly 
 inherited. 
 
 In 1873 he took up his abode in Balti- 
 more, having made an engagement as first 
 flute for the Peabody Symphony concerts. 
 Here he resided for the rest of his life, en- 
 gaged always in a threefold struggle for 
 health, for bread, and for a literary career. 
 To his father, who kept open for him a place 
 in the law office at Macon, he wrote (Nov. 29, 
 1873) that, first, his chance for Kfe was ten 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 21d 
 
 times greater at Baltimore ; that, secondly, 
 he could not consent to be a third-rate strug- 
 gling lawyer for the rest of his life ; and 
 that, in the third place, he had been assured 
 by good judges that he was " the greatest 
 flute player in the world," and had also every 
 encouragement for success in literature. As 
 a result, he stayed, breaking down at short 
 intervals, but playing in the orchestra winter 
 after winter, — writing, lecturing, teaching. 
 He studied laboriously, as his books bear 
 witness. He had a theory of verse. It seems 
 ingenious, suggestive, and overstrained, but 
 it is easy to beUeve that to one who takes it 
 on the middle ground where Lanier dwelt, 
 halfway between verse and music, it might 
 seem conclusive. 
 
 Most of us associate its fundamental pro- 
 position with the poet Coleridge, who, in his 
 Christabel, announced it as a new principle 
 in English verse that one should count by 
 accents, not by syllables. This bold asser- 
 tion, which plainly marked the transition from 
 the measured strains of Dryden and Pope to 
 the free modern rhythm, was true in the sense 
 in which Coleridge probably meant it ; nor 
 does it seem likely that Coleridge overlooked 
 
220 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 •what Lanier points out, — that all our nur- 
 sery rhymes and folk-songs are written on 
 the same principle. There is certainly nothing 
 more interesting in Lanier's book than the 
 passage in which he shows that, just as a 
 Southern negro will improvise on the banjo 
 daring variations, such as would, if Haydn 
 employed them, be called high art, so Shake- 
 speare often employed the simplest devices of 
 sound such as are familiar in nursery songs, 
 and thus produced effects which are metri- 
 cally indistinguishable from those pf Mother 
 Goose. 
 
 Lanier W9,s a critic of the best kind, for his 
 criticism is such as a sculptor receives from 
 a brother sculptor, not such as he gets from 
 the purchaser on one side or the marble- 
 worker on the other. What can be more ad- 
 mirable than his saying of Swinburne, " He 
 invited me to eat ; the service was silver and 
 gold, but no food therein save pepper and 
 salt ; " or of William Morris, " He caught a 
 crystal cupful of yeUow light of sunset, and 
 persuading himself to deem it wine, drank 
 it with a sort of smile." Among the fullest 
 and most suggestive of these criticisms is his 
 estimate of Whitman. 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 221 
 
 Whitman represented to Lanier a literary 
 spirit alien to his own. There could be little 
 in common between the fleshliness of Leaves 
 of Grass and the refined chivalry that could 
 write in The Symphony Hues like these : — 
 
 " Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea, 
 We maids would far, far whiter be. 
 If that our eyes might sometimes see 
 Men maids in purity ? " 
 
 In Lanier's lectures before Johns Hopkins 
 University at Baltimore upon The English 
 Novel and its Development he has much to 
 say upon what may be called the anti-kid- 
 glove literature, a product which is really no 
 better than the kid-glove literature, at which 
 it affects to protest. Lanier quotes the hues 
 of Whitman, " Fear grace, fear elegance, civ- 
 iUzation, d^licatesse," and again the passage 
 in which the same poet rejoices in America 
 because " here are the roughs, beards, . . . 
 combativeness, and the like ; " and Lanier 
 shows how far were the founders of the Re- 
 pubHc — Washington, Jefferson, Frankhn, 
 Adams — from this theory that there can 
 be no manhood in decent clothes or well- 
 bred manners. He justly complains that this 
 rougher school has really as much dandyism 
 
222 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 about it as the other — " the dandyism of 
 the roustabouts," he calls it; that it poses 
 and attitudinizes and "is the extreme of 
 sophistication iu writing." "If we must have 
 dandyism in our art," he adds, " surely the 
 softer sort, which at least leans towards de- 
 corimi and gentility, is preferable." Then, 
 going beyond literature to the foundation of 
 government, he quotes the ancient Epictetus 
 against this modern school, and asserts that 
 true manhood has no necessary connection 
 with physical health or strength, and that 
 the true athlete is he who is ruler over him- 
 self. 
 
 Lanier complains of this type of democracy 
 — the merely brawny and sinewy — " that 
 it has no provision for sick, or small, or puny, 
 or plain-featured, or hump-backed, or any 
 deformed people," and that is really " the 
 worst kind of aristocracy, being an aristocracy 
 of nature's favorites in the matter of muscle." 
 Then he describes some weak-eyed young 
 man in a counting-room toiling to support 
 his mother, or send his brother to school, 
 and contrasts him with this physical ideal. 
 " His chest is not huge, his legs are inchned 
 to be pipe-stems, and his dress is Uke that of 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 223 
 
 any other bookkeeper. Yet the weak-eyed, 
 pipe-stem-legged young man impresses us as 
 more o£ a man, more of a democratic man, 
 than the tallest of Whitman's roughs ; to the 
 eye of the spirit there is more strength in 
 this man's daily endurance of petty care and 
 small weariness for love, more of the sort 
 which makes a real democracy and a sound 
 republic, than in an army of Whitman's un- 
 shaven loafers." This came, be it remem- 
 bered, from a man who fought through the 
 seven days of fighting before Richmond ; 
 who had " given his proofs," as people used 
 to say in the old days of dueling. 
 
 We have followed out this line of thought 
 about Whitman, not merely for its own sake, 
 but because it probably draws Lanier into 
 sharper expression and more characteristic 
 statement than are to be found anywhere 
 else in his works. That he could criticise 
 profoundly one much nearer to himself than 
 Whitman is plain when Lanier comes to 
 speak of SheUey, of whom he has a sen- 
 tence that seems to be another shot in the 
 bull's-eye of the target. He says : — 
 
 " In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored 
 under an essential immaturity ; it is very possible that 
 
224 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 if he had lived a hundred years he would never have 
 become a man ; he was penetrated with modern ideas, 
 but penetrated as a boy would be ; crudely, overmuch, 
 and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and 
 illogical, — so I call him the Modern Boy." 
 
 It remains to be said that in Lanier's poe- 
 try we find the working out of these ideas, 
 but according to the free faith which he held. 
 There is uniformly a wonderful beat and ca- 
 dence in his poems, — a line of a dozen sylla- 
 bles mating with a line of a single syllable in 
 as satisfactory a movement as can be found in 
 his favorite Mother Goose or in the " patting 
 Juba " of a plantation singer. The volume of 
 his poetry is less than that of Hayne, but its 
 wealth and depth are greater. Having spent 
 so much of his hfe in playing the flute in an 
 orchestra, he has also an ear for the distri- 
 bution of instruments, and this gives him a 
 desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an 
 answer, or an echo, or a compensating note. 
 In the poems that most arrest attention, — 
 as the Cantata at the opening of the Phila- 
 delphia Exposition, — this characteristic was 
 so developed as to give an effect of exag- 
 geration and almost of grotesqueness, which 
 was, however, so relieved by the music that 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 225 
 
 the impression soon passed away. But into 
 his description of sunrise in the first of his 
 Hymns of the Marshes, he puts not merely 
 such a wealth of outdoor observation as makes 
 even Thoreau seem thin and arid, but com- 
 bines with it a roll and range of rhythm 
 such as Lowell's Commemoration Ode can- 
 not equal, and only some of Browning's 
 early ocean cadences can surpass. There are 
 inequalities in the poem, little spasmodic 
 phrases here and there, or fancies pressed 
 too hard, — he wrote it, poor fellow, when 
 far gone in his last illness, with his pulse 
 at one hundred and four degrees, and then 
 unable to raise his food to his mouth, — but 
 much the same is true of Keats's great frag- 
 ments, and there are lines and phrases of 
 Lanier's that are not excelled in Endymion, 
 and perhaps not in Hyperion. 
 
 A passage from those " hymns " must be 
 quoted. It is called simply Dawn : — 
 
 " But no ; it is made ; list ! somewhere, — mystery, 
 •where ? 
 
 In the leaves ? in the air ? 
 In my heart ? is a motion made ; 
 'T is a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade. 
 In the leaves 't is palpable ; low multitudinous stirring 
 Upwinds through the woods ; the little ones, softly 
 conferring, . 
 
226 THE SOUTHERN INFLUENCE 
 
 Have settled my lord 's to be looked for ; so, they are 
 
 stiU; 
 But the air and my heart and the earth are arthrill, — 
 And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of 
 the river, — 
 
 And look where a passionate shiver 
 Expectant is bending the blades 
 Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades, — 
 And invisible vriugs, fast fleeting, fast fleeting, 
 
 Are beating 
 The dark overhead as my heart beats, — and steady 
 
 and free 
 Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea — 
 (Bun home, little streams. 
 With your lapf uls of stars and dreams), — 
 And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak, 
 For, list, down the inshore curve of the creek 
 
 How merrily flutters the sail, — 
 And lo, in the East ! Will the East unveil ? 
 The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed 
 A flush : 't is dead ; 't is alive ; 't is dead, ere the West 
 Was aware of it ; nay, 't is abiding, 't is unwithdrawn ; 
 Have a care, sweet Heaven ! 'T is Dawn." 
 
 All that Lanier did afforded but a glimpse 
 of what he might have done, had health and 
 time been given him, but these were not 
 given, and his literary monument remains 
 unfinished. He died of consumption at Bal- 
 timore, at the age of thirty-nine, Sept 7, 
 1881, leaving a wife and four boys. His 
 
WALT WHITMAN 227 
 
 work will long live as that of the Sir Galahad 
 among our American poets. 
 
 We may, perhaps, include here what is to 
 be said of Whitman, not so much because 
 he lived for a time in the South, wait 
 as because Lanier's criticisms thus Whitman. 
 bring him freshly to mind. He was, indeed, a 
 person and a poet singularly detached from 
 place. He lived in New York, in New Or- 
 leans, in Washington, and was always ready 
 to take the road for a new experience. He was 
 carpenter, printer, editor, government clerk. 
 Perhaps it was from his early years in the 
 neighborhood of New York city, just then 
 beginning to outgrow its provincial character, 
 that his first inspiration was drawn. Several 
 of his poems record the delight with which the 
 manifold restless forces of life in the new 
 metropolis afEected him, and the fondness 
 which grew in him for all sorts and conditions 
 of men as he saw them upon the wharves and 
 streets of New York. 
 
 In the stricter sense of the critics. Whitman 
 may not be called a poet. There seems to be 
 a provision in nature for a class who appear at 
 long intervals, who become known as poets, 
 
228 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 and yet ■who resolutely confine themselves 
 to a few very simple stage properties, and 
 substitute mere cadence for form. There 
 was for many years an Ossianic period, when 
 simple enthusiasts sat up at night and read 
 until they were sleepy about the waving of 
 the long grass on the blasted heath, and the 
 passing of the armed warrior and the white- 
 bosomed maiden. Ossian is not so much read 
 now, but Napoleon Bonaparte admired him 
 and Goethe studied him. Neither is Tupper 
 now much cultivated ; but I remember when 
 his long rambling lines were copied by the 
 page into many extract books, and that he 
 too was welcomed as relieving mankind from 
 the tiresome restraints of verse. It would 
 be a great mistake, doubtless, to class Whit- 
 man with Ossian on the one side, — though 
 he names him with Shakespeare among the 
 writers whom he studied in youth, — or 
 Tupper on the other ; but it would be a still 
 greater error to overlook the fact that the 
 mere revolt against the tyranny of form has 
 been made again and again before him, and 
 without securing immortal fame to the author 
 of the experiment. 
 
 It is no uncommon thing, moreover, for 
 
WALT WHITMAN 229 
 
 the fiercest innovating poets to revert to the 
 ranks of order before they die. Whitman 
 abstained, through all his later publications, 
 from those proclamations of utter nudity to 
 which Emerson objected, and omitted some 
 of the most objectionable instances of it from 
 later editions ; and was also far more com- 
 pressed and less simply enumerative than when 
 he began. True poetry is not merely the put- 
 ting of thoughts into words, but the putting 
 of the best thoughts into the best words ; it 
 secures for us what Kuskin calls " the perfec- 
 tion and precision of the instantaneous line." 
 It fires a rifle-bullet instead of a shower of 
 bird-shot ; it culls the very best phrase out 
 of language, instead of throwing a dozen 
 epithets to see if one may chance to stick. 
 For example, Emerson centres his Problem 
 in " a cowled church-man ; " Browning singles 
 out an individual Bishop Blougram or Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, as the case may be ; but Whitman 
 enumerates "priests on the earth, oracles, 
 sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks, 
 muftis, exhorters." In The Song of the 
 Broad- Axe there are nineteen successive lines 
 beginning with the word " where ; " in Salute 
 au Monde eighteen in succession begin with 
 
230 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 "I see." In / Sing the Body Electric he 
 specifies in detail " wrists and wrist-joints, 
 hand, pahn, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, 
 finger-joints, finger-nails," with thirteen more 
 lines of just such minutiae. In the same poem 
 he explains that he wishes his verses to be re- 
 garded as "man's, woman's, child's, youth's, 
 wife's, husband's, mother's, father's, young 
 man's, young woman's poems." This is like 
 bringing home a sackful of pebbles from the 
 beach and asking us to admire the collected 
 heap as a fine sea view. But it is to be noticed 
 that these follies diminish in his later works : 
 the lines grow shorter ; and though he does 
 not acquiesce in rhyme, he occasionally ac- 
 cepts a rhythm so well defined that it may be 
 called conventional, as in the fine verses enti- 
 tled Darest thou now, O soul f And it is a 
 fact which absolutely overthrows the whole 
 theory of poetic structure or structurelessness 
 imphed in Whitman's volumes, that his warm- 
 est admirers usually place first among his 
 works the poem on Lincoln's death. My Gap- 
 tain, which comes so near to recognized poetic 
 methods that it falls naturally into rhyme. 
 
 Whitman can never be classed as Spinoza 
 was by Schleiermacher, among " God-intoxi- 
 
WALT WHITMAN 231 
 
 cated " men ; but he was early inebriated 
 with two potent draughts — himself and his 
 country : — 
 
 " One's self I sing, a simple separate poem, 
 Yet utter the word Democratic, the word Un Masse." 
 
 With these words, two of them French, his 
 collected poems open, and to these he has 
 always been true. They have brought with 
 them a certain access of power, and they 
 have also implied weakness. We cannot at- 
 tribute final and complete acceptance to any 
 poet in whom the emotion of high and ideal 
 love between the sexes has no visible place. 
 When Thoreau says of Whitman, " He does 
 not celebrate love at all ; it is as if the beasts 
 spoke," ^ the verdict seems to be final. Not 
 only has he given us no love poem, in the 
 ordinary use of the term, but it is as hard to 
 conceive of his writing one as of his chanting 
 a serenade beneath the window of his mistress. 
 This not only separates him from the poets of 
 thoroughly ideal emotion like Poe, but from 
 those, like Rossetti, whose passion, though 
 it may incarnate itself in the body, has its 
 sources in the soul. 
 
 ^ Letters, p. 345. 
 
232 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 As time went on, this less pleasing aspect 
 became softened ; his antagonisms were dis- 
 armed by applauses ; although this recogni- 
 tion sometimes took a form so extreme and 
 adulatory that it obstructed his path to that 
 simple and unconscious life which he always 
 preached but could not quite be said to 
 practice. His career purified itself, as many 
 careers do, in the alembic of years, and up 
 to the time of his death (March 26, 1892) he 
 gained constantly in friends and in readers. 
 Intellectually speaking, all critics now admit 
 that he shows in an eminent degree that form 
 of the ideal faculty which Emerson conceded 
 to Margaret Fuller — he has "lyric glimpses." 
 Rarely constructing anything, he is yet sin- 
 gularly gifted in phrases, in single cadences, 
 in casual wayward strains as from an -iEoUan 
 harp. It frequently happens that the titles 
 or catch-words of his poems are better than 
 the poems themselves, as we sometimes hear 
 it said in just praise of a clergyman that he 
 has beautiful texts. " Proud Music of the 
 Storm," " When Lilacs Last in the Door- 
 yard Bloomed," and others, will readily oc- 
 cur to memory. Often, on the other hand, 
 they are inflated, as " Chanting the Square 
 
WALT WHITMAN 233 
 
 Deific," or affected and feeble, as " Eido- 
 lons." One of the most curiously un-Ameri- 
 can traits in a poet professedly so patriotic 
 is his way of employing foreign, and espe- 
 cially French words, to a degree that recalls 
 the fashionable novels of the last generation, 
 and gives an incongruous effect comparable 
 only to Theodore Parker's description of an 
 African chief seen by some one at Sierra 
 Leone : " With the exception of a dress-coat, 
 his Majesty was as naked as a pestle." 
 
 Of all our poets, he is really the least sim- 
 ple, the most meretricious ; and this is the 
 reason why the honest consciousness of the 
 classes which he most celebrates — the drover, 
 the teamster, the soldier — has never been 
 reached by his songs. He talks of labor as 
 one who had never really labored ; his Drum 
 Taps proceed from one who has never per- 
 sonally responded to the tap of the drum. He 
 has something of the turgid wealth, the rather 
 self-conscious amplitude, of Victor Hugo, and 
 much of his broad, vague, indolent desire for 
 the welfare of the whole human race ; but he 
 has none of Hugo's structural power, his 
 dramatic or at least melodramatic instinct, 
 and his occasionally terse and brilliant con- 
 
234 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 densation. He sometimes suggests a young 
 man of rather ideal stamp who used to invite 
 Mr. Emerson and others to give readings at 
 his room in Boston, many years ago. He was 
 an ardent disciple of Fourier, and had painted 
 on his door in large golden letters the motto 
 of Fourier, " Universal Unity," with beams of 
 starlight diverging from it in all directions. 
 Below this was the motto, hung separately 
 and painted in neat black and white, " Please 
 wipe your feet." Unfortunately, Whitman 
 himself, with all his genius, was not quite 
 careful enough to provide the foot-mat. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE WESTERN INFLXTENCE 
 
 It is not a great many years since the mere 
 suggestion of any Western achievement in 
 literature would have called out such anec- 
 dotes as belonged to the time when Senator 
 Blackburn and Colonel Pepper of whiskey- 
 making fame are said to have been talking 
 about horses at Washington ; and Represen- 
 tative Crane of Texas asked them, " Why do 
 you not talk of something else ? Of Hterature, 
 for instance, to improve your minds ? I like 
 poets," he said, " especially Emerson and 
 Longfellow." " Longfellow ? " interrupted 
 Colonel Pepper ; " oh, yes, I know Longfel- 
 low ; he is the best horse ever raised in Ken- 
 tucky." That was the point from which 
 Western literature started ; and its progress 
 has been so recent that it is not possible, as 
 it has been in our studies hitherto, to appeal 
 to the verdict of time. Most of that progress, 
 indeed, has been made during the past twenty 
 years. 
 
236 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 Of the few voices which commanded marked 
 attention before that time, Bret Harte went 
 First West from Albany before he came 
 
 Writers. j]a,st again and left American shores 
 forever. Mark Twain and Mr. Howells were 
 born east of the Missouri, which comes nearer 
 than anything else to being the middle divid- 
 ing hne between the Eastern and Western 
 halves of the continent. It was not many 
 years ago that one of the most highly edu- 
 cated of Americans asserted positively that 
 this nation could never have a great literature 
 because no people had ever possessed one 
 unless living within easy reach of the ocean. 
 Time has shown that a vast inland country 
 has also its resources and its stimulus ; as, in- 
 deed, Cooper long ago indicated by naming 
 one of his earliest novels The Prairie. Such 
 a field must of course develop physically be- 
 fore it develops intellectually ; and commonly 
 artistic development comes later still. Only 
 a century ago three fourths of the continent 
 was a trackless wilderness ; yet its recent 
 development has been so rapid that it is 
 hard for us actually to realize what that utter 
 vacancy of human life meant to those who 
 first had experience of it. 
 
AN EMPTY CONTINENT 237 
 
 It is not yet fifty years since an Eastern 
 traveler who had ventured as far as Ken- 
 tucky brought back this tale of An Empty 
 the early solitude there as it had Continent. 
 been fifty years before that time. The first 
 explorer, Daniel Boone, he told us, who died 
 in 1820, used to travel absolutely alone for 
 weeks together in the Kentucky forests with 
 only his rifle for company. He could not 
 take even a dog for fear of the Indians ; and 
 once he had to travel a hundred miles on a 
 single meal. There were springs in the Lick- 
 ing Valley where twenty thousand buffaloes 
 came and went, and whole Indian tribes fol- 
 lowed their tracks. The Indians never once 
 even saw Boone, for they did not suspect that 
 any white man could be there ; and he avoided 
 their tracks and never saw them. After a 
 while, there was another white explorer, Si- 
 mon Kenton, whose coming into that region 
 was unknown to Boone. They had ap- 
 proached the valley from opposite directions ; 
 each recognized by signs that there was a hu- 
 man being somewhere near, but out of sight. 
 Then began long hours of noiseless manoeu- 
 vres on each side, spying, evading, Hstening, 
 concealing, climbing, burrowing, each trying 
 
238 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 to find out without self-betrayal who or of 
 what race this stranger was ; and such was 
 their skUl in concealment that it was forty- 
 eight hours before either of them found 
 out that the other was not an Indian or an 
 enemy. 
 
 Fancy this loneliness, terrific and almost 
 sublime, in the very heart of the continent, 
 nay, far east of that, — for Kentucky itself 
 is barely a quarter way across it. Consider 
 that this was but little more than a century 
 ago, and then think of that vast continent 
 now settled, cultivated, organized, schooled, 
 first divided into territories, then into states, 
 counties, towns, villages, all filled with people 
 who can read and write and look to the philan- 
 thropist for a public Hbrary. The superin- 
 tendent of the census in 1890 announced offi- 
 cially that there was no longer any frontier 
 line in the population map. The continent 
 has been crossed, the first rough conquest of 
 the wilderness has been accomplished. This 
 is the region to which we are now to look 
 for authors. All the great literary territories 
 on the continent of Europe, Italy, Germany, 
 France, Austro-Hungary, could be laid to- 
 gether in a small portion of it. The mere 
 
EARLY WRITERS ABOUT THE WEST 239 
 
 size of a country is not a criterion of its pro- 
 ductiveness in art, but it is reasonable to 
 suppose that some of the vast energy hitherto 
 employed in the task of opening the West 
 will presently be spared from the toil of 
 practical life, to give a good account of itself 
 in literature. 
 
 The first authors who came from the West 
 to delight our young people at the East were 
 Audubon, the ornithologist, who 
 had a way of interspersing between writers 
 his bird sketches bits of what he a^ontthe 
 called Ornithological Biographies, 
 usually personal narratives in the woods, be- 
 ginning in 1831 — and Timothy Flint, who 
 wrote Ten Years in the Valley of the Mis- 
 sissippi (1826), and also who wrote from Cin- 
 cinnati to the London Athenceum and had his 
 books translated into French. These books, 
 with those of Peter Parley (sometimes writ- 
 ten by Hawthorne), gave a most vivid charm 
 to the Western wilds and rivers. 
 
 In The Pioneers Cooper made us already 
 conscious citizens of a great nation, and took 
 our imagination as far as the Mississippi. 
 Lewis and Clarke carried us beyond the Mis- 
 sissippi (1814). About 1835 Oregon expe- 
 
240 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 ditions were forming, and I remember when 
 boys in New England used to peep through 
 barn doors to admire the great wagons in 
 which the emigrants were to travel. Then 
 came Mrs. Kirkland's A New Home, Who 'U 
 Follow? (1839). Besides this we had L- 
 ving's Tour of the Prairies (1835) and his 
 Astoria the following year. The West was 
 still a word for vast expeditions, for the pictu- 
 resqueness and the uncertainty of Indian life, 
 and not for the amenities of a civilized con- 
 dition. Aspirants for literary fame were not 
 long lacking, to be sure, but as most of their 
 work was based upon reading rather than 
 experience, it had nothing characteristically 
 Western about it. Most of them turned in- 
 stinctively, ere long, to the Atlantic coast 
 for sympathy and bookstores, as the Atlan- 
 tic states had looked to Europe. 
 
 I shall always remember with satisfaction 
 the delight with which Elizabeth Whittier, 
 the poet's far more brilhant and vivacious 
 sister, used to tell the tale of how their 
 mother was once called to their modest front 
 door, about 1850, by two plump and lively 
 maidens who inquired for her son. They 
 were told that he was not at home. They 
 
EARLY WRITERS ABOUT THE WEST 241 
 
 cheerfully announced that they would come 
 in and wait for hitn ; and on being told that 
 he was in Boston and might not return that 
 day, they said that it was of no manner of 
 consequence ; they had just arrived from 
 Ohio, were themselves authors, and would 
 come in and remain until he got back. So 
 they came in and waited, and proved to be 
 Alice and Phoebe Gary. They were brought 
 up in an Ohio cabin, had no candles to read 
 by, and so read in the evening by lighted 
 rags in a saucer of lard. Their only books 
 were the Bible, The History of the Jews, 
 Charlotte Temple, and a novel called The 
 Black Penitents, with the cover gone and 
 the last page all lost, so they never knew 
 what became of the penitents, or whether the 
 people who tore the precious book to pieces 
 had also repented. Their published poems 
 were full of dirges and despair, but they 
 were the merriest of visitors, perfectly at 
 home, and, as the poet luckily returned the 
 next day, they stayed as long as they pleased 
 and filled the house with fun. 
 
 It is only indirectly, as we have shown, 
 that Uncle Tom's Cabin can be classed as a 
 product of the West. It was written in the 
 
242 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 East by an Eastern woman, though the ma- 
 terials were collected during a residence of 
 nearly twenty years in the middle West. 
 
 The first definite intellectual product of the 
 Great West was a swarm of " humorists," 
 The political and otherwise, who were 
 
 "Humorists." Jgj. jQQgg Q^gy tJje la^jjjj to ggt ij. 
 
 laughing, sometimes in a good cause, some- 
 times in a bad one. 
 
 Nothing used to strike an American more, 
 on his first visit to England thirty years ago, 
 than the frequent discussion of American 
 authors who were rarely quoted at home, ex- 
 cept in stump-speeches, whose works had no 
 place as yet in our literary collections, but 
 who were still taken seriously among educated 
 persons in England. The astonishment in- 
 creased when he found the almanacs of 
 " Josh Billings " reprinted in " Libraries of 
 American Humor," and given an equal place 
 with the writings of Holmes and Lowell. 
 Finally he may have been dijven to the ex- 
 treme conclusion that there must be very 
 little humor in England, where things were 
 seriously published in book form, which here 
 would never get beyond the corner of a news- 
 paper. He found that the whole department 
 
ARTEMUS WARD 243 
 
 of American humor was created, so to speak, 
 by the amazed curiosity of EngUshmen. It 
 was a phrase then rarely heard in the United 
 States ; and if we had such a thing among 
 us, although it might cling to our garments, 
 we were habitually as unconscious of it as 
 are smokers of the perfume of their favorite 
 weed. We have accepted the phrase now, 
 and have consented to take a modest sort of 
 pride in possessing "the American humor- 
 ist." This means that we are now content to 
 let the reputation of our humor stand or fall 
 by the quality of the American joke. 
 
 So far as pure humor is concerned, there 
 has never been a distinct boundary line be- 
 tween England and America. Nor can we 
 say that what is called American humor be- 
 longs distinctively to the West. The early 
 " humorists " were mostly of Eastern origin, 
 though bred and emancipated in the West — 
 thus Artemus Ward was from Maine, Josh 
 Billings from Massachusetts, and Orpheus C. 
 Kerr and Eli Perkins from New York. The 
 prince among these jokers was Ar- Artemus 
 temus Ward, who as a lecturer Ward. 
 glided noiselessly upon the stage as if dressed 
 for Hamlet, and looked as surprised as Ham- 
 
244 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 let if the audience laughed. The stage was 
 dark, and the performance was interrupted 
 by himself at intervals, to look for an im- 
 aginary pianist and singer who never came, 
 but who became as real to the audience as 
 Jefferson's imaginary dog Schneider in Rip 
 Van Winkle, for whom he was always vainly 
 whistling. This unseen singer, we were told, 
 would thrill every heart with his song, " Is 
 it Raining, Mother Dear, in South Boston ? " 
 or, "Mother, You are One of My Parents," 
 and could, we were assured, " extract a fiver 
 from the pocket of the hardest-hearted man 
 in the audience." This was the kind of plat- 
 form humor which captured two continents, 
 and substituted for the saying of M. Phila- 
 rete Chasles in 1851 : "All America has not 
 produced a humorist," the still more danger- 
 ous assumption that America produced no- 
 thing else. 
 
 The European popularity of this " Ameri- 
 can humor " was in part based, no doubt, 
 upon the natural feeling of foreigners that 
 something new is to be demanded of a new 
 country, and this novelty is more naturally 
 looked for, by the mass of readers, in cos- 
 tumes and externals than in the inward spirit. 
 
BRET HARTE 245 
 
 Much of the welcome was given most readily 
 to what may be called the BufEalo Bill spirit, 
 and belonged to the tomahawk and blanket 
 period. When a Swedish visitor to this coun- 
 try, some twenty years ago, was asked whether 
 Frederika Bremer's novels, once received here 
 with such enthusiasm, were stiU read in Swe- 
 den, he said " No ; " and to the question as 
 to what had taken their place he replied, 
 " Bret Harte and Mark Twain." It is un- 
 doubtedly these two men rather than any 
 others among the Western humorists, in their 
 opinion of whom Europe and America, for a 
 time at least, most nearly united. 
 
 Apart from his characterization of such 
 broadly humorous types as "Truthful James " 
 and "Ah Sin," Bret Harte deserves 
 
 ,1 f 1,1., ■'^ret Harte. 
 
 to be remembered as tne picturesque 
 chronicler of life in California during the 
 early gold-hunting days. His later work 
 leads one to think that it was a lucky stroke 
 of fortune which led the young native of 
 New York with the quick eye and the clever 
 pen, at precisely the right moment, into an 
 uncultivated field. It was his lot, as was 
 said by some critic, to remain for thirty years 
 what is called a promising writer. He created, 
 
246 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 at the very outset, four or five well-marked 
 characters, and afterward pubhshed some 
 thirty-six volumes without adding another. 
 While his work was of narrow range, how- 
 ever, it belonged, at its best, to a respectable 
 order of romantic fiction. It is not a little 
 triumph to have created even four or five 
 types of character, or to have produced three 
 or four strong pieces of invention. Not 
 much more, certainly, could have been ex- 
 pected of a writer who not long after his 
 first success left the West, and, somewhat 
 later, America, never to return. Such vol- 
 untary denationalization has been not uncom- 
 mon among American writers. The most 
 striking among recent instances is that of 
 Henry James, a man of great powers, but 
 of a well-nigh fatal instinct for super-refine- 
 ment in life and art. So subtle and de- 
 tached is his later method, that it l^is been 
 said of him, not unfairly, " Even his cosmo- 
 politanism has its limitations ; to be truly 
 cosmopolitan a man must be at home even 
 in his own country." 
 
 Over-refinement is not the fault with which 
 Mark Twain can ever be accused ; his reck- 
 less robustness, indeed, constitutes his main 
 
MARK TWAIN 247 
 
 strength. I myself was first introduced to 
 Mark Twain's books in 1872 by an unim- 
 peachable English authority — on ^ark 
 a somewhat different line from Mr. Twain. 
 Clemens, — namely, Charles Darwin. "What! " 
 he said to me, " you have never read Mark 
 Twain? I always keep his Jumping Frog 
 on a chair by my bedside that I may turn to 
 it in case of sleeplessness ! " and however 
 doubtful this form of compliment may appear, 
 it was certainly something that it cheered the 
 wakeful hours of so great a brain. It is not 
 to be admitted, however, that Englishmen 
 have ever been very discriminating critics of 
 Mark Twain. As they have never demanded 
 of him high Uterary qualities, they have never 
 felt his occasional want of them nor been 
 especially interested when he developed them. 
 He has been to them hke those absolutely 
 recognized wits who fill a table with laughter 
 or delight whenever they happen to ask for 
 a bit of bread. That Mark Twain is one of 
 the really great jesters of the world is 
 doubted by no one ; but it may be that he 
 will be like many others of that class whose 
 works stand in hbrariesj whose volumes open 
 easily at one or two often-read pages, while 
 
248 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 the rest of the well-bound volumes are left 
 unopened. Yet one thing is certain. In what 
 has been weU called " the Odyssean story of 
 the Mississippi " under the name of Huckle- 
 berry Finn, Mark Twain did something 
 toward laying the foundation of an original 
 Western literature. The whole local atmos- 
 phere, the tragic vividness with which heroic 
 figures appear before us, rustic, even boyish, 
 alive for a few hours, then disappearing 
 with the same quiet abruptness in death ; a 
 whole family made interesting, even charm- 
 ing, to us, then vanishing mercilessly in a 
 meaningless border feud : this is a distinct 
 step forward in American literature, and 
 cannot be put out of sight either by too am- 
 bitious efforts like his Joan of Arc or by 
 free and easy journalistic extravaganzas like 
 Innocents Abroad. 
 
 The first Western writer really recognized 
 as taking the position of a literary leader at 
 w. D. How- the East was, of course, Mr. Howells, 
 ells. yf}^Q came East in 1860 and has al- 
 
 ways remained. The peculiar charm of How- 
 ells's prose style has, doubtless, had its effect 
 in disarming criticism. He rarely fails to give 
 pleasure by the mere process of writing, and 
 
W. D. HOWELLS 249 
 
 this is much, to begin with ; just as, when 
 we are listening to conversation, a musical 
 voice gratifies us almost more than wit or 
 wisdom. Mr. Howells is without an equal 
 among his English-speaking contemporaries 
 as to some of the most attractive literary- 
 graces. Unless it be in Mr. James, he has no 
 rival for half-tints, for modulations, for subtile 
 phrases that touch the edge of an assertion 
 and yet stop short of it. He is like a skater 
 who executes a hundred graceful curves 
 within the limits of a pool a few yards square. 
 Miss Austen, the novelist, once described her 
 art as a little bit of ivory, on which she pro- 
 duced small efEect after much labor. She 
 underrated her own skill, as the comparison 
 in some respects underrates that of Howells ; 
 but his field is the little bit of ivory. 
 
 This is attributing to him only what he 
 has been careful to claim for himself. He 
 describes his methods very frankly, and his 
 first literary principle has been to look away 
 from great passions, and rather to elevate the 
 commonplace by minute touches. Not only 
 does he prefer this, but he does not hesitate 
 to tell us sometimes, half jestingly, that it is 
 the only thing to do. He says, " As in litera- 
 
250 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 ture the true artist will shun the use of even 
 real events if they are of an improbable 
 character, so the sincere observer of man will 
 not desire to look upon his heroic or occa- 
 sional phases, but will seek him in his habit- 
 ual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness." 
 He may not mean to lay this down as a canon 
 of universal authority, but he accepts it him- 
 self ; and is apt to state his own views too 
 much as the decision of a court. He accepts 
 it with the risk involved of a too-limited and 
 microscopic range. That he has fully escaped 
 this peril is due to the fact that his method 
 went, after all, deeper than he admitted : he 
 was not merely a good-natured observer, like 
 Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman, but he had 
 theories and purposes, something to protest 
 against, and something to assert. 
 
 He is often classed with Mr. James as 
 representing the international school of nov- 
 elists; yet in reality they belong to widely 
 different subdivisions. After all, Mr. James 
 has permanently set up his easel in Europe, 
 Mr. Howells in America ; and the latter has 
 been, from the beginning, far less anxious to 
 compare Americans with Europeans than 
 with one another. He is international only 
 
W. D. HOWELLS 251 
 
 if we adopt Mr. Emerson's sayiug that Eu- 
 rope stretches to the AUeghanies. As a na- 
 tive of Ohio, transplanted to Massachusetts, 
 he never can forego the interest implied in 
 this double point of view. The Europeanized 
 American, and, if we may so say, the Ameri- 
 canized American, are the typical figures that 
 re-appear in his books. Even in The Lady of 
 the Aroostook, although the voyagers reach 
 the other side at last, the real contrast is 
 found on board ship ; and, although he allows 
 his heroine to have been reared in a New 
 England village, he cannot forego the satis- 
 faction of having given her California for a 
 birthplace. Mr. James writes " international 
 episodes " : Mr. Howells writes inter-oceanic 
 episodes ; his best scenes imply a dialogue 
 between the Atlantic and Pacific slopes. 
 
 In one sense the novels of Mr. Howells 
 have, like those of many other writers of 
 Western origin, proved a disappointment. In- 
 stead of bringing with them a largeness, as 
 of the prairies, the genius finally developed 
 has been that of the miniature artist. One 
 must step back a century and read what Haz- 
 litt wrote of Clarissa Harlowe to find the 
 precise criticism for such work. " Clarissa, 
 
252 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 says Hazlitt, " is too interesting by half. 
 She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, 
 her samplers, her aunts and uncles. She is 
 interesting in all that is uninteresting." ^ It 
 is not unusual to find such superfine devel- 
 opments of art attempted in rough, new 
 countries ; but they cannot be said to repre- 
 sent the Hfe of which they may be, by reac- 
 tion, the outcome. There have been of late 
 decided manifestations of an instinct toward 
 the direct expression of the Western spirit. 
 
 In looking at the recent Western contri- 
 butions altogether, however, we perceive one 
 Local marked feature they have in com- 
 
 Types. j^on ^jj^ ^.j^g Eastern. The labors 
 
 of inany authors, in all parts of our vast 
 country, are gradually putting on record a 
 wide range of local types. As a rule, to be 
 sure, it is the less educated classes which are 
 more easily drawn, though these may not 
 necessarily or always be the best worth 
 drawing. Hence we are acquiring a most 
 valuable gallery of more or less rustic groups 
 spread over the continent, while the tradi- 
 tions of polish and refinement are ignored 
 for want either of personal experience or of 
 
 1 Hazlitt's Lectures on English Poets. 
 
LOCAL TYPES 253 
 
 skill. Unluckily, the writer who has suc- 
 ceeded with village life always wishes to deal 
 with more artificial society. It is as inevita- 
 ble as the yearning of every clever amateur 
 comedian to act Hamlet. Bret Harte and 
 many of his successors handle admirably the 
 types they knew in early life, but the mo- 
 ment they attempt to dehneate a highly-bred 
 woman the curtain rises on a creaking doll 
 in starched petticoats. Few, indeed, of our 
 early Western authors could venture to por- 
 tray, what would seem not so impossible, an 
 everyday gentleman or lady. For the East, on 
 the other hand. Miss Jewett has been able to 
 produce types of the old New England gen- 
 try, dwelling perhaps in the quietest of coun- 
 try towns, yet incapable of any act which is 
 not dignified or gracious ; and Miss Viola 
 Roseboro has depicted such figures as that of 
 the old Southern lady, living in a cheap New 
 York boarding-house, toiling her life away to 
 pay her brother's or her father's debts, and 
 yet so exquisite in all her ways that the very 
 page which describes her seems to exhale a 
 delicate odor as of faded jasmine.^ 
 But Western literature is assuming an aspect 
 
 ' See Book and Heart. 
 
254 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 of larger development than any mere inter- 
 pretation of the local type. The wondrous 
 " transitory city " created by the Chicago 
 Exposition made an era in Western life, and in 
 the standing of that region before the world. 
 For the first time, we all asked ourselves, not 
 " Is this the wild West ? " but " Is not this 
 America ? " and from that moment, it would 
 seem, the West began to find direct expres- 
 sion in literature. Howells can never repre- 
 sent it; he came East too soon and too 
 reverentially. But we find it in a book like 
 Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland, 
 where the vigor of characterization carries 
 one away from the first moment to the last, 
 and the figures seem absolutely real. Mr. 
 Garland's pictures of life in the middle West 
 are sombre, but not morbid. In one respect 
 his work and that of Frank Norris present 
 an odd paradox. Each of these writers set 
 out with the stated intention of breaking 
 away from the literary traditions of the East. 
 They did, so far as the Eastern states of 
 North America are concerned ; but they did 
 not hesitate to go stiQ farther east, to France 
 and Eussia, for their models. Mr. Garland's 
 earlier tales have much of the ironical com- 
 
LOCAL TYPES 255 
 
 pactness of de Maupassant, and Mr. Norris's 
 novels could not have been written but by a 
 worshiper of Zola. It cannot be expected 
 that the spirit of the West will find perfect 
 expression under such a method. If Amer- 
 ica cannot find utterance in terms of Eng^ 
 land, she certainly cannot in terms of France. 
 There are certain racial prescriptions of taste 
 and style which cannot be safely ignored. 
 Apart from the question of method, the sub- 
 stance of Mr. Norris's books is of exceptional 
 power, and his early death deprived not only 
 the West, but the whole country, of one who 
 promised more even than he had accom- 
 plished. Mr. Norris's last story, The Pit, 
 dealt with Chicago as a great financial centre. 
 The work of Mr. H. B. Fuller has had to 
 do rather with its civic and social life ; The 
 Cliff-Dwellers is the most striking of his 
 stories, and bids fair to stand as the best 
 analysis of the life of the " sky-scraper " 
 and the department store, that is, the life of 
 the ordinary prosperous dweller in a great 
 American city. 
 
 How trifling may seem the total amount 
 of this literary exhibit beside the gigantic 
 enterprises, the daring achievements, the 
 
256 THE WESTERN INFLUENCE 
 
 great inventions which make the chronicle 
 of the vast interior ! An Easterner traveUng 
 in the West may well be amazed, not at any 
 ostentation of vanity on the part of Western 
 hosts, but at their wonderful humility over 
 an achievement so vast as the material con- 
 quest of a continent. How easily all else 
 must seem to them secondary ; so that it may 
 look hke a trivial matter, as the Western edi- 
 tor said, to " make culture hum." But when 
 we turn our eyes backward, we see that in 
 all nations the laurels of literature have en- 
 dured beyond these external displays of 
 power. They outlive cities, state-houses and 
 statesmen. One may quote those fine lines 
 of the once famous poem, Festus : — 
 
 " Homer is gone, and where is Troy and where 
 The rival cities seven ? His song outlasts 
 Town, tower and god, all that then was, save Hea- 
 ven." 
 
 It may be that Mr. Norris's book will hve 
 when the tremendous operations of the wheat 
 pit are forgotten ; or if not that book, some 
 other. Life is more important than art, but 
 art is its noblest record. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 FORECAST 
 
 In preparing the foregoing narrative, the 
 attempt has been made from the outset to 
 concentrate attention upon the few promi- 
 nent writers and forces which have deter- 
 mined the development of American letters. 
 It may be that some names have been wrongly 
 subordinated or ignored ; but the critic must, 
 after all, discriminate according to his own 
 judgment. There is a wise old Persian say- 
 ing, " They came to shoe the Pasha's horses, 
 and the beetle stretched out his leg to be 
 shod." The fundamental difficulty for fal- 
 lible critics is to determine which is the 
 Pasha's horse and which is the beetle. 
 
 Even in dealing with the past, it is possible 
 to go hopelessly wrong in one's judgment of 
 individuals, books or writers. For rpj^^ j,^jj 
 instance, Addison still stands, tra- biuty of 
 ditionally, at the head of English ^"*'''^"- 
 prose writers, in respect to style ; but from 
 
258 FORECAST 
 
 his account of the greatest English poets he 
 omits the names of Shakespeare, Beaumont, 
 Fletcher, Massinger, Webster and Marlowe ; 
 a tolerably correct list of the leading drama- 
 tic poets in the English tongue. One might 
 almost say that he wrote his list through 
 time's telescope reversed. In the same way 
 Ruskin rules out from his list of English 
 poets Shelley and Coleridge. One might hope 
 that the good taste or vanity of the great 
 poets themselves would restore the balance of 
 their own fame, at least, but Tennyson wrote 
 in his later years, " I feel as if my life had 
 been a useless life ; " and Longfellow said, a 
 few years before his death, to a young author 
 who shrank from seeing his name in print, 
 that he himself had never got over that feel- 
 ing. 
 
 " Would it please you very much," asks 
 Thackeray's Warrington of Pendennis, "to 
 have been the author of Hayley's verses?" 
 Yet Hayley was, in his day, as Southey testi- 
 fies, " by popular election the king of the 
 English poets ; " and he was held so import- 
 ant a personage that he received, what prob- 
 ably no other author ever has won, a large 
 income for the last twelve years of his Ufe 
 
THE FALLIBILITY OF CRITICISM 259 
 
 in return for the prospective copyright of his 
 posthumous memoii's. Miss Anna Seward, 
 writing to Sir Walter Scott in 1786, ranks 
 him and the equally forgotten Mason as 
 " the two foremost poets of the day ; " she 
 calls Hayley's poems " magnolias, roses, and 
 amaranths," and pronounces his esteem a 
 distinction greater than monarchs hold it in 
 their power to bestow. Yet probably nine 
 out of ten who shall read these lines will 
 have to consult a biographical dictionary to 
 find out who Hayley was; while his odd 
 protege, William Blake, whom the fine ladies 
 of his day wondered at Hayley for patron- 
 izing, is now a favorite with lovers of litera- 
 ture and art. 
 
 It makes indeed a part of the magic of 
 new books that no man can guess securely 
 at their future. I remember vividly the sur- 
 prise of my old friend and guide. Professor 
 Edward Tyrrell Channing, then the highest 
 literary authority in America, when I inserted 
 in my Commencement oration at Harvard 
 in 1841, a boyish compliment to Tennyson ; 
 only two or three copies of whose first thin 
 volumes had as yet crossed the Atlantic, 
 though these had been read with enthusiasm 
 
260 FORECAST 
 
 by young people at Concord and at Cam- 
 bridge. I, exhorting young poets with the 
 mature enthusiasm of seventeen, bade them 
 " lay down their Spenser and their Tennyson " 
 and look within, and Professor Channing let 
 it pass in the understanding that by Spenser 
 I meant the highest authority, and by Tenny- 
 son, the lowest. This construction I refused 
 with some indignation, for it was a capital 
 passage of which I was quite proud and 
 which had been written by my elder sister. 
 When I explained my real views as to Tenny- 
 son, the kindly professor said, " Ah, that is a 
 different thing. I wish you to say what you 
 think. I regard Tennyson as a great calf, but 
 you are entitled to your own opinion." Such 
 instances show us that forecast in literature 
 is not easy even for those whose oppor- 
 tunities for forming a sound judgment are 
 exceptional. 
 
 It is interesting to note in this connection 
 that in estimating contemporary English writr 
 The Ameri- ers during the nineteenth century, 
 can Verdict. America was more just than Engr 
 land. The successive leaders of English lit- 
 erature, such as Lamb, Carlyle, Tennyson and 
 Browning, were apt to be recognized first in 
 
THE AMERICAN VERDICT 261 
 
 America. Shelley tells us how utterly ignored 
 Charles Lamb was in his prime by the EngHsh 
 public, and Willis tells us that it was not so in 
 America. He says in his Letters from under 
 a Bridge — his only thoroughly attractive 
 book — " How profoundly dull was England 
 to the merits of Charles Lamb until he died. 
 . . . America was posterity to him. The 
 writings of all our young authors were tinc- 
 tured with imitation of his style, when in 
 England (as I personally know) it was diffi- 
 cult to light upon a person who had read 
 Elia." It was an American, Charles Stearns 
 Wheeler, one of Emerson's early disciples, 
 who collected in the Athenaeum library the 
 scattered numbers of Eraser's Magazine, 
 thus bringing together the fragments of 
 Sartor Resartus, which was published in a 
 volume in Boston before it appeared in that 
 form in England. The same Charles Wheeler 
 went to England soon after and bore to Tenny- 
 son the urgent request of his American ad- 
 mirers that he would reprint his early volumes ; 
 which he did in the two-volume edition 
 which appeared in 1842. The cheap, early, 
 double-columned [1841] edition of Brown- 
 ing's Bells and Pomegranates found sub- 
 
262 FORECAST 
 
 scribers in Boston at a time when, as Brown- 
 ing himself told me, it attracted no atten- 
 tion in London ; and Margaret Fuller wrote 
 a notice of Paracelsus and Pippa Passes 
 in the Dial, at a time when no such notice 
 had yet appeared in Europe. If there was 
 such a thing as literary foresight during the 
 past century, its fountain was to be found in 
 the New World, not the Old. 
 
 In speaking of the soundness of the judg- 
 ment of the American public, one cannot, of 
 The Popular coursc, iuclude the vast number of 
 Verdict. peoplo who read some sort of books. 
 In this country the authors who have 
 achieved the most astounding popular suc- 
 cesses, are, as a rule, absolutely forgotten. 
 I can remember when Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., 
 received by far the largest salary yet paid to 
 any American writer, and Dr. J. H. Robinson 
 spent his life in trying to rival him. The 
 vast evangehcal constituency which now reads 
 Ben Hur then read Ingraham's Prince of 
 the House of David ; the boys who now pore 
 over Henty would then have had Mayne Reid. 
 Those who enjoy Gunter would have then 
 read, it is to be presumed, the writings of Mr. 
 J. W. Buel, whose very name will be, to most 
 
THE POPULAR VERDICT 263 
 
 readers of to-day, unknown. His Beautiful 
 Story reached a sale of nearly three hundred 
 thousand copies in two years; his Living 
 World and The Story of Man were sold to 
 the number of nearly two hundred and fifty 
 thousand each, and were endorsed by Glad- 
 stone and Bismarck. This was only fifteen 
 years ago, for in 1888 he received for copy- 
 right $33,000 and in 1889 |50,000; yet 
 one finds at hand no book of reference or 
 library catalogue that contains his name. Is 
 it not better to be unknown in one's Hfetime, 
 and yet live forever by one poem, Uke Blanco 
 White with his sonnet called Life and Light, 
 or by one saying, like Fletcher of Saltoun, 
 with his " I care not who makes the laws of 
 a people, so I can make its ballads," than to 
 achieve such evanescent splendors as this ? ' 
 
 One thing the larger public is likely to do. 
 It is a fortunate fact that popular judgment, 
 even at the time, is apt to fix upon some one 
 poem by each poet, for instance, and connect 
 the author with that poem inseparably thence- 
 forward. Fate appears to assign to each 
 some one boat, however small, on which his 
 fame may float down towards immortality, 
 even if it never attains it. This is the case, 
 
264 FORECAST 
 
 for instance, with Longfellow's Hiawatha, 
 Lowell's Commemoration Ode, Holmes's 
 Chambered Nautilus, Whittier's Snow- 
 Bound, Mrs. Howe's Battle Hymn, Whit- 
 man's My Captain, Aldrich.' s Fredericksburg 
 sonnet, Helen Jackson's Spinning, Thoreau's 
 Smoke, Bayard Taylor's Song of the Camp, 
 Emerson's Daughters of Time, Burroughs's 
 Serene I Fold my Hands, Piatt's The 
 Morning Street, Mrs. Hooper's / slept and 
 dreamed that life was beauty, Stedman's 
 Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word, 
 Wasson's All 's Well, Brownlee Brown's 
 Thalatta, EUery Channing's To-morrow, 
 Harriet SpofEord's In a Summer Evening, 
 Lanier's Marshes of Glynn, Mrs. Moulton's 
 The Closed Gate, Eugene Field's lAttle 
 Boy Blue, John Hay's The Stirrup Cup, 
 Forsyth Wilson's Old Sergeant, Emily Dick- 
 inson's Vanished, Celia Thaxter's Sand- 
 Piper, and so on. All of these may not he 
 immortal poems, but they are at least the 
 boats which seem likely to bear the authors' 
 names into the future. 
 
 If it is hard to make individual predict 
 tions, when we turn to the collective forecast 
 for a nation we enter upon a larger and 
 
THE COLLECTIVE FORECAST 265 
 
 doubtless more difficult subject, whicb the 
 infinite possibilities of war or other ,^5^^ CoUeo- 
 national complication make harder tive Fore- 
 still. No such forecast can ever ''^*" 
 go very far for a nation which has not yet 
 clearly worked out its own destiny, does not 
 even comprehend itself, has not decided 
 whether it is to be a self-governing republic 
 from end to end, or a benevolent despotism 
 to govern whole outlying races and genera- 
 tions. The last generation made the dis- 
 covery that American literature has a quality 
 and a flavor of its own ; and it is not Kkely 
 to discredit that discovery merely because 
 Hterature itself, in the leading nations of the 
 world, has just now held back a little to 
 make room for commerce. The temporary 
 disappearance of Emersons and Hawthornes 
 in America is not more marked than that of 
 Tennysons and Brownings in England, or of 
 Goethes and Schillers in Germany. During 
 the interval when great books have not mul- 
 tipHed, the great fortunes which are to buy 
 books will have been accumulating ; perhaps 
 the next race of authors will be a little better 
 fed than those who have passed ofE the stage ; 
 and yet it may be found that their work will 
 
266 FORECAST 
 
 not really suffer, though endangered. Mean- 
 time every nation must try the experiment in 
 its own way and under its own conditions; 
 some of the minor nations of the world have 
 tried their hands at authorship during the 
 past few years, while their more powerful 
 neighbors have been making money ; and 
 presently England and Germany and America 
 may take their turn again at the gray goose 
 quill now turned into a golden pen. 
 
 So far as the collective future of American 
 literature is concerned, it may be said, that 
 Three there are three leading obstacles 
 
 Dangers. commouly alleged, which it must 
 overcome. These are : — 
 
 1. The alleged influence of the so-called 
 Puritan tradition. 
 
 2. The alleged materialism of the age. 
 
 3. The mainly scientific tendency of edu- 
 cation and thought. 
 
 Let us consider these in order : — 
 1. It was Matthew Arnold who main- 
 tained that the Puritan spirit in America was 
 utterly hostile to literature and art. As to 
 the Puritan period, it is needless to say that 
 the forest pioneer did not compose orchestral 
 symphonies or the fQ\i^deTS of a nation carve 
 
ALLEGED OBSTACLE OF PURITANISM 267 
 
 statues of one another. Thoughtful and 
 scholarly men created Massachusetts Colony, 
 at least, and could at most brinp" 
 
 o 'Yhe A1 - 
 
 hither the traditions of their uni- legedOb- 
 versities and leave them embodied ^**''^« °* 
 
 11 mi ■ 1-p 1 Puritanism. 
 
 in a college, iheir Me was only 
 historically inconsistent with what we now 
 call culture ; there was no logical antagonism ; 
 indeed, that life had in it much of the mate- 
 rial of art in its sturdiness, its enthusiasm, 
 and its truthfulness. To deny this is to see 
 in art only something frivolous and insincere. 
 Major John Hathorne put his offenders on 
 trial and convicted and hanged them all. 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne held his more spiritual 
 tribunal two centuries later, and his keener 
 scrutiny found some ground of vindication 
 for each one. The fidelity, the thoroughness, 
 the conscientious purpose, were the same in 
 each. Each sought to rest his work, as all 
 art must in the end rest, upon the absolute 
 truth. The writer kept, no doubt, something 
 of the sombreness of the magistrate; each 
 nevertheless suffered in the woes he studied ; 
 and as Nathaniel Hawthorne " had a knot 
 of pain in his forehead all winter " while 
 meditating the doom of Arthur Dimmesdale, 
 
268 FORECAST 
 
 SO may the other have borne upon his brow 
 the trace of Martha Corey's grief. 
 
 No, it does not seem that the obstacle to a 
 new birth of literature and art in America 
 A Real li^s in blind adherence to the Puri- 
 Obstaoie. tan tradition, but rather in the 
 timid and faithless spirit that lurks in the 
 circles of culture, and still holds something 
 of literary and academic leadership in the 
 homes of the Puritans. What are the ghosts 
 of a myriad Blue Laws compared with the 
 transplanted cynicism of one Saturday Re- 
 view f How can any noble literature germi- 
 nate where young men are constantly told by 
 some of our professors that there is no such 
 thing as originality, and that nothing re- 
 mains for us in this efEete epoch of his- 
 tory but the mere re-combining of thoughts 
 which sprang first from braver brains? It 
 is melancholy to see young men come forth 
 from college walls with less enthusiasm than 
 they carried in ; trained in a spirit which is 
 in this respect worse than English toryism, 
 — that it does not even retain a hearty faith 
 in the past. It is better that a man should 
 have eyes in the back of his head than that 
 he should be taught to sneer at even a retro- 
 
ALLEGED OBSTACLE OF PROSPERITY 269 
 
 spective vision. One may believe that the 
 golden age is behind us, or before us, but 
 alas for the forlorn wisdom of him who re- 
 jects it altogether ! It is not the climax of 
 culture that a college graduate should emu- 
 late the obituary praise bestowed by Cotton 
 Mather on the Eev. John Mitchell of Cam- 
 bridge, " a truly aged young man." Better 
 a thousand times train a boy on Scott's novels 
 or the Border ballads than educate him to 
 believe, on the one side, that chivalry was a 
 cheat and the troubadours imbeciles, and on 
 the other hand, that universal suffrage is, an 
 absurdity and the one real need is to get rid 
 of our voters. 
 
 2. It is further alleged that there is se- 
 rious danger to literature in a period of over- 
 whelming material prosperity. It is The Ai- 
 a thing not to be forgotten, that ^^s«^ ^^- 
 
 . . .II- stacleof 
 
 tor a long series oi years the plain Material 
 people — in Sumner's phrase — of Prosperity. 
 our Northern states, at least, were habitually 
 in advance of their institutions of learning, in 
 courage and comprehensiveness of thought. 
 There were long years during which the 
 most cultivated scholar, so soon as he em- 
 braced an unpopular opinion, was apt to find 
 
270 FORECAST 
 
 the college doors closed against him, and only 
 the country lyceum — the people's college — 
 left open. Slavery had to be abolished be- 
 fore the most accomplished orator of the 
 nation could be invited to address the grad- 
 uates of his own university. The first among 
 American scholars was nominated year after 
 year, only to be rejected, before the aca- 
 demic societies of his own neighborhood. 
 Yet during all that time the rural lecture 
 associations showered their invitations on 
 Parker and Phillips ; culture shunned them, 
 but the plain people heard them gladly. The 
 home of real thought was outside, not inside, 
 the college walls. 
 
 That time is past, and the literary class 
 has now come more into sympathy with the 
 popular heart. Even the apparent indiffer- 
 ence of a popular audience to culture and 
 high finish may be in the end a wholesome 
 influence, recalling us to those more import- 
 ant things, compared to which these are sec- 
 ondary qualities. The indifference is only 
 comparative ; our pubhc prefers good writ- 
 ing, as it prefers good elocution ; but it val- 
 ues energy, heartiness, and active service 
 more. The public is right ; it is the business 
 
ALLEGED OBSTACLE OP PROSPERITY 271 
 
 o£ the writer, as of the speaker, to perfect 
 the finer graces without sacrificing things 
 more vital. " She was not a good singer," 
 says some noveUst of his heroine, " but she 
 sang with an inspiration such as good sing- 
 ers rarely indulge in." Given those positive 
 qualities, and it may be justly claimed that 
 a fine execution does not hinder acceptance 
 in America, but rather aids it. Where there 
 is beauty of execution alone, a popular audi- 
 ence, even in America, very easily goes to 
 sleep. And in such matters, as the French 
 actor, Samson, said to the young dramatist, 
 after snoring during the reading of his new 
 play, " Sleep is an opinion." 
 
 And this brings us to the conclusion, that 
 while the enormous material and business life 
 now developing is sometimes feared as a sub- 
 stitute for literature, it may yet prove its 
 ultimate friend and promoter. Perhaps it 
 may be found that the men who are con- 
 tributing most to raise the tone of American 
 literature are the men who have never yet 
 written a book, and have scarcely time to 
 read one, but by their heroic energies in 
 other spheres are providing materials from 
 which a national literature shall one day be 
 
272 FORECAST 
 
 built. The man who constructs a great me- 
 chanical work helps literature, for he gives 
 a model which shall one day inspire us to 
 construct literary works as great. We do 
 not wish to be forever outdone by the iron 
 machinery of Pittsburg or the grain elevators 
 of Chicago. We have hardly yet arrived at 
 our literature, — other things must come 
 first ; we are busy with our railroads, per- 
 fecting the vast alimentary canal by which 
 the nation assimilates raw immigrants at the 
 rate of a million a year. We are not yet pro- 
 ducing, we are digesting ; food now, literary 
 composition by-and-by ; Shakespeare did not 
 write Hamlet at the dinner table. It is of 
 course impossible to explain this to foreign- 
 ers, and they still talk of composing, while 
 we talk of dining. 
 
 If the judgment of another nation is, as 
 it has been called, that of a " contemporary 
 Transatlantic posterity," it is worth while to con- 
 Opinion. sider what sort of American literary 
 product has excited the widest interest abroad. 
 The greatest transatlantic successes of this 
 kind which American novelists have yet at- 
 tained — those won by Cooper and Mrs. 
 Stowe — have come through a daring Amer- 
 
TRANSATLANTIC OPINION 273 
 
 icanism of subject, which introduced in each 
 case a new figure to the European world, — 
 first the Indian, then the negro. Whatever 
 the merit of the work, it was plainly the 
 theme which conquered. Bret Harte's popu- 
 larity in England is due to the same cause ; 
 and there are other instances which come 
 readily to mind. Such successes are little 
 hkely to be repeated, for they were based on 
 temporary situations, never to recur. The 
 mere oddities or exceptions of American life 
 have now been pretty fully presented to the 
 world. A far higher task remains to be fully 
 accomplished, the presentation in Hterature, 
 not of American types alone, but of the 
 American spirit. 
 
 To analyze combinations of character that 
 only our national life produces, to portray 
 dramatic situations that belong to a clearer 
 social atmosphere, — this is the higher Amer- 
 icanism. Of course, to cope with such things 
 in such a spirit is less easy than to describe a 
 foray or a tournament, or indefinitely to mul- 
 tiply such stQl-lif e pictures as the stereotyped 
 English or French society affords ; but the 
 thing when once done is an incomparably 
 nobler achievement for the American artist. 
 
274 FORECAST 
 
 It may be centuries before it is done. No 
 matter ; it will be done. 
 
 It is a satisfaction to observe that the 
 instinctive movement which is establishing 
 American fiction, not in one locality alone, 
 but on a field broad as the continent, uncon- 
 sciously recognizes this one principle, — the 
 essential dignity and worth of the individual 
 man. This is what enables it to dispense 
 with the mechanism of separate classes, and 
 to reach human nature itself. When we look 
 at the masters of English fiction, Scott and 
 Jane Austen, we notice that in scarcely one 
 of their novels does one person ever swerve 
 on the closing page from the precise social 
 position he has held from the beginning. 
 Society in their hands is fixed, not fluid. Of 
 course, there are a few concealed heirs, a few 
 revealed strawberry leaves, but never any 
 essential change. I can recall no real social 
 promotion in all the Waverley novels except 
 where Halbert Glendenning weds the maid of 
 Avenel, and there the tutelary genius disap- 
 pears singing, — 
 
 " The churl is lord, the maid is bride ; " 
 
 and it proved necessary for Scott to write a 
 
THE ALLEGED OBSTACLE OF SCIENCE 275 
 
 sequel, explaining that the marriage was on 
 the whole a rather unhappy one, and that 
 luckily the pair had no children. Not that 
 Scott did not appreciate with the keenest zest 
 his own Jeannie Deanses and Dandie Din- 
 monts, but they must keep their place ; it is 
 not human nature they vindicate, but only 
 peasant virtue. Such virtue vanishes from 
 the foreground when the peasant is a possi- 
 ble president ; and what takes its place is the 
 study of individual manhood and womanhood. 
 3. There remains the fear, even among 
 ciUtivated lovers of literature, that American 
 intellect is pledged too firmly to TheAi- 
 science. Literature represents a ^^^^^*^]'- 
 
 •■■ stacle of 
 
 world outside of science, and one Science. 
 which competes with it, in due modesty, for 
 the rule of the human mind. It is commonly 
 claimed that the balance at present is in- 
 clining in favor of science and away from 
 literature. It is, indeed, claimed for science 
 that it is exclusively to rule the world. An 
 accomplished German savant, long resident 
 in this country. Baron Osten Sacken, once 
 remarked that in his opinion poetry was 
 already quite superseded, and music and art 
 must soon follow. Literature, he thought, 
 
276 FORECAST 
 
 ■would only endure, if at all, as a means of 
 preserving the results of science, probably in 
 the shape of chemical formulae. He was a 
 most agreeable man, who always complained 
 that he had made a fatal mistake in his 
 career, through rashly taking the whole of 
 the Diptera, or two-winged insects, for his 
 scientific task ; whereas to take charge of 
 a single genus of insects would have been 
 enough, he thought, for the life-work of a 
 judicious man. Personally he should have 
 selected the mosquito. 
 
 We smile at this as an extravagance, to be 
 classed with the repining of that German 
 professor who reproached himself, on his 
 death bed, with having wasted his life by 
 attempting too much in studying both the 
 aorists, or indefinite tenses, of the Greek verb, 
 whereas if he had concentrated himself wholly 
 on the second aorist he might have been of 
 some real use in the world. But we have by 
 the direct confession of the great leader of 
 modern science, the noble and large-minded 
 Darwin, an instance of almost complete 
 atrophy of one whole side of the mind at the 
 very time when its scientific action was at 
 its highest point. Up to the age of thirty. 
 
THE ALLEGED OBSTACLE OF SCIENCE 277 
 
 Darwin tells us, he took intense delight in 
 poetry — Milton, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, 
 and Shelley — while he read Shakespeare 
 with supreme enjoyment. Pictures and music 
 also gave him much pleasure. But at sixty- 
 seven he writes that " for many years he can- 
 not endure to read a line of poetry ; " that he 
 has lately tried Shakespeare, and found it so 
 intolerably duU that it nauseated hi^^ ; and 
 that he has lost almost all taste for pictures 
 and music. This he records, not with satis- 
 faction, but with " great regret ; " ^ he would 
 gladly have it otherwise, but cannot. It is 
 simply that one whole side of his intellectual 
 being was paralyzed ; a loss which all the 
 healthy enjoyment of the other side of nature 
 could scarcely repay. Yet it is possible that 
 the lesson of Darwin's limitations may be 
 scarcely less valuable than that of his achieve- 
 ments. By his strength he revolutionized the 
 world of science. By his weakness he gave 
 evidence that there is a world outside of 
 science. 
 
 It is easy to cite the testimony of other 
 high scientific authorities to the essential one- 
 sidedness of the exclusively scientific mind. 
 
 1 Life, by his son. Am. ed. pp. 30, 81. 
 
278 FORECAST 
 
 The late Clarence King, formerly Director of 
 the United States Geological Survey, wrote 
 thus, shortly before his death : ' " With all 
 its novel powers and practical sense, I am 
 obliged to admit that the purely scientific 
 brain is miserably mechanical ; it seems to 
 have become a splendid sort of selE-directed 
 machine, an incredible automaton, grinding 
 on with its analyses or constructions. But 
 for pure sentiment, for all that spontaneous, 
 joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the 
 temperature of passion and the subtle thrill 
 of ideality, you might as well look to a cast- 
 iron derrick." For all these, then, we must 
 come back, by the very testimony of those 
 scientific leaders who would seek to be whole 
 men also, to the more flexible point of view, 
 to the works of creative imagination, — to 
 literature, in short. 
 
 Literature is, as Wordsworth said of poe- 
 try in particular, not science, but " the an- 
 Literature tithesis of scieuce." If there be 
 and an intellectual world outside of 
 
 oienoe. science, where is the boundary-line 
 of that world ? We pass this line, it would 
 seem, whetiever we enter the realm usually 
 
 1 See Book and Heart, p. 32. 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 279 
 
 called intuitive or inspirational ; a realm 
 whose characteristic it is that it is not subject 
 to processes or measurable by tests. The 
 yield of this outer world may be as real as 
 that of the scientific world, but its methods 
 are not traceable, nor are its achievements 
 capable of being duplicated by the mere 
 force of patient will. Keats, in one of his 
 fine letters, classi^es the universe, and begins 
 boldly with " things real, as sun, moon, and 
 passages of Shakespeare." Sun and moon 
 lie within the domain of science ; not long 
 since, to speak of one instance, came that 
 extraordinary discovery which has revealed 
 in the bright star Algol a system of three 
 and perhaps four stellar bodies, revolving 
 round each other and influencing each other's 
 motions, and this at a distance so great that 
 the rays of light which reveal them left their 
 home fifty years ago. The imagination is 
 paralyzed before a step so vast; yet it all 
 lies within the domain of science, while sci- 
 ence can no more tell us how Macbeth or 
 Hamlet came into existence than if the new 
 astronomy had never been born. It is as 
 true of the poem as of the poet — Nasdtur, 
 nonfit. We cannot even define what poetry 
 
280 FORECAST 
 
 is; and Thoreau remarks that there never 
 yet was a definition o£ it so good but the 
 poet would proceed to disregard it by setting 
 aside all its requisitions. 
 
 Shelley says that a man cannot say, " ' I 
 will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even 
 cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as 
 a fading coal, which some invisible influ- 
 ence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to 
 transitory brightness ; this power arises from 
 within, like the color of a flower which fades 
 and changes as it is developed, and the con- 
 scious portions of our nature are unprophetic 
 either of its approach or its departure." ^ In 
 a like vein Schiller wrote to Korner that what 
 impressed him when he sat down to write was 
 usually some single impulse or harmonious 
 tone, and not any clear notion of what he 
 proposed writing. " These observations," 
 he says, " arise from an Ode to lAght with 
 which I am now busy. I have as yet no idea 
 what the poem will be, but a presentiment ; 
 and yet I can promise beforehand that it will 
 be successful." ^ We have self-revelations 
 
 1 Defense of Poetry in Essays and Letters (Am. ed.), i. 
 66. 
 
 ^ Correspondence of Schiller and Korner. 
 
THE CONCLUSION 281 
 
 from Mozart, altogether parallel to these, in 
 regard to the process of composing music. 
 
 Such manifestations of genius are neces- 
 sarily rare, and are, in the long run, the out- 
 come, even more than the impelling force, of 
 a firm and wholesome way of life. Libra- 
 ries, galleries, museums, and fine buildings, 
 with all their importance, are all secondary 
 to that great human Ufe of which they are, 
 indeed, only the secretions or appendages. 
 " My Madonnas " — thus wrote that recluse 
 woman of genius, Emily Dickinson — " are 
 the women who pass my house to their work, 
 bearing Saviours in their arms." Words wait 
 on thoughts, thoughts on Hfe; and after 
 these, technical training is an easy thing. 
 " The art of composition," wrote Thoreau, 
 "is as simple as the discharge of a bullet 
 from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an 
 infinitely greater force behind them." 
 
 Out of our strong forward-bearing Amer- 
 ican hfe, with its apparent complications, and 
 its essential simpUcity, is to come. The Con- 
 some day, a purer national expres- oi^sio"- 
 sion than we have yet known. We are still 
 in allegiance to Europe for a thousand things, 
 for traditions, for art, for scholarship. For 
 
282 FORECAST 
 
 many years we must yet go thither, as did 
 Eobinson Crusoe to his wreck, for many of 
 the very materials of Uving. But materials 
 take their value from him who uses them, 
 and that wreck would have long since passed 
 from memory had there not been a Robinson 
 Crusoe. 
 
 The briUiant and somewhat worldly Bishop 
 Wilberforce was once pointed out to me, rid- 
 ing in the Park at London, as I walked with 
 Carlyle and Froude thirty years ago ; and it 
 was perhaps they who told me a story which 
 the Bishop loved to tell of himself, as to the 
 rebuke he once received from a curate whom 
 he had reproved. The curate was given to 
 fox-hunting, and when the bishop once re- 
 proved him and said it had a worldly appear- 
 ance, " Not more worldly," the curate rephed, 
 " than a certain ball at Blenheim Palace " at 
 which the bishop had been present. The 
 bishop explained that he was staying in the 
 house, to be sure, but was never within three 
 rooms of the dancing. " Oh ! if it comes 
 to that, your lordship," said the curate, " I 
 never am within three fields of the hounds." 
 
 Grant that nowhere in America have we 
 yet got within those three fields, — we will 
 
THE CONCLUSION 283 
 
 not say of Shakespeare, but of Goethe, of 
 Voltaire, even of Heine, — the hunt has at 
 least been interesting, and we know not what 
 to-morrow may bring forth. Matthew Arnold 
 indignantly protested against regarding Emer- 
 son as another Plato, but thought that if he 
 were to be classed with Marcus Aurelius or 
 Epictetus, a better case might be made out ; 
 and certainly that is something, while we 
 wait for the duplicate Plato to be born. Our 
 new literature must express the spirit of the 
 New World. We need some repression, no 
 doubt, as the Old World has never been back- 
 ward in reminding us; but what we need 
 still more is expression. Spenser's Britomart, 
 when she entered the enchanted hall, found 
 above four doors in succession the inscrip- 
 tion, " Be bold ! " " Be bold ! " " Be bold ! " 
 " Be bold! " and only over the fifth door was 
 the inscription, needful, but utterly subordi- 
 nate, " Be not too bold ! " 
 
APPENDIX 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 A GLOSSARY OF NAMES OF WRITERS IN 
 
 AMERICA WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO 
 
 PURE LITERATURE 
 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson. Born in Wolcott, Conn., Nov. 
 29, 1799. He established a school for children in Boston, 
 which was very successful until the press denounced it on 
 account of the advanced ideas of the teacher. He then gave 
 up the school and devoted his time to the study of philoso- 
 phy and reforms, and later moved to Concord, Mass., where 
 he founded the so-called " school of philosophy," and became 
 one of its leaders. He contributed to The Dial and pub- 
 lished Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), Table Talk 
 (1877), Sonnets and Canzonets (1882), and an Essay (1865), 
 presented to Emerson on his birthday. Emerson had a great 
 veneration for him. Died in Boston, Mass., March 4, 1888. 
 
 Austin, Wiluam. Born in Charlestown, Mass., March 
 2, 1778. He graduated from Harvard in 1798, studied law, 
 and became eminent as a practitioner. Spending some time 
 in England, he published, as a result. Letters from London, 
 (1804). His works include Oration on the Anniversary of 
 the Battle of Bunker Hill (1801) ; Essay on the Human Char- 
 acter of Jesus Christ (1807) ; and his most famous story, Peter 
 Rugg, the Missing Man, originally contributed to the New 
 England Galaxy (1824-26), of which he was editor. Died 
 in Charlestown, Mass., June 27, 1841. 
 
288 APPENDIX 
 
 Brown, Charles Brockdbn. Born in Philadelphia, Jan. 
 17, 1771, of Quaker parents. He was really the first Amer- 
 ican to make a profession of literature. He first undertook 
 the study of law, and it was not till 1798 that Wieland, his 
 first romance, was published. The rest of his works followed 
 in quick succession : Ormond in 1799 ; Arthur Mervyn, Part 
 I in 1798, Part II in 1800 ; Edgar Huntley in 1799 ; Clara 
 Howard in 1801 ; and Jane Talbot in 1704. In the mean time 
 he had become an editor, having in charge between 1799 
 and 1808 The Monthly Magazine and American Review (New 
 York) and The Literary Magazine and American Register 
 (Philadelphia). He wrote also Alcuin, a Dialogue on the 
 Rights of Women (1797) ; several political pamphlets ; a 
 General Geography ; and a treatise on Rome during the Age 
 of the Antonines. Died of consumption, Feb. 22, 1810. 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen. Born in Cummington, Mass., 
 Nov. 3, 1794. His father was a country physician, and could 
 give him only a year at Williams College, after which he 
 spent the years between 1811 and 1825 in the study and 
 practice of law. His genius was remarkably precocious. 
 Thanatopsis, perhaps his most famous poem, was written at 
 the age of seventeen. His first creditable volume of verse, 
 published in 1821, included Thanatopsis and the Lines to a 
 Water-Fowl. Numerous other volumes appeared between 
 that date and 1864. The translations of the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey were published between 1870 and 1872. In 1825 he 
 gave up the practice of the law to become editor of The 
 New York Review. A year later he became assistant editor 
 of The New York Evening Post, and in 1829 assumed the 
 editorship. This responsible position he held till his death, 
 which occurred in New York City, June 12, 1878. 
 
 Channing, William Ellery. He was born at New- 
 port, K. I., April 7, 1780. Here his boyhood was passed, and 
 here he received his first strong religious impressions. 
 Graduating from Harvard, he became an instructor in a, 
 family in Richmond, Va., where he acquired an abhorrence of 
 
APPENDIX 289 
 
 slavery ; later he studied theology at Cambridge, and his 
 first and only pastoral settlement was in Boston. He became 
 widely known as the leader of the Unitarians, and his nu- 
 merous writings, published singly, were brought together in 
 five volumes (Boston, 1841) just before his death ; a sixth 
 volume being added later, and in 1872 a volume of selected 
 sermons entitled The Perfect Life. A volume of selections 
 from his MSS. was edited later by one of his granddaugh- 
 ters. Some of his writings on the subject of slavery are a 
 letter on The Slavery Question (1839) ; a tract on Eman- 
 cipation (1840) ; and an argument (1842) on The Duty of 
 the Free States, touching the case of the slaves on board 
 the brig Creole. He died at Bennington, Vt., Oct. 2, 1842. 
 
 Channing, William Ellery (2d). Nephew of the 
 foregoing, and son of Walter Chanuing, M. D. Born in 
 Boston. Entered Harvard in Lowell's class (1838), but 
 did not graduate. He lived for most of his life in Concord, 
 Mass. He published two volumes of poems, in 1843 and 
 in 1847; and several other volumes of verse in subsequent 
 years. His principal prose works are Thoreau, the Poet 
 Naturalist (1873) ; and Conversations from Rome, first pub- 
 lished in 1902. 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore. Born in Burlington, N. J., 
 Sept. 15, 1789, of Quaker and Swedish descent. His early 
 life was spent in the then wilderness of New York, and 
 after a short time at Yale he entered the navy, where he 
 remained for about three years. The interesting descriptions 
 which we have in his works are founded on his early life in 
 the wilderness and at sea. His first novel. Precaution, ap- 
 peared in 1820. He was a prolific writer, and is, perhaps, 
 best known by his Leather- Stocking Tales, which are, in order 
 of narration. The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohi- 
 cans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), 
 and The Prairie (1827). Other works are The Spy (1821) ; 
 The Pilot (1823); The Red Rover (1828); The Water-Witch 
 (1830); Homeward Bound (1838); The Wing-and-Wing 
 
290 APPENDIX 
 
 (1842) ; suudAJloat and Ashore (1844). Died at Cooperstown, 
 N. Y., Sept. 14, 1851. ' 
 
 Curtis, George William. Born in Providence, R. I,, 
 Feb. 24, 1824. He was in a New York mercantile house for 
 a year, and at the age of eighteen joined the Brook Farm 
 community, afterward going to Concord, Mass., where he 
 worked on a farm and studied. After traveling abroad he 
 came home, was placed on the editorial staff of the New 
 York Tribune, and later became editor of Harper's Weekly. 
 In 1853 he began the series of essays in Harper's Magazine 
 known as The Easy Chair; three volumes of these Essays 
 from the Easy Chair were collected and republished. Some 
 of his publications are Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) ; 
 The Howadji in Syria (1852).; Lotus-Eating (1852) ; Poti- 
 phar Papers (1853) ; Prue and I (1856) ; and Trumps, a 
 novel which appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1862. He 
 stood high as an orator, and was in great demand as a lec- 
 turer. Died at his home on Staten Island, Aug. 31, 1892. 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry. Born in Cambridge, Mass., 
 Aug. 15, 1787. After a short course at Harvard College, 
 he studied law and was admitted to the Boston bar. He was 
 a member of the Anthology club, which conducted The 
 Monthly Anthology, but without success. He was one of the 
 founders of The North American Review, his first publica- 
 tions appearing in it as An Essay on Old Times and a criti- 
 cism of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets. He also 
 published a literary periodical called The Idle Man. His 
 first volume of Poems containing The Buccaneer appeared 
 in 1827; and six years later he published at Boston a col- 
 lective edition of his Poems and Prose Writings. Died in 
 Boston, Feb. 2, 1879. 
 
 Dickinson, Emily. Born in Amherst, Mass., Dec. 10, 
 1830. A recluse by temperament, she rarely went beyond 
 her father's grounds, and, although she wrote many verses, 
 was with the greatest difficulty persuaded to print three or 
 four poems during her lifetime. Her Poems (1890) and 
 
APPENDIX 291 
 
 Poems (1892) were edited by M. L. Todd and T.W. Hig- 
 giuson ; and Letters of Emily Dickinson (2 vols., 1894) by 
 M. L. Todd. She died at Amherst, May 15, 1886. 
 
 Dickinson, John. Born iu Maryland, Nov. 13, 1732. 
 He studied law in Philadelphia and in London and practiced 
 successfully in Philadelphia ; was a, member of the First 
 Continental Congress and the author of a series of state 
 papers put forth by that body. In 1788, he wrote nine let- 
 ters signed " Fabius," and was the author of Letters from a 
 Pennsylvania Farmer to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies 
 (1767) ; Essays on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain 
 over the Colonies in America (1774). Died in Wilmington, 
 Del., Feb. 14, 1808. 
 
 Drake, Joseph Rodman. Bom in New York City, Aug. 
 7, 1795. Left an orphan, he suffered the hardships of pov- 
 erty and after a brief business career, studied medicine. At 
 fourteen he wrote the poem The Mocking Bird. In 1819, he, 
 with Fitz-Greene Halleck, contributed to the N. Y. Eoening 
 Post a series of humorous verses called The Croakers. His 
 fame chiefly rests on his poem The Culprit Fay, written in 
 1816. The Culprit Fay and Other Poems was published in 
 1836. He died of consumption in New York City, Sept. 21, 
 1820. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Born in Boston, Mass., May 
 25, 1803, of a long line of ministerial ancestors. Graduating 
 from Harvard in 1821, he taught at his brother's school and 
 later studied theology. After a pastorate of nearly three 
 years he left the active ministry. With others he formed 
 the circle known as " Transcendentalists " and soon became 
 editor of its literary organ. The Dial. His volume Nature 
 was published in 1836 ; his collection of Essays in 1841 ; 
 Essays, Second Series (1844); Poems (1846); Miscellanies 
 (1849) ; Representative Men (1850) ; English Traits (1856) ; 
 The Conduct of Life (1860) ; May Day and Other Pieces 
 (1867) ; Society and Solitude (1870) ; Letters and Social 
 Aims (1875); and a posthumous volume, Lectures and Bio- 
 
292 APPENDIX 
 
 graphical Sketches, and collective editions of liis poems, 
 were published in 1876 and later. He died at Concord, 
 Mass., April 27, 1882. 
 
 FiSKB, John. Born in Hartford, Conn., Mar. 30, 1842. 
 He graduated from Harvard College in 1863, and from the 
 Harvard Law School in 1865. He is widely known as a 
 philosopher and historian. Some of his publications are 
 Tobacco and Alcohol (1868) ; Myths and Myth-Makers 
 (1872) ; Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy based on the Doctrines 
 of Evolution (2 vols., 1874) ; The Unseen World (1876) ; 
 Darwinism and Other Essays (1879) ; Excursions of an Evo- 
 lutionist (1883) ; The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of 
 his Origin (1884) ; The Idea of God as affected by Modern 
 Knowledge (1885) ; and American Political Ideas Viewed 
 from the Standpoint of Universal History (1885) ; joint edi- 
 tor with Gen. James Grant Wilson of Appletons' Cyclopaedia 
 of American Biography (1886-89). He died July 4, 1901. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin. Statesman and philosopher, bom 
 at Boston, Mass., Jan. 17, 1706, the son of a soap-boiler and 
 tallow-chandler. He learned the printer's trade, and then 
 ran away to Philadelphia, where he became the editor and 
 proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette. In 1732 he began 
 the publication of the famous Poor Richard's Almanac. He 
 was rather a statesman than a, literary man, and filled 
 many important public offices. The complete collection of 
 his works edited by John Bigelow (1887-89) consists, in a 
 great part, of letters written in a clear, business-like way 
 upon many subjects. His Autobiography, printed first in 
 French, and in 1817 in English, gave him reputation as a 
 writer. He died in Philadelphia, Pa., April 17, 1790. 
 
 Freneau, Philip. Born in New York, N. Y., Jan. 2, 
 1752. He graduated at Princeton in 1771, and spent some 
 time at sea. Later he was a contributor to The United States 
 Magazine and the Freeman's Journal. He was editor of the 
 New York Daily Advertiser, the National Gazette, and for a 
 short time published the Jersey Chronicle and the Time-jnece 
 
APPENDIX 293 
 
 and Literary Companion. At Commencement he delivered 
 with H. H. Brackenridge a poetical dialogue on The Rising 
 Glory of America, written by both, or possibly by Freneau 
 alone. Some of his publications are Voyage to Boston 
 (1774) ; General Gage's Confession (1775) ; The British 
 Prison-Ship, a Poem in four Cantos (1781) ; The Poems of 
 Philip Freneau, written chiefly daring the late War (1786) ; 
 Poems Written between the Years 1768 and 1794 (1795) ; 
 Poems Written and Published during the American Revolu- 
 tionary PTar (1809); and 4 Collection of Poems on American 
 Affairs (1815). He died near Freehold, N. J., Dec. 18, 
 1832. 
 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene. Born in Guilford, Conn., July 
 8, 1790. He was for many years a clerk in a banking-house, 
 and formed, in 1819, a literary partnership with Joseph 
 Bodman Drake, publishing anonymously in the New York 
 Evening Post a series of good-humored verses called the 
 Croaker papers. His poem Fanny appeared in 1819 ; Marco 
 Bozzaris (1825) ; Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems (1827). 
 His Poetical Writings (1869) were edited by Gen. J. G. 
 Wilson. He died at Guilford, Conn., Nov. 17, 1867. 
 
 Harte, Francis Bret. Bom in Albany, N. Y., Aug. 25, 
 1839. Went to California in 1854. After attempting various 
 occupations, such as teacher, miner, express-agent and 
 printer's apprentice, he became one of the editors of The 
 Golden Era, and later editor of The Califomian, and The 
 Overland Monthly. His first book. Condensed Novels, was 
 published in 1867 ; Poems (1870) ; The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp, and Other Sketches (1871) ; Fast and West Poems 
 (1871) ; Poetical Works (1873) ; Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands 
 (1873) ; Echoes of the Foot Hills (1874) ; Tales of the Ar- 
 gonauts (1875) ; Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876) ; Thankful 
 Blossom (1876) ; The Story of a Mine (1877) ; Drift from 
 Two Shores (1878) ; The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other 
 Stories (1879) ; Flip, and Found at Blazing Star (1882) ; 
 In the Carquinez Woods (1883) ; On the Frontier (1884) ; By 
 
294 APPENDIX 
 
 Shore and Sedge (1885) ; Maruja,a Novel (1885) ; Snow- 
 Bound at Eagle's (1886) ; A Millionnaire of Rough and 
 Ready (1887) ; The Queen of the Pirate Isle, for children 
 (1887) ; The Argonauts of North Liberty (1888) ; A Phyllis 
 of the Sierras (1888) ; Cressy (1889) ; The Heritage of Oed- 
 low Marsh (1889) ; A Waif of the Plains (1890) ; and a 
 second series of Condensed Novels (1902). He died at Red 
 House, Camberley, in Snrrey, Eng., May 6, 1902. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Born in Salem, Mass., July 
 4, 1804, of Puritan stock. He was of an imaginative aud 
 sensitive temperament, and after graduating from Bowdoin 
 College in 1825, spent twelve years in Salem in retirement, 
 reading and writing continually. His first novel, Fanshawe, 
 appeared anonymously in 1826 ; then he became editor of 
 the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Know- 
 ledge, and contributed stories to the Token, the New England 
 Magazine, The Knickerbocker, and the Democratic Review, 
 Tmce-Told Tales came out in 1837; second volume of Twice- 
 Told Tales (1845) ; Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) ; 
 The Scarlet Letter (1850) ; The House of Seven Gables 
 (1851); The Wonder Book (1851) ; The Blithedale Romance 
 (1852) ; A Campaign Life of Franklin Pierce (1852); and 
 I'anglewood Tales (1853) ; The Marble Faun (1860) ; Our 
 Old Home (1863). The unfinished works published after 
 his death were The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton and 
 Dr. Grimshawe's Secret. His American and English Note- 
 Books and French and Italian Note-Books were posthumously 
 edited by his wife. During this time he occupied several 
 government positions. Died at Plymouth, N. H., May 18, 
 1864. 
 
 Hayne, Paul Hamilton. Born in Charleston, S. C, 
 Jan. 1, 1830. He graduated at the College of South' Caro- 
 lina and studied law, but gave up legal practice for litera- 
 ture, and was the editor of Russell's Magazine and the 
 Charleston Literary Gazette, contributing also to the South- 
 ern Literary Messenger. He served in the Confederate army 
 
APPENDIX 295 
 
 until his health failed. In feeble health, he yet wrote much, 
 and was the author of Poems (1855); Sonnets and Other 
 Poems (1857); Avolio, a Legend of the Island of Cos (1859); 
 Legends and Lyrics (1872); The Mountain of the Lovers, 
 and Other Poems (1873) ; Life of Robert Y. Hayne (1878) ; 
 Life of Hugh S. Legare (1878) ; and Poems, Complete Edition 
 (1882). He died at Copse Hill, Forest Station, Ga., July 
 6, 1886. 
 
 Holland, Josiah Gilbert. Born in Belchertown, 
 Mass., July 24, 1819. Graduating from the Berkshire 
 Medical College at Pittsfield, Mass., in 1844, he contributed 
 to the Knickerbocker, became associate editor of the Spring- 
 field Republican, and published his History of Western Mas- 
 sachusetts in 1855; then followed Timothy Titcomb's Letters 
 to Young People, Married and Single (1858) ; Bitter Sweet, 
 a Poem in Dramatic Form (1858); Miss Gilbert's Career 
 (1860) ; Lessons in Life (1861) ; Letters to the Joneses (1863) ; 
 Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects (1865); Life of Abraham 
 Lincoln (1865); Kathrina, a poem (1867); The Marble 
 Prophecy and Other Poems (1872); Arthur Bonnicastle 
 (1873); The Mistress of the Manse, a poem (1874); The 
 Story of Sevenoaks (1875), and Nicholas Mintum (1876). 
 Died in New York City, Oct. 12, 1881. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Born in Cambridge, Mass., 
 Aug. 29, 1809. Graduating from Harvard in 1829, he 
 studied law for a year, then studied medicine and estab- 
 lished a practice in Boston. Some of his professional pub- 
 lications are Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Sci- 
 ence, with Other Addresses and Essays (1861); Medical 
 Essays (1883). He is best known for his literary work, 
 and contributed to the Atlantic Monthly the famous papers 
 and poems published in 1859 under the title of The Auto- 
 crat of the Breakfast Table. Other publications are The 
 Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860); The Poet at the 
 Breakfast Table (1873); The New Portfolio (1886); Over 
 the Teacups (1890). His novel Elsie Venner was publislied 
 
296 APPENDIX 
 
 in 1861; The Guardian Angel m 1S68 ; and j4 Mortal Antipa- 
 thy in 1885. He also issued Urania, poem (1846) ; Astrcea, 
 poem (1850); Songs in Many Keys (18Q2) ; Soundings from 
 the Atlantic, essays (1863); Mechanism in Thought and 
 Morals (1871) ; Songs of Many Seasons (1875); The School- 
 boy (1878); John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir (1878); The 
 Iron Gate, and Other Poems (1880); Pages from an Old 
 Volume of Life (1883); Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 (1884); Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887); and Before 
 the Curfew, and Other Poems (1888). Died in Boston, 
 Mass., Oct. 7, 1894. 
 
 Ikving, Washington. Born in New York City, April 
 3, 1783. At the age of sixteen he studied law, but never 
 practiced. His first literary work, which took the form of 
 letters, was published under the pen-name of " Jonathan 
 Oldstyle." In 1807, he issued, with others, a periodical 
 called Salmagundi, or the Whim^Whams and Opinions of 
 Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. A History of New York, . . . 
 by Diedrich Knickerbocker, appeared in 1809 ; and during the 
 war of 1812 he wrote for the Analectic Magazine. The 
 Sketch-Book was published in 1819. It was followed by 
 Bracebridge Hall (1822); Tales of a Traveller (1824); Life 
 and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) ; Chronicle of 
 the Conquest of Granada (1829); The Alhambra (1832); 
 Tour on the Prairies (1835); Astoria (1836); Adventures of 
 Captain Booneville (1837); his complete works (1848-50); 
 Mahomet and His Successors (1849-60) ; Oliver Goldsmith, a 
 Biography (1849) ; Wolfert's Roost, and Other Papers (1855) ; 
 Life of George Washington (1855-59). Died at Sunnyside, 
 Irvington, N. Y., Nov. 28, 1859. 
 
 Jackson, Helen Fiske (Hunt). Born in Amherst, 
 Mass., Oct. 18, 1831. She was the daughter of Prof. 
 Nathan W. Fiske, and married in October, 1852, Capt. 
 Edward B. Hunt, and October, 1875, William S. Jackson. 
 Contributed poems and prose articles to the N. Y. Nation, 
 Independent, and Atlantic Monthly. She was greatly inter- 
 
APPENDIX 297 
 
 ested in the Indians, and her worka dealing with that sub- 
 ject are A Century of Dishonor (1881), and Ramona (1884) ; 
 other works are Verses by H. H. (1870); Bits of Travel 
 (1872); Bits of Talk about Heme Matters (1873); Sonnets 
 and Lyrics (1886). Died in San Francisco, Aug. 12, 1885. 
 
 Knight, Sarah. Born in Boston, Mass., April 19, 1666. 
 She was the daughter of CapC. Thomas Kemble and wife 
 of Richard Knight, and taught school in Boston, counting 
 among her pupils Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Mather. 
 Her Journey from Boston to New York in the year 1704, from 
 the Original Manuscript, including the Diary of the Rev. John 
 Buckingham of a Journey to Canada in 1710, was published 
 in 1825. Died at Norwich, Conn., Sept. 25, 1727. 
 
 Laneek, Sidney. Born in Macon, Ga., Feb. 3, 1842. He 
 graduated from Oglethorpe College, Midway, Ga., in 1860, 
 and served in the Confederate army daring the Civil War. 
 He published Tiger-Lilies in 1867, and was after the war a 
 clerk, and principal of an academy, and later practiced law 
 with his father; then became a lecturer in English litera- 
 ture. In 1880 he wrote his poem Sunrise. Some of his 
 works are Florida : Its Scenery, Climate, and History (1876) ; 
 Poems (1877); The Boy's Froissart (1878); The Boy's 
 King Arthur (1880) ; The Science of English Verse (1880) ; 
 The Boy's Mahinogion (1881); The Boy's Percy (1881); 
 and The English Novel and the Principles of its Development 
 (1883). Poems by Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife, appeared 
 in 1884. He died of consumption, in Lynn, N. C, Sept. 7, 
 1881. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Born in Portland, 
 Me., Feb. 27, 1807. Graduating from Bowdoin College in 
 1825, he went abroad, and then became professor of modern 
 languages at Bowdoin and later (from 1836 until 1854) at 
 Harvard. The most important of his published works are 
 Hyperion (1839) ; Voices of the Night (1839) ; Ballads and 
 Other Poems (1841) ; Poejns on Slavery (1842) ; The Span- 
 ish Student (1843) ; The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems 
 
298 APPENDIX 
 
 (1846) ; Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie (1847) ; Kavanagh 
 (1849) ; The Seaside and the Fireside (1850) ; The Golden 
 Legend (1861); The Song of Hiawatha (1856); The Court- 
 ship of Miles Standiih (1858) ; Tales of a Wayside Inn 
 (1863); it translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867); 
 Flower de Luce (1867); The Divine Tragedy (1871); Three 
 Boohs of Song (1872); Aftermath (1874); The Masque of 
 Pandora (1875); Keramos (1878); Ultima Thule (1880); 
 and In the Harbor (1882). He died in Cambridge, Mass., 
 March' 24, 1882. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell. Born 1n Cambridge, Mass., 
 Feb. 22, 1819. Graduating from Harvard in 1838, he was 
 admitted to the bar, but devoted himself to literature. He 
 contributed to The Liberty Bell, Anti^Slavery Standard, and 
 the Boston Courier in which the Biglow Papers appeared 
 (1846-48). He issued his first collection of verse, A Year's 
 Life, in 1841; A Legend of Brittany (1844); Conversations 
 with Some of the Old Poets (1845) ; The Vision of Sir Launfal 
 (1845); A Fable for Critics (1848); and Poems (1848). 
 He became professor of modern languages at Harvard, 
 was the first editor, of the Atlantic Monthly, and was joint 
 editor with Professor Norton of the North American Re- 
 view. Fireside Travels appeared in 1864; a second series of 
 Biglow Papers (1866); Under the Willows (1869); Among 
 my Books (1870); and My Study Windows (1871). He was 
 minister to Spain, and later was transferred to England. 
 Democracy and Other Addresses was issued in 1887; Hearts- 
 ease and Rue (1888); and Political Essays (1888). He 
 died in Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 12, 1891. 
 
 Mather, Cotton. Born in Boston, Mass., Feb. 12, 
 1663. Graduating from Harvard in 1678, he studied theo- 
 logy and became minister of the North Church in Boston. 
 He was one of the leaders in the movement against witch- 
 craft, and in justification of his attitude wrote The Wonders 
 of the Invisible World (1692). He also published, among 
 many volumes, Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft 
 
APPENDIX 299 
 
 and Possessiom (1685) ; Essays- to do Good (1710) ; but is 
 best known by bis Magnolia Christi Americana; or, The 
 Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). Died iu 
 Boston, Mass., Feb. 13, 1728. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop. Born in Dorchester, Mass., 
 April 15, 1814. Graduating at Harvard in 1831, he studied 
 at Gottingen, and occupied several public positions abroad. 
 He published Morton's Hope, a novel, in 1839, and Merry 
 Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony in 1849. His 
 first historical essay on Peter the Great came out in the 
 North American Review for 1845. The Rise of the Dutch 
 Republic was published in three volumes (1856), two vol- 
 umes of The History of the United Netherlands in 1860, the 
 two concluding volumes in 1868, and The Life and Death 
 of John of Barneoeld, Advocate of Holland, viith a View of 
 the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War 
 (1874). The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, D. C.L. 
 (1889) was edited by G. W. Curtis. Died at « Kingston- 
 Russell House," near Dorchester, Eng., May 29, 1877. 
 
 OssoLi, Maegarbt Fuller. Born in Cambridge, Mass., 
 May 23, 1810. Extremely precocious in youth, she became 
 a prominent member of the group of Transcendentalists, 
 taught, edited The Dial, and was then literary critic for the 
 New York Tribune ; went to Italy and married the Marquis 
 of Ossoli, and was actively interested in the Italian struggle 
 for independence in 1849. She had a remarkable personality 
 and a natural talent for literature. Some of her published 
 works are A Summer on the Lakes (1843) ; Woman in the 
 Nineteenth Century (1844) ; and Papers on Literature and 
 Art (1846). She died, by shipwreck, vrith her husband and 
 child, off Fire Island Beach, N. Y., July 16, 1850. 
 
 Paine, Thomas. Born in Thetford, Norfolk Co., Eng- 
 land( Jan. 29, 1737. He was an exciseman, and having been 
 dismissed from the excise service, emigrated in 1775 to 
 America, where his literary ability brought him the position 
 of editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. He published Com^ 
 
300 APPENDIX 
 
 mon Sense in 1776 ; the first number of his Crisis appeared 
 in 1776 ; the Rights of Man (1791) and the Age of Reason 
 (1794^95). Later, he became a French citizen, was impris- 
 oned, released, and returned to America. Died in New York 
 City, June 8, 1809. 
 
 Parker, Theodore. Born in Lexington, Mass., Aug. 24, 
 1810. He studied, taught, and then went to the Harvard 
 Divinity School. Later he became the representative of 
 Transcendentalism in the pulpit. His published works in- 
 clude Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion (1842) ; 
 Miscellaneous Writings (1843) ; Sermons on Theism, Atheism, 
 and Popular Theology (1852) ; Occasional Sermons and 
 Speeches (2 vols., 1852) ; Ten Sennons of Religion (1853) ; 
 Additional Speeches and Addresses (2 vols., 1855) ; Trial of 
 Theodore Parker for the Misdemeanor of a Speech in Faneuil 
 Hall against Kidnapping (1865) ; a volume of Prayers 
 (1862) ; and one entitled Historic Americans (1870) includes 
 discourses on Franklin, Washington, Adams and Jefferson. 
 Died in Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860. 
 
 Parkman, Francis. Born in Boston, Mass., Sept. 16, 
 1823. Graduating at Harvard in 1844, he studied law, but 
 devoted himself to literary work, contributing articles to 
 the Knickerbocker Magazine, which were collected and pub- 
 lished as The Oregon Trail (1849). Other publications are 
 The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) ; Pioneers of France in 
 the New World (1865) ; The Book of Roses (1866) ; Jesuits 
 in North America (1867) ; Discovery of the Great West 
 (1869) ; The Old Regime in Canada (1874) ; Count Fron- 
 tenac and New France under Louis XIV. (1877) ; and 
 Montcalm and Wolfe (1884). Died at Jamaica Plain, Mass., 
 Nov. 8, 1893. 
 
 Parton, James. He was born in Canterbury, England, 
 Feb. 9, 1822, and came to the United States when he was 
 five years old ; taught in Philadelphia and contributed to 
 the Home Journal. Some of his publications are Life of 
 Horace Greeley (1855) ; Humorous Poetry of the English 
 
APPENDIX 301 
 
 Language from Chancer to Saxe (1856) ; Life and Times of 
 Aaron Burr (1857) ; Life of Andrew Jackson (3 vols., 1859- 
 60) ; General Butler in New Orleans (1863) ; Life and 
 Times of Benjamin Franklin (1864) ; Life of Thomas Jeffer- 
 son (1874) ; and Life of Voltaire (1881). Died in Newbury- 
 port, Mass., Oct. 17, 1891. 
 
 Pkrcival, James Gates. Born in Berlin, Conn., Sept. 
 15, 1795. He graduated from Yale in 1815 and studied 
 medicine and botany. Later be was appointed assistant sur- 
 geon in the army. He contributed articles to the U. S. Lit- 
 erary Magazine; studied geology and was appointed to 
 assist in making a survey of the mineralogy and geology 
 of Connecticut, the results of which are given in his Report 
 of the Geology of the State of Connecticut (1842). His poems 
 Prometheus and Clio were published in 1822. He edited 
 Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1826) ; translated with 
 notes Malte Brun's Geography (3 vols., 1834) ; assisted 
 Noah Webster in the preparation of his Dictionary of the 
 English Language, and wrote several tragedies collected in 
 his Poetical Works (1859). Died at Hazel Green, Wis., May 
 2, 1856. 
 
 PoE, Edgar Allan. Bom in Boston, Mass., Jan. 19, 
 1809. He was partly educated in England and studied at 
 the University of Virginia, and worked for a short time in 
 a counting-room ; then enlisted in the U. S. Army and 
 secured an appointment at West Point, but turned his at- 
 tention to literature. He was editor of the Southern Literary 
 Messenger at Richmond, afterward of Burton's Gentleman's 
 Magazine, and of Graham's Magazine. He published Tam^ 
 erlane, and Other Poems (1827) ; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, 
 and Minor Poems (1829) ; Poems (1831) ; The Narrative 
 of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) ; The Conchologist's First 
 Book (1839) ; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 
 1839); Tales (18i5) ; The Raven, and Other Poems (18^5); 
 and Eureka, a Prose Poem (1848). Died in Baltimore, Md., 
 Oct. 7, 1849. 
 
302 APPENDIX 
 
 Prescott, William Hickling. Born in Salem, Mass., 
 May 4, 1796. He graduated from Harvard in 1814, and 
 would have studied law, but defective vision forbade, and 
 he turned his attention to history by the aid of readers. 
 His first work was The History of the Reign of Ferdinand 
 and Isabella the Catholic (1838), and was followed by Mis- 
 cellanies (1845); History of the Conquest of Peru (1847); 
 The History of the Reign of Philip II., King of Spain ( 1855) ; 
 and ,the Life of Charles V. after his Abdication (1857). 
 Died in Boston, Mass., Jan. 28, 1859. 
 
 RowsoN, Susanna. Born in Portsmouth, Eug., in 1762. 
 She came to America in 1767 with her father, Lieut. 
 William Haswell, and later married in London William 
 Kowson; returning to America she became an actress, and 
 later a schoolmistress. She wrote and published Victoria 
 (1786); Charlotte Temple: or, a Tale of Truth (1790); 
 and Miscellaneous Poems (1804). Died in Boston, Mass., 
 March 2, 1824. 
 
 ScuDDER, Horace Elisha. Born in Boston, Mass., 
 Oct. 16, 1838. Graduating at Williams College in 1858, he 
 taught for a short time, soon removing to Boston and de- 
 voting himself to literature. His Seven Little People was 
 published in 1862 and Dream Children in 1863. He became 
 editor of the Riverside Magazine for Young Children and 
 later of the Atlantic Monthly. Among his works are Sto- 
 ries from My Attic (1869); The Bodley Books (1875-87); 
 The Dwellers in Five-Sisters Court (1876) ; Men and Mari- 
 ners in America (1876); Stories and Romances (1880); The 
 Children's Booh (1881) ; Boston Town (1881) ; Life of Noah 
 Webster (1882); History of the United States (1884); Men 
 and Letters (1888). He assisted Mrs. Taylor with Life and 
 Letters of Bayard Taylor (1884) ; and was editor of the 
 series of Cambridge Poets, and otherwise responsible for 
 the making of many good books. His latest work was the 
 Life of Lowell (1901). He died in Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 
 11, 1902. 
 
APPENDIX 303 
 
 •Sedgwick, Catherine Maria. Born in Stockbridge, 
 Mass., Dec. 28, 1789. Having an excellent education, she 
 kept a private school for yonng ladies. Her first two nov- 
 els appeared anonymously, and were entitled A New Eng- 
 land Tale (1822) and Redwood (1824). Then came The 
 Traveller (1825) ; Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachu- 
 setts (2 vols., 1827) ; The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in 
 America (2 vols., 1835); Sketches and Tales (1835); The 
 Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man (1836) ; Live and 
 Let Line (1837); Letters from Abroad (1841); Morals of 
 Manners (1846); Facts and Fancies (ISiS); and Married or 
 Single ? (1857). Died near Roxbury, Mass., July 31, 1867. 
 
 Sewall, Samuel. He was born in Bishop-Stoke or 
 Basingstoke, Eng., March 28, 1652, and came to America 
 in 1661. Taking his first degree, from Harvard in 1671, he 
 studied for the ministry, but after his marriage had charge 
 of the Boston printing-press for about three years, and 
 occupied various public offices, being a member of the 
 court which conducted the witchcraft trials at Salem. 
 Later lie became convinced of the error of his conduct in 
 this connection and volunteered public apology for it. His 
 various publications are The Selling of Joseph (1700) ; Pros- 
 pects Touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies (1713); A 
 Memorial Relating to the Kennebec Indians (1721) ; and A 
 Description of the New Heaven (1727). He is best known 
 for his Diary, covering the period from 1674 to 1729, pub- 
 lished by the Massachusetts Historical Society (1878-82). 
 He died in Boston, Mass., Jan. 1, 1730. 
 
 Snx, Edward Rowland. Born in Windsor, Conn., 
 April 29, 1841. Graduating from Yale in 1861, he studied 
 divinity for a time at Harvard and then taught in Ohio; 
 was professor of English literature at the University of 
 California, but resigned to devote himself to literary work. 
 He is the author of The Hermitage and Other Poems (1867) ; 
 Venus of Milo and Other Poems (1883) ; and Poems (1888), 
 issued after his death. Died in Cleveland, O., Feb. 27, 1887. 
 
304 APPENDIX 
 
 SIMMS, William Gilmokb. Born in Charleston, S. C, 
 April 17, 1806. He studied law, but in 1828 became editor 
 and partial owner of the Charleston City Gazette. His writ- 
 ings were very numerous. Among them may be named 
 Lyrical and Other Poems (1827); Atalantis, a Tale of the Sea 
 (1832); The Yemassee (1835); The Partisan (1835); Pelayo 
 (1838) ; The Kinsman (1841; new edition 1854, entitled The 
 Scout) ; Confession, or the Blind Heart (1842) ; Castle Dismal 
 (1845) ; The Wigwam and the Cabin, or Tales of the South 
 (1845-46); Areytos, or Songs and Ballads of the South 
 (1846); Poems (2 vols., 1853); The Maroon, and Other Tales 
 (1855); and was editor of War Poetry of the South (1867). 
 A collection of his best works was published in nineteen 
 volumes (1859). Died in Charleston, S. C, June 11, 1870. 
 
 Stockton, Fkancis Richard. Born in Philadelphia, 
 Penn., April 5, 1834. He became an engraver, but soon gave 
 up this occupation for journalism, and was connected with the 
 Philadelphia Post, the New York Hearth and Home, Scrib- 
 ner's Monthly and the St. Nicholas. Some of his children's 
 books are The Ting-a-Ling Stories (1870) ; Roundabout 
 Rambles (1872) ; What Might Have Been Expected (1874) ; 
 Tales out of School (1872) ; A Jolly Fellowship (1880) ; The 
 Floating Prince (1881) ; The Story of Viteau (1884) ; and 
 Personally Conducted (1889). His novels and short stories 
 include Rudder Grange (1879) ; The Lady or the Tiger? 
 and Other Stories (1884) ; The Late Mrs. Null (1886) ; The 
 Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. AlesMne (1886); The 
 Hundredth Man (1887) ; The Christmas Wreck, and Other 
 Tales (1887) ; The Bee Man of Om and Other Fanciful 
 Tales (1887) ; The Dusantes (1888); Amos Kilbright, with 
 Other Stories (1888) ; The Great War Syndicate (1889) ; 
 The Stories of the Three Burglars (1890) ; and The Merry 
 Chanter (1890). Died in Washington, D. C, April 20, 1902. 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth [Beecher]. Born in Litch- 
 field, Conn., June 14, 1811. She was the daughter of Rev. 
 Lyman Beecher, and in 1836 married Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, 
 
APPENDIX 305 
 
 having been educated at Hartford, Coun., and at the Litch- 
 field Academy. For a short time she lived at Cincinnati, 
 Ohio, where she learned much about the condition of slaves 
 iu the South. Her experience is brought out in Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin, which was written for the purpose of convincing the 
 North of the horrors which attended the institution of 
 slavery. Among her publications are The Mayflower, or 
 Short Sketches of the Descendants of the Pilgrims (1849) ; 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly, which first ap- 
 peared in the National Era of Washington, D. C, between 
 June, 1851, and April, 1852, and was published in book 
 form in 1852 ; A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Presenting the 
 Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is 
 Founded, together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the 
 Truth of the Work (1853) ; A Peep into Uncle Tom's Cabin, 
 for Children (1853); Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands 
 (1854); Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856); 
 The Minister's Wooing (1859); Old Town Folks (1869); 
 Lady Byron Vindicated, a History of the Byron Controversy 
 (1869); Pink and White Tyranny (1871); Religious Poems 
 (1865); Men of Our Times (1868); Footsteps of the Masters 
 (1876); Poganuc People (1878); and a Dog's Mission 
 (1881). Died iu Hartford, Conn., July 1, 1896. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard. Born in Kennett Square, Chester Co., 
 Penn., Jan. 11, 1825. He received a high-school education 
 and contributed poems to local papers, bringing out his first 
 volume, Ximena, and Other Poems, in 1844. Some of his 
 publications are Views Afoot, or Europe seen vnth Knapsack 
 and Staff (1846) ; and many other accounts of travel, the 
 final one being Egypt and Iceland (1874). Among his 
 novels are Hannah Thurston (1863) ; John Godfrey's For- 
 tunes (1864) ; The Story of Kennett (1866) ; Joseph and his 
 Friend (1870); and BeauJy and the Beast, and Tales of Home 
 (1872). His books of poetry, by which he is, perhaps, best 
 known, include The Poet's Journal (1862) ; Poems (1865) ; 
 The Masque of the Gods (1872); Lars: a Pastoral of Norway 
 
306 APPENDIX 
 
 (1873); Rome-Pastorals (1875); The National Ode (1876); 
 and Prince Deukalion ; a Lyrical Drama (1878). His most 
 valuable work in verse was a translation of Goethe's Faust. 
 Some of his miscellaneous writings were published after his 
 death under the title Studies in German Literature (1879) ; and 
 Essays and Notes (1880). Died in Berlin, Germany, Deo. 
 15, 1878. 
 
 Thaxtbr, Celia [Laighton]. Born in Portsmouth, 
 N. H., June 29, 1836. Her father, Thomas B. Laighton, 
 was keeper of the Isles of Shoals lighthouse, and here most 
 of her life was passed. In 1851 she married Levi Lincoln 
 Thaxter. Her works include Among the Isles of Shoals 
 (1873); Poems (1871); Driftweed (1878); Poems for Chil- 
 dren (1884) ; The Cruise of the Mystery, and Other Poems 
 (1886). Died on Appledore Island, Aug. 26, 1894. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. Born in Concord, Mass., 
 July 12, 1817. Graduating from Harvard in 1837, he de- 
 voted himself to literature, supplying his simple needs by 
 surveying, carpentering, and engineering. He cared for sim- 
 plicity of life and not at all for society. He and his brother 
 spent a week in a home-made boat, a journey which found 
 record in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849). 
 He lived for some time in a hut which he had built himself 
 on the edge of Walden pond, and made the experience 
 famous in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). He wrote 
 for The Dial, Democratic Review, Graham's, Putnam's and 
 the Union magazines, the Atlantic Monthly, and the N. Y. 
 Tribune. Some of his published works are Excursions in 
 Field and Forest (1863) ; The Maine Woods (1864) ; Cape Cod 
 (1865) ; Letters to Various Persons (1865) ; and A Yankee in 
 Canada (1866). Died in Concord, Mass., May 6, 1862. 
 
 TiMROD, Henry. Born in Charleston, S. C, Dec. 8, 1829. 
 He attended the University of Georgia and then studied 
 law, but became a war correspondent for the Charleston 
 Mercury and later editor of a paper in Columbia, S. C. All 
 his possessions were destroyed at the time of Sherman's 
 
APPENDIX 307 
 
 march to the sea, and, overcome by poverty and ill-health, 
 he died at Columbia, S. C, Oct. 6, 1867. A volume of his 
 poems appeared in 1860, and in 1873 The Poems of Henry 
 Timrod, Edited, with a Sketch of the Poet's Life, by Paul H. 
 Hayne. 
 
 Trumbull, John. Born in Westbury (now Watertown), 
 Conn., April 24, 1750. Graduating from Yale in 1767, he 
 became tutor there and then studied law. His published 
 works include The Progress of Dulness (1772-74) ; Sia Elegy 
 on the Times (1774) ; his famous M'Fingal, a Modern Epic 
 Poem (1774-82). He was associated with the " Hartford 
 Wits " in the production of The Anarchiad (1786-87), and 
 was judge of the superior court from 1801 until 1819. The 
 Poetical Works of John Trumbull were published in 1820. 
 Died in Detroit, Mich., May 10, 1831. 
 
 Webster, Daneel. Born in Salisbury (now Franklin), 
 N. H., Jan. 18, 1782. Graduating from Dartmouth in 1801, 
 he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and was unsur- 
 passed as a lawyer and orator. He became U. S. represent- 
 ative from New Hampshire and later from Massachusetts, 
 and in 1827 was made U. S. Senator from the latter state. 
 Some of the best known of his public orations are those on 
 the Bunker Hill monument, on the Pilgrim anniversary, 
 and the eulogium on Jefferson and Adams. His most cele- 
 brated political speech is his Reply to Hayne. A collection 
 of his Works appeared in 1851, and of his Private Corre- 
 spondence in 1856. Died in Marshfleld, Mass., Oct. 24, 1852. 
 
 Whipple, Edwin Percy. Born in Gloucester, Mass., 
 March 8, 1819. At the age of fourteen, he published articles 
 in the Salem newspapers, and soon became superintendent 
 of the news-room of the Merchants' Exchange, Boston. 
 Eventually he gave up journalism to devote himself entirely 
 to literature. He became known as a critic from his article 
 on Maeaulay, which appeared in the Boston Miscellany 
 (1843) ; and the same year he began to lecture. He was 
 literary editor of the Boston Globe, 1872-73. Among his 
 
308 APPENDIX 
 
 publications are Essays and Reviews (2 vols., 1848-49) ; 
 selected lectures entitled Literature and Life (1849) ; Char- 
 acter and Characteristics of Men (1866) ; The Literature of 
 the Age of Elizabeth (1869) ; and Success and its Conditions 
 (1871). He also edited with James T. Fields the Family 
 Library of British Poetry (1878). There were issued posthu- 
 mously Recollections of Eminent Men (1887) ; American 
 Literature, and Other Papers (1887) ; and Outlooks on Society, 
 Literature and Politics (1888). Died in Boston, Mass., June 
 16, 1886. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, or Walter. Born in West Hills, 
 Long Island, N. Y., May 31, 1819. He was, in early life, 
 a printer in summer and a school teacher in winter, and 
 helped edit several country papers. He served as an army 
 nurse in the Civil War and later held several government 
 positions. His works include Leaves of Grass (1855) ; Drum 
 Taps (1865) ; Memoranda during the War (1867); Demo- 
 cratic Vistas (1870); Passage to India (1870), containing 
 his poem. The Burial Hymn of Lincoln ; After A II, not to 
 Create Only (1871) ; As Strong as a Bird on Pinions Free 
 (1872) ; Specimen Days, and Collect (1883) ; November 
 Boughs (1888) ; Sands at Seventy (1888) ; and » collective 
 edition entitled Complete Poems and Prose (1889). Died 
 Mar. 26, 1892. 
 
 Whittiee, John Greenleaf. Born in Haverhill, Mass., 
 Dec. 17, 1807. The Quaker poet had slender means, and by 
 shoe-making and a term of school teaching earned money 
 to attend the Haverhill Academy for two terms. At the age 
 nineteen he had contributed verse anonymously to the Free 
 Press, edited by W. L. Garrison, who encouraged the poet 
 and became his life-long friend. Later, Whittier edited the 
 American Maniffacturer, the Haverhill Gazette, and the 
 Hartford, Conn., New England Weekly Review, also contrib- 
 uting to John Neal's magazine. The Yankee, and afterward 
 editing the Pennsylvania Freeman. He at first contributed 
 most of his literary work to the National Era of Washing- 
 
APPENDIX 309 
 
 ton, D. C, an important anti-slavery paper, but after the 
 establishnaent of the Atlantic Monthly he wrote mainly for 
 that. Some of his works are Legends of New England in 
 Prose and Verse (1831) ; Moll Pitcher (1832) ; Poems, 
 Chiefly Relating to Slavery (1838); Ballads (1838); Lays of 
 My Home, and Other Poems (1843) ; Voices of Freedom 
 (1849) ; Songs of Labor and Other Poems (1850) ; The 
 Chapel of the Hermits, and Other Poems (1853) ; A Sabbath 
 Scene (1853) ; The Panorama, and Other Poems (1856) ; 
 Home Ballads (1860) ; In War Time, and Other Poems 
 (1863) ; Snow Bound (1866) ; The Tent on the Beach, and 
 Other Poems (1867) ; Am^mg the Hills, and Other Poems 
 (1868) ; Miriam, and Other Poems (1870) ; The Pennsylvania 
 Pilgrim (1872) ; Hazel Blossoms (1874) ; Mabel Martin 
 (1875) ; Centennial Hymn (1876) ; The Vision of Echard 
 (1878) ; The King's Missive, and Other Poems (1881) ; The 
 Bay of Seven Islands, and Other Poems (1883) ; Poems of 
 Nature (1885) ; and St. Gregory's Guest, and Recent Poems 
 (1886) ; and the prose works : The Stranger in Lowell 
 (1845) ; Supernaturalism in New England (1847) ; Leaves 
 from Margaret Smith's Journal (1849) ; Old Portraits and 
 Modem Sketches (1850) ; and Literary Recreations (1854) ; 
 A final edition of his works supervised by the poet himself 
 appeared in seven volumes (1888-9). Died in Hampton 
 Falls, N. H., Sept. 7, 1892. 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel Pakker. Born in Portland, Me., 
 Jan. 20, 1806. Graduating from Yale in 1827, he soon 
 founded the American Monthly Magazine, which later was 
 merged into the New York Mirror. He had already con- 
 tributed to his father's magazine, the Youth's Companion, 
 and soon went to Europe, and wrote many letters about 
 his travels which were published in the Youth's Compan- 
 ion. His works include Scripture Sketches (1827); Fugitive 
 Poetry (1829) ; Melaine, and Other Poems (1835) ; Pencillings 
 by the Way (1835); Inklings of Adventure (1836); Loiter- 
 ings of Travel (1839); Letters from under a Bridge (1840); 
 
310 APPENDIX 
 
 Lady Jane, and Other Poems (1844) ; Dashes at Life with a 
 Free Pencil (1845); Rural Letters (1849); People I Have 
 Met (1850) ; Hurrygraphs (1851) ; A Summer Cruise in the 
 Mediterranean (1863); Outdoors at Idlewild (1854); Paul 
 jFaree, a novel (1857) ; The Convalescent (1859); and Poems, 
 Sacred, Passionate and Humorous (1864). Died at Idlewild, 
 near Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, N. Y., Jan. 20, 1867. 
 
II 
 
 LISTS FOR STUDY AND READING 
 
 I. GENERAL AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 
 
 (A) 
 C. F. Richardson's American Literature, 2 vols., G. P. Putnam's 
 
 Sons, 1887. 
 M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature during the Colonial 
 
 Time, 2 vols., G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1878. 
 M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 
 
 vols., G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1897. 
 Wendell's Literary History of America, Charles Scribner's Sons, 
 
 1901. 
 
 (B) 
 E. A. and G. L. Duyckinok's Cyclopedia of American Literature, 
 
 2 vols., Charles Seribner, 1855. 
 E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson's Library of American 
 
 Literature, 1 1 vols., Webster & Co., 1887-90. 
 E. C. Stedman's American Anthology, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 
 
 1900. 
 
 II. SPECIAL AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Chapter I. The Ptjbitan Wbitebs 
 
 (A) 
 
 Campbell's Anne Sradstreet and Her Time, D. Lothrop & Co., 
 1891. 
 
 B. Wendell's Cotton Mather, the Puritan Priest, " Makers of 
 America Series," 1891. 
 
 Allen's Jonathan Edwards, " American Reli^ous Leaders Se- 
 ries," 1889. 
 
312 APPENDIX 
 
 (B) 
 The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by 
 
 D. H. EUis, Charlestown, 1867. 
 Mather's Magnolia, 2 vols., Hartford, 1853. 
 Jonathan Edwards's Works, CarviU (New York), 1830. (There 
 
 is also a Bohn edition, 2 yols.) 
 
 Many selections from other works in this period will be found 
 in Stedman and Hutchinson ; and not a few in Tyler. 
 
 Chaptbb n. The Seoulab Wiuters 
 
 (A) 
 M. S. Austin's Idfe of Freneau. 
 The Federalist, edited by Paul Leicester Ford, 1897. 
 
 (B) 
 Sarah Knight's Journal, reprinted in Albany, 1865. 
 The Biary of Samuel Sewall, Mass. Hist. Soc, 1878-1882. 
 Philip Freneau's Poems, reprinted by J. R. Smith (London), 
 
 1861. 
 Sneath and Trumbull's McFingal, edited by B. J. Leasing, New 
 
 York, 1880. 
 Works of Fisher Ames, 2 vols., Little, Brown & Co., 1854. 
 
 Ghafteb ni. The Philadelphia Febioo 
 
 (A) 
 
 MoMaster's Life of Franklin, "American Men of Letters Series," 
 1887. 
 
 Morse's Life of Franklin, " American Statesmen Series," 1889. 
 
 William H. Prescott's Life of Charles Brockden Brown (printed 
 in Sparks's Library of American Biography, and in Prescott's 
 Biographical and Critical Miscellanies, Lippincott, 1845). 
 
 (B) 
 Poor Bichard's Almanack, " Thumb-Nail Series," The Century 
 
 Co., 1898. 
 Franklin's Life, Written by Himself, edited by John Bigelow, 
 
 3 vols., J. B. Lippincott, 1874. 
 
APPENDIX 313 
 
 Franklin's Works, edited by John Bigelow, 3 vols., Lippinoott, 
 1875. 
 
 Charles Brockden Brown's Novels, 6 vols., McKay, Philadel- 
 phia, 1887. 
 
 Chapter IV. The New York Peeiod 
 
 (A) 
 
 Life and Letters of Washington Irving, by Pierre M. Irving, 4 
 vols., G. P. Putnam, 1862-64. 
 
 C. D. Warner's Washington Irving, in " American Men of Let- 
 ters Series," 1881. 
 
 T. R. Lounsbury's James Fenimore Cooper, in " American Men 
 of Letters Series," 1883. 
 
 P. Godwin's Life of Bryant, 2 vols., D. Appleton, 1878. 
 
 H. A. Beers's Nathaniel Parker Willis, in " American Men of 
 Letters Series," 1885. 
 
 E. Gary's George William Curtis, in " American Men of Letters 
 Series," 1894. 
 
 (B) 
 
 Good editions of Irving and Cooper are so nnmerons as to need 
 no specification. 
 
 The standard edition of Bryant is P. Godwin's, 4 vols., D. 
 Appleton & Co., 1883-1884. 
 
 For critical estimates of the Knickerbocker School, see particu- 
 larly Wendell's Literary History, Bk. IV., vi. ; and C. E. 
 Woodberry's essay in Harper's Magazine, July, 1902. 
 
 Chapter V. New England Period — Prbliminabt 
 
 (A) 
 Q. T. Cnrtis's Life of Daniel Webster, 2 vols., D. Appleton & Co., 
 
 1869-1870. 
 W. H. Channing's Memoirs of William Ellery Channing, 3 vols., 
 
 Crosby and Nichols, 1848. 
 H. B. Adams's Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, Honghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 1893. 
 George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott, Ticknor 
 
 & Beed, 1863. 
 
314 APPENDIX 
 
 C. H. Farnham's Life of Francis Parkman, Little, Brown & Co., 
 
 1900. 
 Mrs. J. T. Fields's Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hougfhton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 1897. 
 
 (B) 
 Webster's Works, 6 vols., Little & Brown, 1851. 
 Channing's Works, 1 vol-, American Unitarian Association, 1886. 
 Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vols., New York, 
 
 1843. 
 Parkman's Works, 12 vols.. Little, Brown & Co., 1865-1898. 
 E. P. Whipple's Essays and Reviews, 2 vols., 1848-1849. 
 
 Chapter VI. The Cambridqe Group 
 
 (A) 
 S. Longfellow's Life of Henry Wadsworth Loncfellow, 3 vols., 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1891. 
 T. W. Higginson's Longfellow, in " American Men of Letters 
 
 Series," 1901. 
 E. S. Robertson's Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in 
 
 " Great Writers Series," Walter Scott (London), 1887. 
 S. T. Pickard's Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 
 
 vols., Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1894. 
 T. W. Higginson's Whittier, in " English Men of Letters Series," 
 
 1901. 
 J. T. Morse's Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 vols., 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1896. 
 Horace E. Scudder's James Russell Lowell, 2 vols., Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 1901. 
 
 (B) 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., are the authorized publishers of the 
 works of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Hawthorne, 
 Emerson, and Thoreau. The standard edition in each case is 
 the Riverside edition. 
 
 Chapter VII. The Concord Grodp 
 
 (A) 
 
 0. W. Holmes's Emerson, in " American Men of Letters Series," 
 1885. 
 
APPENDIX 315 
 
 The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, 2 vols., Osgood & 
 
 Co., 1883. 
 Eeary James's Life of Hawthorne, in " English Men of Letters 
 
 Series," 1880. 
 C. K Woodherry's Hawthorne, in " American Men of Letters 
 
 Series," 1902. 
 F. B. Sanhom's Thoreau, in " American Men of Letters Series," 
 
 1882. 
 F. B. Sanhorn and W. T. Harris's Life and Philosophy of 
 
 Aicott, 2 Tols., Eoberts Bros., 1893. 
 
 (B) 
 
 Theodore Parker's Works, 12 vols., Triibner & Co. (London), 
 
 1863-1865. 
 A. Bronson Alcott's Table Talk, Roberts Bros., 1877. 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Southern Influence. — Whitman 
 
 (A) 
 
 W. P. Trent's Simms, in " American Men of Letters Series," 
 
 1902. 
 W. M. Baskerrill's Life of Sidney Lanier, in " Southern Writers 
 
 Series," Barber & Smith (NashviUe), 1897. 
 G. E. Woodberry's Foe, in " American Men of Letters Series," 
 
 1885. 
 John Burronghs's Study of Walt Whitman, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 1896. 
 H. Ellis's The New Spirit, Walter Scott (London), 1890. 
 
 (B) 
 W. G. Simms's Poems, 2 vols., Eedfield (New York), 1853. 
 W. G. Simms's Novels, 18 vols., Eedfield (New York), 1884- 
 
 1886. 
 H. B. Timrod's Poems, 1860. 
 P. H. Hayne's Poems, D. Lothrop & Co., 1882. 
 Sidney Lanier's Poems, Charles Scribner, 1884. 
 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855. 
 Walt Whitman's Complete Prose Works, 1898. 
 
316 APPENDIX 
 
 Chapteb IX. The Wbstebn Influekce 
 
 (A) 
 This period is too recent to possess " authorities." There is an 
 excellent chapter in Wendell's Literary Eisiory. 
 
 (B) 
 C. F. Browne's (Artemus Ward) Complete Works, Dillin|^ham & 
 
 Co., 1898. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are the American publishers of Bret 
 
 Harte's Complete Works. 
 
m 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 Events in Amekican and English History and 
 
 LiTBBATUBE 
 
 ENGLISH 
 1603-1626. James I. 
 1608. Milton bom. 
 
 1610. ShakeBpeare's The Tempest. 
 1610-1614. Chapman's Somer, 
 
 1611. The " King James " Bible. 
 1616. Shakespeare died. 
 
 1623. The Shakespeare Folio. 
 1625-1649. Charles I. 
 
 1625. Bacon's Essays. 
 
 1626. Bacon died. 
 
 1632. mum's VAllegro xaAll Pen- 
 
 aeroso. 
 1642. Beginning of Civil War. 
 
 Newton bom. 
 1644. Milton's Areopagitica. 
 
 1649. Charles I. executed. 
 1649-1660. The Commonwealth. 
 
 1658. Cromwell died. 
 1660-1685. Charles n. 
 1663-1678. Butler's jETudifrnM. 
 1667. Milton's Paradise Lost. 
 Swift bom. 
 
 1670. Dryden Poet-Laureate. 
 
 1671. Hilton's Paradise Regained, 
 
 and Samson Agonistes. 
 
 1674. Milton and Herrick died. 
 
 1678-1684. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress. 
 
 1685-1688. James n. 
 
 1688. The English Revolution. 
 Pope and Gay born. 
 
 1700. Dryden died. 
 Thomson bom. 
 
 1703-1714. Queen Anne. 
 
 1704. Swift's Satlle of the Books and 
 Tale of a Tub. 
 
 1707. Union of Scotland and England. 
 Fielding bom. 
 
 1709. The Tatler, edited by Steele. 
 
 AMERICAN 
 
 1607. Landing at Jamestown. 
 
 1608. John Smith's True Relation. 
 
 1620. Landing of the Pilgrims at 
 
 Plymouth. 
 WillMm Bradford's History oj 
 
 Plyvwuth Plantation. 
 1626. George Sandys's Translation of 
 
 the first fifteen boolss of 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses. 
 1630-1648. John Winthrop's History 
 
 oj New England. 
 1640. The Bay Psalm Book by Rich- 
 ard Mather, John Eliot, etc. 
 (The first book printed in America.) 
 1647. Nathaniel Ward's The Simple 
 
 Cobbler of Agawam. 
 1650. Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth 
 
 Muse lately sprung up in 
 
 America. 
 1662. Michael Wigglesworth's The 
 
 Day of Doom,. 
 1664. New Amsterdam became New 
 
 York. 
 
 1673-1729. Samuel Sewall's Diary. 
 1675. King Philip's War. 
 
 1682. Philadelphia founded by Penn. 
 
 1689. Cotton Mather's Menwrdble 
 
 Providences. 
 1702. Cotton Mather's Magnolia. 
 
 1706. Franklin bom. 
 
318 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 1711. The Spectator^ edited by Addi- 
 son. 
 Pope's Essay on Criticism. 
 
 1714^1727. George I. 
 
 1715. First four books of Pope's trans- 
 lation of the Iliad. 
 
 1719. Addison died. 
 
 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Part 
 I. 
 
 1726. Swift's GuUvver^s Travels. 
 
 1727-1760. George III. 
 
 1759. Johnson's Rasselas. 
 
 Burns bom. 
 1760-1820. George III. 
 
 1765. Percy's Religues. 
 
 1766. QoldBmitVB Vicar of Wakefield. 
 1768. Sterne's SeTdimenial Journey. 
 
 Gray's Poems. 
 
 1774. Goldsmith died. 
 Southey bom. 
 Chesterfield's Letters to Sis 
 
 Son. 
 
 1775. Burke's speech On CoTicilia- 
 
 tion. 
 Sheridan's The Rivals. 
 
 1776. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of 
 
 the Roman Empire. 
 
 1778. Miss Bumey'g Evelina. 
 
 1783. Crabbe's The Village. 
 1785. Cowper's The Task. 
 
 1791. BobwbIVb lAfe of Johnson. 
 1793. Buras's Poem*. 
 
 1795. Garlyle and Keats bom. 
 
 1796. Coleridge^B Poems, 
 
 1800. Miss Edgeworth's Castle Rack- 
 rent. 
 Gowper died. 
 Macaulay bom. 
 1803. "War with France. 
 1805. Battle of Trafalgar. 
 
 Scott's Lay oftfie Last Minstrel, 
 1807. Wordsworth's Poems. 
 1809. Tennyson, Browning, and Eliza- 
 beth Barrett Browning bom. 
 1811. Jane Austen's Sense and Sen- 
 sibility. 
 
 1813. Shelley's Queen Mob. 
 
 1729. William Byrd's History of the 
 Dividing LiTie. 
 
 1732. Washington bom. 
 
 Franklin's Poor Richard's Al- 
 manac begun. 
 
 1746. Braddock defeated. 
 
 1754. Jonathan Edwards's Freedom, 
 of the Will.- 
 
 1764. Otis's Rights of the British 
 Colonies. 
 
 1766. The Stamp Act repealed. 
 
 1770. The Boston Massacre. 
 
 1771. Franklin's AutoHograph/y (in- 
 
 complete). 
 
 1773. The *' Boston TearParty." 
 
 1774. First Continental Congress. 
 
 1775. Battles of Lexington and 
 
 Bunker Hill. 
 John Trumbull's McFingal 
 (Canto 1). 
 
 1776. Declaration of Independence. 
 Thomas Faine's Common Sense. 
 Boston evacimted by the Brit- 
 ish. 
 
 1777. Surrender of Burgoyne. 
 
 1779. KopkinBon'B Battle of the Kegs. 
 
 1781. Surrender of Comwallis. 
 
 1782. Independence of America ac- 
 
 knowledged by England. 
 1787. The Federal Constitution 
 framed. 
 
 1789. Washington inaugurated. 
 
 1790. Mrs. BowBon's Charlotte Tem- 
 
 ple. 
 1795. Philip Freneau'a N&w Poems. 
 1798. Charles Brockden Brown's Fiie- 
 
 land, 
 1801. Btowti'b Edgar HmUley^ Clara 
 
 Howard^ and Jane Talbol. 
 
 1803. Louisiana Purchase. 
 
 1807. Joel Barlow*a TJie Columbiad. 
 1809. Fisher Ames's Speeches and 
 Writings. 
 Lincoln bom. 
 
 Irving's Kni-ckerbocker^s His- 
 tory of New York. 
 18]2, War with England. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 319 
 
 1814. Wordsworth'e The Excursion. 
 Scott'a Wav^ley. 
 
 1815. Battle of Waterloo. 
 
 1817. Keats's Poems. Coleridge's 
 BiograpMa Liieraria. 
 
 1820-1830. George IV. 
 
 1821. De Quincey'a Covfessions of 
 an English Opium Eatm: 
 
 1822-1824. It&mM'a Essays of Elia. 
 
 1824-1828. Landor's Imaginary Coiv- 
 versations. 
 
 1826. S. B. Browning's PoeTtis. 
 
 1829. Catholic Emancipation Act. 
 
 1830. Tennyson's Poemst Chiejiy Ly- 
 
 rical. 
 
 1832. Reform Bill passed. 
 
 1833. R. Browning's Paidine. 
 Garlyle's Sartor Besarttts. 
 
 1836. Dickens's Pickwick Papers. 
 1837-1900. Victoria. 
 
 1841. Robert Peel Prime Minister. 
 
 Punch established. 
 1843. Wordsworth Poet-Laureate. 
 
 Macaulay's Essays, 
 
 1847. MisB Bronte's Jane Eyre. 
 Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 
 1848-1876. Macaulay's History of 
 England. 
 
 1850. Wordsworth died. 
 
 Tennyson Poet-Laureate. 
 Tennyson's Tn Memoriam. 
 
 1852. Thackeray's Henry Esmond. 
 
 1853. Kingsley's Hypaiia. 
 
 1854-1856. Crimean War. 
 
 1814. Peace with England. 
 
 1817. Monroe President. 
 
 1S20. Ivvi-Rg' a Sketch Book, 
 1821. Bryant's Poems. 
 
 Cooper's The Spy. 
 
 James G. Percival's PoeTns. 
 
 R. H. Daua.^6 Dying Buccaneer. 
 
 1826. 
 1827. 
 
 1830. 
 
 1831. 
 
 1837. 
 
 1838. 
 1839. 
 
 1840. 
 
 1841. 
 1844. 
 
 1845. 
 
 1847. 
 1848. 
 
 1849. 
 
 1850. 
 1851. 
 
 1853. 
 1854. 
 
 Longfellow's Poem^. 
 
 Fitz-Greene Halleck'sPoenw. 
 
 Miss Sedgwick's Hope Leslie. 
 
 W. P. Wilhs's Sketchy. 
 
 W. E. Channing's Liscou/rses, 
 Reviews, and Miscellanies. 
 
 Whittier's Legends of New 
 England. 
 
 Poe'a MS. Found in a Bottle. 
 
 Joseph Rodman Drake's The 
 Culprit Fay and Other 
 Poems. 
 
 Emerson's Historical Discourse 
 at Concord. 
 
 W. G. Simms's The Yemassee 
 and The Partisan. 
 
 Prescott's Ferdmand and Isa- 
 bella. 
 
 Hawthorne's Fanskawe. 
 
 Longfellow's Voices of the 
 Night. 
 
 Cooper's The Pathfinder. 
 
 R. H, Dana, Jr.'s Two Years 
 Bef(yre the Mast. 
 
 Emerson's Essays^Firfit Series. 
 
 Cooper's The Deerstayer. 
 
 Emerson's Essays, Second Se- 
 ries. 
 
 Lowell's Poems. 
 
 Poe's The Haven and Other 
 Poems. 
 
 War with Mexico. 
 
 Longfellow's Evangeline. 
 
 Peace with Mexico. 
 
 Gold discovered in California. 
 
 E. P. Whipple's Essays and 
 Reviews. 
 
 Lowell's A Fable for Critics 
 and The Biglow Papers^ 
 First Series. 
 
 Parkman's The California and 
 Oregon Trail. 
 
 George Ticknor's History of 
 Spanish Literature. 
 
 Whittier's Voices of Freedom. 
 
 Hawthorne's The Scarlet Let- 
 ter. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom^s 
 Cdbim,. 
 
 G. W. Curtis'a Potiphar Pa- 
 pers. 
 
 Thoreau's Walden. 
 
320 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 1857. Indian Mutiny. 
 
 1859. Darwin's Origin of Species. 
 George Eliot's Adam JBede. 
 
 1864. 
 1865. 
 
 1866. 
 
 1867. 
 1868. 
 
 1870. 
 1873. 
 
 1881. 
 
 Ruskin'a Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's Essays in 
 Criticism. 
 
 Swinburne's Poems and Bal- 
 lads. 
 
 Dieraeli Prime Minister. 
 
 FarliamentaTy Reform Bill. 
 
 Browning's The Ring and the 
 Book. 
 
 Gladstone Prime Minister. 
 
 D. G. RoBsetti's Poems. 
 
 Walter Pater's Studies in the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 D. O. RosBetti's Ballads and 
 
 Sonnets. 
 Stevenson's Virginibus Puer- 
 
 isqite. 
 Carlyle died. 
 1885. Austin Dobson's^i the Sign of 
 
 the Lyre. 
 1887. Kipling's Plain Tales from the 
 Hills. 
 Matthew Arnold died. 
 1889. Browning died. 
 1892. Tennyson died. 
 
 1855. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 
 Longfellow's Hiawatha. 
 
 1857. The Dred Scott Decision. 
 
 1858. KolmeB^B Autocrat of the Break- 
 
 fast Table. 
 
 1859. John Brown*s Raid. 
 
 1860. Hawthorne's Marble Paim, 
 
 1861. Lincoln President. 
 Confederacy organized. 
 Beginning of the War of the 
 
 Rebellion. 
 1863. Emancipation Proclamation. 
 Battle of Gettysburg. 
 
 1865. Surrender of Lee. 
 Assassination of Lincoln. 
 
 1866. Whittier'a Snow-Bound. 
 Howells's Venetian Days. 
 
 1869. Grant President. 
 
 1870. Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring 
 
 Camp. 
 1876. Lanier's Poems. 
 
 1878. Henry James's Daisy Miller. 
 
 1879. Stockton's Rudder Grange. 
 
 1880. C&hle'B The GrandissiTnes. 
 
 1881. Longfellow died. 
 
 1884. "Mark Twain's" Huckleberry 
 Finn. 
 
 1888. Howells's Rise of Silas Lap- 
 ham. 
 
 1891. Lowell died. 
 
 1892. Whittier and Whitman died. 
 1894. Holmes died. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, John, 53, 5G, 63, 221. 
 
 Adams, Mrs. John, 52, 56. 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 66. 
 
 Addison, 84, 108, 257. 
 
 " Ah Sin," Harte's, 245. 
 
 A Kempis, Thomas, 128. 
 
 Al Aaraaf, Poe's, 214. 
 
 Alcott, Amos Bronaon, 179, 180-182. 
 
 Alcott, Miss, 126. 
 
 Alden, Cant. John, 129. 
 
 Aldrich, 264. 
 
 Algol, 279. 
 
 All 'i Well, WasBOn's, 264. 
 
 Americanism, 3, 159. 
 
 " American Humor," 242-243. 
 
 American Literature, 7. 
 
 American Poetical Miscellany^ 68. 
 
 Ames, Fisher, 4, 46. 
 
 Ames, Nathaniel, 20. ' 
 
 Ancient Mariner^ Coleridge's, 68. 
 
 A New Home., Who HI Follow f Mrs. 
 
 Eirkland's, 240. 
 Appeal for that Class of Americans 
 
 called Africans^ Mrs. Child's, 125. 
 Areopagitica, Milton's, 165. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 266, 283. 
 Arthur Qordon PyTn, Poe's, 208. 
 Arthur Mervyn, Brown's, 70. 
 Astoria^ Irving's, 240. 
 Astronomical Diary and Almanac, 
 
 Ames's, 58. 
 Athenseumy London, 239. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 106, 132-133, 158, 
 
 162. 
 Audubon, 239. 
 Austin, William, 187. 
 Autobiography, Franklin's, 56. 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Tabic, 
 
 Holmes's, 157, 158. 
 
 Back Bay, 110. 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 5, 119. 
 
 Bancroft, George, 87, 111, 117, 143. 
 
 Barclay of Ury, Whittier's, 147. 
 
 Barlow, Joel, 38. 
 
 BariletVs Dictionary of Quotations, 
 
 113. 
 Battle of the Kegs, Hopkinson's, 55. 
 Baudelaire, 208. 
 
 Beauclerk, Lady Diana, 168. 
 
 Beaumont, 258. 
 
 Beautiful Story, Buel's, 262. 
 
 Beddoes, 211. 
 
 Beleaguered City, Longfellow's, 142. 
 
 Bells, Poe's, 211. 
 
 Bells and Pomegranaies, Browning's, 
 261. 
 
 Ben Ezra, Browning's, 229. 
 
 Ben-Hur, Wallace's, 129, 262. 
 
 Benjamin, Park, 95. 
 
 Bible, 241. 
 
 Biglow Papers, Lowell's, 164. 
 
 Bishop Blougram^s Apology, Brown- 
 ing's, 229. 
 
 Bismarck, 263. 
 
 Blackburn, Senator, 236. 
 
 Black Penitents, 241. 
 
 Blaekwood^s Magazine, 157, 164. 
 
 Blake, 211, 259. 
 
 Bold Dragoon, Irving's, 90. 
 
 Bonaparte, Kapoleon, 183. 
 
 Boone, Daniel, 237. 
 
 Bowdoin College, 139, 140, 184. 
 
 Bracebridge Hall, Irving's, 86. 
 
 Bradstreet, Anne, 9-13, 18. 
 
 Bradstreet, Governor, 10. 
 
 " Brahminism," New England, 159. 
 
 Bremer, Frederika, 245. 
 
 Brevoort, Henry, 37. 
 
 Brewster, Elder, 139. 
 
 Bright, 124. 
 
 Brook Farm Community, 168, 192. 
 
 Brown, Brownlee, 264. 
 
 Brown, Charles Brockden, 51, 69-78, 
 92, 142, 143. 
 
 Browning, 68, 183, 215, 225, 229, 260, 
 261, 262, 265. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., 129. 
 
 Brutus, 175. 
 
 Bryant, William Oullen, 81, 100-104. 
 
 Buckingham, Joseph T., 93. 
 
 Buel, Rev. J. W., 262. 
 
 Bulwer, 73, 186. 
 
 Bunker's Hill, Battle of, 61, 135. 
 
 Burke, 114. 
 
 Bums, 36, 36, 68, 69, 114, 152, 153, 
 
 Burroughs, John, 264. 
 
 Butler, 40. 
 
322 INDEX 
 
 Byrd, Col. William, 199. 
 Byron, Lord, 277. 
 
 Cabot, George, 46,48. 
 
 Caleb Williams, Godwin's, 72. 
 
 Cantata^ Lanier's, 224. 
 
 Carlyle, 169, 170, 179, 260, 282. 
 
 Cary, Alice and Phoebe, 241. 
 
 CasaiuB, 175. 
 
 Chambered Nautilus, Holmes's, 159, 
 
 163, 264. 
 Channing, William Ellery, 10, 110, 
 
 111, 114-116, 183, 192. 
 Channing, William EUery 2d, 169, 
 
 264. 
 Chanting the Square Deifies Whit- 
 man's, 232. 
 Charlotte Temple, Mrs. Rowson's, 92, 
 
 241. 
 Ghasles, M. Philar^te, 244. 
 Ghastellux, Marquis de, 54. 
 Chatham, Lord, 44, 45. 
 Cherbuliez, 78. 
 Child, Lydia Maria, 125, 126. 
 Choate, Bufus, 112. 
 Chrisiabel, CoIeridge^s, 219. 
 Chri.stianu8 per Ignenij Mather's, 17. 
 Christus : A Mystery, Longfellow's, 
 
 144. 
 Clara Howard, Brown's, 70. 
 Clarendon, Lord, 173. 
 Clarissa Harlowe, Bichardson's, 251. 
 Clarke, 239. 
 Glarkson, 150. 
 Clemens, Mr., 247. 
 Cliff-Dwellers, Fuller's, 255. 
 Closed Gate, Mrs. Moulton'a, 264. 
 Cobb, SylvanuB, Jr., 262. 
 Cobbett, 82. 
 Cobden, 124. 
 Cogswell, Mr., 111. 
 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 43. 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 35, 46, 66, 
 
 68, 69, 211, 219, 258. 
 Coleridge, Sara, 142. 
 Collins, Wilkie, 208. 
 Columbus, Irving's lA/e of, 119. 
 Commemoration Ode, Lowell's, 225, 
 
 264. 
 Com/mon Sense, Faine's, 55. 
 Comte, 176. 
 Concord, Battle of, 41. 
 Congress, Continental, 49. 
 Congress, General, 45, 79. 
 Congreve, 108. 
 Conspirai^y of Pontiae, extracts from 
 
 Parkman's, 121-123, 
 Constitution, Federal, 51, 52. 
 Contemplations, Anne Bradstreet's, 
 
 12. 
 Convention, Federal, 51 . 
 Conversation of Gentlemen, Shep- 
 
 ard's, 19. 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 92-100, 
 103, 129, 204, 236, 239, 272. 
 
 Coquette, Hannah Webster's, 92. 
 
 " Corey, Martha," Hawthorne's, 268. 
 
 Correspondence, Motley's, 91. 
 
 Cotton Boll, Thnrod's, 205. 
 
 Courtship of Miles Standish, Long- 
 fellow's, 142, 144. 
 
 Cousin, 176. 
 
 Graigenputtock, 169, 
 
 Crane, Bepresentative, 235. 
 
 Crayon Miscellanies, Irving's, 87. 
 
 Curtis, George, 88, 124. 
 
 Dana, R. H., 10, 124. 
 
 "Dandie Dinmont," Scott's, 275. 
 
 Dante, 166. 
 
 Barest thou now, Soul f Whitman's, 
 
 230. 
 Darwin, 276, 277. 
 Darwinian period) 174. 
 Daughters of Time, Emerson's, 264. 
 Dawn, Lanier's, 225. 
 Day of Doom, Wigglesworth's, 14. 
 Death of the Old Year, Tennyson's, 
 
 210. 
 Declaration of Independence, 45. 
 Declaration of Rights and Griev- 
 
 ances. Gay's, 44. 
 Democrats, 48. 
 Demosthenes, 114. 
 Dennett, John Richard, 106. 
 Denny, Joseph, 66. 
 De Quincey, 208. 
 De Vere, Aubrey, 1^. 
 Dial, 132, 168, 173, 178, 179, 262. 
 Dialogue of Alcuin, Brown's, 70, 72. 
 Diary, Samuel Sewall's, 29-34. 
 Dickens, 74, 186, 203. 
 Dickinson, Emily, 126, 130-131, 264, 
 
 281. 
 Dickinson, John, 44, 54. 
 "Dimmesdale, Arthur," Hawthorne's, 
 
 187, 267. 
 Dismal Swamp, 200. 
 Disraeli, 73. 
 Don Quixote, 129. 
 Drake, 104. 
 Drayton, Michael, 8. 
 Drewry's B1u£Fb, Battle of, 217. 
 Drum Taps, Whitman's, 233. 
 Du Bartas, 12. 
 Dunning, Lord, 60. 
 Dwight, Timothy, 38. 
 
 Edgar Huntly, Brown's, 70. 
 Edinburgh Review, 69, 99, 164. 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 15, 19, 20-23, 
 
 114. 
 Eidolons, Whitman's, 233. 
 Elia, 261. 
 EmersoD, Ralph Waldo, 115, 118, 
 
 131, 137, 145, 146, 168-177, 192, 196, 
 
INDEX 
 
 323 
 
 215, 229, 232, 234, 235, 262, 261, 264, 
 
 206, 283. 
 BncyclopBedia Britannica^ 103. 
 English Novel and iis Development^ 
 
 Lanier's, 221. 
 ^English Trails, 169. 
 Epictetus, 222, 283. 
 Euloffium on Rum, Smith's, 69. 
 Surektt, Foe's, 208. 
 Eutaw, Battle of, Freneau's, 37. 
 Evangeline, Longfellow's, 142, 143. 
 Evelyn, John, 28. 
 Everett, Edward, 72, 111, 112. 
 Examination Relative to the RMieai 
 
 of the Stamp Act, Franklin's, 66. 
 
 Fable for Critics, Lowell's, 166, 178. 
 
 Falkland, Lord, 173. 
 
 Federalists, 173. 
 
 Festus, Bailey's, 266. 
 
 Field, Eagene, 264. 
 
 Fielding, 108. 
 
 Fiske, John, 118, 119. 
 
 FitzGerald, 165, 166. 
 
 Fletcher, 2S8. 
 
 Fletcher of Saltoun, 263. 
 
 Flight of the Duchess, Browning's, 
 
 215. 
 Flint, Timothy, 239. 
 Fourier, 234. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 7, 61, 65, 66-66, 
 
 108, 117, 221. 
 Franklin, James, 58. 
 Franks, Rebecca, 63, 80, 81. 
 Fraser^s Magazine, 95, 261. 
 Fredericksburg Sonnet, Aldrich's, 
 
 264. 
 Preneau, Philip, 36-38. 
 Fronde, 282. 
 Fuller, Mr. H. B., 265. 
 Fuller (Ossoli), Margaret, 179, 180, 
 
 232. 
 Fumess, Ber. Dr., 60. 
 
 Garland, Hamlin, 264. 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 124, 148, 
 
 151. 
 Gay, 108. 
 
 "Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman," 260. 
 Oerm, 132. 
 
 German universities. 111. 
 Gladstone, 263. 
 Godwin, William, 66, 72. 
 Goethe, 265, 283. 
 
 Golden Legend, Longfellow's, 144. 
 Goldsmith, 87, 89, 90. 
 Goodrich, 190. 
 Grant, General, 101. 
 Greeley, Ur., 96. 
 
 Griswold, Rufus W., 64, 106, 208, 210. 
 Gunter, 262. 
 
 Halleck, 104. 
 
 Hamlet, 244, 261, 272, 279. 
 
 Hancook, John, 48. 
 
 Harper^s Magazine, 132. 
 
 Harte, Bret, 172, 236, 246, 246, 253, 
 273. 
 
 "Hartford Wits," 38. 
 
 Harvard College, 126, 140, 147, 202. 
 
 Hathome, John, 267. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 90, 118, 139, 
 177, 182-191, 207. 
 
 Hay, John, 264. 
 
 Haydn, 220. 
 
 Hayne, 204, 206, 206, 224. 
 
 Heine, 283. 
 
 Henriade, Voltaire's, 66. 
 
 Henry, Patrick, 43. 
 
 Herald's College, 1. 
 
 Herbert, 12. 
 
 Hiawatha, Longfellow's, 142, 144, 
 264. 
 
 Higginson, Stephen, 49. 
 
 HUdieth, 117. 
 
 Historians, New England, 116-119. 
 
 History of Columbus, Irving's, 87. 
 
 History of the Jews, 241. 
 
 History of the United States, Ban- 
 croft's, 143. 
 
 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 105. 
 
 Holland, J. G., 124. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 10, 133, 135, 
 137, 143, 146, 152, 153, 154-160, 161, 
 162, 163, 164, 197, 242, 264. 
 
 Hooper, Mrs., 264. 
 
 Hopkinson, Francis, 54, 55. 
 
 House of the Seven Gables, Haw- 
 thorne's, 185. 
 
 Howard, 150. 
 
 Howe, Mrs., 264. 
 
 Howells, W. D., 3, 236, 248-252. 
 
 Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's, 
 248. 
 
 Hudibras, Butler's, 41. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 233. 
 
 Huguenot stock, 148. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 66. 
 
 Hymns of the Marshes, Lanier's, 225. 
 
 Hymn to the Nighi, Longfellow's, 142. 
 
 Hyperkm, Keais's, 226. 
 
 Hyperion, Longfellow's, 140, 141. 
 
 " Ichabod Crane," 88. 
 
 I Fill this Cup, Pinkney's, 216. 
 
 In a Summier Evm/ing, Harriet Spof- 
 
 ford's, 264. 
 Indian Burying-Ground, Freneau's, 
 
 36. 
 Ingraham, 129. 
 Imwcents Abroad, Mark Twain's, 
 
 248. 
 Irving, Washington, 83-92, 94, 119, 
 
 140, 142, 161, 240. 
 I sing the Body Electric, Whitman's, 
 
 230. 
 
324 
 
 INDEX 
 
 I slept and dreamed that life was 
 
 beattty, Mrs. Hooper's, 264. 
 Israfel, Foe's, 212. 
 
 Jackson, Helen, 126, 127-128, 264. 
 James, Henry, 161, 246, 249, 250, 
 
 251. 
 James, William, 18. 
 James River Massacre, 7. 
 Jatie Talbot^ Brown's, 70. 
 Jay, John, 44, 53. 
 " Jeanie Deans," Scott's, 275. 
 Jefferson, Joseph, 244. 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 46, 48, 80, 82, 221. 
 Jeffrey, Lord, 69, 82. 
 Jewett, Miss, 253. 
 Joan of Arc, Mark Twain's, 248. 
 Johnson, Dr., 57, 67, 216. 
 Johnston, Lady, 53. 
 Jonaon, Ben, 174. 
 " Josh Billings," 242, 243. 
 Joubert, 115, 174. 
 
 Keats, 225, 279. 
 Kenton, Simon, 237. 
 Kerr, Orpheus C, 243, 
 King, Cliu'ence, 278. 
 Kirkland, Mrs., 240. 
 Knickerbocker tdteraiure, 106. 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, 106, 132. 
 Knickerbocker's History of New 
 
 York, Irving's, 85. 
 *' Knickerbocker School," 83, 104. 
 Kbmer, 280. 
 Kotzebue, 66. 
 Kubla Khan, Coleridge's, 212. 
 
 Laco Letters, 48. 
 
 Lady of the Aroostook, Howells's, 252. 
 
 Lafftyette, 80. 
 
 Lake poets, 69. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 171, 260, 261. 
 
 Lander, "Walter Savage, 124, 169. 
 
 Lane Seminary, 127. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney, 215-227, 264. 
 
 Last Leaf, Holmes's, 159. 
 
 Last Man, Mrs. Shelley's, 72. 
 
 Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper's, 97. 
 
 Lea/ves of Orass, Whitman's, 221. 
 
 Lee, Richard Henry, 44. 
 
 Lessons of a PrecepU'ess, Hannah 
 Webster's, 92. 
 
 Letters from, a Farmer in Pennsyl- 
 vania, Dickinson's, 64. 
 
 Letters from New York, Mrs. Child's, 
 126. 
 
 Letters from Silesia, J. Q. Adams's, 
 66. 
 
 Letters from under a Bridge, Willie's, 
 261. 
 
 Lewis, 239. 
 
 Lewis, Estelle Anne, 210. 
 
 Lexington, Battle of, 41, 69. 
 
 lAbrary of American Biography^ 
 
 Sparks's, 71. 
 LAfe and lAght, White's, 263. 
 Life of Colvmbus, Irving's, 119. 
 Lincoln, Earl of, 10. 
 Literary Magazine and American 
 
 Register, 70. 
 " Little Boston," 159. 
 lAttle Boy Blue, Field's, 264. 
 TAttle Giffen, Ticknor's, 216. 
 hiving World, Buel's, 263. 
 London Monthly Review, 69. 
 London Times, 95. 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 89, 
 
 90, 104, 106, 131, 135, 136, 137-145, 
 
 152, 153, 161, 170, 184, 197, 203, 
 
 210, 235, 258, 264. 
 Lords, House of, 29. 
 
 Macaulay, 125. 
 
 Macbeth, 279. 
 
 McPingal, Trumbull's, 41 . 
 
 Madison, James, 38. 
 
 Magazines, New England, 131-133. 
 
 Magnalia Christi Americana, 
 Mather's, 17. 
 
 Main-Travelled Roads, Garland's, 
 254. 
 
 Malvern Hill, Battle of, 217. 
 
 Marble Faun, Hawthorne's, 185. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 283. 
 
 Marennes, Billaud de, 82. 
 
 Marie Antoinette, 80. 
 
 " Mark Twain,," 236, 245, 246-247. 
 
 Marlowe, 258. 
 
 Marmion,, Scott's, 38. 
 
 Marshes of Glynn, Lanier's, 264. 
 
 Mason, 45. 
 
 Massachusetts to Virginia, Whittier's, 
 152. 
 
 Massinger, 258. 
 
 Masson, Professor, 165. 
 
 Mather, Cotton, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 269. 
 
 Maupassant, de, 255. 
 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, 1. 
 
 MetamorpTioses, Ovid's, Sandys's 
 translation of, 8-9. 
 
 Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, 
 Longfellow's, 210. 
 
 Milton, 15, 35, 165, 277. 
 
 "Miriam," Hawthorne's, 187. 
 
 Mitchell, Rev. John, 269. 
 
 Mitchell, Dr. Weir, 165. 
 
 Mocking Bird, Hayne's, 204. 
 
 Montagu, Lady Mary, 13. 
 
 Montaigne, 35. 
 
 Monthly Magazine and American Re- 
 view, 70. 
 
 Moore, Tom, 82. 
 
 Morris, G. P., 105. 
 
 Morris, William, 220. 
 
 Mosses from an Old Manse, Haw- 
 thorne's, 185. 
 
INDEX 
 
 325 
 
 Mother Goose, 220, 224. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 87, 91, 118, 
 
 156. 
 Moulton, Mrs., 264. 
 Mozart, 281. 
 My Captain^ "Whitman^s, 230. 
 
 Nails Fastened^ etc., Mather's, 17. 
 Nation, 106. 
 Natimal Era, 128, 190. 
 New England Galaxy, 188. 
 New England Magazine, 158. 
 Neil) York Evening Post, 101. 
 New Ym-kei; Greeley, 95. 
 New York Liferati, Poe'a, 209. 
 New York Mirror, 105. 
 Nodes Ambrosianse, 157. 
 Norris, Prank, 254, 256. 
 North, Christopher, 157, 164. 
 North, Lord, 60. 
 North American Review, 132. 
 North Church, Boston, 16. 
 Norton, Andrews, 10. 
 Norton, Hon. Mrs., 123. 
 
 OWonnor^s Child, Campbell's, 36. 
 Ode to Light, Schiller's, 280. 
 Ode to Sleep^ Trumbull's, 40. 
 Odyssey, Bryant's, 104. 
 Old Manse, 184. 
 Old Sergeant, Wilson's, 264. 
 Oratory, Printed, 41-45, 
 Ormond, Brown's, 70. 
 OnvUhologieal Biographies, Audu- 
 bon's, 239. 
 Ossiau, 228. 
 
 Oasoli, Margaret Puller, 179-180, 232. 
 OiUre-Mer, Longfellow's, 140. 
 Ovid, 8. 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 54, 55. 
 
 Palfrey, 117. 
 
 Paracelsus, Browning's, 262. 
 
 Paradise Lost, Milton's, 15. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 176, 178-179, 233, 
 270. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 98, 118, 119-121. 
 
 Parley, Peter, 239. 
 
 Parton, James, 119. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 166. 
 
 Pathfinder, Cooper's, 99. 
 
 Path from Charlestown, 135 
 
 Pendennis, Thackeray's, 258. 
 
 Peua, William, 74, 146. 
 
 Pepper, Colonel, 235. 
 
 Pepjra, 27, 28, 39. 
 
 Percival, 165. 
 
 Perkins, Eli, 243. 
 
 Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, Aus- 
 tin's, 187-189. 
 
 Philanthropist, 149, 150. 
 
 Phi Beta Kappa, 155. 
 
 Phillips, Catherine. 12. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, 10, 43, 270. 
 
 Piatt, 264. 
 
 Pickard, Mr., 150. 
 
 Pickering, Thomas, 65. 
 
 Pickwick Papers, Dickens's, 90. 
 
 Pinkney, 216. 
 
 Pioneers, Cooper's, 239. 
 
 Pit, Norris's, 255. 
 
 Pocahontas, 8. 
 
 Poe, EdgarAUan, 90, 118, 143, 165, 
 190,206-215,231. 
 
 Poor Pichard^s Almanac, Franklin's, 
 58,59. 
 
 Pope (Alexander), 9, 40, 108, 158, 166. 
 
 Portfolio, 65-69. 
 
 Power of Dullness, Trumbull's, 40. 
 
 PraiiHe, Cooper's, 236. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelite organ, 132. 
 
 Prescott, William Hickling, 71, 73, 
 74, 87, 117, 219. 
 
 Priestley, 59, 82. 
 
 Prince, Dr., 61. 
 
 Prince of the House of David^ Ingra- 
 ham'a, 32. 
 
 Problem^ Emerson's, 228. 
 
 Proud Music of the Storm, Whit- 
 man's, 252. 
 
 Pure Literature, 5. 
 
 Puritanism, 15, 186, 266-2G8. 
 
 Pythagoras, 182. 
 
 Quarles, 12. 
 Quarterly Review, 164. 
 Quebec, Capture of, 121. 
 Quincy, Edmund, 88. 
 Quincy, Josiah, 169. 
 Quincy, Mrs. Josiah, 90. 
 
 RadclifEe, Mrs., 72. 
 
 Ramonaf Mrs. Jackson's, 127, 128. 
 
 Raven, Poe's, 211. 
 
 Reid, Mayne, 262. 
 
 Reminiscences, Goodrich's, 190. 
 
 " Renaissance of New England," 
 109. 
 
 Republican Court, Griswold'a, 54. 
 
 Rhode Island Almanac, J. Frank- 
 lin's, 50. 
 
 Richardson, James, 48. 
 
 Ricketson, Daniel, 103, 196. 
 
 Rip Van Winkle, 88, 244. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 282. 
 
 Robinson, Dr. J. H., 262. 
 
 Rochambeau, Comte de, 13. 
 
 Rochefoucault, 1J5. 
 
 Roseboro, Miss Viola, 253. 
 
 Rossetti, 231. 
 
 Rowson, Mrs., 92. 
 
 Sacken, Baron Osten, 275. 
 Salem Custom House, 185. 
 Salera Lyceum, 170. 
 I Salmagundi, Irviug's, 84, 8- 
 
326 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Salute au Monde, Whitman's, 229. 
 
 Samson, 271. 
 
 Sandpiper, Celia Thaxter's, 264. 
 
 Sandys, George, 8-9. 
 
 Sartor Resartus, Carlyle*8, 261. 
 
 Saturday Review, 268. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's, 185. 
 
 Sohelling, 176. 
 
 Schleiermacher, 230. 
 
 Scots wha hae m' Wallace bled, 
 
 Bums'B, 68. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 36, 86, 90, 93, 96, 
 
 97, 98, 187, 259, 269, 274, 275, 277. 
 Scudder, Horace B., 134. 
 Sedgwick, Mrs., 126, 148. 
 Self-Culture, Ghanning's, 114. 
 Serene I Fold Tn/y Hands, Whitman's, 
 
 264. 
 Seven Fines, Battle of, 217. 
 Bewail, Samuel, 27-35. 
 Seward, Miss Anna, 74, 259. 
 Shakespeare, 1, 108, 138. 
 Shelley, 72, 177, 183, 216, 223, 268, 
 
 261, 277, 280. 
 Shelley, Mrs., 71. 
 Shepard, Thomas, 19. 
 Sherman, General, 101. 
 Simms, William Gilmore, 204, 206. 
 Skeletonin Armor, Longfellow's, 142. 
 Sketch Booh, Irvmg's, 85, 86, 90. 
 Sky^ Walk, Brown's, 70. 
 Smith, Capt. John, 7. 
 Smith, Joseph, 69. 
 Smoke, Thoreau's, 264. 
 Snow-Bound, Whittier's, 264. 
 Society of Friends, 146. 
 Song of the Broad-Axe, Wliitman's, 
 
 228. 
 Southey, 258. 
 Sparkling and Bright, Hoffman's, 
 
 105. 
 Sparks, Jared, 71, 116-117. 
 Spencer, 176. 
 Spenser, 260, 283. 
 Spinning, Mrs. Jackson's, 264. 
 Spinoza, 230. 
 Spofford, Harriet, 264. 
 Spy, Cooper's, 103. 
 Stanley, Wallace's, 72. 
 Stedman, Mr., 163, 264. 
 Steele, 84. 
 
 Stirrup-Cup, Hay's, 264. 
 Story of Man, Buel's, 263. 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 126-130, 272. 
 Strahan, 60. 
 Stuart, Gilbert, 1. 
 Sumner, 269. 
 
 Supernatural a/nd FicUtious Composi- 
 tion, Scott's, 90. 
 Swinburne, 220. 
 Swift, 67, 108. 
 Symphony, Lanier's, 221. 
 
 Ta«itus, 175. 
 
 Tales of a Traveler, Irving's, 86, 87. 
 
 T^es of the Alhambra, Irving's, 86, 
 
 87. 
 Talism^m, Francis Herbert's, 81. 
 Talleyrand, Prince, 62, 82. 
 Taylor, Bayard, 264. 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 68, 176, 258, 
 
 259, 260, 261, 266. 
 Tenth Muse, Ajine Bradstreet's, 11. 
 Te7i Years vn the Valley of l/te Mis- 
 sissippi, Flint's, 239. 
 Thaoher (Higginson), 160. 
 Thackeray, W. M., 186. 
 Thanatopsis, Bryant's, 103. 
 Thaxter, Celia, 264. 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 166, 191-198, 
 
 216, 225, 232, 264, 280. 
 Thoreau, Mrs., 197. 
 Thmc. art mine, thou hast given thy 
 
 word, Stedman's, 264. 
 TbucycUdes, 45. 
 Ticknor, Mr., Ill, 117. 216. 
 Timrod, 204, 206, 206, 216, 
 To-morrow, EUery Channing's, 264. 
 Tour of the Prairies, Irving's, 240. 
 Transcendentalism, 110,167-168,178, 
 
 186. 
 Transcendentalists, 132, 146, 168, 180, 
 
 196. 
 True Relation of Virginia, Smith's,7. 
 Trumbull, John, 38, 39-41. 
 " Truthful James," Bret Harte's,246. 
 Tupper, 228. 
 
 Twain, Mark, 236, 245, 246-247. 
 Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne's, 184, 
 
 190. 
 Tyler, Professor M. C, 14, 38, 57. 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Stowe's, 
 
 126, 127, 128, 241. 
 Unitarianism, 110, 164. 
 
 Vanished, Emily Dickinson's, 264. 
 Van Wart, Henry, 89. 
 Verplanck, Gulian C, 81. 
 Vining, Miss; 80. 
 Vision of Sir LaunfoX, Lowell's, 
 
 164. 
 Voices of the Night, Longfellow's, 
 
 142. 
 Volney, 82. 
 Voltaire, 55, 66, 283. 
 
 Walden, Thoreau's, 191. 
 Wallace, Horace Binney, 72. 
 Wallace, Lew, 129. 
 Walpole, Horace, 45, 49. 
 Ward, Artemus, 243. 
 Warner, Mr., 88, 124. 
 " Warrington," Thackeray's, 258. 
 Warville, Brissot de, .52. 
 Washington, 22, 61, 63, 94, 118. 
 
INDEX 
 
 327 
 
 Waason, 2G4. 
 
 Waverley Novels, Scott's, 93, 274. 
 
 Webster, 268. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, 43, 110, 111, 112- 
 
 114. 
 Webster, Hannah, 92. 
 Webster, Noah, 82. 
 Week on the Concord and Merrimack 
 
 Mivers, Thoreau's, 191, 195. 
 Welby, Mrs. Amelia B., 210. 
 Wellington, Duke of, 123. 
 Wendell, Professor, 18, 109, 161. 
 Wheeler, Charles Steams, 261. 
 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard 
 
 Bloomedy Whitman's, 232. 
 Whipple, Edwin Percy, 124-125. 
 White, Blanco, 263. 
 White, Maria, 161. 
 Whitman, Walt, 220, 221, 223, 227- 
 
 234, 264. 
 
 Whittier, Elizabeth, 240. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 128, 136, 
 
 137, 145-153, 197, 264. 
 Whittier, Thomas, 147. 
 Wietandf Brown's, 70. 
 Wigglesworth, Michael, 14, 20. 
 Wllberforce, 150. 
 Willis, N. P., 105, 190, 210. 
 Wilson, rorsyth, 264. 
 Winsor, Mr. Justin, 119. 
 Wol/ert^s Boosts Irving's, 87. 
 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 72. 
 Woodberry, Professor, 73, 102, 187, 
 
 261. 
 Woodnotes, Emerson's, 176. 
 Wordsworth, 35, 46, 66, 169. 
 
 Tale College, 38, 97. 
 
 Zola, 255. 
 
BlectrotyPed and printed by H. O. Houghton &' Co, 
 Cambridge t Mass.t U.S. A. 
 
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